Defense Horizons

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  Responsive Space and Strategic Information

  Simon P. Worden and Randall R. Correll

  American strategists face a daunting challenge; they must assure and defend American and allied interests, induce and encourage international security cooperation, and deter, dissuade, and defeat a diverse range of potential adversaries. This challenge has been addressed by senior political leadership in recent policy statements, such as the Nuclear Posture Review of 2002, and in the formation of an expanded U.S. Strategic Command, but this vision has not yet taken root in the Department of Defense components responsible for providing operational capability.

  We propose a new strategic posture based upon a war-prevention focus. The central element of our proposal is a transformational space and information sortie capability. American space capabilities now depend on a fixed infrastructure of large, expensive satellites. We argue for a complementary capability to launch small, inexpensive payloads in time of crisis to augment and reconstitute existing capabilities and perform entirely new special operation missions and global conventional strikes through space. These assets also would expand information operations beyond network defense and network attack to create effects in the minds of our adversaries and those who would support them.

  An enabler for these new capabilities will be the technology to deliver effects in and through space rapidly and affordably. A similar capability will be needed to deliver effects through cyber space. Space-based nodes would be critical components of an integrated physical, cyber, and psychological application of military force and strategic influence. These technologies exist today both in the United States and elsewhere. But a focused and funded program to develop them for military purposes is not yet in place.

  This new strategic posture will arguably require the formation of a new space and information military service to organize, train, and equip the space and information force structure of the future. The nucleus of such a new service exists today in the U.S. Strategic Command and its components.

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  Technology and National Security: The United States at a Critical Crossroads

  James Kadtke and John Wharton

  Globalization of science and technology, emerging and unpredictable threats (both manmade and natural), conventional and emerging weapons of mass destruction, and an inversion of technology flow from the private to public sectors all present challenges to our national security.

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  Low-Cost Access to Space: Military Opportunities and Challenges

  Philip Stockdale, Scott Aughenbaugh, and Nickolas J. Boensch

  Space activity is critical to the American way of war. The commercialization of space has potentially radical implications for U.S. national security through its impact on a range of military and intelligence functions and on the ability of the nation to effectively project power around the globe.

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  The Pentagon’s Pivot: How Lead Users Are Transforming Defense Product Development

  Adam Jay Harrison

  Historically, the Department of Defense (DOD) has relied on strategic forecasting to determine specifications for new military products. These specifications are codified in formal product requirements that drive new product development (NPD).

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  Developing an Innovation- Based Ecosystem at the U.S. Department of Defense: Challenges and Opportunities

  Adam Jay Harrison, Bharat Rao, and Bala Mulloth

  The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) is looking at new ways to spur entrepreneurship and innovation among its stakeholders and related constituencies.

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  Defense Partnerships: Documenting Trends and Emerging Topics for Action

  Samuel Bendett

  Public-public and public-private and partnerships (P4s) are time-proven effective solutions for delivering public services at reasonable costs when deployed and managed properly. Various U.S. agencies¹ and international organizations all have longstanding successful P4 initiatives and projects. Recently, Department of Defense (DOD) leaders have expressed increased interest in implementing P4s throughout their organizations.² As DOD is faced with evolving roles and missions in an “unpredictable and complex world amid fiscal constraints, the expertise and involvement of the private sector and other public organizations will be essential.”³ P4s could be ideal tools intended to “further policy objectives, enhance U.S. operational capabilities, reduce costs, gain access to nonmilitary expertise or assets, or build greater capacity in partners.”⁴

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  Global Knowledge Networking: Smart Strategies for Promoting Innovative Learning and Leader Development

  Walter L. Christman, Frank C. DiGiovanni, and Linton Wells II

  Smart security builds on actionable knowledge. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Wales Summit in September 2014 highlighted the need to build on partnerships to prepare and operate together better. Building on the successes of past partnership initiatives and capabilities, this paper proposes new ways to embrace and extend techniques and relationships originally developed under successful Secretary of Defense (SECDEF)-level memoranda of understanding (MOUs) within NATO’s Partnership for Peace (PfP) program. The Global Knowledge Networking (GKN) initiative supports smart decisionmaking by educating and training tomorrow’s agile, resilient, and effective leaders. GKN is a network of people, ideas, and processes to make knowledge actionable and is focused on improving on U.S. and coalition interoperability through improvements in existing training and education capabilities. It has begun to convene strategic dialogues around key challenges and collectively owned opportunities. Its initial framing is globally relevant and focused on the Arabian Gulf region through a proposed test bed for collaboration with the member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). This will allow new tools for interoperability to be explored and created together as enablers of joint capability. Drawing on the experiences of NATO’s Partnership for Peace, it will promote an innovative systems approach that could help cultivate and sustain more effective security partnerships around the globe.

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  Responding to Russia after the NATO Summit: Unmanned Aerial Systems Overmatch in the Black Sea

  Connor Sullivan, Schuyler Standley, and James M. Keagle

  The Ukraine conflict poses unique and asymmetric challenges to the international community. Since the earliest days of the Crimean crisis, Russian support of “separatists” within Ukraine has ranged from plainclothes thugs to more traditional uniformed troops, munitions, and other forms of aid. Some of the individuals involved may have had links to the Russian military or its intelligence community. While much of the aid comes through the porous border between Russia and Ukraine, Russia also leverages the opportunity to use Black Sea smugglers as a way to supply ongoing rebellions or to initiate new revolts. Two Black Sea–bordering regions, Odessa and Transnistria, are home to active pro-Russian movements that could potentially evolve into a pro-Russian state. Worries of Russia supplying separatists via illicit movements on the Black Sea and generally advancing its Novorossyia claims should be matched to a general concern over Black Sea smuggling rings, which traffic humans, weapons, and nuclear materials into Europe via Odessa’s port.

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  A Time to Tweet, as Well as a Time to Kill: ISIS’s Projection of Power in Iraq and Syria

  Heather Marie Marie Vitale and James M. Keagle

  On June 29, 2014, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant or the Islamic State),1 a Sunni jihadist group with the capability of a paramilitary, established an Islamic caliphate. With 10,000 militants, the group took territory and achieved a goal that rival terrorist group al Qaeda has pursued for decades. Yet how did a group with relatively few fighters accomplish so much?

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  Valued Sustainable Services: Building Partnership Capacity Through Collaborating Approaches

  Linton Wells II

  The Valued Sustainable Services (ValSServ) concept is an approach to building the capacity of local populations. It emphasizes the interdependency among telecommunications, reliable power, and information-sharing support, and encourages projects to be developed in integrated packages rather than in stovepiped lines of effort.¹ ValSServ focuses on bottomup projects in complex civil-military operations² that can be funded, planned, and executed at local levels, while being consistent with top-down national and theater strategies. It takes a system-of-systems approach,³ recognizing that successful projects can generate positive ripple effects in local environments and throughout extended networks. This paper focuses on ValSServ within the wide range of U.S. Department of Defense operating environments, such as capacitybuilding to help shape peacetime conditions in partner nations, post-disaster recovery, and helping to move from the “hold” to the “build” phases in counterinsurgency operations.⁴

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  Sharing to Succeed: Lessons from Open Information-sharing Projects in Afghanistan

  Linton Wells II, James Bosworth, John Crowley, and Rebecca Linder Blachly

  The sharing of information in complex civil-military operations1 is important, yet actors rarely do it well. U.S. and allied military forces must be able to communicate, collaborate, and exchange information effectively with the local populations they seek to influence, or they cannot achieve the goals for which they have been committed. Nonetheless, experience from stability operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, numerous humanitarian assistance/disaster relief missions, and efforts to build the capacity of foreign partners suggest that effective information-sharing is much harder than might be expected. This paper sheds light on the difficulties of setting up and sustaining projects to share information in such situations and suggests ways to do better in the future.

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  Preparing the Pipeline: The U.S. Cyber Workforce for the Future

  David J. Kay, Terry J. Pudas, and Brett Young

  In 2008, the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative listed “expanded cyber education” as one of its key recommendations. In 2009, the Partnership for Public Service produced a report stating that the current pipeline of cybersecurity workers into the government was inadequate.¹ In the same year, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates stated that the military was “desperately short of people who have the capabilities [to operate in cyberspace].”² And in 2011, the Inspector General of the Federal Bureau of Investigation reported that 35 percent of the special agents investigating national security cyber-intrusion cases lacked necessary training and technical skills.³ Nonetheless, the U.S. Government and private sector still seek to increase their online operations and dependency in spite of these shortcomings. An expert at the Atlantic Council of the United States sums up this problem: “cyber workforce management efforts resemble a Ferris wheel: the wheel turns on and on . . . we move, but around and around, never forward.”⁴

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  Toward the Printed World: Additive Manufacturing and Implications for National Security

  Connor M. McNulty, Neyla Arnas, and Thomas A. Campbell

  Additive manufacturing (AM)—commonly referred to as “three-dimensional” or “3D” printing—is a prospective game changer with implications and opportunities that affect not just the Department of Defense (DOD) but the economy as a whole. The technology allows the “art to part” fabrication of complex objects from a computer model without part-specific tooling or human intervention.¹ AM has already impacted a variety of industries and has the potential to present legal and economic issues with its strong economic and health-care benefits. Because of its remarkable ability to produce a wide variety of objects, AM also can have significant national security implications. The purpose of this paper is to provide a general introduction to these issues for nontechnical readers through a survey of the recent history and the current state of technology. Included in this paper is a brief review identifying key individuals and organizations shaping developments as well as projected trends.

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  Public-Private Cooperation in the Department of Defense: A Framework for Analysis and Recommendations for Action

  Linton Wells II and Samuel Bendett

  In 2010, a National Defense University (NDU) research project called TIDES1 (Transformative Innovation for Development and Emergency Support) was invited to partner with a company to produce a tradeshow about humanitarian assistance and disaster relief missions and related capabilities. Despite senior-level Department of Defense (DOD) guidance to pursue public-private partnerships, DOD attorneys told TIDES managers to reject the agreement. Differing legal interpretations of the word partner generated concern that the proposed partnership could create an impermissible perception of government endorsement of a private company. Even though it would have advanced the government’s mission and promoted efficiency, a variety of obstacles scuttled the proposed cooperation.

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  Maximizing the Returns of Government Venture Capital Programs

  Andrew S. Mara

  The stories of Google and Segway certainly end differently. With a market capitalization of over $180 billion, Google is arguably the biggest success in the information technology (IT) industry in the last decade. The phrase google it has worked its way into everyday language and dictionaries. On the other hand, Segway remains a privately held company whose products are largely relegated to use by tourists in major cities and security personnel at airports. We certainly do not hear people say that they “segwayed” to work this morning.

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  To Build Resilience: Leader Influence on Mental Hardiness

  Paul T. Bartone, Charles L. Barry, and Robert E. Armstrong

  The military profession is inherently stressful and is getting more so for U.S. troops, who are deploying more often and for longer periods of time on missions that are multifaceted, changeable, and ambiguous. Such stressful conditions can lead to a range of health problems and performance decrements even among leaders. But not everyone reacts in negative ways to environmental stress. Most people remain healthy and continue to perform well even in the face of high stress levels. While much attention in recent years has focused on identifying and treating stress-related breakdowns such as post-traumatic stress disorder, scant investment has gone toward the study of healthy, resilient response patterns in people.

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  Breaking the Yardstick: The Dangers of Market-based Governance

  Don J. DeYoung

  In the middle of the last century, America became a superpower. It happened, in part, because of a well-balanced technological partnership between the Federal Government and commercial sector. After winning a world war against fascism, this public-private alliance went on to cure infectious diseases, create instant global communications, land humans on the Moon, and prevail in a long Cold War against communism. This, and more, was accomplished without bankrupting the Nation’s economy. The partnership’s record of service to the American people and the world has been remarkable.

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  From Sputnik to Minerva: Education and American National Security

  Sean Kay

  This paper examines how external challenges have prompted national investments in education to enhance American national security. Rather than focusing primarily on traditional professional military education, this analysis examines how education has been used as a tool of American power. Four major moments of transformation in the international system are surveyed to illustrate a link between strategic educational capacity, defined as the application of attained knowledge and skills, and national power. The study then assesses how education is used as a power asset in the contemporary security environment. Today, an important educational capacity is emerging in the new Minerva program in the Department of Defense and other transformational educational concepts with security applications. Education is gaining an increasing interest among American decisionmakers as a strategic component of American power and an essential asset for successful military operations in the new global security environment.

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  A 21st-century Concept of Air and Military Operations

  Robbin F. Laird

  The evolution of 21st-century air operations is unfolding under the impact of a new generation of fighter aircraft and a significant shift in the role of air operations in support of ground and maritime forces. So-called fifth-generation aircraft often are mistakenly viewed as simply the next iteration of airframes: fast, stealthy replacements of obsolescent legacy platforms. In fact, the capabilities of fifth-generation aircraft, and their integration into a network-centric joint force, will change the roles of manned fighter aircraft in air, ground, and maritime operations. These changes are so far-reaching that the Services face the challenge of crafting a new concept of 21st-century air operations, indeed, of all combat operations.

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  Cyberspace and the “First Battle” in 21st-century War

  Robert A. Miller and Daniel T. Kuehl

  Wars often start well before main forces engage. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, combat often began when light cavalry units crossed the border. For most of the 20th century, the “first battle” typically involved dawn surprise attacks, usually delivered by air forces.¹ While a few of these attacks were so shattering that they essentially decided the outcome of the struggle or at least dramatically shaped its course—the Israeli air force’s attack at the opening of the June 1967 Six-Day War comes to mind—in most cases the defender had sufficient strategic space—geographic and/or temporal—to recover and eventually redress the strategic balance to emerge victorious. The opening moments of World War II for Russia and the United States provide two examples.

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  STAR–TIDES and Starfish Networks: Supporting Stressed Populations with Distributed Talent

  Linton Wells II, Walker Hardy, Vinay Gupta, and Daniel Noon

  The Department of Defense increasingly is involved in postwar stabilization and reconstruction, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief missions, capacity-building of partner nations at home and abroad, and other such complex operations. To provide sustainable support to stressed populations in these environments, an international, networked, knowledge-sharing research project called Sustainable Technologies, Accelerated Research–Transformative Innovation for Development and Emergency Support (STAR–TIDES)¹ encourages innovative approaches to public-private collaboration, whole-of-government solutions, and transnational engagement. It leverages a distributed network of people and organizations to conduct research, support real world contingencies, and bridge gaps among disparate communities.

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  Lessons of Abu Ghraib: Understanding and Preventing Prisoner Abuse in Military Operations

  Paul T. Bartone

  The abuse of prisoners by U.S. Soldiers at Abu Ghraib had broad strategic consequences, leading many people around the world to question the legitimacy of U.S. goals and activities in Iraq. This paper draws on extensive unclassified reports from multiple investigations that followed Abu Ghraib, and applies key psychological as well as social-situational perspectives to develop a better grasp of the causative factors. From a psychological standpoint, most young adults are powerfully inclined to behave in accord with the social conventions and pressures around them. Especially in ambiguous circumstances, then, it is important that standards of behavior be clear and explicit throughout all phases of an operation and that leaders at all levels represent and reinforce those standards.

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  So Many Zebras, So Little Time: Ecological Models and Counterinsurgency Operations

  Mark D. Drapeau, Peyton C. Hurley, and Robert E. Armstrong

  Force ratios are an important variable in warfare and in nature. On the Serengeti, large zebra herds are constantly hunted by small prides of lions. But with their overwhelming majority, why don’t the zebras unite and attack the lions? Hooves can be as deadly as claws when used correctly. And conversely, if the lions are such effective predators, why are there so many zebras?

  Ecological interactions between predators and their prey are complex. Sometimes the few prey on the many; picture a whale devouring thousands of docile microorganisms. And sometimes the many prey on the few, as with killer bees attacking an unsuspect- ing person. During the past century, the mathematics underlying different types of survival strategies for attacker and evader have been worked out by ecologists, and we now have a fairly good understanding of such relationships.

  While not a perfect metaphor, it is striking that these quantitative ecology models greatly resemble behavioral interactions during counterinsurgency operations. While a predator-prey model alone may be too simplistic to fully describe counterinsur- gency, there are more detailed ecological models of competition that better capture the essence of the problem.

  The purpose of this paper is not to provide definitive solutions, but to suggest a framework for other researchers to adapt and expand upon. Indeed, many of the models discussed are common to both ecologists and economists. The goals of both types of modeling are similar: maximizing profits in terms of food or money at the least risk—death or bankruptcy.

  From our preliminary work on the possible applications of ecology to counterinsurgency, we hope that others more adept at the use of these quantitative models will make significant contributions to the area of predictive ability in combating terrorism and understanding unconventional warfare.

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  Cyber Influence and International Security

  Franklin D. Kramer and Larry Wentz

  Cyber influence is an ongoing source of power in the international security arena. Although the United States has an enormous cyber information capacity, its cyber influence is not proportional to that capacity. Impediments to American cyber influence include the vastness and complexity of the international information environment, multiplicity of cultures and differing audiences to which communications must be addressed, extensiveness and significance of contending or alternative messages, and complexity and importance of using appropriate influential messengers and message mechanisms.

  Enhancing the influence of the United States in cyberspace will require a multifaceted strategy that differentiates the circumstances of the messages, key places of delivery, and sophistication with which messages are created and delivered, with particular focus on channels and messengers.

  To improve in these areas, the United States must focus on actions that include discerning the nature of the audiences, societies, and cultures into which messages will be delivered; increasing the number of experts in geographic and cultural arenas, particularly in languages; augmenting resources for overall strategic communications and cyber influence efforts; encouraging long-term communications and cyber influence efforts along with short-term responses; and understanding that successful strategic communications and cyber influence operations cannot be achieved by the United States acting on its own; allies and partners are needed both to shape our messages and to support theirs.

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  Strategic Fragility: Infrastructure Protection and National Security in the Information Age

  Robert A. Miller and Irving Lachow

  Modern societies have reached unprecedented levels of prosperity, yet they remain vulnerable to a wide range of possible disruptions. One significant reason for this growing vulnerability is the developed world’s reliance on an array of interlinked, interdependent critical infrastructures that span nations and even continents. The advent of these infrastructures over the past few decades has resulted in a tradeoff: the United States has gained greater productivity and prosperity at the risk of greater exposure to widespread systemic collapse. The trends that have led to this growing strategic fragility show no sign of slowing. As a result, the United States faces a new and different kind of threat to national security.

  This paper explores the factors that are creating the current situation. It examines the implications of strategic fragility for national security and the range of threats that could exploit this condition. Finally, it describes a variety of response strategies that could help address this issue. The challenges associated with strategic fragility are complex and not easily resolved. However, it is evident that policymakers will need to make difficult choices soon; delaying important decisions is itself a choice, and one that could produce disastrous results.