The discussion of information warfare and warfare in the information age is often more confused and confusing than informative and productive. This may be true because the problem is hard to conceptualize, perhaps a testament to its ultimate importance. No analysts in history immediately comprehend the logic of their own situation, in periods of transition; a long epoch of disorientation and confusion is usually necessary to learn the necessary rules of the new era. Observers of the contemporary period of military transformation are no exception. Perspectives and theories have to be broken in by the harsh reality of critical analysis in order to discipline them.
Standard models of military innovation neglect important parts of the story. Hitler backed Guderian's new Panzer tactics in the 1930s, but Hitler took a cosmic gamble that it is hard to conceive of a democracy taking. Napoleon represented the purist form of information warfare in history, yet he did this through organization of his army into corps and better intelligence, prior to any increase in information technology.
Approaching the problem from the top down makes it harder to understand how information technology affects military organization. General taxonomies, definitions, and classifications are created, refined, and modified in an exercise that too often is excessively abstract. Key details are stripped from the problem, details that should play a larger role in shaping system design. Searching for better paradigms in order to design forces that exploit better information technology tends to be counterproductive, because it starts at too high a level of generality.
This chapter uses a bottom-up approach instead, as a counterbalance to analyses that refine high-level taxonomies. The fusion of the two approaches is discussed in terms of management issues at the end of the paper.
The significance of DBK is constructed from two important current contingencies: one from the Middle East, the other out of North Korea. The purpose is to draw out significant consequences resulting from improved battlefield awareness, not to fight the war or generate a scenario for its own sake.
The October 1994 feint by Iraqi divisions toward the Kuwait border involved about 1,700 armored vehicles. What could we do with air power if we had the right munitions and knowledge of the location of the armored vehicles? With enough warning time to deploy 200 U.S. aircraft to the theater -- combined land and sea based -- and four antiarmor munitions per aircraft, at two sorties per day, and Pk of .5, then up to 800 armored vehicles could have been killed on day one of the attack.
This yields a vehicle attrition rate approaching 50 percent for a single day of combat, something that would have halted the Iraqi Army and thrown into disarray key units of Saddam's key institution of internal support, his Republican Guard forces. No ground force could maintain cohesion under this attrition. In reality, with tanks and APCs in column, and the behavioral effects of killing lead vehicles, cohesion would break well before 800 vehicles were destroyed. What are some of the more important implications of having this capability?
North Korean mobilization would involve a sequence of actions: injection of covert special forces teams into the South, elite dispersal, the recall of ships to port, and a breakout of ammunition stocks to forward infantry and artillery. Two infantry corps and armored forces, consisting of some 2,500 tanks, 2,300 armored personnel carriers, 1,800 truck mounted multiple-rocket launchers, and 3,000 trucks, would move south. That plus artillery yields 15,000 high-value targets (armored vehicles, artillery, and ammunition and command centers), virtually all within the 200 nm square grid.
Compared to the Iraqi scenario, the North Korean one has a qualitatively different scale. Ten times more targets must be destroyed without delay, to stop the assault before a breakthrough can take place.
The North Korean decision cycle in war is likely to diverge sharply from its preplan structure. Information flows, strategic variables, and institutional detail will be disrupted and swamped, because of the North Korean command system's inability to manage this scale of operation and by U.S. attacks on it. The really important North Korean communication system will not be the one from central headquarters to the field, but rather the one reflected in the behavior code of junior officers. There are six major north-south roads and effectively six invasion corridors. The ratio of vehicles to road space would create large traffic jams, especially as it had never been rehearsed; large amounts of live ammunition would be handled and fired by untrained troops for the very first time; movement of chemical weapons would create special problems; the sparse command and control system would be flooded from below with reports of problems and requests for permission, leading to delays in new orders coming back from above; couriers would not be able to deliver messages in a timely way.
No one can say, in advance, where the traffic buildup will be greatest. With a U.S. ability to locate these areas quickly there is an impetus to decentralize the targeting assignments to cut down on delays. More precise tailored information may not be of great value in such a target rich environment and could be of negative value if it induced delay. There is relatively little danger that the North Koreans could quickly alter this condition, as their capacity to undertake cross-corps assignments of forces or to exploit the benefits from weapons of mass destruction is almost nonexistent, certainly compared to what was expected from the Warsaw Pact.
Because the United States would have order of battle and unit location information on North Korean units, our Marine amphibious forces could pose a much greater threat. This brings out an important feature of improved battlefield awareness: knowing where the enemy isn't may be as important as knowing where he is. U.S. forces could be injected into undefended areas and protected once they got there. The North Korean armored 10th and 425th corps are held back to protect the Pyongyang-Wonsan axis in fear of U.S. amphibious assault, something very much in our interest to maintain. In other words, battlefield awareness for the United States in Korea turns a combined arms attack at the DMZ into an infantry attack, as we can compel the North Koreans to hold their armor back in order to send it to coastal areas to handle amphibious threats. This makes the defense at the DMZ more fault tolerant, as the pace of a breakthrough is reduced because of its infantry character.
The above suggests creation of U.S.-ROK phantom divisions to threaten North Korea all azimuth, in particular in the far north as well as on the Pyongyang-Wonsan line. The technical question is, how can we project an appearance of U.S.-ROK divisions at locations in North Korea that are undefended, but that would be threatening enough to require disruptive countermoves? This certainly requires DBK in the form of offensive electronic warfare, perceptions management, and special units.
Conceivably, with a preemptive strike on massing North Korean forces north of the DMZ a main line of resistance could be kept away from Seoul, with large positive political consequences. Flexible deterrent posturing alternatives become easier. One problem with surging U.S. aircraft into ROK airfields is that they become prime targets for weapons of mass destruction. Because these are fixed sites, the North Korean could probably hit them. With improved battlefield awareness, basing offshore becomes feasible, as aircraft will not have to loiter searching on their own for targets. They can be sent to target rich areas immediately following launch. Improved battlefield awareness can lessen vulnerability to weapons of mass destruction of air assets. Nevertheless, U.S. ability to detect preparation for NBC attack by the North would still be extremely limited.
With these two scenarios it is easier to think of the impact of improved battlefield awareness in more general terms, starting from a perspective which is close to the action. Next, plausible improvements in this capacity in the year 2008 are incorporated. This involves substantially improved communication interlinks between sensors and weapons, greater interoperability among sensors, and operation of new high performance reconnaissance systems.
What would an investment program to attain improved battlefield awareness look like? The current planning, programming, and budgeting system (PPBS) categories may be worse than useless; they reflect an era of fewer interdependencies within U.S. forces. The benefits of DBK arise from improved weapons and faster operations, which are not covered by PPBS categories. With future forces, one part will influence the success of the other; PPBS assumes a loosely coupled system where command and control investments can be neatly separated from weapon system decisions. A plausible replacement for the present PPBS, intended to reflect the unique character of battlefield awareness improvements, is suggested from trends in the corporate world.
How have large multinational corporations approached their reorganization to exploit information technologies? There are at least three important distinct success characteristics of these firms:
In a military setting timely responsiveness would be measured by decision cycle time, time lost awaiting decisions, percent deliveries on time, etc. Efficiency is measured by cost per kill, kill probability per weapon, the number of sorties per day, etc. Knowledge transfer is analogous to information availability and intelligence and is measured by the ability to connect sensors and weapons, to interlink reconnaissance systems, and to check against faulty data.
A business-matrix approach involves scoring different forces on these three criteria against varying threat contingencies. The goal is to force consideration of the investment tradeoff among programs that reduce response time, increase efficiency, and exploit the synergy of these two through improved information and intelligence. Historically, the Pentagon has invested in building up programs that emphasize some of these more than others. During the McNamara years the emphasis was on efficiency. During the 1970s it was on responsiveness, of getting a force quickly to the Persian Gulf. Today there is a large investment in information and intelligence.
In the future, DOD will have to emphasize all three characteristics, with an operations staff that can assemble a force with dominant features best suited to a situation. In the Iraqi scenario, for example, it is the increased efficiency of laser-guided bombs reflected in higher Pk's that gives the decisive benefit. In the Korean contingency, responsiveness is critical because of the forward deployment of the North Korean Army.
The major management problem facing the Pentagon is focusing on organizational metrics rather than on technical system characteristics. Information technology enhances the contribution of specialized technical staffs, while the great benefits of interlinkage among shooters and sensors fosters the merger of such staffs to get the design right. That these specialists come from different technical communities creates friction and misunderstanding, which can distract attention from the larger purpose. The objective is the payoff from these changes, which should be judged not in purely technical ways such as higher data rates, but rather in improvements in organizational performance such as increased responsiveness and efficiency.
As multinational corporate experience suggests, the right answer is not to decide in advance how much responsiveness or efficiency is needed, but instead to have an operating system that can adjust rapidly to different environments. For a Korean scenario, the U.S. military should tilt toward prompt responsiveness, while for the Iraqi scenario it is less important to get large amounts of force there than it is to get the right kinds of shooters and munitions. This is what is meant by strategic assembly, the art of tailoring the force to a contingency. Strategy to task assignments are no longer one-shot affairs, but continuous activities which change with conditions.
This heightens the importance of knowing the enemy, not just target signatures but his decision cycles and in institutional detail. Knowing about the training of North Korea's junior officers matters because its macroinformation structure will disintegrate when burdened by the coordination tasks of operations, especially when it is degraded by U.S. attack. The resulting microinformation structure at company level and below is what the North Korean Army will devolve into. This phase change is important, but it is fairly certain that U.S. intelligence does not look at the problem this way. The new intelligence roles and missions commission should be brought into this discussion because U.S. intelligence organizations are at a critical time of transition.
Most people probably believe that changing the organization for increased battlefield awareness is driven by changes in its formal structure, or at least by the rearrangement off information circuits in it. The classic organizational change strategy has these sequential steps:
But the ideas in this paper suggests a better change strategy would be to reverse this order completely.
The search for high-level general taxonomies (e.g. information warfare, counter-command and control warfare, offensive versus defensive information based warfare, and so forth) reflects a perspective on the problem that is a prelude to changes in formal departmental structure (e.g., the department of countercommand and control warfare, the department of defensive information based warfare). Understanding the enemy's microinformation structure, tradeoffs among responsiveness and efficiency, and a strategic assembly mentality all arise as the end product of changes introduced after boxes and lines are moved around an organization chart. This is quite troubling.
It would be far better to begin the analysis of what to do with the aforementioned end products, because this would greatly improve the chances off getting the design right in the first place. Then, formal structures could be built around information and work flows, it would be organized around process rather than around departments.
All this goes to the problem of managing the synergy of information and intelligence with responsiveness and efficiency. The major problems of achieving dominant battlespace knowledge are not problems of departmentalization and coordination of operating forces but problems of organizing information storage and processing -- not problems of a division of labor among services, but problems of the factorization of decisionmaking. These problems are best attacked by examining the information system in abstraction from service and department structure.