Ray Alderman, VITA Standards Organization
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What sits on top of the kill chain?
WARFARE EVOLUTION BLOG: In my previous article, I promised that we would integrate the warfare models (RMAs [Revolution in Military Affairs], warfare domains, strategic offsets, the OODA Loop, and generations of warfare) with the kill chain. That noble goal has been overcome by events. A number of important reports have been released in the past few months, so it’s best that we take a look at those elements first. Otherwise, we risk confusion and lose some critical connections about how the kill chain is evolving.
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Fire and finish: The middle of the kill chain
WARFARE EVOLUTION BLOG: As stated in previous articles, we need to reduce the complete kill chain down to 10 minutes or less, according to General John Jumper. So, all new systems and weapons must fit inside the kill chain somewhere (find, fix, fire, finish, feedback). And, they must speed things up significantly. We also established that the latest radar, sonar, SIGINT, IMINT, and other sensor systems fit in the find and fix phases. Now, it’s time to take a look at some of the latest developments going into the fire and finish phases.
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Artificial intelligence (AI)…and artificial stupidity (AS)
WARFARE EVOLUTION BLOG: Isaac Asimov first published the three laws for super-intelligent robots in 1942, and we are ignoring them. Although Department of Defense (DoD) directive 3000.09, dated November 2012, says that a human must always pull the trigger or press the button on our weapons, we violated that when we created the Phalanx CIWS and the Aegis missile defense system, although those weapons are defensive. Now, everybody with a lot of money, or a lot of education, is claiming that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will take us to a “singularity,” sometime between 2020 and 2040, where machines become exponentially smarter than humans. At that point, the machines and killer robots will eliminate humans and take over the world.
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Find and fix: The front-end of the kill chain
WARFARE EVOLUTION BLOG. I can speak to this topic with some level of experience. My old military intelligence unit, Army Security Agency (ASA) was the military arm of the National Security Agency (NSA). Our primary mission was to find, identify, fix, and track every significant military unit on the planet, including both our enemies and our allies. As Sun Tzu is credited with saying (or maybe it was Machiavelli, or Petrarch, or Michael Corleone): "Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer."
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A quick update on activity in North Korea
WARFARE EVOLUTION BLOG: In our last episode, I promised that my next article would be on the “find and fix” phases of the kill chain. The recent news coming out of North Korea compels me to interrupt that plan. However, these new developments seem to fit the proposed topic well, especially at the tactical level. So, let’s throw-in a quick update on Kim Jung Un’s (KJU) latest malfeasance and how our intelligence systems and people are involved.
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Shrinking the kill chain
WARFARE EVOLUTION BLOG: When I first started researching this topic, I thought writing this article would be straight-forward and easy. As with many other subjects in this series, that was not the case. Targeting models are integrated into kill chains, or vice-versa, and that creates some confusion. The available stream of information about this subject is both narrow and shallow. However, we are seeing a sequence of evolving kill chain models, at the strategic and tactical levels.
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And then there’s submarines
WARFARE EVOLUTION BLOG: Submarines were harder to count than aircraft carriers in my previous blog. According to scattered web information, there are about 533 submarines in the oceans today, operated by 40 countries. But that number moves around, mostly because (1) there are a number of new submarines coming into service and (2) it’s hard to say how many antiquated Russian, Chinese, Iranian, and North Korean submarines are still operational.
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Aircraft carriers are just big fat targets
WARFARE EVOLUTION BLOG: During World War II in the Pacific, aircraft carriers were primarily used to defeat enemy carriers and battleships at sea. The whole point of island-hopping was to gain airstrips on land, to launch bomber attacks on the enemy troops on other islands. That was the plan until the Doolittle Raid in 1942, where the USS Hornet launched sixteen long range B-25 bombers to hit Tokyo.
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Radar cross section: The measure of stealth
WARFARE EVOLUTION BLOG: The primary measure of stealth, or low observability (LO), is the radar cross section (RCS) of the target, whether it’s aircraft, missiles, or ships. The radar pulse goes out from the transmitter, hits the target, and bounces back. The radar receiver measures the energy in the return signal in decibel (db) units, but that’s a hard way for normal people to visualize the size of a target. So, we must convert db to square meters (m2) to get the picture.
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Generations of fighter aircraft and the F-35 vs F/A-18 arguments
WARFARE EVOLUTION BLOG: When some writer talks about 4th, 5th, or 6th generation fighter aircraft, what do they mean? Like the previous articles in this series on the generations of warfare, there are multiple definitions by multiple authors. For fighter aircraft generations, there’s Hallion (1990), Aerospaceweb (2004), Air Force Magazine (2009), Jim Winchester (2011), and Air Power Development Center (Royal Australian Air Force, 2012).
Ray Alderman, VITA Standards Organization
Ray Alderman, VITA Standards Organization
Ray Alderman, VITA Standards Organization
Ray Alderman, VITA Standards Organization