Omniscient, Impregnable Ocean Surveillance Systems?

Pretty much every time the topic of the aircraft carrier’s future combat viability comes up, or the general viability of surface fleet operations within a contested zone for that matter, we hear arguments that potential adversaries’ surveillance systems will assuredly turn the waters they monitor into graveyards for American and allied warships. Sensors are becoming too sensitive and ubiquitous, we’re told. Data fusion hardware and software are becoming so powerful that platforms—especially large ones—will soon no longer be able to hide amidst the ‘background noise,’ we’re warned. Efforts to disrupt an adversary’s situational picture will demand cyber-penetration of his surveillance/reconnaissance networks, we’re admonished. Perhaps the boldest claim, often made implicitly, is that the quality of the adversary’s situational picture will remain pristine as a conflict wears on. And so on. I may be paraphrasing these arguments, but I am not exaggerating what has sometimes been asserted.

Now, I fully agree that the challenge posed by advancing sensor, data fusion, and networking technologies is severe. The threat is real and growing; much effort in countermeasure development and procurement, doctrine and tactics development, and force-wide training will be necessary if we are to respond effectively. There are two serious common flaws in all of the above arguments, though.

First, they are essentially asserting that maritime surveillance/reconnaissance ‘systems of systems’ are virtually omniscient and impregnable. If that is indeed true, then I must commend our potential adversaries on developing the first flawless sensing, communications, and human decision-making systems in history. Somehow I doubt they’ve reached such a milestone.

Second, they attribute capabilities to potential adversaries’ surveillance systems, skills to those systems’ operators, and genius to those operators’ commanders without acknowledging that the very same capabilities, skills, and genius can be present on our side as well. Physics doesn’t pay attention to national flags. Nor does human psychology amidst war’s fog and friction.

Just because the technical, tactical, and operational difficulties of overcoming advanced wide-area surveillance systems—and the humans who use them—would be considerable most assuredly does NOT mean that it could not be done when needed. One of the constant themes in my writings has been to point out the things the U.S. Navy did during the Cold War against a then-state-of-the-art ocean surveillance system and a highly intelligent opponent. Again, while sensor, processor, and communications technologies have advanced, so have the technologies and techniques available for use as countermeasures. It’s part of the never-ending, iterative struggle between offense and defense, scouting and anti-scouting. This struggle is as old as war itself. Sometimes offense or the scout possesses the upper-hand, and at some point thereafter it is captured by the defense or the anti-scout. The switching of who holds the advantage can take place extraordinarily quickly; one should read Martin Bollinger’s excellent book on the WWII competition between German radio-controlled glide bomb developers and allied Electronic Warfare (EW) countermeasure developers, Warriors and Wizards, to see how this occurred in practice. Likewise, one should read Norman Friedman’s seminal explorations of the Cold War competition between Soviet maritime scouting and U.S. Navy anti-scouting. While it is true that these U.S. Navy capabilities were never tested in war against the Soviets, the very same is true about the Soviets' capabilities.

I fully agree that we mustn’t assume anything about our abilities at any given point in time to degrade any particular potential adversary’s surveillance/reconnaissance picture. I also recognize that there are likely to be some key doctrinal or decision-making process differences between how the Soviet Ocean Surveillance System operated and how our contemporary potential adversaries’ ocean surveillance systems operate. Nevertheless, I vehemently disagree with crediting our potential adversaries with abilities to track and target our forces seamlessly while outright denying us any possibilities for disrupting or degrading that coverage. After all, the underlying technologies, tactical principles, and physics/psychology-based exploitable vulnerabilities are largely available to both sides.

As for the assumption that we need to cyber-penetrate adversary networks if we are to handicap them, well, that neglects the many possibilities of messing with their situational pictures more directly. Restoration of our Cold War-era ability to conduct complex tasks, including protracted carrier air operations, under highly restrictive Emissions Control conditions. Conduct electronic or kinetic attacks as possible to disrupt, distract, or destroy their sensors and electromagnetic/acoustic data relay paths located on, under, or over the ocean. Use less-valuable platforms to simulate more valuable platforms. Saturate their picture with real contacts, of which only a few are the platforms requiring protection. Overwhelm them with multiple lines of operations, of which only one or two are ‘real’ and the others feints or demonstrations. Induce them to prematurely burn up their limited inventories of their longest-range weapon systems. Show them something they expect to see, and then exploit their reactions. Many combinations of these options can be tailored to meet a particular situation.

Yes, adversary systems can have strong counter-countermeasures. No system is perfect, however, and sometimes the best counter-surveillance and counter-targeting measures are more psychological than technological. It is terrific when we possess enough intelligence on the inner workings of some threat system to blind or deceive it through our clever countervailing use of technology. That said, blinding and deception can be accomplished with just as much impact by presenting the adversary with a misleading ‘picture’ consisting of actual platforms, emissions, and the like to distract him, confuse him, or perhaps even impel him to take actions we can exploit.

It needs to be appreciated that the ocean surveillance systems under discussion are a threat to any naval combatant, not just aircraft carriers. Even U.S. submarines will face an undersea equivalent—albeit with less area under effective surveillance—in the future. These systems must be suppressed, deceived, or attrited, whether temporarily or permanently, if naval operations within a given segment of a contested zone are to be conducted at a tolerable level of risk and with a tolerable allowance for damaged or lost platforms.

It follows that the sequence of operations in a campaign, and the overall design of that campaign, will matter immensely. Why does a carrier (or any other surface platform with medium to high campaign-value) have to ‘go downtown’ immediately at the start of a conflict? We certainly didn’t do that in the Second World War; our prewar plans eventually came to rule out such a high-risk “through-ticket” approach. Despite many assumptions then and now to the contrary, even the Maritime Strategy of the 1980s didn’t demand surface operations that far forward early in a Soviet-American war. If we want to telegraph to a contemporary potential adversary that any conflict would assuredly not be short, cheap, or low-risk, perhaps designing operating concepts that have a strong chance of ensuring conflict protraction would be best for strengthening our conventional deterrence credibility? The beauty of having many combat arms across our four services—not to mention those of our ‘frontline’ allies who would be inherent parties to many of the highest-danger future conflicts we face—is that it creates campaign design options. The successful use of precursor or parallel operations to pave the way for temporary localized U.S. scouting/anti-scouting superiority in a main operation or its successor operations is quite possible even in a major peer-level conflict.

The bottom line is that we have access to a much larger toolbox than many are willing to acknowledge. I am not arguing that deception and concealment are silver bullets that can assuredly shield our forces under all circumstances. Hardly so; like any of the other tools for gaining operational access, they could fail in action. I certainly wouldn’t build a strategy, campaign plan, or operating concept around an assumption that our deception and concealment efforts would be successful. However, when their intelligent use is balanced with imaginatively-structured operations rooted in calculated risk (including the design of branching actions that account for failed counter-surveillance), and with a LOT of training and discipline, a LOT of options and opportunities open up. In fact, some potential adversaries’ network-dependent architectures and C² doctrine for performing maritime denial tasks are just as—if not more—vulnerable to what I’ve outlined than our force-level networking architectures and C² doctrine are…or have to be. Operations on interior lines of networking combined with decentralized C² doctrine that embraces command-by-negation are simply essential to us in that regard.

We learned to do counter-surveillance and counter-targeting extremely well during the Cold War. I don’t see why we can’t—with the requisite focus and investments—get back to that level. I believe that the debates over future naval force architecture and doctrine, not to mention theater strategy in general, need to better address these questions. Reasonable people can disagree with the arguments I've made, but I would welcome counterarguments that are rooted in theory, historical case studies, or empirical assessments of surveillance and countersurveillance technologies' inherent capabilities AND limitations. It's time to stop overlooking ‘the dark arts,’ or otherwise dismissing them out of hand. It's time to stop unquestioningly awarding our potential adversaries an invincible degree of surveillance dominance on paper.

The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and are presented in his personal capacity. They do not reflect the official positions of Systems Planning and Analysis, and to the author’s knowledge do not reflect the policies or positions of the U.S. Department of Defense, any U.S. armed service, or any other U.S. Government agency.