Category Archives: Future Tech

What is coming down the pipe in naval and maritime technology?

Could Robot Submarines Replace Australia’s Ageing Collins Class Submarines?

April 13, 2016 Guest Author Leave a comment

This article originally featured on The Conversation. It can be read in its original form here.

By Sean Welsh

The decision to replace Australia’s submarines has been stalled for too long by politicians afraid of the bad media about “dud subs” the Collins class got last century.

Collins class subs deserved criticism in the 1990s. They did not meet Royal Australian Navy (RAN) specifications. But in this century, after much effort, they came good. Though they are expensive, Collins class boats have “sunk” US Navy attack submarines, destroyers and aircraft carriers in exercises.

Now that the Collins class is up for replacement, we have an opportunity to reevaluate our requirements and see what technology might meet them. And just as drones are replacing crewed aircraft in many roles, some military thinkers assume the future of naval war will be increasingly autonomous.

The advantages of autonomy in submarines are similar to those of autonomy in aircraft. Taking the pilot out of the plane means you don’t have to provide oxygen, worry about g-forces or provide bathrooms and meals for long trips.

Taking 40 sailors and 20 torpedoes out of a submarine will do wonders for its range and stealth. Autonomous submarines could be a far cheaper option to meet the RAN’s intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) requirements than crewed submarines.

Submarines do more than sink ships. Naval war is rare but ISR never stops. Before sinking the enemy you must find them and know what they look like. ISR was the original role of drones and remains their primary role today.

Last month, Boeing unveiled a prototype autonomous submarine with long range and high endurance. It has a modular design and could perhaps be adapted to meet RAN ISR requirements.

Boeing is developing a long range autonomous submarine that could have military applications.

Thus, rather than buy 12 crewed submarines to replace the Collins class, perhaps the project could be split into meeting the ISR requirement with autonomous submarines that can interoperate with a smaller number of crewed submarines that sink the enemy.

Future submarines might even be “carriers” for autonomous and semi-autonomous UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) and UUVs (unmanned undersea vehicles).

Keeping People on Deck

However, while there may be a role for autonomous submarines in the future of naval warfare, there are some significant limitations to what they can achieve today and in the foreseeable future.

Most of today’s autonomous submarines have short ranges and are designed for very specific missions, such as mine sweeping. They are not designed to sail from Perth to Singapore or Hong Kong, sneak up on enemy ships and submarines, and sink them with torpedoes.

Also, while drone aircraft can be controlled from a remote location, telepiloting is not an option for a long range sub at depth.

The very low frequency radio transceivers in Western Australia used by the Pentagon to signal “boomers” (nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed submarines) in the Indian Ocean have very low transmission rates: only a few hundred bytes per second.

You cannot telepilot a submarine lying below a thermocline in Asian waters from Canberra like you can telepilot a drone flying in Afghanistan with high-bandwidth satellite links from Nevada.

Contemporary telepiloted semi-autonomous submarines are controlled by physical tethers, basically waterproof network cables, when they dive. This limits range to a few kilometers.

Who’s the Captain?

To consider autonomy in the role of sinking the enemy, the RAN would likely want an “ethical governor” to skipper the submarines. This involves a machine making life and death decisions: a “Terminator” as captain so to speak.

This would present a policy challenge for government and a trust issue for the RAN. It would certainly attract protest and raise accountability questions.

On the other hand, at periscope depth, you can telepilot a submarine. To help solve the chronic recruitment problems of the Collins class, the RAN connected them to the internet. If you have a satellite “dongle on the periscope” so the crew can email their loved ones, then theoretically you can telepilot the submarine as well.

That said, if you are sneaking up on an enemy sub and are deep below the waves, you can’t.

Even if you can telepilot, radio emissions directing the sub’s actions above the waves might give away its position to the enemy. Telepiloting is just not as stealthy as radio silence. And stealth is critical to a submarine in war.

Telepiloting also exposes the sub to the operational risks of cyberwarfare and jamming.

There is great technological and political risk in the Future Submarine Project. I don’t think robot submarines can replace crewed submarines but they can augment them and, for some missions, shift risk from vital human crews to more expendable machines.

Ordering nothing but crewed submarines in 2016 might be a bad naval investment.

Sean Welsh is a Doctoral Candidate in Robot Ethics at the University of Canterbury. The working title of his dissertation is Moral Code: Programming the Ethical Robot. He spent 17 years working in software engineering for organisations such as British Telecom, Telstra Australia, Fitch Ratings, James Cook University and Lumata. He has given several conference papers on programming ethics into robots, two of which are appearing in a forthcoming book, A World of Robots, to be published by Springer later in the year.

Sean Welsh does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

Featured Image: HMAS Rankin at periscope depth. United States Navy, Photographer’s Mate 1st Class David A. Levy

Capability Analysis, Future Tech

A Proactive Approach to Deploying Naval Assets in Support of HA/DR Missions

March 30, 2016 Guest Author Leave a comment

Naval HA/DR Topic Week

By Marjorie Greene

In our current information age, there appear to be many trends that are reshaping the naval approach to operations in support of HA/DR. Among them are the following:

The extremely broad availability of advanced information and communications technologies that place unprecedented powers of information creation, processing, and distribution in the hands of almost anyone who wants them – friend and foe alike;
The increasing complexity of missions as naval forces increasingly form partnerships with various civilian agencies and nongovernmental organizations;
The rising importance of decentralized operations;
The data deluge – the unprecedented volume of raw and processed information with which humans must contend.

All of these trends are reinforced by the rapid rise of social media. Many naval analysts are conducting research that will give insight into how social networks can be exploited, especially during HA/DR operations.

Deeper Civil-Naval Integration Will Be Needed for HA/DR

To help frame and inform studies about the true value of “soft power” missions in the future, CSIS conducted a study in March, 2013 of “U.S. Navy Humanitarian Assistance in an Era of Austerity.” Chaired by Admiral Gary Roughead (USN Ret.), formerly Chief of Naval Operations, the study discusses the emergence of proactive humanitarian assistance and the need for deeper civil-military integration. This will be a challenge unless the military has the cultural knowledge to know whom to communicate with during these missions.

There are still major barriers to using social media for naval operations when warfighters respond to crises. For example, how can we use social networks for theater operations in such a way that the data can be combined with traditional command and control tools (usually classified) for naval operations? How can we overcome the considerable challenge posed by information overload? How can we reconcile the traditional decision-making of hierarchically oriented commanders with that of the civilian sector which is currently cooperative and collaborative?

Until recently, most basic research has focused on developing technical solutions to filter signals from noise in online social media. But this is starting to change. There is less emphasis on techniques such as keywords to filter or classify social network data into meaningful elements and more emphasis on introducing new methodologies to come to a conclusion about the importance, utility, and meaning of the data.

I have also been looking for alternative methodologies to evaluate the impact of incorporating information from social media streams in HA/DR operations. Analyses have shown that naval officers often lack the regional cultural knowledge to know whom to communicate with in HR/DR missions and must build working relationships with new groups of stakeholders and responders for each mission. Naval officers are required to develop the cultural connections to conduct the mission and the operational data shows that this process often takes too long. It may be that social media can facilitate these bonds and relationships.

Social media is changing the way information is diffused and decisions are made, especially for HA/DR missions when there is increased emphasis on commands to share critical information with government and nongovernmental organizations. As the community of interest grows during a crisis, it will be important to ensure that information is shared with appropriate organizations for different aspects of the mission such as evacuation procedures, hospital sites, location of seaports and airports, and other relevant topics. Social media can increase interoperability with non-military organizations and create a faster decision cycle. For example, studies have shown that even using traditional messaging, in the first 14 days of the U.S. Southern Command’s Haiti HA/DR mission, the community of interest grew to more than 1,900 users!

Operational conditions vary considerably among incidents and coordination between different groups is often set up in an ad hoc manner. What is needed is a methodology that will help to find appropriate people with whom to share information for particular aspects of the mission during a wide range of events. A potential methodology might be to pro-actively establish relationships before a crisis occurs and a model for doing this is presented below. The model mimics the famous experiment of social psychologist Stanley Milgram, who provided the first empirical evidence of “six degrees of separation” when constructing paths from friend to friend as in a social network.

The Stanley Milgram Experiments

In his famous series of experiments in the 1960’s, Stanley Milgram hypothesized that short paths can be found to quickly reach a target destination when an individual mails a letter to someone he or she knows on a first-name basis with the instructions to forward it on in this way toward the target as quickly as possible. The letter eventually moved from friend to friend, with the successful letters making the target in a median of six steps. This kind of experiment – constructing paths through social networks to distant target individuals – has been repeated by a number of other groups in subsequent decades.

The Model

In an approach similar to the Milgram experiments, I propose to use a unique message addressing rule which constructs social networks as events occur. It is an approach to intelligent agent-based computations that builds on behavioral models of animal colonies. These animal models show how colonies can detect and respond to unanticipated environmental changes without a centralized communications and control system. For example, the ant routing algorithm tells us that when an ant forages for food, it lays pheromones on a trail from source to destination. When it arrives at its destination, it returns to the source following the same path it came from. If other ants have travelled the same path, the pheromone level is higher. Similarly, if other ants have not travelled along the path, the pheromone level is lower. If every ant tries to choose the trail that has higher pheromone concentration, eventually the pheromones accumulate when multiple ants use the same path and evaporate when no ant passes.

Just as an ant leaves a chemical trace of its movement along a path, this simulated agent attaches traces of previous contacts by means of “digital pheromones” to each message that it sends. This is done by ensuring that all communicators along a path are kept aware of all previous communicators in the path. Suppose, for example, “A”, “B”, and “C” represent three naval warfighters using a social network. “A” starts a path on a particular topic by sending a message to “B”. “B”, in turn, decides to send a message to “C” on the same topic. Thus far, this is similar to the Milgram experiment, in which a “path” was created as a letter was forwarded from friend to friend until it reached a designated “target” in the network. However, in this case the target “emerges” from the interaction of A, B, and C. Another major difference is that a simple message addressing rule is used that asks each communicator to “copy” all previous communicators on a topic when it chooses to send a message on that topic.

The diagram below illustrates an analysis of an actual event in which A, B, C, D, and E (who are commands represented on the Y-axis) communicated using traditional messaging during a humanitarian assistance operation. The diagram shows that 7 messages were sent between the commands for this event. (An arrow from A to B means “A sent a message to B”.) So, for example, message 1 is from command A to his subordinate Command B at 0021 and starts the message path asking for supplies to be sent to the area. (Command A also sent this message to B’s subordinates “for information”.) In message 2, Command B addressed his own subordinate Command D, as well as Command E, a non-government organization, who ultimately sent the supplies.

In the event illustrated above, the third message from C to B asks the status of supplies. Because C was addressed in the first message, he knew of the request for supplies. However, Command C was not copied in the 2^nd message from B and did not know about this message. This is why I suggest that a message-addressing rule will be very important in the future use of social media. It will achieve two major objectives:

It will guarantee that all warfighters along the path are automatically kept informed of previous communicators in the path on the topic. This provides the important feedback that socio-technologists have shown to be very important in the control of large-scale coordination during evolving operations;
It avoids keywords by defining a topic through communication that represents a path in a social network. This provides a way to deal with changing topics and an uncertain organizational structure in an evolving crisis.

Conclusion

I have developed an approach to coordinate activities during HA/DR missions as naval warfighters continue to see greater use of nonhierarchical communications for complex interactions. Collaboration with external partners is expected to grow when conducting HA/DR missions. If a social network of trusted coordinators were established before a crisis occurred, military and civilian commanders would already have working relationships with each other and could plan HA/DR missions in advance. Deeper integration could be achieved using social media to exchange information and the right group of trusted collaborators would be pro-actively defined. Such an approach would assist in sustaining planned assistance in an era of global austerity.

Marjorie Greene is a research analyst at CNA. She has more than 25 years of management experience in both government and commercial organizations and has recently specialized in finding S&T solutions for the U.S. Marine Corps. She is active in both the Military Operations Research Society and IEEE, where she serves on the Medical Technology Policy Committee and the Bioterrorism Working Group.

Featured Image Source: Open DNS Security Labs Visualization of Canada’s Internet Infrastructure

Cyber War, Future War

21st Century Maritime Operations Under Cyber-Electromagnetic Opposition The Finale

March 17, 2016 Guest Author 1 Comment

The following article is part of our cross-posting partnership with Information Dissemination’s Jon Solomon. It is republished here with the author’s permission. You can read it in its original form here.

Read part one, part two, and part three of the series.

By Jon Solomon

Candidate Principle #6: Technical Degradation is Temporary, Psychological Effects can be Enduring

It must be appreciated that the greatest damage caused by an adversary’s successful cyber-electromagnetic attack may not be in how it degrades a system or network’s performance, opens the door to kinetic attacks against a force, or even tricks commanders into making operationally or tactically-sub-optimal decisions. All of these are generally temporary effects and can be recoverable with flexible plans, resiliency-embracing doctrine, and crafty tactics. Rather, as renowned naval analyst Norman Friedman has hypothesized, it could very well be the shattering of commanders’ and operators’ trust in their systems and networks that is most destructive. If personnel are not conditioned to anticipate their systems’ and networks’ disruption in combat, an attack’s lasting effect may be a morale-corroding fatalism. Likewise, if they are deceived just once by a manipulated situational picture, and even then not necessarily in a majorly harmful way, they may still hesitate to take needed actions in subsequent engagements out of fear of deception even when none is present. Either of these consequences could result in ceding the tactical if not operational initiative. In a short conflict, this might be catastrophic. Doctrinal collapse might also result, which would be especially debilitating if force structure is designed so tightly around a given doctrine that it severely limits options for creating or adapting operating concepts on the fly.[i]

Interestingly, similar effects might conceivably occur even when a system’s or network’s electronic protection and information assurance measures cause a cyber-electromagnetic attack to only achieve a relatively minor degree of immediate ‘damage.’ In fact, near-continuous cyber-electromagnetic harassment in the form of noise jamming, incessant yet readily parried cyber penetration attempts, situational picture-manipulation attacks that the target’s operators can quickly discover and reverse, intermittent system crashes or network connectivity interruptions that are quickly recovered from, or even severe disruptions of non-critical systems and network services may wear a force’s commanders and crews down mentally even if their critical systems and networks remain fully capable. A clever adversary might actually find this psychological degradation more exploitable (and more likely to be available for use at any given time) than technical degradation. Indeed, cyber-electromagnetic warfare’s psychological applications may well be where it finds its greatest utility.

Assessing the Implications

As the Chief of Naval Operations and others have asserted, the cyber and electromagnetic domains have become equally important to the physical domains in waging modern war.[ii] The cyber-electromagnetic fight will extend throughout all phases of major future conflicts, may begin well before open hostilities break out as an adversary attempts to ‘prepare’ the battle space, and accordingly may be particularly pivotal during a war’s opening phase. Indeed, high-impact anti-network operations with major maritime strategic implications date back as far as the opening moments of the First World War. Just as a belligerent might not be able to win a war with naval dominance alone but could easily lose without it, so it will be for cyber-electromagnetic dominance. It follows that a naval force’s ability to operate within a contested maritime zone will be highly questionable if it cannot effectively suppress or exploit the adversary’s force-level networks while simultaneously parrying the adversary’s own cyber-electromagnetic attacks. This will even extend to operations featuring stealth platforms, as such assets have long needed direct EW support to achieve maximal effectiveness.[iv] Should the U.S. Navy under-appreciate a potential adversary’s integration of cyber-electromagnetic warfare within combined arms doctrine, in a future conflict it would risk facing attrition rates on par with what it endured in the Solomon Islands from summer 1942 through summer 1943—something that its contemporary force structure simply could not endure.[v]

Assuming the candidate principles we have outlined are validated, they will influence future maritime warfare in at least five general ways. First, they will confirm leading tactical theorist Wayne Hughes’s hypothesis from over a decade ago that the next major maritime fight will be defined by the belligerents’ struggle for scouting superiority.[vi] This will represent a drastic change from the U.S. Navy’s post-Second World War combat experiences, in which the absence of threats to its sea control allowed it to focus on maximizing the efficiency and persistence of power projection ashore. Regardless of whether a tactical action pits two naval battleforces against each other, or one against a land-based force, the victor will likely be the side that is able to achieve high-confidence classification, identification, and targeting against his opponent’s forces first, thereby enabling effective attack.[vii] Cyber-electromagnetic discipline and capabilities will clearly be central to the success of the scouting/anti-scouting phases of any future operation.

Second, the above signifies that a force will need to extend its effective scouting and anti-scouting reach beyond that of its opponent. This is not achieved solely by covering a given area with more sensors than the opponent, or deploying scouts at greater ranges than the opponent. Rather, as suggested earlier, a sensor network’s effectiveness is equally a function of its architecture. This means the availability of difficult-to-intercept communications pathways and backup communications infrastructure will be just as important as raw coverage volume, lest key sensors be cut off from the network or the situational picture they feed be decisively manipulated. This also means the network must employ multiple sensor types. For surveillance, this translates into multi-phenomenology sensors positioned (or covering areas) as far as possible forward within the battle space, with some using sensing methodologies and platform characteristics that allow them to avoid (or at least delay) counter-detection. For reconnaissance, this requires sensors capable of penetrating the opponent’s force to support the confident confirmation of a given contact’s classification and identity. The U.S. Navy simply cannot afford to waste precious inventories of advanced weapons by falling for deception in a future battle. In this light, the Navy’s proposed Unmanned Carrier Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike (UCLASS) system could be a critical enabler for effectively employing the proposed Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM), beyond visual range anti-air missiles, and similar network-enhanced standoff-range maritime weapons. It should not be overlooked that UCLASS, a scouting and attack asset that will be organic to the battleforce, can be designed to support expanded operations on interior lines of networking.

Third, if there is to be a reasonable chance that any degradation will be graceful, cyber-electromagnetic resilience must become a defining attribute of systems’ and networks’ designs. Strong electronic protection and information assurance features are certainly vital, with the latter applying just as much to ‘engineering plant’ systems as to the warfare systems they support. Nevertheless, as no system or network can ever be unexploitable, those central to a force’s tactical capabilities must contain additional design features that allow for quick restoration, graceful degradation, or capability expansion when subjected to withering cyber-electromagnetic attacks. Systems’ avoidance of network-dependency will also help greatly to this end.

Fourth, operations within opposed cyber-electromagnetic environments will demand C² decentralization, as a higher echelon’s ability to assert direct, secure control over subordinate units under such circumstances will be dubious. Even if possible, this kind of close control will almost certainly be inadvisable if only for force concealment and counter-exploitation considerations. Instead, maritime forces will need to re-embrace ‘command-by-negation’ doctrine, or rather the broad empowerment of lower-level commanders to exercise initiative in accordance with their higher commander’s pre-disseminated intentions, if they are to fight effectively. Relatedly, aggressive experimentation will be needed to find the proper balance between operating on interior and exterior lines of networking when inside a contested zone—and will probably reveal that the bias should be towards the former.

Lastly, forces capable of operating under command-by-negation and in opposed cyber-electromagnetic environments are not developed overnight. Frequent and intensive training under realistic combat conditions will be needed if the requisite force-wide skills are to be developed.[viii] In particular, much as we have traditionally done to cultivate physical damage control readiness, commanders and crews on the deck plates must be regularly conditioned to expect, recognize, and fight-through cyber-electromagnetic attacks. A force’s cyber-electromagnetic resilience will depend in no small way upon its personnel’s technical, tactical, and psychological preparation for operating with critical systems and networks degraded if not compromised, and with situational pictures that have been manipulated. Likewise, a force’s ability to successfully deceive the adversary—not to mention successfully employ countermeasures against the adversary’s weapons—will depend upon the cyber-electromagnetic tactical skills the force’s personnel cultivate through routinized peacetime training. Emission control discipline, decoy placement relative to defended assets, precision evasive maneuvers, precision timing and sequencing of tactics, and the like require frequent practice if commanders and crews are to gain and then maintain just the minimum proficiencies needed to survive in modern maritime battle. The Navy’s next Strategy for Achieving Information Dominance needs to make it clear that cyber-electromagnetic competence must not be isolated to its Information Dominance Corps, and instead must be ingrained within the total force.

While cyber-electromagnetic risks hardly invalidate the use of advanced sensor and networking technologies, they do caution us not to take for granted that our systems and networks will be secure, functional, and reliable when needed. Our doctrine, contingency operational plans, and tactics must be structured around the assumption each of our warfare systems contain exploitable cyber-electromagnetic vulnerabilities that may prevent us from using them to their fullest—or at all—when most needed. We must not allow ourselves to build and field a force that can only fight effectively when its systems and networks are unhindered and uncompromised.

Jon Solomon is a Senior Systems and Technology Analyst at Systems Planning and Analysis, Inc. in Alexandria, VA. He can be reached at [email protected]. The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and are presented in his personal capacity on his own initiative. They do not reflect the official positions of Systems Planning and Analysis, Inc. and to the author’s knowledge do not reflect the policies or positions of the U.S. Department of Defense, any U.S. armed service, or any other U.S. Government agency. These views have not been coordinated with, and are not offered in the interest of, Systems Planning and Analysis, Inc. or any of its customers.

[i] Norman Friedman. “Trust but Verify.” Naval Institute Proceedings 134, No. 11 (November 2008), 90-91.

[ii] ADM Jonathan Greenert, USN. “Imminent Domain.” Naval Institute Proceedings 138, No. 12 (December 2012), 17.

[iii] LCDR James T. Westwood, USN. “Electronic Warfare and Signals Intelligence at the Outset of World War I.” U.S. National Security Agency, undated, accessed 1/31/14, http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/cryptologic_spectrum/electronic_warfare.pdf

[iv] See 1. ADM Jonathan Greenert, USN. “Payloads Over Platforms: Charting a New Course.” Naval Institute Proceedings 138, No. 7 (July 2012), 18-19; 2. Gordon and Trainor, 213-215, 217; 3. Arend G. Westra. “Radar Versus Stealth: Passive Radar and the Future of U.S. Military Power.” Joint Forces Quarterly 55 (October 2009), 136-143.

[v] Thomas G. Mahnken. “China’s Anti-Access Strategy in Historical and Theoretical Perspective.” Journal of Strategic Studies 34, No. 3 (June 2011), 310.

[vi] CAPT Wayne Hughes, Jr, USN (Ret). Fleet Tactics and Coastal Combat, 2^nd Ed. (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2000), 201-202, 210-212.

[vii] Ibid, 40-44.

[viii] Solomon, “Maritime Deception and Concealment,” 104-106.

Cyber War, Future Tech, Future War

21st Century Maritime Operations Under Cyber-Electromagnetic Opposition Part Three

March 10, 2016 Guest Author 1 Comment

The following article is part of our cross-posting series with Information Dissemination’s Jon Solomon. It is republished here with the author’s permission. You can read it in its original form here.

Read part one and part two of the series.

By Jon Solomon

Candidate Principle #4: A Network’s Operational Geometry Impacts its Defensibility

Networked warfare is popularly viewed as a fight within cyberspace’s ever-shifting topology. Networks, however, often must use transmission mechanisms beyond physical cables. For field-deployed military forces in particular, data packets must be broadcast as electromagnetic signals through the atmosphere and outer space, or as acoustic signals underwater, in order to connect with a network’s infrastructure. Whereas a belligerent might not be able to directly access or strike this infrastructure for a variety of reasons, intercepting and exploiting a signal as it traverses above or below water is an entirely different matter. The geometry of a transmitted signal’s propagation paths therefore is a critical factor in assessing a network’s defensibility.

The Jominian terms interior and exterior lines of operations respectively refer to whether a force occupies positions within a ‘circle’ such that its combat actions radiate outwards towards the adversary’s forces, or whether it is positioned outside the ‘circle’ such that its actions converge inwards towards the adversary.[i] Although these terms have traditionally applied solely within the physical domains of war, with some license they are also applicable to cyber-electromagnetic warfare. A force might be said to be operating on interior lines of networking if the platforms, remote sensors, data processing services, launched weapons, and communications relay assets comprising its battle networks are positioned solely within the force’s immediate operating area.

While this area may extend from the seabed to earth orbit, and could easily have a surface footprint measuring in the hundreds of thousands of square miles, it would nonetheless be relatively localized within the scheme of the overall combat zone. If the force employs robustly-layered physical defenses, and especially if its networking lines through the air or water feature highly-directional line-of-sight communications systems where possible or LPI transmission techniques where appropriate, the adversary’s task of positioning assets such that they can reliably discover let alone exploit the force’s electromagnetic or acoustic communications pathways becomes quite difficult. The ideal force operating on interior lines of networking avoids use of space-based data relay assets with predictable orbits and instead relies primarily upon agile, unpredictably-located airborne relays.[ii] CEC and tactical C²systems whose participants exclusively lie within a maneuvering force’s immediate operating area are examples of tools that enable interior lines of networking.

Conversely, a force might be said to be operating on exterior lines of networking if key resources comprising its battle networks are positioned well beyond its immediate operating area.

This can vastly simplify an adversary’s task of positioning cyber-electromagnetic exploitation assets. For example, the lines of communication linking a field-deployed force with distant entities often rely upon fixed or predictably-positioned relay assets with extremely wide surface footprints. Similarly, those that connect the force with rear-echelon entities generally require connections to fixed-location networking infrastructure on land or under the sea. Theater-level C²systems, national or theater-level sensor systems, intelligence ‘reachback’ support systems, remotely-located data fusion systems, and rear echelon logistical services that directly tap into field-deployed assets’ systems in order to provide remote-monitoring/troubleshooting support are examples of resources available to a force operating on exterior lines of networking.

Clearly, no force can fully foreswear operating on exterior lines of networking in favor of operating solely on interior lines.[iii] A force’s tasks combined with its minimum needs for external support preclude this; some tactical-level tasks such as theater ballistic missile defense depend upon direct inputs from national/theater-level sensors and C²systems. A force operating on interior lines of networking may also have less ‘battle information’ available to it, not to mention fewer processing resources available for digesting this information, than a force operating on exterior lines of networking.

Nevertheless, any added capabilities provided by operating on exterior lines of networking must be traded off against the increased cyber-electromagnetic risks inherent in doing so. There consequently must be an extremely compelling justification for each individual connection between a force and external resources, especially if a proposed connection touches critical combat system or ‘engineering plant’ systems. Any connections authorized with external resources must be subjected to a continuous, disciplined cyber-electromagnetic risk management process that dictates the allowable circumstances for the connection’s use and the methods that must be implemented to protect against its exploitation. This is not merely a concern about fending off ‘live penetration’ of a network, as an ill-considered connection might alternatively be used as a channel for routing a ‘kill signal’ to a preinstalled ‘logic bomb’ residing deep within some critical system, or for malware to automatically and covertly exfiltrate data to an adversary’s intelligence collectors. An external connection does not even need to be between a critical and a non-critical system to be dangerous; operational security depends greatly upon preventing sensitive information that contains or implies a unit or force’s geolocation, scheme of maneuver, and combat readiness from leaking out via networked logistical support services. Most notably, it must be understood that exterior lines of networking are more likely than interior lines to be disrupted or compromised when most needed while a force is operating under cyber-electromagnetic opposition. The timing and duration of a force’s use of exterior lines of networking accordingly should be strictly minimized, and it might often be more advantageous to pass up the capabilities provided by external connectivity in favor of increasing a force’s chances at avoiding detection or cyber-electromagnetic exploitation.

Candidate Principle #5: Network Degradation in Combat, While Certain, Can be Managed

The four previous candidate principles’ chief significance is that no network, and few sensor or communications systems, will be able to sustain peak operability within an opposed cyber-electromagnetic environment. Impacts may be lessened by employing network-enhanced vice network-dependent system architectures, carefully weighing a force’s connections with (or dependencies upon) external entities, and implementation of doctrinal, tactical, and technical cyber-electromagnetic counter-countermeasures. Network and system degradation will nonetheless be a reality, and there is no analytical justification for assuming peacetime degrees of situational awareness accuracy or force control surety will last long beyond a war’s outbreak.

There is a big difference, though, between degrading and destroying a network. The beauty of a decently-architected network is that lopping off certain key nodes may severely degrade its capabilities, but as long as some nodes survive—and especially if they can combine their individual capabilities constructively via surviving communications pathways as well as backup or ‘workaround’ processes—the network will retain some non-dismissible degree of functionality. Take Iraq’s nationwide integrated air defense system during the first Gulf War, for example. Although its C²nodes absorbed devastating attacks, it was able to sustain some localized effectiveness in a few areas of the country up through the war’s end. What’s more, U.S. forces could never completely sever this network’s communications pathways; in some cases the Iraqis succeeded in reconstituting damaged nodes.[iv] Similarly, U.S. Department of Defense force interoperability assessments overseen by the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation during Fiscal Year 2013 indicated that operators were frequently able to develop ‘workarounds’ when their information systems and networks experienced disruptions, and that mission accomplishment ultimately did not suffer as a result. A price was paid, though, in “increased operator workloads, increased errors, and slowed mission performance.”[v]

This illustrates the idea that a system or network can degrade gracefully; that is, retain residual capabilities ‘good enough,’ if only under narrow conditions, to significantly affect an opponent’s operations and tactics. Certain hardware and software design attributes including architectural redundancy, physical and virtual partitioning of critical from non-critical functions (with far stricter scrutiny over supply chains and components performed for the former), and implementation of hardened and aggressively tested ‘safe modes’ systems can fail into to restore a minimum set of critical functions support graceful degradation. The same is true with inclusion of ‘war reserve’ functionality in systems, use of a constantly-shifting network topology, availability of ‘out-of-band’ pathways for communicating mission-critical data, and incorporation of robust jamming identification and suppression/cancellation capabilities. All of these system and network design features can help a force can fight-through cyber-electromagnetic attack. Personnel training (and standards enforcement) with respect to basic cyber-electromagnetic hygiene will also figure immensely in this regard. Rigorous training aimed at developing crews’ abilities to quickly recognize, evaluate, and then recover from attacks (including suspected network-exploitations by adversary intelligence collectors) will accordingly be vital. All the same, graceful degradation is not an absolute good, as an opponent will assuredly exploit the resultant ‘spottier’ situational awareness or C² regardless of whether it is protracted or brief.

In the series finale, we assess the psychological effects of cyber-electromagnetic attacks and then conclude with a look at the candidate principles’ implications for maritime warfare.

[i] “Joint Publication 5-0: Joint Operational Planning.” (Washington, D.C.: Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2011), III-27.

[ii] For an excellent technical discussion on the trade-offs between electronic protection/communications security on one side and data throughput/system expense on the other, see Cote, 31, 58-59. For a good technical summary of highly-directional line-of sight radio frequency communications systems, see Tom Schlosser. “Technical Report 1719: Potential for Navy Use of Microwave and Millimeter Line-of-Sight Communications.” (San Diego: Naval Command, Control and Ocean Surveillance Center, RDT&E Division, September 1996), accessed 10/15/14, www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA318338

[iii] Note the discussion on this issue in “Joint Operational Access Concept, Version 1.0.” (Washington, D.C.: Joint Chiefs of Staff, 17 January 2012), 36-37.

[iv] Michael R. Gordon and LGEN Bernard E. Trainor, USMC (Ret). The Generals’ War: The Inside Story of the Conflict in the Gulf. (Boston: Back Bay Books, 1995), 256–57.

[v] “FY13 Annual Report: Information Assurance (IA) and Interoperability (IOP),” 330, 332-333.

[vi] See 1. Jonathan F. Solomon. “Cyberdeterrence between Nation-States: Plausible Strategy or a Pipe Dream?” Strategic Studies Quarterly 5, No. 1 (Spring 2011), Part II (online version): 21-22, accessed 12/13/13, http://www.au.af.mil/au/ssq/2011/spring/solomon.pdf; 2. “FY12 Annual Report: Information Assurance (IA) and Interoperability (IOP),” 307-311; 3. “FY13 Annual Report: Information Assurance (IA) and Interoperability (IOP),” 330, 332-334.

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