Idiosyntactix Strategic Arts and Sciences Alliance The Brand Name of the Media Revolution

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Nature of Future War

Nature of Future War

Future war can be envisioned as consisting of three general classes of activities. First, there is the perfection of traditional combat. Second, there is the evolution of what have been called non-traditional missions, a very mixed bag of activities including humanitarian assistance, SOLIC operations, counter-drug operations, peace operations, and counter-proliferation. Third, there is the birth of a form of war unique to the information age.

Information technology not only will change the nature of what we know today as war and operations other than war, but also will spawn a new set of activities that will become familiar to future generations as constituting "warfare" in the 21st century. Today, we might have some difficulty in viewing this set of activities as "war" or as the concern or responsibility of DoD. Current planning and budgeting approaches find it difficult to address these aspects of the future, since they are not extensions of existing military missions and responsibilities.

However, in each of these three cases, information technologies will shape the battlespace and define the possibilities.

Future "Traditional" Combat

The future conventional battlespace will be neither contiguous nor orderly. Tempo will be extraordinarily high by today's standards. Given expected improvements in weapons and command and control, if a target can be seen it will be destroyed. Therefore, survival will depend upon organic defensive capability, suppression, and stealth.

Concepts of operation will center around massing fires rather than forces. Command and control concepts will involve dynamic tradeoffs between ensuring that Rules of Engagement (ROEs) are followed, prioritizing targets, and minimizing the time required to pass information from sensor to shooter.

Commanders will have more direct influence on shaping the battlespace and influencing the initial conditions of the engagement. Staffs will be significantly reduced as organizational structures flatten. Most commands will be automatically disseminated and incorporated in decision aids. Many decisions will be fully automated. Virtually all information will be distributed horizontally.

In short, many significant changes will need to be made to respond to the challenges of the information age. With this much change foreseen down the road, care must be exercised to ensure success.

Evolution of Non-Traditional Missions

Since the end of the Cold War, the nation has looked to DoD not only to reduce overall spending, but also to undertake a more diverse set of roles, both at home and around the globe. The unique capabilities developed by the U.S. military to meet the global challenge posed by the Soviet Union and maintained to protect U.S. interests around the world are seen as national assets that can be employed beyond their traditional combat and combat service support roles. Global air and sea lift are important for disaster relief, crisis intervention, humanitarian assistance, and support to peace operations. Similarly, the secure global communications capacity of the U.S. military is a crucial asset in a wide range of situations. The capability of the military to surge from its training bases and to react rapidly when dangerous situations arise far exceeds the capacities of most civilian agencies, for whom surge capacity is a slow and cumbersome process and crisis response is an alien practice. These unique capabilities, combined with the absence of an urgent, direct military threat, have caused the nation to expect greater involvement by DoD in non-traditional missions, such as humanitarian assistance, maintaining law and order when local and state authorities cannot, disaster relief, and countering drug smuggling and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

The international environment has also changed in ways that make non-traditional missions more likely and more diverse. The absence of a single military threat and the need for international legitimacy when force is threatened or used have made coalition operations the norm rather than the exception. International organizations, particularly the United Nations, have become increasingly assertive and have pressed a vision of global interests in peace and cooperation. As the only remaining global superpower, the United States is expected to respond whenever international peace and harmony are threatened and the nations of the world feel action is needed. This has been interpreted to mean that the U.S. must lead when the peace is threatened, international crimes are committed, or human tragedy looms.

The growing internationalism is undercut by parochial clashes and conflicts. Freed from the smothering constraints of communist governments, national movements in Eastern Europe and the former USSR have proven willing to challenge the peace to seek independence. Clans and tribes in Africa have reasserted their interests, sometimes violently. Asia is the site of arms races and uncertain relations between nations. Domestic and international struggles for the long-term control of the Middle East oil wealth and the worldwide resurgence of fundamentalist Islam add to the dangerous international situation. Drug traffickers present a frustrating cross-border challenge. Recent attention has also focused on conflicts arising from environmental issues, particularly disputes over water rights, ocean areas, and transboundary air pollution.

Perhaps most important, media coverage and recent successes have led to very high expectations about the performance of the U.S. military. Minimum casualties among both com-bat forces and civilians is widely perceived as an important and achievable goal. At the same time, the military is expected to be effective by accomplishing missions precisely and quickly. Finally, all this is expected within the context of declining budgets.

Warfare in the Information Arena

As the global society enters the information age, military operations inevitably have been impacted and transformed. Satellite communications, video conferencing, battlefield facsimile machines, digital communications systems, personal computers, the Global Positioning System, and dozens of other transforming tools are already commonplace. Moreover, DoD has gone from being the driving force in information technology to being a specialty user with a new reliance on commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) technology in order to acquire and field cost-effective systems. The widespread proliferation of this technology, as well as the increased reliance on COTS, has contributed to a significant increase in our vulnerablity.

The implications of warfare in the information arena are enormous. First, national homelands are not sanctuaries. They can be attacked directly, and potentially anonymously, by foreign powers, criminal organizations, or non-national actors such as ethnic groups, renegade corporations, or zealots of almost any persuasion. Traditional military weapons cannot be inter-posed between the information warfare threat and society.

Second, even where traditional combat conditions exist (hostile military forces face one another in a terrain-defined battlespace), kinetic weapons are only part of the arsenal available to the adversaries. Indeed, electronic espionage and sabotage, psychological warfare attacks delivered via mass media, digital deception, and hacker attacks on the adversaries' command and control systems will be used to neutralize most traditional forces and allow concentration of fire and decisive force at the crucial time and place in the battlespace.

However, warfare in this information age will require enormously complex planning and coordination, very near real time and total situation awareness, decision support systems that filter and fuse information very rapidly and perform simple plan extensions and revisions almost automatically, and massive database and information exchange capabilities to track both friendly and enemy situations as well as rehearse and forecast battlespace dynamics.

This rapidly evolving situation means that the U.S. military must be able to perform the following three fundamental information warfare missions: 1) protect its own information systems, 2) attack and influence the information systems of its adversaries, and 3) leverage U.S. information to gain decisive advantage in a battlespace where national security is threatened.

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