An Agenda for Fighting Cyberwars

With the microchip transforming armed conflict as profoundly as every other human activity, the down payment is due on the revolution in military affairs: the critical shift in military thinking from Cold War to cyberwar, from heavy, force-on-force slugging matches to agile, precise attacks directed against an enemy’s decision and information systems. Now these new ideas must be squared against the $150 billion to $160 billion that the Pentagon wants to spend over the next five years on the next generation of information-centered weaponry.

Even assuming such staggering amounts can be found, Congress should not start writing the checks before addressing a perennial problem: the interservice rivalry that continues to plague the development and fielding of the systems used to command and control the nation’s armed forces. This problem is rooted in the legislative authority permitting each military service to procure separate command, control and information systems, with joint teamwork and operability as distinctly secondary priorities.

Although this traditional authority worked reasonably well prior to the electronic era, it creates redundancy, waste and inefficiency every time American forces take the field. In Desert Storm, for example, it required six months to transport, assemble and fine-tune the sprawling, jury-rigged information infrastructure that was essential for the U.S. operation. The 28,000 U.S. troops deployed to Somalia in 1992 brought with them 10 service-specific data systems to handle a host of common administrative functions.

Even the new multibillion-dollar satellite Global Broadcast System, intended to provide instantaneous information to field commanders, has separate components administered by the three services and one defense agency.

Assistant Secretary of Defense Emmett Paige has estimated that there are between 5,000 and 9,000 command and control systems operated by the Department of Defense, many of them left over from the Cold War. Despite concerted efforts to identify and retire them, each one is deeply enmeshed with extended service families of administrators, experts and contractors.

This Tower of Babel also is more difficult to defend from the newest generation of Information Age threats. In a 1996 study that drew headlines, the General Accounting Office reported to Congress that there were as many as 250,000 hacker attacks a year against military computer systems. And the U.S. peacekeeping contingent sent to Bosnia reportedly suffered viruses in at least half of their personal computers.

The potential of new technologies--as well as the best interests of the soldier and the taxpayer--require three important steps toward modernization.

Despite redundancy and obsolescence, the Department of Defense’s many command and control systems will endure in the absence of a draconian determination by the department’s civilian leadership. To halt the present practice of mortgaging the future by indefinitely postponing the day of reckoning, large numbers of these systems should be shut down. The appropriate model for such an effort is the Base Realignment and Closure Commissions, which demonstrated that the equitable distribution of pain was best accomplished through clarity of mandates, schedules and expectations.

The current authority of the military services to procure separate command and control systems should be removed and given to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Within the confines of existing missions, the services are great engines of innovative thought and development, but when they procure their own systems, old habits die even harder than old systems.

Commercial, “off the shelf” products should be used more and more to reduce institutional overhead and keep pace with new technology. The advent of secure, reliable global satellite communications such as Motorola’s Iridium has the clear potential to replace some communications channels that the military has had to provide for itself.

These are essential steps in overcoming a fundamental institutional problem that has been tolerated for far too long. And with budgetary and organizational payoffs, it is far too compelling to be ignored anymore. Sen. Strom Thurmond is fond of defining futility as doing the same thing while expecting different results. If our political and military leaders are really serious about the vaunted revolution in military affairs, they can start doing some traditional things differently and begin their preparations for the 21st century by correcting a 19th century anomaly.