The promise, the sale, the hope has been with us for decades. Even before the 1990s birthed “Network Centric Warfare” there was the call that war could be made new if we just had better ways to communicate faster, more accurately, with better fidelity.
War is chaos. It is complicated, unpredictable, and untidy. To the mind that values order, simplicity, and predictability, that will not do. There is always a move to clean war up. Make it function better.
It fails except on the margins.
Progress in communication, technology, and autonomy is essential. In an evolutionary mindset – it is the normal progress of the hyper-Darwinian nature of warfare.
Where you get in trouble is when you assume too much of your own technology and assume your peacetime revolutionary design will translate in to wartime dominance. You give your hope too much weight. You assume too little of your adversary.
You convert your advantage in to your vulnerability.
The latest iteration, already thankfully starting to wilt a bit on the vine, is the Third Offset Strategy. There is a huge problem here. It takes an admission of a critical vulnerability and decides that instead of mitigating that threat, we should double-down on the vulnerability.
If we are in danger because we have built our house on sand, then of course, we just need to put on another layer of sand.
“China and Russia now have theater-wide battle networks that are approaching parity with us,” he added, “so to strengthen conventional deterrence, we want to make sure that we can extend our advantage in that area.”
He described a battle network as a sensor grid that sees what’s happening in theater, a command, control, communications, computers and intelligence, or C4I, grid that makes sense of what’s happening and offers a range of effects, a grid that achieves the chosen effects and a logistics and support grid that keeps the network running.
“Our pacing competitors have put a lot of money in counter-network operations because they know how powerful our battle networks are, so they spend a lot of money on cyber capabilities, on electronic warfare capabilities and on counter-space capabilities because our space constellation is a very important part of our ability to put these battle networks together,” Work said.
The third offset’s initial vector, he added, is to exploit all the advances in artificial intelligence and autonomy and insert them into DoD’s battle networks to achieve a step increase in performance that the department believes will strengthen conventional deterrence.
The offset includes technological leaps, Work said, but it’s really about operational and organizational constructs based on doctrine, training and exercises that allow the joint force to operate with such technologies to achieve an advantage.
The layered technology risk combined with the multiple vulnerability vectors this brings in to every part of our warfighting capability is simply gobsmacking. Where we should be building the ability to operate in a robust and deadly manner off-line and isolated from a hostile EM spectrum in parallel with reinforcing existing systems, instead we are just going to expand that vulnerability?
No.
The Army put another warning out there to us to think hard about our choices.
The U.S. Army has concluded that its $6 billion battlefield communications system would likely be breached by Russia or China in the event of a big-power conflict, rendering it all but useless against sophisticated foes. The Army says it needs at least two years to come up with a new, more resilient system that can provide the tactical networking that soldiers have come to rely on in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Despite the vulnerabilities and flaws that the Army has identified in the program in recent months, the service will still finish fielding the system to the entire force over the next two years, officials said, while trying to quickly patch in upgrades where they can while they search for a new solution. Meanwhile, Congress is prodding the Army to find fixes for the communication system and is only offering half the $420 million the Army requested to finish deploying it in 2018.
Here is what we need to be able to answer. Tomorrow, you don’t have access to your hacked communications systems. How do you fight?
In 4-yrs and a few billion dollars later, your new system does not work. How will you fight?
Navy. Your networks are down, as are your access to GPS and satellite communications. Now. Fight.
Seems silly? Ask those who have been there what they have seen in the eastern Ukraine the last few years. That is only a small percentage of the capabilities you would see in a larger conflict.
The enemy will fight offline. How will you?
