Whitepaper: Asymmetric Surge Capacity

By: Phil Diviniski
Download PDF

Ares and Plutus are Blood Brothers. War and economics are interdependent. Armed conflict consumes all of the factors of production: land, labor, capital, and entrepreneurship.¹ In contrast, a nation’s abundance in the factors of production is secured, seized, and enhanced by military might. Military power consists of an intricate combination of tools or capabilities that provide the ability to control and defend key manmade and natural terrain, and enable causing damage to an adversary’s personnel, equipment, and resources. A linear approach to producing defense capabilities would suggest that the country with the largest defense budget and largest Gross Domestic Product would produce the best capabilities and employ military power the most effectively. However, history and current events indicate there are nonlinear aspects of the interaction of a country’s factors of production and military effectiveness.

Achieving a competitive advantage on the modern battlefield requires considering the cost per capability, ability to mass produce a capability, and the human capital required to adapt a capability in the smallest amount of development cycles. Asymmetric Surge Capacity is a country’s ability to network and incentivize decentralized manufacturing and human capital to produce defense capabilities that are cheaper, more scalable, and more adaptable than an adversary’s capabilities. Preparing and employing Asymmetric Surge Capacity requires tools that provide situational awareness of a country’s manufacturing and human capital, systems to coordinate development and production, and commercial teams of military practitioners that can drive development, testing, and implementation at the pace of conflict.

An example of an economically inefficient approach to warfare

In 2011, the New York Times published a report estimating that the 9/11 terrorist attacks cost the United States $3.3 trillion while Al-Qaeda spent less than half a million dollars to conduct the attacks.² Ninety-four percent of the costs to the United States included expenditures on homeland security, war funding, and future veterans care.³ The US military spent on average $400 per gallon of fuel while conducting operations in Afghanistan.⁴ This expenditure ignored the 962 million barrels of crude oil in the Amu Darya Basin in Northern Afghanistan, which the Chinese have invested $49 million to develop.⁵ And over two decades after the 9/11 attacks, the United States continues to spend over a million dollars on each single period of darkness raid to capture or kill terrorists that live off a few dollars a day and live without indoor plumbing.

An example of an economically efficient approach to warfare

Russia is projected to spend 10.8 trillion rubles ($109 billion) on national defense in 2024.⁶ That is 61 percent the size of Ukraine’s Gross Domestic Product.⁷ By embedding military practitioners with Ukrainian defense tech companies and manufacturers, Ukraine has caused $8 of damage for every $1 spent on a drone.⁸ In mid-September of 2024, Ukraine employed indigenously designed and manufactured one-way attack drones to destroy between 2,000 and 10,000 tons of Russian munition stockpiles.⁹ In this paradigm shift, a $150,000 unmanned surface vessel can cripple a $3.4 billion Destroyer.

Strategic Framework of Asymmetric Surge Capacity

Entrepreneurship can overcome production limitations of land, labor, and capital when it comes to developing and employing military capabilities. In an increasingly multi-polar world marked by competition between great powers, the strategic and operational cost of an economically inefficient approach to warfare is high. The cost is high because the world is highly interconnected, and this produces positive nonlinear outputs when the factors of production are combined well for military means, and it produces negative nonlinear outputs when the factors of production are combined poorly. These nonlinear outputs occur because competition and conflict are a continuous cycle of gaining an advantage in capability and position while denying an adversary an advantage of capability and position.¹⁰ This cyclical nature of competition rewards adaptation and volume.

On the modern battlefield, the most effective defense capabilities are cheap, scalable, and adaptable.

• Cheap makes a capability expendable.
• Scalable means an actor can mass produce the capability.
• Adaptable means the capability is resilient to competitive cycles of measure and countermeasure, and competitive cycles are rapidly decreasing from months and years to days and weeks.

The capabilities that have the greatest impact (i.e., the ability to mass effects) are produced by companies with control or access to a strong manufacturing base and resilient supply chain. Government developed products are increasingly ineffective because they are inefficient to manufacture and unable to scale. This has implications for the domestic defense industry, enabling partners and force projection.

Domestic defense industry:
The foundation of any useful capability starts with understanding:

• The manufacturing and supply chain available because there is no reason to create a bespoke product if it cannot be manufactured in high volume and at a low cost per unit.
• Solutions that consist of generic hardware with open source or highly adaptable software are more useful over time.
• Government developed products are increasingly useless because they are inefficient to manufacture and scale.

Enabling Partners:

• Understanding, networking, and influencing a partner’s industrial capacity and indigenous technology development is more effective and efficient than trying to produce solutions in the United States and ship to partners.
• Partners in crisis and conflict areas can complete development cycles much quicker than the US defense industrial base because of a higher sense of urgency, understanding of the environment, and logistics.
• Key planning factors for partner operations now include the ability to transfer technical knowledge, a partner’s connection to the global supply chain, indigenous manufacturing capacity, indigenous engineering capacity, financing for start-ups, and technical operators and trainers (see Figure 1).

Force Projection:

• Global economic interconnectedness creates both a maneuver and logistics corridor for modern foraging.
• Commercial entities can both create understanding and shape an environment for military force projection at a threshold below overt military signature.