The Emerging System of Systems

While Department of Defense officials often note that we live in revolutionary times, we do not always describe what this portends for the kind of military forces the na­tion should have in the future. There are, of course, many truisms about how the international system, still rever­berating from the collapse of the Soviet Union, must af­fect defense planning; about how relatively constrained budgets will force tough decisions; and about the promise of advanced technology. Yet, the most profound impli­cation of the new era often goes unremarked: namely, that the basic rationale for defense planning has shifted from threat to capability and from liability to opportunity.

The implications of this shift are not easy to grasp. We have planned military requirements against threats for so long—nearly half a century—that the shift to a differ­ent perspective is hard and the organizational and process changes necessary to consummate the shift are only now becoming clear. As long as we had an identifiable threat, we could focus on what we required to counter that threat. We had a fairly well-understood basis for deciding how much was enough.

Now, we are freer to think in terms of shaping the fu­ture. That consideration was, of course, always present in the past as we addressed the required size, structure, and character of our military forces. But today, we must face the issue of the political purpose of military force directly. It is no longer simply a matter of thinking it enough to counter successfully a defined military threat; we must de­sign military forces more specifically in terms of their po-

The Combat Information Center Officer of the USS Barry (DDG-52)—preceding page—has access to information gathered by many sensors—the ship’s own plus a host of joint systems deployed worldwide, including this JSTARS crew (above). The revolution in military affairs revolves around integrating all this information—and acting upon it.

litical purposes. In short, we must rebuild an intellectual framework that links our forces to our policy—no small task in a revolutionary era.

Each of the military services has wrestled with these is­sues over the last several years. Interestingly, much of what they are saying to themselves runs in parallel. Read the flagship pronouncements of each of the military ser­vices: the Army’s descriptions of Force XXI, the Navy’s “Forward . . . From the Sea,” the Air Force’s “Global Reach, Global Power,” and the Marine Corps’ “Opera­tional Maneuver . . . From the Sea.” The visions they sketch are remarkably similar. Each points toward the ca­pacity to use military force with greater precision, less risk, and more effectiveness. Each relies on three areas of technology:

►  Intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR)

►  Advanced command, control, communications, com­puters, and intelligence (Advanced C^JI)

►  Precision-guided munitions (PGMs)

Each recognizes that its efforts are part of a broader un­dertaking. I believe this undertaking is the U.S. revolu­tion in joint military affairs.

Over the past year, the JROC has tried to be a catalyst in articulating elements of these common visions that lie nascent within the nation’s armed forces; and we have gone further, to translate some of these visions into state­ments of military requirements. With the strong support and under the leadership of General John Shalikashvili, we have implemented the “requirements” provisions of the Goldwater-Nichols Act to change the Commanders- in-Chief, JROC, and Joint Chiefs of Staff roles in the Plan­ning, Programming, and Budgeting System (PPBS). Changing times require changes to planning processes that were built for an era that has passed.¹

What is the vision that drives these new processes? It comes in part by realizing what is emerging from past and

Table 1: Weapons and Systems In or Entering U.S. Military Inventories

NORTHROP GRUMMAN CORPORATION

current investments in the general areas of 1SR, C^JI, and PGMs. (See Table 1.)

1 have used the acronyms associated with the various systems and listed them in three broad categories to cap­ture the way we have traditionally talked about them. Few can describe each of the systems or weapons listed—the Pentagon acronyms constitute an esoteric language and not everyone knows the vocabulary. In addition, we tend to see the weapons and systems as separate lists. We have cultivated a planning programming and budgeting system that tends to handle, programs as discrete entities. The PPBS cycle forces us into a compartmented perspective— different offices, different services. Different people deal with one or more of the systems listed; they are dedicated and diligent—and they understand their systems.

Yet, because we tend to deal with these programs separately, it is difficult to recognize that together they posit—qualitatively—a quite different military potential. The interactions and synergism of these systems consti­tute something new and very important. What is happen­ing is driven in part by broad conceptual architectures— and in part by serendipity: It is the creation of a new system of systems. As this broad concept emerges over the next decade, it will carry with it the new revolution in military affairs and a new appreciation of joint military operations, for this revolution depends ultimately on con­tributions from all the services, a common appreciation of what we are building, and a common military doctrine. (See Figure I.)

>■ Bcittlespace Awareness rests on the sensing and report­ing technologies and includes both the platforms and sen­sors we associate with intelligence gathering, surveillance, and reconnaissance—and reporting systems that provide better awareness of our own forces, from in-transit visi­bility of logistics flows to the location, activity and status of our units, allied units, and noncombatants. Included are an awareness of the weather, terrain, and electromag­netic characteristics of any arena in which we may use forces.

► Advanced C-*I is the subsystem that rests on technolo-

The EA-6B (below), the logistics handling unit (right), and the AV-8B (opposite) all perform missions that the revolu­tion in military affairs could render redundant. As such, they are likely candidates for cutback—reducing the funds spent on them could release funds to accelerate the pro­grams that are in fact driving the revolution in military affairs. Making such reductions judiciously, without jeopar­dizing readiness unduly, is a way to maintain essential capabilities while moving into the future.

gies associated with transferring information and sifting through data to extract information. It is the system that converts the information derived from battlespace aware­ness into deeper knowledge and understanding of the bat­tle space and involves everything from automated target recognition to an understanding of an opponent’s opera­tional scheme and the networks he relies on to pursue that scheme. It also is the realm in which target identification, assignment, and allocation take place. In sum, it converts the understanding of the battlespace into missions and as­signments designed to alter, control, and dominate that space.

>• Precision Force Use constitutes the most misunderstood of the three systems. We perceive it as the domain of pre­cision-guided weaponry, which it certainly includes. It also includes, however, other ways of using force pre­cisely—such as offensive information warfare, the sub­system in which the knowledge generated from the inter­action of the first two systems leads to action.

Conceptual frameworks such as this are useful only to the extent that they lead to better decisions in allocating resources. One must guard against getting academically enamored of them, but the construct puts some of today’s force-planning issues into a useful perspective.

It helps, for example, in understanding some of the near­cliches that surround the force-planning effort. Everyone agrees that the capacity “to operate within an opponent’s decision cycle,” as retired Air Force Colonel John Boyd put it, is a good thing to have. Yet, beyond the general tendency to laud such a goal, there is little specific agree­ment on what the phrase means—and even less on how the United States ought to achieve it. Figure 1 suggests that the capacity to operate within an opponent’s decision cycle is a function of the overlap of Battlespace Aware­ness, Advanced C⁴I, and Precision Force Use. To the ex­tent we can expand the areas of overlap, both technically and doctrinally, we can increase the U.S. capacity to achieve this generally desired force-planning goal.

The framework also offers some guidance on the three core technologies that power the new system of systems: digitization, computer processing, and global positioning.

Digitization permits information to be manipulated, enhanced, and compressed for transmission; computer pro­cessing speeds this up; and global positioning allows precise, real-time location and targeting of anything tan­gible. These are the driving technologies for locating and identifying targets, transferring that information to shoot­ers, and guiding the precision application of force onto the target.

Today, the center of technological acceleration in each of these technologies lies generally in the commercial, non-defense sectors. Our ability to accelerate the fielding of the system of systems, on which we will base our fu­ture military superiority, thus depends on our capacity to tap into developments taking place for the most part out­side the existing Department of Defense laboratory and development infrastructure.

Figure 1 also is interesting for what it does not say. It does not say much about the things that normally focus debate over military requirements. It is not the kind of conceptual framework that leads immediately into dis­cussions of numbers of Army divisions, or aircraft carri­ers, or air wings, or the supporting infrastructure for these traditional measures of military capability. Indeed, it does not say much about traditional force structure at all, and it may portend a need in the more distant future for new doctrine and organization.

This is not to discount the importance of such tradi­tional issues, but our conceptual approach focuses on more direct measures of military effectiveness. It is a joint perspective, a framework that frees us from sterile debates about how many divisions or how many carriers—and per­mits us to focus on far more important issues such as the character of our forces and the manner in which they can work synergistically to increase our military capability. In short, the system of systems is fundamentally a joint military entity. No single service can build it alone—only coordinated interactions of all the services can produce it. When it is constructed fully, each of the services will be far stronger.

Finally, the illustration gives us a sense of the rela-

tionship between force planning and foreign policy. All nations have or can buy many of the core technologies, but the U.S. systems in each of these areas are far more capable; few nations, for example, can match U.S. space- based surveillance capabilities.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, only the United States is systematically building the larger system that grows from the interactions of the three subsystems. As a result, the United States will pass through the revolu­tion in military affairs sooner than other nations, which could give the nation not only a qualitatively new mili­tary capability applicable across the spectrum of conflict, but also one that will offer a new basis for deterrence and coalition leadership.

The new revolution in military affairs offers too much not to complete the transition, and each of the services al­ready has implicitly made the decision to push ahead. The speed at which we complete the transition depends on de­fense planning and programming decisions that will be made over the next several years. If we decide to accel­erate the transition we can complete it early in the next century; if we continue to let things evolve at their pre­sent pace, we will not complete it until sometime in the second decade of the 21st century.

If we decide to accelerate the process by emphasizing those systems and weapons that drive the revolution, we can reach our goals years—perhaps decades—before any other nation. If we can combine the new military capa­bilities the transition will give us with foreign and secu­rity policies that are consistent with those capabilities, we will be able to influence the character of the interna­tional system. We will be in a far better position to shape the world, rather than to react to it, than at any time since the end of World War II. Ultimately, this is the opportu­nity that has replaced threat-based planning.

Accelerating the revolution is not, of course, without costs. I believe that those costs are marginal, because the system of systems that will drive the revolution already is largely in the Defense program. But even marginal costs are of concern in a period of relative fiscal constraint. Ob­viously, the budget is not going to increase, and we are faced with what is now a planning dilemma: What can be cut to free the funds necessary to accelerate those pro­grams that are driving the revolution in military affairs?

One way to approach this question is to consider the kinds of forces that will become redundant after the tran­sition. When we have the kind of capability to track logistics from supply point to user that we anticipate acquiring, why would we want to hang on to all of today’s logistics-handling units? If we can destroy every hostile radar emitter minutes or seconds after it is activated, why would we need jammers? If we know where an oppo­nent’s ground forces are and can attack them with long-rang weapons, would there still be a need for close-air support?

It is possible to identify a wide range of current capabilities, forces, and programs that will be less important when the new system of sys­tems is in place. Reducing them marginally now would release the resources necessary to accelerate the acquisi­tion of the new capabilities. Can we as a nation take this risk? Can we shave down the resources currently com­mitted to systems that ultimately will be needed no longer, in order to acquire more quickly the capabilities that will make them unnecessary?

Many may say we cannot, arguing that this is a very risky strategy because it amounts to giving up useful ca­pability today on the bet that we can accelerate the arrival of better capability. We worry, for example, about an at­tack by Iraq on Kuwait or Saudi Arabia, and about a North Korean attack on South Korea, as well as a wide range of other potential contingencies. But we should not forget that Iraqi military capabilities for the near term will re­main only a shadow of what they were prior to Operation Desert Storm, nor should we ignore the trend associated with North Korea’s military capabilities, which is down— not up. Certainly neither of these observations is grounds for complacency, but we should remain objective about the military demands that the United States will face in the short run.

For these reasons, I say the nation should take this leap. We can make reductions judiciously and carefully, with­out jeopardizing readiness or detracting from our capac­ity to meet any near-term military contingencies. We should not lose sight of what can be gained by adopting the perspective General Sullivan so aptly noted. Today, the real risk lies in hesitating, and the real payoff will go to the bold, the innovative, and the inventive.

'A description of the procedural and analytic changes involved can be found in the author’s “JROC: Harnessing the Revolution in Military Affairs,” Joint Forces Quarterly, Winter 1993-1994, pages 55-57, and “A Word from the Chairman,” by General John Shalikashvili in Joint Forces Quarterly, Summer 1995, pages 4-8. The major alterations include the creation of a new analytic process—Joint War­fare Capabilities Assessments—to support JROC deliberations; formal recom­mendations to the Secretary of Defense on Defense Planning Guidance (The Chair­man’s Program Recommendations); and an increase in the Chairman’s role in program review via The Chairman’s Program Assessment.

Admiral Owens is the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A nu­clear submariner, he has commanded the U.S. Sixth Fleet, the USS Sam Houston (SSBN-609) and the USS City of Corpus Christi (SSN-705). His book High Seas: The Naval Passage to an Uncharted World was published by the Naval Institute Press in February.