Prize Winner, Marine Corps Essay Contest
The digital battlefield—the cornerstone of the revolution in military affairs—is the panacea that many hope will help the United States dominate the conflicts of the future. Little has been done, however, to help train operators to fight the stealthy enemy of this new battlefield—the computer virus.
As the world celebrates the turn of a new century, the United States is heralding the official arrival of a new era of its own. The Industrial Age is dead. Enter the Information Age. Seemingly mirroring the plunging of industrial stocks and the skyrocketing of technology issues in the stock market, the United States is shifting its focus from manufacturing dominance and embracing a new technological revolution.
The U.S. military, faced with an unending struggle for an adequate budget and a desire to stay ahead of its enemies, also is showing a strong attraction to highly advanced information systems. After decades of building bigger, heavier, and faster weapons, the U.S. armed forces are opting for a smaller, lighter, and smarter military. Recognizing the tremendous advantages presented by superior information technologies, modern warfare specialists are preparing to fight on the digital battlefield. As it rapidly replaces battle-proven manual systems with more efficient automated ones, the U.S. military must adapt training exercises to ensure that proficiency in the "old ways" is maintained.
This does not mean an end to the acquisition of new systems. On the contrary, wonderful opportunities for improved command and control are arising from the new technological advances. The danger lies in overreliance on these systems without maintaining viable contingencies or alternatives. To understand this fully, it is necessary to examine the U.S. strategy for a digital battlefield, the threats inherent in such a strategy, and the need for livefire training on the digital battlefield.
"Digital battlefield" refers to a combination of automated position location, communication, information, targeting, and sensor systems that provides a common operational picture. Put simply, a digital battlefield allows all friendly forces to know their own locations, the locations of other friendly forces, and the locations of the enemy. Emerging technologies not only will allow players at all levels of the chain of command to view the same picture, but also will allow real-time or near real-time video of much of the action.
The United States has made the use of information technology a major part of its strategy for future war fighting. In "Joint Vision 2010," the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff published his conceptual template for the next decade of warfare. In this document, plans for using new technology are clear:
Advances in computer processing, precise global positioning, and telecommunications will provide the capability to determine accurate locations of friendly and enemy forces, as well as to collect, process, and distribute relevant data to thousands of locations. Forces harnessing the capabilities potentially available from this system of systems will gain dominant battlespace awareness, an interactive picture which will yield much more accurate assessments of friendly and enemy operations within the area of interest.
Forward-thinking military strategists such as Lieutenant Colonel Robert Leonhard predict that digitization of the battlefield can produce a "tenfold increase in velocity." This view is shared by Gerhard Kruger, technical director of C212 Systems, a South African company that specializes in real-time networking solutions for mission-critical applications. Mr. Kruger points out that "trials conducted in the United States show that digitized data can be transmitted from company to battalion twice as rapidly as voice data. Furthermore, digitized data is accurate 98% of the time, compared to only 22% [for voice data]." With gains such as these, the U.S. military will enjoy increased situational awareness, increased tempo, and more accurate targeting data.
After accepting the tremendous advantages provided by the digital battlefield, it is prudent to ask if there is a downside. Given the lofty position this new technology has taken in U.S. military planning, information systems quickly are becoming centers of gravity. The plan is to use the digital battlefield as a force multiplier, to gain the informational advantage, process this information more quickly than the enemy does, and strike first with surgical precision. We also must assume, however, that the nonlinear enemies of the 21st century will view U.S. information systems as critical vulnerabilities.
Bringing down an entire communications network, or at least temporarily disabling it, does not take a great deal of sophistication. As Dr. Martin Libicki, senior policy analyst at the Rand Corporation, points out, "systems can be disabled by cutting off their power, introducing enough electromagnetic interference to make them unreliable, or by importing computer viruses." In addition, the more sophisticated systems often are the most fragile.
The increasing activity of hackers also is a legitimate concern. The February 2000 attacks that temporarily crippled E-Trade, Amazon, Yahoo, and other corporate websites show just- how easy it is for hackers to tie up communications networks with bogus traffic. In 1998, teenagers broke into an unclassified military database and tracked supply orders for the services. They were literally only keystrokes away from crashing critical supply links. Hacker attacks in the fall of 1999 caused the Department of Defense to close off many military websites to nonmilitary traffic. In the middle of a crucial military operation, similar attacks could lead to a disaster in command and control. The commander-inchief warns that "we also face threats to critical national infrastructures, which increasingly could take the form of a cyber-attack in addition to physical attack or sabotage, and could originate from terrorist or criminal groups as well as hostile states."
Finally, operator error must be considered a key vulnerability of the new systems. Many of the new command-and-control systems, such as theater battle management core systems, use common databases. This gives multiple users access to common data. One of my previous units used a common database for tracking contact information for emergency deployment (such as hurricane evacuation). One day, a young Marine deleted most of the records by accident, and then saved his version of the database as the master file. The entire battalion lost hours of work in just a few keystrokes. Luckily, we had backups—but backups can consume precious seconds in a combat environment.
So how can the United States best make use of this tremendous technology, without retaining such an obvious vulnerability? The answer is live-fire digital training. For ages, military leaders have called for realistic training. Though dangerous, live-fire training allows units to work under many of the same conditions they might encounter in actual combat. The desire for such realistic training, however, does not carry over to military exercises designed to test the efficiency of new informarion systems. The tests or exercises often are geared toward the success of the system being evaluated.
For example, when exercises use new information systems to provide a common operating picture, the video screens in the combat operations center become a showpiece for visiting generals and VIPs. Oftentimes, maintaining that current picture as a showpiece becomes a secondary mission. Real enemy forces will conduct attacks to bring down these systems, so why not simulate such attacks? Three simple adjustments to exercises would provide more realistic training.
- Add hackers to the Red Cell's arsenal. All of the services have bright data-systems experts who would jump at the opportunity to demonstrate their capabilities in a major exercise. They should be given the enemy's mission of conducting operations to disrupt friendly major command-and-control nodes. This would allow evaluators to judge how well friendly forces adapt to such threats and to determine if contingency plans are in place.
- Pull the plug on these systems from time to time. Loss of power could occur from enemy attack, lack of fuel for generators, or generator malfunction. I have asked numerous senior officers if the plug ever is pulled on a major system during an exercise. After giving me the "that's-a-stupid-question-captain" glare, they always respond in the negative. It seems that the pressure to succeed in the exercise often overrules the need to evaluate the systems involved properly.
- Train with live viruses. I once heard a data-systems officer complaining that "some idiot" had released a live virus during an exercise and that it had caused a major disruption as it spread throughout the network. My response was, "Good! I'll bet that the data officer responsible for that system will never again be caught with inadequate virus scanning software." That is the beauty of live-fire training in a digital environment: If people die in simulation, they live to fight another day, having learned life-saving lessons. If we continue to train unrealistically, the lessons will be learned too late.
In addition to revamping current training methods, we need to make a concerted effort to ensure that we do not lose proficiency in the old ways of doing things. For example, there is a real danger that the overuse of the Global Positioning System is degrading the individual Marine's ability to use a map and a compass. Similarly, overreliance on a digital common operational picture endangers our proficiency in using grease pencils to plot that same picture. The only way to ensure that these capabilities are maintained is to retain the old methods as part of a Marine's individual training standards. This would ensure that—at a minimum—Marines are taught these skills in occupational standards schools. Commanders then would be responsible for ensuring that their troops maintain proficiency on both the new systems and the backup methods. The new systems provide significant benefits for command and control, but the proven manual systems of the past provide a functional standby when the lights go out.
Captain Andrews recently graduated from the Marine Corps Command and Control Systems School at Quantico, Virginia.