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A mentor of mine, a superb scholar, once told me that good defense analysis starts with a trade-off. The classic example is combined arms doctrine, which is the foundation of modern warfare. Infantry, armor, artillery, and aviation work together to offset each other’s weaknesses. Each brings a combination of mobility, firepower, or protection, though none individually has all three. Infantry has a lot of mobility, but little protection. Tanks have mobility and a lot of protection, but limited magazines. Artillery in the rear has nearly limitless firepower, but no protection. Aviation brings speed, reach, and firepower, but little staying power, and is vulnerable to air defenses. If someone claims a weapon has superlative mobility, firepower, and protection all at once, be skeptical.
There are no wonder weapons, no perfect strategies, no ways to assign financial resources to every possible contingency. What remains are trade-offs, and the need to anticipate and mitigate them as prudently as possible — because in this business, the costs of failure are terrible to consider.
Cogs of War was founded just about a year ago with the knowledge that the stakes are high in defense technology and industrial base policy. Our mission is to publish analysis on these subjects that can help the U.S. military deter its adversaries, and if necessary, fight and win. To do this, our articles make a point of illuminating trade-offs, getting specific and technical, and finding overlooked patterns.
Our readers and supporters know that there’s no shortage of trade publications, Substacks, news outlets, social media posts, and podcasts on defense technology and industrial base issues. Not to mention peer-reviewed academic articles and lengthy think-tank reports. A military officer, investor, or policymaker who wants to get up to speed on defense tech can refer to any of these, but each has a different purpose. Academic articles, for instance, go to great lengths to show their data and methods, but most people don’t have time to read a 10,000-word essay. Trade publications describe new capabilities or acquisition moves but often leave out attendant analysis and critique. Articles in Cogs regularly triangulate among all the above, revealing essential threads and trends lost in the saturated information environment.
It’s not just the quantity of information, now supercharged by generative AI, that poses a challenge for readers interested in defense technology and the industrial base. Most critically in a field that spans the private and public sectors and involves billions (now trillions) of dollars, prevailing claims about technology and policy can obscure parochial and financial incentives. It is, of course, not wrong for companies to promote their products or for politicians to promote regulatory changes. Far from it. But there should always be a role for impartial analysis that stress-tests even the most sophisticated technologies and the most well-intentioned reforms against data and experience.
Despite some concern when we launched that our publication might promote narrow interests, Cogs of War has proven itself independent and heterodox. Our authors have included computer scientists, engineers, patent lawyers, and yes, startup founders and executives from the primes. Our rigorous editorial process, including expert review, delivers reasoned, data-backed, and non-partisan articles. And our sponsor, Booz Allen, has been fantastic, not just agreeing to editorial independence, but insisting on it, while also giving us all the benefit of the knowledge of the exciting builders and technologists that fill their ranks. Our goal — and their goal — is to make industry and government be better, not feel better.
You can see this most clearly in how our authors have covered the predominant theme in defense discourse these days: scale. There’s no shortage of articles (and social media posts) demanding the U.S. manufacture at scale, invest at scale, deliver at scale. The idea is simple and reasonable: Since adversaries can field cheap, attritable systems that deny America’s exquisite systems (aircraft, ships) the freedom to maneuver, the U.S. military should field its own low-cost platforms and munitions to neutralize these threats, or we’ll go bankrupt trading million-dollar missiles for thousand-dollar drones. To bring down the cost per unit, the U.S. government should either purchase a lot of these attritable systems, or create the economic conditions for the private sector to invest in building out capacity.
But scale has trade-offs.
Over the past year, American shipbuilding has finally received the attention that former naval officers like me think it deserves. But scaling vessel construction depends on more than a demand signal. As Mark Wooters showed in Cogs, even startups with access to newly available dollars from the Pentagon cannot fund multi-year leases on new shipyards. Such problems can be fixed in the long term, though America may not have the time to wait. And yet speed — as Austin Gray’s autopsy of the Constellation-class frigate reminds us — trades off against design discipline, and in doing so, can cost even more time. An alternative is to buy where the ships already are. Sam Slocum and Peter Devine argue the United States should lean on allies for merchant tonnage, although the trade-off there is friendshoring against sovereignty.
Nor is money a panacea for solving scale. There’s now a $1.5 trillion request before Congress, yet Matt Vallone warns that more money could actually slow reform, because it hands discretion to appropriators and their parochial interests. Money that does arrive may not speed anything up, Menny Shalom suggests, since the prime contractors’ schedules rest on undercapitalized Tier-2 and Tier 3 component manufacturers. Beneath all of this sits the vital (and often overlooked) work of classifying and measuring inputs and outputs. Aaron Marchant and Mike Benitez ably refine definitions of unmanned vessels and “affordable mass,” respectively, and Erik Schuh’s case for a cost-per-effect methodology shows that a platform that looks cheapest on paper may demand ancillary capabilities that drive up its true cost.
Looking forward, we call upon our authors to help us find more trade-offs, to examine how small, seemingly disparate details aggregate upward, or how big policy and tech changes yield unintended second-order effects across the industrial base. The best way to find these is to keep reading and keep writing. In a media environment marked by snippets and scrolling, the advantage will accrue to those who still read deeply. And a growing body of research indicates that the process of writing itself helps us form and refine our thinking. The less we hand that off to AI, the better.
We thank our sponsor, Booz Allen. And we thank all of you who have read Cogs this year, written for us, and subscribed.
Jonathan Panter is the executive editor of Cogs of War.
Image: Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Melvin J. Gonzalvo via U.S. Department of Defense.
