Jonathan E. Czarnecki
Truth in advertising: I will come clean from the first. I want Daenerys Targaryen to gain the Iron Throne. She’s the one who’s made the heroine’s epic journey. She’s quite literally walked through fire. Dany expresses intelligence, cunning, ruthlessness, compassion, and utter determination. And she’s raised dragons.
Throughout the Game of Thrones televised series, the side of Daenerys Targaryen held an asymmetric (biological) technology edge that no other side can match—she had three dragons (Drogon, Rhaegal, and Viserion), and everyone else had none. This advantage lasted until the final episode of season 7. In that storyline, the White Walker king killed Viserion and resurrected the dragon as a wight (effectively a zombie). At the conclusion of the episode, the king used Viserion to destroy the Wall, which had protected Westeros from the White Walkers for thousands of years. Winter has come to the homeland kingdoms of Westeros.
The dissolution of Dany’s advantage is a fable from which we in the U.S. national security community can learn, or more accurately relearn, four important lessons that accompany any technological advantage: (1) technological advantage is fleeting; (2) all technological advantages leak to the enemy; (3) technological advantages work both ways—for us and against us; and (4) technological advantage disables as well as enables us.
Technology is one important, even vital, context within which conflicts are confronted and fought; and as Colin Gray so wisely reminds us, contexts are everything in war.1 These lessons are especially relevant at a time when the U.S. military is witnessing an apparent dissolution of its formidable technological advantages, especially in comparison with the military of the Peoples’ Republic of China (PRC), and when the United States is attempting to reassert that advantage through a national defense strategy that would focus on implementing and expanding an idea called the “third offset.”2
The third offset can be thought of as a successor to the 1990s-era revolution in military affairs. It is a strategic effort to provide the United States with a lasting technological advantage in much the same manner that the previous two offset strategies did. The first, in the 1950s, emphasized nuclear technologies; the second, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, emphasized precision, intelligence, stealth, and space technologies. The third offset strategy focuses mostly on cyber and artificial intelligence technologies.3
If Daenerys Targayen or her key advisors, Tyrion Lannister and Missandei, had access to the archives that included our own historical Earth, they would have found many cases of the ephemeral nature of technological asymmetry in war, impressive dragons notwithstanding. Horses, chariots, armor, iron blades, wind power, muskets, cannons, steam power, telegraphy, radar and sonar, aircraft, tanks, machine guns, missiles, nuclear weapons, and cyber-domain technologies are just some of the imaginative, clever ways that humans have figured out how to kill their own kind, only to witness their enemies very quickly learning how to develop and use a similar technology, and usually improve it in some way to keep the competitive cycle moving ever onward.
The first lesson is that all technological advantages are fleeting at best.4 Even dragons. Enemies adapt—sometimes they steal your technology (or resurrect it, in the case of Viserion), sometimes they develop a counter, sometimes they change their actions so as to make your advantage irrelevant. The time between introduction of a new technology and a counter generally has been declining over history.
For example, during the early stages of World War II, the British and Germans engaged in the Battle of the Beams, in this instance radio beams that would guide German bombers during night attacks to their targets. The Germans began their effort in September 1939; by May 1941 they had shifted their attention east toward the Soviet Union. During that brief period, the Germans introduced no less than three major radio-beam-producing systems, and the British responded to each in turn. Six iterations of navigation technology representing three generations of improvements occurred within twenty months.5 Comparatively, this pattern of technology introduction and countertechnology adaptation has continued apace in the latest major wars the United States has fought, in Afghanistan and Iraq from 2001 onward. A 2012 Government Accountability Office report on countering improvised explosive devices (IEDs) found that the United States had spent more than $18 billion between 2006 and 2011 on counter-IED efforts, involving 1,340 initiatives, all developed in response to enemy adaptation to U.S. actions.6
The second lesson, related to the first, is that all technological advantages eventually leak into other hands. The way the British obtained the counter to the last German technological improvement in radio navigation would have given Daenerys pause. The British found the latest German radio navigation device in a German bomber that was shot down during a night raid; they then reverse engineered the device to produce false signals that misled other German bombers using the device. In similar fashion, the White Walker king reverse engineered (resurrected and turned) a deceased and recovered Viserion to be used for his nefarious purposes.
We can say that the first two lessons lead to the third: that technological advantage works both ways—for our side and also for our enemy. A successful introduction of a technology forces determined enemies to think critically and creatively about the conundrum into which we have forced them. If our foes have any modicum of intelligence (and virtually all do), they will attempt to adapt to and overcome the advantage and its accompanying strategic, operational, or tactical asymmetries. Call it the technology-advantage version of strategy as described by Sean Connery’s policeman character in The Untouchables: “You want to get [Al] Capone? Here’s how you get him. He pulls a knife; you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital; you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the Chicago way!”
The fleeting advantage and the leakage of technology both promote the inadvertent exchange of technologies. When accomplished on a large, national scale, this can lead to extraordinarily violent contests. The British-German naval race preceding World War I led to the Battle of Jutland.7 The Allied arms race in general during the same period led to a terrific symmetry of forces and doctrine, resulting in complete negation of advantages to either side for almost four years along the western front. All that the respective forces could do was to hunker down, fight, and die. A short-lived, nontechnological advantage of the Germans in 1918 (storm trooper tactics associated with precision artillery barrages) almost broke the stalemate; however, the Allies learned the German tactics; used them with another technology advantage of their own, the tank; coupled them with a new massive influx of raw manpower, the Americans; and crushed the German lines less than five months after the Germans applied their advantage.
Now that Daenerys and her allies have a technological symmetry with their foes, they need to be very careful not to be lured into a strategic stalemate, especially since the enemy literally regenerates itself and additionally can resurrect and turn friendly soldiers who were killed in action.
The fourth lesson, leading from the third, should be clear to readers by now. Technology often disables as much as it enables. This is most unfortunately true when one becomes dependent on that technology for battlefield success. The dependence becomes a form of blindness that makes one vulnerable to exploitation by an enemy. In such circumstances, only bad things can happen.
For a historical reference, Dany and her advisors should pay heed to the American experience at the first naval battle in the Guadalcanal campaign in August 1942, that of Savo Island. The Allies, primarily American with some Royal Australian Navy support, had just wrested Henderson Field on Guadalcanal from the Japanese. They had repelled intense air attacks and, in the tropical heat, had become exhausted. In those days, naval ships were not air conditioned, so the heat was overpowering. Though intelligence had provided repeated findings that a Japanese surface task force was moving south from Rabaul, Allied leadership misread intentions and chose to take defensive naval positions in Savo Sound (soon to be called Iron Bottom Sound for obvious reasons). They wanted their crews to recover from their exertions in battle over the previous two days. The Allied command relied on a technology advantage called radar; this electromagnetic detection and ranging system could, in theory, identify approaching enemy vessels from twenty miles away, even at night.
What the Allied leaders apparently did not know was that detection distance was under ideal conditions and with a more advanced model than their ships had mounted. The real detection distance, under ideal circumstances, was closer to seven miles and then only if the target was within the search cone of the transmitting antenna (which had to be manually turned). When the Japanese approached the Allied formations late in the evening of August 8, 1942, they were outside the cone, and Japanese lookouts using superior night optical technology detected the Americans first. The result was the worst naval defeat at sea (Pearl Harbor being at peace and at anchor) for the U.S. Navy. The Allies relied on radar to provide the warning time to get ready to repel an attack; their situational awareness was disabled by this reliance. It was only because the Japanese ran out of time (they had to be out of Allied air attack range by dawn) that the Allied amphibious fleet avoided the destruction of its protective force.8
All in all, having a technology advantage in war is a mixed blessing. One has to be constantly aware of both the opportunities and the limitations afforded by the advantage and must always be prepared for the inevitable enemy counterpunch and adaptation to the advantage. Dany and her dragons, with her numerous allies, must take the Viserion factor into account in order to have a chance to take the Iron Throne from Cersei Lannister. Daenerys must win with something other than the biological technology advantage that is dragon power.
For those of us who must make our way in our real world, these lessons and their implications signal that we must be prepared to adapt in ways that are unaccounted for in the third offset and its successor conceptions. It is worth our time and attention to reflect on what these alternative adaptations could be.
Let us consider three general approaches to rebalancing the military power wheel to our advantage. First, and most obviously, we can envision obtaining some other technological advantage. After all, Jon Snow and Samwell Tarly are now busy in Westeros mining and refining dragonglass into weapons that are lethal to White Walkers. Of course, as noted in the lessons above, that likely will result in a reciprocal adaptation by the White Walkers.
There’s also the issue of cost, which does not seem to be such a big issue in Game of Thrones but always plays a critical and often deciding role in our world. Pursuit of third offset technologies will be costly; that should be abundantly clear to those with just the most basic understanding of defense research and development and defense acquisition. For example, the F-35 program now is the most expensive weapons system program in history, and the aircraft isn’t even fully operational.9 Similarly, the DDG-1000 destroyer program in the U.S. Navy is so prohibitively expensive that the acquisition program is limited to three platforms; a naval associate of mine calls these ships “works of art” because they’re too expensive to truly be tools of the trade. These two current programs illustrate the cost pressures technology advantages place on defense budgets. Coming at a time in which our nation is incurring record deficits and demanding governmental programs to assist everything from health care to infrastructure, such an expensive alternative to rebalancing military power should be assessed as questionable at the very least.
A second alternative approach to the problem of restoring asymmetric advantage might be to explore revitalizing other instruments of national power (diplomatic, informational, military, and economic).
Daenerys might consider applying diplomacy to reengage Cersei Lannister or to make inroads with Cersei’s alliance with Euron Greyjoy, the leader of the Iron Islands and head of a formidable fleet. Alternatively, she might be able to negotiate with the White Walker king, who in the past has engaged in a form of diplomacy with the wildings north of the Wall; admittedly, this seems a most unlikely task, though it might buy time for her to marshal her forces.
In our world, Ambassador Robert Oakley, former ambassador to Somalia, has said, “If they’re talking, they’re not shooting.” Generally, that is a good thing in a world of proliferating nuclear weapons. We see the potential in the Korean talks about peaceful settlement of the Korean War; we should see the potential that President Emmanuel Macron of France made reference to concerning the Iranian nuclear treaty, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), in his speech to the U.S. Congress. Even if imperfect, Macron said, “there is a framework” that can be improved on.10
Information is a second instrument of national power that can be applied as a substitute or complement to technological advantage. This instrument can be expressed through strategic communications or messaging, through disinformation, through network disruption, and through deception and manipulation with the aim of getting inside the minds of relevant parties of interest.11 Dany could engage Bran Stark, the new Three-Eyed Raven, to use his growing power to see into the past and the future and to manipulate both. Bran has a mental connection with the White Walker king, one that could be exploited . . . but for good or evil?
In our realm, we have seen and continue to experience the results of messaging, of manipulation and deceptive information in our current politics. We know that social media is a decisive tool that can polarize or integrate societies. The power and speed with which information operations can affect massive changes in a polity are frighteningly fast, overwhelming governments’ abilities to cope with or respond to information.12 To date, the advantage of information operations has resided with the offense, the disruptors, whether they be private agents or agents of Russia or the PRC. The challenge for the United States is to be able to reintegrate the social and political messages that enable us to perceive ourselves as a united people working to improve our lot in the world.
Applying the military instrument of power is more than just applying technology, although that surely is and will be a component of future operations. Here, Daenerys and her allies would be well advised to turn to the likes of J. F. C. Fuller and B. H. Liddell Hart of the British or John Boyd of the Americans, for recommendations on how more effectively to apply the substantial military forces she has to overcome the White Walker army now flooding into Westeros. All three would emphasize maneuvers or indirect approaches to attacking the enemy. They would also remind our heroine that war is conducted simultaneously at the physical, cognitive, and moral levels. Even if wights are difficult to physically kill, they can be outthought and outfought, and friendly forces can be constantly reminded of the moral imperatives of the human side. Dany, even while leading a coalition, must find a way to quicken her decision cycle so as to effectively paralyze the White Walkers, allowing the humans to strike when and where they can be most effective.
We may believe that our armed forces, those of the United States and its allies, already practice Fuller, Hart, and Boyd very well. Perhaps that can be argued to be the case at the tactical level, but operationally and strategically, that hardly appears to be the situation. Our opponents in the prolonged War on Terror remain potent, if severely damaged. They have an incredible resilience that is derived from the intensity of their ideas and faith that transcends the blood they have shed on the battlefield. Tactically, we surpass our foes wherever we have met them, but to what end?
In many ways, we seem to be reliving the experience of Colonel Harry Summers’s conversation with Colonel Tu of the North Vietnamese Army, allegedly occurring in 1975, in which Summers remarked, “You know, you never defeated us on the battlefield” (n.b., this was an overstatement); Tu responded, “That may be so. But it is also irrelevant.”13 We have fought this war well on the physical level but not so well on the cognitive and moral levels. Our military may argue that the problem is out of their hands because civilian political leaders provide the strategic direction that leads clearly to operations and campaigns, and civilian leadership has been anything but consistent or constant over the course of the war. As Colonel Tu might say, that may indeed be so. But it is also an admission of defeat of a kind—that is, we cannot defeat an idea or a faith, no matter how onerous it seems to us. We should ponder that point the next time we as a nation get the urge to launch a flight of missiles or an armed drone somewhere, for some reason.
Finally, there is the economic instrument of national power that can be applied to the Great War in Westeros. It seems clear that there are manpower limitations in Westeros, especially among the fractured kingdoms. One can suppose that Dany could send emissaries, as indeed Cersei has, to Essos and beyond to obtain additional mercenary armies and navies, as well as for resources to support the same. She certainly has the talent for these types of negotiations in the persons of Tyrion Lannister and Daario Naharis. Both are proven arbitrators and promoters of her cause who increase the probabilities of their success in the Iron Bank of Braavos; and if negotiations fail, Daario’s fighting qualities likely would quell any significant disagreements.
Our own application of the economic instrument of national power has been extensive and generally successful. Recently, Korean president Moon Jae-in has credited President Trump’s threatened sanctions with renewed North Korean interest in negotiations. The threatened use of sanctions and their removal have also proven a useful tool in the Iranian JCPOA treaty. Finally, targeted sanctions against key wealthy Russian billionaires over the Russian information campaign against the United States have certainly gotten Russian attention to the problem. We should realize that the longer economic sanctions are in place, the more difficult it is to maintain unity of effort among those applying them. That difficulty was one significant problem in the post–Desert Storm Iraqi sanctions regime; they also led to unintended consequences, such as increased suffering among Iraqi people due to lack of access to certain health and agricultural goods.
There is a third way to go about restoring an asymmetric advantage in the war for Westeros now being waged. That way is one of unlimited or, in Clausewitzian terms, absolute war. Truly, the war that is upon Westeros is an existential one: between the humans and nonhumans (White Walkers). The intention of the White Walker invasion of the south—that is, the kingdoms of Westeros—seems clear: to kill and turn all humans into wights. This being the situation and the desired end state of the White Walker king, then Daenerys should consider one of the last ruminations of her father, the Mad King, Aerys Targaryen, who fixated on immolating the entire population of King’s Landing with his proclamation: “The traitors want my city . . . but I’ll give them naught but ashes. . . . Burn them all.”
A scorched-earth strategy that uses wildfire and dragon fire certainly would kill the White Walker army; it would also devastate Westeros for an indeterminate time to come. Akin to the Soviet strategy at the beginning of World War II, this means sacrificing much of Westeros’s territory and people. In this case, millions of human inhabitants likely would die, mostly through starvation and sickness. This strategy buys time to build or rebuild armies, as well as acting as a killing mechanism against the northern threat. However, given the extremity of the consequences, Dany likely would perceive this as a last resort.
Here, our comparison between the fictional world of Westeros and our real world comes to an end. The strategic threats that we face, while significant and costly, are hardly existential. The Taliban and the Islamic State are regional entities with occasional global reach. The PRC is mostly a competitor for global economic hegemony, not political dominance. The Russians, however devious and devoted with their information operations, are trying to fight demographic realities—they are losing population, and in the end, population is the essential ingredient for political and economic power. Eventually, the Russians must learn to manage their decline until a semblance of population stability can be restored.
In no instance of the above threats and competition is a scorched-earth option realistic, desirable, or acceptable for the United States. By scorched earth, here I mean the use of nuclear weapons, a far more dangerous and powerful technology than wildfire or dragons. And yet as part of the implementation of the third offset, the United States plans to upgrade and expand its nuclear arsenal over a ten-year period. There are compelling technological reasons for doing so: the existing systems are based on 1960s technologies; our competitors (think Russia) are upgrading theirs; and our existing systems can be changed from area to precision weapons, thus enabling their utility. All well and good.
But do we really want such an asymmetric advantage?
A Wall of sorts that would prevent some as-yet-unknown White Walker threat from our homeland?
And a homeland that looks like Westeros?
Do we really want to play the game of thrones?
1. Indeed, Gray has made it his first maxim. See Colin S. Gray, Fighting Talk: Forty Maxims on WAR, PEACE, and STRATEGY (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009).
2. The phrase “third offset” originated in the Obama administration, where the strategy focused on technological advances. The translation of this strategy into national defense strategy can clearly be read in the Trump administration’s 2018 National Defense Strategy (or at least its unclassified summary). In fact, the strategy was expanded to include adaptation of the department’s culture and organizations to these technological ideas. For an example of the initial strategy, see Mackenzie Eaglen, “What Is the Third Offset Strategy,” Real Clear Defense, February 15, 2016, https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2016/02/16/what_is_the_third_offset_strategy_109034.html. For the expansion and implementation of the idea, see Steve Blank, “National Defense Strategy: A Compelling Call for Defense Innovation,” Real Clear Defense, February 13, 2018, https://www.realcleardefense.com/2018/02/13/national_defense_strategy_a_compelling_call_for_defense_innovation_300284.html.
3. A good summary of the third offset and its predecessors can be found in Robert Martinage, Toward a New Offset Strategy: Exploiting U.S. Long-Term Advantages to Restore U.S. Global Power Projection Capability (Washington DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment, 2014).
4. My colleague Jan S. Breemer reminds me that the lesson does not always hold. He mentions the case of Greek fire, which remained an advantage to the Byzantines for almost six hundred years. In fact, the actual ingredients of the weapon remain in dispute to this very day.
5. Brian Johnson, The Secret War (Barnsley, UK: Pen and Sword Military Classics, 2004).
6. Government Accountability Office, Counter Improvised Explosive Devices, GAO-12–861R (Washington DC: Government Accountability Office, August 1, 2012).
7. Earlier, a nineteenth-century naval arms race occurred between Great Britain and France. See Jan S. Breemer, “The Great Race: Innovation and Counter-Innovation at Sea, 1840–1890” (Corbett paper no. 2, Corbett Centre for Maritime Policy Studies, King’s College, London, January 2011).
8. James D. Hornfischer, Neptune’s Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal (New York: Bantam Books, 2012). Hornfischer provides the most up-to-date history of the Battle of Savo Island; see especially pt. 1.
9. Adam Ciralsky, “Will It Fly?” Vanity Fair, September 16, 2013, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/joint-strike-fighter-lockheed-martin.
10. Fred Kapan, “L’Etat of the Union,” Slate, April 25, 2018, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/04/macrons-speech-to-congress-was-a-rousing-rebuke-of-trumps-foreign-policy.html.
11. Timothy L. Thomas still has the best summary of this way of conducting information operations, in his “The Mind Has No Firewall,” Parameters 28, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 84–92.
12. There is a large and growing body of literature on the political and social effects of information applied by social media. One excellent reference is Cass R. Sunstein, #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).
13. Richard Halloran, “Strategic Communication,” Parameters 37, no. 3 (Autumn 2007): 4.