Network Centric Warfare
We may or may not be in the midst of an RMA, but Network Centric Warfare is an emerging reality in modern armed forces. Below are four short readings. The first addresses the nature of Network Centric Warfare; the second is an article that suggests that on tomorrow's battlefield, the laptop may be as vital as the rifle and asks how the Pentagon will grapple with managing this microchip revolution. The third article challenges all this emphasis on information and technology, and the fourth article addresses possible vulnerabilities of a network centric force.
As you read the following four selections, do some critical thinking and:
- Evaluate the arguments for and against the importance of NCW.
- Analyze how the arguments stack up against your experience with NCW.
- Analyze how all this talk of NCW impacts the field of geospatial intelligence, and specifically the role, mission, political position, and funding of the NGA?
Figure 06.01: US Army Soldier using Blue Force Tracker.
SOURCE: Department of the Army.
Blue Force Tracker allows Soldiers to maintain situational awareness on the battlefield by knowing their own location, the location of friendly forces (the blue forces), plotting enemy locations, and communicating this all over a network to maintain a common operating picture or COP. The system uses digital maps, remotely sensed imagery, and global positioning system data which are all geospatial intelligence products or techniques.
Figure 06.02: Major Allan Foskett, Chief of Highway Traffic, and SGT Juan Franco of the 450th Movement Control Battalion are shown preparing to enter Iraq.
SOURCE: Department of the Army.
MAJ Foskett has his Movement Tracking System (MTS) up. MTS is a satellite based system with a digital map that can be zoomed in and out. A global positioning system transmits the unit location to other users, and the system overlays all or selected users on the digital map. The system also allows for text messaging via satellite thus overcoming the limitations of terrestrial radio systems. MTS allowed the 450th Movement Control Battalion to maintain in-transit visibility of critical logistics convoys, and to communicate over long distances. Highway Regulating Teams patrolling the main supply route often were able to call in medical evacuation helicopters for units out of radio contact thus saving many lives. SGT Franco is a digital graphic designer. He took locational data obtained by GPS equipped Highway Regulation Teams and produced a simplified strip map of all the theater logistics nodes in Kuwait and Iraq. His map was widely reproduced and distributed. The map enabled both military and contracted logisticians to support the force.
Now consider the extract from The Implementation of Network Centric Warfare published by the Office of Force Transformation in January 2005.
The Implementation of
Network Centric WarfareWhat Is Network-Centric Warfare?
Network-centric warfare is an emerging theory of war in the Information Age. It is also a concept that, at the highest level, constitutes the military's response to the Information Age. The term network-centric warfare broadly describes the combination of strategies, emerging tactics, techniques, and procedures, and organizations that a fully or even a partially networked force can employ to create a decisive warfighting advantage.
The implementation of NCW is first of all about human behavior as opposed to information technology. While "network" is a noun, "to network" is a verb. Thus, when we examine the degree to which a particular military organization, or the Department as a whole, is exploiting the power of NCW, our focus should be on human behavior in the networked environment. How do military forces behave, perform, and organize themselves when they are networked? As illustrated in the next chapter, experience with networked forces to date indicates that Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines conducting military operations at the tactical and operational levels of war gain a significant advantage over adversaries because of shared situational awareness. NCW theory has applicability at all three levels of warfare—strategic, operational, and tactical—and across the full range of military operations from major combat operations to stability and peacekeeping operations.
A networked force conducting network-centric operations (NCO) is an essential enabler for the conduct of effects-based operations by U.S. forces. Effects-based operations (EBO) are "sets of actions directed at shaping the behavior of friends, neutrals, and foes in peace, crisis, and war." EBO is not a new form of warfighting, nor does it displace any of the currently recognized forms of warfare. Throughout history, decision makers have sought to create conditions that would achieve their objectives and policy goals. Military commanders and planners have attempted to plan and execute campaigns to create these conditions—an approach that would be considered "effects-based" in today's terminology. EBO in the 21st century, enabled by networked forces, is a methodology for planning, executing, and assessing military operations designed to attain specific effects that achieve desired national security outcomes.
The armed forces of many of our allies and multinational partners are moving rapidly into the NCW arena and developing networkcentric capabilities of their own to be able to conduct EBO. When we conduct military operations with our allies and multinational partners today and in the future, we seek to obtain maximum advantage derived from the power of NCW. At the same time, it should not surprise us that our enemies and potential adversaries around the world, including international terrorist organizations like al Qaeda, may seek to acquire network-centric capabilities on their own terms in order to use them against us when conducting surveillance, planning operations, or actually carrying out attacks. It is reasonable to expect that terrorist organizations are also analyzing the vulnerabilities and weaknesses of our networks and planning to exploit them in the future.
NCW generates increased combat power by networking sensors, decision makers, and shooters to achieve shared awareness, increased speed of command, high tempo of operations, greater lethality, increased survivability, and a degree of self-synchronization (figure 1). In essence, it translates information advantage into combat power by effectively linking friendly forces within the battlespace, providing a much improved shared awareness of the situation, enabling more rapid and effective decision making at all levels of military operations, and thereby allowing for increased speed of execution. This "network" is underpinned by information technology systems, but is exploited by the Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines that use the network and, at the same time, are part of it.
Figure 1: Information Age Transformation: Network-Centric Warfare.
Office of Force Transformation 2005, The Implementation of Network-Centric Warfare. Washington DC: Department of Defense. Pages 3-5
Follow this link if you would like to download The Implementation of Network-Centric Warfare as an Adobe Acrobat file. (1.0 Mb)
Now consider this somewhat dated but prescient article that foresaw much of what we are experiencing today.
December 11, 1999
Future-Shock Troops
On tomorrow's battlefield, the laptop may be as vital as the rifle, and the Pentagon is grappling with how to manage this microchip revolution.
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
A decade after the end of the Cold War and fresh from an air-war victory in Kosovo, the American military finds itself—like the British military just after World War I—supremely powerful, technologically superior, but constantly looking over its shoulder. In 1919, Great Britain led the world with its innovative aircraft carriers and tanks, just as, today, the United States leads with cruise missiles and stealth airplanes. But Britain then, like America today, was weighed down by the burdens of world leadership. And, ultimately, London failed to hold its lead. Twenty years after Britain emerged victorious from "the war to end all wars," Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany had outstripped the overextended island superpower.
The Pentagon fears that history will repeat itself. The American military is no longer the upstart power of the 1920s and '30s that could experiment away, confident that Great Britain would police the planet. Now America has inherited Britain's place, and its problem: how to keep the peace today while preparing for tomorrow's wars.
But the Pentagon is under additional pressure. America is the lone superpower in an age in which technological change is almost incomprehensibly rapid, as a new generation of faster microchips emerges every 18 months. The Pentagon believes the microchip will change the face of war—for enemies and allies alike—at least as radically as did gunpowder, and the military must transform itself to keep up. Indeed, Pentagon planners even have a name for this technological transformation—the "revolution in military affairs."
But how do you manage a revolution? How does the world's foremost military power harness the new technology and adapt it for a new way of fighting, while maintaining the traditional military strength it needs to prevail in any war in the near term? How does it change the military organization and culture to match the speed of electrons through silicon or light through a fiber-optic cable?
Information as Power
Part of the Pentagon's problem is simply explaining to lawmakers and the general public what the "revolution in military affairs" is, and what it is not. Even military insiders are blinded by the buzzwords, said retired Marine Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper: "Nobody has a clue what the hell they're talking about."
It also doesn't help that the "revolutionary" label is slapped onto almost any new weapon that comes down the pike, to make it an easier sell to Congress, said Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas. Take the Marine Corps' new V-22 "tilt-rotor" aircraft, which flies like a plane but lands like a helicopter. "It's assembled in my district; I'm a very strong supporter," Thornberry said. But Defense Secretary William S. Cohen extolls the aircraft as "the revolution in military affairs in action"—which, said Thornberry, "it's not." No single wonder weapon makes a revolution, Thornberry added, "and my fear is, the search for that silver bullet encumbers the need to change the culture and the organization."
Fundamentally, the military revolution has two parts. The first is new, "smarter" weapons. This part the public knows well, through the Pentagon-supplied videos it has watched since the Persian Gulf War—of precision bombs hitting their targets unerringly, of cruise missiles flying a thousand miles while making minute course corrections, of stealth bombers slipping over targets undetected. Microchips have made these weapons possible and are making them better every year. Indeed, the old military goals of faster, higher, and stronger are being replaced by the new paradigms of smaller, stealthier, and more precise.
But the second, and far broader, part of the revolution in military affairs is in information technology. Simply put, new technologies allow the American military to collect more information about the enemy on a given battlefield and disseminate it more quickly than ever before. In Pentagonese, the revolution is about "information dominance." Sensors, satellites, computers, and troops on the ground collect vast amounts of information, and the promise—and the challenge—lies in managing all the information so that it helps the war fighters without overwhelming them.
The fact that the computing power of yesterday's room-sized mainframes can now fit on a soldier's wrist or in his weapon makes possible entirely new ways of waging war. Computers can now steer weapons and troops so accurately, in fact, that to take full advantage of them, the military needs more-detailed maps: The missiles are more precise than the maps the generals use for planning strikes. The National Imagery and Mapping Agency has launched a crash program to create in just five years a detailed, constantly updated, computer database of maps of all the key crisis regions in the world. Satellites now in development could eventually map the entire earth down to one square meter of detail.
The benefit from all of this information collection lies both in locating the enemy and in precisely locating oneself. Anyone who's ever overshot the exit on an unfamiliar highway while fumbling with the map knows how easy it can be to get lost; now try the same exercise cross-country, with people shooting at you. Troops spend most of their time trying to keep track of where they are, and sometimes they still get it badly wrong. World War II bombers occasionally raided the wrong city, and as recently as the Gulf War, an entire Egyptian tank brigade—thousands of men—got lost in the desert.
That the American forces in the Gulf generally did know where they were is a tribute to the Global Positioning System. Handheld GPS receivers use satellite signals to pin- point locations to within four yards—but the troops still have to match the computer-generated coordinates to an old-fashioned paper map. The next step will be a computerized, "smart" map that automatically tells the soldier, "You are here."
To reach this goal, the Army's 4th Infantry Division is testing something called the "Tactical Internet." A computer in each vehicle not only displays its own position (fixed by GPS), but broadcasts that information to every other soldier on the tactical network so that everyone's digital map shows where everyone else is. That intelligence lets troops keep close track of their friends so they can work together to kill the enemy—instead of accidentally killing one another. "It's an excellent system," said an enthusiastic 4th Infantry Division soldier, Staff Sgt. John Feiler.
In the past, when Feiler's squad of combat engineers found an enemy unit or minefield, "normally we would have to call our platoon leader, the platoon leader would have to call the captain," and so on up the chain of command until everyone was informed, Feiler said. With the self-updating computer map, said Feiler, "we can instantly send that [warning] out, and everybody within the area knows."
The Tactical Internet also makes attacking targets much faster than under the old way of relaying instructions—over the radio and up several layers in the chain of command—to get the artillery units to fire. In the past, the shortest interval between identifying the target and getting artillery shells to hit it was 15 to 20 minutes, even for experienced troops, Feiler said. Now Feiler can fill out a touch-screen form on his laptop, send an e-mail to the artillery unit, and see shells hit the target, all in as little as 60 seconds. And because GPS and laser range finders help tell precisely where the target is, the system turns even an old-fashioned howitzer into a smart weapon.
The Army is still struggling to get such tactical communications systems to work reliably in its vehicles. But both the Army and the Marines have already experimented with the next step—giving such a system to every single infantry soldier. Getting the troops to adapt is hard going, though. "It's very difficult to expect a young squad leader in a battle in the middle of a street to open a laptop," said Maj. Gen. Martin Berndt of the Marine Corps' Combat Development Command. The Army, trying to make the system even lighter and more portable, is developing video-display eyepieces that drop down from a soldier's helmet, but that program is behind schedule.
One stopgap device has met with such success that it is already being issued to Army and Marine infantry: It's a personal radio that costs a few hundred dollars. The small radio headsets do not include computerized maps or direct uplinks to artillery. But they let squadmates—even when they're far apart—stay in constant touch to relay orders. Before the personal radios, troops had to risk exposure to enemy fire as they ran back and forth, carrying the orders. "A lot of leaders are wounded or killed while they're up moving" about to give orders, said Sgt. Danny Jackson of the Army's 10th Mountain Division, a fan of the new radios. "I've seen it happen in Somalia." And the radios also eliminate the need to yell out commands that the enemy can overhear.
It is not only members of the infantry who benefit from the power of information: Fighter pilots can, too. Studies show that in dogfights with more than a couple of enemy aircraft, pilots quickly lose track of who is where. So in 1994, the Air Force flight-tested a digitized display that showed the "allied" pilots in a mock battle not only where the allied and "enemy" planes were at all times, but which allied aircraft was targeting which enemy plane. Armed with this superior information, the "allied" pilots in the exercise "shot down" four "enemy" fliers for each one of their own they lost—even though both sides had the same F-15 fighters.
The most dramatic advance in information, however, would be to link everyone, from infantryman to fighter pilot: The Army, Air Force, Marine Corps, and Navy would share all of their information over one computer network. Everyone would know where every friendly unit was, and where anyone had spotted an enemy; commanders could conduct a lethal symphony of attacks from land, air, and sea. In one 1998 Navy experiment with such a network in South Korea, Navy Aegis radars aboard ships spotted "enemy" artillery that was attacking the Army on land, while Army helicopters were at sea sinking small enemy boats. Local commanders were so impressed, they not only kept the still-experimental network up and running, they even had it expanded. The crucial detail common to all of these experiments: no new wonder weapons. Instead, the relatively inexpensive networks give everybody better information so they can use their existing weapons more effectively.
But cheap computer chips do not imply an easy or automatic military revolution. Far from it. Today's tanks, ships, and airplanes may be too slow, current headquarters and supply stockpiles too cumbersome, and the military organization too unwieldy to take full advantage of the fast-flowing information. That means, said one former Army officer, that the Army's 4th Infantry Division experiment "is not progress, it is an expensive inhibitor to progress" because it simply sticks new computers onto the same gas-guzzling 70-ton tanks organized in an essentially unchanged 15,000-troop heavy division.
Military revolutionaries call for new vehicles that sacrifice protective armor for speed, and new organizations that slash reaction times. At October's annual meeting of the Association of the United States Army, a private Army support group, new Chief of Staff Gen. Eric K. Shinseki electrified his audience when he called for a long-term move to lighter, wheeled vehicles instead of tracked vehicles such as tanks, and for the immediate creation of slimmed-down brigades with 5,000 troops for rapid reaction. Most reports portrayed the plan as adding a new medium-weight unit alongside existing heavy tank and light infantry forces. But Shinseki's ultimate goal is more ambitious: a "standard design" that "will erase the distinctions between heavy and light forces"—and create a new model division for the entire Army.
Centralized or Decentralized
The information revolution presents the American military with a crucial, unresolved question: Who should run the war? If masses of information about the battlefield can be collected and centralized onto one top general's computer screen, should that high-ranking officer make all the detailed decisions on how to fight the war? Or should the infantryman on the ground with his laptop, who sees where the battle is moving minute by minute, use the network to call in massive firepower on his own initiative?
The American military has always taken pride in the battlefield initiative of its junior officers and the senior enlisted people who assist them. Such independence was often a virtue that arose out of necessity, because paper maps and poor communications meant that the generals were not sure where their subordinates were at any given time. The downside of such decentralized control, said Maj. Gen. Timothy Kinnan, the Air Force Doctrine Center chief, was that low-level commanders fixated on their local fights and missed the big-picture opportunities. With a computer network pooling information from all units in a force, he said, a central headquarters can now understand, and more effectively control, an entire theater of war.
But not everyone sees that as a gain. "If you believe you can control all these hard-chargers from behind a cathode- ray tube, you're mistaken," scoffed the Marines' Berndt. The computer networks should be used not to centralize control, but to decentralize, he said. Only by giving junior officers full access to all of the network's data, and the authority to act on their own initiative, can military leaders enable a force to react fast enough to win in the Information Age, Berndt said. Retired Marine Corps Commandant Charles Krulak agreed. In the future, he said, "the individual soldier is going to have unbelievable firepower at his fingertips. . . . He is also going to [face] life-or-death decisions that most people have a hard time even imagining."
But empowering individuals on the battlefield—Krulak calls such troops "strategic corporals"—comes with a risk. In an era when news of civilian casualties in wartime reaches a global TV audience in minutes, one mistake in judgment by an infantryman in the field could cause an unintentional massacre. In politically sensitive situations, of course, high elected officials can, and often do, veto targets that the military has selected for destruction. In the Kosovo conflict, for example, elected leaders of NATO countries were frequently consulted before sensitive targets were hit in Serbia. But that course of action, too, comes with a cost. Surrendering control to higher authorities means sacrificing speed. And speed is often the key to victory.
In the new style of warfare, the goal is not simply to kill more enemies more quickly than ever before. The goal is to react, counterpunch, anticipate, and initiate faster than the enemy can. The Air Force bombed Yugoslavia with impunity and with stunning precision, but early on, it let Slobodan Milosevic set the pace. When NATO began the war with a phased bombing campaign, in the belief that Milosevic would quickly yield, the alliance gave him time to prepare for each escalation in the air war. "He's deep inside our decision cycle," Army Times quoted an Air Force briefing officer as saying during the Kosovo conflict; he meant that Milosevic was good at anticipating NATO's moves. "He's about 12 hours ahead of us."
During the Kosovo crisis, the U.S. military, hamstrung by NATO politics and its own Industrial Age planning procedures, did not achieve the true potential of superior infor- mation: To act faster than the foe can react, getting so far ahead in the decision-making cycle that by the time the enemy decides how to remedy a situation, it has already changed. The military revolution's goal is not just to blow up the enemy's headquarters, but also to blow his mind.
The Pitfall: Chaos
The promise of the military revolution is that superior information will let American forces run rings around their enemies. If you know more about the enemy than he knows about himself, then you know how to hit his weak points and avoid his strong ones. But this idea is not really revolutionary at all. Such "maneuver warfare" dates back at least to the 13th century, with the lightning conquests of Genghis Khan's outnumbered but fast-moving Mongol "hordes" on horseback. The modern archetype is the "blitzkrieg" victory of Nazi Germany in 1940. With fewer and less powerful tanks than their French foes, the innovative Germans used a then-novel technology, the radio, to coordinate attacks that were so fast and flexible that the French commanders collapsed in panicked indecision.
But skeptics say that maneuver warfare, even at its most expert, can be countered. The fast-moving Germans in World War II found that their foes caught on and caught up—the Russian Marshal Georgi Zhukov trapped Nazi tanks at Kursk, and the American Gen. George S. Patton flattened the Germans' attempt to break out at the Bulge. The 1991 Persian Gulf War was not an unqualified triumph of Information Age maneuver warfare either, even though allied information gathering helped immensely to surround and pulverize Iraq's Republican Guard. Saddam Hussein's mobile Scud missile launchers, for example, escaped the huge air hunt unscathed, because the Iraqis moved them constantly, day and night, in their own version of maneuver warfare. Furthermore, if the future American force relies on communications and sensor technology, those systems will inevitably become the targets of countermeasures, and they ultimately could become vulnerabilities.
In the cloud-covered hills, forests, and villages of Kosovo, for example, the Serbs dispersed and kept on the move, so that Air Force bombs took out as few as 10 Serb tanks. Of the hundreds of tank kills that NATO initially claimed, most had destroyed only decoys. To the eyes of pilots and the optical sensors of satellites high overhead, the mock-ups looked like tanks. And the Serbs skillfully supplied the mock-ups with heat from small fires, pans of water, or even hair dryers to mimic an armored vehicle's still-warm engine, for the benefit of the high-flying infra-red sensors. Said retired Army Lt. Col. Ralph Peters: "These sensors are actually very easy to fool, if you have a sense of their parameters."
Technology enthusiasts counter that the ability of new generations of sensors to seek is advancing faster than the ability of enemies to hide. Retired Navy Adm. William Owens, one of the fathers of the revolution in military affairs, said in an interview that even with existing radar satellite technology—which the Pentagon could have bought before the Kosovo War started, but didn't—"you have the ability to see through foliage, you have the ability to see a particular object well enough to tell whether it's plywood or metal." And in the future, a network of different types of sensors will look at each potential target in several ways—using visible light, radar, heat, and sound—so something that tricks one sensor will not trick another.
That kind of joint effort by several sensors, however, requires constant communication. The Army's 4th Infantry Division, for example, now needs 16 specialized computer vehicles—and shutting one of them down does not take sophisticated hackers, just guys with guns. "Those relay units become targets on the battlefield," said the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory's chief of staff, Col. Gary Anderson. In exercises, "bad guys go after them, once they realize what they're doing."
But Army experts say the system is more resilient than it would appear at first glance. "They can blow them up, but [it] is a self-healing network," said Army Sgt. Avery Owens, who runs the 4th Infantry Division's system. Much like the civilian Internet—originally designed to keep Cold War research going, in the event of a nuclear attack—the Tactical Internet can route around a broken link. The system is very difficult to jam, Owens said, and the database itself is almost untouchable, even if a computer terminal is captured.
Assuming the system works at all, however, what if it works too well? Too much information only adds to the stress of battle, and under stress, even trained officers often fall back on a basic human instinct: They focus on one small piece of the problem and ignore the big picture—exactly the opposite of the revolutionaries' intent. "We wouldn't buy a gun system without knowing how fast you can load it," said retired Navy Cmdr. Alan Zimm, now at the Applied Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University. "We're buying all these information systems without knowing how fast you can load the human decision-maker."
Assuming that all the information collection and dissemination systems do work and that they give U.S. troops "information dominance," it still may not be enough. Even if troops know exactly where everyone is on both sides, they still cannot predict how all those individuals will react under stress. With all the information in the world, said Vice Adm. Arthur Cebrowski, the president of the Naval War College, "warfare will always be an intensely violent, highly uncertain enterprise, fraught with risk and peril."
In an influential 1996 study, analyst Barry D. Watts applied to warfare the latest findings of "chaos theory"—the science of how an imperceptibly small cause can have surprising and immense effects in a complex interacting system. It is this chaos that makes the path of a tropical storm so hard for meteorologists to predict. It is the same with war fighters: With hundreds of human beings thinking, fearing, and fighting on each side, a battle can be as complex and unpredictable as any hurricane.
The Way Ahead: Experiment
Between the two incompatible visions of the future—the dream of perfect information and the nightmare of ineluctable chaos—how can the Pentagon decide what to prepare for, before the future hits it in the face?
"Traditionally, defense weapons have taken a long time to develop—10, 15, 20 years," said Jacques Gansler who, as undersecretary of Defense for acquisition and technology, is the Pentagon's chief weapons buyer. "Modern information technology cycles [are] more like 18 months." A new design's electronics may become obsolete before it is even built. Some critics say that's what is happening with the Air Force's F-22 stealth fighter.
One attempt to shorten the weapons development time is something called "spiral development," which breaks down the bureaucratic barriers between industry and the military. Troops and contractors work side by side as the weapon is tested, fixing problems on the fly—a technique the Army is using with its Tactical Internet. But the bottom line, as always, is the budget. Just to pay the annual salaries and benefits of the 1.4 million troops in uniform costs the Pentagon about $70 billion every year. The Pentagon says it needs that many people if it is to meet the demands of current national strategy—being prepared to fight two wars nearly simultaneously. But if it keeps the force that large, the Pentagon cannot afford the new generation of weapons. "The force we have now is larger than we can sustain and recapitalize at the same time," said Richard N. Perle, a former Reagan Defense Department official and now an adviser to Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush, the Texas Governor. In a September speech on national defense, given at the Citadel, Bush called for $3 billion a year in new research "to skip a generation of technology." The Clinton appointees now in the Pentagon say they, too, would like to leap ahead with a new generation of weapons, but say it is impractical. "We might have a war tomorrow," Gansler said. "You can't just say, `Well, we'll scrap all the old equipment and wait for the new stuff to come in.' " Balancing these two needs—to protect the present and transform the armed forces for the future—poses "a very real resource problem," Gansler said.
But not all defense experts see the dilemma so starkly. Many say there is plenty of money, if the Pentagon simply decides to do without a few expensive weapon systems designed mainly for the long-gone Cold War. "They've got more than enough money," scoffed Lawrence J. Korb, a former Reagan Defense Department official-turned-budget-hawk who now is at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City. The problem, Korb says, is the process: Each armed service protects its own pet weapons projects—such as the Air Force's $200 million-apiece F-22 fighter, or the Navy's roughly $2 billion "Virginia" submarine—while starving innovative joint-service work on information technology.
"The funding for joint experimentation," said Thornberry, "is still woefully inadequate." A year ago, pushed by Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, D-Conn., and by now-retired Sen. Dan Coats, R-Ind., the Pentagon finally created an inter-service test program—under what is now the Joint Forces Command—but Congress cut the requested $500 million budget to $30 million, while approving a total of $550 million a year for the services' individual experimentation programs. "Joint Forces Command is really the caboose" on the Pentagon train, said Lieberman. "We were disappointed."
So for now, the new program will mainly coordinate already-planned individual experiments by the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marines, to make sure the information technologies and tactics actually work together, said joint experimentation chief Air Force Maj. Gen. Tim Peppe: "I don't see us having the financial resources to go do something on our own." Many in the military and Congress believe that giving the money directly to Joint Experimentation would produce better results at less cost. "We ought to be experimenting a lot," said Lieberman. "We also ought to avoid the redundancy in experimentation."
But the "redundancy" argument is one that the armed services have been refuting successfully for years, arguing that trying several different ways to do the same thing is sometimes exactly what the military needs to do, in learning and adapting to new conditions. "For every six [ideas] you try, one or two pan out, but they're the one or two that make all the difference," said former Army officer and now defense scholar Andrew Krepinevich. To develop the aircraft carriers that won in World War II, the Navy of the 1930s did not just brainstorm, it actually built six ships of four different designs to see what worked best. But today's approach can put too many eggs into too few baskets. The best example, Krepinevich said, is the Joint Strike Fighter, the Pentagon's next-generation aircraft planned for the Air Force, Navy, and Marines (albeit customized for each). The Pentagon wants to save money by buying it in bulk for all the services—a projected 3,000 planes over 30 years. That plan can save billions of dollars, Krepinevich said, but relying on one plane is "an extremely poor way of hedging against geopolitical and military uncertainty, because you're giving yourself very few tools in the toolbox."
In the end, the problem is that preparing for the wars of tomorrow is necessary, but expensive—in money, in time, in intellectual energy. And so, too, is defending American interests today. The question is how to strike the right balance. " 'Revolutionary' is the appropriate word" for the change that has to happen, said Gansler, but "we're going through that, of necessity, in an evolutionary fashion."
There are many critics of both the RMA idea and the concept and implementation of Network Centric Warfare particularly in the current operating environment. Consider this opinion piece by retired Army Major General Robert Scales who is the former commandant of the US Army War College and a well regarded military academic.
February 3, 2005
Pg. 21Human Intel Vs. Technology
Cultural knowledge important in Iraq
By Robert H. Scales
Now that the election is over, the military will turn its attention to the mission of creating an advisory effort intended to transform newly minted Iraqi soldiers into effective fighting units. We have been here before. Long-term security on the Korean Peninsula was achieved in large measure with the creation of KMAG, the Korean Military Advisory Group in 1951. In spite of opinions to the contrary, the American advisory effort in Vietnam, MACV, did a very credible job of professionalizing the Vietnamese army. The American advisory effort in El Salvador gave the Salvadorans enough breathing room to begin the process of democratization.
Immediately after the liberation of Baghdad, I e-mailed an old friend who informed me that what he needed most to carry on the war was "interpreters I can trust." His concerns proved prophetic. The advisory period of the war in Iraq will continue to teach the lesson taught by this officer nearly two years ago. In an age of shock and awe, the American military's greatest shortcomings have been human rather than technological - cultural awareness, civil affairs, civic action, information operations (military-speak for our effort to gain the moral high ground from Al Jazeera) and, most importantly, intelligence.
Intimate knowledge of the enemy's motivation, intent, will, tactical method and cultural environment will prove to be far more important for success in the advisory phase than smart bombs, aircraft and expansive bandwidth. A successful advisory effort depends on the ability to think and adapt faster than the enemy. Soldiers must be prepared to thrive in an environment of uncertainty, ambiguity and unfamiliar cultural circumstances. This war will be won by fostering personal relationships, leveraging non-military advantages, reading intentions, building trust, converting opinions and managing perceptions, all tasks that demand an exceptional ability to understand people, their culture and their motivations.
Yet even after nearly three years of evidence to the contrary the Department of Defense still pins its efforts to fight this war in large measure on the concept of "net-centric warfare." Military theorists in the Pentagon claim that new information and computing technologies will allow U.S. military forces to "lift the fog of war." According to this view, a vast array of sensors and computers, tied together, can work symbiotically to see and comprehend the entire battle space and remove ambiguity, uncertainty and contradiction from the military equation, or at least reduce these factors to manageable and controllable levels.
Such theories, however, rest on a profound ahistoricism that entirely misses the lessons of the past, much less the lessons learned in Iraq. The painful truth is that the enemy has a vote. He adapts and seeks to mitigate our technology because he wants to win. He has learned to counter our electronic networks by "unplugging" to create nets of his own, made up of tribal connections to brutal thugs who rely on dispersed forces commanded by nothing more than a common ideology and the unity of a single purpose - to kill Americans and Iraqi loyalists.
In Iraq, reform in the human dimension is being driven from the combat zone, not from in the Pentagon. Commanders are teaching their soldiers how to be street-savvy fighters as well as how to gain the trust of the locals while on patrol. Any soldier or Marine in the field will tell you that he gets virtually all of his useful intelligence by walking the beat and talking to citizens in order to build trust (and occasionally making a back-alley payoff to find and kill terrorists). I asked one brigade commander what sort of intelligence he received from high-level "networked" products and he replied succinctly: "week-old powerpoint slides."
Information technology is a not a bad thing. Technologically advanced sensors are useful even in the most primitive combat zones. But this war clearly shows that the military has evolved a technology culture that all too often fields information systems with scant regard to their utility for saving lives of soldiers and Marines. Net-centric technologies give generals and admirals an unprecedented view of the sea and air battle. We need instead to gain "culture-centric" advantages that will give soldiers an unprecedented view of the enemy lying in wait across an alleyway.
We must learn from those who have learned from the tough school of real war. We must begin now to change the techno-net-centric culture that has so influenced the way this nation fights its wars. The Department of Defense must get serious about fighting using people as well as machines. The debate over future defense policies and programs must be joined by those with a record of proven performance in fighting the kind of unplugged, human-centered, unconventional campaign that will most certainly confront us generations into the future.
Retired Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales is a former commander of the Army War College.
Now consider this recent news article and contemplate the potential vulnerability of a network reliant force.
September 14, 2007
Pg. 1China Emerges As Leader In Cyberwarfare
In recent weeks, China has been accused of hacking the Pentagon as well as British and German government offices.
By Robert Marquand and Ben Arnoldy, Staff writers of The Christian Science Monitor
PARIS; AND OAKLAND, CALIF. — When suspected Chinese hackers penetrated the Pentagon this summer, reports downplayed the cyberattack. The hackers hit a secure Pentagon system known as NIPRNet - but it only carries unclassified information and general e-mail, Department of Defense officials said.
Yet a central aim of the Chinese hackers may not have been top secrets, but a probe of the Pentagon network structure itself, some analysts argue. The NIPRNet (Non-classified Internet Protocol Router Network) is crucial in the quick deployment of US forces should China attack Taiwan. By crippling a Pentagon Net used to call US forces, China gains crucial hours and minutes in a lightning attack designed to force a Taiwan surrender, experts say.
China's presumed infiltration underscores an ever bolder and more advanced capability by its cybershock troops. Today, of an estimated 120 countries working on cyberwarfare, China, seeking great power status, has emerged as a leader.
"The Chinese are the first to use cyberattacks for political and military goals," says James Mulvenon, an expert on Chin's military and director of the Center for Intelligence and Research in Washington. "Whether it is battlefield preparation or hacking networks connected to the German chancellor, they are the first state actor to jump feet first into 21st-century cyberwarfare technology. This is clearly becoming a more serious and open problem."
China is hardly the only state conducting cyberespionage. "Everybody is hacking everybody," says Johannes Ullrich, an expert with the SANS Technology Institute, pointing to Israeli hacks against the US, and French hacks against European Union partners. But aspects of the Chinese approach worry him. "The part I am most afraid of is … staging probes inside key industries. It's almost like sleeper cells, having ways to [disrupt] systems when you need to if it ever came to war."
In recent weeks, China stands accused not only of the Pentagon attack, but also of daily striking German federal ministries and British government offices, including Parliament. After an investigation in May, officials at Germany's Office of the Protection of the Constitution told Der Speigel that 60 percent of all cyberattacks on German systems come from China. Most originate in the cities of Lanzhou and Beijing, and in Guangdong Province, centers of high-tech military operations.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel publicly raised the issue with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao in Beijing last month. Mr. Wen did not deny China's activity, but said it should stop. President George Bush, prior to his meeting with Chinese President Hu Jintao in Sydney, Australia, at the APEC summit last week, stated that respect of computer "systems" is "what we expect from people with whom we trade."
The accusations, hard to prove conclusively, still illumine an emerging theater of low-level attacks among nations. This spring, presumed Russian hackers made headlines with a one-off cyberblitz of Estonia, shutting down one of the most wired countries in Europe for a week - blunt payback for removal of a Soviet war memorial.
But China's cyberstrategy is deemed murkier and more widespread. The tenaciousness of Chinese hackers, whose skills were once derided by US cyberexperts, has begun to sink in to Western states and their intelligence services.
Probes of the Pentagon system that would bring US intervention should China attack Taiwan are part of a program dating to the 1990s that links cyberwarfare to real-world military action by China's People's Liberation Army. The very probe shows success in China's long-term program, experts say.
"The Chinese want to disrupt that unofficial network in a crucial time-frame inside a Taiwan scenario," says Mr. Mulvenon. "It is something they've written about. When you read what Chinese strategists say, it is the unclassified network they will go after … to delay deployment. China is developing tremendous capability."
Much of the hacking prowess in China is attributed to "gray hat" hackers - techie mercenaries, often younger males, geeks proud of the title — who can be mobilized to attack systems if needed, experts say.
In cyberparlance, black hats are hackers whose professional life is spent trying to attack other systems. White hats are those who defend against attacks. But China is regarded as having a substantial number of hackers in the gray middle — cutting-edge technopatriots loosely affiliated with the Chinese government, but who are not formal agents of the state.
This allows many Chinese hackers to exist in a zone of deniability. To be sure, provability and deniability are central in cyberwarfare. The most difficult problem is how to prove who hacks a system.
In recent weeks, Beijing has officially expressed shock, pain, and denial of news reports like those in Der Speigel fingering China, and at a host of official and semi-official accusations. But China's ardent denials, in the face of its own professed desire to be a cyberattack specialist, are not entirely persuasive, analysts say.
"Sometimes [Chinese] will brag about their exploits, and other times they'll disclaim them entirely, blaming unknown rogue individuals," says Bill Woodcock, research director at Packet Clearing House, a nonprofit research institute that focuses on Internet security and stability.
The new focus by other governments on China's capabilities are part of getting to know a country long criticized for a lack of transparency. "China's ambitions are quite extensive. It is a great power that is rising, and so other people want to scrutinize you. That's part of being a great society," says a veteran European China-watcher in Beijing. "When you hack into the private files of other governments, people want to know what you are doing. If you talk about a harmonious world, and a harmonious society, and then you do things that aren't harmonious — you get called out."
Of particular alarm for Washington and other world capitals are so-called "zero-day attacks" — cyberpenetrations that look for software flaws to exploit. This is not an uncommon pastime for hackers. But in China's case, suspicion falls on professional hackers, says Sami Saydjari, a Defense Department computer-security veteran who now heads a firm called Cyber Defense Agency in Wisconsin.
"The Chinese … [put] very strong controls over … their Internet, and it's highly unlikely there are hacker groups that have any substantial level of capability they don't control," says Mr. Saydjari.
Analysts say China constantly probes US military networks. But attributing this conclusively to the People's Liberation Army, fingered by German officials in Der Speigel, is almost impossible. To trace attacks to their source requires the help of those who control each link, or router.
Proving cyberattacks involves what Mulvenon calls the "Tarzana, California, problem." How does one know an attack "isn't coming from a kid in Tarzana who is bouncing off a Chinese server?" Mulvenon asks. "You don't. You can't predicate a response based on perfect knowledge of the attacker. But we think that correlation is causation. That is, 'Who benefits?' The best-case analysis is to correlate attacks with what Chinese have always said and written their goals are, which makes them by far the most likely suspect."
Cyberpenetration runs the gamut, from simple to sophisticated. There's a simple "Trojan horse attack," for example, said to be used against the German chancellery. Hackers send what appears to be a legitimate e-mail. When opened, it installs malicious software that allows hackers to open files in a private network, or disrupt it. A Trojan horse is not surprising in an unclassified system, says Saydjari. "But some of the attacks attributed to China have been quite sophisticated."
Beijing's control showed in September 2003, when the company that administers .com and .net domain names made unilateral changes to the Internet's functioning. System administrators around the world scrambled to make piecemeal fixes.
"The domain-name system was broken for more than two weeks for the rest of the world, but after a brief interruption, it got mysteriously … unbroken inside China after eight days," says Mr. Woodcock.
PLA doctrine explicitly states that information-technology disruption is part of "asymmetric" warfare. The US is more vulnerable than China to a cyberattack, says Saydjari, because of its greater reliance on high-tech, networked systems.
The PLA's "People's War" doctrine argues that all able-minded People's Republic computer users have a responsibility to fight for China with their laptops, says Woodcock. He argues that Beijing might call on ethnic Chinese hackers in any part of the world, hoping they might help. Even nonhackers might be asked to participate in "denial of service" (DoS) attacks — a weapon to shut down enemy websites that requires massive numbers of computers to accomplish. "The power of numbers is on their side," Woodcock says. China has the largest DoS capability in the world, he says, a concern to private-sector companies as well.
So far, China doesn't seem to be organizing DoS attacks, says Mr. Ullrich. During the EP-3 spy plane spat between the US and China in early 2001, some Chinese youths launched DoS attacks. But the government curtailed the attacks.
For several years, China has focused most of its military research and production on a high-tech air and missile-attack force — to overwhelm Taiwan. Hence, China's probe of the Pentagon NIPRNet. "They want to be able to attack the Net. They don't need a supersexy penetration program," Mulvenon argues. "They just bomb the Net itself. They disrupt the deployment of our military, simultaneously saturate Taiwan, delay the US arrival, and Taiwan capitulates. It's what they talk about."
