- Published
- By Maj Kimber Nettis, USAF
The Air Force, in conjunction with fellow joint warfighters, must adapt our thinking and culture to be able to seamlessly shift between domains, components and regions to create high velocity, precision warfighting effects to satisfy the Joint Force Commander's mission needs.
—AF Multi-Domain Operations (MDO) Implementation Plan 2018
In recent years, the Department of Defense (DOD) has turned its attention to the growing need for MDO. The National Defense Strategy states that to “compete in this complex and contested security environment, the US must be prepared to operate across a full spectrum of conflict, across multiple domains at once.”1 The various branches of the military have taken this guidance and have started to implement various forms of MDO integration into their services. As Lt Gen Norman Seip, retired, the Air Force senior mentor for Multi-Domain Command and Control, stated, “the goal of MDO operations is to create complex, simultaneous dilemmas at once for the enemy.”2 To do this, we must realize how our current operational environment has changed with the rise of space and cyber technologies and how that has changed our access to information and the participants we face. We also must realize that the battlefield has extended back to the home front, and this presents new challenges that must be faced with new solutions.
Some have argued that the DOD has been doing MDO all along and that this is just a new Pentagon buzzword meant to elicit additional funding. What makes MDO different than fighting as a Joint force? This article will take a quick look at how warfare has evolved and why we have headed toward the MDO doctrine. Additionally, the article provides a framework as a rudimentary way to understand basic MDO concepts that can be utilized to create offensive and defensive MDO objectives at the tactical and operational levels of war.
Evolution of Warfare
The main impetus for change in how a military conducts warfare is based largely on changes in technology and the scheme of maneuver. When new technology is introduced to the battlefield, one must adopt the scheme of maneuver and update the tactics, techniques, and procedures and associated plans and orders. This brief evolution of warfare will cover the main doctrines used throughout time and the technological developments that sparked changes in how we fight.
The first battles were linear in nature. One army would line up against another army and draw swords, spears, or muskets and fight until one army had won. When one side was decidedly smaller or less capable of fighting in this traditional manner, guerrilla warfare was a balancing maneuver with tactics that included ambushes, sabotage, and raids. Then a change in technology, namely machine guns, sent armies into the trenches.
According to Nicholas Murray, author of The Rocky Road to the Great War, “trench warfare proliferated when a revolution in firepower was not matched by similar advances in mobility, resulting in a grueling form of warfare in which the defender held the advantage.”3 Trench warfare became known as the symbol of the futility of war.4 This type of warfare was often a stalemate that had high casualty rates. Then, there was a change in technology and doctrine. During World War I, the Germans focused on the scheme of maneuver by implementing infiltration tactics while the British and French focused on the development of tanks to achieve victory.
AirLand Battle
Coming out of Vietnam, AirLand Battle was the US Army’s main fighting doctrine in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1973, the United States Training and Doctrine Command was established under Gen William E. DePuy. Gen Donn A. Starry was sent to Israel to understand the Yom Kippur War. The tempo, speed, and proliferation of new weapons were different than anything that had previously been seen on a battlefield. He saw the importance of air and land battle together and how antitank guided missiles changed the battlefield. He is quoted as saying, “the army we have today coming out of Vietnam is not the army we need going into the future.”5
A change in doctrine turned into a “DOTMLPF revolution,” referring to the acquisition process of doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership, personnel, facilities, and policy. General Starry took the lessons learned from the Yom Kippur War and started what is known as the Army’s Big Five Modernization Program and inspired the Air Force’s investment in stealth and precision standoff weapons.6 The change in doctrine inspired new weapon systems that changed how the Army trained with the rollout of new training centers and leadership schools. The evaluation of this radical training and doctrine approach came in the form of Operation Desert Storm. The world got to see the US defeat the world’s fourth-largest army in a matter of 100 hours with low casualties. It was like the Yom Kippur War but even faster and more lethal.
Irregular Warfare
Doctrine changed once again as we faced new threats such as violent extremist organizations (VEO). Irregular warfare became the normal way to fight wars from 2003 onward. Irregular warfare has been described as “a violent struggle among state and non-state actors for legitimacy and influence over the relevant populations.”7 The US has been fighting this type of war for the last couple of decades in Iraq and Afghanistan. While the US was steeped in VEO threats, a new form of warfare began to emerge as the threats changed. Near-peer and peer competitors brought about the need to focus on MDO as the adversary would look and fight much differently than the VEOs we had been facing in recent wars. We would be contested in every domain, and the speed of warfare only increased as new technologies such as artificial intelligence and hypersonics compressed the time in which we would be able to act and make decisions.
Multi-Domain Operations
The newest doctrine to emerge from the US DOD is multi-domain operations. MDO is “a concept that the Joint force can achieve competitive advantage over a near-peer adversary by presenting multiple complementary threats that each requires a response, thereby exposing adversary vulnerabilities to other threats. It is the artful combination of these multiple dilemmas, rather than a clear overmatch in terms of any particular capability, that produces the desired advantage.”8 In other words, MDO is a way to provide effects with timing and tempo that the enemy cannot compete with. The chief of staff of the Air Force, Gen David L. Goldfein, has focused on multi-domain command and control as a means of achieving MDO in the Joint Force.
One may ask, how is MDO any different than fighting together as a Joint Force? After all, the Goldwater-Nichols act was the fix action to the interservice rivalry during Vietnam and the failed Iranian hostage rescue attempt. In the past, MDO were single-domain focused, with coordinated effects, and archaic command and control (C2) processes. Operations today are layered or synchronized but not fully integrated. The authorities for space/cyber forces are retained largely at the strategic or national level while authorities for air operations remain at the operational level. Situational awareness capabilities are not designed to provide an integrated understanding of the battlespace that spans all domains, and C2 constructs do not provide the necessary agility to synchronize effects.9
Organizations such as Air Force Warfighting Integrating Capability are looking at how we make decisions at pace and scale needed with a peer competitor, how to create a common operating picture that will connect the right sensor to the right processor, and ultimately to the right shooter. They are also working to ensure that the right systems and people are in place for multi-domain C2 and distributed C2.
The Army has created its first unit to combine long-range targeting, hacking, jamming, and space to support the move to MDO. The unit is called I2CEWS, which stands for all the capabilities it brings: intelligence, information, cyber, electronic warfare, and space. This unit was stood up at JB Lewis-McChord, Washington to counter the Chinese threat.10
Hybrid Warfare
Before moving into domain considerations, it is worth noting the current doctrine held by one of our top competitors. The Russians utilize what has been termed hybrid warfare. Hybrid warfare is simply the combination of previously defined types of warfare: conventional, irregular, political, or information. A hybrid threat is any adversary that simultaneously employs a tailored mix of conventional weapons, irregular tactics, terrorism, and criminal behavior at the same time and battlespace to obtain their political objectives, according to Dr. Francis Hoffman, a distinguished research fellow at National Defense University.11 Russia uses new information warfare tactics such as meme warfare to create chaos among populations such as the US. Russia has also been identified in several elections meddling campaigns around the world, including Ukraine, France, and the US.12
Russia also includes the use of tactical nuclear weapons in its overall view called new generation warfare. Its whole of government approach seeks to “manipulate the adversaries’ perception, maneuver its decision making process, and influence its strategic behavior while minimizing (compared to the industrial war era) the scale of kinetic force use.”13
Domain Considerations
Now that we have briefly covered the evolution of warfare and how we have arrived at the need for MDO, we need to look at the domains to set a foundation for where operations are taking place. The traditional domains are air, sea, land, space, and cyberspace. Air Command and Staff College (ACSC) professors Jared Donnelly and Jon Farley state that a definition of domain is in order as we are beginning to see how these nonphysical domains are starting to have real effects on our missions.14 They proposed the definition of a domain given by Jeffrey Reilly, the director of the ACSC Multi-Domain Operations Strategists concentration, as a “critical macro maneuver space whose access or control is vital to the freedom of action and superiority required by the mission.”15 It is simply an area that one must have access into and an area in which one can make effects, and this arena does not have to be physical.
A sixth domain has been under consideration lately due to the rise in information operations, and that is the cognitive domain. Gen Robert Brown, commander of US Army Pacific, stated that the cognitive domain should not only be considered a domain, but, in his opinion, it is the most important domain.16
The cognitive domain is becoming increasingly more important with the introduction of space and cyber technologies. The domain has opened up the populace to more information, making the traditional gatekeepers inadequate, and making it easier for any actor, state or nonstate, to make effects in any domain. The traditional gatekeepers are being outpaced at sharing information by entities such as Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms.
A good example of how the cognitive domain is increasingly becoming a more critical domain can be seen in the book, War in 140 Characters: How Social Media Is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century. The author, David Patrikarakos, describes how Twitter is now the main source of vital, timely information in the Russia-Ukrainian conflict. He is a reporter on the frontlines of the conflict and consistently gets his most up-to-date information from users via Twitter. There are pros and cons when it comes to this kind of speed of information. Patrikarakos writes about seeing the vastly different reports from the pro-Russian and pro-Ukranian sides. As a journalist, he is concerned about writing the facts of the situation, yet he sees false information “re-tweeted thousands of times.”17 He stated, “it wasn’t propaganda I was witnessing, it was the re-invention of reality. And social media was at its heart.”18 Patrikarakos also stated that he saw a “mass enlistment” that included noncombatants and civilians.19 These new participants in the operational environment can have very real effects on the battlefield.
The enemy realized a long time ago that they could not compete with the US in a battle of military versus military; therefore, other means of competition became the way to win the battle of resources and power. Patrikarakos said, “I began to understand that I was caught up in two wars: one fought on the ground with tanks and artillery, and an information war fought largely, though not exclusively, through social media. And perhaps counterintuitively, it mattered more who won the war of words and narrative than who had the most potent weaponry.”20
An example of how social media can change a battlefield can be found in a recent article entitled, “With Just $60 and Internet Access, Researchers Found and Tracked NATO Troops and Even Tricked Them into Disobeying Orders.” The article illustrates the importance of a commander realizing the entirety of the operating picture. “Researchers with NATO’s Strategic Communications Center of Excellence used open-source data—primarily social media—to identify 150 soldiers, locate multiple battalions, track troop movements, and even persuade service members to leave their posts and engage in other ‘undesirable behavior’ during a military exercise.”21 It is worth stating that the researchers were red team members, but the adversary can be anyone with internet access and a cause.
In response to this ever-changing environment, the US Air Force has recently established the 16th Air Force, as its Information Warfare numbered air force. The new command will “integrate multisource intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, cyberwarfare, electronic warfare, and information operations capabilities across the conflict continuum to ensure that our Air Force is fast, lethal, and fully integrated in both competition and war.22
An expansion of the cyber domain has also been discussed in many venues and publications to be changed to the Electromagnetic Spectrum (EMS) Domain. Gen James M. Holmes, Air Combat Command (ACC) commander, stated at the 2019 Air Force Information Technology and Cyberspace (AFITC) Conference that it is under consideration to change the word cyberspace to EMS when talking about the domains in which ACC dominates. This change is due to cyber being a subset of the larger arena in which to make effects.23
Expanding Battlefield
The next concept to discuss is the expanding battlefield. Due to the new technologies that our nation has today, both state and nonstate actors can have tremendous impacts on our technology and military operations from anywhere in the world. The technology available is low-cost and available to anyone. Not only can the enemy impact operations within the area of operations, but now the enemy can hit us at our home stations and have a tremendous impact on the area of responsibility (AOR). Patrikarakos explains the extended battlefield:
Unconventional forces may strike in grey zone operations long before conventional troops officially go to war if they ever do. The first blow may be struck by proxies like the Russian-backed Ukrainian rebels, deniable forces like the Little Green Men in Crimea or Chinese state-owned fishing vessels in the South China Sea, non-military government agencies like the Chinese Coast Guard, or ‘lone wolves’ inspired to act by social media but with no connection to the enemy. It may come from cyber-attacks, whose origin is notoriously hard to figure out, and which may involve months or years of careful preparation but then take effect in seconds.24
The video “Evolving Threats to Army Installations in a Complex World,” produced by the Army, explains in great detail how the enemy can affect operations even before leaving the home stations. If the enemy can stop the troops or demoralize them even before the military leaves the US or home installation, they will never make it to the battle across the world, or when they do, it will be at a huge disadvantage.25
Figure 1 was taken from the Army’s “Operational Framework Six Physical Spaces.”26 It shows the traditional concept of the understood battlespace from the blue forces side labeled from “Strategic Support Area” to “Tactical Support Area,” while areas from “Close Area” to “Deep Fires Area” are the red forces side. What the military must realize is that through new technologies, the “safe havens” of home base or just being in the US is not “safe” any longer. Whether it is a state or nonstate actor, both have the means to accomplish effects that will cripple us. Some examples would be:
• State actors attacking critical infrastructure from across the world
• Nonstate actors attacking our space systems or jamming GPS
• A lone wolf flying a commercial drone over a military base with a grenade and blowing up huge munition areas such as what was seen in Ukraine in 2017
• An Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) sympathizer attacking our water supply systems in the US
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