Dominant Battlespace Knowledge Edited By Martin C Libicki and Stuart E Johnson Introduction by Admiral William A Owens NATIONAL DEFENSE UNIVERSITY NDU Press Book October 1995 A popular Government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy or perhaps both Knowledge will forever govern ignorance And a people who mean to be their own Governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives JAMES MADISON to W T BARRY August 4 1822 NATIONAL DEFENSE UNIVERSITY President Lieutenant General Ervin J Rokke Vice President Ambassador William G Walker INSTITUTE FOR NATIONAL STRATEGIC STUDIES Director and Publisher Hans A Binnendijk PUBLICATIONS DIRECTORATE Director Fredrick T Kiley Dr Stuart Johnson is the director of INSS's Research Directorate Martin Libicki is a Senior Fellow at INSS's Center for Advanced Concepts and Technologies INSS publishes NDU Books to provoke thought and inform discussion on issues of U S national security in the post-Cold War era These books present current topics related to national security strategy and policy defense resource management international affairs civil-military relations military technology and joint combined and coalition operations Opinions conclusions and recommendations expressed or implied are those of the authors They do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Defense University the Department of Defense or any other U S Government agency Cleared for public release distribution unlimited Portions of this publication may be quoted or reprinted without further permission with credit to the Institute for National Strategic Studies Washington D C A courtesy copy of reviews and tearsheets would be appreciated For sale by the U S Government Printing Office Superintendent of Documents Mail Stop SSOP Washington D C 20402-9328 ISSN 1071-7552 Table of Contents FOREWORD i INTRODUCTION ii DBK OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES 1 DBK AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 5 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF DBK 20 THE FUTURE OF COMMAND AND CONTROL WITH DBK 28 DOMINANT BATTLESPACE AWARENESS AND FUTURE WARFARE 39 DBK WITH AUTONOMOUS WEAPONS 47 JUST-IN-TIME WARFARE 54 About the Authors 62 FOREWORD The Department of Defense has been successfully exploiting rapidly developing advances in information technology for military gain On tomorrow's multidimensional battlefield - or battlespace -- the increased density acuity and connectivity of sensors and many other information devices may allow U S Armed Forces to see almost everything worth seeing in real or near-real time Such enhanced vision of the battlespace is no doubt a significant military advantage but a question remains How do we achieve dominant battlefield knowledge namely the ability to understand what we see and act on it decisively The papers collected here address the most critical aspects of that problem -- to wit If the United States develops the means to acquire dominant battlespace knowledge DBK how might that affect the way it goes to war the circumstances under which force can and will be used the purposes for its employment and the resulting alterations of the global geomilitary environment Of particular interest is how the authors view the influence of DBK in light of the shift from global to regional stability issues that marks the post-Cold War world While no definitive answer has yet emerged it is clear that the implications of so profound a change in military technology are critical to the structure and function of the U S Armed Forces In working toward a definitive answer the authors of this volume make an important contribution to a debate whose resolution will shape the decades to come Ervin J Rokke Lieutenant General USAF President National Defense University i INTRODUCTION Admiral William A Owens USN Vice Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff The Emerging U S System of Systems Three simultaneous revolutions have pushed us toward change The first is from the revolution in world affairs brought about by the implosion of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War We are also experiencing a related revolution -- the reduction in the defense budget which began almost a decade ago and accelerated because of the demise of the Soviet Union The third revolution affecting the U S military is what some call the revolution in military affairs In part because of earlier investments particularly in technologies our military capability is improving rapidly and these improvements point toward a qualitative jump in our ability to use military force effectively We will be the first nation to pass through the revolution emerging with different strengths that can give us an edge across the entire spectrum of contingencies against which the nation may need to commit its military What kinds of requirements are emerging from these revolutions They fall into three general categories which for convenience we may call intelligence command and control and precision force • The first category intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance ISR involves sensor and reporting technologies associated with intelligence collection surveillance and reconnaissance as well as the new means by which we are able to keep track of what our own forces are doing Because of advances in this area we are expanding quite dramatically our capacity to maintain real-time allweather awareness of what is occurring in and above a wide geographical area • The second is command control communications computer applications and intelligence processing -- advanced C41 the technologies and techniques by which we translate the awareness of what is occurring in a broad geographical arena into an understanding of what is taking place there and communicate that understanding quickly surely and accurately -- in usable form -- to combat forces Advanced C41 is where processes like target identification mission assignment and force allocation take place In other words it is the realm in which we convert the understanding of a battlespace to missions and assignments designed to alter control and dominate that battlespace • Then there is precision force which many understand to be precision-guided weaponry and it certainly includes this category of weapons It is a broader concept however that emphasizes speed accuracy and precision in the use of force and therefore encompasses all our forces the infantry as well as strategic bombers and includes things like information warfare This is the area in which the knowledge generated from the overlap of the first two areas leads to action It ii is easy to miss the power generated by the interaction of ISR advanced C41 and precision force because we tend to see developments in each of the areas as discrete and separate Consider table 1 which lists some of the weapons and systems already budgeted and programmed that have entered the active inventories or will do so in the years ahead Something about the way we plan and program in the Defense Department keeps us in compartmented perspectives We are more adept at seeing some of the individual trees than that vast forest of military capability the individual systems are building so it is easy to miss the fact that together these programs posit a qualitatively different military potential iii TABLE 1 Weapons and Systems In or Entering U S Military Inventories ISR sensors AWACS Rivet Joint EP-3E JSTARS HASA SBIR Tier 2 Tier 3TARPS MTI REMBAS MAGIC LANTERN ISAR FDS ATARS C4I GCCS MILSTAR JSIPS DISN JUDI C4I FTW TADIL J TRAP TACSAT JWICS MIDS SONET LINK-16 DMS SABER Precision Force SFW JSOW TLAM BLK III ATACMS BAT SLAW CALCM HAVE NAP AGM-130 HARM AIR HAWK SADARM HELLFIRE II TLAM BLK IV JAVELIN THAAD What is happening driven in part by broad conceptual architectures in part by serendipity is the creation of a new system of systems Merging our increasing capacity to gather real-time all-weather information continuously with our increasing capacity to process and make sense of this voluminous data builds the realm of dominant battlespace knowledge DBK DBK involves everything from automated target recognition to knowledge of an opponent's operational scheme and the networks relied on to pursue that scheme The result will be an increasing gap between U S military forces and any opponent in awareness and understanding of everything of military significance in any arena in which we may be engaged Likewise our growing capacity to transfer DBK to all our forces coupled with the realtime awareness of the status of all our forces and the understanding of what they can do with their growing capacity to apply force with speed accuracy and precision builds the realm of near perfect mission allocation We will increasingly assign the right mission to the right force matching our forces to the most successful course of action at both the tactical and operational levels of warfare Further our increasing capacity to use force faster more accurately and more precisely over greater distances and interacting with the advances in ISR will build a qualitatively better realm of battle assessment We will know the effects of our actions -- and understand what those effects mean -- with far more fidelity far earlier than anything we have experienced to date This dominant knowledge in turn will make any subsequent actions we undertake even more effective because we will truly be able to operate within the opponent's decision cycle and the opponent's capacity to operate at all will have been greatly eroded This new system-of-systems capability is at the heart of the American revolution in military affairs RMA It embodies a new appreciation of joint military operations for the system-of- systems depends ultimately on contributions from all the military services a common appreciation of what we are building and a common military doctrine iv This transition is inevitable but the speed at which we complete it depends on recognition of what is emerging and on our defense planning and programming decisions over the next several years If we decide to accelerate the transition it can be completed early in the next century We could therefore be on the other side of this new revolution in military affairs years perhaps decades before any other nation This is important for many reasons one of the most significant is that completing the revolution offers us the opportunity to shape the international environment rather than simply react to it This then is the essence of the argument in favor of accelerating RMA It is a bold vision and a controversial one Visions count however only if people try to make them real and the professional military should not try to reify this one unless it holds up to honest critique Let us turn to the five most serious criticisms that have surfaced so far Opponents Fight Back Postmortems of the American experience in Vietnam include the suggestion that although the United States could put men on the moon it could not win in Vietnam because unlike the inanimate moon the opponent in Vietnam fought back Does a version of this homily apply to the system-of-systems vision in the sense that no matter how technologically sophisticated the U S military may become small opponents would fight back by channeling their aggression in ways that circumvent undermine or neutralize the technology Americans bring to the conflict Those making this argument do not usually get very specific about how an opponent might be able to do this They sometimes allude to people's war or weapons of mass destruction or terrorism without explaining what it is about these forms of aggression that would necessarily defy the capabilities inherent in the system-of-systems -- but their general point is a serious one The conflicts we face will remain competitions among thinking learning and adaptive human beings so we need to recognize that any future opponent could diligently and intelligently try to counter capabilities the system-of-systems gives us Assuming opponents will try to counter the system-of-systems does not mean they will succeed however History is replete with examples of how advances in military technology were eventually countered or matched Yet history also has intriguing examples of real revolutions in military affairs -- Guderian's blitzkrieg Ellis's vision of amphibious warfare and the nuclear revolution come to mind These gave the revolutionaries dominance in conflict in some cases for extended periods None of these revolutions lasted forever and the edge they provided ultimately eroded but it was good to have the edge not only because it paid off in conflict but also because it gave leverage to foreign policy A better consideration than historical precedent is the inherent character of the system-ofsystems The technology it rests upon emphasizes flexibility and adaptability It will enable the U S military to know more about the flow of conflict than an opponent and to operate better within the decision cycle of that opponent It will arm American forces with the means of learning faster on a battlefield traditional or otherwise and being more adaptable and flexible than an opponent In other words it starts from the fundamental assumption shared by its critics war is a human contest that rewards v innovation learning adaptability and flexibility The system-of-systems theory suggests that Americas can be better in meeting those criteria criteria armed with technology designed to support them than others can be without the technology Relying on Technology is An Achilles’ heel One of the most frequently leveled criticisms by those who think the vision is really a mirage is that the reliance on information technologies -- the kind of sensors data processing and communications subsystems that appear in table 1 -- carries an inherent weakness that opponents can exploit the vulnerability of such technologies to offensive information warfare or hacking Do information technologies carry an electronic Achilles' heel that opponents can exploit If so heavy reliance on the system-of- systems might make the United States vulnerable to catastrophic failure in efforts to use it successfully in conflict There is to be sure great danger in relying on military systems that have exploitable flaws Indeed the characteristic that gives any system its potency -- that the parts of a system enhance the effectiveness of one another -- also makes some systems susceptible to catastrophic failure if one of their central parts can be jeopardized Yet there are some aspects of the system-of- systems that ought to alleviate if not refute these concerns First the people implementing the vision are far from ignorant of the danger of inherent flaws A great deal of thought planning money and continual effort goes into reducing real or hypothetical vulnerability A lot of that effort follows the same kind of approach used so successfully in the SSBN security program -- namely don't wait until someone else finds a vulnerability instead think and work continually to find and eliminate it first Second the computer and communications technologies on which the system-of-systems are based are becoming less not more susceptible to the various forms of information warfare A race will probably always exist between those who seek to ensure the security of information-based systems and those who seek to overcome their security measures Yet the trend favors the effort to increase not degrade security In part this is because of the relative hardness of the new generations of communications equipment Fiber optic cable for example has physical characteristics that make it inherently more difficult to tap surreptitiously Third there is a robust redundancy to the emerging American system-of-systems This redundancy works against the possibility of breaking the whole system it also means that if there are ways of successfully attacking parts of the system the overall system would not collapse but rather would degrade slowly In one sense this is faint praise we don't want the system-of-systems to degrade at all In another sense it suggests an opponent would be defeated or dead before he could defend against counter or defeat the capabilities we could bring against him Clearly none of this is cause for complacency we need to continually bear in mind potential vulnerabilities and work hard to find and end them Neither can a case be made vi that the vision is flawed or that moving to the system-of-systems carries more risk than sticking with the status quo It Applies Only to the Last War Some argue that the system-of-systems may work only in a conflict similar to Desert Storm with relatively open terrain and with an opponent who turns out to be scared and stupid one who gives us enough time to amass an overwhelming force That was the last war however not the next one Future conflicts may take place in terrain less open with an opponent not as militarily naive as Saddam Hussein and against an army that is a lot more skilled in hiding Urban areas jungles and mountains are as likely to be arenas as open deserts There it is argued the system-of-systems is less applicable and relying on it at the expense of a force built for close combat in very ambiguous tactical situations is a recipe for failure However the system-of-systems can apply across the spectrum of conflict Americans will always seek the capacity to use military force with speed precision effectiveness and low risk to the participants The dispositions movements and capabilities of an opponent's forces may be easier to discern in open desert than in the middle of Mogadishu or triple-canopied jungles but this is no reason to refrain from trying to discern them The fact is that the system-of-systems will give us far better capacity to do this and with greater effectiveness and lower risk than we currently have What other approach can better solve the military difficulties posed by the kinds of terrain missions and opponents we may face in the years ahead We owe the men and women who may be in harm's way every edge technology can provide Technology will never be a substitute for courage or human toughness in conflict but it can increase the likelihood that the tough and courageous will be successful The System-of-Systems Ignores the Fog and Friction of War Some argue the vision refutes the wisdom of combat experience and military history regarding the fog and friction of war War they point out is inherently chaotic and ambiguous The only things certain about it are that you will know less than you need to and your strategies and plans will not work out as well as you had hoped These critics appeal to observers as varied as Clausewitz and Sun Tzu as authorities and to personal anecdotes as proof Of course they are correct Conflict is chaotic confusing and messy We will never have perfect understanding of a battlefield our systems and weapons will never work flawlessly all the time and the forces we ask to wage war will never do everything correctly every time The system-of-systems does not promise perfection it promises to reduce the fog and friction of war faced by the U S military and to do so sufficiently to give the United States a radically better edge in conflict over any opponent at least so long as the United States has the system-of-systems and the opponent does not vii Much of this hypothesis is susceptible to analysis Over the last year the joint warfare capabilities assessments have applied considerable analytic effort to testing it and a lot more has to be done before we can say it's right or wrong We can quantify the coming improvements in things like battlespace awareness target recognition connectivity data exchange rates weapons reach and accuracy and destructive power These all point to large jumps quantitatively over the remainder of this century Impressive numbers do not necessarily constitute the RMA however Obviously we must watch these assessments and analyses over the next year very carefully but so far the analytic view supports the vision that the United States is on the cusp of a qualitative change in its capability to use military force It's Not Broken Don't Fix It There is considerable agreement within the Pentagon on the central issues that we ought to continue to develop our capacity to understand the battlespaces in which we may operate to improve joint operations and continue to pursue the technologies that promise the RMA The real issue is the rate at which we should go down these paths The amount of effort needed to accelerate the achievement of the vision is not substantial most of the programs that drive the RMA are already funded They will reach fruition relatively soon and not all of them should necessarily be accelerated Their significance is after all a function of their interaction Accelerating some but not others may give only marginal gains some simply cannot come any faster no matter how much money we throw at them At the center of the debate is whether we should take away from some programs and give to others Such change is not new to Pentagon planning What is new is the basic rationale for changing In the past change was driven either by the perception of threat e g we developed new capabilities because of improvements our competitor the Soviet Union was making in military capabilities or by the belief that things inside the military were broken enough to seek different solutions The Army went through such a period of introspection after Vietnam Now however neither of these motivations is particularly relevant so the intellectual basis for arguing for change cannot rest in traditional rationales It rests therefore in a sense of opportunity to make high dividend changes that pay off in maintaining a U S military superiority beyond the turn of the century and in forging a new link between American military capabilities and American foreign policy one better suited to the postCold War world The system-of-systems vision may provide a means of recementing this link In an increasingly ambiguous world where coalitions will parallel and perhaps replace alliances and where nations will look for continued U S leadership smart flexible mobile effective forces make sense viii DBK OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES Stuart E Johnson The United States military has achieved a great deal of success in the post-Cold War era • We no longer face the most stressful of our missions global competition with a peer military power • The quality of our troops is good and morale in the armed forces is high • Heavy investment in the procurement of weapon systems in the 1980s makes our forces equipped with weapons more capable and more modern than those possessed by any conceivable adversary Other factors are working in our favor in the short run The Iraq of today is not the Iraq of 1990 North Korea's conventional forces equipment is deteriorating and our own forces have been improved in the meantime We have some breathing space during which we can think about the capabilities we will need in our armed forces a decade or two from today Still there is little room for complacency Regional aggressors midsized powers such as Iraq and North Korea while no match for the militaries of the United States and its allies overall can mount a serious challenge to our interests in their own backyards We must cope with this threat with diminishing resources The defense budget has been dropping steadily since the mid-1980s and is 35 percent smaller than a decade ago The cuts have been deepest in the procurement account which exceeded $120 billion in 1986 but dropped steadily to below $50 billion in 1995 This has led to a sharp drop in the number of weapon systems coming into the force structure in recent years a trend that will continue for the immediate future The capital stock of the U S military is beginning to age and the rate at which new weapon systems are being procured is well below the replacement rate for every major category of weapon system In 10 to 15 years our Armed Forces will be facing widespread obsolescence of a number of traditional military equipment items most notably attack helicopters bombers submarines and transport aircraft Force structure has been cut as well Our forces are about 40 percent smaller today than when we drove Iraq out of Kuwait Active ground and air forces are only slightly larger today than the forces actually deployed in Desert Storm Indeed were we to send a force the size of our Desert Storm deployment it would require 80 percent of the active army and air force The new majority on Capitol Hill has expressed strong support for defense but the actual increases proposed in the defense budget are modest Moreover as pressure to balance the federal budget continues these increases are in peril 1 We cannot ignore the multiplicity of demands being put on the military to support operations other than war and conflict at the low end of the spectrum Since 1991 the U S military has been engaged in 14 operations involving forces of a company size or greater While many of these have involved only modest-sized combat units heavy demands have been placed on support forces in particular transport and logistical supply units These forces critical to the successful prosecution of a major regional conflict have been stretched thin Choices must be made today We cannot continue to live off the stocks of weapon systems acquired in the 1980s and replacing them one-for-one Maintaining our forces in a high state of readiness and the full force structure is expensive and may not be sustainable We have to think about doing business differently This study examines an approach to how we might fight a high intensity conflict -- a major regional conflict -- more effectively and more efficiently The approach takes advantage of rapid advances in automatic data processing sensor technology and telecommunications to develop a system that provides our forces with DBK The implications of this capability are far reaching and span the spectrum from providing a broad operational level view of the battlefield to the possibility of targeting and striking targets within minutes of detection This concept of warfighting allows us to address a number of problems that we face • The cost of maintaining a force structure large enough to fight two major regional conflicts in a classical manner simultaneously Today we have forces that are assessed by the Department of Defense to be adequate to fight two major regional conflicts nearly simultaneously The cost of maintaining this size a force and keeping them is a high state of readiness is high Dominant battlespace knowledge exploited wisely provides a different way of doing business that could be more efficient -- blunting aggression at a lower cost • Deploying large forces to a theater to fight an enemy that can deliver weapons of mass destruction Coupling dominant battlespace knowledge with precision guided munitions permits standoff delivery even offshore delivery This is useful because it puts high-value assets out of range of short-range ballistic missiles that can be used to deliver weapons of mass destruction Even as potential adversaries acquire longer range delivery systems the further back we keep our assets the more we complicate the enemy's targeting There is another advantage if a regional aggressor in possession of weapons of mass destruction especially nuclear weapons tries to blackmail friendly host nations in the region If Saddam had had a nuclear weapon system with sufficient range he may well have threatened to strike Riyadh if Saudi Arabia allowed deployment of U S forces on its soil Being able to operate off-shore or well back from the battlefield can go a long way to neutralizing an agressor's leverage against a friendly nation This approach also reduces our logistics footprint in the theater and reduces the value of individual targets thereby presenting less lucrative targets for weapons of mass destruction For example since fewer munitions are needed per target kill the transportation infrastructure can be more austere and munitions storage areas can 2 be smaller In sum heavy dependence on ports munitions depots and a large transport network is relieved • The time to respond to an aggression and bring firepower to the battlefield is reduced A system that provides dominant battlepsace knowledge can provide a rapid reading of an aggressor's troop deployments and movements We can then bring firepower to bear on key targets quickly thereby allowing disruption or even bluntingof an attack before we would have had time to deploy adequate ground and air forces into the theater itself This capability would have been useful to augment Operation Vigilant Warrior where we deployed ground and air forces into the theater to check Iraq's moving four divisions forward to the Kuwait border Indeed the mere possession of this capability could have considerable deterrent power to augment that of forces in the theater To explore DBK in its many perspectives and ramifications this volume hosts a series of essays The first DBK and its Consequences asks where the United States can get such a capability what it can be used for and how others might respond to it and then concludes that the U S is approaching the ability to see everything of unambiguous military relevance on the battlefield even if this capability will vary greatly by circumstance With it the U S can probably stop most cross- border blitzkrieg-style attacks no small achievement Others however may react in different ways Apart from altering the battlefield e g terrorism weapons of mass destruction information warfare a canny adversary would reconfigure its forces to distribute its assets thinly making it cost ineffective to attack it through stand-off precision weaponry The United States in turn could respond by building vertical coalitions with allies at risk out information flows would multiply the effectiveness of their organic defenses The second essay The Significance of DBK is a detailed excursion of what DBK may provide to the two canonical Major Regional Contingencies a war in the Gulf and an invasion across the Korean DMZ The analysis is that the United States has a reasonable expectation of stopping an invasion in its track in the first scenario and a good chance of prevailing although not as quickly in the second It concludes that DBK permits shifting warfighting assets from strategic to more immediately effective tactical targeting flattening hierarchies and changing the planner's role from strategic allocator to resource assembler The argument is also presented that there is need for a broad reexamination of how information is used in the war one that starts from the bottom up rather than the top down The Future of Command and Control with DBK begins with the assumption that by the year 2005 we could obtain Dominant Battlefield Awareness and explores opportunities that this capability affords to design new command concepts and organizational structures The ability to manange Command and Control effectively as well as manage our sensors communications and weapons systems to achieve a true System-of-Systems will be the key to leveraging the capabilities provided by emerging technologies to give us a winning edge 3 DBK Implications for the Future Conduct of Warfare argues that these technologies put the commander back in command The ability to manage complex operations in near real-time permits expanded operational synergies from the merely integrated to the truly coherent They permit the reemergence of decisive combat in lieu of differential attrition Commanders so armed will be able to maneuver inside the cycle times of their opponents take advantage of more rapid learning and achieve phase-change dominance - the ability to by striking force the enemy to undertake a debilitating change of phase from one mode of operations to another Exploiting DBK however means that it be applied across the entire cognitive hierarchy -- from data to information knowledge and finally understanding To do the math as a popular electronic game manufacturer urges DBK and Autonomous Weapons replays Operation Vigilant Warrior but with advanced weaponry such as brilliant anti-tank munitions sensor-fuzed weapons and wide-area mines Using a canonical force mix and weapons load-out this study concludes that autonomous weapons may be the key force multipliers in such scenarios permitting very high rates of attrition within the first few days of combat By contrast Just-in-Time Warfare sees the potential of DBK in precisely the opposite way when information on the battlefield is available but difficult choices must be made about engagements in part because of resource limitations DBK permits forces to mass at the point of contact coming together to engage the point of the enemy spear and disengaging with equal rapidity To support such a capability requires a sea change in the organization of military force concepts such as virtual organizations command- bynegation automated rules of engagement and cooperation and just-in-time logistics play a leading role 4 DBK AND ITS CONSEQUENCES Martin Libicki How would U S military operations be affected if we enjoyed DBK in an area associated with a major regional contingency This question is addressed in several parts • What is the most optimistic but plausible assessment of how well and by what means U S forces can see the battlefield by the time new systems now being designed are fielded roughly 2008 • What are reasonable expectations of what the other side can see by then • How could the U S military best exploit DBK • How do these conclusions fare in the face of selected sensitivity analyses a larger battlespace a defensive orientation notably U S troops in place at the outset of conflict and an enemy whose strategy takes our information dominance technologies into account The usual caveat applies Specific analytic results will depend on the identity of the foe e g wealth size sophistication and extant information infrastructure whether our allies or enemies own the turf at the outset the terrain of the battlespace e g relative ratios of blue water brown water desert plains forest cities and jungle the strategies of both sides of the conflict and the rules of engagement that they but particularly we operate under None of this captures fully the effect of technological surprise operational innovation and dumb luck on actual outcomes How Much Battlefield Awareness As computer communications and associated sensor technologies improve in power speed and acuity the ability to see everything within a given area continues to improve in some cases at very fast rates If it improves enough even perfect situational awareness may understate what U S forces can see Situational awareness is knowing the disposition location and orientation of all hostile forces -- e g seeing the tank columns Such knowledge permits more effective mission planning prevents being surprised and permits imposing surprise on others What militaries really want is the ability to see a target precisely enough to ascertain its location within the lethal radius of whatever munitions best kills it -- seeing each tank precisely enough to order its destruction by coordinates Implicit in this definition is information dominance so that U S forces can see deeply without themselves being at high risk A good sense of the possible comes from analyzing four factors • How visibility is sought • What its limits are 5 • What we can see • What the other side can see in comparison What Our Technology Permits A discussion of how U S forces achieve DBK serves a few purposes it helps explain why the limits of visibility are where they are how the architecture of a system that would ensure visibility has to evolve and what opportunities lie for the other side to evade our sight Collection itself is only the start of visibility synthesis e g data fusion and analysis are equally necessary but it does set the limits of our capabilities and the requirements for integration software U S forces will be able to exploit a great number of sensors Stand-off sensors can detect electro-optical infrared passive microwave and reflected real or synthetic aperture radar Close- in sensors can detect pressure magnetic fields gravity differentials sounds and certain chemicals Stand-off Sensors Space sensors on heavy low-earth orbit LEO craft are likely to improve in resolution but still face tradeoffs with field of view timeliness and data transfer rates Alternatively today's technology permits real-time coverage via staring sensors down to two meter resolution e g via four Hubble-caliber spacecraft in middleearth orbits If sensor packages can be sufficiently reduced a far larger fleet of very small satellites e g the size of the $50 million MSTI or the $80 million Clementine satellite can provide comparable coverage and much wider synoptic range Fleets of small stealthy satellites are more robust against peer and near-peer threats with laserblinding capability and other antisatellite techniques If the locus of interest can be pinpointed finely enough unmanned aerial vehicles UAVs despite their weight limitations can provide even better coverage and can be flown under clouds A UAV with a relatively light and inexpensive package e g a 1000mm mirror-lens camera feeding a 2000 x 3000 charge-coupled device on a 35mm frame can resolve down to 1cm from a kilometer away a second camera placed 2m away from the first e g on either wing or one at the front and one at the back can provide depth perception down to 1 meter infrared sensors can work at night and detect heat signatures and synthetic aperture radar is useful but resolving power is usually only half as good The UAV's problem is supporting real-time communications without revealing itself Even without real-time communications turning lidar light detection and ranging on which cuts through most stealth can reveal its location to a sufficiently sophisticated enemy Active radar-based sensors can cut through foliage and under the right soil conditions can see into the ground They do so however at greater cost somewhat lower resolution and being active at the expense of platform stealth Passive sensors can also detect radio emitters and thus geolocate their source A technologically competent foe can nullify such information by using focussed 6 transmissions e g line-of-sight or at least microwave generating electro-magnetic clutter operating in a dense environment one that produces echoes or designing systems such that emitters are separated from more valuable targets e g bistatic radars and relays to higher- power transmitters Sooner rather than later the use of public- key encryption and digital signatures will limit our ability to exploit other than detect such radio-frequency or any other communications Close-In Sensors These are good for supplementary information making fine distinctions defeating certain forms of stealth and cuing long-range sensors Any sensor that can fly can also be put on the ground coverage is less but resolution is better and a collection of cheap devices can collectively produce powerful data Vibration sensors such as acoustic seismic or pressure particularly when placed in incompressible media such as ground or water can sense reports of artillery or gunfire and detect the movement of large machines Antinoise devices those that generate an acoustic signal equal and opposite of the original signal may limit their future effectiveness Gravimetric and magnetic sensors are good for distinguishing otherwise identical vehicles by their weight or steel content They are relatively hard to spoof although magnetic fields can be cluttered but their coverage is relatively small and they have to be placed near their quarry Chemical sensors despite their limited range are good for distinguishing among similar industrial activities and for detecting the presence and movement of humans The Extent of Visibility The value of DBK depends on who we are trying to see Visibility is easier against likely enemies over the next 10 years such as Iraq or North Korea who are deeply schooled in the Soviet way of war but less so in the information revolution Visibility is harder against possible enemies beyond 10 years if they appreciate what our systems can do and develop new forms of warfare to counter them Industrial war can be beaten by informational tools post-industrial war which acquires many of its techniques from preindustrial conflicts is a far different challenge as a discussion of the following limitations -- bandwidth intent and denial -- suggests Bandwidth The raw data required to resolve down to even 0 1 meter over such a large terrain are daunting even with tomorrow's computers A single eight-band multispectral eight-bit deep image of a 200nm by 200nm box at 0 1 meter resolution requires almost a hundred trillion bytes of information e g 20 000 CD- ROMs worth even with low-loss 10 1 image compression or as much as NASA's Earth Observation System takes 2 days to produce Real-time updates require retransmission anytime something moves Advances in processing speed and storage notwithstanding the communications bandwidth necessary to transmit these data for analysis runs into fundamental limits on radio spectrum laser- based communications without the optical fiber may have to be developed for such purposes 7 U S forces will have to rely on cue-filter-pinpoint systems aboard sensors to report back on the battlespace selectively Indeed several laboratories are working on techniques that can pre-filter imagery by several criteria e g industrial-age weaponry presents contours e g straight lines of the sort that are unlikely to occur in nature Artificial intelligence will replace many human functions in recognizing objects and patterns but a good system will have to be very large and the fate of large software projects is always difficult to predict Intent To what extent does seeing constitute knowledge In a high or mid-intensity conflict against an adversary such as Iraq or North Korea this is not a serious problem The presence of a tank where it is not supposed to be is sufficient to infer intent In this case detection of the target coupled with the appropriate strike systems is all we need to destroy the target Detection is only part of the challenge in dealing with guerrillas and terrorists however Being able to detect a pickup truck from a stand-off distance is no mean feat knowing that its occupants might be armed and hostile however is prerequisite to forming a military response Some data such as the identity of individuals useful in distinguishing threats from bystanders or their facial expressions and body language which might determine their intent cannot be discerned by any remotely plausible sensor scaled for wide area coverage Broader data on the intentions of threats are likely to require humint Such collection will be made easier by the information revolution e g more detailed data bases on individuals encrypted untraceable communications from behind-the- lines sources Still the fundamental determinants of such information flow e g agent recruitment are unlikely to change much over time Denial Information collection capabilities are likely to outpace the parallel rise in the amount of clutter and the sophistication of stealth but the latter will retard the onset of perfect visibility As the other side begins to see better and shoot farther the use of some of our sensors may be constrained AWACS and JSTARS are wonderful tools but they radiate like Christmas trees and will be at increased risk as the consequences of their visibility are made actionable How visibility is sought also matters If we have the cooperation of those who occupy the battlespace we can use infrastructure sensors If we lack cooperation but our engagement is overt we can dispense sensors into the environment If our engagement is covert e g we are not yet at war or we wish to hide our fingerprints while helping one side of a conflict U S forces cannot easily use sensors that can be captured and traced back us What Can We See Because no military information system can see everything to required detail at once it has to rely on cuing filtering and pinpointing Such systems are vulnerable to surprise because certain scanning possibilities are pre-excluded the Inchon landing the Nazis in Ardennes or given short shrift so that unexpected detail is treated as an anomalous 8 artifact and ignored Techniques can be developed to use systems of in-place sensors that can communicate among themselves sift through their bitstreams report only interesting data and thus get around the bandwidth problem and limit the need for heavy manning of cue-filter-pinpoint loops In practice DBK will vary by target • U S forces should be able to detect the presence and movement of large platforms inside the 200nm by 200nm box in real time • When cued our systems should be able to do gross identifications e g distinguish Naval vessels from commercial ships Large platforms include ships widebodied aircraft and probably even small SCUD launchers tanks and armored personnel carriers unless well concealed When cued U S forces should be able to determine the location and rough identification of military events such as small platform movement missile firings artillery rounds and even most gunfire in real time and with sufficient accuracy for counter-fire • Most forms of stealth are not likely to work against U S sensor systems except perhaps stealthy missiles over their short flight time • Many opposing sensors particularly passive ones are not likely to be seen by U S forces Similarly weapons that silently await signals before activation are unlikely to be detected if sufficiently small or indistinguishable from background objects and if they are not concentrated in expected locations e g non- metallic mines in straits or passes Finer gradations depend on the rules of engagement that U S forces or their allies can take advantage of For instance distinguishing a hostile infantryman from a civilian friends can carry personal IFF devices is not likely to be something a sensor can do In a free-fire zone or an environment where human activity is normally absent it suffices to distinguish humans or civilian vehicles from their background further distinctions are less important If military and commercial systems must be differentiated from each other before targeting certain pieces of evidence can be used weight magnetic flux radio frequency or chemical emissions or even habits and tracks However a competent wellcommanded enemy can be expected to mask all these features as best as possible Forcing them to mask their signatures however has certain benefits it further complicates their military operations whose normal coordination problems are already the source of much of war's fog How much better vision can U S forces expect one or two decades compared to what it could do in the Gulf War In many ways this is an unfair question U S forces then benefitted not only from 6 months of preparation and a terrain with little natural cover but also faced an enemy with little capability to use movement in its defense Just prior to ground combat U S forces were able to identify locate and destroy almost all relevant conventional infrastructure targets including major emitters roughly half of the tanks and artillery pieces a disappointing percentage of nuclear facilities and precious few 9 SCUD launchers Better tactical intelligence particularly if ARPA's War Breaker proves out would probably have raised real-time sightings of SCUDS greatly moving targets considerably and passive stationary targets modestly Plausible advances in target detection between 1991 and 2008 are likely to make a larger difference in a Korean scenario where the enemy is moving forward preparation time nonexistent and cover somewhat greater What Can Others See Over 20 years we will see more but we will also be seen more frequently The latter may in fact have a greater impact on how we conduct military operations Our vision will permit more stand-off operations their vision may well make it necessary Most middle- and upper-income countries should be able to pick up navigational signals from multiple sources and map them into fine-grain digital cartographic data-bases obtain satellite imagery at the 4- to 20-meter resolution level from third-party purveyors or even their own small satellites send signals on communications satellites in low geosynchronous and even middle earth orbits acquire sophisticated turn-key traffic management systems operate UAVs with digital sensors and downlinks and own police networks armed with networked minicameras They could do this through buying or renting capacity from commercial markets or friendly governments Compared to likely opponents in a major regional contingency U S forces are likely to have better information systems a greater ability to degrade opposing information systems and conduct counter-space operations and more access to stealth If the U S were to operate under more restrictive rules of engagement than our enemy we could face a tough decision when it came to degrading enemy information systems or the enemy's access to third party information systems if doing so affects the assets of neutral or allied countries For instance we might suspect that our opponents are getting valuable data from ostensibly environmental satellites which can resolve down to 20 meters but unless we have proof that the owners are knowingly complicit in that transfer it could take a hard decision from senior levels of our national command authority to take action against such assets Similarly the other side may be using a low-earth communications system like Iridium but it may be difficult to design a jamming footprint without leaking interference into adjacent but uninvolved countries Implications Troops given perfect visibility or anything close need no longer expend the effort and risk necessary to acquire it themselves True some of the effort is offset by work required to achieve DBK in the first place but to the extent that DBK can be provided by stand-off weapons or unmanned sensors the savings in risk will be quite large This is no small change in how militaries particularly armies operate Consider for example what a large fraction of the Army's efforts and casualties during the Vietnam conflict stemmed from its search-and-destroy missions The key word in that phrase is 10 search in many cases air power or artillery did the destroying This reflected the reality that finding the enemy without troops on the ground in that environment was extremely difficult Even in the Gulf War one of the primary purposes of land forces was to smoke out the other side air power had destroyed as many tanks as it could cost-effectively and in a timely way It took rolling metal to bring the Army's eyes to where they could see the rest of the enemy's tanks forcing them to fire or run With DBK only psychological reasons i e the visibility of awesome power to make others stop hiding and start running remain to justify most classical ground operations except for territorial occupation More generally patrol operations of all sorts from combat air patrol to frigate-based picket duty and their attendant risks can be sharply cut back Direct cost and casualty savings are supplemented by the indirect benefits of not having to support a large in-theater logistics and command apparatus The savings in logistics is more than money our long logistics tail is our Achilles' heel If Saddam Hussein had possessed more accurate missiles his sallies would have created enormous havoc to our port operations The next foe is unlikely to permit U S forces to build up without contest The instruments of logistics -- ships ports aircraft airfields and supply dumps -- are far too visible to escape notice in a coming era of visibility Thus with the exception of the stealthy equipment and doctrine attendant to the supply of special operations force elements any logistics infrastructure will invite the attention of foes that cannot pass up an opportunity to extract cost and casualties DBK may also affect the order in which targets are attacked To understand why requires first realizing that PGMs mean that what can be seen can reliably be killed To the extent that the name of the game in future conventional warfare is to avoid being seen successful militaries will base their strategies on operations that generate the least signature Increasingly especially in quick- reaction environments movement is more likely to generate signature than standing still Movement expends energy creates noise disturbs the background and shows up on moving-target indicators Standing still has fewer signature disadvantages evidence of human occupation in one place tends to accumulate but such data take longer to collect Needless to add offense in pursuit of territorial occupation is difficult to do without a great deal of movement Thus offensive operations capture the initiative at the expense of greater visibility In such a world targets appear as a deliberate result of the other side's actions in the absence of active reconnaissance the initiative is on the other side As visibility increases however the initiative shifts Mobile targets become more visible and the side with DBK has a richer menu from which to choose Thus the pattern of engagement can favor the DBK-rich side initiative need not rest with the side with the greater firepower As the visibility continues to increase how targets are attacked assumes greater importance as well The combination of our ability to see without being there and of the risks to our being there suggests three modes of engaging threat forces via stand- off using vertical coalitions and with information warfare 11 Stand-off Weapons Delivery Weapons can be delivered from stand-off range via stealth attack aircraft cruise missiles and ballistic missiles or speculatively laser or other directed energy sources from space All are expensive in ways that advances in information technology cannot do much to reduce For instance the F-117A is a $50 million aircraft that even if flown twice a day and preserving stealth requires heavy maintenance after each mission can deliver only four bombs on target in that time period Unless they are loitering aircraft cannot prosecute targets that disappear a half hour after they appear e g most aircraft shoot-and-scoot systems and stealth is designed for night operations Cruise missiles have a somewhat faster turnaround but they too are expensive using today's guidance systems future GPS INS guidance could be cheaper and are vulnerable to look-down shoot- down systems Current versions require the shooters be within 1 000 or 2 000 km of the target this puts the shooters at some risk submarines are stealthy but expensive cruise missile platforms A $2 million cruise missile can deliver only a 200-kg warhead Ballistic missiles permit the fastest turnaround between sightings and prosecution an extended ATACMS could cover 200 km in 3 minutes They can be fired from indefinite stand-off distances and in some versions have the highest likelihood of hitting the target They too will be expensive $10 000 kg at least until and unless reusable launch vehicles prove out One variant on ballistic missiles is very long-range artillery delivered from electromagnetic rail guns provided that guidance and control elements are engineered to withstand the initial G- forces generated on firing Another variant is to use a large and very heavily armored sea-based platform as a host for long-range artillery or missiles Remotely controlled ground-based missiles offer the advantage of rapid delivery from short distances and can thus service short- term targets Their use however requires either initial control of the terrain or some surreptitious method of delivering and emplacing these weapons A speculative way of engaging ground systems is through lasers from space possibly space-based but more likely ground-based reflected off space-based mirrors Lasers have the advantage of near-instant response but they may infringe on treaties and several tricky engineering problems remain to be solved The location of ground-based lasers would be impossible to hide Enemy targets for their part can be protected with obscurants and mirrors of their own Essentially stand-off systems are worthwhile for large fixed targets and expensive platforms that once exposed stay exposed for long periods of time They are less than satisfactory for inexpensive targets those generating short-lived signatures or those that are exposed briefly e g between hiding In general the United States has already gone about as far as it ought to in replacing dumb rounds with smart ones wherever the latter are more expensive to use For some 12 targets such as sprawling logistics sites or advancing dismounted forces dumb rounds remain the appropriate choice of munitions Prosecuting them with PGMs or long-range dumb rockets is costly and largely ineffective Instead U S forces need to maintain survivable in- theater systems capable of delivering dumb ordnance efficiently A reasonable guess is that keeping our bombers hidden will require the ability to target enemy radars coupled with the other side's slowness in engineering bistatic radars and alternative sensing devices e g acoustic detection Keeping our own artillery hidden will be a contest between our operational stealth and their sensors to include UAVs Vertical Coalitions More often than not U S forces will fight in coalitions historically the most common types have linked U S expeditionary forces and the forces of a beleaguered ally These coalitions have had both horizontal components two brigades in combined operations and vertical components United States providing the predominant amount of air power while local forces provide more ground troops Our eyesight will permit future coalitions to be far more vertical which is more than just as well in the absence of future great power conflict that would otherwise justify putting large U S forces at risk The essence of a vertical coalition is that local allies would supply the forces and the firepower the U S military would supply the information that would permit their $10 000 to $100 000 rounds to approach near-perfect kill probabilities One possibility is to outfit our allies with seeker heads with software designed to home in on targets based on encrypted signals generated from information that we supply externally thus unlike the Stinger missiles we provided to the Afghan rebels such instruments would be near useless when turned against us or an ally if we no longer feed them We would supply overall intelligence on the whereabouts and movements of distant echelons Our overhead systems both space and air breathing would permit pinpointing of enemy platforms Our distributed sensor systems would be put in place to operate analyze and convert data into fire-control solutions This would permit friendly forces to take precise measure of the enemy providing them with realtime one-shot one-kill capability We might even control the targeting once they have fielded the weapon Vertical coalitions provide many advantages over horizontal ones By reducing the number of U S forces at risk special operators significantly aside we would have far more flexibility to intervene at lower thresholds before little problems become big ones not to mention to test our information-based warfare systems more frequently and against a wider range of opposition By removing our forces from the theater we deprive smaller opponents of rallying points and larger opponents of targets against which they might use weapons of mass destruction Reducing the need to move forces long distances economizes our requirement for scarce and expensive power projection forces In some cases the United States might be able to tilt the contest to one side without unambiguous proof that we had intervened at all The use of stand-off sensors as a substitute for forces also frees us from the necessity of overseas bases they permit more operations to be planned and conducted from international waters 13 That said vertical coalitions are no panacea In operations where we lack allies Just Cause multiplying zero force still equals zero In Desert Storm a very high level of multiplication would have been required to permit Kuwait and Saudi Arabia alone to equal Iraq Vertical coalitions require more intensive information exchange than horizontal coalitions and thus more difficult C4I as well as operational security problems Fuzing data from our stand-off systems for instance and any local sensors they might have would present a large systems integration problem that we and they might not have a chance to practice beforehand Information Warfare The more we know about the other side the more economical our strikes against it can be if we can paralyze the head -- a strategy that entails command-and-control warfare -we need not take on the arms Alternatively if our forces knew exactly where enemy electronics sat we could disable them through a variety of soft kill methods ignoring however the difficulties of battle damage assessment The result is less bloodshed all around and presumably an easier time persuading the other side to come to terms Unfortunately a large share of the information necessary for such warfare is not available from the usual sensors -- it takes humint a commodity with a supply not likely to grow at rates that characterize information technologies in general True analyses of radioelectronic emissions or network traffic statistics might shed light on how the other side's information systems work but technology also provides ways for the other side to disperse command centers encrypt communications and otherwise confuse electronic collection by propagating electronic clutter Tomorrow's communications environment however offers a novel means by which information warfare could disarm foes with far less bloodshed In the Gulf War's latter stages we were able to persuade Iraqis to flee their tanks by convincing them they all were targets Using this template suppose U S forces broadcast the identity and location of platforms and then destroyed them After the correlation between having one's coordinates show up on the screen and being destroyed has been sufficiently demonstrated it may be enough simply to broadcast the identity and location of every found target those who read their death warrant on the tube could be persuaded to abandon their vehicles saving their blood and our weaponry Peace Enforcement There is little doubt that technology can substitute for human intervention in enforcing peace particularly in demilitarized zones otherwise used for invasion corridors In the 1970s a U S defense contractor used a sequence of sensors to monitor the EgyptianIsraeli frontier Visibility gives peace operations a new dimension beyond indications and warnings that is beyond situational awareness Visibility allows the near instantaneous conversion of platforms to targets Hitherto violators across an observed zone lost a few minutes or at most hours of surprise Visibility strips them of cover and leaves them vulnerable to 14 precision-guided munitions it links presence to certain visibility as the PGM revolution linked visibility to certain death More generally such data permit both sides to speak from a single core image of the zone even if one or both sides supplement it with their own sensors If disputes arise they at least do so from a common base of evidence and are that much more resolvable Making imagery sufficiently detailed and providing all of it as collected deflects criticism that the provider the United States is presenting an outdated or even selective view of the zone to make a point One drawback is that our fielding our best stuff shows everyone the acuity of our systems Conversely by then our edge may no longer be in sensors but in pattern recognition and data fusion We can show people what we can make out but leave unsaid what we can in fact see Sensitivity Analyses Most of the above analysis is robust against changes in two assumptions -- the size of the battlespace and a defensive orientation -- but a sophisticated enemy that alters its strategy by assuming that we can see everything can limit what our DBK buys us Expanding the Box Technically speaking a larger box increases the bandwidth and assets required to achieve the same level of visibility If the other side's visibility increases correspondingly it lengthens the stand-off distance The most frequent critique of the 200-nm limitation is that while it covers the tactical theater e g the KTO the central Korean peninsula Bosnia it tends to leave out the center of gravity for the other side e g Baghdad Pyongyang and Belgrade Yet the kind of visibility that technology as opposed to better humint and analysis affords over the next 20 years is unlikely to affect the strategic bombing campaign very much The targets we could not find e g nuclear facilities were those we could see but not identify Everything else e g headquarters buildings power infrastructure power grids and factories is already visible The more interesting question is an expansion of a virtual visibility unlimited by distance or the ability to understand the other side's information architecture and the enemy's ability to target ours This issue breeds optimists and pessimists On the one hand increased networking allows remote mischief makers to play havoc with U S systems On the other technology permits such systems to be made invulnerable in ways that for instance a tank cannot be made invulnerable Today's gaps in U S systems stem from complacency not technology For instance the 1994 hacker attack on Rome Air Development Center exploited a design flaw in the same Unix program that hosted the 1988 Internet Worm incident As for attacking overseas systems the United States has many people capable of understanding how computers are wired and few people who understand how societies are wired into computers -- as an example who can explain 15 why Japan has few internets Knowing the value to the enemy of what we can destroy goes beyond identification of the target system Defensive Orientation Visibility alters many of the differences between being on the offensive and being on the defensive Traditionally the offense could better concentrate firepower at a time and place of its own choosing Visibility plus stand-off systems however largely nullifies that capability force concentration is no longer a prerequisite to fire concentration Usually the offense has the power of surprise and shock but again DBK should minimize the confusion if not the fear that gives surprise and shock its power Correspondingly however vision gives the defense two strong advantages Whoever owns the terrain at the outset of conflict is in a better position to have the terrain wired for sensors local positioning systems and communications Also as noted movement creates signature What if U S forces started with troops already in theater and forced to defend themselves The oft-cited problems of confusing our forces and those of the other side in close engagements can be countered by IFF systems that rely on continuous and automatic positional reporting Since troops in place mean some supplies in place the problem of running supplies into theater is at least partially solved The real problem is more likely to be political our forces might be inhibited from shifting from close-in combat to stand-off combat much less to vertical coalitions by the fear that our allies might be demoralized by the process Adaptations by the Other Side It remains quite plausible that U S forces could detect track identify and target every specifically military hostile platform and or vehicle in the box fast enough to destroy it with precision-guided munitions Demonstration of that capability would logically make nations abjure the use of industrial-era methods to coerce or occupy other nations This is not tantamount to the end of military aggression although in itself it is a significant achievement The largest gap in awareness would be the persistent difficulty of distinguishing military from their civilian counterparts in commercial practice A pickup or jeep for instance might be far less effective than a tank but if the Bushmaster or portable missile system inside it can be sufficiently obscured such vehicles can still be potent against police or lightly armed military forces Urban warfare would still be extremely difficult to sort out cleanly With work passenger airliners can be modified to carry weapons and cargo ships can carry torpedo and vertical launch systems without a great signature Thus even foes who would resort to war for conventional ends the control of peoples and territories not theirs might seek unconventional methods of doing so The trick in employing such substitutions is to mask indicators of military activity Such a shift requires both different operations as well as different equipment A pickup truck may 16 appear to be a civilian item but a coordinated charge of pickups across a desert toward a fortified point tends to resemble a charge of tanks more than it resembles normal commerce or even summer weekends in the California deserts A fleet of 18-wheelers overwhelming a border guard would be assumed to be a military attack despite its bizarre guise A nation wishing to bring military force to bear on another would therefore be forced to adopt methods associated with low- intensity warfare • Infiltration of troops disguised as normal commercial traffic • Encouragement of externally organized crime and terrorism by those otherwise assumed to be engaged in normal criminal activity • Gathering of military intelligence using methods associated with commercial intelligence • Exploitation of the target's own information collection systems • Careful placement in advance of real bombs in a nation's physical infrastructure and logic bombs in its information infrastructure Carefully placed such actions may induce tensions but not call for physical retaliation At some propitious political point the aggressor may burst forth using weapons of war that act militarily but until used look civilian Such methods may succeed without triggering the response that ostensibly military actions might take Military operations in general would gravitate to high- density environments despite their ability to slow forces of all kinds Operations would be a constant search for cover and thus would favor forests jungles and cities War would seek commerce as its visual shield -- an attack of jeeps otherwise hidden in everyday village trade arriving at the proper point in time for an offensive operation could be effective although a high degree of skill in coordinating the attack may be required River commerce can turn ugly quickly Airports can be attacked by the precise discharge of armed troops emerging from the everyday chaos of air transport These actions make the pessimistic assumption that a target's immune system can normally and clearly distinguish invading antigens from its own cells More frequently the aggressor's task is eased by the continuous presence of elements in a friendly country which for political or ethnic reasons might tolerate the political aims of another Short of declaring large portions of itself a free fire zone the defenses against such invasion are below the threshold that omniscience implies Nevertheless if U S forces intervene in such chaos its ability to see will be of value but only in limited spheres We may be able to detect and defeat local concentrations of force -- as long as these points can be defined in time However forestalling smaller scale applications of force requires humint 17 Compensatory Advantages Nevertheless if U S forces can blunt conventional military attacks thereby forcing an aggressor to fall back on unconventional attacks this is in itself a significant achievement The force structure that is particularly efficient at coercing and conquering neighbors can be eaten whole by a U S military with dominant battlespace knowledge This leaves a force structure that must operate through subtle but deadly means may be insufficient to exercise regional power and seize and occupy territory More generally light forces that can evade U S systems are insufficient to outgun forces on the other side The more that our ability to see forces a difficult choice between these two force structures the better the chances for regional stability A high-low punch makes it difficult for either light or heavy forces to survive More generally a nation might not be able to afford both types of forces more tellingly the command- control-and-culture necessary to support one method of warfighting may be completely incompatible with command-control-and-culture appropriate to the other A second great advantage which follows from the first is that unconventional aggression is more difficult to couple with coercion -- which in many cases is the real goal An Iraqi tank force which had just taken Kuwait for lunch may have the ostensible capability of coercing Saudi Arabia to conduct its oil marketing to Iraq's liking If however Iraq had to rely on unconventional aggression to make the same point its coercion would lose much of its psychological power Since war is often used to give credibility to coercion a capability resident in U S forces that removed coercion would reduce the incidence of conflict The third great advantage of particular importance as Asia replaces Europe as the cockpit of great power confrontation is that the infiltration of forces across seas is far more visible than its infiltration across land Simply put in an increasingly transparent world a seaborne threat is far less credible than a land-borne threat Its best expression a naval blockade is never quick resembles a siege in its visible side-effects and requires a large and thus expensive blue-water submarine force or very long-range rocket and missile bombardment to carry off Asian countries may be ripe for rivalry but without the physical means to convert this rivalry into successful warfare such tensions are unlikely to be converted into crises that call forth a U S response Conclusions U S forces can expect to enjoy dominant battlespace knowledge in major regional contingencies for the foreseeable future The extent of such dominance will be limited by the persistence of clutter and stealth in tomorrow's environments the vulnerability of information systems to semantic deception and the enormous data-flow requirements coupled with limited radio-electronic bandwidth needed by synoptic systems Cuefilter-pinpoint discrimination systems will ease this last problem however U S possession of DBK would not by itself translate into assured victory under all circumstances Our society is generally more sensitive to casualties and our forces have 18 to go farther to engage in battle for example We need to reduce our sizable logistics chain Investments that permit U S forces to approach full battlefield awareness reduce the effectiveness of and thus deter certain kinds of threats The ability to combine stand-off and intrusive sensors to see most military platforms can force potential bullies to abandon the easiest paths to dominating their neighbors Although second-best methods of causing havoc are certainly threats they are harder and more expensive to employ and tend to work with far less certainty and speed Thus forcing others to resort to second-best methods can to a large extent decouple the deadly synergy between coercion and aggression U S forces are also becoming more visible a fact that affects both how perfect visibility is achieved and exploited Replacing large visible sensors by networks of smaller less visible sensors permits omniscience to be preserved without our sensors being targets Yet the problem of getting steel on briefly visible targets from far away remains Vertical coalitions in which the U S supplies the eyes and local allies the arms may be one solution to the riddle Does the criticality of DBK necessarily require we shift more of our defense resources to achieving it In one sense the tide of the information revolution is stronger than any swimming we do relative to it even the cheapest desktop computer on the market outperforms the top-of-the-line desktop of 1990 Otherwise investment remains an issue of which rather than whether The incremental value of some information investments notably dispersed sensors agile C3 and data fusion is still high while comparable investments in other technologies e g fighter aircraft may not offer the same advantages However some information investments may no longer be all that cost effective either e g multimedia C2 systems and large complex sensors whether airborne seaborne or spaceborne As a broader issue the military-technical revolution taking place within U S could also take place among those overseas Its transformation into a revolution in military affairs with all that implies for operations doctrine and organization has yet to transpire but the payoff is substantial 19 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF DBK Paul Bracken The discussion of information warfare and warfare in the information age is often more confused and confusing than informative and productive This may be true because the problem is hard to conceptualize perhaps a testament to its ultimate importance No analysts in history immediately comprehend the logic of their own situation in periods of transition a long epoch of disorientation and confusion is usually necessary to learn the necessary rules of the new era Observers of the contemporary period of military transformation are no exception Perspectives and theories have to be broken in by the harsh reality of critical analysis in order to discipline them Standard models of military innovation neglect important parts of the story Hitler backed Guderian's new Panzer tactics in the 1930s but Hitler took a cosmic gamble that it is hard to conceive of a democracy taking Napoleon represented the purist form of information warfare in history yet he did this through organization of his army into corps and better intelligence prior to any increase in information technology Approaching the problem from the top down makes it harder to understand how information technology affects military organization General taxonomies definitions and classifications are created refined and modified in an exercise that too often is excessively abstract Key details are stripped from the problem details that should play a larger role in shaping system design Searching for better paradigms in order to design forces that exploit better information technology tends to be counterproductive because it starts at too high a level of generality This chapter uses a bottom-up approach instead as a counterbalance to analyses that refine high-level taxonomies The fusion of the two approaches is discussed in terms of management issues at the end of the paper Two Canonical Scenarios The significance of DBK is constructed from two important current contingencies one from the Middle East the other out of North Korea The purpose is to draw out significant consequences resulting from improved battlefield awareness not to fight the war or generate a scenario for its own sake Middle East Contingency The October 1994 feint by Iraqi divisions toward the Kuwait border involved about 1 700 armored vehicles What could we do with air power if we had the right munitions and knowledge of the location of the armored vehicles With enough warning time to deploy 200 U S aircraft to the theater -- combined land and sea based -- and four antiarmor munitions per aircraft at two sorties per day and Pk of 5 then up to 800 armored vehicles could have been killed on day one of the attack 20 This yields a vehicle attrition rate approaching 50 percent for a single day of combat something that would have halted the Iraqi Army and thrown into disarray key units of Saddam's key institution of internal support his Republican Guard forces No ground force could maintain cohesion under this attrition In reality with tanks and APCs in column and the behavioral effects of killing lead vehicles cohesion would break well before 800 vehicles were destroyed What are some of the more important implications of having this capability • A substantial part of core Iraqi military capacities could have been destroyed in a single day If this would not deter future adventures it is hard to know what would Among the many important factors the increased efficiency of precision anti-armor munitions matters most • Against Iraq's feint the U S deployed over 150 combat aircraft in a week Thus 200 aircraft is a large but not massive U S effort that could be deployed quickly given suitable changes in logistics and preplanning A smaller logistical footprint is extremely important The often-heard comment that the United States had the luxury of a 7-month buildup before Desert Storm suggests that a quick reacting opponent could trump our response by beating our deployment times Yet a 200aircraft force with precision antiarmor munitions could do enormous damage even if an attack had commenced and the border been crossed • Sortie rates could be raised even further in the first days Shifting carrier based planes from air defense to ground attack would have improved the results Similarly overloading the carriers by adding an extra attack squadron to a carrier would increase capability kill further In an Iraqi threat situation risks to the carriers would not be unmanageable Moreover other ways to protect carriers would permit more loading of aircraft for ground attack to destroy more Iraqi vehicles • Using more air crews or postponing maintenance to raise sortie rate look attractive because the tempo will not be maintained for more than a few days • The JCS concept of changes from one where we worry about sending a force big enough to do the job to one where a 200-plane force can halt a tank army • Iraq's most obvious counter is to attack air bases with SCUDs possibly with weapons of mass destruction Air defense of ground airfields increases in value and the attractiveness of carriers also increases • Quick shooting real-time updates would be needed for in reality the armored columns would disperse and flee the battle area • A fast deployable mine field possibly wide area mines dropped behind the armor could trap it in the forward position or at least slow it down leading to more kills The traditional value of mines to slow an enemy has not had much historical effect because the fields were not covered by fire Slowing an enemy in 21 this new context clearly makes a big difference and could be a unique threat to force compliance with demilitarized zones • The law of requisite variety says that organizational structure should be only as complex as the complexity existing in the environment The driver in this scenario is efficiency gain from an increase in weapon Pk's something that was planned to occur by 1994 The outcomes do not depend on any breakthroughs in sensors or computing technology beyond what is programmed to occur Unless there is some reason to embrace additional complexity it should be avoided Korean Contingency North Korean mobilization would involve a sequence of actions injection of covert special forces teams into the South elite dispersal the recall of ships to port and a breakout of ammunition stocks to forward infantry and artillery Two infantry corps and armored forces consisting of some 2 500 tanks 2 300 armored personnel carriers 1 800 truck mounted multiple-rocket launchers and 3 000 trucks would move south That plus artillery yields 15 000 high-value targets armored vehicles artillery and ammunition and command centers virtually all within the 200 nm square grid Compared to the Iraqi scenario the North Korean one has a qualitatively different scale Ten times more targets must be destroyed without delay to stop the assault before a breakthrough can take place The North Korean decision cycle in war is likely to diverge sharply from its preplan structure Information flows strategic variables and institutional detail will be disrupted and swamped because of the North Korean command system's inability to manage this scale of operation and by U S attacks on it The really important North Korean communication system will not be the one from central headquarters to the field but rather the one reflected in the behavior code of junior officers There are six major northsouth roads and effectively six invasion corridors The ratio of vehicles to road space would create large traffic jams especially as it had never been rehearsed large amounts of live ammunition would be handled and fired by untrained troops for the very first time movement of chemical weapons would create special problems the sparse command and control system would be flooded from below with reports of problems and requests for permission leading to delays in new orders coming back from above couriers would not be able to deliver messages in a timely way No one can say in advance where the traffic buildup will be greatest With a U S ability to locate these areas quickly there is an impetus to decentralize the targeting assignments to cut down on delays More precise tailored information may not be of great value in such a target rich environment and could be of negative value if it induced delay There is relatively little danger that the North Koreans could quickly alter this condition as their capacity to undertake cross-corps assignments of forces or to exploit the benefits from weapons of mass destruction is almost nonexistent certainly compared to what was expected from the Warsaw Pact 22 Because the United States would have order of battle and unit location information on North Korean units our Marine amphibious forces could pose a much greater threat This brings out an important feature of improved battlefield awareness knowing where the enemy isn't may be as important as knowing where he is U S forces could be injected into undefended areas and protected once they got there The North Korean armored 10th and 425th corps are held back to protect the Pyongyang-Wonsan axis in fear of U S amphibious assault something very much in our interest to maintain In other words battlefield awareness for the United States in Korea turns a combined arms attack at the DMZ into an infantry attack as we can compel the North Koreans to hold their armor back in order to send it to coastal areas to handle amphibious threats This makes the defense at the DMZ more fault tolerant as the pace of a breakthrough is reduced because of its infantry character The above suggests creation of U S -ROK phantom divisions to threaten North Korea all azimuth in particular in the far north as well as on the Pyongyang-Wonsan line The technical question is how can we project an appearance of U S -ROK divisions at locations in North Korea that are undefended but that would be threatening enough to require disruptive countermoves This certainly requires DBK in the form of offensive electronic warfare perceptions management and special units Conceivably with a preemptive strike on massing North Korean forces north of the DMZ a main line of resistance could be kept away from Seoul with large positive political consequences Flexible deterrent posturing alternatives become easier One problem with surging U S aircraft into ROK airfields is that they become prime targets for weapons of mass destruction Because these are fixed sites the North Korean could probably hit them With improved battlefield awareness basing offshore becomes feasible as aircraft will not have to loiter searching on their own for targets They can be sent to target rich areas immediately following launch Improved battlefield awareness can lessen vulnerability to weapons of mass destruction of air assets Nevertheless U S ability to detect preparation for NBC attack by the North would still be extremely limited Impact of Improved Battlefield Awareness • With these two scenarios it is easier to think of the impact of improved battlefield awareness in more general terms starting from a perspective which is close to the action Next plausible improvements in this capacity in the year 2008 are incorporated This involves substantially improved communication interlinks between sensors and weapons greater interoperability among sensors and operation of new high performance reconnaissance systems • Relatively smaller U S forces can be far more effective than anything previously considered That a 200-airplane force could amputate a significant part of the Republican Guards and stop a four division attack in its tracks has major implications The concept of a tripwire strategy can be altered so that breaking a trip wire would immediately invoke prompt substantial punishment not merely a threat of considered escalation 23 • The debate over attacking fielded forces versus the enemy's brain would be reopened yet again One of the reasons the Desert Storm air campaign took the form that it did was because during the buildup period when the United States did not have Army defenders in place it was not considered feasible to destroy an advancing Iraqi Army in Saudi Arabia There is probably no answer to this debate but some shift toward striking fielded forces is becoming a viable option • The horizontal military organization would be built around workflows and information flows which are lateral and cross departments from national intelligence to shooters without going up and down through a hierarchy • U S forces could operate with smaller logistical support or more accurately certain option packages could be structured in this way to reduce time and vulnerability The role of the operations planner would change from a resource allocator e g assigning platforms to theater to a strategic assembler building a coherent organization from parts Knowing what information flows to open up among sensors weapons and headquarters would require knowledge of work flows This requires a different mind set and outlook with significant training and exercise design implications Opening Guardrail data flows to Navy forces or JSTARS to the Army would also depend on mission and threat and could not be prescribed in advance U S forces are moving to a network organization but it is a variable topology network whose structure changes by mission threat and condition • The United States still cannot afford to lose air bases However there are some mitigation approaches to compensate for this vulnerability As logistics loads lighten aircraft and other launchers can be dispersed Reconfiguring aircraft carriers toward higher sortie generation e g more air crews and more attack aircraft is attractive because of shorter periods of peak tempo operation The threat environment is developing in a way that gives a large U S payoff to battlefield information dominance First many countries are changing from mass infantry armies to more modern forces relying on armored vehicles and electronic command and control increasing the number of targets and emitters Second from the Middle East to Asia military forces are moving from division to corps level structures because of their increased size Both trends introduce not only new capabilities but also new coordination problems which may not always be solved well The next 20 years are likely to be a learning curve period for operation of more complex forces and the United States can stay ahead of this power curve through increased battlefield awareness • Combat is increasingly assuming the pattern of a continuous flow rather than a sequence of moves and counter moves Analogy with corporate experience suggests this calls for new organizational structures to manage operations and their character cannot be entirely foreseen NBC weapons remain a major problem unlikely to be solved by any foreseeable improvements in sensors or weapons Even a few successful attacks can cause large destruction and the U S will not have a 100 percent counter to them 24 • With more front-to-front horizontal information sharing the importance of the nodes closest to the action becomes critical The problem is not one of nodes failing countered by redundancy but the propagation of faulty data from node to note where added redundancy compounds the problem Instead it requires extensive cross-checking and filtering driving up the information processing burden Information technology may help more by its ability to compensate for the inevitable transmission of incorrect data in a network as for its support for more precise targeting Management Issues What would an investment program to attain improved battlefield awareness look like The current planning programming and budgeting system PPBS categories may be worse than useless they reflect an era of fewer interdependencies within U S forces The benefits of DBK arise from improved weapons and faster operations which are not covered by PPBS categories With future forces one part will influence the success of the other PPBS assumes a loosely coupled system where command and control investments can be neatly separated from weapon system decisions A plausible replacement for the present PPBS intended to reflect the unique character of battlefield awareness improvements is suggested from trends in the corporate world A Business-Matrix Approach How have large multinational corporations approached their reorganization to exploit information technologies There are at least three important distinct success characteristics of these firms • Timely responsiveness • Efficiency • Knowledge transfer among their parts In a military setting timely responsiveness would be measured by decision cycle time time lost awaiting decisions percent deliveries on time etc Efficiency is measured by cost per kill kill probability per weapon the number of sorties per day etc Knowledge transfer is analogous to information availability and intelligence and is measured by the ability to connect sensors and weapons to interlink reconnaissance systems and to check against faulty data A business-matrix approach involves scoring different forces on these three criteria against varying threat contingencies The goal is to force consideration of the investment tradeoff among programs that reduce response time increase efficiency and exploit the synergy of these two through improved information and intelligence Historically the Pentagon has invested in building up programs that emphasize some of these more than others During the McNamara years the emphasis was on efficiency During the 1970s it 25 was on responsiveness of getting a force quickly to the Persian Gulf Today there is a large investment in information and intelligence In the future DOD will have to emphasize all three characteristics with an operations staff that can assemble a force with dominant features best suited to a situation In the Iraqi scenario for example it is the increased efficiency of laser-guided bombs reflected in higher Pk's that gives the decisive benefit In the Korean contingency responsiveness is critical because of the forward deployment of the North Korean Army The major management problem facing the Pentagon is focusing on organizational metrics rather than on technical system characteristics Information technology enhances the contribution of specialized technical staffs while the great benefits of interlinkage among shooters and sensors fosters the merger of such staffs to get the design right That these specialists come from different technical communities creates friction and misunderstanding which can distract attention from the larger purpose The objective is the payoff from these changes which should be judged not in purely technical ways such as higher data rates but rather in improvements in organizational performance such as increased responsiveness and efficiency As multinational corporate experience suggests the right answer is not to decide in advance how much responsiveness or efficiency is needed but instead to have an operating system that can adjust rapidly to different environments For a Korean scenario the U S military should tilt toward prompt responsiveness while for the Iraqi scenario it is less important to get large amounts of force there than it is to get the right kinds of shooters and munitions This is what is meant by strategic assembly the art of tailoring the force to a contingency Strategy to task assignments are no longer one-shot affairs but continuous activities which change with conditions This heightens the importance of knowing the enemy not just target signatures but his decision cycles and in institutional detail Knowing about the training of North Korea's junior officers matters because its macroinformation structure will disintegrate when burdened by the coordination tasks of operations especially when it is degraded by U S attack The resulting microinformation structure at company level and below is what the North Korean Army will devolve into This phase change is important but it is fairly certain that U S intelligence does not look at the problem this way The new intelligence roles and missions commission should be brought into this discussion because U S intelligence organizations are at a critical time of transition Change Strategies Most people probably believe that changing the organization for increased battlefield awareness is driven by changes in its formal structure or at least by the rearrangement off information circuits in it The classic organizational change strategy has these sequential steps • Change formal structure and responsibilities 26 • Change interpersonal relationships and information flows • Change individual attitudes and mentalities But the ideas in this paper suggest a better change strategy would be to reverse this order completely The search for high-level general taxonomies e g information warfare countercommand and control warfare offensive versus defensive information based warfare and so forth reflects a perspective on the problem that is a prelude to changes in formal departmental structure e g the department of countercommand and control warfare the department of defensive information based warfare Understanding the enemy's microinformation structure tradeoffs among responsiveness and efficiency and a strategic assembly mentality all arise as the end product of changes introduced after boxes and lines are moved around an organization chart This is quite troubling It would be far better to begin the analysis of what to do with the aforementioned end products because this would greatly improve the chances off getting the design right in the first place Then formal structures could be built around information and work flows it would be organized around process rather than around departments All this goes to the problem of managing the synergy of information and intelligence with responsiveness and efficiency The major problems of achieving dominant battlespace knowledge are not problems of departmentalization and coordination of operating forces but problems of organizing information storage and processing -- not problems of a division of labor among services but problems of the factorization of decisionmaking These problems are best attacked by examining the information system in abstraction from service and department structure 27 THE FUTURE OF COMMAND AND CONTROL WITH DBK David Alberts The Vice Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff has posed a deceptively simple question How would we do things differently if we had DBK While the explosion of information and communications technologies has profoundly affected the basic structure and operations of some organizations others including DOD have adapted in an incremental fashion Yet to fully understand the implications that a vastly improved awareness of the situation could have on concepts of our defense posture -- including operations command structures forces structures doctrine training weapon systems and logistics -- we need to consider the possibility of revolutionary change and we need to build a mission-oriented DOD based on the opportunities afforded by technology -- in this instance the opportunities afforded by achieving DBK To do this we need to explore one important aspect of this challenge how we might capitalize on the opportunities made possible by having a vastly improved capability of situation awareness by changing the way we approach command and control C2 This paper begins by laying out the terms of reference followed by an analysis of the overall impact that having this capability would have on U S Force Structure Organization and Doctrine and the role that C2 plays in determining these attributes of our defense posture The historic role of C2 in warfare is then sketched in terms of how it contributes to the achievement of the fundamental principles of warfare The C2 capabilities necessary to leverage fully these opportunities are then identified Finally the changes that need to be made to current approaches to command concepts organizations doctrine and systems in order to exploit our improved knowledge of the situation are explored The paper concludes that the potential benefits of achieving DBK are well worth pursuing and identifies a number of issues and action items to address and realize these benefits Terms of Reference and Assumptions The impact that any improvement in our capabilities will have is a function of the particular mission and scenario at hand As a baseline for the analysis from which excursions in the form of sensitivity analyses can be taken a Major Regional Contingency MRC with a regional power is considered The horizon for the analysis is the year 2008 This is far enough out to achieve significant advances in capability as well to provide the time needed to adjust our doctrine and organization to take advantage of those advances The baseline case does not consider coalition warfare which could significantly complicate C2 In addition this analysis initially focuses on a combat mission unencumbered by tight political constraints of the type that have limited our ability to act in Bosnia 28 Situation awareness has many different dimensions and while given the time horizon and the nature of the resources likely to be available total or perfect situation awareness is beyond our reach Nevertheless improvements in our capabilities well short of achieving total or perfect situation awareness could provide quantum improvements in our effectiveness By 2008 we could achieve considerable improvements in our current ability to see and understand the battlefield Our adversary a regional power will also be able to take advantage of some of the available technology albeit not to the extent we will Thus the United States will continue to have information dominance in a notional 200 nm- square battlefield maintaining or even increasing the edge we have over others Information dominance would be of only academic interest if we could not turn this information dominance into battlefield dominance The ability to approach total situation awareness and prevent our adversaries from achieving it and our capability to exploit our relative advantage in information result in a situation in which we have achieved DBK Achieving DBK without being able to respond militarily to an adversary's moves is a nonstarter so this paper analyzes a situation in which the united States can strike at virtually any target or a kill-at-will capability and establish a virtual link between any sensor and any weapon in near real time -- but not necessarily between all sensors and all weapons simultaneously As with situation assessment kill-at-will capability comes in varying degrees characterized mainly by Pk the probability of kill which in turn is a function of target latency and hardness travel time or the amount of time it takes to put ordinance on target and the accuracy of the delivery system While post-kinetic weapons may reduce travel time to virtually zero and increase accuracy dramatically significant delays associated with targeting and command decision processes associated with combat will remain Thus the tradeoffs between the quality of decisions and speed addressed later will remain a central issue for C2 for the foreseeable future As noted situation awareness is multidimensional It includes knowing the current position classification identity condition and recent history of all items of military significance on the battlefield in the 200 nm square It also can be said to include knowledge of the objectives intentions and plans of all players Items of interest include strategic targets of both the conventional kind e g factories as well as the unconventional kind e g financial networks A baseline assumption for DBK is that we know in near real time the positions of all friendly neutral and enemy objects of interest we have more limited information regarding their current conditions and recent histories and we have somewhat less information about enemy intents and plans The information associated with DBK is assumed to be corporate knowledge -- that is we collectively have this information It is not assumed that this information is instantaneously available to everyone If fact figuring out how best to distribute elements of available information is a major challenge and will to a large extent drive our approach to C2 Implicit in DBK and kill-at-will assumption is our possession of considerable stand off capability for example remotely piloted vehicles few manned systems would be placed 29 at risk In fact in the kind of warfare in which both sides have good situation assessment ability and relatively smart munitions high value targets become extremely vulnerable unless this vulnerability is reduced by stealth or speed Finally it is assumed that we are resource constrained That is weapons logistics communications and computer processing are limited and need to be allocated and scheduled In fact in a very real sense the problem boils down to resource allocation questions and our ability to make these investment decisions in ways that allow us to take full advantage of the opportunities that technology affords to defeat the enemy with minimum casualties collateral damage and time and resources expended Potential of DBK A common analytical technique is to make some simplifying assumptions to bound the problem in an attempt to establish the feasibility of an approach or concept In this case a gross feel for the potential value of DBK can be derived from looking at the problem of destroying a given number of targets with different levels of C2 capability figure 1 While the word destroy is used to simplify this discussion it should be understood that in reality a full range of actions including exploitation co-option disruption and degradation need to be considered Image not available The worst case is when one has no C2 and weapons are free to fire on any target In this case unintentional duplicative and or overlapping fire will result Some targets will be over killed while others will escape unharmed Given no C2 or what amounts to random targeting there is also no ability to prioritize targets which on the battlefield have widely differing values values that change as the dynamics of the battle unfold The values of targets are not limited to positive numbers there are also numerous situations when targets may actually have negative values and thus need to be avoided rather than hit Obvious cases include the sort of collateral damage that can be exploited for its propaganda value Less obvious cases are situations in which killing a particular target sacrifices possible long-term benefits for short-term gains Given perfect C2 which in turn is dependent on perfect information an optimal allocation of weapons assignments can be made dynamically as a function of ordnance available weapon capabilities Pks and target values The result will be that high-value targets are destroyed with high probability that valuable ordnance is not wasted on low value targets and that targets with negative values are spared The result will be that more operationally significant damage will be inflicted along with a more effective use of resources The leverage of C2 grows as the effective Pks increase Our current ability to do C2 falls in between these two extremes and the value of achieving DBK is bounded by the spread between the line that represents our current ability and the line that represents perfect C2 The potential impact of DBK goes well beyond any tactical advantage associated with being able to destroy targets efficiently 30 DBK in providing us with an opportunity to hit the right targets at the right time offers us an opportunity to change the way we organize command and equip our forces It is the impact associated with these changes that will determine the ultimate value of having DBK Figure 2 illustrates the fragility of overreliance on DBK or indeed C2 at the expense of firepower We be careful to build an organization with significant teeth and if we choose to embark on a path that makes us heavily reliant on technology we must also take steps to ensure that the systems that we will come to rely upon to give us DBK and C2 are designed to deliver appropriately high levels of reliability and availability We will also need to deal with the possibility of technology failures or degraded capability however rare they are projected to be to ensure the success of our missions The safety blanket of having force in depth to hedge against failures in systems may not be a viable approach given current budgetary trends Investment Challenge Determining the role that a vastly improvement situation assessment capability can play in our defense posture is a part of the perennial debate regarding the proper balance between investments in C2 and other elements of our warfighting ability including manpower readiness high- and low-technology weapons training and education Despite the growing consensus that additional investments in C2 will pay off handsomely beyond some point it will be more than offset by reductions in force structure or readiness A View of Future Command and Control The remainder of this chapter develops a view of future C2 that evolves from the achievement of DBK DBK represents a quantum leap from even our current level of capability which is nevertheless formidable by historical standards Therefore it would be incorrect to simply extrapolate linearly from today's capability This approach would also lead to incremental change that will not get us to the point where we could fully exploit the opportunities afforded by DBK Put in another way business as usual is not the answer Incremental changes will not result in speediness or efficiency DBK provides an opportunity that can not be fully taken without turning to new command concepts and organizational approaches Given the assumptions used in this analysis command control will undergo change in a number of key ways Commanders will be more focused on strategic issues the role of staffs will be diminished and organizations will be flattened New concepts of operations will be required to achieve the desired levels of target damage necessary for success and there will need to be associated changes in force structure the mix of weapons and the nature of logistics The reductions needed in response times decision execution cycle times and the number of decisions that needed in high- intensity combat situations all in a short time span are beyond human capability Fortunately the changes brought about by DBK make automating a large subset of decisions a viable approach 31 To follow the reasoning that led to these conclusions we must start with a review of the objectives of C2 and how over the years we have attempted to improve our ability to plan and conduct warfare C2 Objectives C2 exists only to facilitate the accomplishment of a mission Its has no intrinsic value rather its value derives from the contribution that it makes to mission success A brief review of what C2 has traditionally sought to achieve and how it attempts to achieve it will provide a good foundation for understanding what will change with DBK C2 provides commanders and their staffs with the tools necessary to successfully operate in an environment clouded by the fog of war and uncertainty This environment of fog and of uncertainty has profoundly influenced military thought and strategy throughout history The principles of war are rooted in this fundamental characteristic of the battle field Therefore it should be of no surprise that the way the military is currently structured results in large part from a desire to minimize confusion and misunderstanding and to deal with uncertainty Unity of command and appropriate span of control involve structural approaches to the problem while approaches to the development and management of information have been process oriented While much progress has been made in improving the C2 process less attention has been focused on the structural or doctrinal aspects of C2 Specifically C2 and associated organizational structures military tactics procedures and doctrine have sought to • Reduce the fog of war • Exercise control over forces in a way that accommodates the fog of war • Exploit the fog surrounding the enemy commander and forces • Increase the fog for the enemy Given this way of looking at the objectives of C2 it is clear that what has become known as information war or IW is intimately related to C2 C2 has sometimes been confused with communications or information systems and IW has sometimes been confused with electronic countermeasures These misunderstandings are obstacles to progress and need to be addressed because achieving DBK requires an full understanding of C2 and IW Command control communications and intelligence systems C3I have been primarily concerned with reducing a commander's fog by attempting to provide a complete and accurate picture of the enemy and the environment reports on the disposition and capability of friendly forces and battle damage assessments C3I systems have also been used to achieve timely and assured dissemination of information and orders and in 32 achieving a common perception of both the situation and commands missions objectives and tasks With the addition of significant information processing power and decision aids C3I systems have begun to support a capability for near real-time reassessment of the situation and continuous option development and analysis C2 as an Offensive Weapon While C2 has long been considered an enabler necessary to help attain the goals contained in the often stated Principals of War it has only been very recently that C2 has been seen as an offensive weapon The essence of the offensive nature of C2 derives from its contribution to maintaining the offensive in classic terms Maintaining the offensive involves the ability to dictate both the time and place of action The offensive nature of IW has long been understood for IW both utilizes friendly C3I systems and targets enemy C3I systems One of the greatest potential benefits of DBK is in fact the improved ability it provides to conduct IW The ability to neutralize disrupt subvert deceive weaken or fragment an enemy's offensive or defensive capability by taking actions against enemy commanders staffs and systems translates into a powerful offensive capability When combined with a strategy to achieve option dominance IW and C2 achieve their greatest synergism Option Dominance Ultimate Offensive Weapon A key to achieving option dominance is being able to respond faster than one's adversary -- to always be one step ahead Such an ability will permit us to co-opt enemy plans and actions before they can be effective In order for us to achieve option dominance three conditions or prerequisites must be met We must recognize what needs to be done This involves a number of inter-related steps including the development of an understanding of the current situation and its implications the generation of options to be considered the analysis of these options and a command decision regarding what option will be taken Having recognized what needs to be done we need the ability to accomplish all this faster that it takes for the enemy to act or react This involves not only all the tasks implicit in recognizing what needs to be done but also the time it takes to translate an option into understandable assignments their transmittal to subordinates and the time it takes to understand these directives and act upon them It is important to realize that absolute speed is not the issue rather is it the relative speed that is important Thus we gain as much from slowing down the enemy as we do in speeding up our C2 In fact given the tradeoffs between absolute speed and quality slowing down the enemy via IW carries with it some attractive benefits We need to be more than a paper tiger That is we need the ability to actually execute the option selected Having DBK certainly is a very big part of recognizing what needs to be done But by the same token it is not sufficient to achieve this first necessary step on the road to option dominance Perhaps the most important missing ingredient is the need to develop an 33 appropriate response to the situation as it is unfolding This requires the creativity and insight that only an experienced commander can bring to the battlefield The very same technology necessary to achieve DBK namely information and communications technologies may make it possible for us to operate inside the enemy C2 cycle But the ability to push piles of data around the battlefield is not sufficient to allow us to operate inside the enemy's decision and execution cycle We need to be able to design a more streamlined process than we currently have to satisfy the time-critical nature of this task This is considered a little later on The kill-at-will capability assumed for the baseline analysis completes the picture and allows us to take advantage of the information dominance we have achieved If option dominance can be achieved and we can demonstrate this capability to potential adversaries then we may be able to preempt enemy actions and hence prevent this kind of extremely costly combat from occurring In effect we would effectively change the nature of conventional war C2 Implications There are two major implications that the achievement of DBK has for our approach to C2 The first is that we will effectively move from a situation in which we are preoccupied with reducing the fog of war to the extent possible and with designing approaches needed to accommodate any residual fog that exists to a situation in which we are preoccupied with optimizing a response to a particular situation In short we will move from a situation in which decisionmaking takes place under uncertainty or in the presence of incomplete and erroneously information to a situation in which decisions are made with near perfect information Decisionmaking in the absence of complete and accurate information is far more difficult than decisionmaking with perfect information Therefore many of the ways we approach command today are a direct result of finding ways to come to grips with the task of timely decisionmaking in the absence of adequate information under conditions of extreme stress and where the cost of error may be extremely high Professional military education PME doctrine and organizational structures have all been tailored to deal with this problem The result is to concentrate on what is called max a min solutions that is on those focusing on avoiding decisions with large downsize risks in favor of decisions which are optimal by expected value standards There are other implications as well These include an emphasis on strategy and tactics that require keeping considerable forces and resources held in reserve to deal with the unknown or unexpected While DBK certainly does not eliminate risk or uncertainty from command decisionmaking it does radically alter the balance of the situation Accordingly those command concepts doctrine organizations and force structures that have been optimized over time to deal with the fog of war need to be revisited to see how they might be better adapted to the realities of DBK 34 The second major implication of having DBK derives from the conditions that must obtain if we are to be able to take full advantage of the opportunities provided by having this capability The utility of having DBK is a function of both the timeliness of the response and our ability to make the most of limited resources These two prerequisites for success frame the C2 issues we need to address At issue is the way we will distribute information and decision making Without a doubt we will need to finally break the umbilical chord between the command chain and the flow of information The Key Tradeoff Speed v Optimization DBK gives us the opportunity to hit movers blunt offensives with massed fire rather than massed forces and achieve option dominance The desire to take advantage of this opportunity provided by DBK drives us to minimizing the decision and execution cycle -going from seeing a target to destroying one Destroying as used here includes physical destruction or hard kill as well as interruption neutralization and other aspects of soft kill Running counter to this need for speed is the need for optimal resource allocation Resource allocation is needed to ensure that the fire power available during a given period of time is allocated to targets with the highest priority value at that time Resource allocation is also necessary to keep the costs of supplies and lift capability as low as possible Thus the desire to get ordnance on target rapidly comes into conflict with this need to efficiently and effectively allocate resources This translates into C2 architectural tradeoffs To minimize the decision execution cycle the path from the sensor to the shooter needs to be minimized -- if possible to go directly from the sensor to the shooter However to make best utilization of resources allocations needs to be made globally þ that is over the entire battle space and in the context of an appropriate period of time Thus the decisionmaking process required to allocate resources needs to be able to see the big picture in order to determine overall priorities and the consequences of various allocations Central to the future of C2 will be the nature of the tradeoffs made with respect to distributing information and decisionmaking The best way to distribute decisionmaking and information on the battlefield is of course a function of the mission scenario technical capabilities and cost However we can be reasonably certain that in the time frame for this analysis that neither a completely centralized nor a completely distributed approach will be best Why First providing DBK to all shooters would require prohibitively high bandwidth and hence cost Second hierarchical flows of information would be too slow to achieve the decision and execution cycle times necessary to maintain option dominance Therefore an inventive mix of horizontal and vertical information flows as well as a new approach to decision making will be required In terms of getting the right information to shooters in a timely fashion the challenge will be to dynamically manage the flow of information from sensors to shooters along with targeting priorities and ROEs This will involve a highly automated capability to establish 35 virtual links sessions between selected sensors and weapons These sessions would need to be dynamically managed in accordance with battle events and priorities Here again a key tradeoff will need to be made this time it boils down to a tradeoff between optimization with centralized control v less than optimal allocations with distributed control Given the enormous complexity of the battlefield at the level of granularity of control needed for real-time targeting and prioritization ways to effectively decompose a battlefield need to be explored Creating what might be called Information Resource Spheres seems to be a promising approach The concept of decomposing the battlefield into information resource spheres is designed to create manageable areas in which the distribution of information and decisions can be optimally distributed dynamically These areas may not be solely geographically based Each information resource sphere would contain all the information necessary for DBK within the sphere Spheres would operate asynchronously Forces within the sphere would need to be able to operate seamlessly organically joint or integrated so that all communications doctrine and procedures worked together transparently Each sphere needs a single commander who has command over all forces and resources necessary to counter the threat within the sphere The creation of information resource spheres is in effect a means to distribute workload in a way that tries to keep suboptimization to a minimum Using spheres requires of course that an overall commander create spheres collapse spheres assign missions ROEs priorities and resources to spheres and monitor their progress and situations Impact of DBK on C2 As noted DBK moves us into a world where many decisions can be made with something approaching perfect information Not only are these decisions far easier for humans to handle quickly while under stress but these types of decisions become more like mathematical problems that are truly a piece of cake for computers running sophisticated applications software to handle Computers do some things better than humans Making routine decisions with near perfect information rapidly is one of those things Given the very large number of decisions that will need to be made in near real time and the massive amounts of information that will need to be processed to support these decisions not only can computers do the job but computers are the only way the job can be accomplished Rather than diminishing the role or importance of the commander the delegation of these decisions to computers really expert systems that have been designed and tested by military experts actually frees up the commander to devoted more energy to strategic issues and concerns As a result commanders will be able to concentrate their efforts on establishing mission objectives and priorities and in balancing assignments and resources Perhaps even more importantly it frees commander to devote attention to developing possible courses of action for consideration a task that requires the creativity and experience that only they can bring to the battle 36 The role of staffs will significantly diminish however provided that adequate processing power is available and appropriate expert systems have been developed and tested Because many of the detailed tactical or logistical decisions will become automated staffs will not be needed nearly to the extent they are now There are some rather nice side effects to this consequence First the fog that is generated by staffs will be much reduced and second communications and processing resources utilized by staffs will also be reduced Edge of the Envelope C2 While by 2008 we will not yet be able to fully exploit the opportunities that are provided by DBK we will be considerably down the road toward this objective The edge of the envelope of C2 -- the C2 that makes optimal use of DBK -- while not achievable by 2008 is nevertheless instructive to imagine providing us with a vision of the direction in which we are headed This vision will not only help to focus our attention in broad terms on where we are going but will also enable us to see if there are unintended consequences or dangers associated with taking this path that need to be worked DBK and the technology associated with the achievement of DBK will permit commanders to operate in the Nintendo style With the view of the battlefield and resources literally at one's fingertips a command will be able to at the click of a mouse obtain different views of the battlespace varying in their focus and granularity in order to be able to develop an assessment of the situation and in turn develop options The commander will be able to explore the likely outcomes of various options and upon deciding on a particular course of action have the decision translated into appropriate orders and communicated to subordinates If the tempo of the battlefield permits or if the sensitivity or importance of a particular aspect of the conflict warrants the commander's personal attention a commander would have the ability to manage at a micro level as well The operational and tactical levels of command would therefore be compressed into one in the command console and the systems that support it To support this edge of the envelope C2 a number of automated capabilities would need to exist • Software that given mission objectives and available resources would prioritize targets • Algorithms that based upon the attributes of targets and weapons would assign targets to weapons and provide for the virtual link between sensor and shooter • Experts systems that could develop in near real time battle damage assessments Planning tools that could allocate resources with total asset viability • Software that could play out various options and determine and assess their outcomes A commander of the future would also be able to with the help of automated decision aids discompose the battle space into spheres that automatically parse mission 37 assignments and objectives as well as information and resources in an appropriate fashion Summary of the Impact of DBK Having DBK would have a dramatic impact on the way we approach C2 The role of commanders would be enhanced in a number of ways • The importance of a strategic vision would increase simply because given DBK such a vision would be far more likely to be right and hence less effort would be spent on adjusting plans or replanning • Commanders would have a much greater chance of having their vision correctly implemented given the automated processing and communications support provided • By freeing commanders from worrying about the fog of war and developing contingencies for a variety of different situations commanders could devote more effort to thinking creatively about the best way to deal with a situation and to developing options • Commanders will be able to review proposed options both in greater detail and faster than ever before thus further increasing the likelihood that options selected will be sufficiently well conceived to actually play out in the battle without significant alteration However commanders of the future will be required to have a greater understanding of technology and a greater facility to work with automated tools Organizationally hierarchies will flatten to facilitate the flow of information and decisions while the role of staffs will be greatly diminished their work being largely automated Further there will be an increased premium on interoperability to ensure that we get the greatest utility out of our resources Technically we will shift the emphasis from a reliance on bandwidth to communications connectivity and processing power and be increasingly dependant on intelligent software The changes in both C2 and in the form of warfare as we would prosecute it promise considerable economies This leads to the conclusion that the investment necessary to move towards DBK is worth very serious consideration within DOD The investment required is more than just R D funds or system procurement dollars It also involves a commitment to the kind of change in our organizational structures and doctrine that will allow us to both take advantage of the opportunities afforded by having DBK and the economics that are associated with a new approach to C2 38 DOMINANT BATTLESPACE AWARENESS AND FUTURE WARFARE Jeffrey Cooper New decision aids intelligent agents simulation modeling and forecasting aided by artificial intelligence and fuzzy logic permit large volumes of data to be collected processed and displayed without swamping users Data correlated becomes information Information converted into situational awareness becomes knowledge Knowledge used to predict the consequences of actions leads to understanding Thus the cognitive hierarchy A DBK defined not as data the transparent battlefield but as knowledge a significant exploitable asymmetry offers powerful implications for the organization of warfare DBK provides synoptic integrative knowledge not just data on discrete objects and events DBK lets its possessors pierce the fog of war and thus master the unfolding progression of circumstance decisions and actions in the battlespace it puts commanders in real-time command C4I is converted from mere coordination to the orchestration of combat power focused on decisive points Those who respond rapidly can acquire the advantages of initiators but avoid the vulnerabilities to which initiators expose themselves Thus is altered the historic balance between offense and defense Introduction DBK can be applied at one of three levels • At the shallowest it could be appliqu‚d onto present operational concepts and organizational structures e g as the value of turning inside the enemy's cycle was demonstrated at 73 Easting a land battle in the Gulf War Effectiveness would rise without affecting the basic conduct of operations • It could underwrite a Reconnaissance Strike Defense Complex RSDC so that long-range precision strikes could substitute for closure and close combat • At the deepest by supporting joint integration it could promote coherent operational concepts to win operationally decisive engagements that provide strategic results The deeper the application the more that operational concepts and organizational structures must change DBK plus advanced communications can alleviate classic span- of-control constraints and allow command structures to be delayered to improve rather than impede flows of critical information Many intervening filters hitherto needed to process information and control subordinates could be replaced by automated decision- support systems that respond directly to the battle commanders Local information e g detailed health and status updates need no longer flow up nor or detailed orders flow down 39 DBK plus precision strike would let U S forces threaten enemy buildups prefatory to invasion Excellent real-time surveillance capabilities let us locate track and target enemy mobile forces and their critical logistics and C4I infrastructures We could place their forces at risk rather than going after static but easy-to-find centers of gravity and chancing collateral damage Our response to Iraq's October 1994 feint illustrates the current practice of interposing U S forces in response to hostile acts Unfortunately as our overseas bases close and forward deployments draw down our forces have to move farther to contingencies Intervention costs more and takes longer and is thus less viable against repetitive or continuous threats If we could get the same result by coupling smaller on-scene forces so that opponents would still have to mass for attack with devastating counterconcentration attacks staged from over the horizon DBK would prove a powerful deterrent Although DBK will be implemented according to the commander's vision it assumes a common set of capabilities and requires a core set of supporting systems among them wide-area sensors and fast processors Unfortunately DBK cannot be appreciated within the present framework of stovepipe operations and piece-part analyses They require a shift in focus from individual elements of combat power to their integration Defining DBK The synoptic vision of DBK lets commanders • Forge a common purpose for dispersed combat forces • Assess the battlespace accurately by understanding its evolving dynamics and correlated patterns • Develop their own adaptive vision of combat operations • Project the consequences of their decisions across the space and time of combat • Recognize periods and places of potential vulnerability as they evolve • Create not just find or identify windows of opportunity that can be exploited By so doing commanders can transcend the classic problems of coping with uncertainty where to direct personal focus how to assess prefiltered information e g the directed telescope how to avoid dependence on preplanned responses to potential contingencies and foremost and how to oversee and orchestrate the entire operational area despite its scale and scope Like a counter-punching boxer DBK lets commanders exploit the enemy's own initiatives One of key functions of command is to allocate resources including time to accommodate the progress of the operation and not give the enemy a breathing space 40 through material shortfalls or human exhaustion see Training and Doctrine Command U S Army FM 100-5 Operations June 1993 DBK allows commanders to develop an adaptive intent to unify the activities in the battlespace and let them execute a simultaneous high-tempo integrated operation against the enemy's military power and will Quantity and tempo in and of itself can overload the enemy's command system and generate exploitable opportunities while minimizing casualties attendant from extended attrition combat DBK allows the application of force from multiple media at the right place and time It supports both cycle-time and phase-control dominance so that agile and adaptive units can engage and defeat larger forces in rapid succession By conducting a seamless continuous campaign these tactical victories could be propagated not only throughout the extent of the opponent's tactical echelons but they would also have a cumulative impact resulting in decisive victories DBK is the key to achieving nonlinear combat results even tactical units can initiate operationally decisive results as they did at the Battle of Midway Operational-Level DBK The Adaptive Campaign If DBK is to be truly dominant it must entail a real- time synoptic vision defined by the relationship among the strategic operational and tactical levels of war Synoptic will be defined not so much by sensors but by the commander's ability to integrate widearea information and comprehend it which depends on how good the decisions aids are and by the planning horizon affected by unit mobility and the reach of the weapons The act of acquiring DBK cannot wait for combat assets such as submarines mobile missiles and mine-laying equipment are hard to find and track after units deploy Battlespace preparation requires data e g near-continuous tracking of enemy assets to start flowing in peacetime and grow denser as crisis builds Such data includes enemy orders of battle table of organization and equipment databases and target locations Because DBK is pointless if decoupled from the will and means to act this suggests a more assertive posture for the United States to adopt during peace and crises to retain initiative and control rather than react to the transition to crisis and conflict DBK requires that what each level sees is consistent and proportionate to its need for situational awareness not necessarily the same Scalability matters as does avoiding information overload a potential hazard of DBK systems DBK must provide location and movement data on one's own forces and enemy forces and on the complex relationships and interactions between the two It must allow the relative phase between the sides to be controlled through time-distance relationships Tactical DBK Coherent Combat Operations DBK can be particularly useful for tomorrow's war Combat can be expected to be dispersed noncontiguous discontinuous and nonsequential characterized by meeting engagements rather than planned assaults and defenses are more likely and heir to the rapid propagation of success and failure Hitherto the purpose of linear deployments was 41 to maintain a continuous front to minimize exposure and vulnerability from the flanks and salients Nonlinear tactics try to do the same by reducing exposure times and using coordinating units to provide cover Coherent operations provide leverage to tactical initiatives as they are exploited by a fully integrated adaptive force capable of seizing them in real-time A nonlinear battlespace requires different skills of both senior and subordinate commanders Cycle-Time Dominance DBK improves the understanding of critical combat dynamics as they occur so that they may be translated into timing and spatial cues for tactical actions Many analysts have returned to the Observation-Orientation- Decision-Action OODA Loop see Col John R Boyd USAF Ret A Discourse on Winning and Losing August 1987 to understand the potential impacts of the Information Revolution on combat operations Unfortunately they have focussed on the decision side rather than the action side Good communications are analogous to Boyd's key technical requirement for 3 000 psi hydraulics to link a pilot's rapid decisions to his aircraft's performance As with air combat small advantages in each maneuver action ultimately result in a decisive firing solution This is particularly attractive for repetitive action response cycles in combat Time becomes the critical determinant of combat advantage Phase Dominance But what shorter cycle times really achieve is to let U S forces to select the right time to engage the enemy so as to maximize differences in relative combat capabilities Phase-Dominance builds small advantages into decisive victories DBK informs commanders of the natural operating cycles and rhythms of enemy forces as well as their own and ensures that actions can be executed exactly when needed Maintaining the coherence a combination of mental and physical concentration of combat units is never easy -- especially when they are forced to alter their state in combat one reason why the reorientation conducted by the 20th Maine at Little Roundtop is considered a classic Armies change their tempos and shift back and forth between road march and assault formation between defense against air to defense against ground or from either to offense from one objective to another especially in meeting engagements Each change not only perturbs unit coherence but risks a loss in the essential phasing between the integrated joint forces that produces overall operational coherence It requires a different mental attitude and task sets -- a resetting of the cycle The coherence of an organization takes time to reestablish this might be called a phase-change timeconstant In the interim the unit cannot act in focus and is more vulnerable Surprise works because it comes from unexpected directions but a larger reason is that it hits at unexpected phases in the operational cycle it forces an unexpected and disruptive phase- change with the attendant loss of coherence while re-orientation is taking place Thus U S dive bombers caught the Japanese carriers by surprise at Midway during their extremely vulnerable refueling and rearming phase of cyclic operations 42 Real-Time Learning In the Cold War the U S developed a detailed understanding of Soviet equipment order of battle doctrine concepts of operations and tactics We observed their large-scale training tests and experiments and read their military texts Thus we could train and exercise against them or their prot‚g‚s with great realism We also knew the battlefield Our soldiers in Germany used to boast that they knew every rock and tree between the Inner-German Border and their positions Similarly submariners as much as anyone recognize the need for details of the operating area such as thermal layer depths bottom features and even seasonally changing biota that operational onscene experience alone provides With some exceptions e g North Korea we will lack these advantages against tomorrow's enemies With today's threats so diverse such familiarity must be acquired much faster Real-time learning will have to be substituted for intelligence -- a new requirement that must be factored into DBK at all echelons It also helps to know how others may respond to your moves this helps define the size of the battlespace and focus the resources behind DBK This creates a need to educate everyone simultaneously about enemy tactics concepts equipments and system capabilities -- with profound implications for professional military education and training Jointness The classic approach to jointness used discrete units from the services but ones separated in time and space through Fire Support Control lines This reduced mutual interference and allowed each force to operate tactically by itself This model eased problems stemming from limited real-time situational awareness and communications that complicated coordinating diverse forces The problem was that joint capabilities were simply additive Admiral Owens for instance posited two paths for jointness see ADM William Owens in Living Jointness Joint Forces Quarterly Winter 1993-94 7-14 The specialized path uses the best qualified force component for a given mission the more effective path synergism was created by combining forces in such a way that higher outputs combat effectiveness result than could be achieved by simply adding the outputs of different forces His analysis suggested the two were fundamentally different paths rather than one dimension with different degrees of synergy and effectiveness Because the U S defense drawdown makes overwhelming force much harder to field joint operations are required for effectiveness and efficiency Intuitive acceptance of integrated joint forces and dependence on non-organic non-controlled resources and capabilities are also needed Integrating U S forces from different media forces opponents to counter multidimensional multifunctional operations but they also create opportunities for exploitation by different elements of the force at the same time they cloak vulnerabilities and disadvantages of operations conducted in single medium Synergy comes from focusing on a common tactical objective employing common doctrine synchronizing the tactical echelons and providing mutual support Its prerequisite is that it requires integration at lower tactical echelons and thus demands 43 greater situational awareness broader understanding of operational progress and greater adaptability in procedures Coherent operations conduct combat as a single process with an integrated unit operating in-phase to amplify its power exploit opportunities in real time and get inside the opponent's cycle times Integration cannot work without defeating the friction inherent in operations conducted by diverse forces Phase-related differences in operating cycles among joint forces tend to explain the difficulties in managing joint operations Subtle factors affecting when phases change and how long it takes help in understanding how to execute operations coherently The ability to see understand adjust and communicate better and faster is the foundation of integration DBK provides these essential tools it enables force integration and reinforcement without pausing for synchronization or mutual interference This gives joint forces all the advantages of a single organism e g cycle-time advantage while retaining their underlying diverse capabilities see Jeffrey R Cooper The Coherent Battlefield SRS White Paper Arlington VA June 1993 For that reason complex systems operating at the edge of their performance envelope require their feedback loops to function well which means fast tight and predictably Delays can delink adaptive corrective actions and knowledge of their effects and it is also difficult to maintain coherent processes in excessively slack systems Both are heir to unpredictable overshoot and undershoot because of imprecise control or prediction DBK offers unique opportunities to maintain the real-time close-coupling required for feedback loops to assist in leading a flexible dynamic campaign The key to conducting complex joint operations coherently is timely communication of the commander's intent so that the entire hierarchy shares a consistent vision and objective DBK will provide tools to reinforce the traditional role of command exercise by promoting a shared timely image of the battle a combination of intelligence and status indicators even as it adapts to an evolving battlespace C4I Systems and Architecture Impacts Changes in the locus and focus of decisionmaking will change the nature of the transmitted information intelligence support issues data-types and channels Decisive Combat The most fundamental changes in warfare may be the return of Clausewitzian decisive victories in place of attrition warfare The latter paradigm exemplified by World Wars I and II were waged by large relatively equal industrialized nation-states and won largely by material and mass not by coups de main or great battlefield victories even those like Kursk and Stalingrad DBK lets commanders exploit seams in the enemy's forces gaps in his abilities and openings provided by his sequential operations Forces and fires can be rapidly reassigned between holding breakthrough and exploitation operations Opponents can be kept from cohering their forces so that the United States avoids the need to take on enemy 44 forces en bloc as General Sullivan noted of Operation Just Cause Mobile lethal and rapid operations conducted in parallel could let U S forces defeat units in detail at a time of our own choosing across the battlespace The other side can act only in a pre-planned but uncoordinated manner in the face of our initiatives The result may thus resemble the classic coup de main except not executed as a single main-force engagement but a parallel set of tactical operations Throughout the Cold War the United States worried about fighting outnumbered Its strategy against the Warsaw Pact coupled quantitative advantages and sufficient size to dissipate the momentum of the Pact forces through tactical nuclear weapons or later Active Defense Only with AirLand Battle 1983 did the we begin to think of decisive strokes with conventional forces In the brief period between the Wall's fall and the Drawdown there remained enough overwhelming Force to wage AirLand Battle against regional opponents such as Iraq Efficiency in deployment and sustainment of massive force rather than effectiveness in force application was the critical problem With the Drawdown the latter is essential DBK permits limited forces to be an effective instrument of war by allowing the conduct of decisive combat Altering the Command and Control Paradigm Many suggest that high-tempo complex simultaneous operations do not let the commander control forces effectively Command has to be automated through preplanned courses of action and rules of engagement Yet true integration demands the reinforcement of commanders in exercising real-time command during combat This in turn requires reexamining the current paradigm that treats command and control as inseparable Exploiting DBK demands decentralization of command authority and a concomitant relaxation of control at the higher levels Existing organizational structures themselves reactions to earlier C3I shortages reinforce the tight linkage between command and control as well as classic distinctions between strategic operational and tactical operations The need to support seamless continuous parallel operations also requires modifying the C4I architectures that support the command structure Counterpart adaptations in commercial firms have taken so long because technologies were used to increase efficiency in performing the old tasks rather than reengineering the entire process Exploiting the DBK is likely to require similarly fundamental changes in military operational concepts and organization structures Vulnerabilities If DBK centralizes sensor fusion and decisionmaking it can introduce new vulnerabilities If it is built on decentralized decisionmaking and exploiting vulnerabilities may be reduced there will be fewer nodes that can affect the entire operation if corrupted DBK offers the ability to focus on key battlespace activities But loss of critical focus may be induced by phase-change information overload or self-induced distractions In tomorrow's high-tempo battlespace the opponent's C2W activities need only to distract 45 or delay momentarily for critical focus to be lost IW may cause loss of lock a reason for revisiting the extensive Soviet literature on Radio-Electronic Combat Vulnerability assessment while warranted must be considered as part of integral operational design not merely overlaid as a stand-alone counter- counter-measure plan Comparative Advantage Because DBK is largely built from commercial systems it is available to others Whether or not the technology itself gives the United States an advantage will depend on who uses it well Unfortunately our intelligence community has had more success tracking system capabilities than in predicting how well others could use them -- which for DBK depends on complex questions of organizational cultures and adaptability difficult for outsiders to predict Nevertheless because the information revolution is real most elements of DBK are inevitable Whether we can harvest this revolution and strengthen our national security is a matter of choice so is the selection of focus and means of implementation which in turn depends less on enhancing the individual piece- parts than on integrating all elements into a synergistic effective organization These issues demand the most serious consideration 46 DBK WITH AUTONOMOUS WEAPONS Michael Soveriegn DBK alone is meaningless Military relevance comes from the ability to hit what you can see To do this it is necessary to analyze the synergy of DBK and a new class of autonomous weapons in a canonical scenario -- what might have occurred if Saddam Hussein's lunge in October 1994 had not stopped short of the Kuwait border Although DBK can deter the assumption in this case is that it did not the issue is whether DBK mated to autonomous weapons can let the United States win in a timely manner without major deployment or without having to buy new platforms Autonomous weapons -sensor-fuzed weapons SFW brilliant anti-tank submunition BAT and wide-area munitions WAM -- are those needing far less human guidance than earlier weapons and promising a high Pk if placed within range Prior Studies Most prior studies suggest that armored thrusts can be stopped from the air alone using autonomous weapons Examples include RAND's The New Calculus and The Use of Long-Range Bombers to Counter Armored Invasions and similar studies by Jasper Welch Major General USAF Ret A more recent study by OSD S R examines the kill rate from onhand U S forces plus those that can arrive over the next few weeks in a scenario similar to Vigilant Warrior they concluded that despite high kill ratios most of the vehicles would reach Kuwait A McDonnell- Douglas study showed similar results but a lower kill rate Recent studies by JCS and the Navy suggest that more than one kill per sortie can be obtained even from today's unguided cluster munitions v the 01 rate in the Gulf but that mixes all sorts of sorties together Recent work by Dr Raymond Macedonia suggests that sensor- fuzed weapons SFW can generate powerful results if wide area mines are placed in attack corridors attackers are forced to slow down for mine-clearing and risk being hit from the air or take large casualties from the mines themselves Advanced WAMs could be used to help target more mines or guide SFWs Commanders with DBK could deploy thin lines of WAMs and use the feedback to call in more SFW or ATACM-based WAMs -- even under bad visual conditions that might frustrate DBK Study Parameters The results of the study are predicated on a careful definition of DBK and a reasonable characterization of autonomous weapons DBK is the upper limit of what intelligence systems 10 years hence can be expected to do It entails the precise location of enemy units and their general status but not the status and location of each platform The location of mobile units can be known intermittently but they do move over time Not all this data will be known instantly by all units nor is it equally available from difficult environments or in the face of countermeasures There 47 would remain a gap between DBK and actual targeting that may require additional local information man-in-the-loop or very intelligent weapons with terminal guidance capability The benefits of DBK are that it • Removes uncertainty as to whether an attack is underway • Gives the location composition and status of the attacking units • Ensures sufficient knowledge on friendly units During the Gulf War the United States came close to achieving DBK at the outset of the air war This knowledge however took a long time to acquire and degraded as soon as air actions raised uncertainties about the results While DBK was not achieved for the ground war JSTARS helped provide a real-time ground picture for the first time DBK does not mean that all U S units would be in continuous possession of sufficient targeting information that would require perfect C3 great mobility and survivability Direct-fire weapons whether ground or air based require more than DBK they also need delicate and time-consuming reconnaissance surveillance targeting and maneuver actions plus fast expenditure rates and therefore heavy logistics to produce sufficient kills First-generation PGMs e g laser-guided bombs reduced the logistics requirements of combat but still required precise target information they also put the designator and the platform at risk Autonomous weapons though can be targeted with less precise information and in some cases e g stand-off delivery do not even put the launch platform at risk DBK is needed to generate taskings but the timing of mission scheduling is no longer so critical because moving targets can be localized again Autonomous Weapons Autonomous weapons can select their own aimpoints and are available in quantity Even though redundant kills reduce efficiency overall kill rates can be high • BAT is a 20-kg self-guided acoustic and IR antitank round with a large acquisition area that permits a high Pk even when launched from medium altitude or from stand-off e g MLRS ATACMS Tomahawk or JSOW Now in early testing it is expected to cost less than $100 000 per but is unlikely to appear in large numbers before 2000 absent a more relaxed procurement cycle • SFW is a smaller self-guided IR hit-to-kill round with a smaller acquisition range designed for counter-battery applications MLRS and ATACMS delivery or lowand medium- altitude air drop It is low-rate acquisition with a $20 000 price tag 48 • WAM is a 16-kg mine capable of launch an SFW to about 100 meters It can be remotely controlled an improved version may be networked as a sensor field It is designed for ground artillery or air delivery an anti-helicopter variant is being developed It is projected to emerge from engineering development in 1996 and cost $25 000 per Order of Battle Using the Iraqi feint as a base the following target set is assumed • 4 000 armored vehicles • 200 high altitude SAM sites • 100 C3 sites • 20 long-range radar sites • 20 airfields • 200 SCUD support sites • 80 infrastructure nodes U S forces consist of • 30 aircraft F-15 and F-16 on hand because of the continued Southern Watch operations • An aircraft carrier with 50 attack aircraft is nearby • 100 long-range bombers from CONUS and Diego Garcia armed with sensorfuzed munitions dispersed from wind-adjusted tactical munitions dispensers WATMDs • 18 Apache helicopters with Hellfire out of Kuwait • 24 A-10s with Maverick rockets and 30mm out of Kuwait • Two reinforced brigades to implant WAM supported by MLRS and ATACMS with SFW as well as tube artillery with laser-guided projectiles includes Allied ground forces • Another 100 aircraft within 5 days Other assumptions include 49 • Air superiority is not an issue except near Iraqi air defense units it is assumed that air attacks are launched from medium altitude to keep attrition low • There is enough strategic warning to permit loading up on weapons which are otherwise too sensitive to keep in the Middle East on a permanent basis • No countermeasures were factored in even though anything that is a great advantage for one side will become a potential target for the other In practice the instruments of DBK will be attacked dispersion will be used to frustrate autonomous weapons and information warfare will be used to introduce delay into the sensor-to-shooter cycle TABLE 1 Various Weapons Operational Load-Out and Effective Mobility Kills per Sortie Number Platform Loadout Kills Sortie Kills Day 10 F A-18 2 JSOW w 3 BAT each 2 3 40 20 F A-18 2 JSOW w 6 SFW each 3 6 120 10 F A-18 2 JSOW w 8 BAT each 6 8 120 10 F-14 2 JSOW w 3 BAT each 2 3 40 20 F-16 2 WCTMD w 32 SFW 3 32 120 10 F-15E 2 WCTMD w 32 SFW 8 32 160 20 A-10 Hfire 2 Maverick 4 16 160 50 ATACMS 12 BAT 3 6 150 50 ATACMS 24 SFW 4 12 200 100 MLRS 6 SFW 1 5 3 150 10 B-2 16 TMD w 40 SFW 32 320 80 90 B-1 16 WCTMD w 32 SFW 25 256 562 100 Tomahawk 16 BAT 4 8 400 18 AH-64 Hellfire 4 16 216 Table 1 contains the various weapons operational load-out and effective mobility kills per sortie assuming a Pk of 50 percent Sortie rates over the first 10 days are three a day for helicopters two a day for fixed- wing aircraft in theater once every 2 days for 50 bombers out of Diego Garcia once every 4 days for CONUS-based bombers Launch rates for ATACMS and MLRS are 200 a day total The figure in parenthesis is nominal kills per sortie the difference reflecting wastage due to multiple submunitions targeted on an aimpoint See the appendix for a more detailed discussion of the difference The basic results shown in the right-most column indicate that a modestly size air attack force if not otherwise diverted could kill half the targets 2618 in the first day of combat These rates four kills per sortie 2 600 per day far exceed rates from Desert Shield thanks to DBK autonomous weapons and the fact that armor when it moves is out in the open No kills were calculated for WAM but they play a large role in slowing down the attack so that sufficient attrition can be effected before Kuwait and thus cover is reached Implications and Limitations Implications fall into five areas DBK itself munitions C3 training geo-location and survivability DBK Even if major military formations can be located they cannot necessarily be targeted Environmental constraints sensor revisit time the complexity of processing and fusion and simple task overloading can result in significant delays before C3 systems get their information Many sorties will be working with out-of-date information on mobile units Even autonomous weapons require a degree of target localization that delays deny them The status of targets is also hard to assess Battle damage assessment was difficult in the Gulf War The ability to fuze videotapes from guns and laser-guided bombs should increase our ability to know what these weapons do but autonomous weapons present new difficulties no one is necessarily looking If battle damage assessment is bad autonomous weapons will not work as well WAMs used to see which vehicles are moving may help BDA Autonomous Weapons Although good munitions made the scenario work the U S military traditionally holds off on buying high-end munitions preferring to wait until they get better or cheaper This strategy may work for long wars but not short ones This scenario needs between 10 and 20 thousand autonomous weapons to work Delivery systems will cost more if they have to be stand- off e g Tomahawk JSOW but even so they remain cheaper than new launch platforms C3 and Training Sensor-to-shooter delays degrade DBK a motivation for the other side's IW efforts DBK is also degraded if tactical development and training do not keep up with new systems Joint training and exercises are implied because of the global nature of DBK and the mix of forces that must be on scene to carry out this scenario Geo-Location The conversion of DBK to targeting requires platforms be aware of their own location speed and acceleration in three dimensions Thus the vulnerability of GPS matters 51 Survivability Attack forces DBK equipments and their supporting C3 infrastructure all must survive enemy attack to make the scenario work The small U S forces could be suppressed attacked or diverted e g to SCUD hunts by unexpected enemy capabilities Often a stand-down is necessary to fix problems Appendix Although the number of weapons on an aircraft is subject to physical limits weight attach points etc maximum payloads are rarely achieved because of the tradeoff of weapons for fuel inventory limits and the possibility of having to drop a load for tactical reasons The number of BAT submunitions for example is limited by the desire for flexibility depending the model of aircraft internal versus external carriage and other factors A more careful analysis would consider the geometry of attack and the target set Delivery means also matter -- e g whether a standoff launch can be achieved that surprises the enemy and therefore precludes the dispersion of targets But tactics are hard to anticipate for any scenario The translation between nominal and effective kills per sortie must take many factors into account • The delivery of sensor-fuzed weapons from tactical munitions dispensers from medium altitude will probably waste most sub- munitions they are unlikely to make contact unless targets are parked close together • BATs have a greater acquisition rate than SFWs and their search behaviors can be adjusted thus their kill rate is higher • A night-flying B-2 can drop the same tactical munition dispenser of SFWs with many kills because its radar target mapping is accurate with short warning time targets are not likely to be dispersed • Stand off-weapons such as the SLAM a Harpoon variant and JSOW will provide a low wastage rate because they carry small numbers of sub-munitions and are individually targeted from so far off that they will result in similar surprise • TMDs and Tomahawks carry large numbers of sub-munitions are inherently subject to wastage rates as high as 90 percent if the submunition has a small acquisition area e g SFW With several minutes of free fall time they are affected by wind and are therefore inaccurate Wind-corrected TMD can be accurate from higher up if the target location is well known at launch time Their guidance works off GPS and would best served fixed targets and those identified by radar target mapping • JDAM is a GPS-guided weapon comparable in punch to the Mk-82 series of bombs When dropped from high altitudes it can achieve surprise but moving 52 targets may depart from their original location in the meantime unless the bomb is updated in flight Thus JDAMs are likely to be used against fixed targets except from B-2s which can fly low at night Both JDAM and WCTMDs can carpet bomb an area • MLRS and ATACMS can operate with low wastage of SFW against up-to-date locations of concentrated but surprised forces or against fixed targets But under current conditions they would have a high wastage against moving armored columns 53 JUST-IN-TIME WARFARE James Hazlett Previous chapters have looked at DBK with the assumption that the U S Armed Forces had enough platforms and weapons available to prosecute targets and enough time to get them all into theater Two previous papers indicate that the equipment necessary to stop an armored column is well within expected future force levels Another suggested that this fact would persuade enemies to eschew conventional massed attacks entirely and revert to sub rosa incursions using military assets masked as civilian ones This chapter presents a new philosophy of warfare Just-in-Time Warfare that DBK makes possible It examines the role of potential reconnaissance-strike-defense complexes RSDCs In future information wars virtual reconnaissance strike and defense would be coordination in battles fought as meeting engagements where both sides are on the offense With requirements to shift between offense and defense in minutes or seconds only multipurpose systems practicing just-in-time warfare will survive with military systems providing communications multisource intelligence early warnings of tactical and ballistic missiles and navigation will be vital Planners will have to coordinate reconnaissance strike and defense missions together over informationand-orders data networks linked primarily through outer space The requirement to switch roles quickly makes time precious and coordination an even finer art Warriors will have to synchronize schedules and orders as well as deliver military operations to meet rapidly emerging demands Turning inside the enemy's decision loop will determine success or failure To develop this capability we must develop new procedures equipment and information systems plus provide better training Only when the U S military becomes learning organization -- and all that this concept implies -- would it be able to enjoy an advantage achieved by establishing a clear and favorable differentiation from the competition As the tempo of battle increases and militaries can engage from greater and greater standoff distances platforms must serve many purposes including offense and defense With increased battlefield awareness on both sides future confrontations will tend to be meeting engagements where both sides are on the offensive It may be necessary to shift between offense and defense in minutes or seconds -- only multipurpose systems practicing just-in-time warfare will prevail In the business world just-in-time means less work-in- progress WIP less overhead less inventory at each stage of production and less slack time in the system In military terms just-in-time uses DBK and information technology to produce real- time scheduling to cut the need for today's enormous inventories More frequent deliveries of smaller amounts of product i e destruction allow for more flexible scheduling quicker response and shortened decision cycles If the batch size of weapons and other logistics shipments into a theater can be reduced so will the vulnerability of logistical connections 54 Just-in-time suggests that forces need no longer be massed prior to attack When mass is needed for offensive or defensive purposes it need take place only at point of impact Large formations of ships planes or armor can give way to staggered scheduling and positioning that present no discernible pattern to an adversary Not being able to sense where the attack is coming from -- because it could come from everywhere at any time -takes the other side's initiative away Putting the adversary in a defensive reactive mode simplifies our problem and complicates his It implies synchronizing planning scheduling ordering and delivering of military operations as needed to meet currently emerging demands Massing at the point of impact and just-in-time techniques can be applied to command control communications information warfare and logistics Command Just-in-time warfare requires sophisticated yet flexible command control and information systems It is possible to link these systems in an RSDC responsible for managing just-intime warfare across the entire theater of operations Such an RSDC would be a virtual vice real organization It would draw its strengths and inputs from and send its outputs to other organizations via high-speed robust data networks RSDCs would link organizations to exploit evanescent opportunities on the information terrain Commands would contribute whatever skills access and access they do best creating a best-of-everything organization with world-class elements unavailable to any single one Standardized memorandums of agreement and understanding MOA MOU could facilitate these lash-ups Operational Control Operational Command OPCON OPCOM arrangements would be less permanent less formal and more opportunistic Organizations would band together to meet specific opportunities and may disband or relocate when the need evaporates or circumstances change Virtual organizations would cause the services to rely far more on each other and require far more trust than before They would share a greater sense of codestiny or if done wrong co-dependence Thus would traditional boundaries of the services be altered Dense and frequent cooperation among like elements suppliers and customers will make it harder to determine where one organization ends and another begins An RSDC to be optimized must be viewed as a value-adding partnership VAP and transcend today's interservice rivalries The services have gone about as far as they can go with regards to vertical integration -- information flows very quickly and effectively from top to bottom and back But cross-service flow is another matter The technologies now exist that permit communications among the services at all levels instead of just at command centers If the services and agencies that provide the various technologies and expertise at each point in the engagement cycle are perceived as partners rather than competitors then each step in the process can be optimized to match with those before and after it The services 55 and agencies must come to the realization that they have a major stake in each others' success Given the present and near future states of possible computer-informationcommunication system integration it is possible to incorporate this value-added chain into a virtual information data bus Digitized information video visual data audio will be inserted by the sensor and intelligence systems ride the RSDC data bus and be modified by target sequencing algorithms Modifiers can be injected across the bus as needed e g alter all report data meeting the following criteria Users weapons platforms would draw only what affected them -- a determination that could be made immeasurably more efficient by filters artificial intelligence and user agents Information could be stored in a format that could go from initial report through the identification decision assessment assignment and engagement reengagement process with information itself modified only at the point of extraction Ultimately the energizing of appropriate circuits following paths of least resistance most reliability or redundancy or fastest route to engagement s could be done to a large extent automatically Weapons-to-target pairings could be computer selected and ordered under a command-by-negation CBN doctrine where each engagement would proceed to its successful conclusion or reengagement unless humans intervene or because the system recognizes that the engagement violates commander's rules of engagement coordination or priorities Control Automating C2 functions helps free commanders to deal with the choices that systems cannot handle Fuzing multiple-source intelligence and battle damage assessment generates information beyond the reach of any single sensor The ability to do this in parallel would free forces from the current organic sensor-organic weapon lock sensor and weapon hard-wired to each other on the same platform a variety of sensors could pair with a variety of weapons on the fly Sensors and shooters no longer be in the same place National or remote sensors may have the best picture from which to conduct an engagement A local sensor may be paired with a theater or national weapon An Army Ranger could in practice be armed with a Tomahawk cruise missile or a Stealthdelivered bomb -- the same way that the main battery of an Aegis cruiser is already not its on-board missiles but a Navy F-14 a Marine F A-18 or an Air Force F-16 Parallel decisions rather than one-at-a-time one-after-another decisions permit much faster optempos By inputing mission priorities rules of coordination and engagement and an acceptable-degree-of-difficulty the commander can set a required confidence level that must be achieved before an engagement is executed In a touchy face-off with a nuclear-armed peer competitor a commander might require near certainty Against a Third-World niche competitor where quick decisive action is required the commander may be more willing to act on a more- likely-than-not standard with a low degree-ofdifficulty threshold 56 Rules of Coordination and Engagement ROCE and Mission Priorities Today commanders provide guidance through verbal or written rules of coordination and engagement ROCE These rules require a fair amount of interpretation before they can be converted into formats recognized by today's weapons and C2 systems Computerized ROCE's would help commanders set mission priorities between say strike counter-strike close-air-support and defense these weights could be fed automatically into the targeting and weapon assignment process By using command-bynegation automated ROCE's and mission priorities and pre-determined confidence and urgency requirements computer-generated pairings will give the commander and their staff more time and freedom to concentrate on the problems hitherto perceived as too hard to handle or otherwise unanswered Communications Just-in-time warfare requires flattened virtual organizations Some of its components may actually remain and operate in the continental United Sates CONUS far away from any front Using communication triggered by orders and information will ensure connectivity without requiring large bandwidth Communications need not be passed over continually active circuits Ships aircraft ground units and command centers are bogged down today maintaining multiple circuits that carry very little information -most of which is static and the rest largely unimportant -- and certainly not in an optimized format Other technologies can cut down on communications loading Pre-loaded battlefield maps on CD-ROM or silicon would require communications only when data changes This vastly simplifies the problem of picking out the target thus converting a map into a super moving-target-indicator Software agents could be used to seek out intelligence on targets -- vastly simplifying today's overwhelming correlation problems and freeing much of it from the slowness of human hands User Interfaces Virtual reality's time has come A virtual picture supported by holographic displays and large color screens of the battlespace may now be more accurate and usable than a real one Presenting fused information and intelligence as 3-D images which couple weapons pairings and targets and can be examined from all aspects will make operations faster and more accurate Commanders could avoid the mental gymnastics required convert read data e g lat long bearing range course speed into a mental image The more easily commanders can interpret the picture the quicker they can make decisions It is time targets looked like what they are - - not symbols that require interpretation Topographically replacing physical geography with infography e g lines of communication may alter the conduct of warfare Information peaks and ridges may become the centers of gravity of future warfare Information intersections become as 57 important for targeting as nodes or command bunkers both from an offensive and defensive viewpoint Targeting Paradoxically total awareness may open the door to greater reliance on dumb munitions Before DBK most targets were treated as fleeting Engagements were conducted even though Pk was low and the degree of difficulty or toughness of the shot was high With DBK fleeting no longer means passing quickly but moving quickly DBK lets us engage threats at the right moment in terms of Pk and degree of difficulty moving quickly matters less Dumb ordnance may be deliverable with precision against these new fleeting targets because they no longer disappear Real-time targeting which is possible using just-in-time warfare can be used with standoff weapons and dumb ordnance launched from out-of-theater and bombers and cruise missiles can be assigned en route to the theater The success or failure of previous strikes therefore can be factored in real time While still possible it may no longer be necessary to plan enormous raids to cover large areas to hit moving targets because speed is no longer important when it cannot clear a target from the area Real-time targeting allows the designation of a new type of target -irrelevant or inconsequential ones that are not necessary to attack unless and until they threaten something platforms with short-range weapons older generation tanks and aircraft or systems that need long and easy-to-see preparation prior to use e g liquidpropelled TBMs DBK command-by-negation new targeting philosophies and existing automatic engagement systems make it possible to sharply reduce blue-on-blue engagements Many systems such as the Aegis Weapons System were designed to be able to automatically engage massive Soviet raids -- last ditch features meant for engagements when no human could decide and act quickly enough The parameters that had to be met by threats before they were automatically engaged were normally very exact This was done to make undesired engagement less likely and successful engagement more likely With a new purpose automatic systems can be used very effectively in an increasingly infoaware world They are microcosms of the RSDC with defense emphasized If we trusted these systems to make decisions when there was not time for human intervention why can't we rely on them more when there is time Many of these systems can and do take inputs from IFF systems Using IFF systems and other concepts presented here might have prevented the USS VINCENNES 1988 and UH-60 shootdown 1994 incidents Battle Damage Assessment BDA BDA is key to the operation of an RSDC and the management of ordnance During the Gulf War many targets had to be re-hit because BDA was not available was indeterminable or could not be correlated fast enough to a critical or time-sensitive 58 target Lack of adequate BDA was listed as a problem in the Gulf War Report to Congress for the Tomahawk SLAM ALCMs and others DBK makes it possible to use BDA more discriminately Often the suppression of a target is more important than its destruction With DBK a target's reaction to an attack would be more visible and may suffice for BDA A retreating target is usually an inconsequential target Reevaluating the requirements and criteria for BDA would have a direct impact on the amount of ammunition required in-theater and on the engagement process Today when BDA determines that a target was not killed or when BDA is not available a reengagement is ordered This may no longer hold when fleeting targets are redefined as moving targets and when only targets that satisfy the necessary criteria will be engaged Concept of Operations In WWII Korea and Vietnam U S forces took and retook real estate multiple times This was driven by the need to take the high ground and to deal with the uncertainty as to when possession of the real estate was actually required With DBK we need only take particular physical real estate when it suits a specific mission for a specific period The information terrain may become the real battlefield Battles can become truly nonlinear It will no longer be necessary to always take Hill 151 before taking 152 Holding Hill 152 might not be so necessary for our purposes as holding hills was necessary in the past Tough spots can be avoided as DBK makes specific objectives e g for stand-off weapons special operations forces or information warfare attack singularly targetable with the risks from nearby forces clearly quantifiable Maps depicting troop and weapons employment might look more like measles than spaghetti The days of the left-hook may be past Scenarios It may be easier to illustrate how DBK can support just-in- time warfare by looking at three scenarios of tactical engagements • Example 1 National Sensors Special Operating Forces SOF and Joint Surveillance and Target Attack System JSTARS aircraft independently detect same Scud transporter erector launcher TEL with 50 45 and 35 percent confidence respectively The fuzed confidence exceeds the 55 percent engagement requirement in the CINC's ROCE hook in the data bus The target is mapped to a visual display with pairing lines made available F-117 Stealth Fighters Tomahawk and A-6 Attack Bomber assets In the absence of offsetting negatives the F-117s receive heads-up display orders to go to the target their orders are paired with SOF for updates by verbal-to-text link over data bus hooks on orders trigger comm-link through data bus A second event a short-fuze detection of enemy airfield with impending aircraft launch trips more hooks in data bus Again in the absence of offsetting negatives the F-117s are redirected to the airfield Based on the Tomahawk's limited launch window orders to engage 59 the SCUD TEL automatically flow there Simultaneously SOF forces get an ancillary charge to provide final phase laser illumination National Sensor BDA is requested by ROCE hooks but negative orders are subsequently generated as SOF reports visual sure kill With A-6's paired with combined Marine Army reconnaissance RECON Ranger team for Close Air Support final coordination is assigned to Air Force Air Controller in an Army H-60 • Example 2 A patrolling SSBN detects adversary surface action group SAG by sonar and reports it via satellite burst transmission National Sensors are steered to localize and validate contacts an SSN is asked to close in as well The SSN visually identifies the contacts and feeds the data to the info-order net for targetweapon pairing including Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar ISAR images ISAR and GPS data are fed to the SSN's Tomahawks as well as a closing carrier battle group and a maritimized B-1 wing Targets appear on visual displays with pairing lines to both the SSN and CVBG The CVBG orders are negated by the CINC due to a planned surprise littoral strike in support of amphibious landing The B-1 wing receives orders pairing to SSN for coordinated time-on- target warat-sea strike by verbal-to-text link over data bus hooks on orders trigger commlink through data bus Based on a high probability of a DUC of SAG open Tomahawk and B-1 windows and no negatives orders flow and launch proceeds The SSN launches a cruise missile National Sensor BDA is requested by ROCE hooks but before it swings over the area it is called back as SSN-launched BDASLCM reports video radar IR infrared sure kill • Example 3 A Marine ground commander reports the successful destruction of an enemy irregular infantry brigade with remnants fleeing north into a densely populated valley JSTARS aircraft RIVET JOINT aircraft and Marine reconnaissance teams in the Valley provide independent confirmation Target correlations trip the 55 percent confidence requirement Given the population density and low concentration of enemy weapon strike fire potential CINC's ROCE hook for ground-based engagement to minimize casualties is enabled GPS-based Automated Terrain Assessment indicates a highly probable choke point at a pass that commands the route of the retreating enemy Estimated time of arrival by the retreating enemy column is 2 hours Target appears on visual display with pairing lines to available Army Marine Independent Action Units IAU With no negatives given an Army regiment receives bursted frag orders to target it is paired with a Marine Recon team for updates by verbal-toverbal link over data bus hooks on orders trigger comm- link through data bus The IAU is paired with a UH-60 squadron entering the area upon completion of a resupply mission The regiment's commander develops a concept of operation and execution orders by analyzing a 3-D digital target map with realtime updates Once at the pass UH-60 and Army IFF transponders continuously update their position over the data bus providing a moving target exclusion zone The route there is automatically planned and continuously updated to minimize exposure to ongoing target weapon pairings Landing unopposed the company moves into position blocks the retreat of the demoralized column and forces its surrender after a brief firefight 60 Conclusion DBK would permit the U S military to change from a vertical stove-piped serial hierarchical decisionmaking to flattened parallel virtual decisionmaking and still be able to turn inside any potential adversary's decisionmaking loop Learning must permeate the U S military at every level and be an important part of everyone's mission statement Employing just-in-time techniques in all areas of warfare including Command-byNegation bursted communications smart software agents and smart logistics and balanced weapons -- and the training necessary to use all of these -- will make it possible to take full advantage of DBK and the revolution in military affairs 61 About the Authors Admiral William A Owens is the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff From July 1992 to December 1993 he directed the post-Cold War restructuring of the U S Navy serving as the first Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Resources Warfare Requirements and Assessments N8 He holds degrees from the U S Naval Academy and Oxford University Dr Stuart E Johnson is currently the Director of Research of the Institute for National Strategic Studies of the National Defense University He has part-time teaching appointments at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs and at the George Washington University Elliot School of International Affairs Dr Martin C Libicki is a senior fellow of the Advanced Command Technologies program INSS He is a specialist in the application of information technologies to national security issues He has written extensively on information warfare information technology standards and the revolution in military affairs Paul Bracken is Professor of Political Science and Professor of International Business Yale University He is the author of The Command and Control of Nuclear Forces Reforging European Security with Kurt Gottfried The Diffusion of Advanced Weaponry and many journal articles on European defense Asian security and defense planning Dr David Alberts is currently the Director of Advanced Concepts Technologies and Information Strategies Directorate ACTIS at INSS National Defense University ACTIS houses both the Center for Advanced Concepts and Technology ACT and the School of Information Warfare and Strategy IWS He has over 25 years of experience with all phases of the design development and evaluation of innovative state-of-the-art systems Jeffrey R Cooper is a Senior Researcher at Science Applications International Corporation where he focuses on the strategic policy and operational aspects of the Revolution in Military Affairs and Information Warfare He is a frequent lecturer at the National Defense University on a variety of defense-related topics Dr Michael G Sovereign has been teaching Command-and-Control at the Naval Postgraduate School since 1970 and he currently chairs its institute of Joint Warfare He is the co-author of Quantitative Models for Production Management and a 1982 recipient of the Secretary of Defense's Meritorious Civilian Service Medal James Hazlett a retired naval officer is a Senior Analyst at SAIC Inc He is a graduate of the U S Naval Academy and has published in the Naval Institute Proceedings and in the Joint Force Quarterly 62