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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 MSO. I'm your host, Ken Miller, director of Advocacy and Outreach for the Association of Old Crows. You can follow me on Twitter @FTCNHost. Thanks for listening. In this episode of From the Crows' Nest, I sit down with friend and long sought after guest, analyst and writer Dr. Tom Withington to discuss MSO in the context of Joint All-Domain Command and Control or JADC2. So without further delay, let's get to the conversation. Tom, welcome to From the Crows' Nest.
Dr. Tom Withington (00:39):
Ken, it's great to talk to you and I'm thrilled to bits to be here. I must say I'm a big fan of the podcast. It regularly accompanies me when I'm out to go for a walk or going for a run or whatever it is I'm doing. So I'm thrilled to be here and it was good to talk to you a couple of weeks back as well for the subject that we are going to be discussing today.
Ken MIller (00:58):
I really appreciate it. We have talked in the past about having you on the show and just recently I took over AOC webinars and since then you've given a couple webinars and that just kind of provide us that little energy to get you on the schedule here. But we had a great conversation and I wanted to have you on the show today to talk about JADC2, Joint All-Domain Command and Control, where it's at, where it's going, what does it mean, especially for EW. I just thought to get us started, it's hard to stay on top of everything, what has been on your mind here the past few weeks regarding JADC2 or anything, anything in the EW defense realm?
Dr. Tom Withington (01:34):
Well, you're absolutely right, there has been some interesting developments in the fortnight or so since we spoke. I though it was quite interesting that following the webinar I noticed that C4ISR publication, they have been doing some interesting coverage of JADC2, primarily looking at where things have been going on the naval side of that program, which is known as Project Overmatch. Now the naval project is quite interesting because it's probably the one that we know least about. The Navy have preferred to keep their cards quite close to their chest on what they're doing. They have cited understandable operational and security concerns regarding China and giving the Chinese too much of an inkling of the trajectory and the path for Project Overmatch.
(02:23):
I can understand that to an extent because any large scale, if you like, strategic or operational competition involving China, let's hope it doesn't degenerate into war. But certainly the way things are going at the moment in terms of the geopolitical tension, I think that is very strongly characterized by the maritime domain. So it's understandable, I think the Navy are keeping their cards close to their chest. But what we do seem to be seeing is that things are moving apace and I think this is quite encouraging because what we've tended to see in the past, not just in the US but I think throughout NATO, is sometimes quite grand projects are announced and they have very laudable and very impressive goals, but then they seem to, forgive the terrible pun, fall off the radar slightly and we perhaps don't hear so much of them. It is encouraging that I think the DOD is showing that it's very serious about this as are the US services in general and things are moving forward.
Ken MIller (03:21):
A couple weeks ago the president did deliver his defense budget, his total budget, to Capitol Hill. Of course that includes the defense budget, $886.3 billion for national defense. I found it interesting with the budget, there's that kind of justification the overall, "Here's why we're spending what we're spending on what." They kind of point out two things. Number one, they recognize China as a key strategic competitor and they label Russia as an acute threat to us and its allies. I think that those two interesting use of words to identify two emerging threats but also two different ways of seeing how you're going to invest in some new technology, new capabilities for an acute threat versus strategic competitor. What does it mean?
(04:07):
So JADC2 looks different, you could say, maybe if you're responding to a strategic competitor than an acute threat and so JADC2 is going to kind of shift in how it looks depending on how it's used. Just to get started then with this, JADC2, we've covered this on the podcast for several different episodes quite a while ago, from DOD perspective, industry perspective, academic perspective and we've heard it described as a ubiquitous network or a patchwork quilt of existing capabilities and it depends on how visionary you want to get or how practical. In your research and your analysis of JADC, could you help us just kind of define, when we say JADC2, it means a lot of things to a lot of people. What is it in your mind in terms of what DOD is trying to accomplish?
Dr. Tom Withington (05:00):
That's a very good question, Ken, because for the past few months I have been trying to distill all of this into a workable definition that we can all use. I was writing on JADC2 the other day and I came up with something that I'm hoping is at least a step towards getting to this goal. How I try and describe it is effectively it's the connectivity or the, let's say, it's the networking of every platform, sensor, weapon system, personnel, base and capability at all levels of war, so tactical, operational, strategic, to improve intra and interservice interoperability. In other words, I think what it's striving to do is to achieve the connectivity of everything and that is a hugely ambitious task. But the key thing behind it is to break down interservice stovepipes, if you like.
(05:59):
This is a key thing, because for a long time what we've seen is that the Navy, Air Force and the Army have effectively done their own thing from a C2 perspective, from a command and control perspective, which has been great in terms of the moving information around the battle space, within the army, within the Marine Corps, whatever it is. But the key challenge here is now getting those services to be able to share information between them. That's one of the key things. I liken it to, I suppose, how in the civilian world how we deal with computing in the sense that if we go back 10 or so years or perhaps even further, we had our desktop computers, we had our laptop computers and we had our mobile phones, so we're talking pre-smartphones here. It was a bit of a nightmare moving information between those few things.
(06:50):
I remember having to have thumb drives and, right, "what articles do I need to take with me to work when I'm traveling on this 11 hour flight" and physically taking those from the desktop and putting them on the laptop. Now we do this seamlessly. We use things like Dropbox or whatever it is and everything's synced together, our smartphones are synced with our laptops and our computers, et cetera. I think in a sense that's how the DOD visualizes the command and control architecture for the US services. Now the question is why are they doing this? Well, the key thing I think behind it is to really improve the speed and quality of decision-making of the services, again at all points of war. It's not just about making the decision quicker, which is vitally important.
(07:37):
If we go back to our OODA loop, John Boyd, whoever gets around the OODA loop quickest tends to prevail. But the key thing is having a better quality of decision-making. As we all know in our everyday lives, we always take the best decisions when we have the best information, whether it's buying car insurance, going to the grocery store, whatever it is. Again, I think that's mirrored in how the DOD and the forces see things progressing as will it towards the future.
Ken MIller (08:03):
But that has been something that I think you could say that the services have not done as well. Maybe they're doing better now than they have in the past, but they've not done well, because the services' job is man, train equipment. It's the joint forces, at least in the US side, it's their responsibility to bring the fight to actually fight the war. Then you throw in our allies and partners, and we'll get to that later, because JADC2 affects them as well. How do you get the interservice collaboration earlier on in that process so that when you're starting a program. Air Force has ABMS, Project Overmatch in the Navy, Project Convergence in the Army. How do you get that interservice connectivity earlier in the process?
(08:48):
It seems to be something that the services are still trying to figure out. They're probably making good progress, but once you start to open up the doors to more information and more reliable information, you bring in collaborative systems and the speed of which you need to sift through all that and pass that on to the war fighter, the shooter, how do you get that earlier in the process and the services when their job is to man, train the Army, Navy, Air Force, so forth?
Dr. Tom Withington (09:18):
I think the key thing is to have the interconnectivity baked in from the start. I think with any program, with any capability that you're bringing on stream, the key thing is to have this ability for whatever it is, whether it's an individual soldier, whether it's an armored vehicle, whether it's a ship, you name it. But for it to have that ability to link out and link in is absolutely vital. I think the way to do this is really to look at what we've done in other areas, so things like cybersecurity, electromagnetic protection, the whole thing with open standards architecture with things like SOSA and MOSA, for instance. These are now requirements before the first blueprint is even drawn, before the first AutoCAD drawing is even made. These requirements are already there. This is a prerequisite before you do anything else. I think really that's where you need to be in the procurement cycle and in the R&D cycle for any capability you're bringing on stream.
(10:13):
The challenge however is that we're not starting from a blank sheet. As JADC2 comes in, it's important I think also to emphasize that JADC2 is not really a program, per se, it's an aspiration, it's a set of goals effectively that these disparate efforts like Overmatch that we talked about will meet. But I think the key thing is right at the start of that process is having that in mind. But the problem is that, as I said, we're not starting from a plain sheet of paper. We're going to have legacy capabilities that remain in service as we bring the new capabilities which will have JADC2 star connectivity baked in from the start as they come on stream. That I think is where the friction could arise is effectively how you take a platform by the B-52 and ensure it is JADC2 compatible? Now, sure, it can be done, but how do you do it? That's only one platform, that's one capability. You could replicate that obviously across the board of the DOD, so that's got to be a challenge, I think.
Ken MIller (11:18):
I'm in total agreement with you, Tom, that we have to get this kind of baked into the process and a lot of this has to do with how we think about the bigger problem and obviously Association of Old Crows, we're here talking about EMS superiority. We had a panel discussion on innovation a couple years ago that I spoke at and I made the point that, and I still think it's relevant today, is that you can talk all you want about JADC2. There's a lot of really good stuff that we're trying to do and I think important stuff and things we have to do. But you have to solve the first problem and that's to have EMS superiority upfront, because it's the backbone of everything you want.
(11:57):
You can't have connectivity, you can't have assured connectivity. You might have some connectivity, but what happens when that adversary wants to take that away or do you have the ability to adapt to change and kind of flow into a different mode of connectivity, so that you can move around some of your adversary tactics. With EMS superiority, what is your view in terms of how DOD is positioning itself to really accomplish and ensure this upfront? Shouldn't every conversation of JADC2 start with EMS superiority?
Dr. Tom Withington (12:29):
It absolutely should do, because I'm in complete agreement, Ken, electromagnetic superiority and supremacy are absolutely vital for JADC2 working. One of the things, it sounds perhaps a bit of a flippant example, but you and I are both very familiar of these very elaborate graphics that we get from industry, we get from DOD, of a tanker, a frigate, an aircraft, a satellite and there's these lightning flashes linking them between each other and showing you how information is all going to move around. I'm always looking at them and going, "Where are the red flashes? Where are the red flashes coming in to break those links?" Because that's the reality of the battlefield that the US and her allies are going to face tomorrow.
(13:12):
I'm encouraged by the fact that one of the work strands within the cross-functional team at DOD, one of the lines of effort, is very much focused on ensuring access to the spectrum and ensuring information security and safeguarding that, realizing that that is an asset that has to be protected at all costs. I think to be fair to the Pentagon, I think they're in the head space, I think they get it, which is really important obviously. But I think the crucial thing beyond that is we're also going to have to look slightly differently at how we do things. We're very lucky at the moment because we've got some very interesting avant garde technologies that are coming on stream.
(13:53):
The minute you were mentioning about the fact that the spectrum is going to be congested and contested made me think of things like cognitive radio and cognitive radar. We are going to need those AI-based systems that can work out what is happening in the spectrum and go, "Right, I need to change my behavior to accommodate this and not only do I need to do that, I need to make sure my human operator knows that I've just done it and I need them to understand why I have taken those decisions so that they are fully cognizant of what is happening." In a sense where we are going with JADC2, we can only get there if we really, really emphasize the spectrum superiority, the spectrum supremacy. But to do that, we've got to be prepared to embrace the new avant-garde technologies which can help us do that.
(14:44):
I mean, technology's not the only solution. I think this comes back to something we're always saying at the old Crows and it's so important. Actually everybody has to be spectrum-minded. Yeah, it's just absolutely essential. We can have as much connectivity as we want. We can have huge amounts of data flying around the battle space, but at the end of the day if you've got a group of soldiers there who've got their smartphones and are on social media, you're potentially in a world of hurt. You've got to see all of this holistically if it's going to work. You and I get that, the Crows get that. We've all got to go out there and get that message, make sure the people who perhaps don't hear it so much are hearing it but crucially that they understand it.
Ken MIller (15:31):
One of your slides in your presentation, you add a quote from Tim Ryan who is a senior fellow at Space Power Studies in Mitchell Institute and it says, "Success in war will go to the side that possesses superior battle space knowledge, makes better decisions, directs forces more effectively, and closes kill chains faster." All absolutely true. How much of this is, when we talk JADC2, we often talk about how it's going to work in battle, but there's this other element of how do you project it's going to work to an adversary. They have to understand, our adversaries have to know and fear we can do these things once the fighting starts. Because if you're looking over at a situation in Ukraine, for example, where there's is armed conflict going on and devastation, obviously you're looking at how do you conduct a JADC2 type of mission with the fighting happening?
(16:28):
Over in a China, a more strategic competition scenario, your China's goal is to unify their dynasty and on a global stage they want to look like they're doing that nonviolently. A lot of their movement toward Taiwan or controlling the South China Sea, this is going to be done without fighting. This is going to be done to the left of launch. So it's going to be very critical for US to project that we have a JADC2 capability that is going to respond in a certain way if you try to do something aggressive, and that looks a lot different than maybe what we see in Ukraine. Could you talk a little bit about how you project this notion of JADC2 to an adversary like China where you might not actually be able to test how it works because the idea is you want to avoid the fighting to begin with?
Dr. Tom Withington (17:17):
Another very good question, Ken. Yes, it's interesting, isn't it, with JADC2, the deterrent effect, is this the new equivalent of moving the Second Fleet into a particular part of the world as a bit of a warning to whatever the bad guys are up to of, "Hang on, you need to cool off a little bit, otherwise things get a bit hairy." I mean, perhaps there's a potential to demonstratively use elements of JADC2 in peace time. I mean, when you were talking just now, it got me thinking about something like a DPRK missile launch, for instance, if you've got a ballistic missile launch going on. Kim Jong-un often likes flexing his muscles and launching a few missiles here and there to show what he's capable of.
(18:00):
What is the potential for the DOD in such a situation to say, Well, look, okay, we didn't need to intercept this missile but we knew the second it had been launched, we knew what was going to happen. We were able to share that targeting information in seconds to our Aegis ships that were in the Pacific, they were prime to intercept this missile if necessary. We shared this information with our allies. The president was kept constantly apprised of what was happening. We shared that data with the ground base mid-course defense system that's up in the northwest of the United States." Demonstrating that you can do this rapid movement of data and you can filter the data so everybody gets what they need in peacetime and safe, we have the means to do this.
(18:42):
The Chinese balloons would've been an interesting situation to have used that with recently. I think in peacetime you can do a lot, and also you have this capability that you can assist peacetime situations with. I think it was the Air Force's, the air battle management system, the ABMS, which is the big works strand of JADC2, the Air Force is pursuing. Elements of that were used in terms of coping with the COVID-19 pandemic I think in 2021, 2022, I forget the exact date, but that again was a clear demonstration of, "This is what this technology is and this is what it can do." I think wherever you can, the important thing is for DOD to get the message out there. "We know what you're up to and we can share data very effectively on this, just so you know." Because as you said, this has a very powerful deterrent effect potentially.
Ken MIller (19:35):
Because what you want to do against an adversary is communicate to them that the cost of doing anything aggressive is going to be greater than you're going to be able to afford, whether it's financially, life or whatever. I think that JADC2 has a tremendous capability to almost overwhelm an adversary if done properly in terms of giving that sense that US and its allies, we're everywhere, we know everything, we are able to respond. Yeah, there might be some areas where our advantage slips, but overall we can adapt and stay on the offensive. I think that's a very important message, that I hope that JADC2 as it continues to evolve is we're able to project that in a deterrence way to a strategic adversary like China.
Dr. Tom Withington (20:23):
I think it reminds me of something that the singer David Bowie said years ago about the internet. The internet was in its infancy, and he was doing an interview on the BBC. Bowie was always quite a visionary, could always spot trends and see the way things were going in music and art and other areas. He was asked about the internet and he was a very early adopter of the internet and he was asked, "Well, what is the effect of the internet going to be?" He replied that, "Impossible to say. I think what we've seen of it so far, and this is your early Nineties, I think we've barely scratched the surface. I think human brains can't even begin to comprehend the impact this is going to have on our life. I think in a military sense, JADC2 is quite similar. You and I can quite clearly see the applications for this technology and the impact it can make strategically all the way down to the soldier in the foxhole.
(21:19):
But I think one of the things we'll see as the technology is rolled out and as it gets into the hand of war fighters, is we'll see it has applications that we simply couldn't imagine, that we couldn't dream of, and that's going to be very interesting. It's going to throw up some challenges too. It may cause us to start rethinking parts of our doctrines. It may cause us to rethink how we do command. It is going to be challenging, but it is going to offer a lot of potential capabilities we simply have not envisaged, which is one of the things I think that makes it quite exciting.
Ken MIller (21:53):
Some of those advances in technology and capabilities, that that's going to come when also the fighting starts and we realize we have a weakness or we have an area that we're being attacked and we need to respond. This is something that the electromagnetic warfare community has always been good at is that quick turnaround solution using electromagnetic spectrum operations to protect the force and to execute emission. So properly planning for that, I think there's a lot of goodness there that hopefully we can see grow. Earlier in our conversation, you mentioned obviously the CFT and their lines of effort and I just wanted to spend a little bit more time kind of talking about some of these aspects because going through the lines of effort, you hit on all the major topics of speed, quality of information, as you've mentioned, AI, artificial intelligence, machine learning applications and so forth.
(22:44):
There are five lines of effort as I understand it, and I would imagine that they are ranked somewhat in priority, although sometimes they don't do that just to kind of make sure that everything is taken as the highest priority together. But the first one is the data enterprise. I want to just touch on that because to go back, we talk a lot about spectrum congestion and we need to have the sensors in place to collect the data and to sift through the data and to be able to transmit information. Could you talk a little bit about how the data standardization efforts are underway to improve the visibility and accessibility and so forth of the data that's out there, in a ever-congested spectrum environment?
Dr. Tom Withington (23:32):
From my understanding of how this effort is progressing is that essentially it's all focused on creating, as you said, those standards. With the whole JADC2 philosophy, you're going to be getting potentially a deluge of data and that's going to be deluge of data from many different sources. It's going to be encoded in many different ways, it's going to be using many different languages. Data sizes will be different, on and on it goes. What you effectively need, as I understand it, is you need some way to take that data. Or let's say for instance, you've got a feed that's coming from a ground surveillance radar, so you've got a group of soldiers who are deployed and they've put two ground surveillance radars at tactically important points near their position to see what's going on and to see what the enemy is doing.
(24:24):
Those radars are obviously collecting imagery and data the whole time, but what they're probably doing as we look towards the future is they have an edge computing capability that is realizing, "Okay, we don't need to worry about the antelopes. We've got AI algorithms embedded in our computing that ensures that we ignore those, that we ignore things that we don't need to see and we only focus on the things that we do." When the radar recognizes through its algorithms that, "Hang on, this looks like a convoy of trucks approaching us," that information is then sent onto the combat cloud through radio communications or through whatever it is, and then shared with whoever needs that information. What you need at that point is the moment that data is realized to be important, the trucks in this case, you need a way of standardizing that data so it can go up into the cloud and then whoever uses it can access it and do whatever they need to do it with, and this is a huge challenge.
Ken MIller (25:25):
One of the challenges that we've talked about a lot is if you're collecting data, and that data, depending on how that data looks, it could be intelligence or have an operational element to it. It could look the same, but if you're in operations, you're going to say, "Hey, that's something, that that's information I need to attack." If you're intel, that's going to be information that you want to analyze and maybe do something else with that you don't want to necessarily send to the operational folks. So how do you develop a standard that says, "Okay, we're collecting this. This needs to go through intelligence, this needs to go to operational." Or how do they share across the stovepipes of the two and the three and other stovepiped elements of a fighting force?
Dr. Tom Withington (26:08):
I think one of the things we're lucky with in NATO at the moment is, in a sense we've got form, because we've done a very crude version of this with tactical data links with things like M-Series and J-Series messages that our listeners will be familiar with, things like link 11 and link 16, so you've got a several criteria into which the information goes and then is shared with whoever needs it. But one of the things of course that JADC2 embraces is AI and there's a huge premium placed on AI, particularly at the cloud computing level, to effectively act as the clearinghouse for the data, to do that process that you just talked about, to be able to an extent recognize when this "is this information or is this intelligence" for instance. There's a big difference between those two things.
(26:56):
Your information is that, "We know that the bus from wherever arrives at the bus station at five o'clock every weekday." The intelligence is, "We know that on Thursday there's a high-value individual on that bus." So how do you stream those two things? I think really that's where the AI and the machine learning element comes in, and that's really a big part of the heavy lifting of JADC2 is the real danger with this, if we don't get this right, is exactly what you've just said. We could have a huge amount of information and it's not collated properly, it's not shared properly, nobody really knows what it's doing on the cloud. "Why was it put there in the first place? What am I looking at? Why is it here?"
Ken MIller (27:37):
It can really freeze your decision-making process, and that's not anything you can afford in a fight, obviously.
Dr. Tom Withington (27:43):
Completely. The DOD's been emphatic that the human remains on the loop at all times, but for the human to remain on the loop and for that information to be relevant, the person not only needs to see the data that they need to action, but I think the crucial thing is they need to understand why they've got that data. They need to understand why did the AI take this decision? That comes towards the trust question as well. It's one thing adopting all of this technology, but I think one of the biggest battles is you've got to get the war fighter to trust it and realize, "Okay, I can use this. This isn't going to let me down, and most importantly, it's not going to let my mates down who I'm relying on." That's part of the battle because what we're doing is huge, and if we don't get it right, the risk is it just gets discarded. Just we can't use it so we bypass it.
Ken MIller (28:34):
It's interesting because we talk AI, we always talk about... Not we, but just generally humanity, we talk about all the promises, how fast the information can be recognized and deciphered and sent around. When you're in combat, that decision point is critical because you have to, I mean, you're talking lives on the line, both military and civilian, and you can't afford to make a bad decision. When we talk AI and how it's shaping business, there's always that element of risk of, "Well, I can assume a certain amount of risk in the AI protocols based on some of the biases and things that are entered into that program." Military, we always talk about that zero risk, unable to take certain risks. This is the line of effort too, obviously establishing a human enterprise, keeping the human in the loop on the AI and ML. How are we talking about risk in this equation? I know it's a huge component, but tell us a little bit about what you're hearing in terms of how we are negotiating these risk concepts.
Dr. Tom Withington (29:39):
Well, I think part and parcel of managing the risk and understanding how it's going to affect us and also understanding how we're going to use this technology comes from all of the training and exercises that all of the US services has been doing so far, as they've been gradually inducting various elements of what the JADC2 philosophy's going to be. If you take the Army as an example, the Army does Project Convergence, which is an annual exercise where it puts a lot of its networking technology through its paces. Part of that, for instance, is it's been doing experiments and exercises with the integrated tactical network and this is a connectivity effort that's going on to enable the connection of things like tactical tablets, that kind of thing, to move information that is perhaps not necessarily secret but is sensitive or non-classified.
(30:29):
I think a hugely important part, in terms of this management of risk and understanding the risk, is getting the technology in the hands of the war fighter and getting them to be as aggressive with it as possible, if you like. I'm a big fan of the red flag philosophy that the US Air Force have always had, which is, "Do an exercise, make it horrifically unpleasant and difficult, get everyone to train in it, because then when you get to the war, hopefully, God willing, it's not as intense." Well, it will be intense, but it is something below the threshold of red flag, which becomes easier for you to navigate. I think that's a key part of it. I mean, almost whenever you've got a new capability that is coming to the fore that is going to contribute to the JADC2 overall philosophy, you absolutely have got to do that...
(31:28):
How can this go horribly wrong? If it does go horribly wrong, what do we do? We use the cliche trainers who fight all the time, but the reason we use it all the time, it's like the OODA loop, is because it's so relevant. The risk management I think comes from using it, trying to break it, and if we do break it, seeing how we can repair or seeing how we can manage without it, and that goes across all levels of war, I think.
Ken MIller (31:52):
I think you want to try to minimize the assumptions that you make in these training exercises too. Particularly we've seen this with EW in the past because we have a hard time training in a realistic environment and for electronic warfare. A lot of times we'll run in and we'll do exercises and we'll assume certain things are going to be there. We'll assume certain actions can be taken that will have a certain level of superiority or advantage in the spectrum, and you want in your training exercises to minimize those assumptions because you can't make those assumptions and you can't train your systems and your soldiers based on assumptions either, so I think trying to get focused in on training, which is extremely important.
(32:32):
Staying with the training piece a little bit, we've seen this over in Ukraine with Russia. They have some amazing technology and capability, Russia does. What we found was that their training was not up to par in terms of once the fighting started. One of the, I think, the benchmarks of US and allies training is that we really do try to decentralize training, decentralize decision making as much as possible, get it down to the hands of the war fighter, the soldier or the shooter and democratize it, so to speak. Could you share a little bit about your thoughts on how the leadership between high level military leaders down to the shooter level, at the lowest level, the one that's right in the fight, how JADC2 kind of changes the way we think of leadership and communication down the ranks for our military?
Dr. Tom Withington (33:25):
Sure. You probably remember a few years back, there was an interesting concept that was going around in military academic circles called the strategic corporal. And the strategic corporal idea was that if you have a situation, let's say like the Afghanistan theater or Somalia or wherever it is, you're fighting in an urban environment and suddenly that corporal with his or her section of troops assumes a strategic significance because let's suppose they're in a war-torn state, they're in a three block war, the area where they are embedded, where they are patrolling, you've got two factions that hate each other. You've got civilians, you've got some civilians who sometimes are with one of the factions and sometimes not. Perhaps you've got organized crime elements, you've got all these different things going on. It's a very dynamic environment.
(34:16):
On top of it, you've got a CNN crew or a BBC crew or whoever it is, and they're watching every move you make. If something goes wrong, it's going to be on the evening news and it's going to lead. The strategic corporal is having to manage a huge amount of decisions and having to manage a huge amount of inputs. I think one of the things that the impact that JADC2 has at that kind of level of war is that that corporal hopefully gets access to much better information than they have at the moment, and that improves their decision-making. Using our example of the war-torn city, these two factions and civilians, some of whom are with the rebels, sometimes they're not, it ebbs and flows, the organized crime elements, what you hope is that you get that corporal on their end user device is suddenly getting information that, "Okay, we know for a fact and we've absolutely determined that these three houses here and the people in them have absolutely nothing to do with the insurgency.
(35:17):
They're just trying to go about their daily lives, but their next door neighbor, they've got a bomb factory underneath. We need to go and deal with that. But you really, really need to make sure that the neighbors are involved in this as little as possible." Again, it's going back to this, it's not only making quicker decisions, it's making better decisions because the information you've got to go on is better quality. I think in many ways... I'm glad you brought the example of Ukraine up and particularly Russian doctrine as well. This idea we often hear in Russian doctrine, there's this emphasis that subordinates are not encouraged to take their own decisions and to think on the spot in a way that NATO troops very, very much are. What I'm hoping is that this empowers that democratization of decision-making that we enjoy in NATO militaries even further, because I genuinely believe that is a war winning capability that we share in NATO.
(36:12):
I think one of the things Ukraine has taught us, and this comes back to the sort of overall JADC2 goal, is that I don't want to dismiss the Russians because I think they're still a very capable fighting force, but I think one of the things we've seen is that there is a technological gap and there's a doctrinal gap between the Russians and NATO, and I think our job now is to increase that even further, make sure that gap is as wide as we can possibly get it, and JADC2 I think feeds into that.
Ken MIller (36:38):
I want to stay with the NATO theme for a bit. We've talked a lot so far about JADC2, kind of more or less from a US perspective. Jumping to the fifth line of effort and not to diminish the others that we won't get to cover, but the fifth line of effort is really mission partner information sharing, working with our allies, working both NATO and other regional allies and partners that we have. Can you share how JADC2, the concept of JADC2 as we talk about it in the US, how it's applied or seen from a NATO perspective in terms of working together and how does that influence decision-making in terms of funding and priorities in NATO?
Dr. Tom Withington (37:19):
Sure. I've been very encouraged with what I've been hearing in NATO and what I've seen, because one of the great attributes I think that the US military has is that US military thinking is a bit like rock and roll in the sense that when the US came up with rock and roll, everybody in Europe wanted to buy into it, because it was great and it was good to listen to. I think every time there is an important military innovation in the US, whether that's network-centric warfare, whether that was AirLand Battle, and really JADC2 is the inheritor of that. This is not a new thing. This conversation has been going on, or these efforts have been going on, really since the end of the Vietnam War and the emergence of AirLand Battle concept and that interest in jointery that came out as a result of that.
(38:02):
What you're seeing in NATO is that, for instance, the British, the French, are very much into this and they're working hard on their own multi-domain operations efforts as we speak. They're doing that within their own forces in order to take advantage of this improvement in the speed and quality of decision-making, but also to be able to plug into what the US is doing and vice versa. I think we're potentially going to get a situation in the future where it's a bit like what you see with Link 16 in the air domain that when you have a big air operation now and the US involved, what tends to happen is that NATO will say, "Look, if you don't have Link 16, you can't really play. If you want to play, you've got to come with that capability."
(38:45):
I can see the JADC2 connectivity being like that with, "Okay, X, Y and Z NATO nations, you're going to be part of this framework force with the US, but you absolutely have to be able to link your data in with what we're doing, and equally we need to be able to link back with you." The way to do that is to start these efforts now and get working on that. That's what we're seeing in the UK, it's what we're seeing in France. Germany, I think, has interest and of course it'd be interesting to see what the Finns and the Swedes do as they come into NATO.
Ken MIller (39:14):
We're nearing the end of our time. It's funny, when we have you on the webinar, we say, "Hey, Tom, you have an hour to just talk nonstop." Then I invite on the podcast, it's like, "Hey, you've got 30 minutes to have a conversation," and the assumption is that we're going to cover as much information in the podcast as we do in the webinar, and that's just not true. There's going to be a lot that we don't simply get to. But just to kind of wrap things up a little bit, what are some of the thoughts of things that you really kind of want to drive home to the listener that we might not have been able to cover in the course of our normal conversation?
Dr. Tom Withington (39:46):
I think the first one is that JADC2 is non-negotiable, really, from my perspective. We can't embark on this effort and NATO can't embark on its other MDO multi-domain operations efforts and sort of look three or four years down the road and go, "Huh, you know what? Better scale this back, better probably curtail a lot of it. It's getting expensive. It's taking ages to procure. We need to maybe think again about this." This isn't like an attack helicopter program that spun out of control in costs or whatever it might be. If we don't get this capability, we will be at a major disadvantage to our near peer competitors because I can promise you they're thinking about it. China certainly is thinking about it. So that's the first point.
(40:32):
The second point links into this, which is all of these efforts have still to run the gauntlet of politics, whether that be in the US with the political situation in Congress, and obviously whichever side of the aisle people are on, they're thinking about money, they're thinking about how much money is available, and there is only ever so much money that is available and that's mirrored think elsewhere in NATO. There's always going to be a political temptation to cut back on this, and this comes back really to my third point, which echoes an excellent editorial John Knowles wrote in JED the other week where he talked about advocacy and he said, "It's incumbent on all of us to go out there and talk about the electromagnetic spectrum and to do advocacy work."
(41:22):
This is not the same thing as lobbying. This is about educating people, and JADC2 comes into that. We've all got to be JADC2-minded, or let's say, we've all got to be multi-domain operations-minded because that encompasses what NATO's doing as well. But the crucial thing is we've got to explain it to people, because one of the biggest obstacles we face is if policymakers don't understand something, I can promise you they'll be tempted to wield the ax and to wave the red pen. We all need to get out there, we need to get ourselves educated on this, and we just go and bang the drum, and we need to keep the conversation going. I think that's the other thing. That'd be my closing thoughts, really.
Ken MIller (41:59):
Those are great points, and I obviously completely agree with the advocacy piece and the need to educate members of Congress, leadership in DOD. We oftentimes make the assumption that the leaders know what we know, and that's not usually the case. We ought to take every opportunity we can just to reinforce that. One of the things that is going to be coming up here in the near future is AOC's going to be doing a panel discussion with the Hudson Institute here in DC with the Congressional Electromagnetic Warfare Working Group, which is a group of members of Congress who are dedicated to this issue of advocacy for EW in Congress. We're going to be talking a lot about these topics, and it's a great opportunity to speak to Congress, to help staff and other leaders in the sector figure out what is the right path to take on policy, so all these come together.
(42:53):
I really appreciate those comments. Tom, as always, it's great to talk to you and I wish we had more time. Hopefully you'll be a frequent contributor here to From the Crows' Nest. Love to have you back on. Love your articles and all the presentations that you do for AOC, so thank you so much for taking time to join me.
Dr. Tom Withington (43:08):
Ken, it's been a real pleasure. Thoroughly enjoyed our conversation today. Let's keep the conversation going and we'll talk again soon. Thanks again.
Ken MIller (43:16):
That will conclude this episode of From the Crows' Nest. I want to thank my guest Dr. Tom Withington for joining me. Also, don't forget to review, share, and subscribe to this podcast. We always enjoy hearing from our listeners, so please take some time to let us know how we're doing. That's it for today. Again, you can follow me on Twitter at @FTCNHost. Thanks for listening.
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