A Conversation with John Knowles on Defense Budget and JADC2

Show Notes

In this episode, Host Ken Miller recaps and shares excerpts from a conversation he had earlier with Mr. John Knowles, editor of the Journal of Electromagnetic Dominance (JED). They cover a range of issues from the defense budget to JADC2, and some upcoming additions of the JED that are coming out in September. Ken also shares exciting news about upcoming From the Crows’ Nest episodes, including a sit down with Mr. David Weinberger, author of the book Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility. 

To learn more about today’s topics or to stay updated on EMSO and EW developments, visit our website.

Creators & Guests

Host

Ken Miller

AOC Director of Advocacy & Outreach, Host of @AOCrows From the Crows' Nest Podcast

Producer

Laura Krebs

Editor

Reese Clutter

What is From the Crows' Nest?

This podcast features interviews, analysis, and discussions covering leading issues of the day related to electromagnetic spectrum operations (EMSO). Topics include current events and news worldwide, US Congress and the annual defense budget, and military news from the US and allied countries. We also bring you closer to Association of Old Crow events and provide a forum to dive deeper into policy issues impacting our community.

Ken Miller (00:10):
Welcome to From the Crow's Nest, a podcast on electromagnetic spectrum operations, or EMSO. I'm your host, Ken Miller, Director of Advocacy and Outreach for the Association of Old Crows. Thanks for listening. In today's episode, we are doing things a little different. A couple of weeks ago, I sat down with John Knowles, he's the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Electromagnetic Dominance, or the JED, to discuss a range of issues from the defense budget to Joint All-Domain Command and Control, or JADC2, and also some upcoming additions of the JED that are coming out in September. I'll share some excerpts of that conversation later in the program.

Ken Miller (00:43):
Before I get to that, I want to preview some of our upcoming episodes and share a few other notes that hopefully pique your interest. First, I'm very excited about our upcoming episodes, especially I sit down with Mr. David Weinberger. He is the author of a book, Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We're Thriving in a World of Possibility. It's a great book, and as you're wrapping up your summer vacations, I would highly recommend that you add it to your reading list. There is a lot of applicability to our electromagnetic spectrum operations community. David has been a thought leader on how the internet artificial intelligence machine learning is changing, how we live and do business. And the book, Everyday Chaos, is about how this technology is enabling us to take advantage of all the chaos it's revealing. So it's changing our understanding of how things happen, and it has implications for how we develop strategies for predicting, preparing, and managing our world.

Ken Miller (01:35):
So when we talk about EMSO, we are learning that the EMS is not just congested, and contested, and complex. It's also chaotic and technology is forcing us to rapidly change how we model and simulate this environment. I read the book over the summer and I wanted to have David on, and I look forward to sitting down with him and having the episode out in September.

Ken Miller (01:56):
We are also working on episodes, continuing our conversations on open systems architecture, microelectronics supply chain, and electronic protection. And we also have some insight into the recently signed implementation plan for the electromagnetic spectrum superiority strategy. Now, all that said, that's just this podcast, From the Crow's Nest.

Ken Miller (02:15):
We also have our sister podcast, The History of Crows, and this has been a lot of fun to put these episodes together. If you're on vacation here in August, driving across the country or sitting on the beach and you enjoy listening to history, please take time to catch up on History of Crows. We just released episode four, The Beam Wars, that shares untold stories from World War II, that include the Battle of Britain, the Night Blitz. And of course, the Beam Wars.

Ken Miller (02:41):
We have our next episode, episode five, coming out, is going to cover the air campaigns over Hamburg and Berlin, the code breakers from Bletchley Park and the EW and radar operations that supported D-Day and the landing on the beaches of Normandy. These have been great to put together, and I really encourage you to take some time to catch up and learn a little bit more about EDW history.

Ken Miller (03:05):
History is important, it anchors our identity as a society and also as an operational community. AOC is going to be rolling out some broader history initiatives here in the coming weeks. But most importantly, we want to collect and share your stories. And so I want to take this opportunity to let our listeners know that if you have a mission, a program and agency, some story that you want to share, go to our website, crows.org/podcast, and contact us. We're looking for as many first person accounts as we can gather.

Ken Miller (03:36):
Now, without further delay, I want to share some excerpts from my conversation with John Knowles, Editor-in-Chief of AOC's Journal of Electromagnetic Dominance, or the JED. I sat down with John a few weeks ago and we discussed a range of topics. First on the docket was the annual defense budget, which is well underway in Congress, albeit a bit behind its normal schedule. Both defense appropriations and authorization bills will move to full congressional committee markups in September when Congress returns, and then of course, to the respective floors.

Ken Miller (04:06):
So I asked John what trends he saw in the President's Budget that was submitted to Congress a couple of months ago.

John Knowles (04:12):
There were trends that were carried on that I think were really good to see. One was, there is a lot of EMSO in there, a lot of EW and SIGINT programs that they're talking about. Going back to the President's Budget request, there's a lot of funding for small disposable platforms and expendable platforms, which are going to push the electronics into lower size weight power, smaller platforms. And they're going to be less expensive too because they're going to be on platforms that probably aren't coming out of the battle space necessarily. So they got to be a little bit more expendable than we typically have designed for. So that was an interesting thing to see some of those in the 62, 63 tight budget lines, and the platforms that go with them. So they're marrying that up.

John Knowles (04:55):
And now you can kind of start to see why the DoD has been so focused on things like demos and really getting their arms around new technology and getting a sense of how would our operators use these new things. You see DARPA help out with mosaic warfare and things where they're not just coming up with a new technology, but maybe also some of the operational concepts that go with it. These new technologies is [inaudible 00:05:20].

Ken Miller (05:20):
On the shifts that are occurring in the budget to develop and field technology faster, John had this to say.

John Knowles (05:27):
So there are two, I think, major shifts that weren't... If you looked at a budget from 10 years ago, you wouldn't see these things, even five years ago probably. One of the early shifts was this focus that this realization that weapons' platforms, especially the large complex weapons' platforms, whether it's a ship and surface combatant, a fighter jet, something like that, they have a timeline for how long it takes to develop and feel that F-35 is probably the worst case scenario, but it takes a long time to feel those electronics that are going to go on them need to be bought at a faster pace than the platform itself. And so you need to really be able to pace this commercial technology and the way it's coming out, utilize it, things like that. So you're seeing more interest in OTA and middle tier acquisition that can move faster for defense electronics in general, but EW and SIGINT in particular.

John Knowles (06:19):
So you're seeing that, and that's not brand new, and this goes back to maybe 2016, '17, '18, you started seeing that. That created the ability to develop technology faster in the S&T world and demonstrate it in field demos and things like that, which put an onus on industry by the way, to go and basically put their money into development more themselves, bring their solutions to a demo and compete as opposed to, say, getting an EMD contract, or something like that, and saying, "Okay, based on this paper proposal, we're going to build this hardware system, this piece of hardware plus software in it."

John Knowles (06:52):
But what I am seeing is the Air Force, for example, and their 62 and 63 S&T programs, they are putting specific money into making sure that there is a vehicle, a strategic technology development vehicle in all of their 62, 63 programs that are dealing with electronics to get it from 62, 63 to 64, to EMD, basically to full acquisition as opposed to S&T, which is sort of 62, 63. So you're seeing that in the Air Force, that was kind of new to me this year, I didn't see that in the previous budgets where like every 62 program element or 63 program element had some sort of vehicle, had money put aside for these demos.

Ken Miller (07:32):
On the difficulties of truly understanding how DoD and the services are investing EW.

John Knowles (07:38):
I think it's very difficult, partly because so much of the budget is happening, at least for me, so much of it happens in the classified world that you don't know what they're building there. You have an idea. And so it's very hard to say the service isn't doing this, or isn't doing that because they might be. So I always try to be very careful about what I say when I draw a conclusion, because there's a big chunk of the world that we just don't see and you can't talk about. But I look at something like [inaudible 00:08:06] and there's an interesting pattern, I think, in [inaudible 00:08:10]. There's nothing in the army... Again, this is, like in my world, I go on to observe behavior over the course of almost 30 years of here's what the army has done, or the Navy has done.

Ken Miller (08:21):
Congress is also making sure that DoD knows that Congress is paying attention to the EMS superiority strategy and the implementation plan that was recently signed and released. There was a congressional hearing in the spring that highlighted DoD's failure to implement previous strategies on the EMS and EW. This new strategy can not share the same fate. And so Congress has passed several reforms in recent years to improve oversight and leadership, and they continued this push over the summer in subcommittee marks.

John Knowles (08:50):
They really want to make sure that the implementation plan was followed through, so they want to report right about the implementation plan. As we speak now, the implementation plan has been signed, but not publicly released, so I haven't seen it yet. So I'm not sure exactly what's in it. But the committee wants to make sure that they're on record as saying, "We really want to make sure you know we're interested in this too." So, that's a positive step.

John Knowles (09:12):
The other area that the CITS, the city's committee weighed in on was developing digital technologies for survivability and lethality testing. So they're getting into a discussion that's been in some of the AOC podcasts and some of the AOC conferences this year on electromagnetic protection, and in making sure that the systems are very efficient in dealing with the environments that they're going to be in the electromagnetic environments, operating environments that are going to be, again, contested, congested.

John Knowles (09:42):
So they weighed in... That was kind of what the city's weighed on... Those were the two big issues that I saw there. I should add in, their language about looking at the electromagnetic spectrum superiority strategy, implementation plan, they want the designation of a senior official for that implementation. So there's already a senior designated official for EW, but they're basically again saying who is going to be in charge of implementing this. They're very serious about those recommendations not getting lost and basically watered down like other strategies where they haven't been fully implemented. They really want accountability here. I think that's, again, interesting language. And that's what I would expect out of that committee that Congress [inaudible 00:10:25] is running.

John Knowles (10:25):
So I think Congress is trying to keep the attention focused on a concentrated strategy, a centralized strategy, and an implementation plan that gets taken care of by one person. And they're going to represent something somewhere. It doesn't get to get handed across three different or four different organizations. And Congress is saying, "We have our eye on you. We see you. We know that you're in the midst of change." But you look at where EW is in terms of Pentagon bureaucracy, my personal opinion is, this could go the way of the other strategies, because there's, again, no one to take care of it. So Congress has our eye on the ball, and they're letting the Pentagon know that.

Ken Miller (11:03):
We also discussed JADC2, which has been a frequent topic here on From the Crow's Nest, including a great conversation with Brigadier General, Rob Parker, in June, from Joint staff, J6.

John Knowles (11:13):
What I see in JADC2, is maybe conversations that no one's having right now. I kind of think of JADC2, and I hate to boil it down to something really simple, but everybody wants to buy JADC2, and they want to look at the performance characteristics of it. It's kind of like buying a new car and you want it to look like a Ferrari and talk about it like a Ferrari, but really it's got to be available. It's got to work. It's got to be able to perform in a tough environment. You know that whoever you're fighting, if it's a peer competitor, they're going to go at you in the EMS because they think that's your weak underbelly. They're going to try to take away your data links. They're going to try to take away your C2 capability because they know how dependent we are on that.

John Knowles (11:53):
And so nobody's talking about the electromagnetic survivability of these systems. So it goes back to the EP conversation, does the DoD have the ability to really put JADC2 in the systems that are going to make up JADC2, ABMS and things like that, through the ringer, not just when they develop it, but when they go to train with it, all the aspects of it, so that we really know we have a plan. Everybody understands how this is going to perform. We're not performing. It's not that this thing has to be perfect all the time, but what are we going to do if parts of it aren't available, or certain things are happening.

John Knowles (12:28):
JADC2, to me, everyone thinks about it and they're probably right, obviously, to think about it from a data standpoint, from an information standpoint. But I see it from a connectivity standpoint too. It has to be able to move information, not through wires, but through the electromagnetic spectrum. And we don't really have a very good way, as far as I can tell, of testing it out and making sure it's going to work or to train with in an environment where it's not all available.

Ken Miller (12:56):
Finally, the September edition of JED is just around the corner, and John provided us a preview.

John Knowles (13:01):
Our September issue is going to have a cover story on camouflage, concealment and deception, which kind of gets into the EP conversation. It's an interesting discussion because, again, we built out in the Gulf war, this offensive battle network. We were able to use ISR in a health sensor to shooter network, precision engagement, things like that. And we've been refining that for 30 years. We've never faced it. So we've, again, have been training and operating in permissive environments. And now you look at Russia or China, they've got a lot of UAVs, they can leverage space. When you bring AI into your ISR world, and they can start picking out target features based on radar returns, based on electromagnetic signatures, like executing very good EP. So you don't know using a lot of LPI, LPD, a lot of electro-optical sensors that can again pick out targets, IR, things like that, we're not used to facing that.

John Knowles (13:53):
So we've got to think about how do we hide from the sensors that are going to be out there. We're not going to just shoot down all the sensors. If we think that's our game plan, there's a lot of sensors out there. Some of them are in space. There's a lot of things that we have to figure about how to camouflage, multispectral camouflage that is, conceal what we're doing.

John Knowles (14:10):
And then there's a whole... Our emissions, how good are we at emissions control? How good are our systems at not being detected out there? So there's a whole concealment piece. And then we're going to need a lot more decoys out there than we have today because we're going to have to create some false targets for our adversaries to try to diffuse their attacks. But if you look at what Russia has done in Syria and Eastern Ukraine, they have really put together a nice sensor to shoot or kill chain with just UAVs, and sensors, and some long range artillery and precision munitions. They have really been able to concentrate fires in the right place. So sometimes if it's a high-value target, they're going to use a lower munition. If they just want to break up an enemy force, they're going to put a lot of artillery in there.

John Knowles (14:51):
You've got a lot of precision long range artillery. You've got a lot of good enough ISR that it's very difficult to blunt that. We're not familiar with operating in that environment, but we've got to think about that. So again, I feel like we're having a back to the future conversation about the end of the Cold War. You're not going to have easy access to the EMS and be able to maneuver in there without being detected and probably jammed. And you're probably not going to be able to just assemble your forces out on the battlefield. And this goes back to the joint war fighting concepts that we've been operating under for 30 years, which is we can mass our forces because no one's going to attack us. And we can attack you with mass forces. And we're learning that we may not be able to get away with that anymore. What are the implications of that in the EMS?

John Knowles (15:33):
And again, going back to our EMS strategy conversation, if you don't have a sound EMS strategy, then whatever you think of for joint war fighting concepts, if EMS operations isn't baked into that, you're really still not all the way there. You're not going to be ready for that. And so this September, [inaudible 00:15:50], to go back to your original question is kind of getting it at a piece of that in the land domaine.

Ken Miller (15:55):
And we'll conclude this episode of From the Crow's Nest. I do want to thank John Knowles for joining me and sharing his thoughts on the defense budget and other topics. Again, don't miss our upcoming episodes of From the Crow's Nest in September, and catch up on our History of Crows podcast. We are also going to be live at the AOC convention and symposium November 30th to December 2nd. We'll be interviewing keynote speakers and other guests throughout the week with daily segments and episodes.

Ken Miller (16:19):
To learn more, go to crows.org/podcast. Have a great rest of the summer. And thank you for listening.