Distributed Targeting

A reader, Benjamin Oliver, recently made a very succinct comment regarding the use of the LCS and every other Navy ship as shooters.  To paraphrase slightly, he said that distributed lethality won’t work without distributed targeting.   This is a brilliant summation of the issue.

The LCS will have 100+ nm anti-ship missiles coupled with 20 nm sensors.  Yes, the ship will have a helo and a UAV but the helo will be reserved for ASW and near-ship ASuW.  The UAV will have a very limited sensor field of view and a single UAV will be woefully inadequate for broad area target searches.  Thus, the ship will have to depend on off-board sensing and targeting.  We’ve discussed this many times.

The Navy’s plan to use P-8s and Triton UAVs is unworkable.  Both are large, slow, non-stealthy aircraft that will serve only as target drones for enemy aircraft and missiles.

Submarines simply don’t have the sensor range or speed to cover the large swaths of ocean needed to find enemy ships.  Plus, our submarines will have more important tasks than acting as search platforms for the LCS.

Satellites are not capable of real time targeting, contrary to what many people believe, and they won’t last long in a peer war.

So, where will the distributed lethality get its distributed targeting?  The short, simple, and painful answer is that there is no viable distributed targeting system.  The kill chain is missing a key link and the Navy’s distributed lethality is just another unworkable Navy fantasy without it.

The concept of distributed targeting is, however, viable with the right sensors.  Unfortunately, the Navy does not have the right sensors and, worse, seems to have no grasp of the problem and no intention of getting the right sensors.  The task falls, then, to us to define the right sensors.

The requirement is simple.  The sensor needs to be able to penetrate many hundreds of miles of enemy territory undetected, find targets, and transmit the data back to the shooters.  For the sake of this discussion, we’ll assume the shooters are ships, the LCS specifically, although the shooters could also be aircraft or land bases.

So, the sensor needs great range, long endurance, stealth of some form, a decent size/power radar and/or good optical sensor, and secure communications.  There are also a couple of implied characteristics.

Unless the sensor is a very large AWACS / E-2 Hawkeye / P-8 Orion size platform, the radar it carries (assuming it uses radar) will, of necessity, be small and low powered which means the field of scan will be limited.  This suggests that large numbers of sensors will be needed to make up for the limited individual coverage.

This, in turn, implies the characteristic of affordability.  Large numbers of sensors can only be produced if the individual sensor is cheap. 

By definition, many of these sensors won’t make it back.  This, again, argues for extreme affordability to be able to absorb the losses and costs.

So, having defined the requirements, what form of platform can meet the requirements?

Unmanned underwater vehicles (UUV) are stealthy but too close to the surface to have much sensing range and are too slow to cover much territory.  UUVs, then, would not make good general purpose distributed sensors.  They could, however, be useful for monitoring limited, fixed areas like navigational chokepoints or harbors. 

Unmanned surface vessels (USV), like UUVs, lack the sensor range and speed to cover sufficient territory.  In addition, they lack the inherent stealth of a UUV.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) potentially offer the range, endurance, and speed to cover larger areas.  Combined with the high altitude they operate at, the sensing area is correspondingly greater.  UAVs also offer the potential to be stealthy through a combination of small size (compared to an AWACS or P-8) and airframe shaping.

Blackjack UAV

UAV’s, then, seem to be the best choice for distributed sensors.  The concept of operation would be to flood a region with many dozens of UAVs at any given moment.  Although an individual UAV would provide limited coverage, the large numbers would ensure adequate area coverage and compensate for the inevitable high attrition rate.

The key question is whether the desired characteristics can be made to fit in an affordable package.  Can we build a UAV with great range, small size, stealth, and decent radar/optics for a low enough price to allow us to build thousands of them?  That’s a difficult challenge but that’s the part of the kill chain the Navy needs to be working on.  An LCS with a hundred or thousand mile anti-ship missile is useless if we can’t provide targeting.

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Side note:  An upsized Blackjack UAV might make a good design starting point for a distributed targeting sensor.  The Blackjack has an operational radius of 480 miles and is small enough to be operated from any ship.  It has a degree of stealth by virtue of its size and the airframe could probably be shaped to provide a greater degree of stealth.

Alternatively, a downsized MQ-1 Predator might also make a good starting point.  It has an operational radius of around 1000 miles.

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Kill Chains or Mistake Chains?

One of the recent buzzword bingo entries that has caught on is “kill chain”.  In simple terms it’s the sequence of events that lead to ordnance on target.  The simplest kill chain is,

see the target

pull the trigger

Simple.  Easy to understand.  Reliable.

A more common kill chain as envisioned by today’s Navy is,

sense the target via multiple sensors

transfer the data to a common data processing location

fuse the sensor data into a common tactical picture

assess the tactical picture against overall objectives

obtain Command and Control (C2) guidance and approval

assign a specific weapon

transfer targeting data to the shooting platform

shoot

hand off mid-course guidance to another platform

Think I’m making up a complex chain like that just to make a point?

Consider the recently discussed kill chain involving the LRASM guided by a chain of F-35s transmitting and retransmitting data back to a central fused tactical data center, then to the shooting platform and back out to the F-35 for guidance and possible re-programming.  The chain might also include data relay stations in the form of satellites or other aircraft.

Still not sure this is realistic?

Consider the Navy’s Co-operative Engagement Capability (CEC).  Multiple platforms share data to assemble a common tactical picture which is evaluated by the air defense command function which then assigns weapons and launch platforms.  Mid-course guidance may come from any platform.  That’s an actual, existing chain.  How well it works is unknown.

Want one more example for the future? 

USNI website has an article discussing the Virginia class SSN replacement and a 200 nm range replacement torpedo.  See if you can discern the kill chain in the following description of torpedo usage from the article.

“… to employ a 200-mile torpedo …  Connor [ed. VAdm. Mike Connor, COMSUBLANT] said that while an attack boat like the Virginia or SSN(X) might launch a torpedo, the targeting data might come from another platform.

Those other platforms could include an aircraft like an unmanned aerial vehicle launched from the submarine or something like a Boeing P-8 Poseidon. In fact,  the submarine might not even guide the weapon to its target in the terminal phase of the engagement, Connor said.”

OK, so kill chains are getting longer and more complex.  What’s the point?

We stated in a previous post that

Complexity = Unreliability

Consider a kill chain as a series of events, each with its own probability of failure.  It stands to reason that the more links in the chain, the greater the chance of one of them failing.  If a single link in the chain fails, the entire chain fails.  It turns out that there is a mathematical description of such a chain.  Briefly, the probability of success for the entire chain is the multiplicative product of the probabilities of the individual events (links).  If you didn’t follow that, don’t worry.  What it means is you multiply the individual probabilities.  For example, if there are two steps in a chain and each has a 95% probability of success, the total probability of success is,

.95 x .95 = .90   or  90%

In the example I offered at the start of the post, there are nine steps (links).  If each step has a 98% chance of success, the total chance of success is only 83%. 

Of course, each step is not uniform in its probability of success.  Some will be very high and some will be less so.  Regardless, the point is that the greater the number of steps (links) in the chain, the less likely the entire chain is to function correctly.  Hence, again,

Complexity = Unreliability

The other aspect to a kill chain composed of high value units, as in this example, is that the units are tied up performing routine, mundane tasks.  In the F-35 example, only the first one or two F-35s need stealth.  After that, each F-35 is a colossal waste of resources.  Of course, if the target is of sufficiently high value then the use of multiple F-35s performing nothing more than communications relay functions may well be worth it.  However, for general surveillance the F-35s would mostly be wasted.

This doesn’t even begin to address the issue of maintenance as a function of complexity.

Back to the main point of unreliability as a function of complexity.  We’ve looked at a simplistic example of a chain.  Now, throw in the added complexity of the networks, nodes, displays, and software, all of which have to work correctly to receive the data, reduce it to an understandable tactical picture, and retransmit both the data/images and resulting actionable commands and we’ve added many more steps to the chain, each with their own failure rates.

Everything we’ve discussed so far has been idealized and the individual step (link) failure probabilities are those inherent to the step.  Now layer on the effects of deliberate enemy disruption in the form of electronic countermeasures, jamming, false signals, etc. and many of the step failure probabilities increase significantly.

Lastly, top it off with natural disruptions such as weather effects, atmospheric ionization, solar flares, curvature of the earth, and whatnot and the failure probabilities further increase.

So, what is ComNavOps suggesting?  Simply that we need to carefully balance complexity against reliability.  Further, I’m suggesting that we’ve gone too far down the path of complexity.

Consider the F-35 targeting chain.  Someone, on day one of conceptual design of the F-35, should have said, “Hey, we don’t want to set up a chain of multiple F-35s just to handle communications.  Instead, let’s make a longer ranged communications capability an inherent part of the design so that a single F-35 can communicate with the controlling station.  In fact, while we’re at it, why don’t we make sure that the F-35 can communicate directly with other platforms, like the Hornet or Hawkeye, without needing a conversion step.”

In combat, confusion will reign.  The simpler our weapons and systems are, the more likely they are to work.  It’s as simple as that.

See the target.  Pull the trigger

USNI, “Navy Starting Work on New SSN(X) Nuclear Attack Submarine”, Dave Majumdar, October 23, 2014,

http://news.usni.org/2014/10/23/navy-starting-work-new-ssnx-nuclear-attack-submarine