Anti / Area Denial Assets

P.W. Singer and August Cole’s 2015 novel, Ghost Fleet, demonstrates how the American military’s trending dependence on high-tech, networked warfighting may be vulnerable to foreign near-peer and hybrid threats. Merging expertise from Washington-based foreign policy think tanks and defense technology sectors, the authors weave a fictional, yet plausible depiction of a near-future war featuring the United States, China, and Russia.

The 1776 united States of America Declaration of Independence contain the words that succinctly describe our national objective, strategy, and message, “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” In today’s United States of America, the world acknowledges American’s as the preeminent owner of individual freedoms, holding and promoting these three basic principles for some 240 years. During these years, the U.S. has employed the use of intelligence to shape its objectives and strategies, and then in times of war used the same intelligence to shape strategic messages against foreign powers. However, as hostilities decline and give way to the restoration of relative peace, the use of intelligence for strategic messages against foreign powers ceases. Under these circumstances, the void created by secession of U.S. messages, provides a communication opportunity to foreign powers for transmission of anti-U.S. messages. Attempts have been made to reinstate the offices that during war countered these anti-U.S. messages to a comprehensive reorganization of the U.S Government intelligence community. This paper does not support creation of a new agency or department to utilize existing strategic intelligence.

In a 2015 article, “Is U.S. military becoming outdated?” written by Stuart Bradin, Keenan Yoho, and Meaghan Keeler-Pettigrew, the authors argued that despite the U.S. military maintaining a position of global dominance “without peer” during conventional operations, it is not the ideal force against current and future threats. The authors claim that there are several negative factors arising due to the past sixteen years of war against several state and non-state elements, inferior cultural differences of government bureaucracy compared to commercial firms, and a misallocation of defense spending that leaves the US military waging war inefficiently while simultaneously losing technological dominance against current and future threats.

During every period of conflict we observe how our economy shifts to stabilize and support such massive military movements. We will be going through 3 major Department of Defense evolutions during times of conflict to compare those to how economically we must fight a 4th generation, non-conventional war.

American peer competitors operating in the gray zone have significant implications for American security interests. China and Russia have exploited conceptual and organizational challenges (Paradoxes of the Gray Zone, 6 ) within the American establishment making it vulnerable to gray zone challenges.

Globalization is a significant security trend because it will accelerate many other trends and will influence operational environments for the Joint Force in the next four to ten years. Strategic planners must assess future security trends in order to anticipate capabilities, capacity and readiness requirements that will be necessary to protect U.S. national interests. Globalization will continue to shape the operational environment as an increasing number of people, products and information flow across borders (National Military Strategy 2015, 1). The availability of information, volume and rate of people moving across borders will continue to favor non-state actors and terrorist by increasing recruiting and movement of terrorists into contact

The United States has focused on developing better methods and capabilities to obtain intelligence since the revolutionary war. Arguably, the most significant advances in intelligence collection capabilities have developed since the digital era and have matured through asymmetric warfare during the Global War on Terrorism. For the past thirteen years, the United States has continued to grow technical intelligence capabilities to understand and develop the military battlefield environment. With this growing, need for technical intelligence the United States’ non-technical intelligence methodologies have gradually atrophied and reduced the nation’s military ability to obtain a comprehensive intelligence picture. Through examples in Iraq, Afghanistan, and African countries, we can illustrate adversaries’ abilities in an asymmetric environment to overcome technical intelligence requiring the nation to retrain and perfect non-technical intelligence capabilities. With a constantly evolving battlefield, the future success of the nation requires a blended approach of collecting and disseminating intelligence utilizing technical and non-technical capabilities equally to enable predictive deployment of military power against unseen threats in future operating environments.

The United States has the most capable intelligence apparatus of any country in the world. The information produced by various agencies gives the United States a substantial advantage when it comes to understanding world events, predicting and preparing for unsettled times, fielding military forces, and making a host of other political and economic decisions. From an ethical perspective, it means that the United States Intelligences information can create the risk of security for the United

Three of the potential roadblocks associated with the implementation of a National Counter Intelligence (CI) strategy that I believe are the most important rest within resources, information and risk, outlined in Michelle Van Cleave’s article “Strategic Counterintelligence What Is It and What Should We Do about It?” The idea of a national level effort is not a new idea. The National Security Act of 1947 provided basis of our intelligence and CI functions. DoD naturally took the mission of CI activity which fit within the DoD scope. Up and until the 1980s a series of failures within the CI world, such as the failed hostage rescue in 1980 helped to place emphasis on the lack of coordination between DoD services. A new definition of CI was

The intelligence community has still not adapted to the non-traditional problem set. Threats evolve much faster than bureaucracies can ever hope to adapt. Doctrine is a mire and tradition clogs the wheels of the machine. Groundbreaking ideas are shouted down; intelligence operations are run “by the numbers.” On a personal note, as a senior intelligence NCO and acting intelligence officer with multiple tours in Special Operations, I have made a career out of breaking training exercises in garrison, with our troops meeting all commander’s requirements and desired end-states several days early, by re-tooling doctrine and reconfiguring intelligence products and procedures to meet idiosyncratic and “unsolvable” problem sets. In so doing,

Terrorism is the warfare of the future. The battlefield has changed and it will take professional intelligence agencies to gather information about these unorthodox combatants. To help fight the war on terror, intelligence corporations must be present. However, some of the agencies can be combined with others to make a “super agency”. Three agencies that currently play a major role in the battle on terrorism will be the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). Discussion will be given on which

Additionally, Hughes states the external environment impacts any technological system. Over time societies adopt technologies to eliminate uncertainties inherent to open systems. Fifth generation sensor fusion, which translates and synthesizes external, multisource inputs, acts as an autonomous means to mitigate uncertainty thereby maximizing tactical combat power. Certainly, any technological system must be responsive to the international security environment. This belief is central to Barry Posen’s argument which concludes the external environment, the international balance of power, shapes the innovation of military doctrine. Lacking an existential Soviet threat, the US would have little need to improve or expand its nuclear arsenal.

In the post-Cold War eras, the US intelligence community saw many crises and transient threats as the U.S policy makers raised questions about the need and the role of the U.S. intelligence community. This thing made the effort of defining the priority of the U.S. intelligence more difficult and further complicated. Intelligence became an area “where the government could reap savings.” (Ibid, Para 2) The government resource savings in the US intelligence community resulted in cutbacks from the intelligence collections such as HUMINT and technical, including cutbacks in analytic resources. (Ibid) They all had significant U.S. policy issues in the U.S. intelligence community at that time. One example, talking about the Iraqi intelligence failures, carefully drafted national intelligence failed in its singular mission “to accurately inform policy deliberations.” (Ibid, Final Thoughts, Para 1) In this term, we can consider how the case of Curveball’s fabricated story of Iraq having weapons of mass destructions tricked the U.S. intelligence community and American foreign policy in Iraq operations. The U.S. intelligence community and policy makers spent long hours and carried out intense debates on the Iraqi intelligence cases/issues, yet they both could not ignore and mitigate the U.S. intelligence failures in Iraqi operations. (Dorgin & Goetz,

For thousands of years warfare remained relatively unchanged. While the tactics and weapons have changed as new methods of combat evolved, men and women or their weapons still had to meet at the same time and place in order to attack, defend, surrender or conquer. However, the advent of the of the internet has created a new realm of combat in which armies can remotely conduct surveillance, reconnaissance, espionage, and attacks from an ambiguous and space-less digital environment. Both state and non-state actors have already embraced this new realm and utilized both legal and illegal means to further facilitate their interests. What complicates cyber security further is as states attempt to protect themselves from cyber-warfare, private

The United States (U.S) Intelligence community has come a long way since the revolutionary war. After winning independence from England, the U.S would not invest much into intelligence or foreign policy until the 20th century. Foreign policy was simply not a priority for our young nation, having an ocean on eastern and Western boarders of the country severely limited potential threats. President Franklin D. Roosevelt would be the first president since Washington to understand the importance of intelligence and lay the groundwork for what we now consider national intelligence. Unfortunately, it has taken two catastrophic failures in intelligence for the U.S to realize the need for good intelligence and take steps to improve itself. The