Tom Cotton: America Needs To Adjust To The Future Of Warfare

 Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) said this week that the U.S. needs to learn from global conflicts that have erupted in recent years to make needed adjustments on the battlefield to be ready for the future of warfare.

Cotton made the remarks during a Hudson Institute panel discussion with Joe Lonsdale Cofounder, Palantir Technologies; Shyam Sankar, Chief Technology Officer, Palantir Technologies; and others.

So specifically in the context what Israel’s done in the last two weeks, they’ve made a lot of news, but tell me what you think about how Israel has been able to innovate and change the future of war over the past year since October 7.

Cotton said that both Israel and Ukraine have been able to make rapid adjustments on the battlefield because they do not have to deal with the “most complicated bureaucracy” in the world, the U.S. Department of Defense.

He said that there needed to be more innovation and that change has to take place on the battlefield faster in order for the U.S. to continue winning, but cautioned that at the end of the day, traditional military hardware was still needed to ultimately win.

“We still need stealth bombers and fighters and aircraft carriers and submarines, but a lot of what you’ve seen on the battlefield in the Middle East and Ukraine are smaller, more expendable items that have much higher production rates, therefore much lower unit cost as well,” he said. “So that’s one thing that Israel and Ukraine has done very well that our Department of Defense doesn’t do that well because it doesn’t innovate fast, government as a whole doesn’t really.”

“Too many of my colleagues in the Congress think that you can win wars with keyboard strokes or hashtags or lighting up your national symphony with another country’s flag colors,” said the combat veteran. “In the end, you win wars by killing the other side’s soldiers or destroying their stuff, whether it’s with a Tomahawk missile or an Abrams tank, or increasingly in the case in of say, Ukraine and Israel with again, small high-production, low-cost drones or munitions. And we have to keep that in mind. That war may change in the technology that’s used, but that’s ultimately the way wars have been fought and won forever, is by closing with and destroying the enemy on the battlefield.”

Cotton praised Israel’s recent military operations against Hezbollah, including blowing up pagers and walkie talkies used by thousands of the groups terrorist fighters.

“I would imagine Hezbollah terrorists are very skeptical now about using the cell phones or even the electric toothbrushes they might have,” he said. “But that’s an example of how, again, whoever was behind that very clever, very cutting-edge technology, getting into supply chains makes you wonder maybe what’s in our supply chain here in America. But in the end, it’s still killing or wounding warriors on the battlefield.”

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