Podcast

Sea Control 252 – Bordering on Crisis with Brian Wilson and Nora Johnson

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By Jared Samuelson

Defecting Soviet sailors, possible contamination from explosions in Chinese port facilities, and deadly lemons! How do the U.S. and Canadian governments organize a whole-of-government response to a threat originating in the maritime domain? Brian Wilson and Nora Johnson join the podcast to discuss Maritime Operational Threat Response, the U.S. response, and Maritime Emergency Response Protocol, its Canadian counterpart.

Download Sea Control 252 – Bordering on Crisis with Brian Wilson and Nora Johnson

Links

1. “Bordering on Crisis: Overcoming Multiagency Crisis Coordination Challenges,” by Brian Wilson and Nora Johnson, New York University Press, 2021.
3. “The Defection of Simas Kudirka,” by Tom Dunlop, Martha’s Vineyard Magazine, December 1, 2005.

6. “Lemons Caught in a Squeeze,” by Paul Blustein and Brian rnes, The Washington Post, September 10, 2004. 

Jared Samuelson is Executive Producer and Co-Host of the Sea Control podcast. Contact him at [email protected].
Strategy

The U.S. Military In Competition: Supporting Effort One

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By Ryan Ratcliffe

“Ultimate excellence lies…in defeating the enemy without ever fighting.” —Sun Tzu

“America is back,” proclaimed President Joe Biden in his first address to the Department of State. “Diplomacy is back at the center of our foreign policy,” he continued, declaring that the United States would repair its alliances and reengage the world to confront global challenges. Speaking to the department that had recently published its comprehensive assessment of relations with China and called for a revival of U.S. foreign policy, the President’s words were likely well received. 

Designed to serve as a modern-day “long telegram,” The Elements of the China Challenge reveals the Chinese Communist Party’s aim to revise world order, highlighting many of the Party’s malign and coercive activities designed to achieve its subversive ambitions. The authors of this seminal work, the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff, conclude by calling for the United States to refashion its foreign policy around the principles of freedom and to reserve the use of military force for when all other measures have failed. 

Diplomacy will certainly be fundamental in addressing the China challenge, but returning it to the forefront of U.S. foreign policy will not occur overnight. Decades of systemic decline have reduced U.S. diplomatic capacity and left the military as the more prolific instrument of national power. Therefore, until the Department of State completes the transformation it requires and returns to primacy, the Department of Defense will need to shoulder some of the burden in answering the China challenge. One such element that the Department of Defense should assist with is countering actions in the gray zone. 

The gray zone is the “contested arena somewhere between routine statecraft and open warfare,” and it includes actions taken to achieve relative geopolitical gains without triggering escalation. So, despite the U.S. military’s preeminence as a joint fighting force (or, more likely, as a testament to it), state actors like the Chinese Communist Party are pursuing and achieving success in the gray zone. These revisionist actors purposefully avoid armed conflict in an effort to evade the lethal arm of U.S. foreign policy, challenging traditional assumptions of strategic deterrence. Left unchecked, these gray zone victories will gradually amass into a direct threat to U.S. national security; this makes it well within the military’s purview to orient on the gray zone. 

To help counter the gray zone strategy the Chinese Communist Party regularly uses, the U.S. military should consider non-traditional approaches to competition. Such creative military support would buy U.S. diplomacy time to rebuild its capacity for securing freedom, while still avoiding armed conflict. This article offers a framework for achieving this non-traditional support from the U.S. military: First, the United States should leverage its military manpower to legally support non-military competition activities. Second, the U.S. military should establish a forward-deployed headquarters to command and control the military’s involvement in competition. Finally, the senior military officer in this competition-focused headquarters should be charged with synchronizing operations in the information environment.

Providing Military Support to Competition

Although there are many definitions, competition is generally viewed as fundamental to international relations. To effectively compete, though, one must develop a thorough understanding of the competition. Therefore, it is important to recognize that the pinnacle of Sun Tzu’s “win without fighting” maxim is not determining the fate of a battle before it is fought; the true measure of excellence is to never even do battle because one’s aims were wholly achieved without conflict.

Recognizing that its competitors seek to achieve their revisionist aims below the threshold of armed conflict, the U.S. military must adapt its deterrence strategies to counter illegal gray zone operations. Deterrence by denial, defined as elevating the probability of operational failure, likely has a greater chance of succeeding in the gray zone than deterrence by punishment, such as taking retaliatory action. To effect deterrence by denial in the gray zone, the U.S. military should enable its interagency and international partners to counter the illicit activity that often underpins gray zone strategies.

Countering malign behavior has many faces: U.S. allies upholding their own sovereignty, partner nations protecting their economic livelihood, and the U.S. government imposing economic sanctions are all examples of ways to achieve competition’s strategic ends. In spite of their critical role in opposing illicit gray zone activities, though, the agencies that confront malign behavior often lack the manpower to reach the point of taking action. Manning shortfalls, exacerbated by the expansive size of the Indo-Pacific, leave the U.S. military’s interagency and international partners unable to muster adequate back-end support for their efforts, such as maintaining robust intelligence pictures or gathering actionable evidence of malign activity.

The U.S. Department of Defense, on the other hand, is more adequately manned for the task of competing in the Indo-Pacific. For example, U.S. Indo-Pacific Command alone has approximately 375,000 military and civilian personnel assigned to its area of responsibility. In contrast, the U.S. Department of State employs only 70,000 individuals throughout the world, and the New Zealand Defence Force is just over 15,000 strong. So, while the U.S. military’s interagency and international partners lack the manpower to identify and track gray zone activity, nearly two decades of asymmetric conflict has left the U.S. military manned, trained, and equipped to provide precisely the type of back-end intelligence and logistical support its partners require. Any manpower that the U.S. military contributes to these partners is likely to have outsized impacts on their ability to compete and counter gray zone actions.

It should be clarified that supporting competition cannot detract from the U.S. military’s lethality, a unique capability it alone provides. Therefore, like any effective strategy, efforts to counter gray zone operations should be focused on the most important and attainable objectives. Careful consideration should be given to preserving the “means” of the U.S. military to protect national security: its combat power. However, supporting competition and retaining combat power are not mutually exclusive. For example, many of the skills required to perform maritime governance, such as fusing multi-source intelligence data or finding and fixing maritime vessels, directly translate to combat operations. Activities supporting competition can and should be used to build operator proficiency, while simultaneously contributing to deterrence by demonstrating credible military power in the region.

A Competition-Focused Command

To synchronize the U.S. military’s support to competition and maintain awareness of the collective risk acceptance, U.S. Indo-Pacific Command should consider establishing a competition-focused headquarters west of the International Date Line. This headquarters would provide the unity of command required to develop the foreign, joint, and diplomatic partnerships needed to compete with a state actor seeking to undermine regional stability. 

Some will view a headquarters west of the International Date Line as incurring too much risk of escalation, but the opposite is more likely true. The U.S. military will be unable to deter illicit gray zone activities without accepting some risk, as a willingness to accept risk demonstrates commitment to one’s adversary. Accepting greater risk does not mean the United States should condone or take wanton action, though, as disparate or conflicting actions could elevate the risk of unintentional or inadvertent escalation. Instead, risk acceptance should be carefully considered for the confluence of the U.S. military’s efforts to support competition. Establishing a forward headquarters, then, directly addresses the issue of risk: it would demonstrate commitment to the United States’ competitors while maintaining a complete picture of the military’s support to competition, thereby decreasing the risk of escalation.

The ideal structure for this organization would be a Combined Joint Interagency Task Force (CJIATF) led by a senior civilian, with a 3-star general or flag officer serving as deputy, and possessing a cabinet of experienced foreign policy advisors and liaison officers. To ensure a “forward mindset”, the CJIATF should be positioned in Guam, Australia, or Palau, and staffed by a mix of deployed and permanent personnel. Such a construct will provide responsive command and control for regional competition, increasing the U.S. military’s ability to support competition while freeing other units to maintain their focus on conventional mission sets and traditional strategic deterrence.

There are many factors that make a CJIATF the ideal choice to serve as the nexus of military support to competition. First, joint task forces provide a “single mission focus” with the ability to “integrate forces…in a dynamic and challenging political environment.” They also foster “de facto interdependence” through an environment of mutual reliance on their members’ contributions. The “combined” and “interagency” modifiers emphasize the need to include a wide variety of partners within this joint task force—partners that should range from U.S. government agencies to a host of international liaison officers.

To effectively navigate the complex requirements of providing military support to external entities, the CJIATF should employ a blend of traditional and novel concepts. For example, the “by, with, and through” approach translates well to competition. Although more commonly associated with armed conflict, this approach offers an outline for orchestrating interagency and international cooperation: The CJIATF strives for actions performed by its partners, with the support of U.S. forces, and through a legal and diplomatic framework. Such an approach would allow the U.S. military to support a wide range of partner actions, while still abiding by international law and applicable U.S. Code. 

Competition demands exactly the kind of interagency and international cooperation that a joint task force promotes. As the stakes of competition continue to rise with tensions following suit, detailed integration between the military, government agencies, and partner nations remains the best hope for diminishing the risk of conflict. Avoiding conflict while preserving the rules-based international order should be considered success in today’s competition, and a CJIATF is uniquely capable of supporting this objective.

Information-Related Synchronization

In addition to enabling partner actions, the CJIATF will need to grapple with the fact that all competition efforts are inexorably tied to the information environment. Instant communication and weaponized social media offer ample opportunity for competitive exploitation, and they present considerable risk of inadvertent escalation. Additionally, misinformation and deep fakes now offer low-cost means to wreak societal havoc with ambiguous attribution. 

Despite some documented success, the United States has struggled to develop a unified understanding of information operations. Difficulty preventing exploitation, such as Russian interference in U.S. elections or Chinese industrial espionage, creates a perception of information vulnerability—a setback the United States must rectify. To fix this, consideration of information operations needs to move from garrison staff, academia, and think tanks to the operational realm. The role of every warfighter has changed: You are no longer simply “doing land operations, you’re doing an information operation in the land domain.” 

The connection between competition and information makes the CJIATF’s responsibilities inherently information-centric. Therefore, in addition to enabling its partners to compete, the CJIATF must also synchronize information operations in support of competition. This focus on gaining advantage in the battle for information dominance makes the CJIATF’s senior military officer a logical choice to serve as the first Joint Force Information Component Commander (JFICC).

The JFICC is a novel approach to the battle-tested functional component commander construct. Commanders designate a subordinate functional component commander to establish unity of command and unity of effort for operations in a specific domain (i.e., there are normally separate component commanders for operations on land, at sea, in the air, etc.). This type of domain-specific synchronization is precisely what the United States needs to overcome its previous setbacks in the information environment. Additionally, operations can have significant effects in the information environment regardless of the domain they are executed in, and the inverse is also true: Actions in the information environment can have real-world impacts in physical domains. 

To manage this cross-domain interaction, the JFICC needs to synchronize the projected effects of all efforts in the region. This robust requirement, combined with the move towards all-domain operations, means the JFICC must be able to deploy their information-related capabilities as a demonstrable force, in line with the forces operating in the other domains. They will then need the authority and capacity to mass this force in support of decisive action. Designating the CJIATF commander as the JFICC directly addresses this requirement by placing “the responsibility and authority for execution of the decisive [information] tasks under a commander vice under a staff officer.”

Although it is non-doctrinal for a joint force commander to serve as a functional component commander, there is some precedent for this: A Special Operations Joint Task Force commander may also serve as the Joint Force Special Operations Component Commander. Comparing special operations forces with information-related capabilities turns out to be rather effective, as neither “own” physical battlespace, neither historically have a dedicated service component, and both often operate below the level of armed conflict.

Any future JFICC will likely be faced with an extraordinarily complex all-domain problem, and will be able to directly impact national strategic objectives. Experience is the best teacher, and the U.S. military should capitalize on the opportunity to advance its ability to operate in the information environment by employing the first JFICC below the threshold of armed conflict. Doing so will provide valuable insight into the dyad of operating in the physical domain and information environment simultaneously—a fundamental challenge of all-domain operations. 

Competition is Not a Nine-to-Five Job

To realize its strategic aims, the United States must make a concerted effort to align its means and ways to achieve its ends, building upon its strengths while improving its deficiencies. Supporting interagency and international partners where command and control resides with a new headquarters commanded by a novel functional component commander presents formidable challenges, but it is precisely the economy-of-force option the United States needs to better compete now. This structure aligns with strategic guidance from the highest levels of the U.S. Government, and it could eventually serve as an example for other theaters to emulate, such as U.S. Africa Command.

Finally, a subtle but crucial aspect of implementing this construct is that it acknowledges the gray zone operating environment for what it is: a contest of wills without violence. Left unchecked, these gray zone strategies could lead to a Tzu-esque defeat of the rules-based international order before Clausewitzian force is ever used. With this recognition, the U.S. military must shift its approach to competition from a “nine-to-five” business model and begin applying effort commensurate with traditional military operations.

Utilizing the U.S. military to support competition will likely be difficult and often uncomfortable. Additionally, establishing another forward-deployed headquarters will require both personal sacrifice and significant monetary commitment, and appointing a new functional component commander will challenge traditional military thought. There is, however, something much worse than these changes: failure to levy the existing force against today’s challenges with the hope that tomorrow’s force will be more capable of achieving success. Hope is not a viable course of action when national security is at stake.

As put forth in The Elements of the China Challenge, the United States needs to mobilize the global forces who ascribe to the existing world order and are willing to defend it, keeping one aim in mind: securing freedom. The forward-mindset and combined, interagency nature of this supporting approach will do exactly that: ensure the United States’ efforts align with and support the strategic interests of its partners in the Indo-Pacific. This paradigm shift could be the rallying cry that unites a constellation of allies and partners to form the whole-of-society approach this contest will require. The time for action is now; the world order we know depends on it.

 Major Ryan “Bevo” Ratcliffe is an EA-6B Electronic Countermeasures Officer and a Forward Air Controller in the United States Marine Corps, currently assigned to I MEF Information Group. He will begin pursuing a Master of International Public Policy from The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in August 2021.  

The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Marine Corps, Department of the Navy, or Department of Defense.

Featured image: A JH-7 fighter bomber attached to a naval aviation brigade under the PLA Northern Theater Command taxies on the runway with drogue parachute during a flight training exercise in early January, 2021. (eng.chinamil.com.cn/Photo by Duan Yanbing)

Podcast

Sea Control 251 – Undersea, Out of Mind with Dr. Christian Bueger and Dr. Tobias Liebetrau

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By Jared Samuelson

Dr. Christian Bueger and Dr. Tobias Liebetrau join the program to discuss real and imagined threats to undersea cables, infrastructure, and the complexities of regulating and protecting an international network. 

Download Sea Control 251 – Undersea, Out of Mind with Dr. Christian Bueger and Dr. Tobias Liebetrau

Links

1. “Protecting hidden infrastructure: The security politics of the global submarine data cable network,” by Dr. Christian Bueger and Dr. Tobias Liebetrau, Contemporary Security Policy, March 29, 2021.
2. SafeSeas Network Website

Jared Samuelson is Executive Producer and Co-Host of the Sea Control podcast. Contact him at [email protected].

Future Tech

Software-Defined Tactics and Great Power Competition

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By LT Sean Lavelle, USN

There are two components to military competency: understanding and proficiency. To execute a task, like driving a ship, one must first understand the fundamentals and theory—the rules of navigation, how the weather impacts performance, how a ship’s various controls impact its movement. Understanding is stable and military personnel forget the fundamentals slowly. Learning those fundamentals, though, does not eliminate the need to practice. Failing to practice tasks like maneuvering the ship in congested waters or evaluating potential contacts of interest will quickly degrade operational proficiency.

In the coming decades, human understanding of warfighting concepts will still be paramount to battlefield success. Realistic initial training and high-end force-on-force exercises will be critical to building that understanding. However, warfighters cross-trained as software developers will make it far easier to retain proficiency without as much rote, expensive practice. Their parent units will train them to make basic applications, and they will use these skills to translate their hard-won combat understanding into a permanent proficiency available to anyone with the most recent software update.

These applications, called software-defined tactics, will alert tacticians to risk and opportunity on the battlefield, ensuring they can consistently hit the enemy’s weak points while minimizing their own vulnerabilities. They will speed force-wide learning by orders of magnitude, create uniformly high-performing units, and increase scalability of conventional forces.

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Imagine an F-35 section leader commanding two F-35 fighters tasked to patrol near enemy airspace and kill any enemy aircraft who approach. As the F-35s establish a combat air patrol in the assigned area, the jet’s sensors indicate there are two flights of adversary aircraft approaching the formation, one from off the nose to the north and the other off the right wing, from the east. Each of these flights consists of four bandits that are individually overmatched by the advanced F-35s. Safety is to the south.

These F-35s have enough missiles within the section to reliably kill four enemies, but are facing eight. Since the northern group of bandits are a bit closer, the section leader decides to move north and kill them. The section’s volley of missiles all achieve solid hits, and there are now four fewer enemy aircraft to threaten the larger campaign.

Now out of missiles, the section turns south to head back home. That’s when the section leader realizes the mistake. As the F-35s flowed northward, they traveled farther away from safety while the eastern group of bandits continued to close on the F-35s, cutting off their path home. 

The only options at this point are to try to travel around the bandits or go through them. A path around them would run the fighters out of fuel, so the flight leader goes straight for the four enemy aircraft, hoping that the bandits will have seen their friends shot down and run away in fear.

The gambit fails, however, and the remaining enemy aircraft close with the F-35s and shoot them down. What should have been an easy victory ended in a tactical stalemate, and in a war where the enemy can build their simple aircraft faster than America can build complex F-35s, the 2:1 exchange ratio is in their favor strategically.

This could have gone differently.

Persistent and Available Tactical Lessons 

Somebody in the F-35 fleet had likely made a mistake similar to this example during a training evolution long before the fateful dogfight. They might have even taken a few days out of their schedule to write a thoughtful lessons-learned paper about it. This writing is critically important. It communicates to other pilots the fundamental knowledge required to succeed in combat. However, success in combat demands not just understanding, but proficiency as well. An infantryman who has not fired a rifle in a few years likely still understands how to shoot, but their lack of practice means they will struggle at first.

Under a software-defined tactics regime, in addition to writing a paper, the pilot could have written software that would have alerted future pilots about the impending danger. While those pilots would still need to understand the risk, ever-watching software would alert them to risks in real-time so that a lack of recent practice would not be fatal. A quick software update to the F-35 fleet would have dramatically and permanently reduced the odds of anyone ever making that mistake again.

The program would not have had to be complex. It could have run securely, receiving data from the underlying mission system without transmitting data back to the aircraft’s mission computers. This one-way data pipe would have eliminated the potential for ad-hoc software to accidentally hamper the safety of the aircraft.

The F-35’s mission computer in our example already had eight hostile tracks displayed. The F-35’s computer also knew how many missiles it had loaded in its weapons bay. If that data were pushed to a software-defined tactics application, the coder-pilot could have written a program that executed the following steps:

  1. Determine how many targets can be attacked, given the missiles onboard.
  2. If there are enough missiles to attack them all, recommend attacking them all. If there are more hostile tracks than missiles (or a predefined missile-to-target ratio), run the following logic to determine which targets to prioritize.
  3. Determine all the possible ordered combinations of targets. There are 1,680 combinations in the original example—a small number for a computer.
  4. For each combination, simulate the engagement and determine if an untargeted aircraft could cut off the escape towards home. Store the margin of safety distance.
  5. If a cutoff is effective in a given iteration, reject that combination of targets and test the next one.
  6. Recommend the combination of targets to the flight commander with the widest clear path home. Alert the flight commander if there is no course of action with a clear path home.

This small program would have instantly told the pilot to engage the eastern targets, and that engaging the targets to the north would have allowed the eastern targets to cut off the F-35s’ route to safety. Following this recommendation would have allowed the F-35s to maintain a 4:0 kill ratio and live to fight another day.

A simple version of this program could have been written by two people in a single day—16 man-hours—if they had the right tools. Completing tactical testing in a simulator and ensuring the software’s reliability would take another 40-80 man-hours. 

Alternatively, writing a compelling paper about the situation would take a bit less time: around 20-40 hours. However, a force of 1,000 pilots spending 30 minutes each to read the paper would require 500 man-hours. Totaling these numbers, results in 96 man-hours on the high-end for software-defined tactics versus 520 man-hours on the low-end for writing and reading. While both are necessary, writing software is much more efficient than writing papers.

To truly train the force not to make this mistake without software-defined tactics, every pilot would need to spend around five hours—a typical brief, simulator, and debrief length—in training events that stressed the scenario. That yields an additional 10,000 man-hours, given one student and one instructor for each training event. At that point, all of the training effort might reduce instances of the mistake by about 75%.

To maintain that level of performance, aircrew would need to practice this scenario once every six months in simulators. That is 10,000 hours every six months. Over five years, you’d need to spend more than 100,000 man-hours to maintain proficiency in this skill across the force.

Software-defined tactics applications do not need ongoing practice to maintain currency. They do need to be updated periodically to account for tactical changes and to improve them, though. Budgeting 100 man-hours per year is reasonable for an application of this size. That is 500 man-hours over five years.

Pen-and paper updates require 100,000 man-hours for a 75% reduction in a mistake. Software-driven updates require 596 man-hours for a nearly 100% reduction. It is not close. 

When a software developer accidentally creates a bug, they code a test that will alert them if anyone else ever makes that same mistake in the future. In this way, a whole development team learns and gets more reliable with every mistake they make. Software-defined tactics offer that same power to military units.

Software Defined Tactics in Action

While the F-35 example is hypothetical, software-defined tactics are not. The Navy’s P-8 community has been leveraging a software-defined tactics platform for the last four years to great effect. The P-8 is a naval aircraft primarily designed to hunt enemy submarines. Localization—the process by which a submarine-hunting asset goes from initial detection to accurate estimate of the target’s position, course, and speed—is among the most challenging parts of prosecuting adversary submarines.

On the P-8, the tactical coordinator decides on and implements the tactics the P-8 will use to localize a submarine. It takes about 18 months of time in their first squadron to qualify as a tactical coordinator and demonstrate reliable proficiency in this task. These months include thousands of hours of study, hundreds of hours in the aircraft and simulator, and dozens of hours defending their knowledge in front of more experienced tacticians.

When examining the data the P-8 community collects, there is a clear and massive disparity in performance between inexperienced and experienced personnel. There is another massive disparity between those experienced tacticians who have been selected to be instructors because of demonstrated talent and those who have not. In other words, there are both experience and innate talent factors with large impacts on performance in submarine localization.

The community’s software-defined tactics platform has made it so that a junior tactician (inexperienced and possibly untalented) with 6-months of time in platform performs exactly as well as an instructor (experienced and talented) with 18-months in platform. It does this largely by reducing tactician mistakes—alerting them to the opportunities the tactical situation presents and dissuading them from enacting poor tactical responses.

This makes the P-8 force extremely scalable in wartime. In World War II, America beat Japan because it was able to quickly and continually train high-quality personnel. It took nine months to train a basic fighter pilot in 1942. It takes two or three years to go from initial flight training until arriving at a fleet squadron in 2021. Reducing time to train with software-defined tactics will restore that rapid scalability to America’s modern forces.

The P-8 community has had similar results for many tactical scenarios. It does this, today, with very little integration into the P-8s mission system. Soon, its user-built applications will be integrated with a one-way data pipe from the aircraft’s mission system that will enable the full software-defined tactics paradigm. A team called the Software Support Activity at the Naval Air Systems Command will manage the security of this system and provide infrastructure support. Another team consisting of P-8 operators at the Maritime Patrol and Reconnaissance Weapons School will develop applications based on warfighter needs. 

Technical Implementation

Implementing this paradigm across the US military will yield a highly capable force that can learn at speeds orders of magnitude faster than its adversaries. Making the required technical changes will be inexpensive.

On the P-8, implementing a secure computing environment with one-way data flow was always part of the acquisition plan. That should be the case for all future platform acquisitions. All it requires is an open operating system and a small amount of computing resources reserved for software-defined tactics applications.

Converting legacy platforms will be slightly more difficult. If a platform has no containerized computing environment, it is possible to add one, though. The Air Force recently deployed Kubernetes—a framework that allows for securely containerized applications to be inserted in computing environments—on a U-2. Feeding mission-system data to this environment and allowing operators to build applications with it will enable software-defined tactics.

If it is possible to securely implement this on the U-2, which was built in 1955, any platform in the U.S. arsenal can be modified to accept software-defined tactics applications.

Human Implementation

From a technical standpoint, implementing this paradigm is trivial. From the human perspective, it is a bit harder. However, investing in operational forces’ technical capabilities without the corresponding human capabilities will result in a force that operates in the way industry believes it should, rather than the way warfighters know it should. A tight feedback loop between the battlefield reality and the algorithms that help dominate that battlefield is essential. Multi-year development cycles will not keep up.

As a first step, communities should work to identify the personnel they already have in their ranks with some ability to develop software. About a quarter of Naval Academy graduates enter the service each year with majors that require programming competency. These officers are a largely untapped resource.

The next step is to provide these individuals with training and tools to make software. An 80-hour, two-week course customized to the individual’s talent level is generally enough to get a new contributor to a productive level on the P-8’s team. A single application pays for this investment many times over. Tools available on the military’s unclassified and secret networks like DI2E and the Navy’s Black Pearl enable good practices for small-scale software development.

Finally, this cadre of tactician-programmers should be detailed to warfare development centers and weapons schools during their non-operational tours. Writing code and staying current with bleeding-edge tactical issues should be their primary job once there. Given the significant contribution this group will make to readiness, this duty should be rewarded at promotion boards to maintain technical competence in senior ranks.

A shortcut to doing this could be to rely on contractors to develop software-defined tactics. To maximize the odds of success, organizations should ensure that these contractors 1) are co-located with experienced operators, 2) are led by a tactician with software-development experience, 3) can deploy software quickly, 4) have at least a few tactically-current, uniformed team members, and 5) are funded operationally vice project-based so they can switch projects quickly as warfighters identify new problems. 

The Stakes

Great power competition is here. China’s economy is now larger than America’s on a purchasing parity basis. America no longer has the manufacturing capacity advantage that led to victory in World War II, nor the ability to train highly-specialized warfighters rapidly. To maintain America’s military dominance in the 21st century, it must leverage the incredible talent already resident in its armed forces.

When somebody in an autocratic society makes a mistake, they hide that mistake since punishment can be severe. The natural openness that comes from living in a democratic society means that American military personnel are able to talk about mistakes they have made, reason about how to stop them from happening again, and then implement solutions. The U.S. military must give its people the tools required to implement better, faster, and more permanent solutions. 

Software-defined tactics will yield a lasting advantage for American military forces by leveraging the comparative advantages of western societies: openness and a focus on investing in human capital. There is no time to waste.

LT Sean Lavelle is an active-duty naval flight officer who instructs tactics in the MQ-4C and P-8A. He leads the iLoc Software Development Team at the Maritime Patrol and Reconnaissance Weapons School and holds degrees from the U.S. Naval Academy and Johns Hopkins University. The views stated here are his own and are not reflective of the official position of the U.S. Navy or Department of Defense.

Featured image: A P-8A Poseidon conducts flyovers above the Enterprise Carrier Strike Group during exercise Bold Alligator 2012. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Daniel J. Meshel/Released)

Fostering the Discussion on Securing the Seas.