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- With data driving defence, we can present ‘ubiquitous deterrence’ to our adversaries through decision superiority.
- Many of the necessary technologies already exist; the cultural hurdle is the most significant.
- Human-machine teams provide a ‘symbiotic advantage’ in decision-making.
- Defence must embrace both problem solving and future-focused experimentation simultaneously.
If you’re a competitive chess player, the only reason you’d play against the latest chess-playing AI is to find out how you’d lose.
This in a military context, is the essence of ubiquitous deterrence. It’s about presenting an opponent with a challenge that seems so overwhelming that they understand the futility of engagement. It’s not merely about having superior strength but about demonstrating the will and ability to use it. It’s about rendering confrontation pointless.
In the contemporary, digitally enabled operating environment, this level of deterrence requires not just advanced systems but also the ability to deploy them at scale, wherever and whenever they’re needed, to support lightning-fast, fully integrated operations.
The technological barriers to presenting ubiquitous deterrence
Presenting this deterrent and turning the integrated operating concept into a reality presents several highly complex technological and operational challenges.
Key to ubiquitous deterrence is Decision Superiority, which in turn, appears to our adversaries that we are ahead of their every move. That decision superiority comes from our ability to collect, ingest, sort, analyse and act on these vast volumes of live data and information.
The good news is that many – perhaps even most – of the necessary assets and technologies already exist. Indeed, some have been in use outside Defence for decades:
- We have many of the sensors we need, and a corresponding amount of data; as our platforms become ever more digitised, we will gain even more data
- We have many of the data management technologies required to store, organise, process and distribute this data, as well as the information and insights derived from it
- The necessary platforms are already in service; there’s a long tradition in Defence of mounting new sensors systems on existing assets
- Much of the supporting data infrastructure we need is already available – it’s just not yet been adopted at the necessary scale
The cultural challenge
However, digital transformation is not just a technical or technological issue. It also presents profound administrative and cultural challenges.
First, as is widely recognised by the Government, MOD and industry, industrial-age processes governing procurement need updating. Those developed for hardware development, procurement and adoption aren’t fit for purpose in an era of software-defined warfare.
On the upside, there’s no shortage of highly capable, highly committed people working to change this, from DASA and Dstl to Commercial X and Defence Digital. Comparable organisations and initiatives are growing and proliferating with NATO itself and across the member states, most visibly in the US.
But it’s the cultural challenge that is, I think, the greatest. It stems from the fact that, while contemporary warfare is still an essentially human endeavour, it’s now being conducted alongside machines and at a pace that’s closer and closer to machine speed.
The implications, both ethical and practical, are as hard to define as they are to manage. Knowing how to think – let alone what to think – about the convergence of humans and machines on the battlefield is an open and highly consequential question.
Human-machine teaming: a symbiotic advantage
Some are tempted to view the continued human involvement in modern warfare as something of a hindrance. A throwback. A physical and cognitive vulnerability in a battlefield populated by tireless, fast, and ruthlessly effective machines.
Ethics aside, taking the human out of or off the loop would be a mistake. Properly aligned human-machine teams outperform purely autonomous systems in a range of contexts in which human operators must handle complex, fast-moving, ambiguous or unfamiliar scenarios. In disciplines ranging from air traffic control to medical diagnostics to cybersecurity, human experience, intuition and judgement still offer a competitive edge.
Take, by way of another example, F1 racing, where human drivers are still – for now – faster than their autonomous counterparts, and where human-machine teams regularly compete with one another.
An F1 team might choose to leave a damaged car on the track because data-derived insight reveals that the time lost by doing so will be less than the time lost by pitting. Instant, seamless access to data and insight, allied to human judgement and intuition, allows teams to operate at speeds – and in ways – that were not only impossible but also unthinkable.
The potential of human-machine teams to transform defence
This symbiosis holds true whether you’re a F1 driver or team principal, a strategist or a race engineer. And it’s true whether you’re working in MOD Main Building or fighting on the front line.
Defence has, for example, many excellent analysts. Thorough analysis, however, takes time. Researching and reporting consume the majority of an analyst’s time, leaving little for the critical thinking that sets great analysts apart. There is, therefore, a trade-off between timeliness and rigor. By accelerating research and reporting, however – two elements of the analytical workflow that machines can accelerate – analysts can focus on applying their imagination, intuition and experience, and deliver reports that are both more rigorous and more timely.
This is how Defence can accelerate the intelligence cycle to the point where it ceases to be cyclical and becomes, for all practical purposes, a continuous flow.
Riding the exponential wave
ISR is just one line of Defence business that can be augmented when humans and machines work together. Comparable improvements can be made across a wide range of day-to-day tasks, from logistics and sustainment to operational planning and C2.
But to focus on narrow, discrete use cases would be to miss the wider, more profoundly important point: when these individual systems and processes come together, the improvement in overall performance doesn’t just accelerate – the rate of acceleration rises. Improvements go from being merely quantitative to being qualitative.
It’s this synthesis that promises to enable Defence as a whole not just to do things differently – more quickly, rigorously or effectively – but to do different things altogether: to plan, prepare and fight in new and unanticipated ways and at unprecedented speeds; to take, if and when required, the ‘unfair fight’ to the adversary.
Adapting to – and then dictating – the pace of change
The technological, administrative, and cultural barriers can, I have no doubt, be overcome. They are ‘problems’, and problems have solutions.
The UK and its allies, however, are confronted not with a problem, but with an ongoing and insoluble predicament. This is where analogies and comparisons with other sectors and industries break down. F1, after all, has discrete seasons. It has rules by which all players and teams must abide. MOD, however, is always on, every hour of every day; from the Continuous At Sea Deterrent to the Joint Expeditionary Force, deterrents have to be continuous to be effective. In this era of constant competition, it’s more important than ever that MOD finds ways to develop new capabilities while maintaining existing ones.
The innovation cycle on the front line in Ukraine is, according to many, in the region of two to three months. According to others, it’s two-to-three weeks. So for Western militaries, it’s not so much a matter of replacing slow, low-risk, deliberative procurement and adoption cycles as one of accelerating them and augmenting them with faster, more continuous processes.
By the same token, it’s not a matter of enabling SMEs and outside expertise to replace established Primes and Systems Integrators; it’s a matter of establishing – within and throughout MOD – complementary budgets and processes, as well as the mindset, that allow for ongoing, high-risk experimentation.
MOD, like the industry that supplies and supports it, doesn’t just have to update its thinking and practices; it needs to think and operate in two ways at once. It must solve problems as well as explore opportunities.
This dualistic approach will ensure that Defence organisations are both responsive to immediate threats and proactive in exploring future possibilities, creating a resilient and adaptable force capable of gaining and maintaining a competitive edge that’s both decisive and obvious to potential adversaries.
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