What's Wrong With Commandant Berger?

The Marine Commandant, Gen. Berger, is force feeding a massive makeover onto the Marines and it’s not going over very well, to say the least.  Outside of his inner circle of sycophants, he appears to have little buy in for his ideas.  Outside groups and individuals, such as ComNavOps, have expressed nothing but scorn and ridicule for his concepts and the Commandant has, lately, taken on an almost whiny air of arrogance and self-pity.  To be fair, relatively few details have been released and lots of hand-waving of problems has occurred which has led outsiders to engage in speculation which may or may not be correct.  The lack of communication from Berger is a fatal flaw considering that he’s trying to sell a new product.  If you want to sell something, you have to provide at least some basic information and Berger has thus far declined to do so.  It’s no wonder, then, that he’s not getting much buy in.

 

In any event, Berger continues to add to his stream of baffling ideas.  For example, his latest is an Amazon-like supply system for forward deployed Marine units.  In his words,

 

“Why couldn’t we use the logistics laydown of something like Amazon, their distribution centers, for our expeditionary basing operations? (1)

 

Aside from the fact that the military already has equipment and parts distribution centers, the concept of using some kind of delivery-on-demand Amazon system ignores (hand waves away) the problem of finding a survivable platform that can penetrate enemy controlled or contested air and sea to reach the forward base to deliver the needed supply.  Amazon doesn’t usually have to fight through enemy territory to make their deliveries so the analogy falls apart. 

 

In addition, the sheer volume of supplies needed to sustain a forward base or unit precludes the small delivery system (ultimately, small delivery trucks that deliver small, individual packages) that Amazon is based on.  Sustaining military units engaged in active combat requires large shiploads of supplies on a frighteningly regular basis.  This kind of large cargo ship is not stealthy, not fast, not maneuverable, and undefended – in other words, what the military would call a big, fat target.  There’s also the issue of unloading delivered supplies.  Amazon drivers toss small packages off their trucks.  Shiploads of supplies require docks, cranes, cargo handling, trucks, and lots of manpower.  Again, the analogy falls apart.

 

Does Berger not understand any of this or does he just throw ideas at the wall to see if anything will stick?  If he has some specific concept that would address the obvious problems then he needs to provide at least a basic description if he wants buy in.

 

Here’s another new idea from the Commandant regarding hand held intel systems:

 

Our intel, I think, can be stored, sorted and downloaded from a cloud for our forward-deployed forces. And a control system for all those things could be in a hand-held device the size of our phones, all the way down to the squad leader, since all the forces are going to be distributed. (1)

 

We’ve repeatedly discussed the difficulties of establishing a network and maintaining communications in an electromagnetically (and kinetically!) challenged environment.  Does anyone really see China allowing us to establish a cloud based intel system in a forward combat area?  China appears to be decades ahead of us in cyber warfare and I can’t see them allowing an unhindered cloud system in a combat theatre.  Does Berger really think this is viable or is he, again, just throwing stuff at the wall?

 

Berger kind of understands his failure to communicate as evidenced by his statement,

 

Berger noted in his opening remarks that “we lost time in development and experimentation due to lack of funding for some long-range precision fires capabilities because of trust. And that’s on me, I have to do a better job with key members on the Hill to reassure them that this is the necessary direction for the future of the Marine Corps. In some cases, they believe we’re moving too fast,” he said. (1)

Despite this apparent recognition, he still isn’t offering any useful information and continues to spew out highly questionable ideas with no explanation.

 

On the other hand, Berger seems to believe that he has Congress’ support.

 

Later in the event, he said in response to a USNI News question that the Fiscal Year 2021 budget cycle indicated to him that lawmakers are on board with the general direction the Marine Corps is moving … (1)

 

I’ve seen nothing to indicate such support and I think Berger is delusional and is seeing what he wants to see.

 

Berger’s behavior has all the characteristics of the ‘smartest man in the room’ syndrome.  He, and he alone, can see the Truth and the rest of us need to quietly follow him.  The problem with this, historically, is that those who believe they’re the ‘smartest man in the room’ are, invariably, not the smartest man and, all too often, turn out to be the dumbest man in the room.  Unless your name is Einstein, you probably aren’t the smartest man in the room!

 

 

 

 

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(1)USNI News website, “Berger: Marines Need to Trust Unmanned, AI Tools for Future Warfare”, Megan Eckstein, 2-Feb-2021,

https://news.usni.org/2021/02/02/berger-marines-need-to-trust-unmanned-ai-tools-for-future-warfare

At The End Of The Rainbow ... Cloud Computing!

The military’s current fad is cloud computing – that nebulous, magic ‘thing’ that will seamlessly connect every sensor, every shooter, and every individual on the battlefield.  What’s the vision?

 

• we’ll know everything and the enemy will know nothing
• we’ll make all the right decisions and the enemy will be paralyzed with indecision
• we’ll have every sensor and shooter connected and the enemy will have no coordination whatsoever

 

What’s the key to making all this work?

 

It’s cloud. It is having your data connected and in a place where I can run analytics on it in real time or near real time, and then render informed decisions to support war-fighting missions,” said Rob Carey, former Navy CIO and deputy DoD CIO, now president of Cloudera Government Solutions. (1)

 

What’s the key assumption - and flaw - in the preceding statement?  It’s the ‘render informed decisions’.

 

The reality of any battlefield intel system, whether human or machine based, is that the raw data will be badly compromised.  That being the case, we fall back to the well known axiom, GIGO (garbage in, garbage out).  Wait a minute … with gazillabytes of data, light speed networks, and artificial intelligence assisted analysis, how can our raw data be garbage?  It’ll be garbage for the same reasons it’s historically always been garbage:

 

Destroyed sensors resulting in only sporadic and partial sensor coverage

Enemy deception (decoys, misdirection, camouflage, obscurants) resulting in incorrect sensor data

Jamming

Misinformation via spurious or incorrect data (false signals) injected into the networks

Miscommunication resulting from incomplete and interrupted data streams or verbal reports

 

So, with all that garbage entering the system, the output is guaranteed to be garbage.  GIGO.  This completely negates the ‘render informed decisions’ assumption.  Whatever decisions are made will be highly suspect.  GIGO.

 

Now, if we were talking about just one minor aspect of our collective warfighting effort, we’d just make a mental note to question our intel predictions and decisions and continue on with fighting the war directly in front of us - as we’ve always done – using whatever intel we could get but tempering it with the understanding that it is flawed and suspect.  However, we’re not talking about one minor aspect.  We’re talking about the entire basis of our collective US military warfighting effort.  The military wants to base everything on this single, mammoth, all-seeing, all-encompassing, AI-assisted, decision making software program they refere to as Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2).  This is the ‘be all’ and ‘end all’ of our military effort.  This is to be our next offset.     ………  and yet it’s obviously flawed from the start at its most fundamental level which is the raw data.  GIGO.

 

You cannot ‘render informed decisions’ with garbage for raw data.  GIGO.

 

Now, let’s be fair and objective.  Some of the data will not be garbage.  Some of it will be legitimate.  This has been true throughout history.  Some intel reports are valid.  Some are not.  Some of the raw data is good.  Some is not. 

 

A ship(s) was sighted at the reported position but the speed, course, number, and type are almost certainly incorrectly reported to an extent.  Which bits are correct and which are not?  We don’t know.  That’s always been the problem.  How do you ‘render informed decisions’ with flawed data?  You don’t!

 

There are no ‘informed decisions’.  Intel doesn’t give us ‘informed decisions’.  It gives us indications and suggestions and possibilities and alternatives and leanings.  In the end, we don’t make ‘informed decisions’, we make tentative assessments and the operational commanders who use those assessments layer on the understood degree of uncertainty.  The commanders may or may not act on those assessments depending on the degree of uncertainty they have about it and the degree of risk they’re willing to assume if they do act on uncertain assessments.  In the meantime, they continue to wage the war that is directly in front of them and whose outcome is decided by firepower, not intel alone.  Unfortunately, we’re abandoning the firepower part and constructing a system that is wholly based on intel … intel that is going to be as suspect as ever, maybe more so because digital systems are even easier to fool than human systems.

 

We can see, then, that this system, this dependence on some almighty digital, cloud-based system is flawed due to the inevitable corruption of the raw data but is that the extent of the problem?  No … there is another level of unreality baked into the concept and that is the end user access.  Consider …

 

“When we want to do call for fires, when we want to do things [where] people’s lives are in jeopardy or they’re at risk, we want that information right there so that they can render their own decision ... at the level of the squad,” Carey said. “So that’s what cloud enables, that connectivity to that information.” (1)

 

So, there you have it.  It’s simple, really.  The squad, in the middle of battle, with explosives going off all around them, dug into the jungle mud and water, with enemy electronic warfare working full time to jam, disrupt, cyber attack any communications, and with enemy fires waiting to zero in on any communications transmissions, will, we assume, still be able to sit quietly and calmly, with full access to a cloud server somewhere and ‘render informed decisions’.  Does that seem even slightly realistic to you?

 

Now, multiply this two-way, intensive computer network communications by a factor of many thousands for all the individual squads, ships, HQs, commanders, etc. who will, presumably, be accessing the system on a continuous basis and you’ll quickly see that the electromagnetic airwaves will be ‘humming’ with non-stop transmissions or, as the enemy calls it, a roadmap to all our locations.  Anyone who thinks we can perform this kind of non-stop, grossly huge bandwidth type of communications undetected is a fool or an officer of flag rank.

 

This concept might have the tiniest, most miniscule chance of working against stone age, third world terrorists in a zero threat environment but it has no chance in any real world scenario against a peer enemy.

 

Just out of curiosity, given that the Chinese appear to have already penetrated every network we have, why do we think our cloud system is going to be immune from cyber attack?

 

I apologize for being crude but this is just mental masturbation on a military wide scale.

Pot of Gold at the End of the Battle Rainbow - Cloud Computing !

 

 

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(1)crisrnet website, “How cloud computing makes Joint All-Domain Command and Control possible”, Andrew Eversden, 26-Apr-2021,

https://www.c4isrnet.com/smr/cloud/2021/04/26/how-cloud-computing-makes-joint-all-domain-command-and-control-possible/

 

The Navy Cloud

Breaking Defense website has an article announcing the Navy’s push to convert from multiple networks to a single Amazon Web Services cloud based data storage/sharing system. (1)

While the benefits are obvious and loudly trumpeted by the Navy, the dangers are waved away and not discussed. 

To illustrate, in my personal life I’ve moved to a 100% local data storage system, meaning, all my files are on jump drives in my possession.  I have no data files on my PC, whatsoever, and none on any cloud service.  Why?  Because there is no such thing as a secure Internet/cloud system.  Every system has been and will repeatedly be compromised.  It’s not through lack of effort by the system owners.  It’s simply impossible to protect data that can be accessed and, indeed, is designed to be accessed. 

My jump drives, on the other hand, cannot be accessed.  They are completely secure.  When I access them, I do so on an isolated computer that acts as a connectivity gap.  The modified files are then loaded on a dedicated transfer jump drive for subsequent uploading to the Internet on a dedicated and protected PC.

Think about the last few years.  Every company swears to us that if we’ll give them our data as we conduct transactions with them, the data will be protected and secured on their impenetrable networks and, yet, we hear week after week about another major company whose data has been compromised.  How many times have you been warned that your personal data, being held by xxxx Corporation, may have been compromised and that you should change your passwords (at that point, they’ve already got your information – changing your password is pointless but if you want to secure the barn door after the horses have left, go ahead)?

So, I pose the question, why do we believe that Amazon Web Services will be somehow immune to the now routine hacking that every other company is subject to, and victim of?  The answer, if we’re being honest and realistic, is that the Navy’s Amazon cloud will be just as vulnerable as every other system.  I know, people are going to write comments about the latest ten thousand bit encryption protection system or whatever.  You know … the same kinds of protection that every other hacked system has had.

Another drawback to consolidating all of the Navy’s information is that if when an enemy does successfully hack the system, they’ll get EVERYTHING.  The current situation, where data resides on many different systems may be inefficient but at least it has the unintended benefit of limiting the amount of data that any one successful hack can acquire.

Okay, so there are dangers associated with this cloud data storage that the Navy has not bothered to share with us but is that the end of the story?  Not quite.  What have we constantly said about military programs?  We’ve said that everything should run through the filter of, “will this improve our combat capability”?  If the answer is no, we shouldn’t be doing it (oops, there goes our gender sensitivity training!).  If the answer is yes, then we’re okay.  So, does moving to cloud storage, with its attendant dangers, improve our combat capability?  Let’s see what the Navy has to say.

One of the biggest benefits to the Navy, Geurts [Navy acquisition chief James Geurts] said, is that sailors and civilians on the pier or on the flight line will be able to reach into the cloud to keep an eye on parts bouncing through the pipeline …

Okay, tracking spare parts is certainly a peacetime convenience.  Whether ‘keeping an eye’ on parts will actually produce the requisite number of parts or simply allow people to verify that the parts are unavailable, is not clear.  Currently we suffer from a lack of necessary parts.  Being able to track that isn’t going to produce the non-existent parts, it will just verify what we already know.  Now, if we have plenty of parts but we’re having problems shipping the parts to the needed locations then this might help.  Of course, we already have multiple systems that are intended to do that so why this system will work and the others haven’t, has yet to be explained by the Navy.  Well, I’ll explain it to you.

The problem with current systems is not that they can’t track a part – that’s computing child’s play - , it’s that the data inputs are garbage and you know the ancient computer axiom:  GIGO (garbage in, garbage out).  Heck, it’s scratched on cave walls!  We’re not taking the time to accurately input parts inventories.  Well guess what?  If we don’t accurately input parts inventories to the cloud, it will be just as inaccurate as what we have now.  ‘The Cloud’ is not magic.  It’s only as good as our data inputs which, apparently, are horrendous.  That’s not going to change.

Moving on …

Simply put, “it will increase the visibility of the data,” Navy Comptroller Thomas Harker added. “Right now, in order to run audits the Navy has to pull data from nine different systems, not all of which are configured the same, and then slice it and dice it and put it all together.” Working that way is time consuming, and “creates challenges in financial reporting.

So, this will allow for easier, more accurate(?) audits.  That’s nice but that does nothing for our combat capability so why are we doing this?

Any other benefits?

If the Pentagon fails to build a common system to share data rapidly among units in different services and different globally-dispersed theaters, it’ll fail to implement the kinds of high-speed, AI-assisted Multi-Domain Operations that military leaders say are imperative in potential future conflicts against advanced adversaries.

So, this cloud will somehow, in some unexplained manner, provide ‘high-speed, AI-assisted Multi-Domain’ operations.  Buzzword bingo, anyone?  Sure, the enemy will be raining old-fashioned artillery shells down on us but we’ll crush them with ‘high-speed, AI-assisted Multi-Domain’ operations.  The poor bastards will never know what hit them. 

When you don’t have any good justification, just string together a bunch of buzzword phrases.  This looks to be a perfect example of that.

This cloud effort sounds like an exercise in convenience rather than combat capability.  It also sounds like a venture that has a lot of potential for profound, unintended, negative consequences.  Hey, China, would you like one-stop shopping for all of our data?  Come hack the cloud!

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Side Note:  F-35 ALIS Case Study in the Making

The Air Force, frustrated with the abject failure of the F-35 ALIS logistics and combat planning software, has instituted a ‘Mad Hatter’ program to transfer the ALIS functionality (the theoretical functionality because, you know, there is no actual functionality!) to cloud servers and a bunch of apps.  In addition to being non-functional, ALIS is also, apparently, quite vulnerable to cyber attack.

… with the current setup, ALIS may be so vulnerable that Robert Behler, the OTE [Director, Operational Test and Evaluation – DOT&E] director, thinks the program should be able to operate for a month without hooking up to it at all. Now that’s a bad sign. (2)

So, as with the Navy’s plan to migrate to cloud storage, no one is explaining how ‘the cloud’ magically eliminates cyber threats whereas the previous, highly encrypted, well protected computing system could not. 

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(1)Breaking Defense website, “Navy Takes First Big Step To Cloud, Pushing Logistics To Amazon’s Service ”, Paul McLeary, 23-Aug-2019,

https://breakingdefense.com/2019/08/navy-takes-first-big-step-to-cloud-pushing-logistics-to-amazons-service/

(2)Defense News website, “Air Force Tries To Fix F-35’s ALIS — From A Big, Broken Box To the Cloud ”, Colin Clark, 6-Mar-2019,

https://breakingdefense.com/2019/03/air-force-moving-f-35s-alis-from-a-big-broken-box-to-the-cloud/