From the Crows' Nest

Ken Miller [00:00:00]:
Welcome to From the Crows' Nest, a podcast on electromagnetic spectrum operations, or EMSO. I'm your host, Ken Miller, Director of Advocacy and Outreach for the Association of Old Crows. You can follow me on LinkedIn or you can email me directly at host@fromthecrowsnest.org. Thanks for listening. All right. I am here with Bryan Clark from the Hudson Institute. Bryan, it's great to have you back on From the Crows' Nest once again. Thanks for joining me.

Bryan Clarke [00:00:35]:
Thanks Ken. It's great to be here.

Ken Miller [00:00:36]:
Always great to catch up with you. You've been a frequent guest. I think the last time you were on here was in August of last year. Basically you were getting ready to embark or you were in the midst of a report which we are going to be talking about today called Winning the Fight for Sense and Sense Making that is coming out soon or is is is out now depending on when you're listening to the this episode. But we discuss this a little bit in August and it kind of flows from a previous report that you did that had you on the show for in January. So really appreciate you coming by, talking a little bit about this report, the study that you're releasing and kind of what it means for transforming our military here, especially as we're kind of in a new era here the last couple last eight days. So know there's a lot of questions about where we're going. So really appreciate you coming coming on the show.

Bryan Clarke [00:01:25]:
Thanks Ken. And I appreciate you taking the time to read the report and to talk about it. This report, this study came out of a project that we did for the office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering looking at fundamentally the goal was to try to come up with ways to improve the non kinetic capability supply chain and we can get to that a little bit later. But what OSD was looking for is ways to try to get more players into this line of work, try to take advantage of the emergence of a bunch of startup companies that are working on the kinetic side to try to bring that same kind of model of innovation and private investment into the non kinetic side. So how do you incentivize that? How do you bring more companies to bear? How do you get a more diverse field of potential performers that give you more more options as well as more throughput in terms of non kinetic capabilities. So cyber and electromagnetic warfare.

Ken Miller [00:02:19]:
I'll typically in in some of your studies, you know, participate in your workshops that you have kind of leading up to it. I did not participate in any workshops on this one. So this is kind of a, a newer topic in that regard. But one of the fascinating things I find with the way that you conduct these studies is once you start to peel back that onion a little bit on these. Yeah, yeah, we want to, we want to work on how we, you know, deploy and use non kinetic cap. It sounds great. And then you start to peel that back into force structure and funding and, and tech development, all of a sudden you have a much harder task to kind of come up with recommendations. So just as a, as a general starting point, when you go into this effort, like what is your mindset? Like, okay, we have this clear goal, right? You have these workshops, but man, you, you can't just like you, once you start to peel that back and dive down into it, it gets complicated real quick.

Ken Miller [00:03:16]:
How hard is it then to keep track of where the goal that you're trying to pursue with these studies?

Bryan Clarke [00:03:21]:
Yeah, it's very difficult, you know, so that, that kind of, very simple goal of how do I get more private companies interested in developing cyber and electromagnetic warfare effects is very challenging to implement. Because you think, okay, well why is it that we have all these new players on the kinetic side that are willing to build systems on their own dime and then offer them to the government? You have companies like Anduril and shield, AI and folks like that. And it's because they can understand the problem space. They can come up with systems and build them on their own. They can do some of their own testing even they have some of their own test ranges. They can do all that on their own and then they can interact with the government and the government generally has a fairly broadly defined need. And then they can come to some agreement and use middle tier of acquisition, the new acquisition path to quickly move from a prototype into a fielded system. So we had to look at on the non kinetic side.

Bryan Clarke [00:04:14]:
Well, what are the roadblocks to being able to do that kind of thing on the non kinetic side? Which meant we had to figure out how do we do it today and what's the processes we use today and do a lot of classified discussions about well, what tools do we have now, what are we building now, how do we do it? And it was very revealing in terms of how antiquated our approach generally is to developing non kinetic capabilities, especially compared to how we've really advanced and sped up the field of kinetic capabilities.

Ken Miller [00:04:43]:
And we'll dive into this a little bit. But I can imagine that the way that we're structured to fight in the electromagnetic spectrum Use using non connect. We are not structured in a way that allows for easy, easy adaptation around those obstacles, similar to what you might find with more kinetic or kinetic weapons. Things that we're more familiar with developing, buying, selling, you know, operationalizing. So the, the need is there. I think it's, we recognize even at the highest level of duty, yeah, we need to, we need to tackle this, but you quickly. At least I get to a point and I guess the question is, do you get to this point where you're like, oh crap, we can't get there from here necessarily or can we, can we even get there from here because there's such a gap of by how we're organized.

Bryan Clarke [00:05:32]:
Yeah, yeah, that's a great point. So like the first problem you run into with non kinetic capabilities is on the kinetic side. If you're Andrew and you want to build the Roadrunner counter UAS system, you can use that Roadrunner munition, which is basically a rocket with a munition, a warhead on it. You can use that a lot against a lot of different targets. You don't really need to understand exactly how a particular drone is built to be able to hit it with a Roadrunner missile. So your understanding of the threat can be pretty generalized and your understanding of the launch platforms can be pretty generalized. You don't need any special insight. But on these non kinetic capabilities, if I want to do a cyber attack on somebody's command and control system that's associated with an air defense radar, well, I need to know pretty precisely how that thing works and what it looks like and what the code is or what the potential access points are.

Bryan Clarke [00:06:21]:
So you need this sort of much deeper intelligence knowledge about the target. It's what they call threat coupled in a way that is much different than the kinetic side. And that's the first roadblock is how do you get companies that are interested in supporting the dodge that information so they can go and start being creative and coming up with innovative solutions. And then you've got to have a place where they can go and do this capability development and testing. And it's not like just having a test range where you go out and have a space where you can just shoot things and blow things up. You got to have like a virtual representation of this system and then the environment in which you're launching the attack. So there's a bunch of special capabilities and special insight or knowledge that you need on the non kinetic side that is really not needed on the kinetic side.

Ken Miller [00:07:08]:
Yeah. So just to, to get started Understanding the, the, the threat environment is difficult in and of itself depending on where your target is or what the threat is. Throughout your recent reports, you, you covered this with the, your Hedge Force report back in January last year, almost a year to the date last year, as well as we discussed it a little bit in, in, in, in August. We are typically structured and correct me if I'm wrong, we're typically structured to fight a global war against two major powers on either side of us. Russia over. No, no one can see my hand gestures, but it's over, over, over to the, to the east to, over toward Europe and then of course Asia into paycom. Two very different adversaries, two very different capability threat threat capabilities, very different ways of organizing the fight. But we have one military, right? So we have to respond.

Ken Miller [00:08:04]:
So, so what you typically have done through this one is through the Hedge Force. You're looking at indopacom heavily in, in this one in particular because it has some unique characteristics and, and that's what we're kind of probably focused most of our time on. But you kind of set out a very scary scenario up front, I'm sorry to say. But like, and you mentioned like, we are unlikely to gain the upper hand in traditional war fighting against, in an Endopacom scenario. And you even go later in talking about the escalation ladder, we have some rungs missing on the escalation ladder as we're currently structured. So looking at indopacom, talk to us a little bit about the forcing function for this study and how this threat creates some unique challenges that if we maintain our approach to fund one military that can meet both of these threats, whether it's Russia and China, how are we positioned today to confront the end of PAYCOM scenario?

Bryan Clarke [00:09:02]:
Going back to that Hedgeforce report, what the both of these studies really highlight is the fact that we did build this one size fits all military. And in a lot of ways we still have that one size fits all military, which was fine as long as our opponents weren't that capable. And now that you've got Russia and China both taking advantage of technology proliferation have both dramatically advanced their capabilities in very different ways. So now we can't really use that same one size fits all military effectively against either of them. And now you get the Houthis and Iran, which they're not major powers, but they can certainly put a stress on our force and have, because they have relatively sophisticated drones and kind of homemade cruise missiles. So now we have to think about having a way that our one size fits all military can tailor itself to these different environments and be effective in a sustainable way. So the hedge force was the idea of, well, on the kinetic side, can we use uncrewed systems to augment the mainline force to give it the tools it needs to be successful in a particular area? So that was focused on the China Taiwan invasion scenario. But you could think of a hedge forces being applied in other locations also.

Bryan Clarke [00:10:09]:
And although the mainline military might shrink because of just the cost and people required to run it, you could see these hedge forces being added to complement it and provide it what it needs in a particular region or against a particular threat. So I would say that this report, this new one, talks about that equivalent of that. On the non kinetic side, what would you use in terms of cyber and electronic warfare to undermine the ability of, in this case China to be confident in its ability to succeed in operations in its region and then win in a war fight? So the non kinetic side can complement the kinetic side. So that's really what we, where we came to this. And on the, in the Chinese case, China and its military are pretty vulnerable to attacks against its what they call reconnaissance intelligence system because they've built out sort of a fire and forget kind of military where you've got a large, large number of land based missiles and a fairly large number of aircraft based missiles or aircraft launched missiles. But they're all more or less just precision fires being controlled from a central center in Beijing somewhere. And it's more or less hierarchical, you know, kind of push buttons and missiles go out and attack the various targets. And that's because China's leaders don't really have the full confidence in their military to go do distributed operations or execute mission command or delegate authority in the way that the US military does.

Bryan Clarke [00:11:36]:
So they want the control things from home and from Beijing and basically use their long range precision fires to get the job done. Which means they're really dependent upon this reconnaissance intelligence system giving them accurate targeting information and a sense of what we, what they think our forces are doing. And if that sensing or sense making starts to fail, then you can undermine the confidence of the leaders in their ability to execute these operations when they need to.

Ken Miller [00:12:02]:
And so, as our listeners have heard me say repeatedly, you know, this, this is another scenario where it shows that EMS superiority is fundamental to winning the next operation. It starts and ends there. Like how we, how we tackle this challenge is going to determine how we win or if we can win the battle, whatever that winning looks like.

Bryan Clarke [00:12:25]:
Yeah. And so we, and you know, I think what we've talked before about the fact that most of our EW investments are focused on defense. They're focused on platform self defense. Even when you talk about suppression of enemy air defenses and airborne electronic attacks, that's really about defending airplanes that are coming in to launch weapons. So almost all of our EW investments are, are focused on protection. And we don't really talk that much about how would you go on offense in the electromagnetic spectrum and in cyberspace. Obviously we think a lot about cyberspace being a domain where you can go on offense because we think about things like stuxnet or the, you know, various attacks that, that Chinese have recently executed against US telecom companies. So Volt Typhoon and those guys, or Salt Typhoon.

Bryan Clarke [00:13:09]:
So the, so I think cyber is perceived as being this place where you do offense. But ems, we've traditionally thought of that as a defensive domain. And one thing we tried to get at the study was how do you go on offense in the ems? And what does that look like?

Ken Miller [00:13:24]:
One of the notes that I wrote down here is that when you're talking, you mentioned the Allied Counter 3C ISR operations. You mentioned that, you know, we have to change our thinking to center more on preventing conflict. Which is what we were talking about just before we started recording is this idea of being able to project your capabilities in that space so that this sense and sense making is almost an anticipatory operation versus a response where okay, we're, there's an aggression and we're going to fight it. This is anticipating the fight and the escalate gets into using as an escalation capability.

Bryan Clarke [00:14:01]:
Right.

Ken Miller [00:14:01]:
More than it ever has in the past.

Bryan Clarke [00:14:03]:
Yeah. If you remember back, you know, like 10 years ago maybe when the Chinese first fielded their anti ship ballistic missiles, the Navy and the Navy leadership were very keen on talking about how they could break the kill chain and how they could keep the Chinese from being able to successfully execute those attacks by attacking the C4 or C3ISR complex. They weren't very specific about how that happens. But the problem with that though is that if you're, if that's all your, if your strategy is simply to do that when the fight happens, you've probably lost. Right. Because you're, you're, you're already facing large numbers of missiles. Yes, you could, you could degrade the kill chain, but they have enough missiles to where eventually a leaker is going to get through. So you don't want to be in the position of only relying on the EMS when the fight has happened.

Bryan Clarke [00:14:48]:
These Capabilities would really lend themselves to peacetime operations to dissuade or deter conflict because they are inherently not that escalatory. And one of the things we talk about in the report is that cyber and electronic warfare tools can be very targeted to send a message directly to your opponent. So in this case the Chinese, without being broadcast to the broader world and forcing the Chinese to react in a way that is save face or to project strength. So if you, if you jam a particular Chinese space based sensor and you make it so that they can't see very well what's going on underneath the sensor, that's a message you're sending directly to the operators of that system and it's unlikely to be viewed or noted by anybody else. And it's a way of directly communicating. So in peacetime you can start to have this engagement between the US and China to deter them from conflict because they start to maybe have less confidence in the ability of that reconnaissance intelligence system to work at the moment they need it to. So Cyber Command does a form of this already in their, their active engagement or active defense strategy where if somebody comes at them in cyberspace, they go at them back just to make sure that they understand we can. So it's, it's a little bit different than that, but it's similar in that you are trying to engage with your opponent in the non kinetic realm as a way of deterring an escalation to the kinetic realm.

Ken Miller [00:16:11]:
And I would imagine that even though the report focuses on the Indo Pacom region, when obviously global security, the prevalence, use of proxy wars and you know, Chinese military projection is not just in the South China Sea, it's throughout the world. And so there's other opportunities to execute these types of maneuvers or cape technologies in other settings that it might not be clear that it's happening.

Bryan Clarke [00:16:40]:
Right.

Ken Miller [00:16:40]:
You know, force versus force, it's just out there, right?

Bryan Clarke [00:16:45]:
Yeah, it's a good point. I mean, you think about Chinese signals intelligence satellites, they're mostly geostationary or some are geostationary. So their coverage goes all the way from Hawaii to the Indian Ocean to the western or the eastern part of the Indian Ocean. So you could be anywhere in there and you could be injecting signals into these satellites. Whether it's a false signal that just creates a decoy or a false target, or you could be injecting a cyber tool via their, that aperture into that satellite, into that satellite's communication network, into the command and control system that is behind it and creating false data that's now going to be propagated, propagated throughout their command and control system. So you don't have to be directly in the Taiwan Strait to be influencing China's confidence and its reconnaissance intelligence system.

Ken Miller [00:17:32]:
Whenever we talk, Brian, it's always one of those things where I, I want to like jump to the concl, the recommendations right away and we, we, I'm trying to like lay down the groundwork and so I apologize if I'm jumping around a little bit. But you mentioned in, in the report that, and this is a theme that we've talked about a lot on with each of the times that you're on the show is, is the notion of the predictability of our situation where we know that our, you mentioned the dominance, the ability to achieve dominance is no longer what it was 20 years, 30 years ago. Predictable. We've known about it, we've been talking about it at least in the MSO community for decades. Right. So now we're here and we're having this conversation again. Talk to me a little bit about when you were doing this report, the environment that you were working within in terms of the understanding that we have to make seismic changes in how in our force structure moving forward to avoid this, what is currently a predictable end in terms of our ability to achieve dominance.

Bryan Clarke [00:18:37]:
Yeah, I think within the department and we talked about this in the workshops that we did for this study, we are definitely in what Mike Mazar calls the post dominance environment, meaning the US no longer has that ability to roll in with its one size fits all military and dominate the situation. We are faced, as we kind of see from real world operations today, with capable adversaries in every theater. So wherever we go, we're going to be faced with somebody who could put stress on us and in some cases could win tactical victories. And although we may be able to, for example, defend Taiwan from an invasion, it's going to be winning very ugly and a lot of losses will be incurred such that it could deter a US leader from intervening on Taiwan's behalf. So we've got to come up with ways to mitigate this loss of dominance. And the hedge force. And the hedge force idea was one way of going about that. This idea of using non kinetics is another aspect of how do we regain an edge in these scenarios when we can't just build a bigger version of today's military because of cost constraints or because of personnel constraints.

Ken Miller [00:19:43]:
Would you say the sense and sense making efforts that you talk about in the report, are they more or less like a subset or A little bit lower hanging fruit to reform than the hedge force concept. Because one of the things we talked about was like, how do you get there? I mean that's like structural, massive structural change to our services and co comms. How do you get there? But this seems a little bit more attainable, right?

Bryan Clarke [00:20:08]:
I would say the hedge force in the Taiwan case is probably fairly achievable, right? Because it's a one case, you can establish a special unit to handle it. You can already see with replicator that the DoD is buying large numbers of uncrewed systems that are relevant to that situation. So you could see how a hedgeforce for a particular situation like Taiwan might be something we could do relatively quickly. The problem is sustaining that because it's a bunch of new hardware that has to be managed by somebody and maintained by somebody and then sustained by a service. And so to your point, I think putting a hedge force in place, maybe not that hard. Putting it, keeping it in place and having it be an enduring capability, very hard. And I think on the non kinetic side, this is a much easier thing to create as a sustainable capability. So if you create a broader or deeper magazine, as we call it, of non kinetic capabilities, that's something that's much easier to sustain than the specialty hedge forces that you might need in every theater around the world in the coming decade.

Bryan Clarke [00:21:07]:
And we talk with the report about how do you, well, how do you build this magazine, how do you create that magazine of effects? But yeah, that's a much easier, I think that's an easier lift than it would be to sustain the hedgeforce construct in every, every theater.

Ken Miller [00:21:20]:
So before we get into some of the specifics of what you recommend, you know, just to kind of continue to pull the thread of kind of setting the stage, I wanted to touch briefly on the one obstacle in the Indo Paycom region versus that we don't really have the same in the European theater. And that's this notion of coalitions and partnerships and all. We have NATO and EU and other mechanisms, we have five eyes, we have aukus. But the Indo Pacom region has a completely different realm of players and relationships to navigate. And we don't have those same, it's not, we don't have the same structural alliances that we have. So talk a little bit about some of the challenge when you're talking about this. We can't, you can't implement what you're talking about unilaterally. We have to work with our allies in the region.

Ken Miller [00:22:15]:
So how does that, how does that affect the challenge when you don't have a NATO, for example.

Bryan Clarke [00:22:21]:
That's a good point. So the, in general, the idea of counter sensing operations is decoys and jamming being employed pretty broadly in the Indo Pacific AOR in a very coordinated way to undermine the confidence that PLA leaders might have in their reconnaissance intelligence complex. And then the sense making part of this is combining that counter sensing operation with a more distributed and recomposable force through initiatives like CJADC2. That gives you this ability to create a bunch of new kill chains or adapt your force structure in different ways. So the looks that the force packages that you're presenting are going to be different. And so for the Chinese, if they look at their contact picture and they see some jamming, they see some obvious decoys or some potential decoys, they can't just predict what's likely happening based on our previous doctrine and our previous behavior, because today that's what they would do, right. If we did this today without changing how the force structure is designed, they would probably be able to figure out pretty quickly, well, a carrier strike group only operates in the following ways. So yeah, there's some jamming and decoys out there, but at the end of the day it's going to look like this when they start to fight.

Bryan Clarke [00:23:32]:
So you have to combine that with the counter sense making meaning I've got to have new formations, I've got to have new combinations of units, I've got to have uncrewed systems that provide a bunch of new adjuncts to the crude force. And that's where the allied part of it provides a potential advantage and then a potential disadvantage, right? So if you're, if you are operating out there and you've got a bunch of Japanese ships that are in concert with your fleet and you're going to do with some counter sense making operations, well, they need to be on board with it and you need to be able to share with them enough information about what you're doing so they don't give up the game, right by, by operating in a way that makes it clear, well, the carrier is really here because you can see how the Japanese guys are driving around, which seems to indicate that even though there's, even though we're being obscured right in that location, there's probably a carrier right there. So we know the carrier's there. We know this decoy carrier is probably not the real carrier. You got to bring your allies on board in a way that allows you to provide this false picture more credibly and with Australia, that's probably more likely to be done because we're under the five eyes partnership. We share a lot of intelligence, especially in electronic warfare. But Japan is much more difficult because there is not that intelligence sharing relationship in the same way. So we got to come up with ways to provide essentially a sanitized set of conops to the Japanese side so they don't inadvertently reveal what we're really doing.

Ken Miller [00:24:52]:
And, and if you dug into, you know, individual cases of each of our allies, obviously you'd probably have the same discussion within NATO. Not everything is, is solved because NATO exists. But each of the countries that you're working with in the Indo PACOM region have their own geopolitical considerations that are extremely unique for that region. Especially if, heaven forbid, a scenario develops where we are unable to provide the level of regional security that we need to, whether it's of Taiwan or the South China Sea or so so forth, instantly changes all of their considerations much faster than you might have in, in a European MOD construct where you have NATO kind of stepping in and saying, okay, here's all of our, all the countries are on the same page, roughly speaking.

Bryan Clarke [00:25:44]:
Yeah. So, and one of the things that, that we tried, we didn't really get it in detail in the study is by, in our current model we rely mostly on kinetics and mostly on kind of the mass of our kinetics to be able to succeed. And if you're our allies, you have, you're, that's all you have to go on, right. So you look at our force and say, well, it looks like you just don't have that much force in the Indo Pacific because we are having to send forces to the Middle east and the military and the Navy in particular are shrinking. So if you're Japan and Australia, you start get a little bit nervous because you're thinking is the US really going to be here to defend us, much less protect its own interests and are we going to have to start bandwagoning or kind of reaching accommodations with China? Because the US is no longer going to be the balancing force that we expected it to be. And these non kinetic capabilities, or we expect them to tip the scale back in our favor. Right. But they don't necessarily see that.

Bryan Clarke [00:26:34]:
Right. You can't see these capabilities. If you're, if you're Australia, you might get some insight into what we're doing, but not completely. And that's why it's important to use these in peacetime so that you can dissuade the Chinese away from conflict. So from The Japanese and Australian perspective in particular, they would see the evidence that, okay, well, China seems to be backing down. We're not exactly sure why, but it seems like they're seeking some less aggressive scenarios than the invasion scenario. And part of the reason for that might be because of our counter ISR efforts or counter sensing and sense making.

Ken Miller [00:27:07]:
Efforts, which also means that you have to share that technology with them. And we typically have a harder time, I think, with that than just selling hardware. So it changes how we even bring them on training, manpower, all those other cascading consequences.

Bryan Clarke [00:27:25]:
But the benefits are huge when you think about it, because the alternative would be we'd have to build a bigger military of the current, in its current structure, which, you know, we're just, we're already seeing that the, that's just not possible. People are going to be the biggest limitation now. And the, the work we're doing with Australia and Japan, the, one of the main limitations on their force structure is people. They don't have enough people or can't get enough people to crew the fleet or force.

Ken Miller [00:27:49]:
And I think it's important because we, we've talked, we talk a lot about workforce and when we talk about we need, we need more people, that doesn't necessarily need, mean we need more recruiting like a larger force. We need, we need, we need to fill the empty requirement, the required seats that we currently have.

Bryan Clarke [00:28:06]:
Right.

Ken Miller [00:28:07]:
So the, the shortfall in, in, in the force is more of the, the right people versus a general number.

Bryan Clarke [00:28:13]:
Yeah, and right, the right people. Because you could see the military beginning to evolve to this hybrid force where there's a lot more uncrewed components to it. Which means I need people that are able to join the, the, the military that have the confidence and comfort in using uncrewed systems that are maybe much more competent at using software or even writing their own software than maybe old fogies like me are. So you got to have this generational shift in the kinds of attributes that our recruits have. And of course, if you have recruits with those attributes, they're going to be in high demand other places. Because if you know how to write software and you have a passing familiarity with uncrewed systems, there's lots of companies that would love to hire you.

Ken Miller [00:28:52]:
Yeah. To your point about we've kind of reached the maximum size, you can see that even currently I've been engaged in conversations this week a lot about, you know, the plans to free some of the army funding. There's some, there's at least some effort out there to say hey, do we need the army the size it needs, you know, who's paying the bill. But there is this idea of we have this top level, we're not, we don't have the force we need. But we can't get bigger or spend more. So we are going to have to have that bill paint. In the past I would say a lot of that bill paying came from the EW non kinetic side. There was maybe not a lot of it, but at least to our community we were hurt by that being the bill pair.

Ken Miller [00:29:36]:
That can't be the case now. So who. So we do have to find that kind of bill pay if we're going to beef up this non kinetic element.

Bryan Clarke [00:29:47]:
Yeah, I agree, I think so. One thing to think about is I think a lot of our investments today, if you look at the budget, are about these self protection systems and you really can't get away from that. Right. Because you need the non kinetic self defenses because they provide that deeper magazine of defensive capabilities. We've seen in the Red Sea how those systems actually work and do divert missiles away from, you know, ships that are being protected. So you can't get away from that. So you have to continue to make those investments. You can't just trade those away and invest in offense.

Bryan Clarke [00:30:17]:
So these offensive capabilities, decoys, jammers that get employed on uncrewed systems are going to be in addition to that. So where do we get that funding from? And I think a lot of it's going to involve making trades within the services away from this more traditional kind of monolithic multi mission platforms and towards more uncrewed systems. And those uncrewed systems might have modular payloads, some of which could be these electronic warfare payloads. So you're looking at shifting that force structure away from that kind of one size fits all military to these more specialized elements which are uncrewed systems predominantly. And then they would carry a variety of different things whether they're doing them kinetic attack or a non kinetic attack. And that's really that in the force design work we're doing right now for the Air Force and Navy, that's what you're seeing is that the way to make this work is you have to shrink that traditional military and add more of these non traditional capabilities. And that actually helps you to succeed. That trading away that traditional mass for this new form of either mass or electronic mass ends up being a winner in terms of succeeding in these scenarios.

Bryan Clarke [00:31:28]:
And that trade also probably benefits us more from the deterrence perspective because I think China doesn't really care that much whether we have another two or three bombers or you know, another carrier even. They do care though, if we start to undermine their ability to understand their environment, that's going to make a difference in terms of their decision making.

Ken Miller [00:31:47]:
And so, you know, going to, I'm looking at the report and I'm on page five right now of 55. So we have to, we, unless, unless you're going to be here for like three hours, for a three hour episode. We, we gotta, I, I've gotta jump, jump on the details. So I want to get into. You talk about the simplified element kind of approach. You spent a lot of time talking about specific EW and HPM high powered microwave applications. Can you share a little bit more about how those two specific EW HPM that what role they need to play moving forward in this effort to have superiority and sense and sense making?

Bryan Clarke [00:32:30]:
Yeah, yeah. So if you think about the simplified campaign that we describe in there, so the, so our argument is we need to start mounting a, these counter sensing and counter sense making campaigns in peacetime as a way of dissuading conflict or at least shifting adversaries away from more aggressive, more intense forms of conflict, like an invasion towards things that are less intense like a quarantine or you know, some kind of blockade of Taiwan. And so the electronic warfare systems that are useful for that are going to be decoy systems that can provide a electronic signature that looks like the radio frequency emissions from a, for example, SPY one radar that a ship would have or a radio set that a marine ground unit might have. Those systems are relatively simple, not that expensive, especially if they're trying to emulate a force that is attempting to be in emissions control. And I think sometimes we get wrapped around the axe because we think, well, a decoy that provides the same kind of signal that a Spy 1 radar can provide needs to be essentially the size of a Spy 1 radar and as expensive and capable. And that's not true, of course, because if you are a ship trying to not be seen, you're going to have your radar in a very low power mode and you're going to be operating with directional beams and you're going to try to avoid detection. Well, if I can make a decoy that provides that sort of emulation and that's not that hard to do and you could do that with an uncrewed system or uncrewed vessel power supply. So that, that's all very doable.

Bryan Clarke [00:33:52]:
So it starts with that, that attempting the signals intelligence spoofing and decoy operation. And then you also want to put your, your existing platforms into MCon and use passive sensing and multistatic sensing to avoid revealing yourself. And that way the signals intelligence satellites are kind of the, that are the first line of sensing for the Chinese are going to get this kind of false picture of there's a bunch of false targets out here that they might assume might be false. And then you've got real targets that are relatively hidden. And so now you need to sort that picture out. So they go to imaging satellites like SAR Synthetic Aperture Radar or electro optical for visual or for infrared. And so these imaging satellites, you could jam and confuse them as well. Synthetic Aperture Radar is a radar just like any other one.

Bryan Clarke [00:34:37]:
So you can use jammers against it to obscure your signature. You can create false signatures just like you would with a DURFIM jammer that commonly aircraft will use for self protection. And you can confuse the SAR satellite as to regarding your location or where the real ships are and then create some fake ships. And then you can also use some infrared spoofers as well to create infrared signatures for the infrared satellites.

Ken Miller [00:35:04]:
And you make a very good point here though because you know, when, when we talk about projection of forces, you know, it's all about what you show them. And you know, you, you can put an aircraft carrier off the coast and you're, you're showing your power and that might trigger, I mean it's, it's been done enough that they had, there's protocols and like how, here's how we're going to respond but with your talk of the escalation ers and we'll get to. I want to get into more of that in just a second. But with regard to using EW and HPM and non kinetic technologies and sense and sense making, you're showing them something that they're not going to want to necessarily be public. Oh, wait a second, you, you found a vulnerability. So a lot of this is going to happen much more subtly and behind the scenes and quietly than say projecting naval superiority. But putting an aircraft carrier out. You're, but you're still projecting your force because they're getting the message.

Bryan Clarke [00:36:04]:
Right. What this is playing off of is deterrence could be a function of demonstrating your ability to deny or to punish. But deterrence can also be a function of creating uncertainty for the opponent. Because if you want to deter by denial, one way to do that is just to show them that you would be able to stop them. The other way to do it is to make them feel less confident in Their ability to succeed because they start to lack, they don't have credibility within their own force. They start to feel like I don't have the capabilities I need to succeed here regardless of what my opponent's doing. So this campaign is really designed to create uncertainty for the Chinese regarding their likelihood of success in operations like an invasion or maybe even a blockade. So yeah, so we're projecting our traditional forces out there, but what we're mostly doing is projecting uncertainty.

Bryan Clarke [00:36:50]:
We're creating this false picture that they know to be false. They know that there's probably bad information in there. And the challenge they have is they have to sort it out. And if it takes time and effort to go sort it out, then this may not be the kind of reconnaissance intelligence system you want to rely on. If you need to execute operations on a really fast tempo or with, you know, tightly coordinated actions in operations.

Ken Miller [00:37:14]:
We want to increase their risk, increase their cost, increase the time it takes them to operate. And all this stuff plays, plays into that and decrease it for ourselves. But in doing this, it's not just simply showing vulnerable their vulnerabilities that they may or may not have, but it's also kind of showing the depth and breadth of your capability that you're bringing to the table in little, little packets and making and forcing them to kind of draw the, connect the dots like, oh, they can do X, Y or Z by showing them a few things. And what that's going to. It seems that what you're getting at is that that's going to make them step back and say, wait a second, what are they doing? Keeping it quiet maybe. But, but without any sort of overt response of that could change to, that could escalate a conflict.

Bryan Clarke [00:38:05]:
Yeah, that's a good point. So the, the capabilities that we would demonstrate as part of the counter sense making and counter sensing campaign would, would be ones that we could also use in conflict. So if you're China and you're getting this series of false targets and jamming operations and creating uncertainty in peacetime, you're going to, you're going to say, well, what could they do to us in wartime if this is what they're doing in peacetime, some, you know, some similar operation is going to make it very difficult for us to succeed in the invasion and the timeframe that we have available to us. So yeah, so this is about projecting power in the, not in the electromagnetic spectrum to deter conflict in the same way that we would try to project power in the kinetic world to deter conflict. So it's a show of force in a way.

Ken Miller [00:38:48]:
So I want to go into then in our remaining time talk a little bit about how we get there. Now obviously we're skipping a lot of material, but that's why I have you on the show. So it encourages everybody to download the report. I'm not sure what time it comes out, but so we'll link to it in the show notes. So we're skipping over a lot, but let's get, let's get to a little bit about some actionable items. Okay. We're eight months into a new administration. We were already having these talks about how we react, reform our force and looking at efficiencies and so forth.

Ken Miller [00:39:20]:
What are some of the steps that you are looking at that are near term we should be taking? We are taking. And then a little bit on the horizon about what should we be thinking about next?

Bryan Clarke [00:39:33]:
Yeah, so what we found in the study was that Most of the DOD's non kinetic effects of cyber and DW are pursued using the kind of old traditional requirements process where we do a capability gap analysis. Somebody goes out and builds a requirement through some analysis and prescribes the solution to be pursued. So talks about a specific type of cyber effect or a particular type of EW reprogramming or EW technique that needs to be done and then that goes out to providers which are mostly government organizations with contractor support. So it's all kind of on site people doing this work and then eventually makes its way out to the force. So that's a very long kind of cumbersome process. Right. It's straightforward. It makes sense if you're the dominant military in a peacetime world where you get to basically drive things in your direction.

Bryan Clarke [00:40:24]:
But if you're now in a much more reactive mode dealing with technologically empowered adversaries, you're going to need to have a lot faster process for being able to get from a new idea for a cyber electronic warfare effect to it being in the force and able to be used. We also, to get to this idea of a campaign of counter sensing and sense making. You got to have a deep magazine of effects because every time you use one it's probably going to be burned and then they'll, they'll start to mitigate the vulnerability that you revealed by the effect. So you got to that deep magazine. So how do we build up that deep magazine? Because right now we don't really try to do that. We just sort of build the capabilities we need for the near term. It's mostly about platform Self protection. On the cyber side, it's mostly about building a small magazine of really silver bullet type of effects that we would use in wartime.

Bryan Clarke [00:41:11]:
So how do we build up, to use R&E's term, a magazine of bronze and brass effects that are maybe not the game changer that you would use in wartime but are good enough to undermine the confidence of the Chinese in the near term. So you need a process that does that in peacetime as well. So I got to be building, building up this magazine of effects and that.

Ken Miller [00:41:31]:
Magazine of effects, correct me if I'm wrong though, is you talk about depth but it also has to be adaptable because it's not just like a, it's not similar to a magazine of, that's a kinetic weapon. I mean you're going to use, got to keep using it but you have to change it each time so it's, it's adaptable.

Bryan Clarke [00:41:48]:
Right, right. So that magazine, the depth of it is both in terms of just the number of effects but also the diversity of effects so that you can continue to give them different looks or different tools that we're going to use to go after different vulnerabilities as they patch up the ones that we reveal in the previous effects.

Ken Miller [00:42:05]:
And so therefore when you, when they do respond and mitigate that now you're observing their, what they're capable of mitigating and you, it opens up a whole new way, opens up another door to what to do next.

Bryan Clarke [00:42:18]:
Yeah, that's good. Exactly. And so what we want to try to get into is a, a dialogue if you will, a back and forth between us and the Chinese via this set of non kinetic capabilities where we generate some effects, we watch their reaction. It reveals whether this was something they cared about or not. Because if they don't react, it appears like it was no big deal to them. Then we know that maybe that was not a vulnerability that's particularly problematic for them. But if they react and you see. So for example, if we do a decoy operation and they send out a bunch of aircraft to go investigate, well that might indicate that that sensor that we just decoyed against was an important one and they felt they needed to get ground truth and it was worth sending forces out to go investig.

Bryan Clarke [00:43:01]:
So that, that's the kind of feedback loop we want to be in with regard to the sensing and sense making competition and the campaign we would undertake.

Ken Miller [00:43:09]:
So in terms of that feedback loop then in terms of where we want to go in this construct in this campaign versus where we are now, it doesn't feel like, I mean, maybe we are, to some extent we're not, we don't have that right now. So how are we effectively understanding what they're able to do operationally? Where are the gaps? One of your graphs you talk about. We're missing a rung on the escalation ladder. So we're, we're, we're missing pieces that certainly impact our ability to project our force. So where are we missing those that, those pieces?

Bryan Clarke [00:43:41]:
Yeah, so the pieces we're missing are these lower rungs in the escalation ladder where we could use non kinetic effects to be able to undermine enemy sensing and sense making. So we don't really feel decoys at any, any scale. So we don't, we don't try to operate those in peacetime. It's something that we envision. Well, if wartime comes, we'll start to use decoys. But using them in peacetime can be a way to start to undermine the opponent's ability to feel like they've got, they can get a good contact picture when they need it. We don't do jamming of sensors in peacetime because we've decided that that is a offensive or aggressive operation, whereas China and Russia don't feel the same way. We probably need to start reframing our thought regarding jamming and think about that as a tool for peacetime deterrence rather than just a tool for wartime or reaction.

Bryan Clarke [00:44:27]:
And then in the cyber world, we need to think about using some of these brass and bronze tools that, you know, less, you know, destructive or less damaging or less impactful cyber effects. But they are useful in undermining the enemy's confidence in their system of systems. So there's both a kind of policy aspect to it that we need to be more willing to use some of these actions or effects in peacetime, but also just fielding the kinds of effectors that you would need. So one, one aspect of this that we haven't talked about is this idea of cross domain effects. So increasingly we have to rely on an electronic warfare system or an RF emitter to get a cyber tool into an enemy network because the network's firewalled off from the broader Internet. So you can't just use a computer to get into it. You have to send somebody into the theater. They have to inject the tool via a radio frequency transmission, which means now I have to have a platform that does that.

Bryan Clarke [00:45:19]:
I've got a whole kill chain now that I have to execute. So we need to think about using uncrewed systems that could do that kind of effects generation and delivery. So there's some force structure pieces of this that we could start to do as we field more uncrewed systems. And there's this policy consideration of are we willing to do these operations in peacetime as a way to shape the decision making of the opponent or are we just going to wait till wartime starts and then break out all of our cool toys?

Ken Miller [00:45:46]:
Well, and I think we've had enough discussion on this show about like you can't wait till wartime if you, if you do that, that's, that's a recipe for disaster. So we do have to do better at adapting to that, the escalation and use this. So everything about the report was very eye opening and like I said at the top of the show, it tied in nicely everything that we've discussed over the course of the year. So I appreciate that to kind of draw this to a close. I mean we talk about that force structure that's necessary for this. How do we do we have the means to fully understand what we need and how we get there from a workforce, from a force structure standpoint? Because every meeting I'm usually in where this topic comes up, it talks up, we talk about we don't have enough people, we don't have the right people, we don't have the right tools. And then the question of how you get there and it just sort of, the conversation dies because no one really knows how we know. So how, how do you approach that to finally tackle this?

Bryan Clarke [00:46:56]:
Well, this gets this idea of why bringing in private companies that are willing to begin developing these capabilities just like we've seen on, on the kinetic side. So there's a lot of money on the sidelines that's being applied to the kinetic world and, and companies like Anduril and, and others have benefited from that. So we could create and incentivize the same kind of investment and attraction of people on the non kinetic side by creating an environment where they would be able to contribute these capabilities. And that's the last part of the report gets into that which is the main thing that our sponsor was looking for. So the idea was we've got a lot of virtual environments in DoD that we use to develop and test out electronic warfare and cyber capabilities, those are all basically tied to a particular program or a particular service. And so it's sort of they get to play with it but nobody else gets to use it. So the idea we had was take those environments as well as new testing and evaluation environments that are being created thanks to funding from Congress that the Test and Resource Test Resource Management center is creating. Make those environments available as part of a consortium.

Bryan Clarke [00:48:01]:
So set up a consortium like we've done in other mission areas and make it so that vetted companies that want to join the consortium can get the appropriate clearances and be able to use these environments to develop capabilities and demonstrate them to government based on operational problems that the government defines. So use that middle tier of acquisition approach where we define an operational problem but we don't define a solution and then we let industry come up with the potential solutions and then those solutions are then purchased by the government under a commercial pricing model. So using OTAs you would buy the products of this innovation if you create that, that sandbox if you will, or it's actually a federated set of sandboxes. We would have a place where companies could come to go and make their case for here's where, here's how I think you solve this problem non kinetically and here's some tools that we would do to use to do that. Because there are a lot of companies that are very smart on electromagnetic effects and also cyber effects, but they're not really incentivized to come into DOD because right now we pay for all this stuff on a time and materials basis. So there's no way them to ever pay back their investors in the way that a, that an Andrew might. But under this model you could make it so they could get paid a commensurate price for the kinds of effects they're able to generate. Because if they solve a problem that the DoD has, the DoDs should be willing to pay for it at a price that pays for all of their intellectual property that went into it.

Ken Miller [00:49:26]:
Well Brian, this is extremely interesting stuff. I wish we had more time to go into this, a little bit more. But I would encourage everyone to download the report. It is available, we'll put it in the show notes and just really appreciate you coming, taking time to come on. Would love to have you back on to kind of see how this is being implemented over the course of the, of the year. I'm sure we're going to have a lot of policy changes coming, you know, floating out there as Congress gets involved here in the next few months. So this is just the beginning of the conversation. You know, there's no magic step to fully implement everything right out of the gate.

Ken Miller [00:50:03]:
So it's going to be a long term process. But I really appreciate you coming in here and opening our discussion up to this. This new. This, this new path that we're on.

Bryan Clarke [00:50:13]:
Thanks, Ken. Yeah, I really appreciate the opportunity. It was great talking to you. I'm glad you are interested in the report and you made some great points about maybe how we should think about framing it.

Ken Miller [00:50:22]:
Yeah. So I appreciate your time and that will conclude this episode of From the Crows' Nest. Thank you. Thanks for joining me as always. Please take a moment to review and share the podcast and thanks to everyone for listening.