Attacking Hostile Battle Networks

Today digital technology pervades the world’s militaries. Their lifeblood is now digitised information circulating through their force structures and used for warfighting and force management.

John Boyd’s well-known Observation, Orientation, Decision and Action (OODA) loop is the principal idea animating current battle network operational constructs.  For Boyd, winning at any level of war requires working the OODA sequence faster than an adversary. The crucial quality necessary for greater OODA loop speed is rapid orientation.  Success lies in friendly force commanders having an accurate mental image of the battlespace more rapidly than those of an opponent.  The intent of a battle network is then to see farther with greater clarity and to act faster with more precision than one’s adversary. 

Given this, the PLA’s theory of victory is based on using information dominance, precision strikes, and joint operations to paralyse, or ideally destroy, the critical functions of the enemy’s operational system.   These cyber, electronic, and physical attacks are aimed to disrupt information flows within the adversary system, degrade its essential nodes (C2, ISR and firepower capabilities), disrupt its operational architecture, and upset its operating tempo. Such actions will combine to undermine the adversary system’s reconnaissance-control-attack-evaluation process.  Once the adversary system cannot effectively function and becomes less than the sum of its parts, the enemy will then “lose the will and ability to resist.”

China’s 2015 Defence White Paper introduced “intelligentization” as the next step in the evolution of warfare beyond today’s “informatization.” Intelligentized warfare will incorporate artificial intelligence technology and be characterized by four key features: increased information-processing capabilities, rapid decision-making, the use of swarms, and crucially: cognitive warfare.

In focusing on cognitive warfare, the emphasis is shifted from information flows being the key to victory to the idea of “winning without fighting” through influencing an adversary’s perceptions of reality, reducing their morale and their will to fight.  Given warfare is a profoundly political enterprise, achieving political goals through the manipulation of human cognition now appears the most effective means of winning intelligent wars.  Dong Zhiqiang writing in the PLA Daily observes that:

“cognition is the process of actively processing information…. [In] combat operations, it is observation, judgment, and decision-making. In the past, cognitive offense and defense mainly suppressed the enemy's perception, and it cannot be called an independent combat method. In intelligent warfare, the development of cognitive science…allow(s) cognitive offense and defense to penetrate into the entire process of combat decision-making. Cognitive combat will be manifested in [the] three levels of inhibition, shaping, and control."

For Dong, cognitive inhibition refers to concealing friendly force actions while weakening the enemy's situational awareness.  In cognitive shaping the focus is not decreasing the enemy's understanding of the battlespace but instead grasping the opponent's thinking habits, appreciating their mental state and comprehending enemy combat capabilities and objectives sufficiently to be able to input into the adversary’s command system carefully customized, believable fabrications. With the adversary’s situational information so shaped, the adversary may make decisions, behave, and take actions favourable to friendly forces.

Cognitive control is the highest form of cognitive warfare. It no longer influences the enemy's decision through inputting false information about the battlespace, but directly controls the decision-making by the adversary command system, whether through influencing the commanders’ judgments or by technical means. The adversary, under our control, then commands their forces to do as we require.

Youngjune Chung writing from Tongji University in Shanghai sees this very much in the long tradition of Chinese strategic thinking.  He argues today’s Chinese cognitive warfare concepts are powerfully shaped by long-held ideas of strategic psychology, usefully defined by the Chinese Military Psychology Research Cooperation Centre to be: “the ‘laws governing the relationships between the human mind and objective existence, and between human mind and the practice of war.”

Cognitive warfare brings new battlefield advantages by being unconstrained by geographic or environmental boundaries and able to disable, disrupt, and damage an enemy force’s performance by silently penetrating the minds of hostile decision-makers. In the military sphere, stratagems include situation-shaping through deception, creating false understandings of reality and “wedge-driving” to destroy enemy cohesion, weaken their over-all strength, and damage alliances.

In this, cognitive warfare operations are seen as multi-domain cutting across the physical domains of the land, air, sea, and space and into the non-physical domains of cognition, cyber, and the electromagnetic spectrum. This suggests a greater role emerging for the PLA’s Strategic Support Force, which has responsibilities for conducting space, cyber, electronic warfare, and psychological warfare operations.

Today’s informatized warfare conceives as victory through having better information. In contrast, tomorrows intelligentized warfare’s cognition focus conceives of victory through better processing of that information.  In both cases, it is relative to the adversary and so damaging the adversary’s information flows, or its processing of that information, helps gain that competitive advantage needed to win.

Battle network systems may be considered as having five major functional elements.  The sensor element collects data on battlespace activities and passes this to the processing element that analyses, aggregates, and synthesizes the data into human-understandable information. Using this information, the decision element commands the effects element to act. These actions can include kinetic fires, that physically damage or destroy adversary forces, and non-kinetic fires, such as electronic warfare or cyberattacks. Acting everywhere across this whole sequence, the communications element allows all the other elements to pass data, information, and decisions across the battle network.

This is a complicated system type in having well-defined boundaries, in aiming to reliably operate in the same manner under adverse conditions and hence be linear in operation and commanded by the central node within the decision element.  Battle network systems are decision-making systems at the strategic-operational level of war, in contrast to communication networks that pass information to dispersed and mobile forces at the tactical level of war. Countering a battle network involves defeating good decision-making by the adversary.

Modern battle networks have proven excellent at gathering, storing, and sharing information from the battlefield but noticeably less effective at processing and contextualising this information.  The networks have been overwhelmed by big data’s 3Vs - Volume, Velocity and Variety - and have trouble turning data quickly into useful intelligence.  The networks have proven not as effective and efficient as originally hoped in building an accurate battlefield picture, especially when time is constrained.

The objective in attacking a battle network varies depending on the impact sought. First, the aim may be to cause a system paralysis that means it cannot perform the strategic level tasks assigned the battle network. Some subsets of this might be possible, such as aiming to stop a specific strategic level task being carried out. Second, the aim could be to disorganise the system in a way that shatters its cohesion, fragmenting it into multiple individual nodes. Third, the aim could be to block the system’s decision-making ability so it cannot react to emerging events. Fourth, the aim may be to slow system operation down, allowing friendly forces to seize the initiative. Lastly, the aim might be to exploit the battle network through taking control or by inputting false information. 

Such aims relate to countering the whole system, but the design of a complicated system also allows defeating segments of it, whether these are in the sense of geographic coverage or functional utility.  A variation on the defeating segments option is to attack not the adversary force battle network but instead its allies’ battle networks. These may be less robust and present easy entry points whether aiming for destruction, degradation, or exploitation. The aim in such attacks is to reduce the overall combat power of the whole alliance arrangement. In this, the major power’s battle network may remain untouched, but its alliance partner’s battle networks may be peeled off.

A complicated system with a centralised network offers a variety of attack entry points including the overall system, the central node, peripheral nodes and the many connections between the centre and the periphery.

In terms of the overall system, it may be possible to actively detach a significant number of the peripheral nodes from the central node. Such system fragmentation will damage its structure, sharply impacting overall system performance. An alternative is to overload the system in terms of space by attacking widely across the network including nodes on the edge of the system and those at some depth. Another option is to overload the system by attacking in time so that the system is perpetually busy over an extended period. In all three methods, physical and non-physical means may be used in conjunction to reinforce problems created or used in various individual manners.  The non-physical means are useful in readily allowing mass attacks; in that sense such means are scale-free.

In the pre-war phase battle network systems will be the subject of varying intelligence collection activities. The systems overall architecture, modes of operation and performance will be considerable interest. As conflict nears, intelligence gathering will significantly increase and, most likely, attempts will also be made to penetrate the system and leave cyber trap doors.  However, such activities can give a useful warning of impending war and if detected allow countermeasures to be developed and be emplaced.  

In terms of the central node, there are two elements that can be attacked: the processing element and the decision-making element. The processing element may be difficult to gain access to but if interfered with could potentially damage the quality and quantity of information passed to decision-makers. Such interference may be gained by inserting viruses into the processing software. Simple viruses may be detected but they will slow system performance down as they are resolved. More sophisticated efforts might place tailored algorithms in the processing software so that friendly assets are not displayed to hostile decision-makers.

The decision-making element presents many opportunities, including through the humans involved. A high order question might be what kinds of decisions would it be most advantageous to interfere with? It may not be necessary, or practical, to obstruct all hostile decision-making as there may be just some which are important to the success of friendly forces.  Examples might be perhaps stopping decisions being made about offensive operations or about space ISR activities.

The concept of ‘reflexive control’ can deliberately target the decision-making element by trying to shape the decision-makers perceptions of reality to be favourable to the adversary’s strategic objectives. This can be done by manipulating such perceptions through targeted disinformation, such as misleading narratives or active deception.

The related concept of cognitive warfare also focuses on the decision-making element, trying to influence the decision-making of the battle network commanders through applying varying degrees of inhibition, shaping, and control. Cognitive warfare appears aimed mainly at situation-shaping through deception and the creation of false understandings of reality. Such activities will create confusion in the decision-maker minds more than make them act in a certain way. However, simple confusion may suffice depending on the strategic objectives sought.

In terms of the peripheral nodes, these are inherently vulnerable to being separated from the remainder of the network. Successful attempts at so breaking the battle network will disrupt its operational architecture and its operating tempo; these may have varying levels of impact on the overall system performance. 

The peripheral nodes are likely to the least robust, resilient, and defended parts of the battle network, whether from physical or non-physical attack. Exploiting this characteristic, and attacking multiple peripheral nodes simultaneously, may allow gaining information superiority through denying the hostile battle network adequate information.  Such information superiority may only be for a limited time period as repairs or alternatives may be found to return system operation.

In terms of the connections, these are also inherently vulnerable although, there are many of them and so there is inevitably some inherent redundancy. The connections in usually being digital may be attacked by cyber means of varying sophistication. Wireless connections may be cut by electronic means or physical attacks; the later however, can usually only impact a small number of connections each attack. Such physical attacks might be more usefully used to cut landline connections, forcing adversaries to use wireless connections susceptible to electronic attack.

Summarising, there several points of potential attack. First, the physical structures and node interaction offer a wide array of diverse pressure points. Second, there are numerous opportunities to introduce feedback delays and cause jerky “chasing your tail” oscillations. Third, the feedback loops, whether balancing or reinforcing, may be able to be exploited. Lastly, a major area for manipulation and damage is the information flows with the intent being to “drive the system crazy.” 

A complicated system has an inherent fragility as it does not transform under pressure like a complex adaptive system type.  Moreover, in being a closed system, the battle network is unable to call on external nodes to replace those lost to attack, or to supplement others when busy. On the other hand, both aspects are generally understood and so the system may be expected to be hardened, made robust, be constructed to be resilient and include backup nodes in reserve elsewhere that may be concealed. The central node in particular is likely to have a standby ready to be connected for use.

Even so, attacks are likely to lead to the complicated battle network systems becoming less capable, in terms of quality of decisions and quantity of actions undertaken. Such attacks will probably lead to graceful degradation in performance as nodes drop off, not a catastrophic systemic collapse. This attribute may mean that the system can repair itself while under attack and progressively come back into full service. The system may also be able to redesign itself to be reconfigured by connecting nodes into a new pattern.

With digital technology omnipresent, future major wars will most likely pivot around duelling battle networks. These complicated systems represent unique target sets best attacked through using system of system thinking and emerging ideas of cognitive warfare. Particularly given China’s “systems confrontation” focus, attacking battle networks is an idea that can’t be neglected. Time to think deeply about it.   

Peter Layton, Ph.D., is a Visiting Fellow at the Griffith Asia Institute, Griffith University. A former RAAF Group Captain, he has extensive defense experience, including in the Pentagon and at National Defense University. He holds a doctorate in grand strategy. He is the author of the book ‘Grand Strategy’ with a new co-authored book, ‘Warfare in the Robotic Age’ due out early 2024.