From the Crows' Nest

Speaker 1 (00:10):
Welcome to From the Crows' Nest Podcast on electromagnetic spectrum operations or EMSO. I'm your host, Ken Miller, Director of Advocacy and Outreach for the Association of Old Crows. Thanks for listening.

(00:21):
In this episode, we are recording from the exhibit hall here at AOC 2022. Each day of the show this week we are bringing you special episodes covering topics related to the theme, an EMSO playbook. Yesterday we were privileged to have John Knowles. He's the editor in chief of the Journal of Electromagnetic Defense. And today I am here with Mr. David Tremper, he is the director of Electronic Warfare in the Office of Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment. And in this role Dave is the senior leader in DOD providing guidance and advocacy for the US development and acquisition of EW capabilities and systems. David's been on the show before and it's great to have him back. Thank you for joining me here on From the Crows' Nest.

Speaker 2 (01:04):
Yeah, Ken, always a pleasure. Enjoy talking about this topic, and happy to give update status on where we've been going over the past year.

Speaker 1 (01:11):
Excellent. You covered down on so many different topics, we'll try to get to as many as we can today, but at this morning's keynote there was an announcement of a new effort, a new office being stood up and I was wondering if you could shed some light on that and how it affects your department.

Speaker 2 (01:25):
Sure. So I think there's been a recognition within the Department of Defense that we have challenges when it comes to acquiring joint capabilities and acquiring missions that cut across multiple systems and multiple services. So within ANS, they're pursuing a new office that would look at how do you acquire joint capabilities, what is the methods for doing that, what are the budgeting approaches that you need to take to be able to either augment service programs of record so that they can address what we call purple requirements that are not specific to services but are joint requirements that aren't specific to services? And then what's the acquisition approach to get there? How do you that? Is it new joint acquisition programs?

(02:05):
It's challenging when you call it a program because it is... they're systems, a systems problems and each one of those systems has their own service specific mission requirements associated with. So it becomes this interoperability challenge. I think we see it play out on things like [inaudible 00:02:19], we see it play out in counter ISR and T, we see it player now on a wide variety of topics where they're very crosscutting. We need joint capabilities and we have a challenging infrastructure right now for actually creating requirements for it and then acquiring against those requirements.

Speaker 1 (02:34):
And this seems to be a really important step because this has been ongoing conversation about the current acquisition process that we have to follow, stifles out some of the innovation and some of the jointness and collaboration that we need to face emerging threats on a much more rapid turnaround schedule than we can do. So do you see that this office is going to... this is the next evolution in how our DOD bureaucracy can address some of these challenges internally and get things to the field sooner?

Speaker 2 (03:05):
Yeah, in fact, I think that's part of the reason I've been asked to help stand up this office. So over the past two years since I've been in the position, I've been using my limited resources to fund what I call cross service feasibility analysis and experiments. And in those cases, what we do from our purple position on EW is we can see across the services on what the services are working on and what they consider their challenges and threats. And because we can do that, we can see that, hey, the Navy has a capability to address this problem that say the Army or the Air Force is now considering, and we use our little amount of funds to do a study on, is the Navy capability applicable to this Army problem? Can we take those army developers and those Navy developers put them together in the room and then hash out, could you use this Navy system for that army problem?

(03:48):
And we found out repeatedly the answer is yes. Right. You can. So I've been announcing that, I've been highlighting the opportunities to do that. I've been highlighting the results that we've been getting out of taking a Navy system off of a ship, putting wheels on it, painting it green and dragging it out into a field and showing that you can use it for a common threat or even, it doesn't even have to be a common threat, it's just that when you look at it from a spectrum perspective, you can use that piece of hardware to do another spectrum technique. And we've seen success in that. And I think that highlighting those opportunities and then pointing out that there is no requirement to do this, right? In some cases there's not a requirement for the Army to acquire this capability that the Navy has, but the operator will benefit from it. You can get it there faster than going through recreating and requirements for the Army, and we're trying to highlight that.

Speaker 1 (04:36):
Yeah, we've been talking, one of the threads through this week has been innovation and oftentimes when we think about innovation, and we were talking about this with John Knowles yesterday, we think of new stuff out in the field that hasn't been maybe fielded or tested yet. But another part of innovation is really optimizing what you already have and understanding that there might be already a solution out there that we just haven't looked at in a different way that can actually do just as good or if not better of a job than a new technology. So is this new effort going to help optimize innovation internally with existing systems and compare that with some new solutions that could be on the horizon?

Speaker 2 (05:18):
Yeah, absolutely. I think that's [inaudible 00:05:20]. And as we look at the technologies that are coming out of S&T and the technologies that are coming out of the OSDR on E radar programs, one of the ideas there is how do you streamline the transition of those types of technologies? And then at the same time, how do you streamline the delivery of a capability against some popup threat? And in both cases it could be either or. It could be that you need a new technology. There's a lot of cases you do that. But in another case it could be repurposing in existing technology. And I think that we talked about this yesterday in the panel that one of the revelations that we've had as we've looked across this space is that we're not talking, we don't need to talk about a Navy system, we don't need to talk about an Army system.

(06:01):
We're talking about threats, we're talking about the spectrum. We're very often talking about a capability that is independent of a service. So because we can do that, if a service has a capability, then we need to be considering, can I use that capability for another service? So the office would both be looking at how do I transition joint capability that's coming out of joint S&T and then how can I address one services capabilities through the availability of another services technology.

Speaker 1 (06:31):
And now when you were talking about the office, you dropped a number of different capability areas and factors, variables and we're going to try to get to many of them. But I wanted to dive into a couple of them first because you, you've been speaking... well you spoke on a panel yesterday, you're going to speak on another panel today. Congratulations on having two sessions in one that think that keeps you busy.

(06:56):
But first wanted to talk with you about electromagnetic protection when you were on the crows nest here about a year ago. This was a big topic that we discussed, and over the course of the year and different engagements and different shows, I've often referenced what you said about the challenge of addressing EP in part because there's not the same community of EP that you would find with electronic attack or electronic support or spectrum management. And that makes it hard because it spread out in the different disparate programs. Wanted to get your state of the union on EP to kick us off and also help people understand how that's evolved over the last year.

Speaker 2 (07:37):
Yeah. We've made progress and I think not in small part to the whole MSOCFT push the EM superiority strategy. I think that one of the things I was able to use that effort to harp on was that there is a hole in the EW plus spectrum management for MSO plan. In that EP is not in EW, the way we acquired. If you look it up on Wikipedia it is, but if you examine the way the DOD acquires systems EP is not acquired as part of an EW community, it's part of radars, comms and P&T. And so through that EMS superiority push, we were able to emphasize that we need to bring in those other spectrum users. We need to highlight the importance of good EMS survivability and good EP techniques in their systems. And in the process of doing that, we had coincidental events that just amplified it. And one was the 5G radar altimeter interference report that came out and all over the news about hey, there's potentially a problem here between the 5G transmitters and the radar altimeter on commercial military aircraft. And we were able to use that as a leverage point to highlight. Neither of those are EW, right?

(08:46):
That's a 5G comms and that's a radar problem that EW is not involved at all. But here you have essentially an EP problem because the concern is that the one sensor can't survive in the presence of the other sensors, so we need to figure that out. So that allowed us to highlight it there. Then you had the events in the Ukraine with Starlink and I've talked about this before, that the significance of assured comms in that Ukraine operation is going to be really interesting to do a analysis on after the fact to determine what was the impact? I think-

Speaker 1 (09:16):
And can I start with you, cause I want to actually cover this a little bit. You said you've been talking about it a little bit. I feel like there's a little maybe not as much understanding about exactly what happened that we can talk about. So could you provide just a little bit of background so that we have a proper context of how to think about that? Because that was a critical turning point or a event that the set the stage for the next period of time with the conflict. So could you talk a little bit more about that in this forum?

Speaker 2 (09:44):
A little bit? So we did reach out, we talked to the SpaceX engineers, we learned more about what had occurred and what they pointed out is that really that proliferated Leo network of satellites is a self-healing network. And so if you attack one of the nodes, the network will heal itself, and that CP right? Yeah, that CP in and of itself. So they had recognized that if they could deploy a self-healing network, that a jamming effect would have very little impact on what they were trying to do. Now they did have to make some software modifications to accommodate some of the attacks, but that also proved the point that in-flight modification of the software to increase your EMS survivability was invaluable too. And it helped also foot stomp not just the value of EP but the value of software reprogrammability and upgradeable in the field.

Speaker 1 (10:28):
And having a system self healing system that can help you narrow exactly a more targeted response to areas that maybe you need to invest more energy or time or effort into fixing for the future.

Speaker 2 (10:40):
Yeah, I think so. And I think the proliferated Leo nature of Starlink in and of itself is EP. And as EW guy, when I look at that challenge of a number of satellite screaming across the sky at any given time in any one of them can be the access point to the network. And trying to defeat that with EW when they're replenishing themselves on the fly constantly coming over, that's a nightmare. And it's particularly a nightmare if you're trying to do it with a dish, which is the low cost way of trying to deny, to deny that link. If you do it with a dish, there's no way you're going to be able to pull it off of the dish. So it drives you to more exquisite, more expensive solutions. And even with the exquisite more expensive solutions, a lot of them, more of them, they're self healing. You attack one and the rest of them will figure out how to route the information, that's a really hard problem.

Speaker 1 (11:28):
So do you find that DOD is evolving properly in this notion of being able to classify or label something that, "Hey, this happened over here. It's an EP problem and having that trigger the right subject matter expertise, technicians, technologists to work on that problem from an EP perspective or are they still kind of misunderstanding what is an EP problem? Because we've always had this issue with EW of metrics and understanding the effect that EEW has. And that's from user perspective, when you're actually from an offensive EW perspective, you're using a system you can jam or whatever, but EP is just that the user interacts with that much differently. So are we evolving properly to recognize, yeah, this is an EP problem, we need to get these people involved?

Speaker 2 (12:17):
Yes, we are. And so one of the other pieces that came out of that EMS superiority strategy was the standup of the EMS senior steering group. And so within the department you've got the EW EXCOM who focuses on EW challenges. You've got the C3LB or the comms command and control leadership board that focuses on interoperability of communications. You got the P&T advisory council that focuses on P&T. Those are all leadership groups. And historically those leadership groups were not connected in terms of what's going on within them and how can they collaboratively work together.

(12:49):
The EMS senior sterling group has been stood up to create the connective fish across those communities. So when the EW [inaudible 00:12:56] comes in and we talk about EP challenges that have occurred or been realized in an exercise but are outside of the e EW world, maybe it's a comms link has been degraded or a radar has been degraded, we can go to that EMS senior steering group and say, "During this exercise we recognize this challenge."He EMS SSG needs to review that and then delegate it out. And so the EMS SSG can then look at it and say what the tactical radio working group needs to come back with an answer on how do you fix this? And I think we're also starting to incorporate the need for EP both in terms of sensors and operators during the exercises. And so I talked yesterday about what we've seen happen in recent exercises lately is that the operators are being told to fight through it.

(13:38):
So historically they turn a jammer on the operators say, "I see you're jamming." Now turn it off so I can complete the exercise. And historically the answer would be okay, they turn it off and let them complete thes. But that's not the answer now, right now the answer, the operator says, "All right, I see it turn it off. And they're told, we're not turning it off. You got to figure out how to work through it. And that's invaluable. And I've sat in the back of a wax, I've seen all kinds of stuff going on and it's invaluable for the operators to have to deal with it because the operators are innovative of themselves and they will flesh out TTPs, they'll figure out workarounds. I've seen it happen. I've come back to the Pentagon and said, "Hey, we're spending hundreds of millions of dollars on this problem."

(14:16):
I just watched an operator figure out a workaround on it while he was out in flight. And so I think the opportunities to put both the systems and the operators under test helps with EMS survivability and helps with EP. And I think we touched on that a little bit last time or in a previous conversation about kind of embedding the war fighter, the operator earlier in development, getting their feedback because sometimes they can spot operational an issue with operational relevance of a certain technology or how it works or responds to a threat. And are you seeing that a lot more in terms of Earl just earlier in development are you get it on out in the field and test it out there, but even earlier, hey, what do the war fighters think of how they could use this and get their say earlier in the processes?

(15:01):
So I think are, and I think the R&D programs like Raider and JCTD are allowing that to happen. I have seen plans that incorporate the operator in the beginning DARPA programs that are looking at bringing the operators in on day one, putting them in the seats and saying, "This is what we're planning to do." So I have seen it's not formalized process for doing that, but I've seen the architecture that allows to happen better in radars. A very good example of that where you're taking a technology, trying to mature it and show it, put it in the operator's hands and getting the operator feedback for rapid transition. I think we're starting to see that happen.

Speaker 1 (15:38):
Great. So I mentioned earlier you're a couple different sessions and I want to make sure I get to another topic that I know is very important to you, and that's the standards, open standards. And I know that's one of the topics you're going to be talking about. There's been a lot of progress over there with the open sense and each of the services, particularly Air Force, I'm thinking Air Force with the [inaudible 00:16:01] standards and the Army with CMOS and so forth. So can you give us a cover down on where are we at with the standards debate? What are some of the challenges, particularly I think with conformance and getting that out to industry and making sure that they're meeting the standards and so forth. What are some of the things that you're going to be working on here in the coming months?

Speaker 2 (16:25):
So the debate, that debate continues, right? And I think that there's a room for standards. There's also rooms for things like translators, right? And there's actually a business case to be made about whether you should conform the standards or whether you should put a translator between your system and the standards. And in some cases you can point out that it's actually more efficient to put a translator in the place. And that's true of anything that's legacy. Anything that hasn't been... that hasn't been built to CMOS or SOS or anything like that. If you really want it to be interoperable and you want to do it quick, then things like stitches, things like tracks are good ways of making that happen and they're effectively, they're efficient for doing it.

(17:07):
But when it comes to building new systems and particularly EW spectrum, using systems that can be used for multiple purposes, providing government reference architectures on how you apply the standards, I think is what we're trying to push. And so this is where CMOs becomes invaluable. CMOs has already been generating those systems, has already few air large as a system that is CMOs compliant. CMOS is already those system, another system that is aligning with CMOs. [inaudible 00:17:31] another system.

(17:32):
I think as we start to see the systems evolve and we recognize that a lot of that is associated with the SOSA consortium, which is 150 industry players. I mentioned this yesterday. The DOD needs to embrace that industry consortium that is evolving the suite of standards and start generating the government reference architectures on how to use the standards, not come in with a stick and say, "Thou shall use this standard." And you're going to do it now it's more of a let's refer people on how to use the standards. And I think that industry consortiums will help evolve that.

Speaker 1 (18:05):
So do you think that they're taking the right path where... Conforming to certain standards can be cumbersome, particularly on smaller or medium sized companies that want to enter into the market in into DOD doing business with DOD, but there's a standard out there that maybe is very costly for a smaller medium company to conform to. Are you seeing do OD really making an effort to help understand how they can continue to compete in the marketplace?

Speaker 2 (18:36):
Yeah, I think one of the justifications for going down those paths is to open it up to those smaller companies. So I think when you get to the point where the smaller company wants to play well then the cost of conforming with those standards becomes part of the budget that they provide to the DOD. But it's still, it's going to be a fraction of the cost of what it would be for them to go through industry prime and then be subject to the rules of the industry crime. Rather, they can instead come to the government, the government to best breed and fund them to conform to the standards as part of their proposal process.

Speaker 1 (19:12):
Another topic that you discussed in your previous presentation here yesterday, you were talking about counter C5RSIT. And I'll let you describe exactly what that encompasses and it's probably the longest acronym. We keep adding numbers and letters to things. But could you go in a little bit about what that means and what is your role in advancing this initiative?

Speaker 2 (19:41):
Yeah, so what we are recognizing, we've been recognizing this for a while, I think the Navy has recognized this for a while and where I got involved in it is that we've historically thought of EW as a defensive, very tactical capability. It's a inbound missile. I'm going to do some jamming and try to deny the jammer. I'm going to do platform protection. I'm going to do some suppression enemy air defense, these types of things that are essentially platform protection, smaller scale tactical, but with the recognition that the threats are growing, getting longer range, all these things, the sensors are longer range. There's a recognition that it's no longer really that defensive tactical problem. It's becoming more of an offensive strategic problem.

(20:21):
And so to really protect our operations, we have to engage to the left of launch. It's not waiting for the missile and then trying to swat at the missiles that comes in, but actually trying to deny the sensor infrastructure that's providing the feeds so that the missile can shoot. So that's more of an offensive EW mission and it drives you to left of launch capabilities. So within the Navy, we originally called it counter ISR, right? We were starting to work in that world of information operations, information warfare, and we were talking about how do you do EEW from far left of launch all the way up through terminal phase on the missile. Overtime it migrated the counter ISR and T. So it was not just deny the surveillance but also divide or to deny the targeting aspect. That's counter ISR and I.

(21:05):
And it became counter C2ISRT, and now it's counter C5ISRT. So you could almost consider it this loose scope creep just on the acronym. But at the end of the day, it's all about how do you engage left of launch strategically and offensively to protect your operations. And there's multiple elements, there's cyber elements, there's EW elements. The EW really gets after the spectrum elements of that there.

Speaker 1 (21:25):
We were having a conversation earlier on the podcast, but we were talking about this notion of building a fabric or web. And the more you're connecting and the more you're developing the fabric, the more complicated you see that fabric, because you're now, particularly from the EMS side, you are not just dealing with military technology, military sensors, you have commercial sensors, you have other public sector sensors that you're just trying to figure out how do they network and what information are you gleaning from that, How do you process that and get that through gateways in the military.

(22:00):
So I can understand why you would end up continually growing these acronyms, but you mentioned it is like a little bit of creep in the scope and doesn't that put some pressure in terms of the funding for some of these efforts? Because we always hear about creep, mission creep and so forth and it's always... It's one of the big things that drags down a lot of EW programs because you start to see the enormity of the problem. So how are you addressing this coming up with affordable solutions to an ever increasing complicated fabric? Yeah. And I think that's where this whole cross service analysis becomes really important. How do you acquire joint things and how do you connect systems? The systems becomes really important because very often when you break down what are all those modes that we're worried about, you will find that somebody's working on it.

Speaker 2 (22:46):
It could be the Navy's working on it. Air Force could be working on it, so you don't want everybody to work on it, right? But it becomes critically important at that point to recognize that maybe the Navy has a solution that we need to understand how to get it into a government reference architecture so that the army can use it or that the Air Force can use it and we don't have to build it again. So that that's really how you get at the efficiency there. And then you start thinking about, well, how do I now enable these systems or systems, these counter C5ISRT missions to exist given that the capabilities are disparate and across the different services, and now you get into that. How do I acquire a mission? How do I create the interoperability? How do I get to [inaudible 00:23:22]?

(23:23):
How do I define [inaudible 00:23:25] even really, right? And so all of those things play out and I think it is not, it's something that we're starting from scratch on. So it's not something that we've said, "Hey, we got to address this counter C5ISRT, so we need to start developing systems from scratch. There's a lot of doing portfolio management accounts against counter C5ISRT, understanding what capabilities are in that portfolio, understanding where the capability gaps are, understanding what the programs are, understanding what programmatic gaps are, and then pointing S&T towards those gaps and trying to acquire the systems, understanding what the red, yellow, green means on a program cost schedule and performance chart, not just in terms of a program but in terms of a mission.

Speaker 1 (24:05):
So I have one last question and I wanted to discuss another topic that I know is very important to you at the show this week is being distributed, the current issue of our journal of electromagnetic defense and the topic is space. And I know that that's something that you worked very hard on recently and have been talking about here at the convention. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the evolution of EW in space and how that relationship is evolving here.

Speaker 2 (24:30):
Yeah. I think this plays right back into that counter C5ISRT discussion. Sensors are becoming long range, engagements are becoming long range. We need to be able to see over the horizon. We need to be able to turn off emitters so that emitters can't be targeted and we need to achieve battle space awareness in the absence of a signature really. So one of the important aspects of that is being able to see things from above. And the significance of Space Force, Space Development Agency and SpaceCom is that they have DOD Title 10 authority in space, which means that the space assets are owned by the DOD.

(25:04):
And that's significant, because historically, if we wanted to do something tactical with a space sensor, like just detecting a signal for instance, you'd have to go to the intelligence community, you'd have to get access to the intelligence community infrastructure. You'd have to figure out how to inter-operate with that infrastructure and you would take all of the latencies associated with that process. And so the people that were doing that were measuring their success based on how quickly they could take information to the tactical edge. Now that you've got that title 10 DOD asset in space, now you can get the information over a tactical data link. And that's the things that space development agency is working on is how do you make the data tactically available? So now you got a sensor that's 1200 kilometers in the air providing you essentially Overwatch, and then SDA is doing it in a proliferated mat fashion.

(25:50):
So it's a lot of satellites overhead with tactical data links to your platforms on the ground. Now you can see over the horizon, you can detect over the horizon, you can find things over the horizon without turning on your emitters and you can get direct directly off of those space assets. And that to me is profound. I think one of the significant points to be made is that for SpaceCom, their area of regard, their AOR is space, right? So in the same way that Indo Payscom, or comms area of regard is that Indo Paycom region or U comm's area of regard is Europe, space com's area of regard is space. So it is now an operational domain within which we can do tactical operations and we can access information to support our eow missions, particularly for long range capabilities and over the horizon types of awareness.

Speaker 1 (26:34):
Thank you, Dave. That is all the time we have for today's episode. I really appreciate you taking some time out of your busy schedule here at AOC 2022 to sit down and chat a little bit about some of the key initiatives your office is working on, and I greatly appreciate your time.

Speaker 2 (26:47):
All right. Thanks, Ken. Always a pleasure.

Speaker 1 (26:49):
That will conclude this episode of From the Crow's Nest. I'd like to thank my guest, Dave Tremper, for joining me. Don't forget to review, share, and subscribe to this podcast. We always enjoy hearing from our listeners, so please feel free to share your thoughts and recommendations. That's it for today. Thanks for listening.