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America’s Future—Defense Policy Principles, Part IVa

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Part III was posted here (and from there can be found the chain of links containing the full series of these posts—or search on “America’s Future” in my blog’s search functionality).  In this final post of this occasional series, I’ll write about the general force structures needed to effect our Defense principles and policies.  Much of what I suggest below will require technological development; however, none of that is futuristic—indeed, some of that technology already is in one or another prototyping stage today.  Further, these force structures support another concept: never fight fair—only fight to win with maximum enemy casualties and maximum damage to enemy entity infrastructure and with minimum friendly casualties and minimum damage to friendly infrastructure.  War is not a sporting event; national survival is in the balance.

I will write here about five essential forces: cyber, communications, space, “traditional,” and special operations.  None of this is to deprecate other areas, for instance intelligence; this is simply a nod to practicalities: I’m writing a too-long post, not a book.

Guiding my remarks are two premises first articulated by  former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in his Known and Unknown: A Memoir.  These are that the time required to recognize the nature of a new threat and to develop counters to it is far too long.  Without going further into bureaucratic imperatives, the SecDef who’s going to bring about these force structures needs to have the courage and stubbornness, as well as the backing of his President and of Congress, to not waste time arguing with those who will not or cannot adapt to the new culture.  Those roadblocks, civilian and military, need to be promptly and decisively terminated.

The other premise is that our systems, which include the people who use them as the critical part of each of those systems, must be more flexible and more lethal, while simultaneously being lighter and more mobile.  This is especially critical for the individual soldier and Marine with his small arms, ammunition, communications, and battery load-out.

Our cyber forces, as I mentioned in an earlier post, must include both defensive and offensive capabilities.  The easiest attack to mount is a simple, brute force denial of service, wherein the attacker simply overwhelms the targeted system(s) with requests for service.  This can include such things as overloading the CPUs with computational demands or overloading the network interface card with demands for communications services.  Other attacks include inserting malware into the computer system(s) for the purpose of corrupting data; blocking access to hard drives; and recording keystrokes (to collect passwords, for instance), collecting actual data, and then broadcasting the collected information back out of the compromised network to the attacker or an accomplice.  Malware can be inserted through a variety of methods ranging from direct, hacked insertion to “social engineering,” where a user, while on his personal system outside the target network, is fooled into downloading malware onto a memory stick and then bringing that memory stick into the target network.  This last is speculated to be one means by which the stuxnet worm was inserted into the Iranian networks.

Defensive forces here include physical and software firewalls and constant, proactive research into malware with associated development of counters to these.  But they must also include human training—and not just the annual routine security refresher that’s so often used.  Training in this area must be as active and rigorous as any of the rest of the soldier’s or Marine’s combat training—cyber combat is every bit as real  and lethal.  But another aspect of defense is to turn the attack and seize the initiative.  Methods and software must be developed to trace malware—whether discovered in situ or during an insertion attempt—back to its source, with the tracing mechanism carrying its own malware for insertion into the originating network(s).  The payload here should include both tracking/reporting software and software intended to disrupt/destroy the originating systems, with a capability of both automatic and manual remote triggering.

Offensive cyber forces will include force capabilities that look a lot like the active defense described just above, with the difference that the payloads here are being inserted on the attack, rather than in counterattack.  The malware being inserted also will have a broader range of payloads: payloads designed for residence in computer chips manufactured for sale overseas, designed for specific systems in the enemy entity’s suite, and so on.

Our communications forces also will need both defensive and offensive capabilities.  Communications always will be a prime target of our enemies, as they seek to isolate command from the forces in contact (for instance).  Thus, communications systems must be protected from physical attack and electronic disruption.  Brute force power-out on the transmission side will be useful as will be increasingly sensitive antennas on the receiving side.  Both systems—and cyber systems generally—will need hardening against power surges, for instance from repeated EMP.  Further, all communications must be encrypted using the strongest encryption possible consistent with rapid coding and decoding (which also puts a premium on communications-supported research into encryption techniques and CPU capacity and speed).  Moreover, since none of this can be guaranteed 100% successful, the systems must be highly and rapidly redundant, and the codes—and code styles—rapidly changeable.

On the offensive side, enemy communications nodes of our choosing must be attacked and destroyed as early as possible in the conflict, with the replacement nodes also of our choosing just as promptly destroyed.  I do not advocate blindly destroying all of his communications facility, however.  Useful nodes should be identified, and these should be used for inserting misleading information into the enemy’s communications.  Such insertions can range from falsified communications from his forces in the field (including individual terrorist cells or individual terrorists) providing misleading status to accessing an enemy’s display systems and placing false information onto them.

Notice here that there will be considerable overlap with other force structures.  Destruction of communications nodes will involve either “traditional” or special operations forces, or both.  Insertion of false information will involve (depending on the spoof being run) special operations forces and/or cyber forces.  Cyber forces especially will be involved in hacking the enemy displays, and this will also require technological advances beyond today’s capabilities.

Our space force structure must be designed to give us both assured and rapid access to space, at all operational altitudes—including in the near term to lunar altitudes.  Assured access includes more than lots of boosters sitting in the rack ready to be rolled out, though.  Our launch facilities are woefully outdated, too few in number, and too slow to ready for a subsequent launch.  Commercial launch facilities should be supported as well as government ones (and commercial access should be made available to the government ones on terms useful to both).  This support, though, should not come in terms of “shared” costs, but more in terms of government getting out of the way of such things as licensing the facilities and each launch.

Military space facilities, both launch and on-orbit, need to be hardened against a variety of attacks: cyber, communications, energy weapon, and many forms of physical attack.  Hardening against cyber and communications attacks have been described above.  Energy weapon attacks can be defended in a variety of ways (while a variety of such attacks need technological advances in understanding their nature as well as means of defending against them): gas or dust ejections can attrit the arriving energy in a number of bandwidths.  Reflective and ablative surfaces (with current technology, both capacities in the same surface aren’t possible; this is another area wanting research and advance) which can dissipate arriving energy before it penetrates beyond those surfaces are among those ways.  Physical attack defenses include weapons that destroy incoming weapons before impact or fusing (whether individual “anti-missile missiles,” sprays of “gravel” to increase the likelihood intercept), evasive maneuvers by the targeted system (of greater or lesser utility depending on the mass and momentum of the target and the presence or absence of terminal guidance and maneuverability of the attacking weapon).

As above, there must be an offensive capability here, as well.  Enemy space systems, including his on-orbit facilities, must be subject to destruction by our forces.   I’ve suggested some attack mechanisms above.  Our forces, though, must be capable of terminal maneuvering so as to defeat target maneuvers; they must be capable of penetrating a gravel shield (initially by overwhelming it with numbers of attacks from a variety of directions, rather than by paying the payload penalty from hardening each weapon against “gravel” impact—of dubious practicality, anyway, given the energies involved in the impacts); they must have energy of sufficient density, and with aiming quality sufficient to allow dwelling on the initial impact point long enough, to penetrate defenses.

This offensive capability also must integrate with special operations forces and “traditional” forces.  While ballistic payloads of sufficient size can be deorbited to fall from orbit, survive reentry, and kinetically impact enemy launch facilities, communications nodes, and other targets (essentially, dropping high-speed rocks on them), attack by special operations and/or “traditional” forces will play a crucial role, as well.  Moreover, offensive forces must be capable of destroying the enemy’s access to space at any time post-launch, as well: from boost to any staging section of flight, through cruise to pre-impact or pre-arrival at his own space facilities.

In my next post, I’ll complete the description of our needed force structures: a discussion of our “traditional” force structure and of our special operations force structure.

America’s Future—Defense Policy Principles, Part III

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I wrote about fundamental principles of Defense policy here.  In this post, I want to talk about some of the Defense policies themselves that are necessary to implement those principles; in a later post I’ll talk about force structures needed to begin to give concreteness and bite to our Defense.  I won’t go into identifying those policies that are suitable and already in place, or unsuitable ones that should be removed, nor will this post presume to be an exhaustive list of policies.  Instead, I’ll  identify what I consider the important with a view to offering a point of departure for continued discussion.

For the sake of review, these are the fundamental principles:

  • defense must be built around the concept winning across the full spectrum of conflict, and across the full spectrum of kinds of enemy combatants;
  • control of the high ground, which means space: LEO today, near-lunar space and at lunar altitudes in the very immediate future, Mars and along Mars’ orbit around the sun within 20 years, and Jupiter and beyond by the end of the century; and
  • flexibility, which includes mobility, agility, and adaptability of both weapons and their support systems and of the soldiers themselves.

There are a broad range of defense policies, from procurement through training, that I’ll ignore in this post.  The overriding policies about which I’ll write here are those involving the nature of combat, cyberspace, communications, and space.

Modern warfare is no longer limited to the classic set-piece battles of the last century.  Those will continue to be a major component of modern and future warfare, if for no other reason than that it always will be necessary to seize and hold the enemy’s real estate, since even his cyber equipment must have a physical location or a network of physical locations.  Those physical locations, though, will no longer be confined to earth (and already haven’t been confined to the surface for some time, now ranging from the bottom of the oceans to high atmospheric operations).

There are two other kinds of combat today, however, and these are no less a lethal threat to our country’s existence: terrorist warfare conducted by non-national entities, and supported to a greater or lesser degree by one or more nation-states, and cyber warfare.  We have seen the deadliness of terrorist war in the attacks on us at the start of this century, in the intimidation of Spain into leaving the coalition fighting terrorists in Afghanistan, and in Afghanistan itself with the terrorist war conducted for years against Afghan women and girls, and the terrorist attacks today against the body politic of that nation.  The current terrorist war that is tearing apart the nascent Iraqi democracy, before that nation can grow out of its infancy is another example.

Terrorist war, though, doesn’t only involve nation-states, and those nation-states that are involved usually participate in a supporting role.  The primary actors here are the terrorist non-national entities themselves.  Examples of these include al-Qaeda and its offshoots (al-Qaeda in Iraq, al-Qaeda in Yemen, and so on), the Taliban, and the terrorists in Iraq today who make war on Sunni and Shiite Iraqis and sometimes on themselves in efforts to frame the other.  These entities are much more diffuse and harder to identify, they use women and children as tools of their war as well as targets, and their targets are nearly completely indiscriminate: the only unifying concept of terrorist targets is how much damage and fear they can cause for the terrorists’ enemy.

Cyber warfare wasn’t even possible until the end of the last century.  Cyberwar is a contest to protect our own computer systems—in weapons systems, communications systems, national infrastructure, financial networks and systems, and so on—from penetration or disruption by our enemies together with our efforts to do exactly that to our enemy’s computer systems.  This is a shadow war that runs from malware disrupting the functionality of the systems to spyware that collects information from those systems without disrupting them to additional malware that lies dormant until activated to carry out their missions.  The malware can be implanted at any time, from being embedded in the chips comprising a system’s CPUs, xROMs, RAM, and so on at the time of chip manufacture to an email or an email’s imagery or attachment to a “memory stick” plugged into the UBS port of a laptop or PC.

Before we can do anything else, then, we must understand the nature of our enemy and the techniques he is using this time to make war on us, as well as successfully estimate how he or another enemy will make war the next time.  Thus, our most important policy in Defense must be one that both supports and facilitates intelligence gathering and fusion (the knitting together of information and estimates from a broad variety of sources into a coherent, single picture).  But this isn’t enough.  This policy also must generate a capacity for political and social research to better understand how war evolves its techniques, how technology evolves and how that impacts the evolution of war, and how all of this is influenced by the more general political, social, and economic evolution of the various societies and nations around the planet.

With this understanding in progress now, it is critical for our Defense establishment to have a policy in place that facilitates our capacity in cyberspace.  This capacity includes not just a defensive one of securing (both through encryption and through assured operations) our computational capability (for instance, but not nearly limited to, our communications, our information displays, our weapons systems, our control over our space-based systems), but also an offensive one.  We must be able to carry the war that our enemy has inflicted on us into his cyberspace (including initiating combat in that milieu, beating our enemy to that punch where possible), with a view toward the destruction of his computational capacity—in his communications, in his information displays, in his weapons systems, his control over his space-based systems.

Our cyberspace policy, to be effective, also will impact procurement.  All of our existing computing chips—those CPUs, xROMs, RAM, and so on—must be swept for malware that might have been embedded by a foreign manufacturer—especially those chips we might buy from the People’s Republic of China.  It goes beyond this, though.  Malware and malware defense are just like any other arms race:  the offensive side nearly always leads, and the defensive side nearly always is behind.  Thus, it’s entirely possible that malware will remain simply because we haven’t identified the new evolution, yet.  Accordingly, new computing chips should be obtained solely from domestic manufacturers.  Some will argue that this will elevate the cost of those chips.  These will be right, at least in the near term (I won’t go into the evolution of costs from an established domestic chip manufacturing industry in this context).  However, the elevated costs of domestic chips also must be weighed against the costs of communications failures, broken water and electricity delivery infrastructures, eviscerated financial systems, weapons that won’t fire, and so on to our survival as a free nation.

Finally, our cyber policy must facilitate our ability to target both non-national entities and their supporting nation-states.  This is especially critical when we’re fighting terrorist war.  We must deny the non-national entity all support from those nation-states that have declared their enmity toward us by supporting our enemy’s active war.  Those nation-states, by that support, will have made themselves active participants in that war, and so their capacity to fight and to support the others’ fight have become legitimate—and necessary—targets, as well.

Note that this dimension of war necessarily is asymmetric.  We have vast networks of computing systems that have become critical to our nation’s functioning, even to our existence.  Many of our enemies are not so dependent.  The reasons for this are broad.  At one end of the spectrum, the enemy simply is not that advanced, as was the case with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and the Taliban-run Afghanistan.  At the other end of the spectrum is the diffuse nature of the enemy, who while technologically sophisticated, has no major computing systems of his own (beyond cell phones and laptop computers and the like), but who relies on the technological infrastructure of his supporting nation-states.

Next, our communications policy must facilitate support our three fundamental principles.  As with cyberspace policies, our communications policy must include both defensive and offensive (including information war) guidance.  After protecting our computing systems, and so the infrastructure and other systems which depend on these for functionality, communications is most important.  An intact cyberspace is foundational to our Defense capability, but we must be able to communicate with our soldiers, our systems, and our infrastructure, our finances, and we must be able to disrupt, to destroy, our enemy’s ability to communicate with his.

Thus, our communications policy must be aimed at ensuring the security of our communications—both in terms of hardening against espionage or real-time eavesdropping and in terms of reliability.  When a unit commander needs to communicate with a soldier, or a space asset, he must be able to do so promptly and with assured contact, and when Headquarters must communicate their commanders in theater and so on down the chain, and/or with a space asset, they must be able to do so promptly and with assured contact.  The information coming back to the commander (at this point I’m deliberately eliding civilian communications, for instance with financial entities; in this context, civilian communications are variations on  this principle theme) must be rapid, reliable, and as accurate as the sensors and soldiers who are initiating the information.

Our communications policy must have two offensive components.  One is an ability directly to attack our enemy’s ability to communicate with his soldiers, his systems, his infrastructure, his finances, and this capability must be able, at our choice, freely to eavesdrop on and to fatally disrupt, if not completely destroy, those communications.  The other component is information dissemination.  Our communications policy must facilitate the rapid, reliable spread both of truth and of propaganda to our enemy’s civilian population, and it must support the rapid and reliable spread of disinformation to our enemy’s military and civilian leadership.  And we must be able to strike, if not first, then in immediate response, as well as repeatedly without regard to our enemy’s subsequent actions.

Finally, space is almost as new a conflict terrain for us as is cyberspace, and we have lost our access to it, except through begging rides from our potential adversaries.  We do retain an ability to reach LEO, in a benign environment, with satellites, but our most likely nation-state adversaries are capable of reaching farther into space—reaching higher ground—and they have active programs for improving on that, including increasing their military capabilities in space.  Accordingly, our next most important policy, and one directly related to our first fundamental Defense principle, is an effective space policy.

It is critical that we rebuild our failed national space program and that we make our own progress along this dimension.  This effort must involve both a new Federal space agency, replacing the wholly dysfunctional National Aeronautical and Space Agency with a body that is capable of assisting DoD in developing the requisite space-oriented and -based assets, and a commercial industry capable of exploiting the resources in space and of supporting national control of that high ground.

Thus, our space policy must center on development of transportation into space and the development of weapons and communications systems that either will pass through space en route to their destinations or that will reside in space.  This policy also must facilitate commercial exploitation of space and of the bodies in space, beginning with the moon and the debris that collects at L4 and L5, and moving outward (and inward) in the solar system.  This facilitation, though, should be limited to a sharing of technologies and techniques with our domestic commercial enterprises.  An example of this sharing is early NASA’s technology transfers to private enterprise during NASA’s heyday of the Mercury and Apollo programs.

With these policies in place, which are primary in supporting our three fundamental principles, along with effective policies covering such other important Defense needs as acquisition, training, general technology development, and so on, we can begin to outline the force structures that will effect our fundamental principles.  That’s the subject for a later post.

The Caliphate

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Is it being established after all, and with the present administration’s acquiescence through ignorance?

There’s this from the Pittsburgh post-gazette (h/t to BLACKFIVE):

The war in Afghanistan may end this year in thinly disguised surrender.

“The Taliban per se is not our enemy,” Vice President Joe Biden said in an interview with Newsweek magazine Dec. 15.

We went to war in Afghanistan to oust the Taliban regime because it had sheltered al-Qaida. Perhaps Mr. Biden forgot.

and [link added]

A story in an Indian newspaper Dec. 29 suggests the reason for the vice president’s memory lapse.  The Obama administration apparently is conducting secret negotiations with the Taliban and has recruited Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s leading jurist, to mediate them.  “Earlier this month, Mr. al-Qaradawi helped draw a road map for a deal between the Taliban and the United States aimed at giving the superpower a face-saving political settlement ahead of its planned withdrawal from Afghanistan, which is due to begin in 2014,” wrote reporter Praveen Swami, citing “Indian diplomatic sources.”

Mr. al-Qaradawi seeks the establishment of a worldwide caliphate ruled by Islamic law.

(Mr Swami also goes on at some length about al-Qaradawi and the threat he poses to India as well as to the West.)

BLACKFIVE points out this:

The bottom line is we have been severely weakened by Obama….  We can start w/ losing one war and one peace [respectively, Afghanistan and Iraq],…the Arab Spring installing Islamists in Egypt, Libya and much of the rest of the Middle East….

Spain surrendered to the Islamists some years ago when it was driven from Afghanistan with its tail between its legs after a series of train bombings followed by instructions from the bombers’ handlers to depart forthwith.

Withal, we have the Umayyad Caliphate being rebuilt from the Middle East west across north Africa and back onto the Iberian Peninsula to the Pyrenees, and east through Pakistan and back into Afghanistan.  The lone holdouts seem to be Portugal and the Sarkozy French in and above Iberia, and a seemingly abandoned Israel in the heart of the redeveloping Caliphate.  It’s true enough that the present reconstruction is no more monolithic than were the Umayyads, but that doesn’t reduce the present threat any more than it did with the Umayyads.  Especially given the current Islamist goals.

Misunderstanding the Threat

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Former CIA Director Michael Hayden (USAF Gen, ret) is reported by FoxNews as saying,

But externally it [closing the Straits of Hormuz] just doesn’t make any sense.

Number one, they [Iran] need the straits as much, perhaps more, than anyone else, the free flow of oil, otherwise their economy is more in the tank than it is today.  Number two, does closing the straits make Iran more or less isolated? … Does closing the straits make it more or less likely that someone will think it’s a legitimate step to attack the nuclear facility at Natanz?  I think it makes it more likely.  So why would the Iranians do that?

Our government’s blinders here (yes, Hayden isn’t any longer in the government, but those who are think similarly) is the utter misunderstanding of Iran and its goals.  As Hayden also says, “This government and its decision-making processes are incredibly opaque.”

I offer some clarification, from my lofty perch on my navel.

“Number one, they need the straits as much, perhaps more, than anyone else, the free flow of oil, otherwise their economy is more in the tank than it is today.”  Number one, the sanctions going into place have the potential to seriously threaten their ability to export oil due to a lack of buyers.  In that scenario, no, they won’t “need the straits…”.

“Number two, does closing the straits make Iran more or less isolated?”  Does Iran care about its isolation?  Certainly the lack of international intercourse can hurt, but is the Iranian government’s pain tolerance the same as ours?  Plainly not.  Nor does the Iranian government care about its isolation as isolation.  Finally, do the Iranian people have any capacity to act, should they disagree with their government?  Those people watched while a previous American administration seemed to incite Iraqis to rebellion against Saddam after our first Iraq war and then stood by while Saddam butchered the Shiites and Kurds.  Lately, they did try to act against their government and experienced the present administration standing by and watching the present Iranian government butcher them.

“Does closing the straits make it more or less likely that someone will think it’s a legitimate step to attack the nuclear facility at Natanz?”  The Iranian government, after years of loud and vociferous chit-chat and firm finger-shaking by the rest of the world, and after years of active support by Russia and the PRC for the Iranian nuclear program, has no reason seriously to think anyone will do anything at all along these lines.  Oh, and not being complete fools, they have been dispersing and bunkering their nuclear weapons facilities.  They think the Israelis might have the stones to act, even though an Israeli mission is fraught with difficulties and has an uncertain outcome.  The Iranian government isn’t too worried about strikes; a greater or lesser likelihood of one is irrelevant to them.

Understanding the threat from a nation begins with understanding that government’s goals.  Let’s broaden Hayden’s question of “why would the Iranians do that?”  One overriding goal of Iran’s is the utter destruction of Israel.  To that end, a successful nuclear weapons program gives them the tools with which to achieve that.  They don’t care the cost to themselves of achieving that destruction; indeed, Iran (at least those who populate the government; the only ones whose goals matter) will simply view their own fate as honored martyrdom.

Another overriding goal of theirs is the destruction of the United States.  To that end, a successful nuclear weapons program also is useful for arming terrorist groups who then will attack the United States (and Europe, and the hands that feed their armorer, Russia and the PRC).  Again, both the terrorists and the Iranian government will simply view their own destruction as a  martyrdom to be sought after.

This threat doesn’t think like we do.  Basing our assessments on the premise that they do is fatally flawed.