Revisiting the EMSO Playbook

Show Notes

In this special episode of From the Crows’ Nest recorded from AOC 2022 in Washington, DC, host Ken Miller is joined by guest John Knowles, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Electromagnetic Dominance (JED), the AOC’s official publication. Ken and John talk about the concept of an Electromagnetic Spectrum Operations (EMSO) playbook and what it means for stakeholders across the military and industry, both in the US and abroad. They also discuss how to best apply lessons from the playbook to the dynamic global threat environment, including both Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and growing tensions in the Pacific.

 

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

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 Crows' 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.

(00:21):
In this episode, we are recording from the exhibit hall of AOC 2022. We are bringing you a special episode each day, taking a closer look at this concept of an EMSO playbook. That is the theme of the show here this week. I think the EMSO playbook is a good way to think about all the capabilities, elements and how they integrate together. All the capabilities, the people, the training, everything that we need to have for EMS superiority. As I've said before, EMS superiority is really the backbone to mission success across all domains. It's an important discussion to really understand the big picture and everything that goes in and really try not to leave anything out in our discussion.

(00:59):
To help me with that here today, I have a good friend and colleague, John Knowles. He is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Electromagnetic Dominance. He has been a regular guest here on From the Crows' Nest and I appreciate having him back here for this first episode here at the convention, just to talk a little bit about what we're hearing on the EMSO playbook here this week and what are some of the themes and topics that we expect to cover over the next few days and what does it mean for our community. Welcome to From the Crows' Nest, John. It's good to have you back on the show.

John Knowles (01:27):
Thanks Ken. It's great to be back here. It's been a long time since I've been here, so it's great.

Ken Miller (01:32):
Yeah, we've only been able to record virtually here over the last year or so that we've been doing this so it's good to sit down and chat with you in person. Basically to get started, I was going to pull a prank on you a little bit and just say, "give me your thoughts", and just let you go off for about 30 minutes and make my job a lot easier. I think the best way is to really start from the beginning of what we're dealing with here. This is the first day, so we're only at the front end of some of these conversations, but we've already had a few good ones on the international perspective. Given the situation over in Ukraine, we had NATO Transformation and Command speak to us early this morning to kick us off, as well as the Artificial Intelligence Office in DOD. I want to touch on those two seemingly disparate topics, but we'll try to weave them together.

(02:27):
Let's speak from an international, big-picture perspective. Oftentimes we talk about EMSO, it's kind of US focused, but there's a huge piece of this obviously we have to deal with now, what does that mean from NATO's perspective. I wanted to get your thoughts on that to start.

John Knowles (02:45):
Yeah, I think that having the first speaker from NATO this morning was excellent. When I first heard the topic theme for the EMSO playbook, really my first thought was, "Okay, Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, US." Immediately though I thought there's multiple... I don't know if you'd say multiple playbooks or multiple pages to the playbook, and they're not just US pages. We're not just looking at a US playbook. We have NATO partners, we have security partners in the US and again, around the world. Again, it's an international community, international profession.

(03:32):
When I think about the playbook, or the playbook concept, I think first being an editor of a magazine, what about language? Are we using the same terms? What do they mean to our partners in the middle of a conflict? Some of our basic US terminology isn't quite aligned with NATO. When we speak in the heat of conflict, in the middle of an operation, when you need to make split-second decisions, are we literally going to be talking the same language in a conflict? I think back to an anecdote I heard from another German general, actually German Air Force General back at AOC Europe show in Berlin. He made this point about Libya and he said when a particular threat came up, it was an erroneous threat, but they thought there was a double-digit threat that popped up, which wasn't in Libya at the time. The US said, "Oh, we're going to get that with some electronic attack." We were referencing Growlers, but to them, they didn't understand necessarily. Basically what happened was everybody got out of the airspace really fast.

(04:52):
There was just a language break because they don't think about, they don't have support jammers. They know that we have them and we use them, but they weren't sure if that was a lethal seed, some sort of harm or something like that. It was just an interesting point that when we speak in our language, in our terminology, our partners aren't necessarily schooled in that. If another NATO nation starts using NATO terminology, how well schooled are we in that?

Ken Miller (05:23):
How do you begin to address that? Because we've talked the issue of lexicon and it's complicated enough even within the US. I mean we have issues of are the services speaking the same language when we talk about this. Does it go to training? We talk about the services here, [inaudible 00:05:41] equipped for the joint force and then the joint force obviously has to integrate with the international, with NATO forces and so forth. Is it a theater training issue that needs to be more addressed or what do you think are some of the possible solutions or ways to address that lexicon problem overseas?

John Knowles (06:01):
I think a lot of it where it fundamentally comes into play is in operations. I think you need in the coalition training, the coalition training should be pushing out the need for a common terminology so that you don't have situations, again, like the Libya thing wasn't a big deal, but it was because the threat, it was just an erroneous threat.

Ken Miller (06:24):
The threats over in Ukraine are real and much more advanced and you probably have less decision time to deal with that miscommunication.

John Knowles (06:34):
Exactly. That's the thing about EW is it's evolved. It actually got... It's amazing how much common terminology we have and common understanding in the West, but at the same time it's not perfect and that's what happens in operations. I think it comes out of coalition training and it comes out of, from there, if you're having communication problems in a training session, training exercise, you need to start working on that there. Then it rolls up into doctrine and language and things like that across the countries. If we're going to... I think Ukraine to me is a very significant conflict in many ways. It's showing Europe that we're going to be fighting as a coalition and we need to definitely... Nobody, no football team has a playbook where the different pages have different languages on them.

Ken Miller (07:32):
From the NATO perspective we're adapting to the conflict. We're learning to work together, progress is being made, you could see some good trends happening on that front. The other theater of course then is Pacific. NATO's not there. Are there lessons that we can learn that we can export to our partners in the Pacific or how does... I mean it's one thing to learn a lesson over there, but the reality is with the evolving global threats we could have be having two theater efforts going on at the same time. How do we take one lesson and learn it in different theater with different partners and different ally constructs? Any thoughts on how we take what we've learned from NATO here looking at Europe and apply it to the Pacific Theater?

John Knowles (08:25):
Well, it's interesting because NATO is a multilayered partnership. You've got government to government, you've got military to military. Then even at the industrial-based level, you've got teams and partnerships and international defense organizations. That is less so the case... I guess my point is NATO is very multilayer and thick and we sometimes forget, we just take it for granted how rich it is.

Ken Miller (09:03):
It's also a bureaucracy that allows all that to come together, that process and they have established relationships and so forth.

John Knowles (09:12):
Exactly. I think that in the Asia Pacific region it's much less complex obviously in terms of bureaucracy, but that's a bad thing in many ways because the US is the glue that holds a lot of that together. It's really more of a hub and spoke model where the US is going to have a lot more of a burden on it because partners aren't necessarily going to be... It's going to be bilateral but... It's going to be one to one relationships with each country versus getting all those countries to work together, especially in a conflict if it happened very soon. Again, there is no NATO, and I guess my point is in some ways the US is going to be the hub of that, but in other ways it's going to be a problem to not have multilateral communication and multilateral training and things like that.

(10:11):
They're starting to get better about it, but it's here and there, it's not a formal alliance. They've never had that over there and they don't have obviously a single cultural identity the way Europe did. It's a little harder to probably build a NATO, but the US will be in more of a central role over there. That will create some advantages for us as the US, I shouldn't say us, but some advantages for the US but it will create a lot of tensions and problems as well because country A, if that's the USA, can work with country B or country C or country D directly but country BC and D may not work together at all. That's hard to make an alliance or a coalition out of that.

Ken Miller (10:56):
From an industry perspective, because one of the great aspects of your job and through the Journal of Electromagnetic Dominance that you edit, you take a look at how the market is responding to this global change that's happening, the threats and so forth and what does it mean for the global defense electronics market. How is industry responding to some of these challenges of integration across country, across services and domains and so forth? How's the market responding? It's obviously doing very well here by virtue of what's going on here at AOC 2022, but what are some of the trends that you're seeing industry take the lead on to address some of these challenges?

John Knowles (11:43):
I think industry's doing a good job of trying to find partnerships where they can, where they make sense. Again, usually it's almost always some of the groundwork has been laid out at a military to military and government to government level. There is sort of a if you do it right on the military side, you can get certain amount of interoperability just by virtue of buying the same platforms with the same software on it or very similar software on there. So example F35, the F16 was really the first one to say, "Hey we have a lot of interoperability in F16. We're all buying the same platform, maintaining it." They have not the same EW, but they have a lot of common EW in there, common radar at least. You can get the rest of the standards working together, even the data links and things like that.

(12:37):
Again, you can do that. I think that NATO's been more successful than Asia-Pacific countries at that. At the end of the day, the industrial base is where the rubber meets the road on all those plans. They have to have incentives to work together and to work on supply chains and things like that together. I think that like F35 is the next incarnation of that, but with the F35, it's not its own thing. You need the entire ISR command control there above that to get the whole sensor to shooter network to make the F35 effective. That's where interoperability and things like that also come in, it's not just buying a particular weapons platform, it's buying a whole constellation of them that work together and then working with maybe you don't have an airborne early warning aircraft or an airborne command and control aircraft like an AEW&C. You've got to work with a partner who's feeding you radar tracks even though that AEW&C type aircraft is not available in your... It's not yours, it's not your country.

Ken Miller (13:52):
One of the themes that we keep hearing about this gets to the point you're talking about getting the right system into the field. We were talking earlier about innovation, it's a great buzzword. You say the word innovation and all of a sudden people are like, "Oh absolutely we need innovation." We also don't always look at it as you can innovate new things that you bring to the field that are bright shiny objects, great new capability. Then there's also the innovation of how you optimize what you currently have. From an industry perspective, how is industry helping the defense agencies US DOD, as well as others, to figure out we need to innovate but we need to optimize what we have versus new capability and helping these defense agencies pick and choose how to go about that with a innovation mindset?

John Knowles (14:48):
I think that one of the things that's happened over the past, I guess I'd almost say a decade, is there's a lot more experimentation in the field where it's a call to industry, bring what you have. We have test equipment or we have a test, some sort of evaluation that we can set up at one of the ranges in the US or something like that. Bring what you have and to me at least the magic in that is having the industry experts, the technical experts working directly with operational people because those two, when they get together, they're going to solve problems. The operator's really good at taking something that was built to do one job and modifying it in some way or using it in a different way that the developer didn't think of. That cross pollination there, that's huge in terms of getting those ideas out there and getting that what you call innovation, I kind of call it operational innovation to a certain extent.

(15:59):
You don't have five, 10 years to develop what you need. You got to go with what you have. I call it your Apollo 13 moment, here's your box full of stuff that's on that you have to work with.

Ken Miller (16:10):
I think it also helps with operational relevance too. You can have a great technology but if it's not usable in the field in the heat of battle, you don't know how to use it or it maybe interferes with something or it just doesn't actually function in a way or in response to the way an adversary might be attacking, then it's not useful. Getting that war fighter embedded earlier in development can weed out some of that and make what you bring to the field actually work a little bit better in what they need. When we talk with... The other aspect of this morning's show when we kicked off, we went from international and we switched gears to talk about artificial intelligence and machine learning, algorithmic warfare, which is a word that I hope I don't have to say too often here on the podcast. I said it right there.

(17:10):
I think it's interesting because when we talk adaptability and agility of systems, a lot of that gets into the software, it gets into the software standards that we're using and the language, of course the algorithms that really basically break everything down to a code that makes a system respond a work way it needs to and learn on the fly. We were talking earlier about the lexicon, the language between people. You also now have this notion of this language between machines and the algorithms that are used in the software. How do you see algorithmic warfare? How do you see the path that algorithmic warfare is on from the US perspective and of course then from a coalition perspective of in terms of what opportunities are in that space for improving how we conduct EMSO?

John Knowles (18:05):
Yeah, it's kind of funny because I have sort of a love-hate relationship with terms like algorithmic warfare, but I also can't speak that term. The reason is because when you talk about algorithmic warfare or digital warfare or any of that, to me at least it's overly reducing the what's important down to just technology or algorithms. It's the same thing with electronic warfare and why we made the shift to electromagnetic warfare. Electronic warfare was named for a box. In that term electronic warfare, in my opinion, saddled our community with everyone thinking that we were just about the box. If I just throw enough money into the Coke machine, the Coke machine's going to give me a box and that's all I have to worry about. I don't have to worry about people and leadership and organizations and all the rest of the DOTMLPF that makes that, it's everything working together.

(19:03):
When you go to algorithmic warfare, you're reducing it beyond the box. Now you're just down a code. Now it's programmer warfare or whatever you want to call it. In that sense, I don't want to reduce further. The reason I like the shift from electronic warfare to electromagnetic warfare is because electromagnetic warfare is about responsibility, operational responsibility for a domain or at least a maneuver space, a strategic maneuver space. We don't have F22 warfare, we don't have missile warfare, air to air missile warfare, AIM-9X warfare, any of that stuff. We have air warfare because that's the operational responsibility for that space, for that domain. When we invent new terms like algorithmic warfare, we're actually getting further down that rabbit hole of technology is the answer to everything.

(19:58):
If I just worry about technology, it solves all my other problems, I'm going to put all my money there. That's one side of my Jekyll and Hyde. The other side of it is, if that's the term we have to use, things like algorithmic warfare, digital warfare, to emphasize the importance of this to leadership it's again not an ideal message, but if it gets the job done, if that's the only way to get people to invest in AI and understand the strategic importance of AI investment and things like that, then so be it. I guess that's just the way it's going to be. But I just hate to lose track of the idea that this is fundamentally about an operational responsibility, operational capabilities, operational decision making. A playbook is not a technology playbook, it's an operational playbook. So playbook should be about EMS operations, not EMS technology playbook, those are roadmaps and technology roadmaps and things like that.

(20:55):
For me that's just my two cents on algorithmic warfare is I'd like to see us talk about the importance of AI as a community without having to elevate the technology to a level, I use tagging the term warfare on it that gives it significance that it doesn't really have in the stack of things we worry about. I don't know if that's...

Ken Miller (21:17):
That's good because I think one of the things we've talked a lot about is even just looking at the role of people, training, there are a lot of components to operations that even from [inaudible 00:21:33] perspective, we've oftentimes struggled with a lack of funding or lack of attention to. We've oftentimes seen where the issue isn't technology. We have the best technology out there today and we always have for generations. As we're even seeing over in Russia and Ukraine, it's not just the technology they have, it's how you use it, how it works in a command and control environment and so forth.

(21:59):
I think there's a lot of promise there. I think it's amazing. At the end of the day, the algorithms are not, it might be made through machine learning, but there's always a person behind there at some point. You still have to make sure that those people understand exactly what they're contributing to in terms of the bigger picture or the bigger capability. You talk about operational responsibility and domains and I'm going to use this as probably one of the most unnatural transitions, but looking at the JED, the monthly JED, the one here that is being distributed at the show, I wanted to bring you on to also talk about that a little bit because the key feature is space.

(22:38):
We talk about operational responsibility and space, you have the space Delta three guardians, an article on that, a feature on that. I wanted you to tell us a little bit about this article and what does that mean in terms of the context of this EMSO playbook and it's a relevant article for this show and explain, because we will be talking space later in the later this week. Give us some insight into what went into this article and what are some of the lessons you pull out for both military as well as industry.

John Knowles (23:11):
Sure. I love that there's a space force. I think that's an absolutely... Again, to me, domains exist because they're strategic and they're physical maneuver spaces for the most part or at least some sort of maneuver space. Space qualifies both those categories. It's overdue the recognition. If you thought about it in the past, we thought of space and we just thought of satellites. We didn't think about contested space or if we did, it was not again in that whole DOTMLPF enterprise type concept. Now space command has come along and they've really said, "Look, we're not just a bunch of boxes that get launched in the space." They've really thought about contested space and how we're going to do that. The delineation I make is 21st century warfare versus 20th century warfare. 20th century warfare the big thrusts were air, land, sea.

(24:11):
You think about World War II, Vietnam, whatever it was, the conflict was less about what becomes important in 21st century warfare, which is in addition to air, land, sea, space, not replacing them, but what glues them together in a joint environment, in a coalition, whatever. What glues those things together in my mind at least is cyber, space and electromagnetic spectrum. You could fight in the 20th century without really focusing on those last three things. In the 21st century, the air warfare, [inaudible 00:24:46] warfare, land warfare only really gain credibility or gain... You're going to win or lose in there because of space, cyber and electromagnetic spectrum operations. Space is a critical piece of that. It's one of those things, it shares a lot in common with EW because you don't really see space. You can maybe look up in your night sky at sunset or just after sunset and see satellites going overhead. You just don't think about getting information from point A to point B, especially for a force like the United States where you're projecting power globally. Even look at Ukraine, right?

(25:20):
Look how important Starlink is to them. When Russia attacked the first week, first few weeks of the war, they attacked Starlink because they knew that was the command control communications system that the Ukrainian forces were using and still are. To me, space is this again, strategic maneuver space and you really have to, and of all the domains, it's the most dependent on electromagnetic spectrum. You can't go up into space and tweak something, you're delivering code up there with satellite communications. You're looking at high dependence on the EMS more than any other domain I think. Again, and you just can't go to war... Even inside your own borders you can't go to war without space. That's just how ubiquitous it's becoming for us. To me I think it's just a really important field and EMSO a huge piece of that and we're going to spend a lot of time in JED going forward fleshing that out and training and all the aspects that they're going to need to flesh it out.

Ken Miller (26:23):
What are some of the upcoming editions? Obviously this was the October one on space, but monthly publication what's on the horizon then?

John Knowles (26:31):
The November JED, I actually wrote the cover story for that, the feature story for that, and that is talking to the 350th Spectrum Warfare Wing down in Eglin. That to me it was a great interview with Colonel Josh Koslov, very dynamic leader, perfect person to follow on from Colonel Young from Dollar. That's one of those things that I'm going to keep watching them because where they're going is to me it's not perhaps completely unique to what other parts of the EW community are doing, but from where the Air Force was... We spent years talking about how is the Air Force really going to rejuvenate and get its EW mission backed to where it needs to be in a pure competitor type environment world with a lot of competition that they have an idea of digital services, EW is a digital service.

(27:34):
They're taking their mission data, the old 53rd EW group and they're changing what they do, but then they're adding to that with these new digital services. I don't want to liken it to your smartphone or anything, but they have a mission app, tactical app system. They have Missionware, which is like apps. They're really thinking about how to get capability out fast through software. They understand that. How to get bypass the non-standard interfaces between two different weapons systems, so they're using things like STITCHES. They did a thing called Project 212. They are, to me, showing the very beginning of showing us what EW is going to look like in 10, 15 years. They're doing it really fast. They're reorganizing for that. They're getting rid of their stovepipe industrial era architecture that they had of the way they were set up. They're very smart, they're very focused on what they want to do.

(28:36):
Stay tuned in anytime that they do something, take a look at what it is because it's probably going to be something that it's not only what they're doing, it's different, but how they're doing it and it's going to be very software-oriented organization, which I think going back to again, AI and everything, they're a really interesting nerve center for the Air Force. Right people at the right time too.

Ken Miller (28:59):
Great. Well thank you. That's all the time we have for today's episode. I want to thank you for once again joining me here on From the Crow's Nest. May try to pull you back in at a later time to get your wrap-up thoughts here because I think it's hard to speak right at the front end of the show when you haven't heard everything. We've been around long enough that we can understand what's going on here. It's always great to talk with you and look forward to continuing our conversation throughout the week.

John Knowles (29:25):
Thanks for having me on. I always enjoy this. Thanks Ken.

Ken Miller (29:27):
Well, that will conclude this episode of From the Crow's Nest. Again, we're going to be bringing you a special episode each day this week. I want to thank my guest today, John Knowles, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Electromagnetic Dominance. Tomorrow I have a special guest, Dave Tremper from the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment to talk a little bit about EW program, acquisition, development, innovation. Then on Thursday, I sit down with our keynote speaker, Dr. Eric Haseltine, who is an author, futurist, former intelligence officer with the NSA. He has a couple books out that we'll be talking about focusing on innovation and how do you innovate in a bureaucracy. A couple of other good guests coming up here in future episodes and hope that you'll be able to download those and listen to those. That will conclude this episode of From The Crow's Nest. I want to thank my guest, John Knowles for joining me today. As always, we'd like to hear from our audience, so please rate, subscribe wherever you download your podcast. Thank you for listening.