THOUGHTS ABOUT C4I SYSTEMS: July 2021

SITUATION

A brutal loss in a secret wargaming exercise October 2020 convinced the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. John Hyten to scrap the Joint Warfighting concept that had guided U.S. military operations for decades. It seemed that there were at least the following weaknesses in projecting the power:

Massing the force before deployment makes it vulnerable to far reaching and hypersonic missiles
Dependability of centralized connectivity and computing for information services handicaps the force if they lose the network
Transmitting in-the-air all time makes units detectable and identifiable through Electromagnetic surveillance measures
Long distances require over-air or over-seas transportation, which means that supply chains are vulnerable for asymmetric impacts
Massing of troops globally takes time and effort. US is operating along exterior lines compared to their competitors who have the interior advantage (Jomini).

“We always aggregate to fight, and aggregate to survive. But in today’s world, with hypersonic missiles, with significant long-range fires coming at us from all domains, if you're aggregated and everybody knows where you are, you're vulnerable,” Hyten said.

Source: https://twitter.com/warkin/status/1216778424552951808

REMEDY

In response, the Joint Chiefs have since October been shifting the U.S. military to a new concept of warfighting operations they call “Expanded Maneuver.” Hyten wants the U.S. military to be ready to fight under the new operating concept by 2030, using many of today’s weapons, aircraft, and ships.

Source: The U.S. Army in Multi-Domain Operations 2028

Earlier July 2021, Hyten released four directives to the services: one each for contested logistics; joint fires; Joint All-Domain Command and Control, or JADC2; and information advantage. On Monday, he revealed new details about these “functional battles”:

1. Contested logistics. Creating new ways to deliver fuel and supplies to front lines. U.S. Transportation Command and the Air Force are working on using rockets and a space trajectory to get large cargo spaceships into and out of battlefields.

AFRL will look at whether reusable commercial rockets that can carry up to 100 tons of cargo could be used to deliver gear to a conflict in an hour or less. The Air Force is also considering using the rockets for humanitarian missions and disaster relief.
AFRL will not develop its own rocket but use commercial rockets already in production. It will work with the Air Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center to determine how to configure and load shipping containers qualified for space flight.
The program would initially focus on port-to-port transfers of cargo but could one day include manned missions that rapidly inject troops into a battlespace, depending on what the commercial sector can create.

Source: Modern War Institute – System logistics in contested environment 2021

2. Joint fires through all domains: “You have to aggregate to mass fires, but it doesn't have to be a physical aggregation,” Hyten said. “It could be a virtual aggregation for multiple domains; acting at the same time under a single command structure allows the fires to come in on anybody. It allows you to disaggregate to survive.” Hyten said the joint fires concept “is aspirational. It is unbelievably difficult to do.” And the military will have to figure out what part will be affordable and practical, he said.

Source: Army Multi-Domain Operations Concept, December 2018.

The concept will call for every service to conduct long-range strikes. “In the future, there will be no lines on the battlefield. ... An Army capability can have on its own platform the ability to defend itself or the ability to strike deep into an adversary area of operations. A naval force can defend itself or strike deep. An air force can defend itself or strike deep. The Marines can defend itself or strike deep. ... Everybody.”
The concept will seamlessly integrate “fires from all domains, including space and cyber,” to overwhelm an enemy.
The concept might endorse the Army’s plan to buy 1,000-mile-plus, surface-to-surface missiles that cost millions of dollars each. Doing so would ignore analyses that have determined using large numbers of these weapons would be far more expensive than employing bombers that can strike any target on the planet for a fraction of the cost, then regenerate and fly more sorties.

3. Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2): The Pentagon’s push to connect everything demands always-on, hackerproof networks, Hyten said. “The goal is to be fully connected to a combat cloud that has all information that you can access at anytime, anyplace,” so that, like with joint fires, the data doesn’t get exposed or hacked because it’s housed in one centralized location, he said.

The Defense Department is in the final stages of work on its strategy to connect sensors from each military service under a unified network, according to the top project official on the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Over the next calendar year DoD will begin experimenting and demonstrating capabilities for JADC2 as well as work on making the Pentagon a data-centric organization.
Tactical data fabric called “Rainmaker” is focused on the Army’s tactical information environment, with imminent collaborations across the services in support of Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control. “It leverages a re-usable set of data management capabilities to provide the right data, in the right format, to the right user, and at the right time. It simplifies and integrates data management across cloud and on premises to accelerate digital transformation.”
Near term the military needs its data fabric to understand data in the current languages those systems speak at the current interfaces the systems support, move that data around the mission space, and present it in formats other systems understand. Longer term, the military needs to update and develop systems as open as possible using modernized data sharing methods.
Seemingly, the challenged JEDI private cloud acquisition has been replaced by JADC2 programme.

Source: Contested Electromagnetic Environment in Modern Battlefield, Joint Air Power Competency Center, 2018

4. Information advantage: This element is the sum of the first three, Hyten said: “If we can do the things, I just described, the United States and our allies will have an information advantage over anybody that we could possibly face.”