Connect with Michael Bares: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-b-423b4737b/
Read "The Kill Chain": https://amzn.to/4eakbaP

Michael Bares spent eight years in the airborne infantry before trading the rifle for research. He started at 4-25 out of Alaska, served as a scout and sniper, and deployed into the ISIS-K fight in Nangarhar attached to 2nd Battalion, 10th Special Forces Group. A second deployment with the 82nd put him in Kabul for the 2021 withdrawal. On the first night there, a commercially available DJI drone passed over his platoon, and 30 infantrymen had nothing to answer it with but a shotgun. That moment became the origin of his work.

Bares now studies that problem as a PhD candidate in Intelligent Systems and Robotics at UWF/IHMC. His argument is that the United States is living through warfare's machine gun moment: a technology has arrived that reorders the battlefield, and doctrine has not caught up. The clearest evidence is economic. A $500 drone can deliver the kind of strike that once required an AC-130, and adversaries are knocking out multimillion-dollar systems with $20,000 loitering munitions while the US answers with multimillion-dollar interceptors. He calls it spreadsheet warfare, and he saw it coming before Russia invaded Ukraine.

The conversation moves from hardware to judgment. Bares makes the case for AI as a decision advantage, compressing the kill chain by parsing the noise that overwhelms commanders, while holding a firm line that a human stays in the loop. He walks through the accountability gap that opens when a machine makes the lethal call, the scalability pressure already pushing Ukraine toward autonomous, pixel-lock targeting, and why he believes autonomous warfare is an unfortunate inevitability given what near-peer adversaries are fielding. Underneath all of it is his larger thesis: the warfighter and the engineer rarely speak the same language, and his job is to be the translation layer between them.

Key takeaways
- The economics of war have inverted. Cheap drones now deliver strikes that once required major airframes, and adversaries destroy expensive targets with $20,000 munitions while the US spends millions to intercept them. Bares calls this spreadsheet warfare.
- The mesh is the real battlefield. His dissertation centers on MANET tactical radios (Persistent Systems MPU5, Silvus StreamCaster) that link drones, ground vehicles, and warfighters into one network. The advantage sits in the connective tissue, not any single platform.
- AI's value is judgment, not just firepower. Its highest use is parsing the flood of battlefield information so commanders decide faster and better, compressing the kill chain.
- Human-in-the-loop is the line he will not cross, but scalability is straining it. Ukraine's one-operator-one-drone model does not hold against mass, which is already pushing systems toward autonomous targeting. The unresolved problem is accountability, because a machine cannot be held liable for a lethal mistake.
- Autonomous warfare is likely inevitable. Not because it is desirable, but because near-peer adversaries are already fielding it and the models are in the open.
- China's edge is structural. A manufacturing base the US offshored, less bureaucracy between idea and production, IP it acquires and distills (DeepSeek is his example), and a culture that prizes education and national purpose.
- Veterans are the translation layer. Combat experience lets someone speak to both the engineer and the operator, and that bridge is where Bares argues former service members add the most value in defense tech.