Networking in an Uncertain World

The events of September the 11th 2001 have brought home for all of us what we have already known for some time but never squarely faced: war in the future is not likely to be played in anything like the way it was played in the past. If, before last September, we could talk about the significant changes in the strategic environment but do little about it, now we must seriously focus on the consequences of that change. This article intends to explore those consequences as they pertain to Network Centric Warfare.To understand the difference between the two types of war, the one we have been fighting for many years in the past and the one we may be forced to fight in future, we must start from the very beginning. Since everything in the theory of war appears to start with Clausewitz, we shall consult his views on the matter. According to him, the aim of warfare is to make the enemy comply with our will. Since in general the enemy has no wish to comply voluntarily, we must force him to do so against his will. The only way to accomplish that, is to render the alternative more painful to him by comparison. Individual examples to the contrary notwithstanding, there are only two things humans cherish more than their ability to be free of foreign imposition: life and property. Consequently, we must endanger these if we want him to comply with our will. History knows of only one way of doing so, employment of a military machine designed to kill people and destroy property.

If unopposed, a military machine so designed would control the enemy’s behaviour by destroying enough people and property to overcome his determination to resist our will. Should it be possible to make the consequences of their resistance clear to the enemy beforehand, we might even be able to accomplish our goal merely by credibly threatening to destroy enemy life and property. Historic examples of this can be found in the many occasions when cities opened their gates to an invading army whose reputation for destruction preceded his arrival.

The same is hardly true, however, if the enemy has a military machine of its own to oppose ours. He could use his machine to do two things: reduce the capacity of our machine to mete out the destructive power that it would otherwise be able to do, or press his own power until the alternatives to war begin to look more attractive to us. In either case, the centre of our attention will then shift from destruction of life and property to disarming the enemy war machine. In fact, warfare evolved to the point where it is no longer thought acceptable to conduct military operations directed at civilians, at least in the civilized world, anyway. Such operations, if undertaken, are called by other names than war, such as terrorism, atrocities, etc, each of which carries a strong negative connotation of immorality. The fact that some people are nevertheless killed by way of disarming the military machine of the enemy has been made palatable both by visibly distinguishing between civilians and military personnel and by recognizing the unpredictable nature of war.

Disarming, is a human act which has come to symbolize the formal submission of one side in a military conflict to the will of the other, much like animals submit to the more powerful specimen by engaging in certain rituals recognized by their kind as ways of stopping a conflict. As such, disarming does not occur until one side manages to bring the other side’s war machine to the point of inefficiency. This can be done in two ways: either one forces the enemy machine into a position from which it can no longer execute its function, or one reduces the machine’s power to function by destroying its components in detail. To do the former requires considerably more ingenuity than killing, to do the latter requires considerably more killing than ingenuity, although ingenuity as well as killing are involved in both. World War I is a particularly plastic illustration of war by attrition of the enemy’s war machine, while the swift German advance in the early days of World War II is a good example of how ingenuity can render the enemy war machine ineffectual.

In the more recent past, the Allies relied heavily on ingenuity as they fought the Soviet Union to a victory under the umbrella of nuclear deterrence. Although not always directly acknowledged, future American warfare plans rely more on killing than on strategic and tactical ingenuity. Given our recently acquired ability to destroy objects with exquisite precision, this is a matter of convenience and expediency. On the other hand, likely enemies rely more on tactical ingenuity than on killing because they can not hope to match us in our strength but can easily exploit our most conspicuous military vulnerabilities, such as our critical reliance on detailed tactical information, our relative immobility, and our lack of patience.

Now, in a war of attrition, the two sides oppose each other symmetrically, much like two caribou at mating time, horns locked in combat, pushing against each other, and, therefore, the stronger protagonist is favoured to win its confrontation with the weaker. In such a war, acquiring strength is, in and of itself, a most desirable thing to do. While ingenuity might enter at some point in the battle, strength is by far the most important element.

In an asymmetric war, where ingenuity becomes more important than killing, the stronger force does not necessarily win over the weaker one, and, therefore, strength is no longer a sufficient condition for winning. Avoiding direct confrontation with the stronger side, the weaker protagonist is likely to focus instead on exploiting the singular vulnerabilities of the stronger side.

With the advent of September the 11th, this “asymmetric” type of war, long reduced to a secondary place in the theory of war, appears to have replaced wars of attrition in importance. Our current enemies, being substantially less able to fight a war against us than the Warsaw Pact might have been before the end of the Cold War, have adopted an asymmetric model of war. Therefore, all decisions concerning the Alliance’s preparation for war should be re-examined in light of this fundamental shift in the type of war it is called upon to fight. In particular, the question of the desirability and nature of a networked force will have to be asked anew.

To set the stage, we suggest that the most reasonable inference to be drawn from the shift to an asymmetric type of war is that the Alliance should move away from the current emphasis on increasing its strength and towards an emphasis on decreasing the singular vulnerabilities characterizing that strength. A research and development program, for instance, would belong to this latter emphasis if it were aimed at eliminating an Achilles’ heel in the Alliance’s capability, but not if it were aimed at merely increasing the magnitude of that capability.

In the context of singular vulnerabilities, the word “vulnerability” is not used to mean, as it usually does, inability to fully defend oneself against being wounded; rather, it is used to describe the possibility that an enemy could, by virtue of his actions, render one’s capability impotent by severing that capability from its expected military effects. Clearly, vulnerability so construed, is a feature of military capability, not of system performance. A system in itself has no vulnerabilities, only shortfalls, and therefore improving system performance does not reduce vulnerability. The capability offered by a deployed system, on the other hand, does have singular vulnerabilities, namely the possibility that the operational assumptions about an enemy that one always makes when expecting capabilities to produce military effects on the battlefield, are not satisfied.

For instance, the widespread expectation that our strike capability will produce destruction among enemy forces, rests on the fundamental assumption that the enemy is available for detection. Consequently, if the enemy were to hide, much as al Qaeda had done in the caves of Afghanistan, our entire strike capability would come to naught; we could go on pounding the mountain sides until we either ran out of weapons or ran out of patience, whichever came first, but no enemy would thereby be killed, unless, of course, they were forced to come out and expose themselves to detection.

Trying to overcome this Achilles’ heel in our strike capability by increasing the detection and tracking performance of our radar system, either through buying better radars or through networking those we already have, would be a fool’s errand because this singular vulnerability, being a property of the tactical situation in which we embedded that system and not of the system itself, would continue to stand; there will be no kill-effects produced by our capability to kill as long as the enemy was allowed to hide.

The proper way to deal with this singular vulnerability is to find a means of forcing the enemy to come out and be detected. In the case described above, the means to forcing al Qaeda out of hiding turned out to be the Northern Alliance, which threatened to take over the country and proceed to hunt the caves. Caught between two complementary systems, the American fire on the one hand, and the Northern Alliance on the other, al Queda turned tail and ran into Pakistan.

The ultimate goal of an acquisition process designed to decrease singular vulnerabilities is therefore to generate a war machine whose capabilities offer no Achilles’ heel for an enemy to exploit, and to achieve that goal by acquiring systems that are complementary to those we already have. These complementary systems, when employed together with current systems, would ensure that fundamental assumptions underlying our natural expectation that capabilities will produce desired effects, will in fact be satisfied. This sharply contrasts with the ultimate goal of the acquisition process current in most nations, which is to generate systems that simply perform better than what they have now.

The introduction of the acquisition process mentioned above is not intended to be a sudden and complete switch from the acquisition process most nations use today, but rather a deliberate movement away from it. There are three distinct reasons for thus temporarily mixing the two acquisition processes. First of all, no institution can transform itself on a dime. Second, our military capability is not nearly as good as we like to think. Acquired, as it was, in a race to the finish with the Soviet Union, there was no time to develop most of our systems to the point of maximum efficiency and, consequently, we must maintain some measure of the old acquisition process to consolidate the capability we have acquired to date. Finally, our current military capabilities will service the Alliance for quite a number of years yet to come and, therefore, the acquisition system must see to it that those capabilities do not become obsolescent before it is time to retire them. To do that, the acquisition system can not completely abandon the current drive to increase capability even as it pursues a vulnerability-reduction program.

After having thus set the background for our inquiry, let us return to Network Centric Warfare. Assume for a minute that we accept the idea of combining the two acquisition processes described above as suggested by the fundamental changes brought about by the events of September the 11th. What does that say about Network Centric Warfare? It seems to us that it says two things. First, it says that we ought to focus less on the network itself and pay a lot more attention to the things we intend to connect through that network. Second, it says that we need to generalize the concept of network beyond the restricted sense of “hard connection between distinct systems” to include “bringing together in a coordinated manner” complementary concepts of operation and perhaps even complementary strategies.

Let us start our discussion of these two consequences with the first one. If, as we suggested before, complementary systems are to play any role in the way we deal with the Achilles’ heel in the Alliance’s capability, then the network must have room for these systems as well, and the focus of our research should include, in addition to building the actual network connections, the process of finding the complementary systems we intend to connect by that network. To illustrate the point, consider antisubmarine warfare.

During the Cold War, our antisubmarine warfare capability rested upon passive systems for detecting submerged submarines. These systems were designed to measure the amount of energy contained in the sound emitted by a submarine during its operation and then compare that energy to a predetermined threshold. The idea was that, if the measured energy exceeded the threshold, one would conclude that a submarine was the source of the received sound; otherwise, the received sound was declared to be nothing but noise.

The product provided by the ASW capability was actual detections of Soviet submarines; the corresponding operational effect we expected from that product, the ability to control the enemy submarine force. The Achilles’ heel separating the capability from the effect was the assumption we made for the longest time that the enemy submarine is noisy enough to allow for the long-range detections required to control his force. Since during most of the Cold War period Soviet submarines were indeed quite noisy, the enemy was in no position to exploit the singular vulnerability in our passive detection capability, and, therefore, that vulnerability remained largely unnoticed.

In the mid 1970s, however, the Soviets succeeded in making their submarines every bit as quiet as western submarines. Now, it happens that the range at which a submarine is detected gets shorter the quieter the target. Therefore, very quiet submarines become detectable only at very short ranges. But, at short ranges, sound propagates in such a manner that improvements in our passive processing would produce only diminishing returns in detection range. Consequently, the quieter the submarine the harder to compensate for lost detection range through improved passive acoustic processing. As a result, we lost our capability to survey the vast reaches of the world’s oceans. By thus exploiting the singular vulnerability in our detection capability, the Soviets rendered our ASW capability all but useless.

Confronted with a total collapse of our ASW capability, we were forced to look for ways of recovering the lost dominance by means other than passive acoustic detection. The first thing that came to mind was the development of active acoustic systems, the operation of which does not depend at all upon the disappearing passive energy. These systems would be complementary to our passive systems in that they could cover the circumstances when the passive capability was singularly vulnerable. Unfortunately, active systems have their own Achilles’ heel: their performance could easily be defeated by a submarine operating slow and shallow. The combination of passive and active acoustic detection capability would therefore not automatically translate into the operational effect of controlling the enemy submarine force.

To get there, we would have had to develop a new family of detection devices that perform well against slow, shallow submarines. Fortunately, such devices can actually be produced and are called nonacoustic detection systems. While nonacoustic systems perform poorly against submarines operating deep, they would be quite good against the shallow ones, no matter how slow they move. A combination of acoustic and nonacoustic systems would therefore provide the means to eliminate the singular vulnerability in our ASW capability by covering each other’s singular vulnerabilities.

The key point to take away from the ASW experience described here is that singular vulnerabilities ought to be eliminated, not by acquisition of improved versions of current systems, but by acquisition of complementary ones.

The second thing we asked of Network Centric Warfare in light of the asymmetric character we expect of future war, was that it be generalized beyond the restricted sense of hard-connecting systems, even if those systems included complementary sets. Specifically, it should bring together in a coordinated manner complementary concepts of operations and strategies as well. Consider the case of urban warfare operations as an example.

One of the most obvious Achilles’ heel at the operational level is our reluctance to generate significant collateral damage during a confrontation that does not touch directly upon the survival of the Alliance’s component nations. This singular vulnerability can easily be exploited by any adversary that, ill equipped to confront us directly, would seek asymmetric advantages. All he would have to do is hide his military assets amongst the indigenous population of his own cities. This kind of urban warfare confronted us in Iraq, where Saddam placed his air defence radars on top of hospitals, in Serbia, where we suffered the embarrassment of hitting the Chinese embassy by mistake, and has confronted Israel in Jenin, where Palestinian terrorist groups were hiding among the population while not engaged in acts of suicide bombing against innocent civilians in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and elsewhere in the West Bank.

This Achilles’ heel separates the capability to locate an adversary from the operational effect of destroying him. Complementary systems that would eliminate this singular vulnerability do not immediately leap to mind. In fact, all systems under consideration for inclusion in the network right now, are specialized spin-offs from current systems and are, therefore, not complementary to them. As we shall argue bellow, it is complementary concepts of operations rather than complementary systems that are required here.

To see how that comes about, let us re-phrase the lesson learned from the ASW example as follows: to eliminate a singular vulnerability we must confront the enemy with the dilemma of choosing between undesirable options. Thus, an enemy submarine that would avoid our active ASW capability by operating slow and shallow will have to contend with the equally powerful nonacoustic ASW capability we have deployed to simultaneously cover the same patch of ocean. On the other hand, an enemy submarine that would avoid our nonacoustic ASW capability by operating deep, would have to contend with our active ASW capability. Since there is no comfort deep and there is no comfort shallow, the enemy submarine must submit itself to the consequences of our ASW capability, or simply go away. He cannot exploit our vulnerability because there is an equally high price to pay no matter his choice.

Applying the same idea to urban warfare, suggests that we need to create conditions under which hiding in the city holds the same penalty to the enemy as not doing so. That can be done by networking, in the sense of implementing in a coordinated manner, two complementary concepts of operations: conventional strikes against the enemy when he is out of the city and unconventional operations aimed at getting him out of the city when he is in the city, either by offering him an irresistible target outside the city or by rendering any action taken by him from within the city ineffective. In other words, the enemy would have to abandon the city and suffer the full effect of our capability if he wanted to avoid becoming irrelevant.

We close this article by considering the War on Terror as an illustrative example of networking complementary strategies. The singular vulnerability that the terrorist organization al Qaeda is trying to exploit is our fundamental dedication to an open society and our essential dependence on a global economy. By doing so, they hope to sever our military capability from the effect they fear most, total destruction of their infrastructure as well as of their appeal throughout the Arab world.

It does not seem possible to eliminate these vulnerabilities either by activities at the tactical level, such as striking individual al Qaeda forces, or by activities at the operational level, such as enticing them into direct confrontation. What is needed here, we suggest, is a complementary strategy.

The main reason our pursuit of al Qaeda is war rather than law enforcement is the fact that it is an organized body with international reach. Consequently, the war on terror should be focused on destroying the organized character, which makes al Qaeda an international threat. The capabilities we bring to bear in this war are military, economic, diplomatic, and legal. We can arrest key figures in the organization, we can collaborate with other nations, in and out of the Alliance, to freeze al Qaeda’s financial assets, we can create diplomatic consensus for militarily dismantling governmental support for terrorism in countries sympathetic to it, and we can focus our respective homeland defences on controlling in-country movement of foreign nationals.

The effects we normally expect from these capabilities are systematic destruction of al Qaeda’s ability to network its operators. However, these effects will fail to materialize if the enemy can successfully exploit the singular vulnerabilities in our capabilities, both military and otherwise. The various Achilles’ heels all eventually come back to a common vulnerability, the national character of the nations comprising the free world, with their open societies, their reluctance to undertake unilateral military action, and their relatively short attention span. To exploit these singular vulnerabilities, the enemy need only keep below the military horizon of the Alliance by dispersing its activities as widely as possible while, at the same time, preserving some form of effective organization.

Since we are not inclined to drastically change who we are, the enemy’s attempt at exploiting our singular vulnerabilities can not be overcome by mere increases in current capabilities and operations; we can not realistically expect to close more borders, arrest larger number of people, provide financial inducement to more nations to attract them into coalition with us, give up our civil liberties, or unduly militarise our societies. Rather, we suggest, the Alliance should create a complementary strategy that would penalize al Qaeda for trying to exploit our singular vulnerabilities, a penalty every bit as painful as the concentrated confrontation with our military might which they are trying to avoid, and then network this complementary strategy with our conventional military, diplomatic, and economic strategies.

In essence, the idea is to find a strategy that would make it difficult for al Qaeda to organize itself while dispersed. Then, as it tries to avoid military confrontation by dispersing its forces, al Qaeda becomes less and less organized an thus more and more subject to local law enforcement action; alternatively, as it tries to avoid law enforcement action by concentrating forces beyond the latter’s ability to handle, al Qaeda becomes subject to military action. The certain knowledge of failure whether dispersed or not, might therefore begin to deter al Qaeda from terrorizing the western world.

Dr. Kaufman is a study director at the Institute for Defense Analyses in Washington, DC. Over the years he has worked on all aspects of naval warfare and is currently involved in studies of surface ship manning issues and of capabilities-based acquisition strategies.