Category Archives: defense policy

Revolution vs Evolution

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The opening two paragraphs lay out the question regarding the nature of warfare:

The way wars are fought is changing fast, as new technologies upend military doctrines on everything from procurement to executing operations.
But just how radical will this transformation be in years to come? And are the hundreds of billions of dollars being invested by the US, its allies and rivals in new tanks, planes and warships going to become the equivalent of buying horses and arrows on the eve of machine guns and howitzers?

Germany’s Inspector General of the Bundeswehr, General Carsten Breuer, added to the question:

The character of warfare is changing fundamentally. Armed forces must be able to adapt faster, integrate new technologies, and learn at speed. If we fail to adapt, we will not be able to prevail.

And Michael Kofman of the Carnegie Endowment in Washington:

Revolutions in warfare are often declared but rarely arrive. Most military developments, like the current trends in the use of drones and precision strikes, are evolutionary. Nobody doubts the impact of gunpowder, but it was on the battlefield for hundreds of years, alongside knights and pikemen.

And this:

Military leaders, governments, and defense companies disagree on whether to call the current developments a revolution that warrants a complete overhaul of existing doctrines.

It’s a silly, time- and resource-wasting question. The situation neither demands nor holds unnecessary the idea of completely overhauling existing doctrines. It does, though, demonstrate—demand—the need to completely review, from the ground up de novo all existing doctrines and to do so periodically.

What matters, rather, is this constant: the need to manage and keep up with, even to drive, the pace of change, and that pace today is far faster than that prior rate of moving from pikes and trebuchets to rifles and cannons, far faster than the pace of weapons, logistics, tactics, and strategies during the world’s last major set-piece war, in the last century. The pace, rapidly accelerating, also is expanding into the constitution of warfare and the nature of war itself.

The question of whether we can make necessary changes across all dimensions of conflict, from political to information to economic to cyber to kinetic—and across the logistics and maintenance aspects of each of them—faster than our enemies can then becomes the Critical Item of national survival, as demonstrated from as far back as Alexander the Great and his weapons development and use and his tactics; the Roman way of war compared with that of the Greeks, Phoenicians, and Carthaginians; and the tactics change demonstrated by the Spanish tercio.

Each of these areas of pacing also has a Do Loop that must be capable of moving apace, from recognition of a situation; through decision regarding how to respond, or better, preempt; to acting on that decision. Our Do Loops—all of them—need to be capable of operating inside of—faster than—our enemies’. If they evolve and adapt faster than we do, then we lose, and they win.

Revolution vs evolution is an irrelevancy.

An Insight into Agility

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NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte isn’t stupid. He’s worried about how to absorb the increased military spending that some NATO members finally are doing and turning that money into modern hardware and men and women trained to employ them in combat.

He’s adept at a particular style of politics—that of sycophancy toward President Donald Trump (R), referring as he does to NATO’s increased spending as the “Trump Trillion.” That’s nothing but a recognition that it took Trump’s hard words and mean tweets to prod the nations into actually increasing their defense spending instead of perennially yapping about it.

Importantly, he stated out loud a critical insight into modern military preparedness. Regarding lessons available to be learned from Russia’s war on Ukraine, he had this, using drones as his example:

It’s not about producing drones, but having the production capacity to produce drones because the technology itself is constantly adapting and is changing every two or three weeks.

That production agility doesn’t only apply to drones or to weapons and weapons systems, though. It also applies to tactics, to campaign strategies, and to soldier, sailor, and airman training.

It requires, too, the political stones to support those agilities. And that requires NATO’s member nations to understand that parochiality inhibits, possibly fatally, any chance for success in any war against an experienced NATO enemy.

Countries seeking to protect domestic companies are…duplicating efforts, such as building too many different types of armored vehicles. That kind of fragmentation is inefficient. It also means less cash for things such as air defense and deep-strike missiles.
Large systems that need to integrate armed forces across the continent, like intelligence, communications, and reconnaissance capabilities, could also be at risk of losing out.

It also leads to the outright failure of nominally agreed joint weapons programs. In the latest case, France, Germany, and Spain spent the last eight years arguing over their defense companies’ priorities for producing a joint fighter, the core pillar of Europe’s largest ⁠defence project. That parochialism led, finally, to complete failure to produce anything.

The leaders of Germany and France have agreed to scrap a landmark project to ​develop and build a new-generation fighter jet, officials said on Monday, bowing to industrial rivalries over Europe’s most ambitious defence programme.

It’s on the military and its political masters alone, though, to develop and deliver the means of protecting the logistic lines of communication. It doesn’t matter how well trained and dedicated are the personnel or how combat capable the equipment if they and the consumables they need—food and fuel—cannot be delivered to the front. Private enterprise can’t build any of that without the military’s clear specifications and the politicians to override nationalist parochialism and to provide the funds for the development and production—and the fortitude to monitor and call out, with stern sanctions, failures to perform, whether politicians or favored companies.

NATO still is less of an alliance than it is a committee of rivals. Correcting that would be Rutte’s next project, if he can last long enough.

Who’s Responsible for Corporate Security?

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The headline raised the question:

Wars Are Blurring Lines Between Corporate and National Security

The article dealt primarily with physical security of critical items and areas, and it touched on cyber security. There are other areas, though, where responsibility among corporate management teams, police forces, and government, whether military or civilian agencies need to be sorted out.

There’s the question of supply chain security, an enemy nation embargoing Critical Items in the supply chain of a nation’s important corporation, whether that corporation is economically important or is an important defense establishment supplier. Even here, the responsibility is mixed. It’s on the military to defeat the embargo (and the political leadership to engage in the related diplomatic engagements while giving the military the tools with which to act). It’s on the corporate management, though, to adjust its supply chain to eliminate the embargo and to do anticipate other high-risk dependencies and make the adjustments necessary to preempt those dependencies. Where the dependency can be eliminated through domestic production, vis., of raw materials, it’s on the nation’s political leadership to remove regulatory and other roadblocks so that domestic production can be done.

There’s also the question of cyber security. Here, a breach of a corporation’s cyber security should be taken as evidence, though not of proof, of corporate management’s criminal negligence. This sort of thing is too obvious an area of weakness for corporate managers to miss or to decline to commit the resources either to block proactively, or to fight and repair successfully and promptly a breach. Here, also, it’s on those managers to make public the breach, what was affected, and who was affected, in fine to spread the word for the benefit of others.

Adding to the complexity, companies now need to protect the data networks that serve as gateways to critical infrastructure. Hackers increasingly target not just computer files to steal information but also systems managing vital functions like building access and factory control, remotely causing physical damage or enabling espionage.

To which I add: vital functions of communications and financial systems, inserting sleeper malware, to be triggered during a crisis or in association with a direct attack to shut down critical nodes in those systems’ infrastructure and erase the data in financial systems, as well inserting the sleeperware into water distribution, national electricity grids, fuel pipelines, with a view to shutting those down or causing their catastrophic failure.

Addressing the question of primary responsibility, Marc Glasser, ex-DHS Chief of Chemical Security US Department of Transportation and the Department of Homeland Security:

The private owner can invest in redundancy, monitoring, and repair capacity, but only governments and militaries can really deter, patrol, attribute, or respond to hostile state activity[.]

Not entirely. That’s all true as far as it goes, but it only goes to reactivity. It’s the responsibility of corporate managers, military leadership, and politicians to act proactively in their spheres to anticipate and move to protect avenues of attack and to block attack attempts.

Wrong Answer, Right Answer

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The US took more serious damage to Naval Support Activity Bahrain, one of CENTCOM’s naval control nodes in the Middle East, than was previously acknowledged. In response, DoD is considering a number of moves, two of which are the following.

…revamping the base in Bahrain, reducing the US presence in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and moving some bases or base functions west, farther from the reach of Iranian missiles and drones….

Withdrawing—retreating—is absolutely the wrong answer. That just contributes to the sense of the terrorists running Iran that they’re winning this conflict, encourages them to continue their violations of the (mistakenly done IMO) MOU, and at least as bad, to a mindset of backing up and defeat in our own military and our politicians—too many of whom already are begging for some sort of surrender.

Alternatively,

Command and control nodes could be moved underground. And military capabilities could become more spread out across the region, the officials said, though they cautioned that no decisions had been made.

This is closer to the right answer. Don’t retreat, never retreat, especially in the face of terrorists. Disperse and decentralize our assets.

And I add: plus up the defense facilities for these establishments, and increase significantly the amount of combat forces and weapons systems in the region.

It is never appropriate to signal withdrawal when our enemies attack. It’s always appropriate to counterattack, do so more powerfully than the attack, and to improve defensive systems.

Don’t Sell F-35s to Turkey because…

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…Turkey still has Russian S-400 air defense missile systems?

The Trump administration is expected to override a decision by a Democratic lawmaker who is blocking a proposed $750 million sale of jet engines to Turkey over concerns about the country’s ties to Russia.
Congressman Gregory Meeks (D, NY) had placed a hold on the sale to Turkey—a NATO ally that is hosting an alliance summit next month—because the country continues to hold a Russian S-400 air-defense system that it bought roughly a decade ago, along with other concerns about Turkey’s role in the region.

That S-400 system, after all, might spy on Turkey’s F-35s and learn how to defeat it.

This is silly. There are reasons to not sell F-35s to Turkey, but the idea that the S-400 can compromise the F-35’s stealth capabilities isn’t one of them, at least not anymore (if it ever was). We’ve sold lots of F-35s to other nations over the years. If the jet’s stealth capabilities could ever be compromised, they already have been, just from their use around the world and our enemies observing their use, including by those objectionable S-400 systems, and collecting data on detecting and otherwise countering the jets. And that foolishly ignores the fact that over those intervening years of F-35 operational use, there have been a plethora of—steadily more and more capable—systems watching and observing and analyzing the F-35 in all its operational flexes.

There are reasons for going ahead with the sale, too, and these should be weighed against those reasons for not selling. The presence of S-400s in the buying nation is not relevant.