March 25, 1999
 

"IO for the Engaged Commander"
 

I appreciate the opportunity to be here with the AFA. The AFA does a tremendous job, and I think that is certainly self evident. The inclusion of people from industry is also a key factor in everything that we get done. Certainly, that remains true in the subject we are discussing here at this conference. I do bring you greetings from Art Money who has been honored by the Association very highly and would like very much to have been here. I am really a fill in and therefore know how fortunate I am to have the opportunity. If Art could at all have been here, let me assure you that he would have been.

Our subject of “Information Operations” and information warfare is extremely important. What a wonderful contribution the AFA is making by arranging this conference. It was a great opportunity to hear the speakers this morning -- especially the substantive kickoff by General Jumper. John Baker is carrying on with what he has been doing very ably across the community. I have crossed paths with him several times because I have a missionary net that I have to cover also, and we meet in various places. He is putting a lot of emphasis in the right place because he is totally mobile and eager to carry that message and move AIA forward with both hats, whether that be out with the troops where he spends ample time or whether it be with the uncomfortable and troublesome area inside the Beltway. He isn’t bashful in any of those places.

I feel inspired by what I’ve seen here today. I have a very nice presentation here that is full of various stuff that would be very interesting inside the Beltway. But I think I will spare you that. Let me respond more to what I am hearing.

First, when Art paid me the honor of taking my current job, I asked him what I should do? It was one of those fortunate occasions when we’d been on business in Chicago. We’d been up to Fort Sheridan, where the reserve forces do a great job in a Joint Reserve Intelligence Center there. We were doing an opening of a new facility. I had him trapped coming back in the seat next to me. If there is anything good about the airlines, that is it. If you can trap your boss in the seat next to you, you can get some meaningful business done. So I asked him. Boss, what is our job? And he said our job is to take care of the warfighters. Then we went through about 30 or 40 minutes of questions, where I said, does it mean this? Or this? When I did that, I said to myself, what would the guys in the field be asking at this point? Art Money’s experience is such that I feel comfortable in reporting that he means just that - take care of the warfighter no matter what you are doing - directly, indirectly, circuitously. He wants to know what will be the end effect on the warfighter. That is the way he is running ASD(C3I).

I am going to gear my revised remarks to that and what I am hearing here. I have had some fortunate things happen to me that will help me do a credible job of this. If I don’t, just fill in the blanks on the Q&A. My purpose is to deal with some of the concepts percolating out of this and maybe how those things can be moved, such as some of those excellent questions to General Baker indicated. As we move forward in this, one thought comes to mind. We the United States of America, have a monopoly only on the leadership for democracy, freedom, free markets and everything that is embodied in that. We have no monopoly on all of the things that would cause problems for us. All the things that can go wrong, we have no monopoly on. We have no monopoly on IO and IW. We have no monopoly on information technology. We have no monopoly on information assurance or any of that kind of stuff. We had better hurry - I am trying to provoke a little thought here. We don’t have the luxury of just sitting back and allowing things to roll forward. That urgency is so clear in what General Jumper was talking about today.

Let me talk a little bit on the information environment. Alvin and Heidi Toffler did a book about six or seven years ago on “War and Anti-War.” Probably most people here have read that. I was struck by it for a couple reasons. John Shaud and I discussed the book because we had a mutual friend -- Don Morelli -- who was mentioned right at the beginning of the book. Remember the way Alvin and Heidi Toffler talked about Don Morelli and Morelli's work with the airland battle and what that meant in terms of how technology would change things. It struck them and they went to meet Don Morelli and wanted to address the future. How is it going to affect us? What is going on here? Recognizing that we had essentially found ourselves in what the Tofflers defined as a Third Wave or age - the agrarian first, then the industrial and now the information age or wave -- what did it mean?

One of the big contributions in the book was that developed nations will fight their wars the way they make their money. I am glad that Morelli got them thinking a little bit in terms of warfare because we find ourselves right in the middle of what they were trying to talk about. Never, never, never forget that not all nations are not highly developed nations, and threats can be very asymmetric. We understand that. But we are essentially making our new money in information technology, as are many nations in the world. Pick one. China soon will be the same way. We can expect to conduct a lot of our military operations very much in that way for that reason, if nothing else. That is a part of our environment.

The threat is everywhere. I live the threat every day in details that I now wish I didn’t have the benefit of knowing. If we would let ourselves be discouraged by the pervasive nature and depth of the threats that we face - we, the United States of America - we, the world’s leading superpower - we, the leader of the engagement ongoing today - if we would let ourselves be put down by that, we would never go to work again. It is very discouraging. We must therefore redouble our efforts and do better with it. What I am trying to weave into this is about the operational art. Especially we are about the operational art in military aviation in all of its applications.

I had a particularly good opportunity a little less than a year ago to be invited by General Jumper when I was in Europe at SHAPE headquarters to go down to the Warrior Prep Center and run Union Flash ’98. That is his large battle staff exercise - combined and joint - which has as its primary training audiences the JFAC. Last year it was Bill Hinton, Third Air Force, and it does a tremendous job of exercising the Air Operations Center and all that is involved in that, along with a battlefield control element from the Army and an element from the Navy that could role play a carrier battlegroup in a scenario that would train about 11 hundred people directly involved in the exercise.

It should be noted that normally one must be very astute in that kind of thing to be invited to be a role playing JTF. But I guess I was the exception. Mike Short, the DO of USAFE, was to be the exercise director. Mike had just been named to be the new 16^th Air Force Commander. All of our priorities were in the right place. Mike had to go to get his F-16 check out which made them dip down, scrape the bottom of the barrel and come up with me to run the exercise. It was all my good fortune as it was Mike’s.

At one time I might have run from exercises like this. I ran to this one. I couldn’t accept fast enough. This kicked off a series of discussions and some correspondence between General Jumper and me about IO and IW. Because, we want to move into that realm. I’ve had some experience with it. I said, this would be a good opportunity. I found my old friend to be way ahead of me on this. He said, we’ve got to get this thing going. Thirteen months ago, General Jumper was saying the same things he said today. Here we are, over a year later. He is engaged, and we haven’t achieved any of it. This bodes ill for the future. We have to change that.

Let me talk about Union Flash 98 to set a baseline. I accepted his instruction to weave IO and IW into the exercise, play it to the degree we could and come up with a conclusion about where we stand. We did that, and we found ourselves with what was the typical situation - an AOC where a lot of good people are working real hard to do those things that need to be done but they found themselves doing those things the same way they had always done them. There was little realm for IO/IW to really fit into the thinking at first. That changed because the friendly JTF commander needed role playing with a video teleconference at least once a day, often twice a day, where the component commanders kept drilling with questions such as: What other alternatives are there? What else can we do? Why does our target list look this way? Are there other things we can do? Finally, a little dawn started to crack through. The AOC started working on this. Careful what you wish because you might get it. Now came the problem of delivering. Although we had some of the right people there, it was extremely difficult to deliver for the same reasons that he mentions today and to achieve the same kind of things that General Baker is trying to bring forward in the structure that he presented here.

We simply could not get engaged, and we weren’t configured too badly. We had NRO there. We had JWAC there. We went back in NSA. We did the kind of things that you need to do. I had a lawyer who never left my side because I kept talking about this. I happened to see Bill Hinton’s lawyer from 3^rd Air Force. He is a good guy who understood what we are doing, and we worked some things, and we made some little cracks, but only little cracks. Nothing that could be considered an accomplishment.

Then we got ready to deal with this in the after action report when the commander would come and sit with us. One of the bright younger guys said, “you know, we need to think about what we can do in IW.” Here I am talking about offensive information warfare for the engaged commander in hostilities. He said, “we did the campaign plan, and we have this operation plan, and 3^rd Air Force had a deployment plan, but we only had an Annex S in the employment.” We didn’t did have any palletized weapons. He said, these capabilities need to be palletized weapons. That is what we are striving for. That is the kind of thing that Soup Campbell probably has on his future horizon, that Ken Minihan, I hope, talked about because he was one of the first guys I debriefed when I got back to the U.S. We have to think about palletized weapons, the kinds of things that are in your TPFD. You don’t invent these on the fly, crack the door and issue it out to the AOC to have it get on to the options for the JTF to pass muster with his CINC. And you must always pass muster with the CINC who has to make sure he is comfortable, authorized and knows you know and can say go with that. It has to be settled at the operational/tactical level. Our emphasis, just as General Jumper was pointing out, is so exclusively at the strategic level. If I gave this speech the way it was originally presented to me, you would probably throw me out of here. This is a couple of drafts later because the guys themselves looked at it and said, “you’ve got to get closer to the audience. It’s an inside the Beltway speech. It is not about supporting the warfighter.” It missed the point of the palletized weapon.

General Jumper liked that. He said, go to work on that and come back next year, work out a more serious piece of the exercise and do this in Union Flash 99. It was scheduled for the last week of April. It has now been canceled for op tempo reasons that we understand. However, undaunted, we will commence planning on the 20^th of April for Union Flash 00. I will tell you we are going to work this very hard at the operational and tactical level because we have invited a lot of people to come who can be a part of the solution as opposed to the alternative.

Thus the way ahead. We have to recognize as we are doing it that IO and IW are pervasive, not new. John’s presentation was clear about that. In fact, the classic CW with psyops, opsec, delay, disruption, deception, destruction and EW - all of that is enhanced by information technology. That is good. But, for the benefit of those here from industry, what we can envision that we need to do in the repertoire of force that we can bring to bear, we need to present as requirements and not wait for things to be issued to us. I am talking about the warfighters. Spare me the luxury of saying “we” there.

We need to push. We shouldn’t take what is issued to us. IO and IW needs have to be stated like everything else in order for us to get what we need. We have to be far more proactive in that regard. By the way, all of the very delicate code and jargon that creeps into this is only parasitic drag. In fact, we have a lot of induced drag, and that is in the bureaucracy. Those drags in the way ahead need to be done away with. We need to get over it. In business, a lot of good work has been done at Lehigh University by Professors Goldman, Nagle and Price. The Air Force’s lean manufacturing effort, documented in a book, “Agile Competitors in Virtual Organizations,” applies here.

Every time I have had an opportunity to speak I have been trying to get people to entertain the idea that if we would just take the people who do the work, like the AOCs, and exercise them using scientific methods like observing and hypothesizing, testing and adjusting, we could get a trial doctrine. Doctrine needs to come up, be approved, integrated, understandable with a broad based fit, and I agree with all that. But we could get a trial doctrine, like a trial contract for you contractors out there. The demonstration contract would suggest the way it ought to look and what it ought to cover. Our warfighters will engage at the tactical and operational level, especially operational level, and they can tell us how doctrine will look, and the tactics, techniques and procedures that will come.

USACOM has a wonderful opportunity to start working this. I hope that Admiral Gaman will be successful. He has everything there in the Tidewater area: Air Combat Command; Training and Doctrine Command. I am saying, if we observe as we move into the future what our people tell us they need, let us think in terms of customer needs, not dictation from the top down.

This brings us to the policy point. The way ahead says that policy needs to adhere much more to the voice of the stakeholders. If I see anything in Washington it is a continuing need for this. I will tell you my friends in USDP, as well as C3I would agree with this. They want to hear from the field. They want input. They don’t want to stumble on blindly just to be criticized for being out of touch. The field has to engage. It must engage. In the field, we have so much of our own, let me say, less than productive behavior, that it is often hard to get a unified voice. We go to those who we would have new policy.

I asked Art questions about whether taking care of the warfighter means preparing a suggested warning order and sending it up to the Joint Staff with the recommendation that this is what the real thing might look like. The warfighter components and CINCs will do it that way.

I know when I was an air component commander, Jim Lindsay at 18^th Airborne Corps, and I did this. We knew it was coming. We sent a model warning order. And it came back with only a few words changed. Those of you with extensive experience know we always do that. Why don’t we do that with policy formulation? The Ted Warners of the world will listen to that. He is a former Air Force officer, now in USDP and central in this business. Guys like Lyn Wells will listen to that. He is a retired Navy officer, commander at sea. He understands this. I wonder if they hear or when they hear, what they hear. Or, could what they hear be made better. I think that is the way ahead.

I see a percolating up from the bottom so what comes down from the top will better take care of the warfighter, and we have some examples of that already being done. General Jumper is the premier, leading example.

With those ideas and concepts and a couple of others that I will try to develop if the right question comes along, let’s get into the questions. If I don’t get the right question, I’ll do it anyway.

General Shaud: Some of our speakers mention the difficulty of defining the roles of law enforcement and the defense establishment in info operations. What needs to be done to clarify the FBI/DoD role? We are talking about our presentations today. We contemplated bringing in the FBI to speak. Maybe you can get into that a little bit.

General Cunningham: There is an invitation: Speak for the FBI. The FBI is finding itself in expanded activities and involvements such as have not been envisioned, as have many others in the national infrastructure protection activity. They are very active. They have their own infrastructure protection activity. They are working and have been very helpful to us in understanding how to deal with the legal limitations.

The FBI, and I mean this in a positive sense, is somewhat like dealing with the Marine Corps. You can get what you need to have done there, but you better understand the culture that you are dealing with. If you do that, it works out fine. I think we will see more and more crossing. The FBI has demonstrated in its activities with other agencies, let me say, in the intelligence community within which I live, that it is able to complement activities in various places, and I would recruit FBI involvement in anything I can do as a warfighter.

General Shaud: As DoD works a new info ops strategic plan, give us some insights into the key issues emerging in this document.

General Cunningham: This presentation was supposed to be about the strategic plan. I prefer to talk about the operational and tactical like General Jumper and most people in this room. It would be wrong to not hold my feet to the fire a little bit on this info ops/strategic plan that I think is due out this fall. It is being worked by Air Force Colonel Bob Blundon, who works for Chris Mellon, the security and information ops deputy in C3I. It is largely aimed at engagement, and that has to do with how you work with other entities in Information Operations. Other entities might range in communities of knowledge. It is not unlike the way knowledge workers are interacting throughout our information age activities throughout our move to knowledge. This works into the strategic plan.

Dr. Bullington over at the Library of Congress recently said, we had better understand the information age is a little passé. We are rapidly moving into the knowledge age. This engagement thing understands how these groups or communities work. These communities might be international. What would be an example of a community? Oskinusos is a community of common interest in which you work a certain way. NATO obviously is one in which you work a certain way, and there are others for other reasons.

In North America, we find ourselves deeply involved, on a daily basis, and for all the right reasons, with Canada. Just take General Jumper’s example of the 106^th and the 104^th and the air defense arrangement NORAD. What is a normal extension of that? It is computer network defense in North America. I think you will see us work together toward a strategy to roll out this fall that will key on the concept of engagement and sharing and loosen up a lot of things that are now very rigid because we feel that we are the only ones to possess certain capabilities and information. In our experience every time we do something with one of our partners, be it bilateral or multi-lateral, one of the first things we learn is we are getting something important out of this.

General Shaud: Is Congress educated enough to appropriate the resources required for a true information warfare capability?

General Cunningham: Excellent question. Congress is extremely motivated on the defensive side for obvious reason. Really good Americans like Ken Minihan have worked mightily to ensure Congress is informed. I heard Ken Minihan publicly say five years ago: “look, if you want to know how to defend on information, you have to know how to attack.” Don’t be oblivious to that. It is fundamental. You have to mount an attack in order to be able to defend. George Tenet the DCI works the Hill daily on these kinds of subject. How will they act? Are they being informed? Without question.

General Shaud: As the Air Force and DoD become increasingly dependent on commercial infrastructure, how do you see our role evolving in protecting our nation’s communication, power and other infrastructure?

General Cunningham: We are extremely involved with the commercial infrastructure. We could not survive. We could not operate without it. That is already understood. Are we becoming more so? Without doubt, and in fact, this is an enterprise activity. We are all in it. Protection. Encryption is an obvious way. Discipline is one. Technology of encryption is one that is very lucrative, along with other techniques to protect information.

I had a discussion a couple of years ago with some very smart people at the University of Toronto, and after about an hour we got to the point to where we said, we have to understand, it isn’t just about protecting your information in some physical way, but perhaps we need to understand what the life cycle of information is. What is the life cycle of usefulness? It strikes me that we go overboard to protect a lot of information that is extremely perishable. We probably do that for very good reason. But we are going to have to become more and more sophisticated in what information we protect and to what degree we protect it.

More than that, in terms of taking care of the warfighter, what is the warfigher’s accessibility to this information, be it data, combat information or finished intelligence. All these things count. A common operational picture is important. I love the way General Jumper said it. I don’t care about updating the picture they’ve got. I need something the guy can put the cursors on, and can I target it? In that context, we did a pretty good thing in federated BDA on Desert Fox and we are working federated BDA overtime as we speak. We better be.

General Zinni caused me to perk up. He said, Chuck, it is really great that federated BDA is coming along. In his wonderfully gentlemanly way. But what do you think we can do about federated targeting? Let’s do federated targeting. I wish I had thought of that. But every place I go now I try not to pass up the opportunity to say, the task now is federated targeting because we know that will make federated BDA a lot easier.

General Shaud: This has to do with the disconnect between strategic and operational levels. Given we will have offensive information capabilities that support a CINC requirement, will the policy maker allow its use to support the warfighter?

General Cunningham: That is critically important. It deals with a philosophical question. To what degree does the policy maker belong in operations? That is what you are really talking about here. In our professional lifetimes, that has been a central argument, and it remains the same. What has changed is it is becoming more critical. This information age makes that policy maker more informed. What we need to do is make that policy maker understand that being more informed is to also be more responsible, not more McNamara like, rather, more responsible. I think we all understand that.

I said I would mention this, and it might be my last chance. Everybody has an IO and IW expert at every echelon. From all the way up there in Ted Warner/Lyn Wells etc. activity, everybody has the IO and IW expert. We are trying to now shrink the cycle that it takes in order to understand what capabilities can be made available to be used. We are working to have a command that will be supporting - a supporting CINC. You have already heard, we are working to have a JTF in that supporting CINC available to the supported CINC. That supported CINC to his JTF. That JTF with the components. All have this kind of expertise resident.

We also can connect all those nodes of expertise. Why don’t we organize this thing? We asked for this coming out of Union Flash 98. Why don’t we organize it in the way we exercise it so the weapon can be palletized and usable by commanders at every echelon who have the situational awareness, who understand the weapons and the technology to the necessary degree but don’t have to know all methods. Not one of them could tell you, except for Jumper, perhaps, how a modern laser sensor works on a bomb. But these people all understand what is going on here. All have confidence in what they are about to do so the capability has enough credibility to be used in concert with other kinetic means and be integrated by the AOC in a way where a single tasking order becomes an integrated tasking order that includes all of space, all of IO and IW as well as the traditional means of delivering, in this case, air power.

We have the structure. We need to exercise it. When we exercise, we need to document. When we document, it needs to be analyzed. That analysis needs to come back into the warfighter as ammo to take forward to get the policy changed. Then those people will be more responsive. But right now it is mass education.

General Shaud: From the CINC’s perspective, how would you recommend a theater commander organize IO? Do you assign it to a component? Do you have an IO cell? This is exactly what you’ve been grappling with over in Europe.

General Cunningham: If you could envision the diagram that I have in my mind now, you would see a supporting CINC, supported CINC, JTF and components feeding the JTF, etc. How would we work this? Right now, each of the components has IO and IW expertise available. The components are talking to one another. In the case of the tasking order, you’ve already heard our vision for that. Where does that info come from? Right now it is in the AOC. It is there because of the expertise that is available. This is the same kind of expertise that is available to land forces, to the sea forces, amphibious, etc. But these entities that possess the expertise, I would assert, are not communicating the same way that these components are communicating among themselves at the commander and ops intel levels. We have to weave that together.

What John is suggesting in this question is, couldn’t you have another component for IO and IW? In the meanwhile, I know that the other structure exists. The only thing that makes me reticent on having a component for that is some of what General Jumper talked about this morning. We have to be careful about making yet another entity. I really liked the way he says all warriors are created equal. I had a big discussion one time with another great planner, Chuck Boyd, and I said, I am just a dumb fighter pilot, but airmen should have plasticized wallet card to carry around, and whenever there’s doubt, it should be pulled out and read. It would say: Air and Space Power Anywhere for the United States of America. That is what we do.

Now I think that IO and IW are now in need of being integrated or at least integrated before they become separated. There is a more fundamental reason for it than the mechanics that I described. It is our youth. All of us in this room live with them. They are smart in this stuff. Not smart in everything, but they are smart in this stuff and there is a culture that goes with it. We have all learned that it is common to ask a young person, “why didn’t you ever study a second language? Language is important.” And they’ll answer, “I have. I speak computer. How about you, Dad?” There is a culture here that accepts the kind of things that we are talking about wanting to do as a natural form of behavior. In fact, as Mike Hayden has been saying for years, we are living with some compression between the 2 and the 3, between intelligence and operations. I remember when Mike Hayden had the job that John Baker now has, it was common to hear him say all the 2s are going to have to understand they are at 2 and one-half moving ever closer to 3. The same kind of a construct goes with this.

General Shaud: Thank you

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