Global Warning with Ryan McBeth
Nov 1, 2026 · 28 min · 10 segments
On this week’s Global Warning: - - Why military innovation won’t be solved through acquisitions alone. - The Boat People are looking to change the missile game - China takes a different approach…
Ryan McBethHost
Again, you know, look, if you've been living under a rock, you might have missed that the United States military is trying to kickstart innovation.
And I know, I know, this whole thing, right? But this time it could be different.
Money is sloshing into places it never has, like, oh, I don't know, small vendors instead of prime contractors.
And the military's leadership seems keen to avoid the slow death the Russian military has suffered on the battlefield.
U.S. military leadership, at least it appears, wants to avoid Ukraine and defeat China.
So how does the United States pull off innovation? Well, In the words of Mark Watney, we're going to have to science
the shit out of this.
Or to borrow from an older TV show, you know, we need to learn how to MacGyver at scale.
In a recent article featured in War on the Rocks, Cogs of War, that actually sounds like an awesome video game, doesn't it? George M.
Dougherty writes that there's plenty of advice on how to accelerate meaningful, meaning effective military innovation, but we must decentralize it, identify it, and communicate operational needs faster.
Establish really tight feedback loops between the warfighter and the developers of the tech.
Leverage off-the-shelf commercial technologies and agile startups and standardize which can enable the scaling of success.
Mick Ryan, writing for the Lowery Institute, argues that Western militaries suffer from a term he calls learning deficit, something that prioritizes the exploitation of existing competencies over exploring new solutions.
Outside observers have found that in Ukraine, users' requirements drive innovation and any technology that reaches the battlefield is evaluated immediately under harsh battlefield conditions.
And this can work really, really well since almost every brigade has their own drone factories.
The problem with this, though, is getting that information out to other brigades.
So, you know, my recent video on Autonomous Warfare Command, one of the handful of initiatives proposed by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth aims to do just that.
Now, in Ukraine, both sides are in this dizzying race to stay ahead of one another, and the dynamic is most acute in electronic warfare.
Each side has found new ways to jam drone signals, and the other side has found ways to get around that jamming.
Mike Ryan, writing on his sub stack, Future Doctrina, says that Ukraine war exemplifies the concept of fast following, in which both nations have fast followed each other, repeated at the technical, tactical, and institutional levels simultaneously.
The imitation cycles that took months or years in the 20th century have contracted to weeks and in some domains, days.
Again, you know, look, if you've been living under a rock, you might have missed that the United States military is trying to kickstart innovation.
And I know, I know, this whole thing, right? But this time it could be different.
Money is sloshing into places it never has, like, oh, I don't know, small vendors instead of prime contractors.
And the military's leadership seems keen to avoid the slow death the Russian military has suffered on the battlefield.
U.S. military leadership, at least it appears, wants to avoid Ukraine and defeat China.
So how does the United States pull off innovation? Well, In the words of Mark Watney, we're going to have to science
the shit out of this.
Or to borrow from an older TV show, you know, we need to learn how to MacGyver at scale.
In a recent article featured in War on the Rocks, Cogs of War, that actually sounds like an awesome video game, doesn't it? George M.
Dougherty writes that there's plenty of advice on how to accelerate meaningful, meaning effective military innovation, but we must decentralize it, identify it, and communicate operational needs faster.
Establish really tight feedback loops between the warfighter and the developers of the tech.
Leverage off-the-shelf commercial technologies and agile startups and standardize which can enable the scaling of success.
Mick Ryan, writing for the Lowery Institute, argues that Western militaries suffer from a term he calls learning deficit, something that prioritizes the exploitation of existing competencies over exploring new solutions.
Outside observers have found that in Ukraine, users' requirements drive innovation and any technology that reaches the battlefield is evaluated immediately under harsh battlefield conditions.
And this can work really, really well since almost every brigade has their own drone factories.
The problem with this, though, is getting that information out to other brigades.
So, you know, my recent video on Autonomous Warfare Command, one of the handful of initiatives proposed by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth aims to do just that.
Now, in Ukraine, both sides are in this dizzying race to stay ahead of one another, and the dynamic is most acute in electronic warfare.
Each side has found new ways to jam drone signals, and the other side has found ways to get around that jamming.
Mike Ryan, writing on his sub stack, Future Doctrina, says that Ukraine war exemplifies the concept of fast following, in which both nations have fast followed each other, repeated at the technical, tactical, and institutional levels simultaneously.
The imitation cycles that took months or years in the 20th century have contracted to weeks and in some domains, days.
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