Spectrum War And The Return To Global Risk
Spectrum War And The Return To Global Risk
Our 21st century military revolution
China is shooting lasers from space and at the Filipino Coast Guard, so it’s time we remembered the words of Adm. Thomas Moorer. “If there is a World War III,” Moorer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1970 to 1974, declared, “the winner will be the side that can best control and manage the electromagnetic spectrum.”
Despite the phrasing, Moorer was not expressing a delusion that a nuclear war with Russia could be “won.” He was referring to the need for secure radio communications to control bombers and ships and submarines and missile silos, the use of jamming to protect aircraft and warheads, the radar technology to see through enemy jamming. Readiness for nuclear war was intended to mitigate nuclear risk, and the development of spectrum technologies flourished as a result.
Elon Musk is wrong to worry that Starlink will be used to “start World War III.” It will be used to manage World War III — arguably, it is being used in a proxy WWIII right now — and preparations to wage that war via Starlink are vital to the entire project of preventing such a war. It worked the first time we had a Cold War. It can work again.
Maybe the reader saw something in the news recently about Chinese spy balloons overflying American missile silos to monitor and eavesdrop. It would not surprise this writer to learn that even in Moorer’s time, similar foreign overflights were being reported as flying saucers.
A Chinese official has accused the US government of overflying Chinese territory with spy balloons, and this might even be true. Such a fact pattern could suggest this strategic competition has been going on for much longer than we knew, and that we are just now finding out about it after decades of hysteria, and that the old timers in the NSA who told tales to the noobs about intercepted UFO communications were telling the truth. Maybe.
But the balloons are just one example of the revolution in military affairs now called EMSO (electromagnetic spectrum operations), the art of war in the 4th dimension of time and space. Just about every single thing on the modern battlefield is part of EMSO now. If a radio or a chip is part of the weapon, it is an EMSO system. Thus the Pentagon can report using electromagnetic means to neutralize the balloon’s sensors, or to jam its receivers, or that “countermeasures” (read: encrypted frequency hopping radios) have limited the effectiveness of the balloons.
Since the moment Guglielmo Marconi completed his first experimental sets, the importance of EMSO has been recognized in military historiography and appreciated by military historians, but almost never to the level of public awareness that it deserves. Some popular portrayals of electromagnetic warfare exist, but radio waves are not toyetic enough to sell to kids. As with the purchase of an automobile, we want the tank, not the radio in the tank.
But then you learn how every German Panzer had a radio receiver in 1940, while none of the French tanks did. Even though they were actually better tanks, the French got licked every time, for their tank crews were each on their own while trying to fight a battle. That is the power of a radio set.
Early last December, a meeting of defense industry apparatchiks discussed what Ukraine would need in order to win the war. “For veterans of Reagan’s administration who attended the forum, all the talk about having to outlast the Russians was more than a bit surreal,” Politico reported.
“Nobody thought this would happen again,” said Dov Zakheim, who served as a senior defense policy official for Reagan and as the top budget official under President George W. Bush. “We almost brought Russia into NATO.”
Global risk has returned, and with it, a new dawn of EMSO development. Responsive to the renewed Russian invasion of Ukraine, NATO has a renewed focus on interoperability and its EMSO-related industries are clamoring for the various procurement stovepipes to come together as policy. A multiplicity of national commands, all with their own components, each pursuing their own solutions to a radio spectrum that is increasingly contested and congested, is a recipe for disaster unless there are standards and a very high level of coordination.
Open standards help alleviate this problem. A single unit, the awkwardly-acronymed JEWCS, does almost all the training and guidance across the entire alliance force. It will have to enlarge. Even the terminology differs: Americans use EMSO, Europeans use EMO (electromagnetic operations).
So it is worth noting that Ukraine’s new Delta intelligence management system is designed to meet NATO standards of interoperability. This is a practical side effect of their receiving NATO weaponry. Data is stored in a cloud hosted by an allied country to inhibit Russian cyberattacks; they have been far less effective than feared before last February, but hardening software is still a smart move.
Reducing interference and fratricide, improving coordination, and interopration are all vital policy tasks for the alliance. Ask the “Old Crows” in the EMSO business right now, however, and they will agree the most important current shift is in western allies’ technology import and export policies.
The potential security hazards of, say, Chinese-made video cameras are obvious and subjects of public discussion. Far more secretive, however, was the national security impetus behind the CHIPS Act that the US Congress passed last August, including “crucial interventions with Republicans by former top Trump officials.” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo held a closed-door session with sixty Senators:
The group of Senators asked around 30 to 40 questions on the various national security implications of relying on chips made in China or Taiwan, according to a senior Commerce Department official, particularly for defense applications. Other questions focused on the timeline for building up U.S. semiconductor capacity, and whether Congress would be too late if they passed the legislation after the August recess. One of the main points that struck lawmakers, according to Raimondo, came from Hicks: 98% of the chips purchased by the Department of Defense are tested and packaged in Asia. “That briefing really moved members who were on the fence,” Raimondo says.
Onshoring more chip manufacturing makes a lot of sense, especially now. Although China has a lot of semiconductor manufacturing, they do not make state-of-the-art chips. Questions remain just how much further chip makers can reduce the nanometer-distances between circuits, but the next generation of microchips will require brand-new machine tools to stamp. Keeping allies on board with this is going to be an important diplomatic task.
It is actually possible to reduce the availability of future chips in China — as well as Iran and Russia — and ensure their availability to American military contractors. Semiconductor factories are the most tightly-controlled facilities on the planet due to the zero-dust environment necessary for manufacturing the product. The national security advantage of onshoring is obvious. Better export controls and enforcement can prevent Russia using the new American-made chips to attack Ukraine. Or so Ukrainians might hope.
It matters because future combat is likely to involve two drones against each other, either following their programming or obeying commands. In that contest, the weapon with the faster processor wins. We are already seeing the first glimpses of this contest in the Persian Gulf and the South China Sea.
“The US Navy’s Fifth Fleet plans to deploy more than 100 unmanned drones in Middle East sea lanes by 2023 to help monitor weapons trafficking and other illicit activities in the region.” Al-Monitor reports.
Both sides are driving the change. Iran has used sea drones to threaten maritime traffic. With the United States drawing down forces in the region, the US Navy is looking to economize by using remote sensors and drones. The reader might already be familiar with the “jet ski” drones built by Ukraine. The US Navy version looks like it, and they are happy with it, but other vendors out there have innovative designs available today, so expect them to proliferate worldwide.
Meanwhile, Iran is building a drone carrier. These will be the new warship type of our century, and future naval warfare will feature drone swarms:
Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy ship Shahid Mahdavi is a former Iranian-flagged container ship that is getting converted into a warship to carry both helicopter and fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles at the Iran Shipbuilding & Offshore Industries Complex Co (ISOICO) at Bandar Abbas near the Strait of Hormuz, according to November photos … published on Monday.
China already has a drone carrier design of their own. Anticipating the counter-threat, the PLAN (People’s Liberation Army Navy, because the regime doesn’t want competing defense agencies) has developed laser weapons. Now China is showing them off in a bid to get our attention.
To counter renewed Chinese aggression, the US Navy is copying their success (so far) in the Persian Gulf. This is an inherently iterative process, and there will be cooperation between anti-western partners to answer western advances.
For example, China is already buying drones from Iran, if we are to believe the Iranians. No doubt Iran will receive cordial assistance in return. Maybe some spy balloons will appear over the Persian Gulf this year.
Understanding the rapid development and deployment times involved, for naval strategy comes with construction times, the US Navy is looking for rapid “overmatch” technology. They want to leapfrog ahead of China, Iran, and Russia by deploying “directed energy," i.e. lasers and microwave weapons. To that end, the fleet is not asking for a new kind of ship. Instead, they are adding more power supply to existing hulls in order to host these new weapons.
DE weapons have key advantages over missiles or gunnery at sea. One, magazine capacity is only limited by power supply; two, they cannot be jammed, like missiles can be. Lasers can swat whole swarms of drones and missiles from the sky.
The Royal Navy has likewise tested their own shipboard and airborne laser system. If the navy with the longest track record of getting trends right adopts high-energy laser (HEL) weapons, they must have promise.
A second option is high power microwave (HPM) weapons already being made and possibly even deployed right now. The next generation of HPMs will use solid-state radio frequency (RF) amplifiers made of gallium nitride instead of vacuum tubes — another technology where controls can slow down adversarial development.
Global risk is nothing new. When Chinese armies and Russian pilots intervened in the Korean War, and Congress was allocating increases to the “defense budget,” United Nations forces fighting in the peninsula did not receive most of the resulting military hardware. In fact, the US Army only ever attained parity in artillery tubes during the entire war, while Europe got most of the new tanks and aircraft.
President Harry S. Truman and his cabinet were convinced that Moscow had a plan to attack the Federal Republic of Germany in concert with their ally. It was the definitive beginning of the Cold War. During that hostile peace, the United States and its system of alliances managed to deter conventional and nuclear aggression by showing their potential enemy a bit of what they could do, and promising more. We have returned to those days, and Adm. Moorer’s rule is more pertinent than ever.