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1. Campaigning to Dissuade: Applying Emerging Technologies to Engage and Succeed in the Information Age Security Competition

Author:
Bryan Clark and Dan Patt
Publication Date:
07-2023
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Hudson Institute
Abstract:
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) presents the United States with its most comprehensive economic and security rival since Great Britain during the nineteenth century. Starting in 2018, US defense strategies have highlighted the threat that the PRC poses to US allies, and successive presidential administrations and Congresses responded by increasing defense budgets to expand US military capability and capacity. Despite these efforts, numerous assessments now show that modernization of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has eroded—and in some missions overcome—US military superiority. Absent large and politically fraught increases in defense spending, continued expansion and improvement of today’s US force are unlikely to regain broad overmatch against the PLA in the Western Pacific. Instead, the United States will need new strategies and operational concepts to deter PRC aggression. Recognizing this imperative, the 2022 US National Defense Strategy (NDS) attempted to move in a different direction from its predecessors through two new lines of effort called “campaigning” and “integrated deterrence.” However, in unclassified documents and speeches by defense officials, both the essence of integrated deterrence and the mechanism of campaigning remain unclear. 1 Emerging technologies offer the US military a way to put these new concepts into action, sustaining its ability to prevent conflict and gaining an upper hand in the strategic competition with China despite the PLA’s “home team” advantages. The United States remains the world leader in operational and technological innovation, as evidenced by decades of advancements in networking and computing—marked recently by the rapid commercialization of artificial intelligence (AI). Building on the 2022 NDS, this report proposes a strategy for campaigning that would exploit information technologies to dissuade China from pursuing acts of aggression against allies such as Taiwan. The primary objective of the proposed campaigning model is to shape PRC government decision-making, especially that of the PRC military, in ways that are conducive to long-term regional stability and prosperity. A whole-of-government effort like that implied by the 2022 NDS would be the most effective form of campaigning because it could exploit the PRC government’s numerous vulnerabilities, from its appalling record on human rights to its loss of economic momentum and its growing demographic challenges. However, this report focuses on actions the US military can take by itself or with allied militaries to dissuade future PRC aggression. In the proposed approach, campaigning is an ongoing sequence of probing, signaling, adapting, and acting by the US military and intelligence community, coupled with and informed by instrumentation of the information environment. In addition to demonstrating US resolve, campaigning should enable the US to estimate competitor habits, preferences, and fears. These estimates would guide future campaigning activities and inform US force planners regarding a competitor’s uncertainty and areas of concern. Armed with increasing insight about adversary beliefs, campaigning actions would aim to shape an opponent’s preferences and priorities away from violent paths to their goals and toward scenarios that are more aligned with US interests. In offering an approach to dissuasion, this report diverges from the strategy of deterring war primarily through threats of denial or punishment. This construct has dominated US defense strategy since the Soviet Union collapsed because conventional dominance enabled the US military to credibly stop or reverse an act of aggression and nuclear weapons provided the capability to impose existential punishment. Today, the PRC’s status as a peer competitor makes denial and punishment less credible. The US government will instead need to prevent conflict before it becomes imminent.
Topic:
Security, Defense Policy, Economics, Science and Technology, Strategic Competition, and Emerging Technology
Political Geography:
China, North America, Asia-Pacific, and United States of America

2. One-Size-Fits-None: Overhauling JADC2 to Prioritize the Warfighter and Exploit Adversaries’ Weaknesses

Author:
Bryan Clark and Dan Patt
Publication Date:
03-2022
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Hudson Institute
Abstract:
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos famously attributes his company’s success to its customer obsession, which drove initiatives ranging from the creation of a cloud infrastructure and processing orders at unprecedented scale to establishing an entirely new logistics network that rapidly moves purchases to destinations. Amazon’s focus on shoppers is understandable, as it only makes about 1 percent of the merchandise it sells. Unlike a product-aligned business model like Apple’s, which seeks to anticipate or shape customer demand, Amazon’s bottom line depends on it being able to understand and respond to consumers better and faster than competitors. Given the urgent challenges China and Russia pose to US allies, the US Department of Defense (DoD) should adopt a fulfillment model like that of Amazon. Although analysts often treat the DoD as a single customer in a monopsonistic relationship with its thousands of suppliers across the defense industrial base, the DoD more closely resembles a market where military services, combat support agencies, and defense contractors collaborate to deliver capabilities to their ultimate customers—combatant commands such as US Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM), US Strategic Command (STRATCOM), and US European Command (EUCOM). Viewing the DoD as a market rather than a customer suggests that services and agencies should focus their efforts on understanding and meeting combatant commanders’ needs. This would reverse the Pentagon’s longstanding practice, codified in the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System (JCIDS), in which services and agencies predict future operational requirements and task government labs or contractors with developing solutions that will fill anticipated capability gaps. JCIDS harkens back to the 20th century’s industrial model of product development exemplified by Henry Ford, who famously said that purchasers of his Model-T could have it in any color they wanted, as long as it was black. The DoD’s customers are similarly disenfranchised. The US Joint Staff, which administers JCIDS and acts as the combatant commanders’ representative in Pentagon decision fora, lacks acquisition authorities and funding and thus can impact defense programs only by defining requirements for future systems. Because requirements are predictive, they attempt to capture the full range of use cases for a new product, leading JCIDS to produce comprehensive, generalized solutions rather than customized capabilities designed to meet combatant commanders’ operational challenges. The argument for military services “pushing” new systems to customers instead of letting end-users “pull” what they need centers on the perception that combatant commanders are focused on near-term capacity rather than next-generation capability. This assessment may have been valid in 2003 when JCIDS was first implemented. Emerging systems like the F-35 strike-fighter and DDG-1000 each took nearly two decades to reach fruition, and combatant commanders lacked the analytic processes and far-term perspective to determine what would be useful or feasible 10 to 20 years in the future. Moreover, the US military in 2003 was by far the world’s most capable force, and threats requiring substantially different US capabilities would take a decade or more to materialize. However, the assumptions underlying the DoD’s industrial model of capability development are no longer valid. INDOPACOM assesses that China could mount a successful invasion of Taiwan during the 2020s, and Russia continues to threaten imminent action against Ukraine and NATO’s eastern members. Combatant commanders’ perspectives on capability requirements should therefore be a top priority for services, agencies, and the defense industry. At the same time, in the commercial sector, computing, manufacturing, and materials technologies are delivering new products within months or several years rather than decades. New defense industrial base entrants that leverage commercial advancements and software-centric innovation could quickly provide relevant capabilities by responding directly to combatant commander’s current and emerging operational challenges. Unfortunately, the DoD’s pursuit of efficiency and centralized decision-making hinder the direct connections between combatant commander customers and commercial or government suppliers that foster innovation. The results will therefore continue to be one-size-fits-all solutions that take longer and are more expensive than concepts and capabilities tailored to meet specific needs. In addition to furthering the Pentagon’s well-documented problems delivering new systems and concepts on cost and schedule, universal solutions will be less likely to target the specific threats posed by such peer adversaries as China or Russia. Without restoring combatant commander customers to the center of the DoD’s capability development efforts, US forces will not be able to keep up with the challenges posed by peer adversaries like China or Russia and may even find themselves behind regional powers with geographic advantages and little to lose. The US military cannot afford another failed and ponderous attempt to “boil the ocean” with universal solutions and should take a page from Amazon by focusing on customer needs first.
Topic:
Defense Policy, National Security, Armed Forces, and Strategic Competition
Political Geography:
Russia, China, and United States of America

3. Competing in Time: Ensuring Capability Advantage and Mission Success through Adaptable Resource Allocation

Author:
Dan Patt and William C. Greenwalt
Publication Date:
02-2021
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Hudson Institute
Abstract:
The keystone of the Department of Defense’s institutional architecture is not acquisition, but rather the budgeting process. This governs its ability to allocate funding to achieve national security objectives, links together requirements and purchasing, sets the calendar of the department, controls changes to investment priority, and serves as the mechanism for Congress to exercise its constitutionally granted appropriations powers. While there have been dozens of acquisition reform efforts, the budgeting process has been nearly untouched since 1961. Bureaucratic resource allocation processes—especially planning, budgeting, and appropriations—are a critical engine for maintaining an edge in a long-term military competition. In the 1950s, this realization was mechanized by the US, when fast-paced military developments with shifting directions were used to drive cost into ponderous Soviet planning processes. Ultimately, Soviet strategists also recognized that agility in resource allocation would ultimately determine the outcome of competition given a sufficiently long horizon. The Department of Defense (DoD) allocates resources through the Planning, Programming, Budget, and Execution (PPBE) system. PPBE is the scheme by which DoD sets its own plans and priorities and also how it asks Congress to approve its spending and provide oversight (often by verifying actual execution against predicted schedule and performance). The history of the PPBE dates to 1961 and is based on period industrial planning concepts. The PPBE’s inflexibility increases the difficulty of rapidly shifting funding to emergent innovations that appear promising, as new programs must typically wait more than two years to be included in the budget. Additionally, the PPBE encodes divisions between research, production, and operations activities that stymy iterative or feedback-based development. A common theme across core DoD processes including the PPBE is an emphasis on long-term prediction of future needs and an attempt to optimize high-performance weapons against projected requirements. When these conditions are not met (whether from shifting technology or shifting adversaries), these processes may not yield optimal, relevant, or militarily effective results. Historical analysis of innovation time cycles—the time measured from the origin of a new concept for military capability until its initial fielding—indicates the cycles were shorter prior to the implementation of the triad of McNamara-era processes, commonly with an average time around five years for both ships and aircraft, and have grown steadily since. Emerging technologies, especially information technologies, are central to future conflict and are largely commercial and globalized. The defense acquisition process and legacy defense industrial base approach struggle to accommodate timely adoption of these technologies, as evidenced by lengthy modern time cycles (more than ten years) for development and fielding of new-start weapon systems. China may have an edge in its resource allocation process, although this topic merits further investigation. Evidence includes their ability to develop and field twenty-five new unmanned aircraft systems from 2010 to 2020, including stealthy carrier-based unmanned systems. Efforts to improve adaptability that focus on acquisition milestones have been only partially successful. Analysis of the chained and linear components of the modern military capability development and fielding process suggests that it is difficult to create a competitive, adaptable resource allocation scheme without revisiting the PPBE and key decision processes that govern the ability to make rapid, early investments in new operational capability or concepts. Incoming administration leadership, military leaders, and Congressional leaders need to revisit institutional structure and the budgeting process recognizing the central role of time in driving innovation, adaptability, and resilience. It is not yet too late to favorably shape the trajectory of long-term military competition with China, but the only hope of an upper hand rests on agility and initiative.
Topic:
Defense Policy, National Security, Military Affairs, and Strategic Competition
Political Geography:
China and United States of America