Adapting Warfare to Social and Technological Change

Some Tentative Thoughts

Bob McDaniel

Full Impact of Information Revolution Yet to Come

• Electrification did not raise productivity until the structure of factories changed.

• Information Revolution’s primary impact will come only after other fundamental organizational changes.

• We have not yet used technology to change our essential relationship to machines, but only to perform more efficiently existing processes.

Steam to Electricity• Old system designed to reduce friction:

machines were grouped around a prime mover (steam engine) - power transmitted by belts, gears and axles.

• New system: each machine has its own power source and, in order to facilitate the flow of production, machines laid out in most efficient manner to achieve that end.

Sundering of the Nation-State

• World is organizing itself into a series of interconnected networks.

• Simultaneously, nation states find themselves torn in two directions - upward toward international security, trade, and social organizations and downward by subnational movements that want to splinter the state.

Emergence of the Small• Empowerment of the individual -

entrepreneurship, free agency• Downsizing, outsourcing, networking of

businesses• Growth of regional and cultural consciousness• Biotechnology - the Genome Project• Nanotechnology - nanomachines• Non-linear complex systems and the significance

of small events (tipping points or "points of singularity")

The implication for small armed forces, such as Canada's, is that a technologically capable force is now a real possibility.

Large/Few vs. Small/Many• In time, the large, the complex, and the few will have to

yield to the small and the many.

• Systems composed of millions of sensors, emitters, microbots, and miniprojectiles, will, in concert, be able to detect, track, target, and land a weapon on any military object large enough to carry a human.

• Analysts talk about the mesh, a system of systems including not only links between people and computers, but also weapons systems, aeroplanes, remote cameras, automated factories and warehouses, intelligent buildings, hospitals, weather stations, satellites, and so on.

Parallel with the Economy• First was the Agrarian Revolution.

• Then followed the Industrial Revolution with mass production and mass warfare.

• If we are now in the process of transforming the way we create wealth, from the industrial to the informational, there is a parallel change taking place with warfare.

• It is logical to assume the fourth generation of war will also take its shape from society.

• Fourth-generation warfare is highly irregular. "Asymmetric" operations — in which a vast mismatch exists between the resources and philosophies of the combatants. Many small firms can outdo the giants through their agility.

• Emphasis is on bypassing an opposing military force and striking directly at cultural, political, or population targets. Many businesses thrive by exploiting niches that the giants find difficult or costly to service.

• the implementation of ‘dominating manoeuvre’ by ‘agile’ military forces deployed on a ‘just-in-time’ basis parallels agile manufacturing and just-in-time production systems.

Paradigm Shift

Paradigm Shift = Machine ----->

(Top down

Design)

Organism

(Bottom up

Design)

Each cell "knows" what to do based on its context.

Mathematics and Change

MathematicsType of

Problem

War

OperationsEconomy

Geometry Line/Area

Tactics of

line and

column

Agriculture

Calculus DynamicsMassed

firepower

Industrial

(Steam)

Matrix

Algebra

Complex

LinearManoeuvre

Assembly

Line

Fractals

Chaos

Complex

Non-Linear

Swarming E-Commerce

Chaos Wars

If you look around the world today, you can list approximately 51 significant conflicts going on somewhere at any given time. US military forces are active in about five places. But big conflict, big war seems to be a thing of the past. Are we in a new era of lots of persistent low-level conflicts, what could be called the "era of chaos wars"?

Why Canadian Forces Excel

Tuesday November 27, 2001The Guardian

"What we are looking at is chaos and ambiguity," says Air Vice-Marshal Brian Burridge, describing what senior officers in the military face in a world of low-intensity warfare and collapsed states. It is their responsibility to see that those who will be called upon to command in these circumstances are able to cope.

Comments about the Canadian Military

From A Soviet Document: "One of the serious problems in planning against Canadian doctrine is that the Canadians do not read their manuals nor do they feel any obligation to follow their doctrine."

A German General Officer: "The reason that the Canadian Army does well in wartime, is that war is chaos, and the Canadian Army practises chaos on a daily basis."

Anonymous 1st Canadian Division Staff Officer: "If we don't know what we are doing, the enemy certainly can't anticipate our future actions!"

The Mesh• Combat requires doing two things: finding targets

and hitting them (while avoiding the same fate).

• PGMs allow their possessors to hit most anything.

• Tomorrow's meshes will allow their possessors to find anything worth hitting. Every trend in information technology favours the ability to collect more and more data about a battlefield, knitting a finer and finer mesh which can catch smaller and stealthier objects.

Dominant InfoAge Social Structure is the Network

• Exploration of emergent social structures leads to an overarching conclusion: dominant functions and processes in the information age are increasingly organized around networks.

• New information technology paradigm provides material basis for network's pervasive expansion throughout the entire social structure.

Hierarchy to Network

Evolution of Street Gangs

Local International Global

1st Generation 2nd Generation 3rd Generation

Turf Gang Drug Gang Mercenary Gang

Turf ProtectiveMarket

Penetration

Power/FinancialAcquis

ition

Proto-NetWarrior

Emerging NetWarrior

NetWarrior

Citizen Activists• Ordinary citizens have used the handheld video

camera, the telephone, the fax and other communications technologies to make their causes known: Philippines, South Africa, Zapatistas, ban landmines movement.

• Anti-WTO activists in Seattle were systematic, well-organized and well-funded. Using modern communications, including the Internet, they were able to execute simultaneous actions by means of pulsing and swarming tactics coordinated by networked and leaderless "affinity groups".

Empowering Disparate Groups

• A new generation of communications satellites will inexpensively link virtually every part of the globe. Importantly, one report noted that for "disadvantaged regions of the world . . . The coming satellite communications revolution could be one of those rare technological events that enable traditional societies to leap ahead."

Decline in Distinction Between Military and Civilian

The distinction between war and peace will be blurred to the vanishing point. It will be nonlinear, possibly to the point of having no definable battlefields or fronts. The distinction between "civilian" and "military" may disappear.

Civilian/Police Counter-Terrorism• Los Angeles has set up a Terrorism Early Warning

Group (TEW), a hybrid organization blending networked organizational features with traditional government structures: law enforcement, fire services and health authorities at all levels of government.

• TEW serves as a mechanism for monitoring terrorist trends and potentials, and rapidly disseminating alerts and warnings.

• TEW uses an "intelligence toolbox" consisting of virtual reachback to technological specialists and advanced methodologies to help project consequences.

A New Mode of Conflict• Cyberwar means operating in small, dispersed

units, so well internetted that they can coordinate, coalesce, and then disperse again in repeated swarming attacks.

• Initially, light ground units infiltrate and take up dispersed positions. As areas cleared, helicopter insertions made more frequently.

• Units may then act as scouts and guides (sensors), calling in accurate air, artillery and missile fire on multiple targets.

Ever since the end of the Cold War Western forces have lagged in developing the correct military response to 4GW—a response that calls for reliance on smaller units versed in manoeuvre warfare. This kind of fighting eschews heavy firepower, attrition, and long-range, high-altitude bombardment. It favours joint-service operations and close-quarters combat involving small, fast-moving units with lighter equipment.

In tactical terms, this means coordinating intelligence on a global scale. It means rapier thrusts against 4GW bases and cells, slicing up the networks linking the cells, and taking out the fanatics who supply the brains and the resources to conduct this kind of indiscriminate warfare. Because the nation-state no longer holds a monopoly on destructive force, a most important change in how 4GW is confronted is to henceforth ordain that the sanctuary of "national sovereignty" is no longer sacrosanct, can no longer be honoured when employed as a facade for sheltering, endorsing and provisioning non- national 4GW assets and formations. As in any conflict, the military task must be to disarm the enemy and neutralize his offensive capability, employing the weapons and tactics appropriate for the task.

To understand the potential shape of the fourth generation of war, we must look at the political, economic, and social changes in society as well as the changes in technology since the advent of the third generation of war.

Politically the world has undergone vast changes. The third generation of war developed when international relations were defined in terms of the European nation states that dominated them. In contrast, the fourth generation of war is coming of age during a period of exponential increase in the number and type of players on the international scene.

Emergence of Netwar

• Conflicts will increasingly be "netwars" or clashes involving networks rather than traditional, hierarchical adversaries.

Network of 9/11 Hijackers

Frequency Distribution of Links

Log/Log Graph of HiJacker Net

Network Analysis1

2

3

4 5

1

1

2

2

3

3

4

4

5

5

1

1

1

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Bombnet is a group of social network analysts studying the structure and potential vulnerabilities of terrorist networks.

Netwar vs. CyberwarNetwar - focuses on new processes enabled by technology (Networks: Nodes/Links)

Cyberwar - technologizes present structures.

• Cyberwar is concerned with traditional military aspects like Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence, also called C3I.

• Netwar refers to information-related conflict at a grand level between nations and societies.

The Evolution of Flows and Forces

• Melée — the primeval state of war with no discernible organization, no need for C2, and no technologies beyond the visual and the aural acuity of the combatants. Aerial dogfights in both World Wars are examples.

• Massing — where written messages and primitive signaling enabled a hierarchically organized central authority to command and to control dispersed mass forces, achieving maximum shock and firepower. These tactics were last seen in attrition war on the linear battlegrounds of World War I, World War II, and in Korea.

• Manoeuvre — exploiting electronic communication

and sensing technologies for command and control of complex, synchronized, multilinear operations that surprised, penetrated and flanked, and focused on the decisive point. These have been described as two-way technologies that turned armed forces into sensing as well as fighting units and were most recently seen as AirLand doctrine in operation Desert Storm.

• Swarming — "a seemingly amorphous, but deliberately structured, coordinated, strategic way to perform military strikes from all directions … sustainable pulsing of force or fire … from a myriad of small, dispersed, networked manoeuvre units", and where information and sensing technologies empower lower level units to function more effectively without hierarchical command levels.

Swarming

It will work best — perhaps it will only work — if it is designed mainly around the deployment of myriad, small, dispersed, networked manoeuvre units (called "pods" organized in "clusters").

Swarming can be conceptually broken into four stages: locate, converge, attack, and disperse.

Swarming forces must be capable of sustainable pulsing: Swarm networks must be able to come together rapidly and stealthily on a target, then redisperse and be able to recombine for a new pulse.

It is important that swarm units converge and attack simultaneously. Each individual swarm unit (pod) is vulnerable on its own, but if united with other friendly units, overall lethality can be multiplied, because the phenomenon of the swarm effect is greater than the sum of its parts.

Tactics of Swarming

Swarming + PGMs• Vulnerability of massed formations on the ground to

airpower and WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction), makes the Dispersed Swarm manoeuvre more appropriate for the future.

• Swarm units can use indirect standoff weapons (both organic - carried on their persons - and nonorganic - a remote asset that has to be called to) such as missile-launched "smart" munitions or offshore naval platforms deep in the rear.

• Shift from direct-fire to indirect-fire weapons will improve the mobility of the individual unit on the ground and reduce its signature.

Some Recent Examples

• The al Qaeda network recognizes the effectiveness of swarming. It exploits the nonlinear nature of the battle space and sees the value of attacking from multiple directions with dispersed units.

• Small bands of widely distributed Kosovo Liberation Army fighters and, to a lesser extent, allied special forces, provoked the Serbs to manoeuvre and fire, instantly making them vulnerable to being attacked from the air.

BattleSwarm

• Cyber/netwar means operating in small, dispersed units, so well internetted that they can coordinate, coalesce and then dissever in repeated swarming attacks.

• In order effectively to disorganize enemy forces, it would require mobilizing - and deploying in "BattleSwarm" - a force only one tenth the size of the enemy forces.

• In a hierarchy, people are defined by the boxes they fill on the organizational chart. In a network, people change their roles depending on the situation.

• Future armed forces look like hordes of cyber-Mongols.

• Arrayed not in platoons or battalions but in "clusters" and "pods."

• Call in airstrikes and direct cruise missiles remotely.

• Infiltrating the landscape in copters and off-road buggies, they float like butterflies but sting like sledgehammers.

Offensive Swarming

Swarming Attack Pattern

Chaos

(Hidden Order)

Maelstrom

(Pattern Recognition)

“Ride the Wave”

Break Off & Reorganize

Situational Awareness

System

From Mars to Minerva• RAND Corporation researchers Arquilla and Ronfeldt

describe information as a physical property, on a par with matter and energy.

• Derive a new conception of power, and therefore of war. Instead of being based on material resources, from now on power resides in relations between people, and thus in organization. From the brute power of the god Mars we are passing to Minerva, the goddess of wisdom.

• Shift from war based on mutual capacities for destruction, to war in which the capacity for disruption, or dis-organization, assumes equal importance.

• Researchers distinguish four levels of what they call their

"vision".

• At the conceptual level, information gives form to structure.

• A major consequence of the information revolution - the rise of network forms of organization.

• The core of their military doctrine is the notion of "BattleSwarm". With each combatant in contact with all others, and unit commanders communicating with air force commanders and with other units it should be possible to employ fewer personnel with greater effectiveness.

• The overall strategy is what may be called "guarded openness". The free circulation of information serves the interests of the Allies and victory in tomorrow's wars will go to those who can tell the best story. It will be a dirty, no-holds-barred propaganda war of competing worldviews and alternative visions of the future (Meme Wars).

Power of Mind

• Military power resides in the domain of the mind and the will: thinking, valuing or attitude, and insight or imagination.

• Military power can increase in effectiveness even as it decreases in violence.

• May be called neocortical warfare.

Telematic LawsMoore's law states that microprocessor chips will either halve in price or double in power every 18 months.

Gilder's law states that total bandwidth of communications systems will triple every 12 months.

Metcalfe's law explains, in global constellations such as the Internet, the value of the network increases geometrically with the number of people who use it.

Grosch's law held that doubling the cost of a computer multiplied its power fourfold. Since then, the cost- performance ratio of computers has flipped; it is greater at the lower end than the upper end. Microprocessors deliver more mips (million instructions per second) for the buck than their more sophisticated mainframe or even supercomputer rivals.

Tactical Command, Control and Communication Systems

(TCCCS)

Athene

IRIS -- [Battalion]

Situation Awareness System

Athene - Command & Control at the battalion and above level for use in harsh combat conditions.

SAS- situational awareness system displays battlefield information in real time at the Battalion Battle Group and below level.

Situational Awareness System

• Enables the battlefield commander to track and direct all his assets in near real-time, using global positioning satellites (GPS).

• Instantaneous moving map manipulation and display on a theatre-wide scale.

• Detailed maps are scanned and stored.• Boosts by a factor of up to 25 times the amount

of geographic information available to today's soldier on the battlefield.

Digital Mapping

• Enables commanders and planners to view maps at the exact scale and level of detail most appropriate to the task being considered.

• Geographic Information Systems (GIS) capabilities allow the latest physical and objective data to be overlaid, together with dispositions of own and opposition resources.

• Transmit map data to operational units for local production, on-screen viewing.

Head Mounted Display

The helmet HUD (heads-up display) allows maps to be displayed with relative positions of pod mates, or three-dimensional layouts to be superimposed in their field of vision. Such wearable computers link together components such as a radio system, a rifle-mounted video camera and thermal sight, and GPS.

battleWEB Vehicle

Tactical Infosphere

• Tactical infosphere is a term for information on demand, or information pull as opposed to push.

• SAS and Athene programmes designed to provide a portion of the information required to fill the infosphere.

• Almost every Canadian tactical vehicle and selected soldiers on foot will be part of the continuously updated database.

• In the future, enemy locations may be entered by sensors, including soldiers, and passed automatically throughout the system.

• Disparate pieces of information must be integrated into a cohesive system.

• Involves pulling different types of sensor information into this infosphere, processing this information in different places, transporting it and presenting it in a manner that permits a commander to make an intelligent decision based on the data.

Real-Time Warfare

• Knowledge army does not require co-location of cells to plan, direct and monitor the progress of operations.

• Complete sharing of available information and using the information-pull principle means that up-to-date information is being added to the infosphere continually.

• Commander and his staff will be separated geographically so they are in the location that best supports their individual functions.

• Video conferencing and electronic white boarding will enable these virtual CPs to operate in real-time.

Virtual Reality Training for War

• Modified version of the popular game "Doom" enables troops to interact and practise fairly realistic small unit tactics and fireteam drills.

• Computer simulator makers have developed workstations that allow company, battalion, brigade, and even division level officers to practise large unit engagement techniques in realistic virtual circumstances.

• Develop interactive skills that are useful in practising modern "Air-Land-Battle" doctrine, that is needed in today's extremely fluid battlefield environment.

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Computing• By linking together hundreds of soldiers, each

equipped with a head-mounted display that broadcasts details of a virtual environment, it would be possible for military units to accurately simulate various scenarios.

• Section/pod could virtually practise an attack while out in the field, before carrying it out for real. "Your training system suddenly becomes your mission-planning system. Before I go attack that hill. I'm going to run a simulation of it with my squad over the next 10 minutes, and simulate it virtually while we're waiting here for orders."

Information Warfare

• "Info War" is not the same as intelligence operations, although it is clearly related to intelligence.

• An attack on an adversary’s entire information, command and control, and, indeed, decision-making system.

• Directed at shrinking or interfering with the enemy’s Observe, Orient, Decide, Act (OODA) loop while expanding and improving our own.

• Planners describe the objective of information war as "information dominance."

There are 7 different forms of Information Warfare:

(i) command-and-control warfare (which strikes against the enemy's head and neck), (ii) intelligence-based warfare (which consists of the design, protection, and denial of systems that seek sufficient knowledge to dominate the battlespace), (iii) electronic warfare (radio- electronic or cryptographic techniques), (iv) psychological warfare (in which information is used to change the minds of friends, neutrals, and foes), (v) "hacker" warfare (in which computer systems are attacked), (vi) economic information warfare (blocking information or channelling it to pursue economic dominance), and (vii) cyberwarfare (a grab bag of futuristic scenarios). All these forms are weakly related.

Distributed Intelligence

• Most of the recent benefits of information technology are going, not into more powerful computers, but into more widely distributed intelligence.

• Computers can be slaved to sensors and networked.

Role of Unattended Sensors

• Unattended sensors in a future theatre of operation detect enemy movements, identify and locate targets, and feed that information via unmanned aerial vehicle communications network nodes to the command centre.

• Commanders collate their data with other information from space and Allied-based sources, then signal unattended battlefield and airborne weapons to launch against enemy assets.

• “Precision weapons without current, precise knowledge of target locations are pretty useless.” Sandia advocates networking small gadgets that might package a global positioning locator, sensor, RF communicator, and a small computer. These relatively inexpensive devices would be widely distributed and in contact with each other to give a comprehensive picture of enemy movements.

• A fractal approach — small patterns that repeat larger patterns — to integrating security will help autonomous groups integrate data currently in separate boxes. Targeted groups include law enforcement, intelligence, public health, first responders, scene commanders, local governments, and private citizens.

Information on Demand

The military is seeking ways to help soldiers on the ground in places such as Afghanistan get information faster. The idea is to let them establish ad hoc computer connections with forces, say, inside helicopters in Uzbekistan, or with officers back home and even with allies abroad, without getting bogged down in multiple security levels and incompatible software systems.

Rapid Prototyping: Parts on Demand

• Today armies depend on pre-positioned supplies or a gigantic logistics tail to provide, say, spare helicopter parts.

• Future armies, relying on advanced computing and "rapid prototyping," will before long be able to make many needed items on the spot. The technology can build objects of any desired shape out of metal, paper, plastic, or ceramics, according to instructions transmitted from data bases thousands of miles away.

• This will reduce the need for permanent foreign bases or supply depots.

Grid Technology• Related to Rapid Prototyping will be the widespread

implementation of Internet2 technology, enabling computer users to order computing power from the grid.

• Super-high-bandwidth Internet2 and readily available

supercomputing power promises to deliver applications like streamed high-definition video, telemedicine, research collaboration, and distance learning.

• This will facilitate "reachback", the remote contacting of any information source, civilian or military, from the battlefield.

Platform-Centric vs. Net-Centric

There is a parallel in the way Western forces fight battles today and the way computing worked in the 1980s. Just as you and your friend worked on incompatible operating systems and software, the military operates on independent weapons platforms. Carrier groups are platforms, as are Leopard tanks and F-18 aircraft, each operating with their own standards. And just as you and your friend wasted time trying to coordinate your different platforms, military experiments have found that platform-centric warfare takes twice as long to destroy 50 percent fewer targets than does network-centric warfare.

Net-Centric Warfare

Value of Netcentricity

• Allows for vast global connectivity, real-time collaboration, and rapid and convenient information exchange.

• It has produced a significant byproduct as well - reduced costs. Moving information is far less costly than moving people and things.

• For the individual networked soldier the numerous elements of support: weapons, intelligence, medical services, etc. may be viewed simply as peripherals, to be contacted instantaneously as required.

Netcentricity has allowed companies to downsize while simultaneously increasing productivity. For example, FedEx's PowerShip customer tracking software boosted both customer volume and satisfaction while allowing for an 80-percent reduction in customer service representatives.

For the military, the promise of being able to mass effects rather than forces, to leave people and machines where they are, and to create smaller, in-theatre footprints, are just a few of the benefits to be derived from its version of netcentricity: Net-Centric Warfare (NCW).

NCW describes how the military will organize and fight in the Information Age. By networking sensors, decision makers, and shooters, a shared awareness is created, which enables faster decision-making, higher tempo operations, greater lethality, increased survivability, and self-synchronization. And because NCW promises a better distribution of resources to tasks than was possible in the past, operations, which may have been impossible under a traditional warfare model, might become feasible in the future.

New Weapons and Countermeasures

• Precision-Guided Munitions (PGMs)• Non-Lethal Weapons• Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles• Stealth Technology• Anti-Ballistic Missile System• Bluetooth and Networking of Sensing Devices• Space Technology

New Infantry Weapon

• Removable top barrel hurls 20mm high-explosive air-bursting fragmentation rounds more than a half-mile. The lower barrel shoots NATO-standard 5.56mm ammunition. These rounds provide accurate single-round or bursts to about 500 yards. Laser-guided electronics as sophisticated as on a modern tank.

Lasers of Lead• Australian inventor Mike O'Dwyer has developed a machine

gun that can fire bullets at a rate of 1 million rounds per minute.

• Rather than use mechanical firing pins to shoot bullets one by one, O'Dwyer's gun holds multiple bullets in the barrel -- one behind the other.

• Electronic charges set off in different parts of the barrel, just fractions of a second apart, fire the bullets in fast succession using traditional gunpowder.

• The all-electronic handgun uses the technology to ensure the gun can only be fired if its user is wearing a special ring that emits an electronic signal. This means the gun would be worthless if it is taken from a policeman or soldier by an assailant.

Counter-Network NetworksTaking a cue from LA's TEW we might envision the following elements in a military network to fight adversary networks:

A network of modules (pods) each comprised of experts covering all levels of expertise. Individual experts/soldiers in contact with relevant contacts anywhere in the network.

Virtual reachback to experts in business, government and academia in realtime.

Group software enables pods and individuals to collaborate on plans and actions when responding to threats.

A Role for NGOs

• Another way to boost the quality and quantity of intelligence is to cultivate more of an open source model - by including nongovernmental organizations, like Amnesty International, in the network.

• This will make it possible to draw on the knowledge of activist groups already engaged in waging social netwars around the world.

• Adding NGOs to a sensory network will also help develop loyalty to a cause. The al Qaeda network draws its strength from the tight religious and kinship bonds among its members. To be effective, the Allies' counternetwork will need to have its own binding, democracy-driven value system.

Books on Networks