Network Lessons for Future Warfare

The Navy (and, to be fair, the entire military) has gone all-in on networking as the basis of our future combat capability.  We’re attempting to create vast regional (or worldwide!) networks of distributed sensors and weapons all tied together in a completely interchangeable, any-to-any linkage.  The Navy claims this will deliver omniscient awareness that will place us inside the enemy’s decision/action loop (OODA, for those of you who recall Col. Boyd’s work) and allow us to wreak havoc and destruction against a hapless, helpless, confused enemy.  While we aren’t at the end point with fully functioning network systems, yet, we do have more than enough existing pieces to get an accurate assessment of the viability of the concept.
 
To ever so briefly review, ComNavOps has mocked the concept as being utterly unrealistic and pure fantasy.
 
To ever so briefly review, history and real world events have mocked the concept as being utterly unrealistic with example after example of the failure of networks, sensors, and weapons.
 
Now, we have yet another real world example of the failure of networking and distributed sensing to examine.  You recall the recent friendly fire shootdown by the Navy of a F-18F Super Hornet on 22-Dec-2024 by the USS Gettysburg (CG-64)?  Reader ‘G2mil’ brought an interview to my attention that examines the incident and offers insight into the networking and sensor failures that led to the shootdown.[1]  The interview is available on YouTube and features retired Navy Capt. Kevin Eyer, a former Aegis cruiser captain, discussing the friendly fire incident with retired former Navy Commander and F-14 RIO, Ward Carroll.
 
Caution:  The interviewee, Capt. Eyer is not on active duty and made no claim to have inside authoritative information.  He did, however, imply that he has access to unofficial, inside information.  The Navy has not yet issued a formal report.  You can make your own assessment of the credibility of the Captain’s information.
 
 
Continuing …  I’ve extracted salient points from the interview and summarized them below.
 

• The IFF interrogation of the aircraft initially succeeded and the aircraft was identified as friendly.  However, the Gettysburg was in the act of recovering a helo of its own and during the recovery had to shut down all emissions.  Upon re-establishing sensor coverage, the aircraft was again queried but this time the IFF failed and the aircraft was not tagged as friendly.
• An electronic warfare (EW) operator identified the aircraft’s emissions as friendly and designated the aircraft as such.  However, the designation failed to register in the system due to a software bug that has been known since 2023.
• The EW operator followed up with a verbal designation of ‘friendly’ on the CIC communication net but, in the din, confusion, and stress of the CIC environment, the verbal statement failed to register with the TAO or anyone who might have intervened.  Verbal communications in stress situations always fail.
• The area wide Cooperative Engagement Capability (CEC) network did correctly have the aircraft identified as friendly however the Gettysburg’s CEC was either down or failed to register the designation from the network.  Networks always fail.

 
 
Here’s a couple of interesting, related notes:
 

• USS Gettysburg ‘failed’ its pre-deployment workups with the ship and crew’s performance being notably short of meeting standards.  Despite this, the ship was allowed to proceed on deployment due to a lack of potential replacement ships.  You’ll recall that we’ve talked about the widespread use of waivers that inevitably lead to tragedy and are at the heart of nearly every incident.  We’ve also noted the Navy’s refusal to hold anyone or anything to established standards.  This ship should never have been allowed to deploy.  The entire point of pre-deployment workups is to certify that the ship/crew are proficient enough to deploy.  Gettysburg was not but deployed anyway.
• NavSea knew about the software bugs but pushed the Aegis software out into the fleet anyway.  This is literally criminal negligence and, in the civilian world, is the basis for criminal and civil trials and lawsuits all the time. 
  

 
 
Discussion
 
As with almost every incident, it was due to a number of supposedly unlikely factors all occurring together.  However, upon examination we see that some of the factors were well known and, thus, the incident was less of a freak confluence of unlikely factors and more of a known problem waiting to happen.  It was just a matter of time.
 
In this incident, we see that despite multiple ships and aircraft tracking the F-18, area wide networks sharing their data, an aircraft that was talking and squawking its identification, and the most advanced surveillance and fire control software in the world, we still managed to lose situational awareness and shoot down a friendly aircraft.  If we can’t keep track of a friendly aircraft with IFF flying a known safe flight path and with no enemy cyber or electronic hindrance, what hope does a regional (or worldwide!) network have in combat?
 
With these repeated demonstrations of ineffectiveness and unreliability, why are we basing our entire future warfare plans on this kind of network/software approach?  This network/data/software approach to warfare requires perfect performance to even begin to be useful in combat and when does perfection ever occur in combat?
 
We shoot down our own aircraft, collide with hulking merchant ships, are unable to verify attacks on us (USS Mason affair), and yet we choose to ignore those real world experiences in favor of fantasy level imaginings of future warfare.  How stupid are we?  The answer is … admiralty stupid!
 
 
 
____________________________

 
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bo34Zwbte6c

USS Boxer - A Second Drone

It is now being widely reported that the USS Boxer, which reportedly downed an Iranian drone using jamming, also engaged a second drone, at the same time.

U.S. Central Command says that one Iranian drone crashed into the sea after the USS Boxer took what Central Command called "defensive action" against it last Thursday. It said the Boxer also "engaged" a second Iranian drone at the same time, but could not confirm it was destroyed. (1)

Set that aside, for a moment, and recall that the Navy wants to operate a distributed lethality concept which is based on a vast network of all-seeing, all-knowing data links assembled into a master picture and then distributed to all the ships in the region.  Thus, every ship, whether it uses its own sensors or not, will know, with unerring accuracy, the location and targeting information about every enemy asset in the region.  This will allow the distributed ships to co-ordinate and mass their fires on the unsuspecting and hapless enemy fleets.

The Navy is applying the same basic concept of vast networks and data links to AAW defense in the form of an advanced co-operative engagement capability (NIFC-CA).

Now, let’s return to the Boxer engagement.  According to the Navy, one drone was downed and the Navy doesn’t know what happened to the other.  Consider the implications of that statement … they don’t know what happened to the other drone.  The ship had all manner of radars, sensors, optical sensors, EW equipment, Mk1 Eyeballs, and who knows what else applied to a drone that was, by all accounts within a thousand yards so of the ship, and they don’t know what happened to it.

Recall the Burke destroyer that supposedly engaged several incoming anti-ship missiles off Yemen a while ago?  Despite Aegis and all manner of other sensors, the Navy couldn’t say whether any of their missiles hit any targets or what happened to the targets.  In fact, careful analysis of the reporting revealed that they couldn’t even say for sure that there were any actual incoming missiles.

Recall the giant hulking cargo ships that two Burke destroyers never saw and collided with.

Are you seeing the pattern?  Despite the manufacturer and the Navy’s claims of omniscient sensing, we can’t actually keep track of ships, UAVs, and incoming weapons right next to us!  So, how are we going to achieve this regional, distributed lethality, all-seeing, all-knowing master sensor picture or the perfectly networked NIFC-CA AAW defense?

We’re basing our naval offense and defense on a claimed capability that has been proven, time and again, to be woefully inadequate.  When you can’t keep track of a drone a thousand feet from you under non-combat, perfect conditions, how are you going to track every enemy asset in a regional distributed lethality network under electromagnetically challenged conditions?  The answer is obvious – you’re not!  And yet, we’re proceeding with the assumption that we can and will.  At what point do you stop believing unfounded claims and start believing actual field performance evidence?  I think that point is now.  The Navy needs to stop believing in Unicorns and Fairy Dust and start looking at reality.

___________________________________

(1)Miami Herald website, “US now says it ‘engaged’ 2 Iranian drones, not 1”, Associated Press, 23-Jul-2019,

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/article233033167.html

Testing Reality

USNI News website reports that the Navy and Raytheon conducted a test of an over-the-horizon engagement of a supersonic target by an SM-6 missile (1).  No test details were released and there’s apparently nothing special about the test.  Navy tests are highly scripted and every effort is made to ensure test success.  The interesting part is the hype surrounding the data sharing using remote sensors linked through the Naval Integrated Fire Control – Counter Air (NIFC-CA) system.  Even this is nothing particularly noteworthy.  This is just an outgrowth of the Cooperative Engagement Capability (CEC).

However, consider these comments.

“ ‘This weapon multiplies the amount of defended space the U.S. Navy can protect,’ Mike Campisi, Raytheon’s Standard Missile-6 senior program director, said in a company statement.

“ ‘The ships can now use data from remote sensors to support the engagement of targets. Sailors can now launch at threats much sooner than ever before.’ ”

So what’s the problem?  The ability to incorporate off board sensor data to allow engagements far beyond the horizon is a good thing, isn’t it?  Well, yes, it is.  If the enemy obligingly allows us to spread our sensor platforms all over the battlespace without hindrance and allows us to communicate between the various sensor platforms and the launch platforms without interference, jamming, ECM, or other electronic disruptions then we’ll be in great shape. 

On the other hand, if the enemy opts to shoot down our slow, marginally stealthy UAVs, BAMS, and defenseless E-2 Hawkeyes and sink our far ranging (almost didn’t get that one out without laughing) LCS network nodes or blanket our communications with electronic noise, jamming, and all manner of ECM and cyber disruption, then I can’t help but wonder how well our NIFC-CA dream will work.

The logical reality is that our sensor platforms won’t be able to penetrate very far in the direction of a likely enemy attack and their data relays will be severely degraded.  Thus, the peacetime promise of AAW intercepts occurring hundreds of miles away, cued by a vast network of sensors, will likely remain an unfulfilled promise.  Our engagement window will not be hundreds of miles away but will be not too far beyond the horizon.

The larger issue, here, is the constant focus by the Navy on highly unlikely scenarios in which advanced technology is allowed to operate unhindered by enemy action.  We’re becoming dependent on unrealistic scenarios that can’t and won’t be realized in actual combat.

Instead of conducting the test they did, the Navy and Raytheon would have been better served conducting the test in the face of an “enemy” that could find and eliminate the off board sensor platforms and apply the full spectrum of electronic countermeasures.  Let that be the test scenario and see what works.  I think we would quickly realize that we’re wasting our time on a lot of fantasy projects.

Now, the wasted time and money is bad but what’s worse is that we’re “growing” a generation of soldiers and sailors who believe that this technology is going to work just as they’ve seen it used in these unrealistic, scripted tests.  Our future combat leaders are learning tactics that are not based on reality.  We need to drastically increase the realism in our testing.

Consider this simple test.  Had we conducted it under realistic conditions, as I’ve described, we would probably conclude that we need to drastically alter our sensor platform approach (maybe many, many more smaller and shorter ranged UAVs flooding an area?), significantly enhance our electronic resistance and communications security, and, the big one, perhaps realize that long range intercepts may not be a realistic expectation and that medium to short range intercepts are what we should be concentrating on.

The Navy desperately needs to begin injecting realism into their tests and stop obsessing over fantasy technology that won’t work in the face of enemy actions.  We need to start designing against the worst case instead of the ridiculously optimistic best case.

(1)USNI News, “Navy, Raytheon Test Standard Missile-6 Against Supersonic Over-the-Horizon Threat”, Megan Eckstein, June 17, 2015

http://news.usni.org/2015/06/17/navy-raytheon-test-standard-missile-6-against-supersonic-over-the-horizon-threat

Soft Kill CEC

The Navy has developed, and continues to refine, its Cooperative Engagement Capability (CEC) for use in anti-air warfare.  Briefly, CEC allows data sharing among individual ships which allows a group-centric engagement capability.  The shooting platform does not necessarily have to be the platform holding sensor contact on the target.  Thus, the entire group becomes a single AAW entity.  I’m not sure how far along that path the Navy has progressed.  Remote missile launch has been demonstrated but whether the software control has progressed to the point of allowing a group to function as a truly integrated single unit is an open question.  Just as Aegis, in full auto mode, makes its own assessment of threats and allocates the best weapons to counter them, so too could a group be controlled to make best use of the individual unit’s inventories and capabilities, at least in theory.

We’ve discussed that soft kill anti-air defense methods have a significantly better proven track record of success than hard kill methods (see, "AAW - Hard or Soft Kill?").  We’ve also noted that soft kill system upgrades and improvements are significantly cheaper than the pursuit of ever newer and more capable missiles and launch systems.  As we’ve pointed out, the Navy needs a balance between the two approaches.  Unfortunately, the Navy’s historical focus has been on the hard kill approach to the detriment of soft kill technology.

Thankfully, the Navy has begun to focus a bit of attention on upgrades to the venerable SLQ-32 ECM/ESM system.  That’s fine but it’s still just a bit-wise approach.  What’s needed is the soft kill equivalent of the CEC system – a soft kill cooperative engagement capability (SK-CEC) that treats the entire group as a single entity and assigns defensive actions based on the group’s capabilities which are, in turn, determined by the individual ship’s inventories, capabilities, detection thresholds,  positions, priorities, etc. 

Current soft kill efforts are conducted by individual ships acting in their own defense or, possibly, on behalf of a nearby ship.  The problem with this is that an action that might benefit one ship might endanger another.  The Royal Navy witnessed this in the Falklands when an escort’s decoys saved the escort but had the unintended effect of redirecting the attacking missiles to the very ship the escort was trying to protect.  SK-CEC would, theoretically allow the group to act as a single entity with defensive actions taken in consideration of the overall welfare of the group and with consideration for the group’s defensive priorities (which individual ship(s) have the highest protection priority).



Soft Kill CED - The Next Step?



Of course, the ultimate development in cooperative engagement would be to unite CEC and SK-CEC to create a single hard and soft kill defensive system.

The core of CEC or SK-CEC systems is the software.  As we’ve seen with the JSF and other advanced programs, this type of advanced and complex software development is challenging, to say the least.  On the plus side, the software can be developed without need of significant hardware until it’s reasonably advanced and ready for real world testing.  We don’t have to actually build ships in order to develop the system.  Development would not be cheap but it would not require insane amounts of money like the JSF or Ford programs.

We seem to have a foreseeable block of time without undue commitments (unless we plunge into another nation building exercise!).  Now is the time to work on an SK-CEC system in conjunction with SLQ-32 and other soft kill technology improvements.

Let’s speculate a bit further …  Given the rabbit hole of escalating costs for hard kill systems in the face of ever more deadly, fast, powerful, and capable anti-ship missiles, one could imagine that a preferred approach might be to drop area anti-air hard kill efforts and focus, instead, on a combination of soft kill and point defense hard kill.  Consider the benefits to the offensive capability of the fleet if such an approach were taken.  Burkes would become instantly more powerful offensively since the bulk of their VLS cells could be devoted to Tomahawks!  Now, for those of you who are already foaming at the mouth and twitching at your keyboards, I’m not yet advocating that this is the correct approach.  Honestly, I don’t know enough about the detailed performance of the various hard and soft kill components to make an accurate and objective assessment of the proposition – and neither do you.  I’m simply taking the hard versus soft kill issue to a logical conclusion.  Whether it’s a good conclusion, I can’t judge but it’s certainly worth thinking about given that our present approach is becoming unsustainably expensive and technologically too challenging.  Let’s face it, hitting a super/hyper-sonic, maneuvering, ECM-capable anti-ship missile with another missile is incredibly difficult currently and may soon become impossible on a practical basis.

The Navy already recognizes the difficulties, bordering on impossibilities, of successfully engaging anti-ship missiles with the current Aegis/CEC system - it’s  why the Navy has moved the amphibious assault point from the horizon to 50+ nm offshore.  The situation is only going to get worse as regards hard kill defense so now is the time to concentrate on soft kill methods.  The money that we’re going to begin pouring into Burke Flt IIIs might be better spent on soft kill methods.  We need to refocus on soft kill approaches and begin working towards an SK-CEC system.