The startlingly efficient coalition victory during the 1991
Gulf War heralded the advent of a revolution in military affairs (RMA). Technologies that allowed rapid information
collection, analysis and dissemination would receive equal if not greater
emphasis relative to kinetic (weapon delivery and payload technologies). During the majority of the last twenty-plus
years, efficient military grade information technologies have remained the
province of comparatively few nations due to factors of complexity,
availability and expense. This de facto technological quarantine has
largely evaporated over the last five or so years due to the proliferation of
powerful, lightweight and readily available integration and knowledge
management tools, many of which are available under open source software
licenses. These technologies have the
potential to create what is effectively RMA 2.0, marked by a global
democratization of military information dominance technologies.
Doctrine
In 2003, David Alberts and Richard Hayes published the
seminal work on modern command and control (C2) doctrinal theory, Power to the Edge. Key tenets of power to the edge
philosophy are:
- Providing information from which relevant situational awareness can be achieved rather than creating a single operational picture;
- Autonomously synchronizing operations instead of autonomous operations;
- Information "pull" rather than broadcast information "push";
- Sharing data rather than maintaining private data;
- Capability on demand rather than allocated capability budgets;
- Open standards rather than interoperable interfaces;
- Common enterprise services rather than separate infrastructures; and
- Commerical-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) based, net-centric capabilities rather than customized, platform-centric stovepiped IT.
Industrial and
Information Age Forces
For many years, the scope and breadth of the technical requirements
necessary to achieve “power to the edge” placed their implementation beyond the
reach of all but the largest and most lavishly funded defense organizations. As a
result, the RMA was unavailable to most for many years. This resulted in the emergence of two
discrete camps; on one side of the divide were forces that had successfully
exploited technology and transformed themselves into information age forces,
while on the other were forces marked by industrial age organizational and
operating principles.
The difference between the two lays in their relative
effectiveness in meeting modern security challenges. Industrial age forces often have great
difficulty bringing the totality of their information, assets and expertise to
bear. As a result, they are hampered in
terms of operational agility and interoperability, perhaps the attributes most
demanded by 21st century warfare.
Complicating matters is the fact that industrial age
force components do not share information, or normally work, with those outside
their domain. Their combat and information systems are designed and procured
independently of one another and are not designed to be interoperable. This all makes sense if the organizational whole
is a simple sum of its parts, and that synergies result from centralized
planning. Unfortunately, centralized planning
does not work well in coalition or asymmetric warfare environments (where
participants have complementary objectives but different priorities,
perspectives and constraints), which are more often the norm for 21st
century warfare than not.
By contrast, information age forces adopt a doctrine that
empowers individuals at the point where the organization interacts with its
operating environment. These individuals
comprise edge organizations, and empowering the edge involves expanding
access to relevant and timely information and the elimination of unnecessary
constraints. Command intent is shared,
resources are allocated dynamically and the rules of engagement are set by
command but implemented by edge forces. When
fully achieved, power to the edge doctrine results in self-synchronizing forces
that achieve a level of operational efficiency that cannot be matched by
industrial age forces.
Technology
The means to achieve information age force transformations
have been historically limited due to factors of cost and availability. In the second decade of the 21st
century, conditions creating a technical “perfect storm” have coalesced,
setting the stage for global RMA 2.0.
Command and control theory, once exclusively the
province of specialized military and government think tanks has essentially
been open sourced. The global commons is
awash in C2 knowledge. The capability of commodity hardware has
advanced to levels undreamed of by early C2 practitioners.
Plentiful, cheap and secure, modern wireless
communications offer the promise of robust, mobile tactical data networks at
bargain prices, creating a viable method for extending tactical data
communications to the lowest echelon organizations.
Open Source Software
The critical change in the technical landscape for
militaries seeking transformation is the availability of advanced, lightweight,
performant and interoperable open source software providing everything from
operating systems to data storage, geospatial information systems, communications
management, content management, hardware clustering, data integration and real-time
data processing capabilities. It’s not
especially far-fetched to imagine the creation of a command and control front
end using entirely open source components.
Historically, defense solutions have focused on proprietary
software. This solution path has
pitfalls, including: Significant
licensing expense, an expectation that “final” products will ship with
significant coding errors which will be corrected through an institutionalized
patching process and long development times and periods between updates. These challenges were historically tolerated
due to the perception that there were unique operational and security
requirements and a lack of useful alternatives.
Open source software, by its nature, addresses many of these
concerns. There are no licensing costs,
and the early provision of capability is prioritized over coding perfection,
with the community providing both robust quality assurance and potential
solutions that are implemented both rapidly and efficiently.
In the late 2000s, defense communities around the world
recognized the promise of open source software.
In 2007, the US Department of the Navy (DON) issued guidance specifying
that open source software was equivalent to COTS with respect to acquisition
decisions. Two years later, in 2009, the
US Department of Defense (DoD) extended this guidance to the entire Department. Currently, there are a number of open sources
packages powering defense applications for both the US and NATO.
The real power of open source software for C2 applications,
however, lies in the middleware space. These enterprise level integration technologies
offer promise not only for nations seeking an initial force transformation, but
also for countries finding the sustainment burden for proprietary C2 to be too
onerous. Open source middleware is the
transformative technology. These tools
will allow seamless processing and distribution of information that provide
edge organizations with the abilities to:
a.
Make sense of the situation;
b.
Work in a coalition environment;
c.
Rapidly identify the appropriate means to
respond to given situation; and
d.
Orchestrate responses in a timely manner.
One example of a complete middleware offering with
applications to the defense domain is the WSO2 Service Oriented Architecture
(SOA) Platform. The platform consists of
eighteen discrete products sharing a common core, each of which is optimized
for a particular role.
CONCLUSION
The transformation of industrial age forces to information
age forces leveraging command and control mechanisms that have long been an
elusive goal. This need not be the case
any longer. The organizing principle of
power to the edge, representing an information age approach to C2 now has a
readily available, affordable computing infrastructure. The combination of infrastructure and
organizing principles places transformation within reach for all.
(Interested in more about RMA 2.0? I've shared a more complete version of my thoughts on the matter in a white paper that you can access here.)
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