Technological change is revolutionising the decision-making process for militaries, while at the same time, weapons are being developed that can travel faster, farther and with greater precision than was previously possible; this offers a huge advantage for the first state to develop such capability.
Western military dominance has been eroded across land, sea, air, space and in the electromagnetic spectrum. Advanced military capabilities are proliferating, and systems that were previously the preserve of Western states, such as armed uninhabited aerial vehicles (UAVs) and high-precision guided weapons, are increasingly operated by others, including potential adversaries, who are also developing new types of capabilities for themselves. There is now contestation in all domains, and the pace of change is accelerating. In 2017, US Secretary of Defense James Mattis said that it took several thousand years of war on sea and land, and around 100 years in the air, for those domains to be brought to the current position, but only ten years for space and cyberspace to mature into war-fighting realms.
Weapons are being developed that can travel faster, farther and with greater precision than was previously possible. Developments in hypersonic flight, for instance, are opening new possibilities in offensive operations. The pace of technological change will accelerate the speed of battle and raise the demand for yet quicker weapons.
Supporting this process is the growing spread of technology and related know-how that has enabled states (and empowered individuals) to develop, acquire and adapt hardware and software. Amid an increasingly data-infused world, technology developments either originating in or driven by the civilian sector will be integrated into war-fighting organisations in order to help leverage and exploit data, provide an advantage over an adversary and enable weapons to be used more quickly and targeted more precisely.
Integrating advanced technologies into command-and-control systems will enable quicker decisions and, coupled with faster weapons, put pressure on an adversary’s decision space: there will be less time to take decisions. The state that is best able to exploit these changes may find opportunity. The problem for Western states is that they are now not the only ones seeking such advantages, and in other countries there may be fewer bureaucratic hurdles to fielding relevant systems. It means that, in the West, attention is focused on a different kind of speed: the pace at which organisations can buy relevant weapons and systems as well as innovate, adapt and integrate change. It is by improving in these areas, as well as in developments in technology and weapons, that the West might be able to reinforce its capability edge.
New capabilities bring new promise
New information and communications technologies (ICTs) carry the potential to improve some existing military systems and reduce the utility of others; the challenge is in discerning which can be adapted and which will be genuinely superseded. ICTs will also deliver new capabilities. Cyber power is one example: it is now a military competence in its own right. Greater use is also being made of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning in order to augment human capacity, to process increasing volumes of data more rapidly than before and to improve the effectiveness of weapons and other military systems.
During the US-led campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, rapid progress in intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities were fused with the emerging capability to exploit large datasets in order to bring actionable information more rapidly to military personnel. (Discerning changes to pattern-of-life movements and mapping adversary networks by tracking their use of ICTs are but two examples.) Over the same period, there were rapid developments in the technical capacities needed to transmit data quickly over distance and in large volumes. Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff General Joseph Dunford noted in early 2017 that data and imagery could now be delivered by satellite to a deployed platoon in Afghanistan at a volume that would only have been possible at divisional level five years before. The volume of data that can be amassed by modern sensor suites, and the speed with which this needs to be processed and disseminated, already surpasses the processing power of the human mind. This is as true for combat platforms as it is for command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR) systems. This had led to the introduction of levels of autonomy. Frank Hoffman notes that the US Navy and US Army ‘now field defensive missile systems with degrees of autonomy built into their controls’.
Other areas of technological progress include:
robotics and uninhabited land, sea and air vehicles – including integrating these with AI systems and teaming with existing weapons;
quantum cryptography and quantum computing;
artificial intelligence, and autonomous control;
nanosciences and materials science, which are important for seeking processing futures beyond current chip designs;
space, to which more nations now have access and where there will in future be greater competition;
directed energy, where advances in power supply have enabled greater progress; and
developments in hypersonic flight.
Of course, some of these have been discussed for years; in many cases they have long been the ‘next big thing’. Nonetheless some are in use, such as the autonomy example mentioned by Hoffman, while artificial intelligence is used for some decision-support functions. And others, like directed energy and hypersonics, are now on the cusp of service entry. This is in some measure because technical capacities have improved, but also because aspirations for use have been reassessed. For instance, some analysts explain the progress in exploiting AI because algorithm-based technologies capable of tasks such as pattern recognition in large datasets are not seen as intrinsically reliant on progress in the search for AI that can mimic human decision-making.
As well as opportunity, this process brings risk. Greater integration of advanced ICTs within armed forces and states will improve the capacity of military systems but will also make those systems vulnerable to the actions of adversaries, such as cyber attack, jamming or spoofing. While ICTs may hold the promise of increasing the speed with which information might be gathered and assessed and an engagement might take place – thus compressing the time in which an adversary has to consider a response – the same might hold true in reverse. Adversaries might have similar capabilities in systems and in weapons. Furthermore, ICTs may also drive yet more automation and autonomy in defences in order to minimise an adversary’s first-strike advantage, possibly increasing the risk of miscalculation in response. According to Dunford, ‘information operations, space and cyber capabilities and ballistic missile technology have accelerated the speed of war, making conflict today faster and more complex than at any point in history’. Other capabilities, including hypersonic weapons, could be added to his list.
Hypersonics
The US, Russia and China are the main actors pursuing developments in hypersonic weapons. These are generally taken to include weapons capable of speeds above Mach 5 (that is, above 6,125 kilometres per hour, although the speed of sound varies with altitude and temperature). Current developments are focused on boost-glide vehicles (where air vehicles are boosted to altitude and speed by more traditional rocket motors and then glide unpowered at high altitude), and hypersonic weapons with air-breathing engines that are able to maintain powered flight until impact. However, the ambition to achieve hypersonic flight is not new; from their early days in the Second World War, ballistic missiles attained hypersonic velocities, and both the US and Russia examined new hypersonic designs at least from the 1970s.
Despite these attempts, hypersonic flight was for years a victim of a conspiracy of optimism. The scale of technical challenges and the lack of maturity of the technology hampered early attempts to introduce operational systems, but progress in this area is now picking up speed for a number of reasons. For one, aspirations have been reshaped. There is now more focus on hypersonic flight for missiles rather than on more sweeping ambitions for applications that might lead to hypersonic passenger aircraft. At the same time, progress has been made in overcoming earlier technical challenges in hypersonics, including in air-breathing propulsion, materials technology, an adequate understanding of high-speed flight aerodynamics, heat-management challenges for guidance systems at hypersonic speeds, a lack of adequate wind-tunnel facilities and immature computer-modelling technologies.
Developments in hypersonic weapons
Russia’s announcement in March 2018 of its Avangard hypersonic weapon attracted much attention. Avangard is a hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV), possibly intended to be launched from the Sarmat heavy intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) or the existing Satan ICBM. It is intended to circumvent Western missile defences and possibly deliver either a nuclear or non-nuclear payload. Moscow said that Avangard will enter service around the turn of the decade.
At the same time, Russia also went public with Kinzhal, a weapon based on the Iskander surface-to-surface ballistic missile and designed to be air-launched from a MiG-31 interceptor. Kinzhal may have anti-ship and land-attack roles. It has a shorter range than Avangard but when combined with the carrier-aircraft’s range could lead to targeting at ranges of around 2,000 kilometres. At a tactical level Russia is pursuing the 3M22 Zircon hypersonic anti-ship missile. Moscow is also developing the izdeliye 75 (also known as GZUR), with a range of 1,500 km. This is possibly an air-launched air-to-surface weapon in the Mach 6 range.
China too is pursuing an HGV, which was termed ‘Wu-14’ by US intelligence analysts. China began testing this around 2014 and a system could be fielded by 2020. It might be dual-capable. Like Avangard, Wu-14 is understood to be an unpowered glider, which would offer only limited options for defensive manoeuvres during flight. China also has air-launched ballistic-missile projects in development.
In the US, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has tested Hypersonic Test Vehicles (HTVs) in the past. Tests in 2010 and 2011 of a research vehicle called HTV-2 ended in the vehicle’s destruction in both instances but generated valuable information about hypersonic heating issues. The services have been active too, working closely with DARPA. The US Army has in the past tested an Advanced Hypersonic Weapon Concept (a glide vehicle), and the US Air Force tested the X-51A Waverider. In the public domain, current efforts are centred on two projects for which contracts were awarded in April 2018. Lockheed Martin was awarded a US$928-million contract to develop the air-launched Hypersonic Conventional Strike Weapon and – it emerged later – a second project called the Air Launched Rapid Response Weapon. Derived from a DARPA tactical boost-glide vehicle project, this reportedly has the designation AGM-183A.
The advent of hypersonic weapons may radically change both the speed and potential range of engagement. Hypersonic weapons may simply arrive too quickly for the adversary to organise an engagement, while current defensive systems might be too slow to shoot them down. And they will bring greater targeting options for time-critical and distant targets, offering strategic reach and precision. As an example, on a test flight in 2013 the US experimental X-51A Waverider hypersonic air vehicle ‘traveled more than 230 nautical miles in just over six minutes’, reaching a peak airspeed of Mach 5.1, according to the US Air Force (USAF). Indeed, ‘hypersonics overcomes the constraints of distance, time and defence that already limit conventional aerospace power projection’, according to senior US defence adviser Richard Hallion. When combined with the benefits of faster C4ISR, enabled by improved processing capabilities and augmented by artificial intelligence, not only will weapons themselves be faster but so too will the capacity to find a target and process all the information necessary to decide whether or not to engage.
Implications for decision-making
Hypersonic systems, once fully integrated into war-fighting inventories, will have implications for the future utility of some military platforms, including bombers and aircraft carriers. They will afford nations an advantage by delivering more and faster targeting options on a global scale and will pose problems for an adversary’s defensive engagements and command and control. Hypersonic systems can create ‘dislocating effects’ by compressing and disrupting an opponent’s decision-making cycle. Other new technologies, such as AI, will have the same effect; these faster weapons and faster systems might, in turn, potentially enable greater capability in each other.
Military leaders strive to make quicker and better-informed decisions than their adversary. Former USAF Colonel John Boyd tried to synthesise military decision-making cycles in his OODA (observe, orient, decide, act) loop. In this case, employing hypersonic systems would rapidly condense the time available for an adversary to effectively observe and orient, creating problems for clear-sighted decision-making. Integrating advanced ICTs like AI brings a new challenge. This will, according to Will Roper, US Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, ‘likely draw this loop into a knot of unprecedented decision speed at global scale’.
But while challenges exist, so too do opportunities. For the side able to employ the more advanced technology, information might be processed faster and fed into the observe and orient stages, enabling a quicker and better-informed decision than would be available to an adversary. AI, for instance, can sift vast quantities of available information (‘big data’) and manage complex sensor feeds in order to provide options up to the decision-making level more rapidly. Doing this at increasing speed might provide more time to make the right decision and enact it more quickly than the adversary. According to Hoffman, ‘in such situations, the necessity for preplanned delegation and engagement authorities is clear’. Even so, as Frank Partnoy of the University of San Diego observed in 2012, acting fast might not necessarily mean acting first: ‘those able to step back and think about the big picture,’ he said, ‘have a major advantage’. Indeed, using technical means to increase the time available to make decisions could, when coupled with fast and accurate weapons (themselves augmented by improved ICTs), create the space to outfox an opponent by waiting for an adversary to move first or even by detecting and engaging a threat before it is launched (engaging ‘left-of-launch’). With system speed in some cases outpacing human capacities, there has been sharpened focus on developments in autonomous control – an area that opens up many other questions in the legal and ethical realms relating to the degree of human involvement, particularly when it comes to weapons release.
Implications for organisations
One of the principal problems for Western states in tackling these questions is that they are no longer the only states setting the pace in areas such as hypersonics and AI. In order to maintain a lead, speed needs to be picked up in some areas, including the pace at which organisations can buy and field relevant weapons and systems, as well as the speed with which defence ministries and armed forces are able to adapt, innovate and integrate change.
The West could look to maintain a technological lead, and it is likely that investments will increase in advanced-technology areas as key Western states try to retain or obtain an advantage. Another approach is to accept contestation while still looking to maintain advantage, aware that dominance might only be temporary. Yet another approach is to focus on specific areas of strength. In March 2018, Steven Walker, director of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, said that ‘the US can no longer be dominant across all scenarios, but it needs to be highly lethal in select ones. This lethality needs to be surprising to peer competitors.’
Achieving this not only requires new and better systems for Western armed forces, but also that institutions change so that these systems are more rapidly and flexibly fielded and employed. A changed security environment means that funding streams for technologies such as hypersonics have now improved in the US, but countries such as China and Russia face fewer bureaucratic hurdles than Western states in meeting their security and defence aspirations. In China’s case, its national ambitions are made clear in speeches (such as Xi Jinping’s keynote address at the 19th Party Congress in October 2017) and in national plans (such as July 2017’s ‘AI Development Plan’). This is more difficult to achieve in the West, although other useful measures could still be pursued by defence establishments in the absence of similar concerted national effort.
Hypersonic WeaponsSource: IISS
Current anti-ship weapons such as Brahmos are capable of achieving Mach 3 in sea-skimming (3-5 MAMSL) profiles. Future systems may achieve velocities of Mach 5 or higher at the same altitude, although at these speeds they will face significant challenges in terms of control and buffeting and airframe heating. This graphic illustrates the difference in reaction time between such systems. Ships will also face high-speed and hypersonic threats adopting different flight profiles, such as dive-attack. High-speed weapons will alter the concept of operations for naval vessels. Alone, this Arleigh Burke-class destroyer can identify sea-skimming threats only as far away as the horizon, as viewed by its highest placed search-and-surveillance radar – the AN/SPS-67. From this position, a sea-skimming threat may be picked up 25.7 km from the vessel. Currently, threats in this area are from supersonic systems. Should hypersonic sea-skimming systems enter service, these challenges sharpen. If an incoming weapon is travelling at Mach 5 (1.72 km/second), this leaves just 15.1 seconds for the destroyer to engage the threat before impact. If the destroyer is operating under the surveillance cover provided by an E-2D Hawkeye airborne early warning (AEW) aircraft, the direct line of sight to the horizon is extended to 350 km. In this case, an incoming missile, at Mach 5, would still strike the vessel 3 minutes 25 seconds from detection.Source: IISS
General John Hyten, commander of US Strategic Command, said when discussing the progress in weapons being made by potential adversaries, that ‘in so many places’ the US had ‘lost the ability to go fast’. To remedy this, Hyten thought change was required in five areas: the budget; requirements (where he said it should take ‘no longer than three months to get a requirement for anything’); acquisition; testing; and risk assessment. Losses during test phases should not constrain the development of a promising programme, and programme directors should be allowed to take risks, accepting that failure is a necessary part of the process of fielding improved systems. The current US approach to testing hypersonic systems might point the way. At the 2018 Farnborough International Air Show, Roper said that recent progress stems from a decision to reshape the hypersonic project and view it as an experimental test programme where risk is accepted.
Acquisition processes also need to move faster. Rapid-capabilities offices – tasked with introducing capabilities faster than normal procurement cycles allow – have in some states helped to bring new systems into service relatively quickly. However, the question remains as to whether governments are willing to allow these offices to operate in the long term alongside more traditional acquisition structures. This raises questions over the level of reform needed to mainstream faster ways of working in acquisition structures and how to achieve this. Improving the requirements process might be one way; another might be to increase the mission flexibility of military platforms. Yet another would be to speed up procurement decision-making. In recent years, the US began a process of moving decision authority for some programmes away from the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Pentagon chiefs think that this will allow them to move ahead more quickly as each decision has fewer review stages.
Also, defence organisations need to work better with the private sector, where an increasing amount of militarily-relevant technology is developed. This would allow defence organisations to more rapidly identify innovation and benefit more quickly from technology developments. The US ‘must leverage commercial technologies and adapt at their pace’, as Roper put it when he was head of the Strategic Capabilities Office. At the same time, defence organisations need to maintain contacts beyond the primes, with small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) where much defence-relevant innovation originates.
Using faster systems to best effect means that organisations will have to consider how to recruit and retain the best people, so that agility and innovation is a personal as well as institutional proficiency. If individuals have the right skills, adjustments might have to be made to military structures and processes to attract and retain them. After all, military leaders, says Dunford, need to prioritise adaptability and innovation and be capable of ‘thriving at the speed of war’.
What difference does it make?
The technical developments described here matter greatly for armed forces. Faster weapons and faster C4ISR systems will change the way military leaders operate on the battlefield as well as how they plan and execute missions. They will also allow a broader range of targeting options than hitherto, with hypersonic weapons allowing more fleeting targets to be engaged than was previously possible. The application of technology will compress decision space; this will be worrisome for an adversary but an advantage for the state able to best harness and integrate these technologies. And while general AI – machines able to think for themselves and perhaps act autonomously – may still be some time off, perhaps now is the time to consider AI’s legal, moral and ethical dimensions and, as Hoffman wrote, ‘think about its effect on war and warfare’. That said, the current level of AI and machine-learning augmentation of C4ISR systems indicates that at least a degree of autonomous control is already in place.
But while these technologies might change the way conflict is fought, it is questionable whether they will necessarily make war any easier or more predictable, certainly when it is fought on land or in complex cultural and political contexts. While they may in some ways be revolutionary (with the side that is able to use, for instance, AI-enabled C4ISR systems being able to benefit from more options more quickly), the course of recent wars should temper views over the effect new technologies can have. In any case, with potential adversaries pursuing the same or similar systems, or measures designed to blunt Western advantage, any edge they bring may be short-lived: these periods of relative advantage are also being compressed. Nonetheless, the increasing speed of weapons and of the decision-making cycle will challenge military professionals. In order to cope with a collapsing decision space, more use will likely be made of technological assistance, as well as reliance on planned routines to enable faster responses at times of operational stress. Meanwhile, mindful of the ‘Clausewitzian elements that frame our understanding of war’s nature’, Hoffman argues that autonomy will change the nature of war. Greater delegation ‘to lower echelons for faster forms of attack’ might, he says, weaken political direction while ‘deep-learning forms of AI will augment the intuition and judgement of experienced commanders’.
It is likely that technological innovation will challenge current conceptions of what conflict is, with a further blurring likely of the line between peace and war and kinetic and non-kinetic action. At the same time, greater progress in robotics, AI and autonomy will have the potential to alter national risk calculations. New technologies will enable ever more sophisticated and disruptive ‘grey zone’ operations. The objectives of these actions may not be intrinsically new, but the use of ever more technically complex means might not only boost the speed at which any potential effect may occur but also increase the difficulty for states seeking to respond in a timely fashion. If anything, these challenges place a premium not just on the need to procure and integrate faster weapons and improved C4ISR systems, but also to increase the speed with which military systems are procured and organisations and personnel can adapt in the face of military demands in peace, war and in the increasingly indistinct area between. Successfully achieving all this is not a given.
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