Loren Thompson
U.S. Army leaders held a breakfast with reporters last week in which they tried to explain their strategy for keeping soldiers connected in future fights. How to pierce the "fog of war" is a long-running theme in military circles, but with each new advance in communications technology, the discussion becomes harder to follow. Some people came away from the breakfast confused. One person who did not was Breaking Defense deputy editor Sydney Freedberg. Freedberg has been following the twists and turns in Army technology plans for years, so he was able to discern what the bottom line was on the network briefing. As he put it, "there's no quick fix: The service is effectively starting over on what it's long described as its No.1 priority." After spending billions of dollars on next-generation tactical communications gear, Army leaders have decided it won't work and they need a different approach.
The new approach is called "halt-fix-pivot," by which planners mean they will stop buying half a dozen battlefield communications systems currently under development, fix deficiencies where they can, and then pivot to a new architecture. They don't know precisely what that architecture will be, but acting Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy intimated that it will be based largely on commercial technologies, particularly those used in smart phones.
Robust, reliable communications links are crucial to survival in ground combat.
This latest rethink in Army modernization was prompted by a May assessment out of the Institute for Defense Analyses -- a federally funded research center -- that identified numerous deficiencies in the Army's communications programs. Among other things, it said the battlefield network of the future was vulnerable to disruption by "near-peer" adversaries like Russia; required too much power and spectrum to operate; depended too much on satellite uplinks; and lacked sufficient range to maintain connectivity in a scattered, mobile fighting force.
These are all serious issues. However, the Army's strategy for addressing network shortfalls is not a serious response. It proposes the same sort of "let's start over" approach that has deep-sixed every major modernization of ground force equipment since the Reagan years. If service leaders launch on the vector they laid out in last week's breakfast, America's soldiers will still lack effective battlefield communications many years from now. Here are five reasons why.
The Army is making the problem too hard. Army leaders are in effect asking, "How can I have robust top-to-bottom connectivity in a wartime environment where fixed communications infrastructure has been destroyed, satellite access is denied, and the enemy is jamming my line-of-sight terrestrial links?" The question answers itself: you can't. But how likely is it that all these circumstances will occur simultaneously in a future fight? Maybe during the early days of a war on Russia's doorstep, but nowhere else. By demanding that all of its comms gear be able to cope with the most stressful conditions planners can imagine, the Army's new strategy guarantees it will never find a satisfactory solution.
In tech development, past is prologue. Many observers have forgotten that the Army's current modernization plan for tactical communications originated in programs for "software-defined" radios utilizing mobile wireless networks on the battlefield. In other words, they were going to apply the promise of commercial telecommunications technology to the challenge of winning wars in the information age. It's 20 years later, and look where we are. Nowhere near achieving that goal, because technology changed, threats changed, and fashions changed. As reporter Freedberg sagely observed in his recounting of last week's breakfast discussion, "The risk of just repeating history is very real."
Commercial technologies are available to enemies. Army leaders admit that they haven't sorted out all the details of the network they want to create, but they follow the advice of the May study in embracing commercial technologies as the solution to what ails their network. There are two obvious problems here. First, nobody at Apple or Samsung designed their systems with an eye to operating in combat conditions. Second, everybody in Moscow and Beijing has an Android smart phone. The point being that our adversaries will have no difficulty laying their hands on technologies that the Army wants to build its battlefield network around when they begin looking for ways of jamming, disrupting or subverting it.
The Army can't keep up if it halts and pivots. The scale of the Army's needs and slowness of its industrial-age weapons buying process mean that whatever new ideas it comes up with will be outdated long before they are fully fielded. For instance, the current comms plan envisions acquiring 193,000 handheld radios, 66,000 manpack radios, 10,000 vehicular radios and 7,000 airborne radios. Imagine how long it will take to develop, produce, field and train for whatever the service decides to buy instead. It is utterly impractical to apply a "let's start over" approach to this gargantuan task. What the Army needs to do is upgrade the systems it is already fielding, gradually correcting the most critical deficiencies over time.
The Army never sticks with a plan. If there is one thing that we have learned about the U.S. Army's institutional culture since the Cold War ended, it is that the service is incapable of sticking with a plan. New leaders appear, new threats loom, new technologies become available, and last year's must-have innovation becomes this year's bill-payer. We have seen this happen multiple times with armored vehicles, scout helicopters and long-range fires. Tactical communications will be no different. So even if it weren't wildly impractical to start over on the battlefield network, we would know that whatever was proposed at last week's breakfast will be forgotten long before it comes to fruition.
Did I mention that Congress and the enemy also get a vote on whatever the Army proposes to do about its battlefield network? When the smoke clears we will not have a streamlined plan for delivering tactical transparency on the battlefields of tomorrow. We will have a series of makeshifts and compromises with fiscal reality that don't look all that different from what the Army has today. So instead of tossing out programs that have taken a decade or longer to develop -- programs that already incorporate many commercial technologies and are significantly better than what came before -- why doesn't the Army for once decide to show some sophistication about how things work in Washington?
Several companies that would likely compete for whatever networking technology the Army buys contribute to my think tank. Some are consulting clients.
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