New defense chief faces significant balancing act

He comes from a service whose core mission, small-unit combat, involves conflict at its most granular. He will now rely on companies like General Atomics here, whose business is leveraging technology to produce maximum potential military lethality with minimal costs.

The president-elect ardently advocated substantially increased defense spending, and just as ardently favors unrestrained entitlement spending. For about $500,000 in expenditures, the 9/11 attackers did over $2 trillion in damage to the United States and the world economy. The linked physical and cyber infrastructures of complex societies are vulnerable to such asymmetries. General Atomics’ scientists toil to redress this imbalance with, for example, the Predator and other remotely piloted aircraft (RPAs).

RPAs can hover for 40 hours over a Middle East target and deliver, with Hellfire missiles, a munitions payload equal to an F-16’s. The “fast movers” — F-16s and the like — must refuel coming and going from the Gulf, and most have returned to their carriers without expending their ordnance. A Reaper, another type of RPA, can deliver what an F-35, the most expensive fighter aircraft, can.

RPAs, which have logged more than 4 million flight hours looking, listening and attacking, can discover what the enemy is planning and doing, and can deliver precision strikes with minimal collateral damage. They could have been an inexpensive and low-risk way of intervening in Syria by enforcing a no-fly, no-movement zone that would have protected President Bashar Assad’s enemies and victims.

But because RPAs are unmanned, they clash with important components of the military culture. Marine jets from Miramar Air Station roar over General Atomics, making what has been called “the sound of freedom,” but some scientists here call it the sound of obsolescence.

Mattis will be trying to take control of the often uncontrollable Pentagon, with its interservice rivalries and intricate problems of matching slowly developed weapons to rapidly metastasizing threats. The good news, such as it is, is this:

The nation just experienced a raucous presidential campaign during which there was silence about the crisis of the entitlement state — an aging population’s pension and health care entitlements swallowing government resources, with alarming national security implications. But technology, pursued determinedly, has the potential to make peace through making deterrent strength less expensive.