Strategic Competition, All Domain Warfare, Distributed Operations, and Emergence as a Heuristic for Contested Environments

Or, Wrestling with Thinking Small in Order to Win Big

An article on the 1973 Yom Kippur War in AUSA I found this morning in realcleardefense.com set me to thinking about strategic competition, all domain warfare, distributed operations, and contested environments in any future conflict.

The authors, LTC Nathan Jennings, Ph.D., and LTC Kyle Trottier, used the 1973 Arab-Israeli War — often known as the Yom Kippur war — as a vehicle through which to better understand how lessons in multidomain operations, in their terms, could help inform US efforts in all domain operations moving forward. As they note in the introduction:

The seminal Middle East conflict, which saw the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) fight an existential war against Egyptian and Syrian adversaries who sought to regain lost territories, stunned the world due to the lethality and destruction of the modernizing battlefield. Featuring sudden reversals and massive attrition, the war saw the IDF lose more than 800 armored vehicles and 100 attack aircraft in just three weeks of intense combat as they grappled with a new array of anti-armor and anti-air defenses. For their part, both the Egyptian and Syrian militaries likewise suffered massive losses as they countered a succession of Israeli ground, air and naval counter-offensives that ended with a dramatic crossing of the Suez Canal.

Today, contemporary conflicts have revealed similar trends that seem to raise the cost of decisive maneuver. As recently seen in Northern Iraq, in the Nagorno-Karabakh region and in Ukraine, attacking forces are encountering an intensity and lethality that echo the 1973 Arab-Israeli conflict and requires adaptive solutions to intractable problems.

Interestingly, while the world has been glued to the events occurring within Ukraine, many are unaware of the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan that took place in 2020 over the formerly “frozen” conflict surrounding the Nagorno-Karabakh region of the Caucasus. In that conflict, the Azerbaijanis, backed by Turkey and Turkish made UAS’s, decimated (in the truest sense of the word) the Armenian armored capability, paving the way for Azerbaijani ground forces to advance and lay claim to the disputed region. The Armenians were totally unprepared to fight against a “drone” equipped adversary and so had no answer to the swarms of aerial vehicles which inflicted such heavy losses on their forces.

Similarly, as is much better understood given the massive media coverage, Ukraine has been able to adapt its approaches toward defending against Russian forces that have invaded the eastern and southern regions of their country. In that conflict, the Ukrainians have adopted a multidomain, all-of-the-above, whole of society approach toward their defense, altering tactics, techniques, platforms, and unit formations on the fly in their existential quest to defend their territory.

While attending a NATO TIDE (Think Tank for Information Decision and Execution Superiority — never let it be said that NATO peddles in clarity!) conference last Fall, we had two Ukrainian majors discuss their DELTA project to facilitate command and control, targeting, and prosecution of targets for operations against Russian forces in an EW denied environment. It was a fascinating example of ingenuity, creativity, necessity, and the breaking of normal military orthodoxies in the face of a numerically superior aggressor.

What the DELTA group did was leverage civilian cloud capability, government and public satellite coverage (Musk’s Starlink a notable inclusion in their conversation), cell phone geolocation, photography, and open-source chat and text capability from the Ukrainian citizens, as well as crewed and uncrewed capabilities to prosecute targets identified through that AI enabled network of communications. The AI enabled portion of the cloud component was able to sort through the tremendous amount of data pouring in, use recognition data provided by Ukrainian forces, identify Russian targets, and then provide timely and shared information across the operational environment to units who could then prosecute those targets to what appears to be — thus far — great success.

When queried about Russian ability to “hack” or otherwise monitor the cloud-based system they had developed, the Ukrainian majors acknowledged this was true, but in their cost-benefit analysis considered it less a threat than trying to operate in the blind against the larger force. In this, they essentially open-sourced their C2, IW, and targeting apparatus in order to more effectively and expeditiously target and destroy Russian forces. It is left to be determined if a more resilient, better trained, more operationally astute Russian force might have better thwarted Ukrainian DELTA efforts, but for the time being Ukrainian experimentation in this space has yielded tremendous benefit so far.

Emergence, War, and Newtonian Determinism vs Chaos and Open System Dynamics

Which brings me to the topic of emergence, wicked problems, and design.

As far as I can discern, the term Wicked Problems was coined by two UC Berkeley professors, Horst Rittel and Melvin Weber, in an article published in 1973 titled, “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning.” In the article they argue that what was once the province of experts operating off of consensus and linear “if A, then B toward outcome C” perspectives was no longer viable in a heterogeneous, open-ended multivariate system:

The professionalized cognitive and occupational styles that were refined in the first half of this century, based in Newtonian mechanistic physics, are not readily adapted to contemporary conceptions of interacting open systems and to contemporary concerns with equity. A growing sensitivity to the waves of repercussions that ripple through such systemic networks and to the value consequences of those repercussions has generated the recent re-examination of received values and the recent search for national goals.

In essence, the authors describe a circumstance whereby, in the field of human endeavor and open system dynamics, our western ontological assumptions and epistemological approaches toward our world are ill-informed and in fact create counter-productive results in our search for solutions to what they describe as inherently wicked problems. In fact, their description of wicked problems is frustratingly . . . well, wicked in and of itself. In dynamic open systems, there are no stopping rules, no end states, and no true of false answers to human actions or solutions. Rather, the system remains in motion, with the consequences of actions, reactions, and counteractions reverberating off each other in unpredictable and stochastic ways. As such, they argue, planners need to consider more dynamical and holistic approaches toward managing wicked problems rather than the linear, deterministic, cause and effect rationality adopted by military planners for hundreds of years. (If this is a topic of interest to you, I recommend Dr. Ben Zweibelson’s work on design, emergence, and military planning posted to Medium.com.)

So why do I bring this up? Quite simply, complex, dynamic, stochastic, systemic networks interacting with and reacting to other complex, dynamic, stochastic systemic networks creates emergent properties within the world system which are impossible to predict with any level of certainty. With that in mind, I oftentimes encountered tremendous frustration from my military students when teaching these concepts in the context of design and military planning.

“So, what you’re telling us is that planning is useless?”

“No,” I would say, “but it’s not the solution either.” As the old aphorism often attributed to Eisenhower describes, “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” In other words, it is in the planning that we will learn as much about the operational environment, our adversaries, and ourselves as possible, so long as we don’t mistake our planning effort as THE definitive solution for prevailing!

Despite my best efforts, though, when it came time to begin developing concepts of operations the students would inevitably default back to the known — large units of maneuver (brigades, carrier strike groups, Marine expeditionary strike forces, and Air Force expeditionary wings), linear formations and battlefields, kinetic solutions, etc. A big ol’ can of American whoop ass to achieve US interests! Clearly, I was a failed educator.

So, why do I bring up wicked problems, dynamic open systems, etc.? Quite simply, I would argue that rather than trying to impose our will to bend the disposition of the environment and our enemy through large formations of military units acting in synchronized and oftentimes predictable manners, we should instead adopt the reality of dynamic systems instead and embrace the power of emergence as an operating principle of 21st Century warfare. Where robotic swarms, cyber-attacks, multivariate threat vectors, and the compression of time and space in the algorithmic era all militate against the traditional US conceptualization of how to wage war, we need to embrace new operational concepts to adapt to this “new” reality.

Consider the video of starlings in flight above. Thousands of individual birds fly in mass formations that shift, morph, transform, aggregate and disaggregate, in a manner called murmuration. Each bird is an individual entity operating in a system of other individual entities in a manner where the whole becomes something much different from the sum of its parts. This is a classic example of emergence.

Going back to the article on the 1973 Yom Kippur war, the authors describe how Israeli and Arab armor units were decimated (again, in the true sense of the word!). They went from aggregated formations to disaggregated formations in a matter of minutes. From there, heroic efforts on both sides managed to repair damaged equipment, reallocate units, or otherwise take steps to re-aggregate those broken units back into fighting formations capable of massing effects on their enemies.

Fast forward to today and the very near future where multiple robotics systems of varying size, shape, and capability are integrated into standing formations of Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine, and Space forces. This potential alone argues for new ways of conceptualizing maneuver in the operational environment. But I would take it even further.

If the US seeks to conduct distributed operations in contested environments, then past notions of mass, firepower, and maneuver will have to be reevaluated. True all-domain warfare will need to incorporate all of the joint warfighting functions in a synchronized, unified manner across geographic, temporal, orbital, and informational space. This means our traditional units of employment/maneuver may have to exhibit the same emergent qualities demonstrated in the starling murmuration noted above where units can aggregate, disaggregate, disperse, reform, and otherwise “flow” to the rhythm of battle.

Likewise, a reconceptualization of the operational environment against strategic (i.e., global) competitors will likewise need to be reevaluated. Rather than massing forces in discreet geographic locations for a traditional force-on-force confrontation, the US will have to disperse its fires across enemy positions around the globe, across the infosphere, and across orbital space as well. Swarming at a time and place of our choosing, keeping the enemy on their heels, while simultaneously removing large formations for easy targeting solutions should be the future of how we envision formation composition, joint warfare, and the operational environment.

Of all the services, it’s my belief the Marine Corps is closest to this realization with their latest warfighting concept of Stand-in Forces — light, agile, self-contained, small units capable of conducting operations from ship to shore, manning islands in the pacific with groups of units armed with anti-ship missiles, etc. Utilizing additive manufacturing (3-D printing), autonomous logistics solutions, and other innovative means of keeping small, widely dispersed units intact and operationally relevant will be the challenge not only to the Marines, but to the wider joint force as well. Gen. Berger caught a lot of heat for his vision and divestment of armored and artillery capability in order to meet that vision, but in my opinion he has it about right.

I’ll explore what all this might look like in terms of unit organizational tables, DoD organizational structure, command and control, etc. But if the Ukraine example is any guide — and I recognize a relatively small, regional battle between two states is a far cry from global war — then the US needs to radically re-think its over-reliance on classification, security-mindedness, and its vision for what constitutes a useful sensor in times of war. Integrating a whole of society approach where the public and private sectors can come together to form — dare I say? — an emergent national security architecture similar to Ukraine which will benefit from the ingenuity, creativity, and the strength of crowd-sourced intellectual and analytical relevance, then I think we will have advanced what constitutes national security into the 21st Century.

Final Thoughts . . .

I know there’s a lot to digest here, and the Devil is always in the details, but I very much hope you’ll feel encouraged to comment and let me know what you think. Do you agree? More importantly, do you disagree? How, and why? Please let me know, and let’s start a conversation so we can get to that pearl!