If It Bleeds, We Can Kill It

Today, modern military strategists find themselves in a position not unlike Dutch’s squad in the jungle.

For the last century, military doctrine—especially Western doctrine—was built on the supremacy of the offense. The concepts of Blitzkrieg, AirLand Battle, and "Shock and Awe" dictated that speed, concentrated armor, and overwhelming air superiority could shatter a defender’s lines before they could react.

However, the rapid proliferation of emerging technologies has turned this paradigm on its head. Today's battlefield is not a place of swift, decisive maneuvers; it is a hyper-lethal, transparent killing zone that heavily favors the defender.

From the muddy trenches of Eastern Europe to the contested waters of the Black Sea and the Taiwan Strait, the offensive has stalled. Cheap drones, ubiquitous sensors, and precision-guided munitions have made traditional massed maneuvers suicidal. The offense is bleeding.

Yet, as military thinkers, we must channel Dutch. If the defensive paradigm has a vulnerability—if it "bleeds"—we can find a way to break it. To regain the offensive initiative, we must first diagnose why the offense is currently failing and then explore how the next generation of technology can be leveraged not just to survive the defense, but to systematically dismantle it.

Part I: The Triumph of the Defensive Paradigm

To understand how to regain the offense, we must understand the technological cage that currently locks it down. For decades, military theory held that a successful offensive required a 3:1 local advantage over a dug-in defender. Today, because of three major technological shifts, that ratio is arguably much higher, rendering traditional offensive doctrines obsolete.

1. Clearing the "Fog of War" (Ubiquitous Surveillance)

Historically, the offense relied heavily on surprise and deception. An attacker would mass forces in secret, exploit a weak point in the enemy’s line, and breakthrough before the defender could reposition reserves.

Today, the "fog of war" has been virtually eliminated by a layered architecture of persistent, ubiquitous surveillance.

1. Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) Satellites: Commercial and military satellite constellations provide high-resolution imagery and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) that can see through clouds and darkness, updating every few hours or even minutes.
2. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs): Cheap, persistent reconnaissance drones hover over every sector of the front line.
3. AI-Driven Signals Intelligence: Cellular networks, radio emissions, and thermal signatures are continuously scraped and analyzed by artificial intelligence to identify command nodes and troop concentrations instantly.

When an army attempts to mass armor or infantry for an assault, they are spotted miles away. The moment a formation moves, it is broadcast in real-time to a defender’s command center. Surprise, the lifeblood of the offense, is dead.

2. Asymmetric Attrition and the Cost-Imbalance Curve

Technology has democratized precision destruction. In past conflicts, destroying a main battle tank or a multi-billion-dollar naval vessel required equally expensive, specialized platforms—another tank, a fighter jet, or a submarine.

Today, the cost-imbalance curve severely punishes the attacker. A $500 off-the-shelf First-Person View (FPV) drone, jury-rigged with a rocket-propelled grenade warhead, can easily disable or destroy a $10 million main battle tank. Similarly, uncrewed surface vessels (USVs)—essentially explosive-laden jet skis guided by commercial satellite internet—have successfully crippled and sunk major naval platforms.

When the cost of destroying a platform is a fraction of a percent of the cost to build it, the attacker faces an unsustainable war of attrition. The offense must move, and moving incurs exposure, while the defender can remain hidden, launching cheap, lethal countermeasures from fortified positions.

3. Precision-Guided Defense at Scale

The proliferation of man-portable air-defense systems (MANPADS) and anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs) has pushed heavy armor and close-air support out of the sky and off the field. A small, decentralized unit of infantry, hidden in a basement or a tree line, can hold an entire armored column at bay. Air forces, terrified of dense, integrated air defense systems (IADS), are forced to fly low or release munitions from safe distances, failing to provide the close-air support required to rupture a dug-in defense.

The result is a return to the grueling, attritional stalemate of World War I, updated with 21st-century geometry. The battlefield is a transparent grid where whatever can be seen can be targeted, and whatever is targeted is destroyed.

Part II: Finding the Bleed — Vulnerabilities in the Modern Defense

If the modern defense seems impenetrable, we must look closer to find its structural flaws. Every system, no matter how formidable, possesses inherent vulnerabilities born from its very design. The modern tech-driven defense "bleeds" in three distinct areas:

1. Cognitive and Data Overload

The defender’s strength relies on a massive influx of data: video feeds, radar tracks, radio intercepts, and satellite imagery. This data must be processed, verified, and translated into actionable targeting data. This creates a massive cognitive bottleneck. If a defensive command structure is flooded with more information than it can synthesize, or if that information is corrupted, the defense paralyzes. The defense is only as fast as its data-processing loop.[MK3] 

2. Extreme Electronic and Digital Dependency

The modern defense is entirely tethered to the electromagnetic spectrum and digital networks. Drones require radio frequencies; satellite imagery requires high-bandwidth downlinks; decentralized units require encrypted mesh networks to coordinate fires. This absolute dependency is a massive single point of failure. Cut the digital tether, and the high-tech defender is instantly blinded, isolated, and reverted back to analog isolation.

3. Supply Chain and Inventory Fragility

Precision-guided defense is highly effective but incredibly resource-intensive. Advanced surface-to-air missiles, thermal optics, and specialized loitering munitions are difficult to manufacture. They rely on global, fragile semiconductor supply chains. A defender may have the upper hand in the first three months of a conflict, but high-tech defenses suffer from a low-volume production problem. Once their deep magazines of precision interceptors are exhausted, their defensive shield crumbles.

Part III: Regaining the Offensive Initiative

To break the defensive stalemate and regain the offensive initiative, the military forces of tomorrow cannot simply build heavier tanks or faster jets. They must fundamentally redefine how offense is conducted.

We must leverage technology to exploit the defender's vulnerabilities through a combination of mass, deception, autonomy, and cross-domain synchronization.

1. Flipping the Attrition Curve: Cognitive and Kinetic Swarming

If the defender can destroy any single high-value target we throw at them, the solution is to stop presenting high-value targets. The offense must shift from a few expensive, exquisite platforms to vast, attritable swarms of autonomous systems.

Instead of launching a $100 million stealth bomber or an armored brigade, an offensive operation begins by unleashing tens of thousands of low-cost, networked autonomous drones.

When a swarm of 5,000 micro-drones floods a defensive sector, it achieves two objectives simultaneously:

2. Sensor Saturation: It overwhelms the defender’s radar and AI target-acquisition systems. The defense simply does not have enough interceptors, ammunition, or cognitive bandwidth to process and target thousands of incoming profiles simultaneously.
3. Kinetic Attrition of the Defense: The swarm forces the defender to reveal their positions and burn through their expensive stocks of air-defense missiles to shoot down $1,000 drones. Once the defender’s magazine is empty, the offensive follow-on forces can move in to exploit the breach.

2. Dominating the Electromagnetic Spectrum (EMS) and Cyber Domains

To blind the transparent defense, the offense must capture and hold absolute superiority in the electromagnetic and cyber realms. The offensive force of the future must treat electronic warfare (EW) not as a support mechanism, but as the primary spearhead of the assault.

Before a single boot touches the ground, offensive cyber operations must infiltrate and disrupt the defender's power grids, command-and-control software, and satellite downlinks. Concurrently, high-powered directed-energy weapons and localized EW jamming must create "digital smoke screens."

By jamming the frequencies used by the defender's reconnaissance drones and blinding their thermal sensors, the offense can artificially recreate the "fog of war." If we can deny the defender the ability to see the battlefield, we strip away their primary advantage, allowing for massed tactical maneuvers to resume.

3. Hyper-Velocity and Time-Compressed Strike Networks

If the defense can spot an offensive force moving from twenty miles away, the offense must minimize the time it takes to close that distance. This requires the integration of hypersonic weapons and AI-driven sensor-to-shooter loops.

Hypersonic cruise missiles and glide vehicles traveling at speeds above Mach 5 drastically compress the defender’s reaction window. When an offensive strike asset can hit a target hundreds of miles away in a matter of minutes, the defender's window to analyze data, pass orders down the chain of command, and fire an interceptor is reduced to seconds.

By pairing these hyper-velocity weapons with an AI-driven "Kill Web"—where data from an offensive scout drone is instantly processed and routed to the optimal strike asset without human bureaucratic delay—the offense can strike defensive positions faster than the human-in-the-loop defense can process the threat.

4. Manned-Unmanned Teaming (MUM-T) and Decentralized Maneuver

The traditional offensive massed formation is dead, but mass itself is not. The offense must learn to mass effects, not forces. This is achieved through Manned-Unmanned Teaming (MUM-T).

In this paradigm, a single human-occupied platform—whether it is a stealth fifth-generation fighter, an armored command vehicle, or a dispersed infantry squad—acts as a localized "quarterback" for a distributed network of robotic systems.

The human operators remain safely outside the defender's lethal engagement zones, while their uncrewed wingmen, ground vehicles, and sub-surface vessels push deep into enemy territory to conduct the dangerous work of breaching minefields, drawing fire, and neutralizing defensive strongpoints.

By decentralizing the human element and distributing the offensive footprint across hundreds of smaller, robotic nodes, the attacker removes the high-value targets that the defender relies on to achieve decisive attrition.

Conclusion: The Perpetual Pendulum of Warfare

Military history is a perpetual pendulum swinging between the offense and the defense.

In the early 20th century, the machine gun, barbed wire, and rapid-fire artillery created an apparently insurmountable defensive advantage, resulting in the slaughter of trench warfare. Yet, the offense eventually found its answer through the synchronized combination of the tank, close-air support, and two-way radio communication.

We are currently living through a similar swing of the pendulum. The digital revolution, AI, and cheap robotics have temporarily handed the crown to the defender. The battlefield has become a transparent, hyper-lethal cage for anyone attempting to push forward.

But this defensive supremacy is not permanent. The modern defense relies on a fragile foundation of digital connectivity, data integrity, and limited high-tech inventories. It has vulnerabilities. It can be blinded, it can be overwhelmed, and it can be outpaced.

By aggressively leaning into autonomous swarming, electromagnetic dominance, hyper-velocity strikes, and decentralized robotic integration, we can shatter the transparent battlefield.

We must stop trying to fight tomorrow's wars with yesterday’s massed doctrines. The modern defense is formidable, but it is not invincible. To paraphrase Major Alan "Dutch" Schaefer: It bleeds. And because it bleeds, we can kill it.

William “Mac” McHenry is a retired CIA Operations Officer and a retired Marine Corps Reserve Colonel. A former Naval Aviator and Recon Marine, he recently concluded a seven year tenure in various senior leadership positions at the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU).

The views expressed in the article reflect those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of War, the Intelligence Community, or the U.S. Government.