The Three D’s Of Mass: Decentralization, Democratization, And Deliverability |
Determining America's Role in the World
Perusing photos from the ongoing war in Ukraine, one is struck by the visual clutter of modern battlefields: villages and fields crisscrossed with fiber-optic cables, forming dense wartime spiderwebs. These networks of sensors are critical to defending against, and directing, drone attacks. They reveal a central (and now obvious) feature of contemporary war: cheaper and plentiful weapons like armed drones enable precision strike at scale, at relatively low cost, across both strategic and tactical levels of war. Energy infrastructure, military bases deep in the rear, individual soldiers, and armored platforms are all vulnerable. Movement has become perilous. Massed assaults have become extraordinarily costly.
These weapons illustrate how the character of war continues to evolve, as new technologies and the systems they enable reshape the continuum of tactical, operational, and strategic considerations. One such consideration is the age-old principle of mass in war. Long understood as the concentration of forces to achieve decisive effects, cheaper, capable weapons are now changing mass in three fundamental ways that in turn are reshaping modern conflict. Mass is increasingly decentralized, democratized, and deliverable at scale.
Mass has traditionally been a key consideration in war—whether explicit or not. Although he did not appear to use the term formally, Thucydides, in the History of the Peloponnesian War, repeatedly shows that numerical superiority, concentration of forces, and the ability to sustain manpower shaped outcomes. Mass required a combination of scale (numbers, in this case men) and focus: where to direct those soldiers. Carl von Clausewitz later formalized this insight, arguing that mass was fundamentally about concentration at the decisive point. For him, the central problem of command was determining where to concentrate force: “The best strategy is always to be very strong, first in general and then at the decisive point.” Over time, the U.S. military codified mass as a principle of war, defining it as “the concentration of the effects of........