Distributed Lethality in the Information Age

The following contribution is by LCDR DeVere Crooks, USN.

In our July Proceedings article “The Face of Battle in the Information Age,” LCDR Mateo Robertaccio and I argue that the US Navy must make a deliberate effort to understand the practical realities of naval combat in the Information Age. The Navy expends a large amount of resources developing and testing discrete capabilities, tactics, and plans of relatively limited scope. But we have made little effort to step back and understand what has (or hasn’t) changed about the basic conduct of naval warfare since our last real experience with it 70 years ago. We can never fully appreciate the realities of combat until it happens, but we can do a lot more to understand how the revolutionary improvements in information transport and the increasingly contested nature of the Electromagnetic (EM)-cyber domain will affect our units’ ability to observe, orient, decide, and act against a determined and capable opponent.

As a surface warfare officer, I’m very excited by the possibilities of the “Distributed Lethality” concept announced by my community’s leadership in January and the energetic discussion that has followed. A renewed offensive focus for the Surface Navy and a return to Surface Action Group (SAG) employment are logical choices given the challenges we are likely to face and the capability available today and in the near future. The aircraft carrier remains the premier platform for global power projection, but it is only one of several tools that will be required to attack and overwhelm a modern anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) system. Distributed groups of capable surface combatants can deliver much of the punch required for the “offensive sea control” that enables force projection ashore. (I borrow that term from another great piece on revitalizing surface capability by CSBA’s Bryan Clark).

But what will be the practical realities of employing and coordinating SAGs in a highly contested EM-cyber domain? Are we equipped to deal with the increased confusion and uncertainty we will likely face? What changes in capability, training, and basic warfighting mentality might be required to weather these complications so we can effectively employ our weapons and tactics?

Answering questions like these requires extensive resources and experimentation. I’m encouraged to see Commander, Naval Surface Forces (SURFOR) and the Naval War College undertaking a program of wargaming to better understand the operational, organizational, and logistical implications of the Distributed Lethality concept. However, though I am not privy to the design and content of those wargames, I wonder whether they will be able to really get at the ground-level (or sea-level?) tactical realities of operating a SAG on a battlefield that is aggressively contested in all domains, especially the EM-cyber. As Mateo and I conclude in our article, that sort of understanding can probably only be reached through live experimentation with extended, loosely structured “free-play” between units that are subjected to as many of the strictures of a modern battlefield as possible. I hope that as Distributed Lethality matures experimentation of this kind will be conducted and the lessons learned carefully studied and incorporated into doctrine, tactics, capability acquisition requirements, and the like.

In the meantime, however, there are a few areas of concern that are immediately obvious and bear further examination as the concept is developed. The first and perhaps most critical area is that of communications and Command-and-Control (C2) in a contested EM-cyber environment. The Navy has begun to appreciate some of the myriad complications such an environment will bring, but significant gaps almost certainly remain in our technical capability and our proficiency.

It is a fair premise that a capable adversary will likely achieve some measure of success in attacking our C2 and administrative networks. In the case of an independently operating SAG, this probably results in intra-group and/or external C2 and other communications becoming unreliable, intermittent, or even actively manipulated, possibly for extended periods and without final resolution. We have notional doctrinal answers to the problem of disrupted C2 in our ethos of decentralized execution and our oft-repeated belief in Mission Command, but doctrine is only valuable to the extent it is internalized and practiced. Most surface warfare officers have very limited experience operating under disrupted, limited, or intermittent C2, especially for extended periods. It is also likely that our massively developed dependence on off-ship networking for every manner of administrative, logistical, and technical support will become a significant liability in any sort of extended scenario. And this says nothing of the possibility that these emissions or the data contained in them might be used by an adversary to target our forces. This set of issues can be neatly summed up by the following statement: we do not yet accept the EM-cyber domain as one that will be continually contested by a capable adversary, just as the air, surface, and subsurface domains will be.

There are solutions—or at least remedies—to these problems, though. On the hardware front there are a variety of promising line-of-sight (LOS) and low probability of intercept (LPI) technologies that can be applied to the intra-SAG communications problem, as well as a number of feasible solutions such as one-way High Frequency broadcast or networks of unmanned high-altitude communications relay systems for aspects of the long-haul communications problem. And there are some very promising technical and organizational measures on the way to improve cyber awareness and resiliency Navy-wide. Lastly, the organic technical skill and awareness of the Surface Navy’s shipboard personnel can be improved and contested communications and C2 can be better normalized as a part of our training and operations.

Perhaps the best way to “build in” the reality of a contested EM-cyber domain is to develop a SAG Communications Concept that incorporates hardware, software, doctrinal, and procedural components. Such an integrated concept could better equip our SAGs from the ground up to handle the environment for which they are intended while still maintaining (or improving) existing capability to plug-and-play with carrier strike groups or other forces.

There are of course a huge number of other human and technical challenges inherent in developing the integrated warfighting capability that Distributed Lethality SAGs will deliver. Many of these are being capably addressed within the Surface Community and the wider Navy. But I would again ask, have we stepped back and sufficiently considered the basic nature of the battlefield and the differences from the past in how we will understand and interact with it? Answering this is a tall order, and as stated above only deliberate experimentation can reliably reveal where the gaps and unexpected complications are.

In this context of warfighting capability, though, the area that is on the surface most concerning is battlespace awareness. How do we ensure that shipboard decision makers will be able to recognize adversary EM-cyber effects and fight through them to find, fix, and finish the forces that are delivering them and/or supported by them? And, as Jon Solomon termed it in his series on Cold War EW here last fall, how do we “condition crews psychologically and tactically for the possibility of deception?” Important technical improvements that can help with these problems are being fielded over the next few years with systems like the Surface Electronic Warfare Improvement Program (SEWIP) and Ship’s Signals Exploitation Equipment (SSEE) Increment F. However, it is unclear whether we are ready to fully absorb these capabilities into our tactical procedures, or more importantly, our basic warfighting mentality. Will the electronic warfare operator continue to be a minor cast member with predictable lines in training scenarios, or will he or she become more appropriately a central node of information and weapons employment? Will much of the ship’s best information warfare capabilities continue to be hidden behind physical and figurative walls in the ship’s cryptologic space? Aside from changes in mentality and practice, what technical changes to our training and data sharing systems should be made to help transition these previously peripheral components of the shipboard—and group-level—warfighting organization to their rightful position at the center?

Overall, to truly sharpen the warfighting edge of the Surface Force we must carefully study all aspects of our readiness and capability, particularly as they relate to the ways in which naval warfighting has probably changed since WWII, or at least since the Cold War. It is also essential, though, that we do not forget those features of warfare that are timeless, such as uncertainty and confusion in the moment, or the certainty that a committed adversary will challenge us in ways we do not expect. As we develop this new concept and the capabilities that go with it, we must carefully experiment to test assumptions about how they will work in practice and look for gaps or things we didn’t expect. To be truly lethal, we have to understand the fight we’re preparing for as best we can and be confident that we’ve readied ourselves as much as possible

LCDR Crooks is a Surface Warfare Officer. 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 the U.S. Navy.