Networked Warfare

The U.S. military stands at an intellectual and structural crossroads. It seeks to field new, transformative capabilities while maximizing the current force, optimizing itself for high-end combat against a peer adversary. In this quest for lethality, the U.S. can embrace a truly networked, distributed force – but only if it makes the necessary investments in connectivity and information security. 5G development must therefore be a military priority, conducted with defense needs in mind.

The Ukraine War, however, demonstrates one of the trends that will dominate future combat. It is not the viability or non-viability of this or that system. Indeed, systems and equipment are not a useful analytical lens. A tank is simply a protected artillery piece designed for mobile combat, a large warship a mobile air defense and strike platform. Rather, the war has revealed the relationship between dispersion and concentration.

In principle, this observation is not new – the U.S. Army’s studies on the future of war identified the need for dispersion and the shifting character of mass as far back as the mid-1990s – but in practice, the way in which it has been expressed is worth attention. Ukraine’s success has stemmed from its ability to disperse and concentrate effectively. It has used lighter, faster moving forces at almost every turn to erode a heavier Russian military. It has been dispersed because it is mobile, it has long-range fires like HIMARS, PzH-2000s, Caesars, and other artillery pieces, and most critically because it is networked. Ukraine’s artillery fire-control system has tasked individual guns to targets at an extremely low level of command dispersion, while also allowing for precise coordination between deep, middle, and short-range fires. This coordination allowed numerically inferior Ukrainian forces to resist Russian pressure in the Donbas and ultimately spoil Russia’s advance.

This same force has now gone over to the offensive, conducting a sustained corrosive campaign against Russian units in Kherson and Kharkiv Oblasts, undoing Russia’s hard-fought gains of many months in days or weeks, and applying pressure elsewhere. Through proper coordination, dispersed Ukrainian units take territory and then use these positions to employ fires. By not massing in the conventional sense, Ukraine avoids a concentrated Russian riposte, and more crucially, denies Russia any tempting targets for a thermobaric or low-yield nuclear weapon if the situation degenerates severely for the Kremlin.

Two factors have enabled this coordination: long-range artillery systems and networked communications between units and unmanned systems. Absent a severe change in strategic circumstances, Russia can do little but absorb this pressure and accept military erosion or reconsolidate and accept the failure of crucial war aims.

The lesson for the U.S. is clear. We have invested in, and now field, several exquisitely complex systems, primarily stealth aircraft, precision-guided munitions, large missile-armed surface combatants, and aircraft carriers. When we seek investment opportunities, we look immediately towards these weapons – it is far easier for the services to advocate for a new physical system, and for Congress and the Pentagon to rationalize its employment, than for them to demand a more conceptual capability. By contrast, we have not invested in the communications and coordination technology necessary for a distributed, networked force, one that can mass when needed, and then disperse as rapidly as possible.

5G offers the U.S. military one route to this distributed connectivity. Fifth-generation cellular technology, as it is formally named, provides users with multiple connection points, allows for greater distribution of connectivity, higher volumes of data transfer, and more rapid data transfer.

The U.S. military must invest in a 5G connected system. But it must do so in a specific manner. Such a system would link older platforms with extant munitions. The Arleigh Burke-class destroyers that form the mainstay of the Navy’s surface fleet is a good example. The Navy seeks to phase them out to free up funds for new systems with newer sensors, ideally small unmanned systems that can be deployed rapidly and are expendable.

In turn, military 5G developments must be secure. 5G’s benefit is also its drawback: by linking so many systems into a single network, it creates far more avenues for attack. The solution is building the network with end-to-end encryption at multiple levels and creating mechanisms so that different parts of the network can operate independently, a move known as “network slicing.”  None of these steps are notional – modern software engineers and technical specialists can implement these procedures. The point of a bespoke military network is to ensure these security requirements, far greater than those of their commercial system counterparts, are highlighted from the earliest developmental phases.

The key, however, is integrating 5G communications capabilities throughout the force, rather than placing them specifically in, and restricting them to, new platforms.

Why is maintaining so-called legacy systems necessary? Because China’s challenge is no longer over the horizon. Admiral Philip Davidson, then commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command warned Congress over a year ago that the PRC could attempt to seize Taiwan within “the next six years.” The term “Davidson window” is common usage shorthand for this.

U.S. defense planners differ. The central premise of the U.S. military’s current procurement and force structure cycle is that diminishing reliance upon older systems, and accruing cost savings, does not damage the U.S.’ current strategic position, because the threat will materialize in ten years, not in two. Yet we go to war with the military we have. Bolstering the current force’s connectivity, and ensuring that the platforms in it are maximized, is far more prudent than cutting costs and throwing cash at platforms that in our glacially paced design and acquisition system might be deployed a decade—or decades—from now. This is a recipe for failure.

Seth Cropsey is the founder and president of Yorktown Institute. He served as a naval officer and as deputy Undersecretary of the Navy and is the author of Mayday and Seablindness.