Pentagon mulling new critical infrastructure defense ops plan: VanHerck

THERESA HITCHENS

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WASHINGTON — The Department of Defense is mulling over a new plan for defending critical infrastructure, as well as working to update its Arctic strategy, both as part of a push toward what the head of Northern Command and NORAD said must be a “vastly different” and more forward-leaning vision of the future for homeland defense.

“Domain awareness will be important, but that domain awareness needs to feed a globally integrated air and missile defense capability, where you can do real time collaboration — think of JADC2 [Joint All Domain Command and Control] — and you can do that with allies and partners so they can generate effects forward for me,” Gen. Glen VanHerck told a Mitchell Institute seminar Thursday as the organization unveiled a new policy paper, “Bolstering Arctic Domain Awareness to Deter Air & Missile Threats to the Homeland.”

VanHerck said that in his mind, integrated air and missile defense doesn’t start within US borders using kinetic attacks, but instead must take place “forward” both geographically and in time.

First, NORTHCOM and the US military writ large need improved domain awareness to allow VanHerck’s fellow combatant commanders to “generate those effects further away from our homeland.” For example, he said, autonomous drones carrying sensors, kinetic weapons and non-kinetic “effectors” could be one future tool, not just in the Arctic, but also “off the eastern seaboard, the western seaboard, or around the globe wherever we need to be” to help defend beyond US boundaries.

Second, VanHerck explained, the ability to make rapid decisions using artificial intelligence and machine tools, allows options for action “left of launch,” that is in the run up to conflict. However, he noted that getting from here to a globalized homeland defense strategy will require some “homework” on DoD’s part.

“Going forward, there’ll be some policy work that needs to be done. Flying unmanned autonomous platforms are likely a policy challenge that we’ll have to work through. Sharing of data and information are policy challenges as well,” VanHerck said.

Even with such a new strategy for taking the fight to the adversary, VanHerck stressed there ultimately will be “things we must defend in our homeland, kinetically or through hardening and resiliency” — namely critical infrastructure.

Critical Infrastructure

One that front, DoD completed a policy last year that gave the green light for him to put together a “commander’s estimate, essentially a plan, of how we would defend that critical infrastructure,” VanHerck said.

VanHerck said that he has completed that assessment — which lays out proposed operational plans and advocates for the resources needed over the current five-year future years defense program and a bit “further out” — and pushed it up the chain at the Pentagon.

While hesitating to go into detail, the NORTHCOM commander said that some sites will require protection “24 hours a day,” but others only during times of crisis or conflict — using tools that range from “resiliency, hardening, deception, denial, along with defending.” The plan also looked across domains and potentially vulnerable capabilities, such as positioning, navigation and timing.

VanHerck said that he is still waiting for a response from DoD, hopefully one that agrees with plan and translates it to a budget to acquire those capabilities.

“I don’t know the timing of that. I’m certainly hopeful that we’ll get that before my time ends here and we can move out,” he said. (VanHerck is slated to rotate out at the end of August.)

All Eyes On The Arctic

Noting his role as the DoD “Arctic advocate,” VanHerck said he also wrapped up a study on what capabilities are needed in the Arctic in particular last May, as tasked by Congress in the fiscal 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, too late however to “inform” the FY24 five-year budget cycle.

“I look forward to seeing what comes out in the budget here in the near future,” he said. “All the services have Arctic strategies. The department is redoing their 2019 Arctic strategy. I look forward to seeing them fund those.”

A new DoD Arctic strategy would, for one thing, need to take into account the Biden administration’s October 2022 Arctic strategy, as well as the broader National Security Strategy released the same month that puts the security of the high north at the top of the agenda.

“The importance of the Arctic can’t be overstated, candidly,” VanHerck said.

One of the key assets on VanHerck’s Arctic defense wish-list is a new over-the-horizon radar system — something that he said could have helped NORTHCOM and NORAD to more quickly have detected the now infamous Chinese spy balloon.

“The department’s done some great work there with funding for over-the-horizon radar capabilities, and working with Canada. They funded two; I’d like to see one more if we could make that happen. And we’re on track to field those later this decade. So, that’ll give us some significant domain awareness, specifically in the Arctic, but it also will give us some domain awareness south-facing, and east- and west-facing. I think that’s crucial.”

The Air Force’s FY24 budget includes $423 million for Over-the-Horizon Backscatter radar — two of which would be in the continental US-based as sites that housed much earlier versions during the 1980s, and one more at sited at European Command — as well as funds detecting stratospheric balloons and unidentified aerial phenomena.