Joint Chiefs Vice Chairman Says Procurement Timeline A Major
Hurdle
The U.S. military must leverage information technology to
deliver capabilities to the battlefield and needs to catch up with
technology before the nation falls behind in cyberspace, the vice
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said at a speech in
Montgomery, AL, Monday.
Marine Corps Gen. James E. Cartwright shared his thoughts about
cyberspace at the annual Air Force Information Technology
Conference.
Most military capability has been built in reaction to known
threats, the general said, but information technology can change
that by providing processing power and storage that allow more
comprehensive predictive analysis to the battlefield.
Cartwright compared manned fighter jets to unmanned systems,
admittedly hitting close to home for the audience of airmen. "A
fighter has -- among other things -- radar, and it carries bombs
and missiles," he said. "The radar detects a target and feeds the
information to the bomb or missile. It hits the target, and
everything else that was detected or known by that platform is
thrown away.
Gen. Cartwright
"If the enemy changes the target or affects the detection," he
continued, "the platform is unusable, and we don't know what
happened for several series of sorties, and events and days and
weeks and months. Then, when it's time to change [the aircraft]
because we've figured out what the adversary's doing, an upgrade
can usually take years, because we want to make sure we're doing it
perfectly the first time. Meanwhile, the enemy has moved on."
On the other hand, Cartwright noted, an unmanned aircraft system
""collects everything, records everything, and saves everything or
[sends] it down to the ground."
Compared to a fighter, the unmanned aircraft system is more
energy-efficient and can spend more time on station, and its
information processing and storage capabilities can "fundamentally
change what you don't know about the enemy," the general said.
The growth of information technology is so rapid that the
military faces a huge challenge with procurement timelines that
take two years to design a platform, three years to manufacture it
and another year to field it, Cartwright said. This requires a
change in the military's culture, he added.
"There are no laws against moving faster," he said. "There are
policies against moving faster -- policies we wrote. Policies are
things we can control, if we can move the culture with us."
Cartwright said that the shift in culture and policy requires
leaders to be willing to accept some risk. He cited National
Military Command Center in the Pentagon as an example. For decades,
he said, the center relied solely on secure voice communications to
reach key military and government decision makers during crises,
because policy prevented the use of other communication methods. In
July 2006, North Korea test-launched long- and short-range
missiles, and thunderstorms in Washington caused the secure voice
communications to fail.
"Decisions are made much quicker, and they are much better
informed, when information can be exchanged visually and
digitally," Cartwright said, "but we have policies against it
because we don't want to risk that system being compromised. But
our voice and circuit-based systems have vulnerabilities, too.
Everything has vulnerabilities. The question is, how do you balance
the risk and the advantage, and how do you keep moving in that
environment, because it is never static?
"You have a thinking adversary who's going to try to outwit you;
who's going to try to take away your leverage. "That's war. That's
the business we're in," he continued. "So eliminating all
possibility of failure is [impossible]. You get paid to work in
those environments of ambiguity and diversity. You have to have
fallback systems. But the resilience of networks far [outweighs]
the resilience of circuit-based systems."
Cartwright challenged the audience to consider first how
information technology can help to prevent and deter warfare, but
also how it can ensure that no matter what happens in warfare, the
United States will win.
"These are the things I expect from you, as officers, as
[military] leaders and as industry leaders: that you lead through
change and find the competitive advantage for this nation and for
our military," he said. "It's absolutely essential."
ANN Salutes Air Force Tech. Sgt. Monique Randolph