By Lieutenant (j.g.) Nicholas Romanow, U.S. Navy

There is a mismatch between the requirements of modern warfare and the perception of the information warfare community (IWC) across the Navy. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), cell phones with social media apps, and Starlink satellite-enabled internet have been used to collect, process, and share information and have had major impacts on today’s battlefields.

Meanwhile, as think tanks and congressional committees affirm the centrality of information for military operations, the current leaders of the IWC are officers from other communities. Of the three flag leadership positions in the IWC, two are held by unrestricted line officers: Tenth Fleet/Fleet Cyber Command led by Vice Admiral Craig A. Clapperton (a naval flight officer) and the Deputy Vice Chief of Naval Operations for Information Warfare, currently Vice Admiral Jeffery Trussler (a submariner).

This is not to discount or disparage these leaders and their work, but rather to consider the message sent to junior officers in the information warfare community. When these young officers look up the ladder, they do not see admirals who were once in their shoes, but leaders who had entirely different starts to their careers. Meanwhile, conventional wisdom often attributes the current retention woes to young officers leaving the military to pursue more lucrative careers in the private sector. However, few young Americans join the military with hopes of getting rich; many rather seek other unique benefits, such as a rewarding and meaningful career and the opportunity to lead at an early stage in their careers. Treating information warfare officers (IWOs) as enablers rather than as leaders in their own right risks sacrificing those intangible benefits—and a key advantage in the war for talent.

To retain officers essential to the future fight, the IWC specifically and the Navy at large must change how IWOs are perceived in the Navy. First, officers in the IWC must seek a closer partnership with the unrestricted line communities. And both sides must recognize that a fusion of traditional and exquisite warfighting capabilities will most certainly dominate the future, not a revolution that upends everything about the nature and character of war. Based on this understanding, IWOs should also take the lead in designing and implementing operational concepts that rely heavily on information warfare capabilities, most notably unmanned platforms. This would enable IWOs to establish themselves as innovators and military leaders for a new age of warfare.

Think Fusion, Not Revolution

The term “information warfare” often connotes a revolutionary set of capabilities that upend how wars will be fought. As early as 1992, “the growing ability to gather, process, and disseminate information . . . far more rapidly than ever before” was described as a pillar of the “Military-Technical Revolution” and began to fuel the idea that information could be wielded as a decisive weapon. The culmination of this belief is captured in Toshi Yoshihara’s analysis of Joint Vision 2020, which posited that information superiority could enable the “full spectrum dominance” that would ensure the U.S. military “would intimidate the adversary into dropping its sword.”1 This created the false impression that practitioners of information warfare expect it to almost entirely replace traditional forms of warfare.

A similar situation existed following World War I as military thinkers debated the role of airpower in future wars. Proponents of airpower such as Army Brigadier General Billy Mitchell believed it would render other instruments of warfare such as warships obsolete. In 1921, Mitchell participated in a Navy-run experiment to prove aircraft could sink a battleship. Unsatisfied with the experiment’s conclusions, Mitchell wrote his own report, arguing that aircraft would supplant seacraft, which was leaked to the press. His tensions with and criticisms of Army and Navy leaders led to his court-martial and subsequent resignation of his commission in 1925. While Mitchell is now seen as a pivotal figure in U.S. military history, the establishment of the Air Force—presumably his primary goal—did not occur until 1947, which begs the question of whether Mitchell’s single-mindedness worked against rather than for the cause of airpower.

A better example for the information warfare community is Admiral William “Bull” Halsey. In 1933, Halsey was ordered to command the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga (CV-3), but instead of training as an aviation observer as assigned, he opted to pursue his wings as a naval aviator to gain a “clear understanding of a pilot’s problems and mental processes.”2 Already an accomplished officer, Halsey was not obligated to undertake additional aviation training, but he nonetheless sought to understand the new warfare discipline he was assigned to oversee. By the time World War II began, he was able to fuse the traditional advantages of the warship with the innovation of airpower and establish carrier aviation as a key component of modern U.S. military power.

Leaders in the IWC should aspire to be like Admiral Halsey. When operational demands permit, IWOs should seek the same qualifications and stand the same watches as their unrestricted line peers to better understand the demands and challenges their colleagues face. Unrestricted line community leaders should similarly revisit whether qualifications need to be restricted to individuals who are eligible to hold command at sea.

In addition, the IWC should challenge some of its own long-held practices. While classification and operational security remain essential, IWOs should not be dogmatic in avoiding conversations with other communities. A concerted effort throughout the IWC to build trust with the unrestricted line communities would overtime lead to more opportunities to lead diverse teams and complex operations, especially as information warfare becomes ever-more important in an era of near-peer competition.

Seize the Initiative to Innovate

Recent conflicts have demonstrated the pace of technological change in warfare, especially in the adoption of unmanned systems and artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled capabilities. IWOs should seize the opportunities presented by these new systems and integrate them into the IWC’s agile and entrepreneurial identity.

Andrew Krepinevich’s 1992 report, “The Military-Technical Revolution: A Preliminary Assessment,” notes that military innovation is neither inevitable nor solely about building new gadgets. Successful military innovation also requires the effective integration of systems into new operational concepts and the adaptation of organizations and bureaucracies to implement those concepts. The effectiveness of unmanned and AI-driven capabilities has been established, including in the maritime domain. Ukrainian forces recently conducted what is thought to be the first naval combat engagement with an unmanned surface vessel, when a sea drone apparently struck a Russian ship in the Black Sea.

Fielding a fleet of uncrewed and AI-driven platforms will require all three core mission areas of the information warfare community: 1) battlespace awareness, which requires gathering and disseminating information; 2) assured command and control, which requires securely and reliably transmitting information; and 3) integrated fires, which includes the manipulation of information to enhance the impact of kinetic and nonkinetic effects. These platforms provide a wealth of opportunities to collect intelligence, but without human technicians onboard, they will need to be highly optimized to avoid wasting valuable bandwidth and storage space. Controlling these platforms over long distances and retrieving the information their sensors collect will require robust assured command-and-control. In addition, the emissions signatures these platforms create will be a central challenge in employing integrated fires and deceptive tactics and imposing targeting dilemmas on the adversary. The IWC should play a leading role in deciding how these new platforms are employed, including designing their operational concepts and integrating them into current strike group and fleet operations.

Countering hostile unmanned platforms also presents a major opportunity for the IWC. Observers of the months-long barrage of Houthi-controlled UAVs against surface combatants in the Red Sea point to an unfavorable cost-exchange ratio, wherein the missiles used to counter these drones are much more expensive than the drones themselves; this conundrum is a clear demand signal for the IWC to leverage its nonkinetic fires pillar to offer a more affordable means of intercepting hostile UAVs. As opposed to missiles which are highly advanced but not easily replaceable, nonkinetic fires offer a more readily scalable means of exploiting the weakness of drones, which rely on some form of external control to execute their mission. Yet, the effective use of such an option will require more than just acquiring new technologies; achieving the aforementioned integration of IW disciplines with the more traditional mission areas historically led by unrestricted libe officers will necessitate a team effort to experiment and design doctrine and tactics to counter this new threat.

While there are already opportunities for the information warfare commander to assume the supported role in maritime operations, this new class of platforms present an opportunity for the IWC to own a central component of the future fleet and shape new kinds of fleet and strike group operations. The IWC should seize the initiative and adapt as an organization to reward creativity and shepherd the tactical innovations that will make unmanned systems a successful military revolution.

Integration as Leadership

More than century ago, then–Captain Ernest King led a study on the development and education of naval officers. His report, which came out in the midst of a fierce debate over how specialized officers needed to be to wield rapidly advancing military technologies, concluded that officers “must be prepared to combine all these technical elements into an organized and unified force.” The true value officers provide as leaders is not the mastery of a single subject but the ability to connect the dots and formulate solutions across multiple warfare disciplines. In the context of information warfare, this should mean establishing tighter partnerships with the traditional warfare communities, as well as embracing and integrating new technologies fielded by the Navy.

For the information warfare community, embracing the “integrator” model of leadership would fit squarely within the naval tradition. As King observed in his report, “the term ‘officer’ is synonymous with ‘leader.’” As long as the IWC has IWOs, these officers must think of themselves first and foremost as leaders.

1. Toshi Yoshihara, “Sun Zi and the Search for a Timeless Logic of Strategy” in The New Makers of Modern Strategy, ed. Hal Brands (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023), 76.

2. William F. Halsey III and J. Bryan, Admiral Halsey’s Story (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1947), 56.

Nicholas Romanow

Lieutenant (j.g.) Romanow is a cryptologic warfare officer currently serving as an operations officer for the National Security Agency’s Cybersecurity Collaboration Center in Fort Meade, Maryland. He is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, where he was also an undergraduate fellow with the Clements Center for National Security.


You can find other interesting article here:
https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2024/may/leaders-or-enablers-role-information-warfare-officers

Source: USNA.org