AI Hacked – How Would We Know?

Since the age of sail, sailors have mastered the skill of navigation on the open seas using the stars and a sextant.  What happened when we introduced the miracle of GPS?  We completely lost our navigating skills.  Aside from a few individual throwbacks who enjoy using a sextant as a hobby, no one in the Navy can navigate without GPS.  Unbelievably, in some of the recent spate of collisions and groundings, it was discovered that bridge navigation teams had even lost the skill of fixing a position by taking bearings on known landmarks.
 
Since time immemorial, explorers have traversed the land using the stars, a map, and dead reckoning.  Our overland navigational skills increased even further with the advent of the compass.  Today, the Army has lost the ability to navigate overland without GPS.
 
Pilots used to be able to navigate cross country and hit a time on target to the second with nothing more than a map, bearings, and a stopwatch.  Today, that’s a lost skill.
 
GPS, the miracle of technology, caused us to lose our navigational skills and has made us weaker and less competent.  We have become dependent on GPS.  When our GPS systems fail or are degraded or eliminated by the enemy, we have nothing to fall back on.  Exactly like a drug addict, we have become addicted to GPS and unable to function without it.
 
What’s the next miracle of technology that we’re working so hard to acquire?  Yes, artificial intelligence (AI).  Does anyone have the slightest doubt that we’ll become utterly dependent on AI?
 
Ask a college student to write a report without using AI.  He’ll produce gibberish.  He’s lost his ability (or never developed it) to conduct research, assemble a cogent thesis, and present an intelligible, written document.  Heck, forget AI;  ask a student to write a paper without the Grammarly app and see what results.  Even simpler, ask any young adult who’s gone to public school to calculate change for a purchase in his head, without a calculator, and watch the deer in the headlights, frozen response.  We’ve become dependent on calculators and can’t even do simple arithmetic in our heads anymore.
 
Does anyone have the slightest doubt that we’ll become utterly dependent on AI?
 
The military, by the way, is attempting to make AI the foundation of our entire command and control systems.  We believe, mistakenly, that AI will give us the advantage we need to beat China.  AI, we believe, will analyze all our data, make sense of the fog of war, tell us exactly what the enemy is going to do even before he knows, and will tell us how to counter and defeat the enemy.  AI.  Magic.  One and the same.
 
Those of us who grew up during the introduction of computers are all too familiar with the well known computer programming adage, Garbage In, Garbage Out (GIGO).  Bad data in, bad results out.  AI is not immune to this phenomenon.
 
Be honest.  Does anyone seriously question what they find on the Internet?  Sure, we’ll make jokes about the Internet but does anyone actually question what they read?  Of course not.
 
Does anyone have the slightest doubt that we’ll become utterly dependent on AI?
 
Where are we going with this?  Hang in there.  We’re almost at the point of the post.  One more tidbit to assimilate.
 
Does a week go by without hearing about high level computer systems and programs, both in the military and civilian worlds, being hacked?  Nope.  And those are just the incidents that are made public.  The military and government computers and programs are hacked on a daily basis but for security reasons the incidents are kept quiet.  Despite our best efforts, various state and criminal actors routinely hack our most secure systems.  For all practical purposes, they’re unstoppable.
 
So, now put those two bits together:  absolute dependency on new technology and unstoppable hacking, and ask yourself what the result will be? 
 
The answer is easy to predict.  China will routinely hack and compromise our AI-based systems and we’ll by absolutely paralyzed because of our dependency.
 
But wait, it gets worse.  What if China hacks our AI-based systems subtly and we don’t even know it?  What if they simply manipulate the AI to give us results that give them the advantage?  We’d blindly accept the results (that’s what dependency is), never questioning them and never knowing we were being mislead and manipulated.  In fact, it would never even occur to us to ask whether the AI output was valid.
 
But wait, it gets still worse.  Even if someone was inclined to question AI results, we have no one competent enough to know what a valid result should be.  You have to have subject matter knowledge and expertise to even have an idea that something might not be right and our so-called professional warriors have no expertise (you built a ship without galvanic corrosion protection!).  So, even someone who was inclined to question a result wouldn’t have the slightest idea whether the result was or was not valid.
 
A calculator is a great tool for someone who has been trained in classical math and can recognize a garbage out result.  It is a terrible tool for someone who has no useful math skills and is unable to recognize a garbage out result.  So too, an AI command and control program could be a useful tool to a thoroughly trained and experienced professional warrior who can recognize a garbage out result.  It is a terrible tool for someone who has no useful warfighting skills and is unable to recognize a garbage out result … such as entire current flag officer corps.
 
We all recognize that networked computers are a vulnerability because if one is hacked, they’re all hacked.  We aren’t doing much to address that vulnerability but we do recognize it.  Similarly, we must recognize that AI is a vulnerability, especially when it’s being used as the basis of our highest level command and control programs.
 
Right now, just like drug dealers, we’re being given a free taste of AI to get us hooked.  We need to halt the process before we become totally addicted and helplessly dependent.  We need to regain our unaided warfighting expertise.  We do that by eliminating all non-war education (diversity, equity, gender sensitivity, climate, etc.) at the service academies, eliminating diversity crap from the leadership and ranks, ruthlessly eliminating paperwork from the daily lives of officers, eliminating deployments, bringing the fleet home for maintenance and training, start promoting a culture of acceptance of aggressiveness and ‘good’ mistakes, and start conducting daily realistic warfighting exercises and force our incompetent leadership to learn their profession.
 

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/

 

Fight In Plain View

In future wars, the US military believes it will see everything, friendly and enemy, on the future battlefield thanks to vast regional/global command and control networks, UAVs, regional sensor networks, underwater unmanned vessels, unmanned surface vessels, satellites, etc.  ComNavOps has pointed out the fallacy in that belief but, for sake of discussion, let’s follow the logic of that belief and see where it takes us.  I must warn you, the destination may be surprising and upsetting.

 

If we believe our omnipotence to be true then we have to believe the flip side which is that the enemy will also see everything since they will have all the same assets, capabilities, and resources and, in the case of China, they’ll have the added advantage of ‘home field’ (we’re talking about a main war, now, not a proxy conflict in Africa or some such) which provides land based radar, air bases, harbors, etc. which will greatly increase the density of sensors that can be applied to the battlefield.

 

If we believe it to be true then we must believe that all forces, friendly and enemy, will be under constant threat of attack or, indeed, constant actual attack since their location will be continually known.

 

That being the case, the inevitable and inescapable conclusion, then, is that it is mandatory that our forces be able to fight exposed and fully out in the open, as far as detection is concerned, because the enemy will know exactly where we are at all times.

 

That’s right, there will be no hiding, no hidden bases, no skulking LCS distributed lethality ships waiting to pounce on unsuspecting prey, no undetected Marine anti-ship missile units hidden on islands, no undetected transports relocating small Marine units and providing them with resupply, no UAVs blithely flying undetected deep into enemy territory, no submarines cruising undetected through enemy waters, etc.

 

I repeat, the logic has to work both ways.  If we can see everything, so can the enemy.

 

So, if our forces will be constantly exposed and under constant attack, how can they survive?  There is one way and one way only and that is through the application of massive, overwhelming defensive firepower combined with extensive ‘armor’ (‘armor’ includes actual armor and also electronic warfare ‘armor’).  Instead of Burkes with a single CIWS, we’ll need ships with dozens of CIWS/SeaRAM and hundreds of ESSM.  Instead of remaining passive and hidden, our ships will need to radiate constantly (no point using passive sensors since the enemy will know exactly where we are!) and, given the inevitable combat damage, we’ll need ships with multiple redundant sensor systems and backup sensors on top of that.

 

Can this actually work?  Can a force survive under constant surveillance and attack?  Of course they can … if they have sufficient firepower.  This is analogous to telling the other team your play and daring them to stop you.  If you have big enough, fast enough, strong enough players you can successfully execute your play even if the other team knows it’s coming.  This is actually what we did in WWII.  Okinawa was not a surprise to Japan.  They knew it was coming.  They knew exactly where our forces were and they attacked almost constantly but it didn’t matter because we had sufficient firepower to survive and succeed – albeit it at great cost.

 

Of course, the astute among you have noticed that the solution to the problem – overwhelming firepower and armor – is the exact opposite of where the US military is going.  The military is almost ignoring firepower while they pursue networks, data, and command and control schemes. 

 

If our ground forces will be under constant attack, why haven’t we developed a robust, mobile, anti-air capability?

 

If our naval forces will be under constant attack, why are our ships so lightly armed (Burkes have only a single CIWS), unarmored, and without redundant or backup sensors and weapons?

 

If our carriers will be under constant attack, why aren’t we training for multi-carrier group operations?

 

Why does our front line F-35 aircraft carry so few weapons?

 

Why does the Marine Corps believe that platoon size units will be able to survive?

 

And so on …

 

 

Now, the extremely astute among you will have already concluded that the best defense is a good offense.  Rather than simply stand and see how long we can survive while the enemy pounds on us, relentlessly, we need to be conducting our own massive and constant attacks on their assets.  Again, this means firepower, not networks, and massive amounts of it.  Where are our massive offensive forces?  Where are our massively powerful and numerous weapons?  China will be flinging super/hyper-sonic ballistic missiles at us and we’ll be answering with subsonic, non-stealthy, obsolete Tomahawks.  I know which side of that exchange I’d rather be on!  China will be flinging supersonic (Mach 2-4) YJ-12 anti-ship cruise missiles at us and we’ll be answering with slow, obsolete, non-stealthy Harpoons or, possibly, subsonic Long Range Anti-Ship Missiles (LRASM).  Again, I know which side of that exchange I’d rather be on.  Chinese submarines will be flinging YJ-18 supersonic anti-ship cruise missiles at us and we’ll be answering with Harpoons or, possibly, an anti-ship Tomahawk missile.  And so on.

 

We lack the firepower, lethality, and numbers of weapons to win a war of attrition.  That’s right, a war of attrition.  If both sides have complete knowledge about each other’s forces, the war defaults to a war of attrition.  All of our vaunted maneuver warfare theories are rendered invalid when the enemy sees everything, just as we can.

 

Now, some of you, quite rightly, may be saying, hey, it’s not possible for the enemy to see all of our forces.  In fact, most of our forces will, at any given moment, be undetected.  Well, if that’s true then it must also be true for the enemy.  Most of their forces will, at any given moment, be undetected and, if that’s the case, why are we basing our entire future military hope on the concept of perfect knowledge and awareness of the enemy’s forces?  Why are we focusing so much effort on networks, data, and sensors if we won’t be able to see the bulk of the enemy’s forces?  Do you see the logical disconnect inherent in what our military is doing?  Either way, perfect knowledge or not, we’re being inconsistent in our logic which means our information-centric approach to future warfare is fundamentally wrong.  The correct approach is firepower-centric with information being used to support firepower, not replace it.  The Russians demonstrated this to perfection in Ukraine and we’ve opted to ignore the evidence.

 

Useful or Pointless?

So, are our systems going to see everything and we’re going to fight in plain view as our military development  path logically dictates or will our systems be unable to see everything which makes our development path fundamentally flawed?  If we are going to fight in plain view, our forces are poorly designed and equipped to do so.

Command and Control Are Opposites

The military has lots of acronyms, to put it mildly and politely.  Arguably, there is no more prevalent or important acronym than C2 (Command and Control), at least in the opinion of the higher levels of military leadership.  C2 has become not only a staple but almost a religion among leadership.  Even the acronym has grown!  It started out as just C2 but it grew into C2I (C2 + Intelligence) then C2ISR (C2 + Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance).  Even that wasn’t enough.  C2ISR led to C3ISR (C2 + Communications + ISR).  Unbelievably, there’s now C4ISR (C2ISR + Computers).  … … …   Do I dare say it?  Is there a C5ISR?  Yes, there is!  It’s the Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Cyber, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C5ISR) Center which is an Army applied research and advanced technology development center under the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command, or CCDC, which is a major subordinate command of the U.S. Army Futures Command.  And before you ask, yes, there is a C6ISR C6ISR (Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Cyber-Defense and Combat Systems, and Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance) being developed.  There’s also JADC2 (Joint All Domain Command and Control).  And the list goes on …

 

We can see, then, that C2 has expanded and grown to encompass … well … everything! 

 

So, what’s wrong with C2?  Isn’t that how we control battles and wars and fight efficiently?  Isn’t that a good thing?  We’ve previously discussed Command and Control (see, “Command and Control”) and the trend by today’s leadership towards ever greater levels of micro-managing under the guise of artificial intelligence battle management software.  Now, though, let’s step back and look at the fundamental concept of Command and Control.

 

To state the obvious, C2 consists of two words: ‘Command’ plus ‘Control’.  What do they mean?

 

Command is the formulation and conveyance of intent, in the form of orders, by the commander to his subordinates.  As we discussed in the previous post, the ideal form of this command is ‘Commander’s Intent’ whereby the commander issues the broad scope and thrust of his desires for his local commanders to execute as they see fit.

 

Control is the step-by-step, item-by-item direction of a subordinate’s actions.   

 

 

Let’s consider control ...  We all recognize that some degree of control is necessary.  Without it, units and individuals would act in an uncoordinated, almost random fashion which would negatively impact the desired outcome.  Units would fail to support each other and would likely interfere with each other.  However, the benefits of control are a function of distance from the controlled.  When the controller is in close physical proximity to the controlled, this is a beneficial operation.  An example would be a squad leader issuing commands to his squad.  In this example, both the controller and controlled are in the same location and experiencing the same situation.  As the controller becomes more and more removed from the controlled, the controller’s understanding of the local situation breaks down and the controller becomes both a burden to the controlled – due to incessant demands for information – and an impediment to swift and proper action  - due to the controller’s lack of understanding of the local situation and the time delays involved in obtaining information, debating alternative courses of action, and the issuance of orders.  An example is almost any operation today where the White House authority and Joint Chiefs sit around a war room monitoring and directing the moment by moment actions of an operation on the other side of the world.  President Lyndon Johnson personally setting target lists in Vietnam or President Carter directing the failed hostage rescue are examples.  There is an endless list of lesser examples of remote commanders directing moment-by-moment operations.

 

So, what do we immediately notice from the definitions of ‘Command’ and ‘Control’?  The obvious point that jumps out is that the two are opposites!  Command, properly executed, is the dispersal of authority to lower levels whereas ‘Control’ is the consolidation of authority to higher levels.  Polar opposites and yet our military has, illogically, combined them into one phrase and one concept!

 

We have grown so used to the combined phrase that we don’t even consider the incongruity inherent in the phrase.  Command and Control is an oxymoron and yet it is the foundation of our military leadership.  That’s a problem!

 

Facing a future war where our communications, in all forms, will be under constant attack, we need to recognize that our ability to issue orders will be severely degraded and that Control will, therefore, devolve to the local unit level whether we want it to or not.  That requires that we embrace the concept of Commander’s Intent and institutionalize the concept of local control.  We need to relentlessly practice it so that when we lose communications in combat, we’ll be comfortable with the situation and able to function effectively.

 

Command and Control are opposites and we need to start splitting them apart and practicing them separately.

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) may not mean to the military what it means to casual observers.  Most of us think of the Terminator when we think of AI.  We recognize that’s a far off fantasy but that’s our vision.  The military, on the other hand, thinks of AI as a way to assist in more comprehensive micro-management.  They don’t state it in those terms but even a cursory examination of the military’s goals shows this to be the case.

“We believe that the current crop of AI systems today are going to be cognitive assistance,” he [Nand Mulchandani, acting director of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center] said. “Those types of information overload cleanup are the types of products that we’re actually going to be investing in.” (1)

So, the military seems to view AI as a data ‘clean up’ or streamlining service which will, of course, be used by remote commanders to more closely micro-manage their subordinates who are the local commanders.

The military is also intensely interested in micro-managing the assets in the field by connecting sensors and weapons and exerting control over them (see, “Command and Control”).

… DoD’s focus on developing JADC2 [ed., Joint All-Domain Command and Control], a system of systems approach that will connect sensors to shooters in near-real time. (1)

AI is also viewed as a common connector between disparate platforms – whatever ‘platforms’ means in this context – so as to, again, enable more effective micro-managing.

“JADC2 is not a single product. It is a collection of platforms that get stitched together — woven together ― into effectively a platform. And JAIC is spending a lot of time and resources focused on building the AI component on top of JADC2,” said the acting director. (1)

We see, then, that the military views AI not as an autonomous, near-sentient, battlefield killing machine but as a tool to aid in the exercise of even closer and tighter micro-managing.  They don’t say it in exactly those words but that’s what they want.  The Admirals and Generals grew up in a zero-defect environment where you didn’t trust your subordinates to operate without your moment-by-moment direction.  Ship command, for example, was an excruciating period of time where you, as Captain, prayed every minute that none of your crew would make a mistake that would result in the dreaded ‘loss of confidence’ pronouncement from your superiors and the loss of your command and career.  You achieved this by micro-managing every action aboard your ship.  Not surprisingly, then, today’s Admirals want to apply the same model of command – meaning micro-management – to large scale Command and Control and they see artificial intelligence as the way to do it.  The more you can see what your subordinates see, the more closely you can micro-manage them and AI is just the thing to allow that – so the Admirals believe.

I’ve repeatedly posted and commented about the ills of micro-managing.  There’s no need to repeat myself.  What I’d like to address is not the self-evident evils of micro-management but, instead, the proper use of AI in the conduct of a war.  What our Admirals (and civilian leadership!) should be using AI for is not assisting in micro-managing but, instead, assisting in the formulation of strategy.  We should be using AI to identify enemy patterns of resource use that might indicate strategic vulnerabilities, identify overall enemy force movements that might presage future operations, assess enemy leadership performance and patterns that might allow us to predict actions and decisions, track enemy munitions expenditures to identify weapons usage patterns and inventories, and so on.  None of this is directed toward telling the individual soldier or sailor which way to turn and when to pull the trigger.  None of this is directed toward telling the individual ship’s Captain what course to steer.  Admirals and Generals should have much bigger problems to worry about than setting a course or monitoring individual soldiers.

Strategy - Not Micro-Managing

Properly used, AI has the potential to be a strategic-level aid for upper command.  One of the difficulties, I’m sure, is that our current – and future – leadership has been ‘raised’ in an environment totally lacking in strategic and operational thought.  Thus, it’s undoubtedly difficult, if not downright impossible, for them to even conceive of using AI for strategic purposes.  They’re simply not wired to think about strategy.  They never had to before so why would they now?  Somehow, we need to break out of that limited thinking and start thinking strategically instead of micro-managing.  AI can offer valuable assistance but only if properly applied.

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(1)C4ISRNet website, “Pentagon AI center shifts focus to joint war-fighting operations”, Nathan Stout, 8-Jul-2020,

https://www.c4isrnet.com/artificial-intelligence/2020/07/08/pentagon-ai-center-shifts-focus-to-joint-warfighting-operations/

Command and Control

Historically, naval combat has followed a very decentralized command and control scheme with command decisions pushed down and out to the local commander.  This was both a requirement due to communications difficulties and a recognition that the on-scene commander generally had a better grasp of the situation.  Unfortunately, in recent decades, the US military has fixated on centralized command with prodigious efforts exerted toward accomplishing micro-management.  While centralized micro-management may be technologically feasible and operationally acceptable during peacetime or in low end combat scenarios, the coming war with China will likely see our communications disrupted, satellites destroyed, comm links jammed, and communication systems cyber-attacked with the result that our ability to exert centralized command will be extensively degraded.  If we don’t begin to retrain for decentralized command, we’re going to see local commanders cut off from command and floundering with no direction and no self-command experience and training to fall back on.

Let’s briefly remind ourselves of some historical examples of command and control, good and bad: 

Midway

At the time of Midway, the Navy’s carrier force was committed to battle and the outcome would determine the fate of the Pacific war for at least the next year.  If there was ever a time for the remote naval commander (Nimitz) to attempt to micro-manage a battle, this would seem to have been it.  Instead, Nimitz resisted the temptation and issued the following order to Admiral Spruance, the local commander at Midway:

In carrying out the task assigned in Operation Plan 29-42 you will be governed by the principle of calculated risk, which you shall interpret to mean the avoidance of exposure of your force to attack by superior enemy forces without good prospect of inflicting, as a result of such exposure, greater damage to the enemy. (4)

Nimitz offered his local commander generalized guidance and trusted the commander to act accordingly, using his best judgment.  As it turned out, Spruance executed the mission splendidly.  He was aggressive as needed and also exercised caution as appropriate when he opted to run on the evening of June 4 to avoid the possibility of a night surface battle with Japanese battleships.(4)

Nelson at Trafalgar

While Nelson was, of course, present at Trafalgar, he was remote in the sense that ship to ship communication was very difficult in those days, bordering on impossible in the heat of battle.  Therefore, Nelson briefed his ship captains on his general plan and intent and then, when the battle began, left each captain (the local commander, so to speak) to act as they saw fit within the context of the overall intent.  The result was a brilliant victory.

President Carter’s Hostage Rescue

President Carter not only exerted a high level of remote command and control but also planned much of the hostage rescue mission.

… we had to have six functioning helicopters. So I ordered eight helicopters … (5)

Carter continued to exert remote command and control right up to personally making the decision to abort the mission.  The result was a dismal failure.

Benghazi Embassy

The 2012 Benghazi embassy disaster was due in large measure to extreme levels of remote command and control both leading up to the event and during the actual fighting.  Multiple available response forces were alerted and left holding or told to stand down while various layers of remote command and control debated about what to do.  For example, from the Wiki write up of the incident,

By 4:30 p.m. ET, Pentagon officials had informed Defense Secretary Leon Panetta about the attack. The Pentagon ordered an unmanned aerial vehicle that was in the air conducting surveillance on militant camps to fly over Benghazi. The drone arrived at 11:10 p.m. local time (5:10 p.m. ET) and began providing a video feed to Washington. At 5:41 p.m. ET, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton telephoned CIA Director David Petraeus to coordinate.

In the end, they did nothing and disaster resulted. 

Soldier Cams

There is no better example of remote command and control than the existence and use of individual soldier cams.  These represent the epitome of micro-managing with remote commanders sitting in control centers watching events play out and issuing orders, often to individual soldiers.

Cold War Carrier Groups

During the Cold War, as the Soviets and Americans played naval cat and mouse, US carrier groups doctrinally operated under strict emissions control (EMCON) with no communications, whatsoever.  The local commander was left to execute the mission as they saw fit.  Indeed, one of the aspects of future war that no one is considering, today, is that in peer combat, ships will be operating under EMCON, as we did during the Cold War, so the sooner we learn to get comfortable with local command, the better.

These examples, good and bad, are not intended to be all-inclusive or to prove or disprove anything.  They are intended simply to illustrate the concept.

It has generally been acknowledged in the US military that remote command and control does not work and that the local commander should be left to act as he sees fit.  Despite that historical, institutional wisdom, our current military leaders are working as hard as they can to do the exact opposite.  The goal of today’s military leaders seems to be to exert control over every sensor, weapon, and individual in a battle.

Contrary to the current trend of ever greater micro-management, we need to give local commanders greater leeway and ultimate command authority.  We need to support local commanders, not command and micro-manage them.  We need to revert to ‘commander’s intent’ philosophy and then allow the local commanders to implement the intent as they see fit.

So, with all that said, what is our current military leadership actually pushing for?  That’s right … more micro-management.  Look at the current push to produce mega computerized battle management  software suites such as those listed below. 

• Air Force Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS) which seeks to connect all four services’ forces in all five domains of war: air, land, sea, space, and cyberspace.(1)  This one is the very definition of micro-management on a mega-scale! 
• Raytheon Multi-Domain Command & Control (MDC2) concept.(2)  A Raytheon graphic of the system actually says, “Battle Manager” (6), as one of its core functions – that’s micro-management of the worst kind.
• Lockheed Theater Battle Management Core Systems (TBMCS).(3)  The name says it all !

Lockheed Theater Battle Management System Exercise

These are the systems being pitched to, and pursued by, the US military.  They are micro-management taken to the extreme with the system seeing what each individual soldier, sailor, ship, and aircraft sees and directing the actions of each on a second by second basis – which, of course, is the Holy Grail of the modern US military.

Raytheon Multi-Domain Command and Control

One final, and overwhelmingly important, aspect of this discussion is that a future peer war is going to degenerate into local command despite our best efforts.  The combined effects of cyber attacks on our command and control software and networks, GPS disruption, communications jamming, sensor disruption and destruction, satellite destruction, network attacks and hacks, and the inevitable confusion (‘fog’) of war will conspire to prevent the micro-management we so desperately want to implement.  When that happens, our local commanders will be left on their own – for the first time in their careers.  Like any first time event, it will not go well.  The local commanders, being unused to thinking on their own and bereft of guidance from above, will flounder and make devastatingly fatal mistakes because they will have had no experience at managing their own battles.

We need to immediately begin exercising local command.  We need to construct complex and challenging exercises, provide the local commanders only ‘commander’s intent’ for guidance, and then sit back and let them manage their battles.  At first, it won’t be pretty.  In fact, it will be downright ugly but that’s the point:  to make the mistakes in peacetime exercises rather than war where the stakes are life and death.

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(1)Breaking Defense website, “Air Force ABMS: One Architecture To Rule Them All? ”, Sydney J. Freedberg, 8-Nov-2019,

https://breakingdefense.com/2019/11/air-force-abms-one-architecture-to-rule-them-all/

(2)Breaking Defense website, “What Multi Domain C2 May Look Like: Raytheon’s Rick Yuse ”, Colin Clark, 19-Jul-2018,

https://breakingdefense.com/2018/07/exclusive-what-multi-domain-c2-may-look-like-raytheons-rick-yuse/

(3)https://news.lockheedmartin.com/2000-10-16-Lockheed-Martins-TBMCS-Command-and-Control-System-for-Air-Combat-Approved-For-U-S-Forces#:~:text=Bringing%20the%20power%20of%20integrated%20information%20technology%20to,expected%20to%20be%20certified%20by%20the%20government%20

(4)Naval War College Review, “Deconstructing Nimitz’s Principle of Calculated Risk”, Vol 68, No. 1, Article 4, Robert C. Rubel, 2015,

https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1180&=&context=nwc-review&=&sei-redir=1&referer=https%253A%252F%252Fwww.bing.com%252Fsearch%253Fq%253Dmidway%252Borders%252Bbased%252Bon%252Bcalculated%252Brisk%2526form%253DEDGEAR%2526qs%253DPF%2526cvid%253D866ac8a032e44f7fb0b8902dd047e336%2526cc%253DUS%2526setlang%253Den-US%2526PC%253DDCTS#search=%22midway%20orders%20based%20calculated%20risk%22

(5)https://www.thehistoryreader.com/us-history/president-carter-iran-hostage-crisis-attempted-rescue/

(6)https://www.raytheon.com/sites/default/files/2018-08/4467674_IIS_MDC2-Infographic_FINAL.pdf

Where Are You Shopping?

Of late, I’ve been seeing nothing but a non-stop parade of proposed products from industry that are the cutting edge (and beyond) of high technology.  I’m seeing exquisitely high tech, artificial intelligence assisted, battle management, unmanned, cross domain, synergistic …  well, that’s enough buzzwords strung together.  You get the point.  No one is offering the military basic, simple firepower that costs next to nothing even though that is likely a better product.  Why not?  Well, it’s all about where you shop.

On a personal level, if you shop at the local thrift store, you’re going to see cheap, basic items.  If you shop at the Apple store, you’re going to see the latest technology stuffed with every function and app that the designers at Apple could conceive.

If you’re the military and you shop at Lockheed Martin, you’re going to see AI-assisted battle management computer products.  What you’re not going to see is offers of bulk quantities of mortar shells.  Which one is likely to be of more use on the battlefield to say nothing of which one is more likely to work?  LM is going to offer what they know how to do and what can make them the most money.  There’s nothing wrong with that.  It’s what business is supposed to do.  The problem is that if the military doesn’t shop at the low level, basic firepower stores then they’re never going to see low level, basic firepower solutions even though those solutions are far more likely to useful on the battlefield.

Here’s the kind of product being offered at the store the military is shopping at.

The Air Force is launching a next-generation airborne surveillance and command and control technology intended to successfully synchronize air, ground, drone and satellite assets onto a single seamless network, service officials said.

ABMS [Advanced Battle Management and Surveillance] seeks to harvest the latest ISR-oriented technologies from current and emerging systems as a way to take a very large step forward – and connect satellites, drones, ground sensors and manned surveillance aircraft seamlessly in real time across a fast-changing, dispersed combat area of operations. (1)

Wow!  You can’t get any more exquisite and less firepower than that!

Wait …  I bet we can do better.  How about this,

The Missile Defense National Team is conducting a feasibility study on connecting the Missile Defense Agency’s integrated command and control system with the U.S. Army’s Integrated Air and Missile Defense Battle Command System.

The team, which is led by Lockheed Martin, consists of Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics and other companies. This team develops C2BMC, the system that integrates separate elements (Aegis, THAAD, SBIRS etc.) of the ballistic missile defense system into a global network. Through C2BMC, commanders can link any sensor, any shooter, at any phase of missile flight in any region, against any type of ballistic threat. (2)

Outstanding!  A global network linking anything to anything.  Is that pretty much the definition of exquisite?  Is there any possible way to top that?  How about this,

Lockheed Martin today unveiled its new HI-Vision Air-Space Integration Lab, a state-of-the-art development and integration facility designed to enable collaboration with customers and industry partners for future advancements in Joint command and control (C2) across air and space domains.

“We are focusing our resources within Lockheed Martin to help address our customers’ increasing requirements for horizontally integrated, network- centric solutions,” said Al Smith, Executive Vice President, Lockheed Martin Integrated Systems and Solutions business area.  …

Modeled after a functioning Air Operations Center, The HI-Vision lab creates a collaborative environment where military and industry personnel will address current and future architectural challenges to achieve greater synergy across air and space go-to-war C2 systems. The lab will serve as an integration proving ground for a wide range of current and future systems, including the C2 Constellation, Theater Battle Management Core Systems (TBMCS), E-10A Battle Management Command and Control (BMC2), Integrated Space Command and Control (ISC2), Distributed Common Ground Station (DCGS), and Missile Defense National Team efforts. (3)

Now we’re integrating the totality of air and space and doing so without any mention of firepower.  Zounds!  I’m lightheaded and my hands are trembling from excitement. 

What do all these proffered products have in common?  None of them involve actual firepower.  You remember what firepower is, right?  Yeah, it’s that stuff that actually kills the enemy.

Another thing they all have in common is price tags that would make even the US government take notice and gulp.

It’s all about where you shop.

When the Navy wanted a gun for the Zumwalt did they shop at the local 155 mm artillery gun maker who’s been cranking out artillery and ammo for half the world’s armed forces?  No, they went to BAE for the exquisite, non-standard, rocket assisted 155 mm gun maker and bought a gun that, despite nominally being the NATO standard 155 mm, couldn’t use any other gun’s ammo.  A gazillion dollars spent and we got nothing out of it.

When the Navy wanted a new stealth fighter did they go to Grumman Iron Works (now Northrop Grumman) for the latest version of a rock solid, basic fighter?  No, they went to a worldwide consortium representing a United Nations of suppliers for an aircraft so complex that it’s been twenty years in development and is just barely now entering service and has sustainment costs that even the military has acknowledged is unaffordable.

When the Navy needed a way to kill drones did they go the neighborhood Oerlikon store and look at the basic, 20 mm machine gun (Oerlikon 20mm/85 KAA, for example, capable of 1000 rds/min at a range of 1+ mile) that’s been a staple on naval ships since the Revolutionary War?  No, they immediately jumped on the laser bandwagon.

When the Navy needed a weapons elevator for their new carrier, did they go to elevators-R-us?  No, they went to the science fiction, quantum physics store for non-existent, theoretical electromagnetic pulse elevators.  How’d that work out?  Well, I’ll let you know if and when the Ford elevators ever get working properly.

If you shop at high tech stores you’ll get high tech products.  Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean high performance products.  In fact, all too often, it means products that flop miserably.  With high technology comes a high risk of failure and a certainty of difficulty in support.

We Don't Need No Stinkin' Artillery, We Got Data.  Let's Buy Ten Of These!

We can’t blame the high tech companies.  It’s what they do.  Of course they’ll push high tech solutions.  That’s where the money is and making money is what they’re supposed to do.  Lockheed isn’t going to suggest binoculars and a note pad for battle management.  They’re going to push bio-matrix, artificial intelligence battle management, with nodes linked by telepathic relays using subspace inductive communications and multi-dimensional, interactive, spatial displays.  Sure, the binoculars and notepad are probably more reliable when the enemy starts raining artillery shells on you but that’s not what will make Lockheed money.  It’s incumbent on the Navy to know what will really work and not be lured by shiny toys.

We need to stop shopping at the high tech stores and start shopping at the bargain basement, firepower clearance stores.

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(1)The National Interest website, “The Air Force Is Creating a System to Manage the Military's Forces in War”, Kris Osborn, 1-Mar-2018,

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/the-air-force-creating-system-manage-the-militarys-forces-24701

(2)https://navaltoday.com/2014/06/27/lockheed-martin-led-team-conducts-study-on-battle-management-systems/

(3)http://www.defense-aerospace.com/article-view/release/26379/lockheed-unveils-new-air_space-lab-(sept.-30).html