Previous chapters have looked at DBK with the assumption that the U.S. Armed Forces had enough platforms and weapons available to prosecute targets, and enough time to get them all into theater. Two previous papers indicate that the equipment necessary to stop an armored column is well within expected future force levels. Another suggested that this fact would persuade enemies to eschew conventional massed attacks entirely and revert to sub rosa incursions using military assets masked as civilian ones.
This chapter presents a new philosophy of warfare, "Just-in-Time Warfare" that DBK makes possible. It examines the role of potential reconnaissance-strike-defense complexes (RSDCs). In future information wars, virtual reconnaissance, strike, and defense would be coordination in battles fought as "meeting engagements" where both sides are on the offense. With requirements to shift between offense and defense in minutes or seconds, only multipurpose systems practicing "just-in-time" warfare will survive, with military systems providing communications, multisource intelligence, early warnings of tactical and ballistic missiles, and navigation will be vital. Planners will have to coordinate reconnaissance, strike, and defense missions together, over information-and-orders data networks, linked primarily through outer space. The requirement to switch roles quickly makes time precious and coordination an even finer art. Warriors will have to synchronize schedules and orders, as well as deliver military operations to meet rapidly emerging demands. Turning inside the enemy's decision loop will determine success or failure.
To develop this capability, we must develop new procedures, equipment, and information systems, plus provide better training. Only when the U.S. military becomes learning organization -- and all that this concept implies -- would it be able to enjoy an advantage achieved by establishing a clear and favorable differentiation from the competition.
As the tempo of battle increases and militaries can engage from greater and greater stand-off distances, platforms must serve many purposes, including offense and defense. With increased battlefield awareness on both sides, future confrontations will tend to be meeting engagements, where both sides are on the offensive. It may be necessary to shift between offense and defense in minutes or seconds -- only multipurpose systems practicing just-in-time warfare will prevail.
In the business world, just-in-time means less work-in- progress (WIP), less overhead, less inventory at each stage of production, and less slack time in the system. In military terms, just-in-time uses DBK and information technology to produce real- time scheduling to cut the need for today's enormous inventories. More frequent deliveries of smaller amounts of product (i.e., destruction) allow for more flexible scheduling, quicker response, and shortened decision cycles. If the batch size of weapons and other logistics shipments into a theater can be reduced, so will the vulnerability of logistical connections.
Just-in-time suggests that forces need no longer be massed prior to attack. When mass is needed for offensive or defensive purposes, it need take place only at point of impact. Large formations of ships, planes, or armor can give way to staggered scheduling and positioning that present no discernible pattern to an adversary. Not being able to sense where the attack is coming from -- because it could come from everywhere at any time -- takes the other side's initiative away. Putting the adversary in a defensive, reactive mode simplifies our problem and complicates his. It implies synchronizing, planning, scheduling, ordering and delivering of military operations as needed to meet currently emerging demands.
Massing at the point of impact and just-in-time techniques can be applied to command, control, communications, information warfare and logistics.
Just-in-time warfare requires sophisticated yet flexible command, control and information systems. It is possible to link these systems in an RSDC responsible for managing just-in-time warfare across the entire theater of operations. Such an RSDC would be a virtual vice real organization. It would draw its strengths and inputs from, and send its outputs to, other organizations via high-speed, robust data networks.
RSDCs would link organizations to exploit evanescent opportunities on the information terrain. Commands would contribute whatever skills, access, and access they do best, creating a best-of-everything organization, with world-class elements unavailable to any single one. Standardized memorandums of agreement and understanding (MOA/MOU) could facilitate these lash-ups.
Operational Control/Operational Command (OPCON/OPCOM) arrangements would be less permanent, less formal, and more opportunistic. Organizations would band together to meet specific opportunities and may disband or relocate when the need evaporates or circumstances change. Virtual organizations would cause the services to rely far more on each other and require far more trust than before. They would share a greater sense of co-destiny (or if done wrong, co-dependence). Thus would traditional boundaries of the services be altered. Dense and frequent cooperation among like elements, suppliers, and customers will make it harder to determine where one organization ends and another begins.
An RSDC, to be optimized, must be viewed as a value-adding partnership (VAP) and transcend today's interservice rivalries. The services have gone about as far as they can go with regards to vertical integration -- information flows very quickly and effectively from top to bottom and back. But cross-service flow is another matter. The technologies now exist that permit communications among the services at all levels instead of just at command centers.
If the services and agencies that provide the various technologies and expertise at each point in the engagement cycle are perceived as partners rather than competitors, then each step in the process can be optimized to match with those before and after it. The services and agencies must come to the realization that they have a major stake in each others' success. Given the present and near future states of possible computer-information- communication system integration, it is possible to incorporate this value-added chain into a virtual information data bus.
Digitized information (video, visual, data, audio) will be inserted by the sensor and intelligence systems, ride the RSDC data bus, and be modified by target sequencing algorithms. Modifiers can be injected across the bus as needed (e.g., alter all report data meeting the following criteria). Users (weapons/platforms) would draw only what affected them -- a determination that could be made immeasurably more efficient by filters, artificial intelligence, and user agents. Information could be stored in a format that could go from initial report through the identification, decision, assessment, assignment and engagement/reengagement process with information itself modified only at the point of extraction.
Ultimately, the energizing of appropriate circuits, following paths of least resistance, most reliability or redundancy, or fastest route to engagement(s) could be done, to a large extent, automatically. Weapons-to-target pairings could be computer selected and ordered under a command-by-negation (CBN) doctrine where each engagement would proceed to its successful conclusion (or reengagement), unless humans intervene, or because the system recognizes that the engagement violates commander's rules of engagement, coordination, or priorities.
Automating C2 functions helps free commanders to deal with the choices that systems cannot handle. Fuzing multiple-source intelligence and battle damage assessment generates information beyond the reach of any single sensor. The ability to do this in parallel would free forces from the current organic sensor-organic weapon lock (sensor and weapon hard-wired to each other on the same platform); a variety of sensors could pair with a variety of weapons on the fly. Sensors and shooters no longer be in the same place. National, or remote, sensors may have the best picture from which to conduct an engagement. A local sensor may be paired with a theater or national weapon. An Army Ranger could, in practice, be armed with a Tomahawk cruise missile or a Stealth-delivered bomb -- the same way that the main battery of an Aegis cruiser is already not its on-board missiles but a Navy F-14, a Marine F/A-18 or an Air Force F-16.
Parallel decisions (rather than one-at-a-time, one-after- another decisions) permit much faster optempos. By inputing mission priorities, rules of coordination and engagement, and an acceptable-degree-of-difficulty, the commander can set a required confidence level that must be achieved before an engagement is executed. In a touchy face-off with a nuclear-armed peer competitor, a commander might require near certainty. Against a Third-World niche competitor where quick decisive action is required, the commander may be more willing to act on a more- likely-than-not standard, with a low degree-of-difficulty threshold.
Today, commanders provide guidance through verbal or written, rules of coordination and engagement (ROCE). These rules require a fair amount of interpretation before they can be converted into formats recognized by today's weapons and C2 systems. Computerized ROCE's would help commanders set mission priorities between, say, strike, counter-strike, close-air-support, and defense; these weights could be fed automatically into the targeting and weapon assignment process. By using command-by-negation, automated ROCE's and mission priorities and pre-determined confidence and urgency requirements, computer-generated pairings will give the commander and their staff more time and freedom to concentrate on the problems hitherto perceived as too hard to handle, or otherwise unanswered.
Just-in-time warfare requires flattened, virtual organizations. Some of its components may actually remain and operate in the continental United Sates (CONUS), far away from any front. Using communication triggered by orders and information will ensure connectivity without requiring large bandwidth. Communications need not be passed over continually active circuits. Ships, aircraft, ground units and command centers are bogged down, today, maintaining multiple circuits that carry very little information -- most of which is static, and the rest largely unimportant -- and certainly not in an optimized format.
Other technologies can cut down on communications loading. Pre-loaded battlefield maps (on CD-ROM or silicon) would require communications only when data changes. This vastly simplifies the problem of picking out the target (thus converting a map into a super moving-target-indicator). Software agents could be used to seek out intelligence on targets -- vastly simplifying today's overwhelming correlation problems and freeing much of it from the slowness of human hands.
Virtual reality's time has come. A virtual picture (supported by holographic displays and large color screens) of the battlespace may now be more accurate and usable than a real one. Presenting fused information and intelligence as 3-D images which couple weapons pairings and targets (and can be examined from all aspects) will make operations faster and more accurate. Commanders could avoid the mental gymnastics required convert read data (e.g., lat/long, bearing/range, course/speed) into a mental image. The more easily commanders can interpret the picture, the quicker they can make decisions. It is time targets looked like what they are - - not symbols that require interpretation.
Topographically replacing physical geography with infography (e.g., lines of communication) may alter the conduct of warfare. Information peaks and ridges may become the centers of gravity of future warfare. Information intersections become as important for targeting as nodes or command bunkers,both from an offensive and defensive viewpoint.
Paradoxically, total awareness may open the door to greater reliance on dumb munitions. Before DBK, most targets were treated as fleeting. Engagements were conducted even though Pk was low and the degree of difficulty or toughness of the shot was high. With DBK, fleeting no longer means "passing quickly" but "moving quickly." DBK lets us engage threats at the right moment in terms of Pk and degree of difficulty; moving quickly matters less. Dumb ordnance may be deliverable with precision against these "new" "fleeting" targets, because they no longer disappear.
Real-time targeting, which is possible using just-in-time warfare, can be used with stand-off weapons and dumb ordnance launched from out-of-theater, and bombers and cruise missiles can be assigned en route to the theater. The success or failure of previous strikes, therefore, can be factored in real time.
While still possible, it may no longer be necessary to plan enormous raids to cover large areas to hit moving targets, because speed is no longer important when it cannot clear a target from the area. Real-time targeting allows the designation of a new type of target -- irrelevant or inconsequential, ones that are not necessary to attack unless and until they threaten something: platforms with short-range weapons (older generation tanks and aircraft), or systems that need long and easy-to-see preparation prior to use (e.g., liquid-propelled TBMs).
DBK, command-by-negation, new targeting philosophies, and existing automatic engagement systems make it possible to sharply reduce blue-on-blue engagements. Many systems, such as the Aegis Weapons System, were designed to be able to automatically engage massive Soviet raids -- last ditch features meant for engagements when no human could decide and act quickly enough. The parameters that had to be met by threats (before they were automatically engaged) were normally very exact. This was done to make undesired engagement less likely and successful engagement more likely. With a new purpose, automatic systems can be used very effectively in an increasingly info-aware world. They are microcosms of the RSDC, with "defense" emphasized. If we trusted these systems to make decisions when there was not time for human intervention, why can't we rely on them more when there is time? Many of these systems can and do take inputs from IFF systems. Using IFF systems and other concepts presented here might have prevented the USS VINCENNES (1988) and UH-60 shootdown (1994) incidents.
BDA is key to the operation of an RSDC and the management of ordnance. During the Gulf War, many targets had to be re-hit because BDA was not available; was indeterminable; or could not be correlated fast enough to a critical or time-sensitive target. Lack of adequate BDA was listed as a problem in the Gulf War Report to Congress for the Tomahawk, SLAM, ALCMs and others.
DBK makes it possible to use BDA more discriminately. Often, the suppression of a target is more important than its destruction. With DBK, a target's reaction to an attack would be more visible and may suffice for BDA. A retreating target is usually an inconsequential target. Reevaluating the requirements and criteria for BDA would have a direct impact on the amount of ammunition required in-theater and on the engagement process. Today, when BDA determines that a target was not killed, or when BDA is not available, a reengagement is ordered. This may no longer hold, when "fleeting" targets are redefined as "moving" targets and when only targets that satisfy the necessary criteria will be engaged.
In WWII, Korea, and Vietnam, U.S. forces took and retook real estate multiple times. This was driven by the need to "take the high ground" and to deal with the uncertainty as to when possession of the real estate was actually required. With DBK, we need only take particular physical real estate when it suits a specific mission for a specific period. The information terrain may become the real battlefield. Battles can become truly nonlinear. It will no longer be necessary to always take Hill 151 before taking 152. Holding Hill 152 might not be so necessary for our purposes, as holding hills was necessary in the past. Tough spots can be avoided, as DBK makes specific objectives (e.g., for stand-off weapons, special operations forces, or information warfare attack) singularly targetable, with the risks from nearby forces clearly quantifiable. Maps depicting troop and weapons employment might look more like measles than spaghetti. The days of the left-hook may be past.
It may be easier to illustrate how DBK can support just-in- time warfare by looking at three scenarios of tactical engagements.
DBK would permit the U.S. military to change from a vertical, stove-piped, serial, hierarchical decisionmaking to flattened, parallel, virtual decisionmaking and still be able to turn inside any potential adversary's decisionmaking loop. Learning must permeate the U.S. military at every level and be an important part of everyone's mission statement. Employing just-in-time techniques in all areas of warfare, including Command-by-Negation, bursted communications, smart software agents and smart logistics, and balanced weapons -- and the training necessary to use all of these -- will make it possible to take full advantage of DBK and the revolution in military affairs.