America is fast approaching “an inflection point in history” and needs to innovate exponentially in war-fighting capability as high-tech threats mount in the Pacific, the head of U.S. Pacific Command said.

“We’re certainly not approaching anything resembling the end of history,” said Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr. “(But), freedom, justice and the rules-based international order hang in the balance. And the scale won’t tip of its own accord or simply because good people wish it so.”

Harris, speaking Tuesday at the WEST 2017 sea service conference in San Diego, said four “considerable challenges” exist in the Indo-Asia-Pacific: North Korea, China, Russia and ISIS.

Adding evolutionary improvements to legacy military systems “isn’t going to cut it,” Harris said. What is needed is a “brave leap of exponential thought and development” in how the U.S. military equips itself for war.

That requires a confluence of artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, computers and people to keep ahead of adversaries’ technology. Harris, who’s based at Camp H.M. Smith in Halawa Heights, noted that futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts machine intelligence will surpass that of humans by 2029 as an example of the speed at which technology is moving.

The Pentagon’s Strategic Capabilities Office already is “changing the game, and changing it fast,” Harris said. The office in October demonstrated the launch of 103 micro-drones from the flare dispensers of three F/A-18 Super Hornets at China Lake, Calif.

The drones then flew in formation. Such “swarming” drones can be used for surveillance, electronic measures or as small bombs.

Harris also said he’s in favor of a crossover of capabilities and that he told Gen. Robert Brown, commander of U.S. Army Pacific at Fort Shafter, that before Harris leaves his Pacific Command job, he’d like to see Army land forces conduct exercises to sink a ship at sea in a “complex environment” with other forces.

The Pentagon has been pursuing for several years what it calls the “Third Offset Strategy” to far outpace the technology possessed by rivals to actually prevent war. The First Offset Strategy came in the 1950s with nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union and the threat of using small, battlefield nuclear weapons for deterrence.

The second offset was brought about in the 1970s and 1980s with conventional guided weapons. Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work said last year that Russia and China “are improving daily in their ability to operate on the sea, in the air … and they’re also becoming quite good in cyber, electronic warfare and in space.”

The idea behind the Third Offset Strategy is that “we should be able to operate from a greater range so that things being built to defeat us were less effective,” Work said. “We just move further back, and we are able to counter them from further back.”

Artificial intelligence and man-machine teaming are promising areas of research and development, Harris said. The Strategic Capabilities Office has described an “arsenal plane” that is a “big weapons truck” supporting stealth fighters. Such a plane, possibly a modified B-52 bomber, could fire missiles and release its own swarm of miniature drones in concert with the fighter planes’ targeting systems.

Another plan calls for a “Sea Mob” utilizing a manned Navy mother ship for small, unmanned swarming boats that would be able to conduct surveillance without putting sailors at risk.