Candidate Principle #2: A Network’s Combat Viability is more than the Sum of its Nodes
Force
networking generates an unavoidable tradeoff between maximizing collective
combat capabilities and minimizing network-induced vulnerability risks. The
challenge is finding an acceptable balance between the two in both design and
operation; networking provides no ‘free lunch.’
This
tradeoff was commonly discounted during the network-centric era’s early years.
For instance, Metcalfe’s Law—the idea that a network’s potential increases as
the square of the number of networked nodes—was often applied in ways suggesting
a force would become increasingly capable as more sensors, weapons, and data
processing elements were tied together to collect, interpret, and act upon
battlespace information.[i] Such
assertions, though, were made without reference to the network’s architecture.
The sheer number (or types) of nodes matter little if the disruption of certain
critical nodes (relay satellites, for example) or the exploitation of any given
node to access the network’s internals erode the network’s data confidentiality,
integrity, or availability. This renders node-counting on its own a meaningless
and perhaps even misleadingly dangerous measure of a network’s potential. The
same is also true if individual systems and platforms have design limitations
that prevent them from fighting effectively if force-level networks are undermined.
Consequently,
there is a gigantic difference between a network-enhanced warfare system and a
network-dependent warfare system. While the former’s performance expands
greatly when connected to other force elements via a network, it nevertheless
is designed to have a minimum performance that is ‘good enough’ to independently
achieve certain critical tasks if network connectivity is unavailable or compromised.[ii] A
practical example of this is the U.S. Navy’s Cooperative Engagement Capability
(CEC), which extends an individual warship’s air warfare reach beyond its own
sensors’ line-of-sight out to its interceptor missiles’ maximum ranges courtesy
of other CEC-participating platforms’ sensor data. Loss of the local CEC
network may significantly reduce a battleforce’s air warfare effectiveness, but
the participating warships’ combat systems would still retain formidable self
and local-area air defense capabilities.
Conversely,
a network-dependent warfare system fails outright when its supporting network
is corrupted or denied. For instance, whereas in theory Soviet anti-ship
missile-armed bombers of the late 1950s through early 1990s could strike U.S.
aircraft carrier battle groups over a thousand miles from the Soviet coast,
their ability to do so was predicated upon time-sensitive cueing by the Soviet
Ocean Surveillance System (SOSS). SOSS’s network was built around a highly
centralized situational picture-development and combat decision-making
apparatus, which relied heavily upon remote sensors and long-range
radiofrequency communications pathways that were ripe for EW exploitation. This
meant U.S. efforts to slow down, saturate, block, or manipulate sensor data
inputs to SOSS, let alone to do the same to the SOSS picture outputs Soviet bomber
forces relied upon in order to know their targets’ general locations, had the
potential of cutting any number of critical links in the bombers’ ‘kill chain.’
If bombers were passed a SOSS cue at all, their crews would have had no idea
whether they would find a carrier battle group or a decoy asset (and maybe an
accompanying aerial ambush) at the terminus of their sortie route. Furthermore,
bomber crews firing from standoff-range could only be confident they had aimed
their missiles at actual high-priority ships and not decoys or lower-priority
ships if they received precise visual identifications of targets from scouts
that had penetrated to the battle group’s center. If these scouts failed in this
role—a high probability once U.S. rules of engagement were relaxed following a
war’s outbreak—the missile salvo would be seriously handicapped and perhaps
wasted, if it could be launched at all. Little is different today with respect
to China’s nascent Anti-Ship Ballistic Missile capability: undermine the
underlying surveillance-reconnaissance network and the weapon loses its combat utility.[iii]
This is the risk systems take with network-dependency.
Candidate Principle #3: Contact Detection is Easy, Contact Classification and Identification are Not
The
above SOSS analogy leads to a major observation regarding remote sensing:
detecting something is not the same as knowing with confidence what it is. It
cannot be overstated that no sensor can infallibly classify and identify its
contacts: countermeasures exist against every sensor type.
As
an example, for decades we have heard the argument ‘large signature’ platforms
such as aircraft carriers are especially vulnerable because they cannot readily
hide from wide-area surveillance radars and the like. If the only method of
carrier concealment was broadband Radar Cross Section suppression, and if the
only prerequisite for firing an anti-carrier weapon was a large surface
contact’s detection, the assertions of excessive vulnerability would be true. A
large surface contact held by remote radar, however, can just as easily be a
merchant vessel, a naval auxiliary ship, a deceptive low campaign-value
combatant employing signature-enhancement measures, or an artificial decoy. Whereas
advanced radars’ synthetic or inverse synthetic aperture modes can be used to
discriminate a contact’s basic shape as a classification tool, a variety of EW
tactics and techniques can prevent those modes’ effective use or render their findings
suspect. Faced with those kinds of obstacles, active sensor designers might
turn to Low
Probability of Intercept (LPI) transmission techniques
to buy time for their systems to evade detection and also delay the opponent’s
development of effective EW countermeasures. Nevertheless, an intelligent opponent’s
signals intelligence collection and analysis efforts will eventually discover and
correctly classify an active sensor’s LPI emissions. It might take multiple
combat engagements over several months for them to do this, or it might take
them only a single combat engagement and then a few hours of analysis. This
means new LPI techniques must be continually developed, stockpiled, and then situationally
employed only on a risk-versus-benefit basis if the sensor’s performance is to
be preserved throughout a conflict’s duration.
Passive
direction-finding sensors are confronted by an even steeper obstacle: a
non-cooperative vessel can strictly inhibit its telltale emissions or can
radiate deceptive emissions. Nor can electro-optical and infrared sensors
overcome the remote sensing problem, as their spectral bands render them highly
inefficient for wide-area searches, drastically limit their effective range,
and leave them susceptible to natural as well as man-made obscurants.[iv]
If
a prospective attacker possesses enough ordnance or is not cowed by the
political-diplomatic risks of misidentification, he might not care to
confidently classify a contact before striking it. On the other hand, if the prospective
attacker is constrained by the need to ensure his precious advanced weapons inventories
(and their launching platforms) are not prematurely depleted, or if he is
constrained by a desire to avoid inadvertent escalation, remote sensing alone
will not suffice for weapons-targeting.[v] Just
as was the case with Soviet maritime bombers, a relatively risk-intolerant prospective
attacker would be compelled to rely upon close-in (and likely visual) classification
of targets following their remote detection. This dependency expands a
defender’s space for layering its anti-scouting defenses, and suggests that standoff-range
attacks cued by sensor-to-shooter networks will depend heavily upon penetrating
(if not persistent) scouts that are either highly survivable (e.g., submarines
and low-observable aircraft) or relatively expendable (e.g., unmanned system
‘swarms’ or sacrificial manned assets).
On
the expendable scout side, an advanced weapon (whether a traditional missile or
an unmanned vehicle swarm) could conceivably provide reconnaissance support for
other weapons within a raid, such as by exposing itself to early detection and neutralization
by the defender in order to provide its compatriots with an actionable targeting
picture via a datalink. An advanced weapon might alternatively be connected by
datalink to a human controller who views the weapon’s onboard sensor data to designate
targets for it or other weapons in the raid, or who otherwise determines
whether the target selected by the weapon is valid. While these approaches can
help improve a weapon’s ability to correctly discriminate valid targets, they
will nevertheless still lead to ordnance waste if the salvo is directed against
a decoy group containing no targets of value. Likewise, as all sensor types can
be blinded or deceived, a defender’s ability to thoroughly inflict either outcome
upon a scout weapon’s sensor package—or a human controller—could leave an
attacker little better off than if its weapons lacked datalink capabilities in
the first place.
We
should additionally bear in mind that the advanced multi-band sensors and
external communications capabilities necessary for a weapon to serve as a scout
would be neither cheap nor quickly producible. As a result, an attacker would
likely possess a finite inventory of these weapons that would need to be
carefully managed throughout a conflict’s duration. Incorporation of
highly-directional all-weather communications capabilities in a weapon to minimize
its datalink vulnerabilities would increase the weapon’s relative expense (with
further impact to its inventory size). It might also affect the weapon’s
physical size and power requirements on the margins depending upon the distance
datalink transmissions had to cover. An alternative reliance upon
omnidirectional LPI datalink communications would run the same risk of eventual
detection and exploitation over time we previously noted for active sensors. All told, the attacker’s opportunity costs for
expending advanced weapons with one or more of the aforementioned capabilities at
a given time would never be zero.[vi] A
scout weapon therefore could conceivably be less expendable than an unarmed
unmanned scout vehicle depending upon the relative costs and inventory sizes of
both.
The
use of networked wide-area sensing to directly support employment of long-range
weapons could be quite successful in the absence of vigorous cyber-electromagnetic
(and kinetic) opposition performed by thoroughly trained and conditioned
personnel. The wicked, exploitable problems of contact classification and
identification are not minor, though, and it is extraordinarily unlikely any
sensor-to-shooter concept will perform as advertised if it inadequately confronts
them. After all, the cyclical struggle between sensors and countermeasures is
as old as war itself. Any advances
in one are eventually balanced by advances in the other; the key questions are
which one holds the upper hand at any given time, and how long that advantage
can endure against a sophisticated and adaptive opponent.
Tomorrow, we will consider how a
force network’s operational geometry impacts its defensibility. We will also
explore the implications of a network’s capabilities for graceful degradation.
[i]
David S. Alberts, John J. Garstka, and Frederick P. Stein. Network Centric Warfare: Developing and Leveraging Information
Superiority, 2nd Ed. (Washington, D.C.: Department of Defense
C4ISR Cooperative Research Program, August 1999), 32-34, 103-105, 250-265.
[ii]
For some observations on the idea of network-enhanced systems, see Owen R.
Cote, Jr. “The Future of Naval Aviation.” (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts
Institute of Technology Security Studies Program, 2006), 28, 59.
[iii]
Solomon, “Defending the Fleet,” 39-78. For more details on Soviet anti-ship
raiders dependencies upon visual-range (sacrificial) scouts, see Maksim Y.
Tokarev. “Kamikazes: The Soviet Legacy.” Naval
War College Review 67, No. 1 (Winter 2013): 71, 73-74, 77, 79-80.
[iv]
See 1. Jonathan F. Solomon. “Maritime Deception and Concealment: Concepts for
Defeating Wide-Area Oceanic Surveillance-Reconnaissance-Strike Networks.” Naval War College Review 66, No. 4
(Autumn 2013): 88-94; 2. Norman Friedman. Seapower
and Space: From the Dawn of the Missile Age to Net-Centric Warfare.
(Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2000), 365-366.
[v]
Solomon, “Defending the Fleet,” 94-96.
[vi]
Solomon, “Maritime Deception and Concealment,” 95.
No comments:
Post a Comment