Ray Alderman, VITA Standards Organization

• Find and fix: The front-end of the kill chain

  Ray Alderman, VITA Standards Organization

  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."

• A quick update on activity in North Korea

  Ray Alderman, VITA Standards Organization

  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.

• Shrinking the kill chain

  Ray Alderman, VITA Standards Organization

  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.

• And then there’s submarines

  Ray Alderman, VITA Standards Organization

  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.

• Aircraft carriers are just big fat targets

  Ray Alderman, VITA Standards Organization

  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.

• Radar cross section: The measure of stealth

  Ray Alderman, VITA Standards Organization

  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.

• Generations of fighter aircraft and the F-35 vs F/A-18 arguments

  Ray Alderman, VITA Standards Organization

  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).

• Domains of warfare and strategic offsets

  Ray Alderman, VITA Standards Organization

  WARFARE EVOLUTION BLOG:It’s 2017, and I’m back. After enduring uncomfortably-deep probing and evaluation of my literary skills and technical analysis capabilities, along with a comprehensive DNA test, my masters here at OpenSystems Media have decided to keep me on as a writer, to ply you with another year of fascinating and intriguing next-generation warfare articles. For 2017 I will write with an emphasis on present capabilities of the U.S. and our enemies, as well as new platforms and strategies under development.

• War in space

  Ray Alderman, VITA Standards Organization

  WARFARE EVOLUTION BLOG: Speculating a war in space is a perplexing subject, so let’s wade into it with a heathy level of trepidation, looking at treaties, space courts, and potential battle scenarios.

• In a cyberwar

  Ray Alderman, VITA Standards Organization

  WARFARE EVOLUTION BLOG: This is another broad, sticky, and complex topic, much like the previous article on cryptology. So, let’s get started by offering some definitions.

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