diff --git a/_collections/_hkers/2024-04-16-assure-tactical-sustainment.md b/_collections/_hkers/2024-04-16-assure-tactical-sustainment.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..a6700815 --- /dev/null +++ b/_collections/_hkers/2024-04-16-assure-tactical-sustainment.md @@ -0,0 +1,288 @@ +--- +layout: post +title : Assure Tactical Sustainment +author: Jack Watling and Si Horne +date : 2024-04-16 12:00:00 +0800 +image : https://i.imgur.com/E72fELO.jpeg +#image_caption: "" +description: "Assuring the Tactical Sustainment of Land Forces on the Modern Battlefield" +excerpt_separator: +--- + +_This paper examines the evolving threat and necessary mitigations to enable the tactical sustainment of land forces between the corps support area and last mile resupply. It postulates three challenges that increasing battlefield transparency and ubiquitous long-range precision fires pose to logistics:_ + + + +1. Logistics must enter the theatre of operations where infrastructure is concentrated, and so key sustainment nodes can be struck throughout operational depth. + +2. Because supply is projected from known points of origin, it is susceptible to pattern-of-life analysis, enabling highly disruptive targeting. + +3. Once forces are fixed in combat, the limited number of ground lines of communication to their positions makes them systemically vulnerable to isolation. + +There are two processes involved in tactical sustainment: the flow of materiel forwards to resupply units; and the recovery of equipment and casualties rearwards. The principles driving tactical adaptation to ensure survivability of these functions are well established and well tested – dispersal, deception and convoys. Technology is transforming how these principles can be applied. For resupply, three technologies and approaches are critical. + +1. The dispersion of caches throughout the rear support area can now be managed through digitised command and control (C2) and planning support tools to avoid concentrating supplies in logistics hubs. + +2. The use of containers and mixed loads can create a uniformity and thus ambiguity to sustainment components that minimises the ability of the adversary to target the logistics structure efficiently. + +3. The deliberate support to logistics elements from combat arms during last mile resupply to open windows for safe passage can enable safe delivery to the front. Given the constraints on how often this can be accomplished, it requires the accurate predictive push of materiel to be efficient. + +Medical support is especially vulnerable. This is because of the electromagnetic signature of medical posts, combined with the decline in adherence to international humanitarian law as regards the protected status of hospitals. It is therefore necessary for medical support to: + +1. Maximise the mobility of Role 2 hospitals by mounting their constituent parts on vehicles and maintaining modular capabilities. + +2. Adapt tactics, techniques and procedures to enable surgery with intermittent relocation, to enable medical posts to continue to function in the indirect fire zone, ensuring damage-control resuscitation can be delivered within 60 minutes of injury. + +3. Equipping and crewing Role 1 facilities to maximise the precision of triage to avoid saturating surgical capacity, bypass Role 2 for those who can be safely evacuated further to the rear on a longer timeline, and offer palliative care to those who cannot be saved. + +4. Ensure that medical support has resilient C2 that can fully exploit the data necessary to coordinate dispersed operations. + +Data is similarly critical to ensuring the survivability of repair and maintenance support: + +1. The use of digital twins to conduct predictive maintenance on complex systems is a key tool for maximising the efficiency of forwards to support dispersed platforms. + +2. For sophisticated components, platform modularity is critical in enabling sensors and other payloads to be swapped out, so that broken components can be repaired in the rear. For simple parts, additive manufacture can be used to minimise the number of unique spares that must be held at the rear of units and brought forwards. + +3. For the repair sites themselves, deception is an increasingly important tool for improving survivability, as concealment is increasingly difficult. + +Collectively, these measures can make a supply system robust, even under extensive surveillance. However, a sustainment system working in this way will still impose constraints on combat arms. It is therefore essential that the combat arms adjust their planning assumptions as regards tempo, the sustainable size of force packages, and the force protection they must offer to their service support arms if they are to sustain the fight. + + +### Introduction + +The cliché that while amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics may be how militaries ought to function, but it is not reflective of peacetime practice. There is relatively little attention given to sustainment in either the British Army’s “Future Soldier” or the US Army’s “U.S. Army in Multi-Domain Operations”. As the Russian invasion of Ukraine has demonstrated, logistics appear to have played a limited role in the Kremlin’s professional planning, showing that the gap between policy aspirations and capability is far from being a uniquely Western conceptual oversight. Nevertheless, throughout history, logistics and sustainment have dictated the size of armies that can be fielded, their tempo, lethality, endurance and resilience. Furthermore, the threats that are reshaping tactics for combat arms units similarly create serious challenges for combat service support (CSS) elements. This paper seeks, therefore, to outline both the threats to CSS and how these risks can be mitigated through tactical and capability development. The questions the paper hopes to provoke – although not answer here – is how changes in sustainment operations must necessarily shape planning assumptions for the combat arms. + +Sustainment is a broad doctrinal term encompassing logistics, medical support, engineering support, pay and personnel services, and maintenance. This paper concerns logistics and medical support forward of the corps: those functions that keep fighting formations able to operate, and which require regular transfers of materiel and personnel forwards and rearwards. The questions of theatre and operational sustainment at corps and above are beyond the scope of this paper, partly because they are largely a question of integrated air and missile defence and cyber defence, which are not solely relevant to sustainment. Nor is this paper concerned with tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) for tactical resupply by support companies inside fighting battalions, as this subject is specific to the particular sub-units being supported. The paper focuses on the divisional support area, protection of its functions, and the forward and rearward flow of materiel by close support sustainment units. + +The paper is divided into four chapters. Chapter I outlines the threats to CSS elements, examining how the changing operating environment poses specific tactical problems for CSS. Chapter II examines how tactical and capability adaptation may solve some of these challenges for resupply of formations, focusing on the movement of materiel forwards in a largely proactively planned manner. Chapters III and IV examine how militaries may mitigate threats to sustainment activities that rely on rearward movement, largely imposed by the adversary: medical and maintenance support. The conclusion considers the impact of these considerations on combat arms, indicating areas for further study. + +This paper has a broad evidence base. The assessment of threat systems is derived from: observation of deep strike capabilities and their kill chains employed during the Russian invasion of Ukraine; practical experimentation with a range of sensor systems and the associated signatures of CSS elements on exercises across NATO; and a review of literature on threat systems, mainly related to the impact on combat arms. The baseline for the potential threat is drawn from core planning assumptions for the sustainment footprint of existing formations. With regard to mitigations, the aim is to identify what a CSS footprint must look like to be survivable given the constraints of the task. + +The paper’s conclusions are largely based on practical observation of sustainment operations, mapping timing and footprint, and interviews with CSS practitioners worldwide over several years. Interviews have also been conducted with dozens of figures in the field of medical sustainment, both individually and at conferences, workshops and exercises. Conclusions are also based on the bitter experience of one of the authors of observing the complications that arose around the sustainment of Ukraine’s armed forces, and the innovative solutions that were found. One of the authors is a senior practitioner, who draws on extensive experience from operations. + +The paper’s methodology is, therefore, essentially an iterative mapping of dependencies. It is important to note that beyond theatre sustainment, military combat service support is, as B A Friedman observed, more of an art than a science. There are numerical inputs that generate the boundaries of possibility but, unlike in a civilian logistics system, the active attempt by an adversary to disrupt processes creates risk in the pursuit of efficiency. For this reason, the authors have sought to focus on the risk calculus that commanders will face, and the constraints the threat will place on their freedom of action. + + +### I. The Emerging Threat Landscape + +In June 2022 it would have been reasonable to assert that the Ukrainian military was being defeated. The enemy had amassed a 10:1 advantage in artillery, was achieving blanket saturation of the electromagnetic spectrum, and had shaped the battlefield to fix Ukrainian forces in killing areas. They were suffering an unsustainable attrition rate, while unable either to find Russian targets or to bring their guns in range to disrupt the Russian fires system. Then everything changed. + +From late June, Ukrainian Guided Multiple Launch Rocket Systems (GMLRS) began to target Russian command-and-control (C2) nodes and logistics hubs. As stockpile after stockpile of ammunition was destroyed, Russian guns were starved of ammunition. The sudden need to disperse C2 alongside attrition of key electronic warfare platforms opened up seams in the electromagnetic spectrum. Over the course of two weeks, the Ukrainians started locating targets and striking back. The Russians saw their fires dominance evaporate, never to be fully regained. They adapted their logistics system, pulling stockpiles back beyond GMLRS range, but this limited the number of rounds their guns could reach, rendering it impossible to achieve the level of fires saturation demanded by their doctrine. In two weeks, the Russians not only lost fires superiority, but saw a whole way of war fade into obsolescence. + +It would be reassuring to believe that the threat to logistics is a distinctly Russian problem. After all, it was GMLRS – fielded by several NATO countries – that disrupted the Russian logistics system. The Russians, meanwhile, have struggled to achieve a similar scale of disruption to Ukraine’s logistics infrastructure. This would be a hubristic level of complacency, however. An examination of how Ukrainian forces used satellite imagery to locate and map the Russian supply system, and the munitions necessary to strike its components, reveals that the technology is available and affordable even for non-state actors. Moreover, Western logistics practices are in many respects as vulnerable as Russian sustainment operations. NATO medical doctrine for warfighting is still fundamentally predicated on concentrating capacity in Role 2 and Role 3 field hospitals, with the Red Cross contributing to their protection. Ukrainian forces lost several such facilities, discovering that Russian EW-based targeting will not distinguish field hospitals from other nodes, and that the footprint of one of its Role 2 facilitiess fitted almost precisely within the lethal blast radius of a 122 mm high explosive round. + +Any effective response to these challenges must be based on a realistic analysis of the threat. This paper begins with a summary of the “find and fires revolution”, as it applies to sustainment. There are three elements to this: ISR; connectivity; and precision strike. In turn, there follow three general problems for logisticians. + +#### Large Footprints and Fixed Infrastructure + +The volume of materiel consumed by a large military formation is immense. An Abrams main battle tank, for example, consumes approximately 1.86 gallons of fuel per mile. A squadron traversing 10 miles of terrain could easily consume 260 gallons of fuel, not counting the fuel required for their supporting vehicles. The volumes necessary to sustain an army require the exploitation of large-scale commercial infrastructure before fuel and supplies can be broken down into deliveries to the front. Sustainment operations are therefore critically dependent on ports, terminals, rail infrastructure, storage tanks, and depots – large, fixed targets that cannot be moved rapidly. + +The concept of dispersion, viable for tactical formations, is only partially realisable for sustainment operations. This is because the greater the distance that logistics elements need to travel to resupply forces, the less efficient the logistics operation, since a greater proportion of the organisation’s resource must be used to resupply and sustain itself. In Afghanistan, where logistics infrastructure was largely uncontested, sustainment operations absorbed up to half of the force. This is not a historically unusual proportion. Rapid expansion of a logistics operation therefore comes at the expense of the efficiency of the force. Moreover, the greater the level of dispersion of logistics elements, which for reasons of efficiency are necessarily lightly armed and armoured, the greater the force protection requirement, drawing combat arms away from combat tasks. Furthermore, sustainment must flow through civilian infrastructure, such as ports, that is optimised for efficiency in peace and therefore concentrated. After this point they may begin to disperse, but they enter theatre concentrated. + +The result is that logistics and sustainment must concentrate at the operational level in large, fixed installations that are identifiable to the enemy and which often constitute single points of failure. In the Falklands campaign, a strike on the logistics hub at Ajax Bay would have immobilised much of the British force. The runway at Ascension Island constituted another potential single point of failure in the ability to maintain momentum. In Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, although there are multiple options for supplying the various fronts, Crimea, which is vital ground, is essentially dependent on two railways for resupply, one of which depends on a single prestige piece of infrastructure: the Kerch Bridge. + +Historically, many logistics sites were protected by two factors. First, the enemy lacked sufficiently accurate weapons to reliably destroy these targets. The US, for example, had to fly hundreds of sorties to be able to reliably damage bridges before the introduction of precision guided munitions, and even after laser designation increased accuracy, the threat to aircraft from surface-to-air missiles made such targets high risk. The second factor was the number of munitions that needed to be brought to bear to have a decisive effect. Precision munitions were expensive, while the separation of stores by berms across a depot would mean that a large number of munitions would need to be committed to destroy materiel where it was concentrated. It is also worth noting that some classes of sustainment infrastructure – notably hospitals – have protected status and ought not to be targeted. + +These factors no longer hold. The proliferation of cruise missile technology means that strikes against critical logistical infrastructure can be sustained without exposing crews to risk. Moreover, the maturation of cheap one-way-attack munitions, capable of damaging soft targets and striking with considerable precision, means that it is now possible to precisely strike a large volume of targets across a logistics depot, destroying stores in place. The destruction by Russian forces of several Ukrainian ammunition dumps with thermite grenades (prior to the full-scale Russian invasion) and the detonation of a Syrian Army ammunition dump at a stadium in Deir ez-Zor with improvised one-way-attack munitions demonstrate the scale of effect that is achievable by these means. The presumption of protected status, moreover, is no longer honoured by many states, rendering these facilities highly vulnerable. + +At higher echelon the impact of these trends is relatively straightforward. First, depots are being moved into greater depth to increase the cost of the munitions that can reach them and thereby reduce the number of strikes that are possible. This then allows for the concentration of defensive systems. However, supplies must subsequently traverse a greater area, and satisfactory solutions for the protection of sustainment capabilities in the intervening space have not yet been identified. + +#### Pattern of Life + +Closer to the Forward Line of Own Troops (FLOT), the challenge is that sustainment operations create highly predicable and detectable patterns of life. Vehicles must drive through fuelling points and casualties have to be drawn back to medical facilities. Refuelling and casualty movements both require dynamic planning and thus communication, such that the medical facilities and sustainment points acquire pronounced and distinctive electromagnetic signatures. + +Historically, unless a signature was maintained for a sustained period, incidental exposure provided limited opportunity to systematically map CSS elements in the deep. Today, however, Ground Moving Target Indication, space-based electromagnetic surveying and other wide-area collection systems enable the sustained observation of patterns of life throughout operational depth, including the tracking of unique signatures. When combined with modern analytical tools, the patterns that emerge over time become highly revealing. For example, if vehicles routinely pause outside a particular building when rotating to and from the front, they immediately become a point of interest, to be placed under close analysis. If synthetic aperture radar imagery can be cued to coincide with a vehicle stopping, it may become possible to confirm that it is a fuelling point. Russian strikes on medical facilities in Syria are a useful case in point. The persistent communication from these facilities, and the presence of cellular phones associated with fighters, made even subterranean facilities distinctive. For Russia, lacking concerns about international law, these facilities became targets. + +The handover of supplies to units in motion must be based on battle drills and standard operating procedures. The selection and communication of cache points, the deconfliction of movement through the rear, and the confirmation of time of handover will all follow pre-agreed procedures that will be replicated. Sustainment, unlike many tactical actions, is a constant task and so there is a consistent pattern of life generated by a force’s tactics, techniques and procedures. These are not only detectable – increasingly so over time – but once a point has been confirmed it becomes possible to track vehicles moving to and from locations to build up a map of logistics nodes, so that the exposure of one point can contaminate others. + +The stand-off sensors that enable this kind of observation – satellites, radar, long-range UAVs and other capabilities – are persistent and survivable. For units conducting tactical actions, the use of electronic warfare and other measures can disrupt enemy kill chains and intelligence collection for limited periods to create windows of opportunity for manoeuvre. But it is not realistic to achieve widespread denial of these capabilities over a sustained period and an expansive area. Consequently, the burden of adaptation falls to the sustainment elements + +Finally, the more that is done to protect sustainment elements, especially force protection engineering, the greater the signature of the activity and the easier it is to track and map. For example, it was possible just using commercial satellites to track the end-to-end transfer of ammunition for Russia from North Korea to the Ukraine front by observing the loading, unloading and preparations for receipt of shipping containers. The expansion of berms ahead of the arrival of these munitions was a clear indicator of where materiel would be moved, even before it was shipped. With access to real-time ISR – rather than commercial satellites with longer latency between collection and dissemination – it would be possible to track the movement forwards from these dumps and thereby establish the placement of caches or the location of batteries. + +#### The Predictability of Ground Lines of Communication + +Manoeuvre forces have a range of options to prevent them from being located with a high level of accuracy or, worse still, anticipated. Dispersion and the exploitation of multiple axes or unusual approaches to targets can allow them to maintain a high level of ambiguity as to their movements and dispositions while out of contact. For sustainment elements, supporting dispersed forces reduces efficiency, but is achievable. Once combat elements become engaged with the enemy, however, two important things occur. First, sustainment demand spikes, as combat forces use their ammunition at a much greater rate and begin to require evacuation of damaged vehicles and injured and dead personnel. Second, combat forces become fixed and the options for the routes by which resupply can occur become significantly constrained, especially if the contact occurs on vital ground. Resupply may be via only one or two ground lines of communication (GLOCs) to reach the fighting units. Moreover, as artillery targets rotating units or resupply convoys, the available GLOCs are degraded or destroyed, with bridges especially susceptible. Temporary bridging can alleviate this problem somewhat, but between the weight limits and damage to the roads, it is common for traffic to only be able to move in one direction over these points. This risks creating traffic jams, and so careful sequencing of forward and return traffic becomes critical. This planning requirement further constrains sustainment troops’ ability to manoeuvre, because they must deliver a significant proportion of materiel and recover casualties within specified timelines, while also having set windows of opportunity within which they can do so along GLOCs. + +The threat to contested GLOCs has been exacerbated by UAVs. Penetrating the FLOT, UAVs will routinely seek to maintain observation over GLOCs and thereby direct artillery fire onto sustainment troops while they move. This dynamic has occurred repeatedly throughout Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, such that in some instances Ukraine has lost more personnel during troop rotations than it has in contact. The planning challenges created by the sustainment of Severodonetsk, Bakhmut and Avdiivka are instructive. In these instances, two GLOCs were preserved but were held under artillery fire. The interdiction of Russian sustainment operations over the bridges in support of Kherson are similarly illustrative of how a force can be disproportionately attrited by fixing its combat power to expose its logistics elements and then using fires to render the position unsustainable. + +Defending sustainment assets once fixed in combat can be achieved. Sanitising the airspace above GLOCs for a period can be delivered by electromagnetic warfare troops and air defence. The use of fires to suppress enemy artillery during a resupply can also reduce the threat. Alternatively, engineers can work to expand the quality of the route, or the number of paths that can be taken. In extremis, logistics can be carried out by vehicles with greater off-road mobility, whether amphibious or tracked, to maintain a diversity of avenues of approach. For small and urgent deliveries, unmanned aircraft systems may be able to shuttle material forwards. The problem with all these methods is that they lead to combat arms who are in contact, diverting resources to protect resupply. This in turn increases the sustainment requirements of the force. Even increasing the mobility of the sustainment force through different vehicles necessarily comes with an increase in cost and complexity, and expands their organic support requirements. These all reduce the efficiency of the fighting force. + +A final complication is the handover of materiel to troops. If the support to forces in contact is conducted within a constrained window of time, determined by the period when counterbattery fire and air defence can lift the threat, it encourages the maximum volume of materiel to be pushed in the smallest number of vehicles possible. The combined arms enablement of the resupply, however, means that the enemy will know what is happening. Once the supplies have arrived at the battle area, they must then be distributed to dispersed fighting elements. First, there is the risk of the supplies being struck once unloaded. Second, there is the risk that if a support element moves supplies from the unloading point to the fighting positions it will be traceable – enemy ISR would have been tipped off about the need to focus by the counterbattery fire – and so will reveal the fighting positions and separate them from the decoy fighting positions that forces are increasingly having to use to remain survivable. + +Collectively, therefore, the find and fires revolution risks making supply of forces costly and complicated by holding fixed logistical infrastructure at sustained risk, by unpicking the supply nodes through pattern-of-life analysis in the deep using stand-off sensors, and by contesting the GLOCs to fighting units. The result of this is to diminish the ability of a force to achieve operational tempo and, by constraining the supplies that can be built up, limit the depth that units can plan to threaten and thereby limit the cognitive risk felt by the enemy. If units can only build up the ammunition, fuel and other supplies to punch a limited distance into enemy terrain before pausing, it becomes easier for the enemy to manage the release and commitment of reserves to ensure that offensive operations must always be against a deliberate, rather than a hasty, defence. + + +### II. Adapting Resupply to Sustain the Force + +There are, in very simple terms, two kinds of sustainment activity. The first is resupply – pushing materiel forwards; the second is recovery – pulling resources backwards, for example, maintenance and medical capabilities. This chapter considers the process by which materiel is moved forwards, while Chapters III and IV consider recovery. Having examined the factors that expose sustainment operations to distinct threats on the future battlefield, several conclusions can be drawn about how combat service support elements will need to adapt, and where adaptation will impose additional demands on the wider force. + +The principles of protection described in this chapter are not new. Dispersion, deception and convoys are techniques that have been used for centuries. However, these concepts can now be applied in particularly important ways because of emerging technologies. This chapter therefore considers the relationship between technology and emerging tactics to address an evolving threat. + +#### Randomised Dispersed Storage + +Consider a warehouse. Traditionally, it has comprised rows of shelves on which objects are placed in a systematic order. Books, for example, might be laid out alphabetically, or boxes given serial numbers, to be stacked in sequence. Each shelf stack would have a designation. Goods that were regularly requested would be stacked closest to the door, and those objects least regularly requested stacked further from the entrance, to maximise efficiency. Such a system allowed a human logistician, who could not remember where an object was in the warehouse, to look up its location, quickly proceed to the relevant area and then move along the shelves until arriving at the correct item. Someone who had never visited the warehouse before could find the items they needed. + +With their network of depots and storage dumps, divisional and brigade support areas follow similar patterns – orderly sites where paper-based tables allow supply personnel to enter and retrieve specific loads. Such a system means that when a spare part arrives from a higher echelon, as long as it is allocated an appropriate serial number it can be inserted in a location where it can rapidly be found. In NATO militaries, this system has evolved to work in support of a pull logistics system, whereby units flag their requirements and only the requested items are retrieved from their storage locations, reducing waste. + +The layout of modern warehouses is changing, however. In a warehouse with a robotic retrieval system, or “smart warehouse”, it is not uncommon for the storage of items to be random. Books might be stored next to toasters and shower gel, with no particular logic other than that dissimilar items are co-located. The reasons for this are simple. For a computer, when an item is placed in the warehouse, its coordinates in three dimensions can be retained as a small data entry and remembered. Unlike the human operator there is no need for a robot to work towards an object by following a building–stack–shelf–location sequence, it can simply go to the coordinates associated with the item. Dissimilar storage reduces the likelihood of mistakes (for example, through a calibration error of a robotic arm). An error is much more likely to be detected if, in attempting to pick up a book, it finds itself clasping a shovel (as opposed to a different book). Even if the machine does not detect the error, a supervisor is more likely to notice. Randomised placement, while reducing the risk of localisation errors for robotic retrieval systems, is not space efficient, so there is much effort put into refining localisation methodologies in civilian logistics. Since the military will continue to retrieve items using humans, however, localisation does not need to be as precise. + +The relevance of this to militaries is not that robotics can replace humans in logistics, but rather that the distribution of materiel across the battlespace need not see the concentration of like materials at centralised locations. Militaries have used GPS tags on shipping containers to assist in retrieving the appropriate boxes for some time. The problem with this is obviously that the boxes broadcast their location and that there is a high risk of GPS disruption. The digitised warehouses, however, hold the location data centrally, based on logging where it was placed. This appears to be a more viable approach, although periodic backups are necessary to avoid corruption of the database. The result is that today it is reasonable to have materiel scattered broadly in small caches all over the rear area in such a manner as to massively complicate tracking and targeting and reduce the efficiency of strikes. + +One historical downside to dispersing logistics is the planning complications it introduces of moving materiel from depots to units. With a paper-based planning process creating orders, the need to coordinate movement to a large number of unpredictable dispersed locations every time there is the requirement to resupply a unit would take a great deal of time. It would also create a range of challenges as regards route deconfliction, and a need to coordinate laterally between different logistics units that would entail much communication. + +The difference today is the ubiquity of smart planning tools. Uber Eats is perhaps the most immediately comprehensible civilian corollary. Uber Eats is premised upon a situation where a recipient will call for supply from a position that was not previously known, for materiel from a location that was not previously known, and the application must calculate the most appropriate carrier given the timing and location of both parties. Moreover, it must coordinate many of these interactions simultaneously. Uber Eats has the advantage of a highly detailed map, terrain that degrades very slowly, and ubiquitous connectivity. Nevertheless, ticketing systems could make it feasible to push jobs to elements with intermittent connectivity. The military today has the capacity to map terrain rapidly using space-based observation. Route planning that accounts for damage is harder to automate, but the process of manually updating this information is fundamentally comparable to the burden of feeding this data into staff planning. A range of technologies today, therefore, allow for storage of materiel to be effectively dispersed throughout the battle area without having a disproportionately negative impact on efficiency. Beyond the key points of theatre entry where civilian logistics anchor logistics, therefore, it becomes possible to break up the concentrated supply areas in the divisional support area, eliminating high pay-off targets. + +#### Ambiguous Loads + +Safety in the carriage of ammunition and fuel is important. Incidents such as that aboard RFA have underscored the sound injunction to separate the carriage of personnel and munitions. This has since been extended to an aversion to mixing loads of most kinds in peacetime. Thus, militaries often field specialist fuel bowsers that have a distinct signature. This helps logistics in peacetime because it means the bowsers can meet safety standards and have greater freedom to drive on civilian roads. There is also an efficiency to the concentration of materiel in transit. For example, a box of ammunition will stack neatly with other boxes of ammunition because they have the same dimensions, and the tracking of materiel is also simpler if each container contains a specific type of item. Thus, a round of ammunition will sit in a box of ammunition, which will sit on a pallet of ammunition within a container shipment of ammunition, for which there will be a clear set of rules governing the transport, tracking and security of the load. + +The efficiency of this approach must contend with the need to break down loads in order to actually resupply units. Few tactical units, for example, require a shipping container’s worth of ammunition. A pallet is much more manageable. Unhelpfully, they also require food, water and spares that do not pack neatly, along with many other consumables. Generally, the need to concentrate the shipping containers to be able to draw from multiple different kinds of stores is done at relatively high echelon because of the concentration of containers. Nevertheless, loads tend to remain separated, with a supply convoy having different loads on different vehicles. Resupply convoys will then move to handover points, either with the logistics unit supporting the lower echelon, or once the operation shifts from formation sustainment to unit resupply, the convoy will usually conduct a circuit, handing over several pallets from each vehicle to a receiving group from the unit, to be broken up according to the disposition of the unit and thereafter distributed to the various fighting elements. This approach is noteworthy for its simplicity and efficiency. + +It is also increasingly vulnerable. It necessarily creates a series of interlinked circles of continuous movement, from known storage hubs to identifiable handover points, and the movement from these points can be traced forward to identify fighting positions. Moreover, the separation and distinctness of loads produces some very particular vulnerabilities. The UK’s 1 Aviation Brigade, for example, fielded eight fuel bowsers as its entire fuel capability until recently. Targeting these could potentially have grounded the brigade. Their movement from the main brigade support area could also indicate the establishment of a forward arming and refuelling point, setting up the conditions for strikes during refuelling. Measures have since been taken to address this and other vulnerabilities. Nevertheless, the example is instructive. + +To break the pattern-of-life vulnerability generated by the existing model and reduce the size of logistical resupply convoys, it is necessary to adopt two measures. The first is to increase the ambiguity of loads by pulling shipping containers further forward in the battlespace. The second is to shift to mixed loads, not of people and ammunition, but of different kinds of stores. Clearly, when containers are shipped into the theatre, efficiency will drive them to be concentrated, as is currently the case. However, at the theatre sustainment level, it becomes desirable to unpack these containers and pack containers with unit-relevant caches comprising mixed loads. Some loads, such as fuel, cannot be readily mixed, but should still be pumped into bladders within containers, thereby rendering the contents of any given shipment ambiguous. + +Medical stores and facilities have traditionally been visibly distinct, partly as medical elements are specifically protected under international humanitarian law (IHL) if they hold to their duties of neutrality and do not, for example, engage in moving ammunition or other lethal supplies. Critically, this protection has been shown to be ineffective in many current conflicts, with hospitals now becoming specific targets. It may therefore be reasonable, or indeed necessary, to hide medical stores and even units in the plain sight of general supplies. Rendering medical capabilities indistinguishable from other stores, rather than actually mixing loads with them, is compatible with IHL, although it means that enemies who strike these facilities have the defence that it was not possible to discriminate between them and legitimate targets. This approach may be highly context dependent, as some adversaries may show greater respect for non-combatant status than Russia. + +The exact contents of a container cache depends entirely on the formation being supported and the planning assumptions of its levels of consumption. However, to use straw man figures to illustrate the process, in intense periods of fighting an infanteer can expect to need 616 rounds of 5.56 mm ammunition per day, assuming a carriage of 10 magazines, plus one in the rifle, and one full replenishment. Often they carry fewer, but this is the upper limit. If they were carrying fewer, many would use the saved weight to carry additional rounds for machine guns or other support weapons. Thus, a company plus attachments, roughly 150 people, will need approximately 92,400 5.56 mm rounds or equivalents per day in intense fighting. An ammunition box holds approximately 1,200 rounds of 5.56 mm. A standard pallet measuring 100 cm x 120 cm can hold approximately 21 boxes, so that four pallets can carry 100,800 rounds. Four pallets can also carry enough 24-hour ration packs for an equivalent number of troops. Thus, packed with the rations over the ammunitions, food and ammunition for a company for a day can fit into a 10-ft shipping container. A standard lorry could either carry a second 10-ft container for other kinds of stores, like batteries and water, or a single 20-ft shipping container, with all stores in the same container. + +Rather than a handover point, there could be a process whereby mission caches are carried from the operational hub in small packets of vehicles and the containers dropped in the rear of a unit. The location of the drop and the contents of the container is uploaded to the logistics system. When it comes time for the unit to retrieve its supplies, its close support logistics element raises a ticket with the logistics C2 system and is assigned a location, or several options, where the requested stores can be found. They can then retrieve the pallets, leaving the container, while informing the logistics C2 system of what was taken. + +In the first instance, this may not sound very different in its implications to the current process. Over a relatively short period of time, however, the effect is to distribute many containers across the rear area, some of which are empty, while others remain full, some of which contain fuel and others not, and some of which contain specialist loads, while others contain standard stores. It rapidly becomes highly ambiguous for the adversary to know where anything is, or what any pattern might be. Containers can, of course, be periodically retrieved. Or one of the containers whose contents have not been depleted may be moved further forward as the force advances. The result, however, is to break any consistent pattern as to where close support logistics elements go, and thus mitigate the threat from pattern-of-life analysis. + +#### Planned Predictive Push and Last Mile Resupply + +The current logistics approach in most NATO militaries is primarily a pull logistics system at tactical echelons. Units call for what they need, and the logisticians work out how to get it to them. Logisticians may well pre-position stores that they anticipate being needed, but this is usually driven by the manoeuvre formations’ planning process, with the logistics plan intended to enable the scheme of manoeuvre. The logisticians work under the manoeuvre forces for several reasons, but an important one is that the manoeuvre forces take the highest burden of the risk, and therefore the logistics troops are combat service support. Ultimately, UK doctrine stipulates that “sustainment is a means to an end. Sustainment should always support the mission”. + +The future operating environment is one in which targeting logistics is likely to be systematic among advanced militaries, because of the disproportionate impact it has on the capacity of combat forces to operate. Moreover, rather than logistics troops being a high pay-off target of opportunity, militaries increasingly have the means to reach over one another and strike the tail. The result is that logisticians must be significantly more proactive in planning their movements. Consequently, movement will often be discontinuous from the wider scheme of manoeuvre. The caching of materiel rather than its handover is a good example of something that facilitates this transition. The logistics planners may also require the support of combat arms in some instances, to shape conditions for access. This is especially true of electronic warfare troops and air defence. + +A critical enabler for moving to an efficient push model is data. If the distance between centralised supply depots and the front is extending, then the risk is that critical materiel cannot reach units in time. This requires the right volumes of the right things to be pushed forwards in anticipation of need. Historically, push systems have been robust but inefficient. However, accurate predictive modelling can drive efficiency, drawing on data on actual consumption under various conditions. Since the caches are containerised, there is also less of a cost if the materiel is not used. It can be left in the container and recovered later, although it may be necessary to deny some critical materiel if it is at risk of being overrun. + +The combined arms element of the logistics plan becomes especially relevant in last mile resupply, from the caches to the sub-units. This will inevitably require movement along exposed GLOCs. The breakdown of company supplies to roughly four tactical vehicles allows for a small footprint to move rapidly along a GLOC. This ensures that only the most responsive fires are likely to prove a threat. UAVs, however, either directing artillery or striking themselves, are a major threat during this phase. The most effective means of reducing this threat are air defence engagements against larger UAVs and electronic protection against ISR and smaller strike UAVs. Navigational jamming is especially important, as even if an adversary gets a UAV over the convoy, it significantly complicates the accuracy of engagements. Disruption of navigation is not just applied against the UAV but also against the launcher, further corrupting the enemy kill chain. Jamming of control frequencies, meanwhile, is important for protection against terminally guided UAVs. + +Air defence assets are scarce, while electronic warfare capabilities risk causing considerable disruption to friendly C2 if they are not deconflicted with friendly activity. It is therefore very important that the mechanisms exist for logistics units to call upon and receive this support from the combat arms, which in turn requires the planning process to be responsive in processing these requests and applying appropriate control measures and deconfliction procedures. Support engineering, whether for mobility support or force protection, is another function that logisticians may need to call upon to expand their options. Here the deconfliction requirement is in capacity, rather than fratricide. + +A further critical function is logistical reconnaissance. This enables proactive push logistics by identifying areas that are appropriate for caches, and enabling the preparation of optimal sites for receipt of caches. For example, if pushing into an industrial area, warehouses or other facilities with large spaces with overhead protection offer a great opportunity to disguise and conceal dispersed caches. Route access, vehicle clearances and what to do with what might already be in the warehouses all require information to plan. + +Planning for the positioning of caches also provides an anticipated laydown that can be used by the joint force to plan protection of logistical supplies. The requirement here is not that each cache be allocated a cordon of troops, which would be prohibitively burdensome. Nevertheless, it does make sense for shipping containers containing ammunition to be kept under observation. This could be achieved by remotely rigging a camera and running the feed from it via cable to a hide position. Locking the container can also create a barrier to civilians tampering with the contents. Simply having troops with overwatch of the site, rather than ringing it, is sufficient in many environments. Of course, even having troops in overwatch would be onerous if it is a dedicated task. However, on a battlefield where reserves need to remain dispersed, logistical reconnaissance proves to be the basis to plan hiding positions for reserve troops, such that there is coincidental force protection for stores without driving concentration. A further function of this reconnaissance is that it provides information to identify points to which materiel might be recovered. Via these means, therefore, using digitised C2 to disperse logistics hubs, moving ambiguous loads, and taking a combined arms approach to resupply, it becomes possible to resupply the force. + + +### III. Medical Support + +Although some medical supplies require special handling, the provision of medical logistics forwards can be made robust through the wider techniques discussed in Chapter II. Medical support, however, entails a greater reverse logistical component; significant effort is expended treating casualties and then bringing them away from the frontline. Also, the adversary often sets the level of demand, at a time and location of choosing. This chapter considers necessary adaptations to medical support on the future battlefield. It focuses on discrete medical capabilities – rather than on those intrinsic to the fighting units – and looks in particular at additional pre-hospital care teams and forward Role 2 surgical capabilities, as these are likely to be most impacted by recent developments. + +#### Prioritising Mobility in Medical Capability + +The transparent battlefield will always expose a medical treatment facility (MTF). Even if the MTF itself can be hidden (for example, underground), the casualties flowing to and from it will always set a distinctive pattern; for example, researchers were able to map the first surge in Covid-19 medical attendances in Wuhan using satellite imagery of hospital car parks. They will also be highly visible in the electromagnetic spectrum, because of the C2 required to facilitate casualty movement and reach-back for specialist advice. + +Loss of an MTF will hugely complicate the demands placed on other support elements and will directly affect the psyche of the fighting force and the population at home, putting a state’s political will to the test. This combination of visibility and value makes healthcare a logical target. IHL aspired to mitigate this by making medical units non-combatant – taking them out of the fight and protecting them, in return for their duty to treat any and all who need it. Sadly, this protection is ineffective. Attacks on MTFs are commonplace; the WHO recorded 806 in 18 countries in the first 10 months of 2023. In some conflicts, MTF targeting appears to be state policy – most notably Syria, where 274 government-attributed attacks affected hospitals, compared with only one on a school in the same timeframe. Attacks on military medical facilities are rarely publicised in Ukraine, for reasons of operational security, but are nevertheless frequent. + +Given that hospitals will be found and targeted, the enemy imposes a critical decision on planners. Should they place medical facilities beyond the range of attack (and/or harden them to survive), or simply make them very difficult to target? With long-range precision fires, a static MTF can never be close enough to deliver life-saving interventions early and remain safe from attack, unless it is also protected. This concept is not new – underground hospitals were used during the First World War and are commonplace in parts of Syria and Ukraine. However, this brings additional constraints, dramatically reducing the number of feasible deployment sites and fixing the facility. Critically, while this approach protects the hospital, the rest of the network assumes proportionally greater risk; even if varying routes and timings, ambulances and resupply always end up at the same place. + +The US is already moving away from fixed canvas or opportunistic hard-standing for C2 nodes, “focus(ing) on mobility as the chief mechanism for survivability”. For Role 2 MTFs to achieve this level of mobility, they must either be smaller, limiting capacity, or subdivided, limiting efficiency. The size of vehicle required to enable truly mobile medical provision has historically been considered unfeasible. But with Boxer command vehicles (7.93 m long and 3 m wide) assessed as survivable on the battlefield, that assumption is no longer tenable. The total size (and hence capacity) of an MTF still presents challenges. A common Role 2 configuration contains: two resuscitation beds; one operating table; two intensive care beds; a ward area (up to 12 beds); as well as x-ray and laboratory equipment, and blood fridges. That significant footprint actually works in favour of the distributed model. Role 2s usually experience relatively little clinical activity. Mass is only required when demand for life-saving damage control resuscitation (DCR) peaks. A modular approach would allow smaller, dispersed units (each containing, for example, an operating table, an intensive care bed and a blood fridge) to move closer to likely points of demand. Modules would only come together and reconstitute mass when absolutely needed, for exactly as long as needed. + +Highly mobile MTFs bring considerable advantages: they can move whenever there is a risk that they have been targeted; RVs with resupply or evacuation platforms can be different every time; they can easily be redeployed if reinforcement is needed elsewhere; they can operate far closer to the point of wounding, potentially increasing the pool of salvageable patients that can be reached; they can set up in a far wider range of locations; and they can always choose to fix in an ideal location (even a distant, underground, protected one) if that suits the operation, whereas a static hospital can never choose to move in anything approaching a relevant timeframe. + +Mobility also brings considerable challenges, most notably the significant changes to TTPs that will be required to cope with movement and their reduced capacity, and the vast increase in coordination (and so communication) and logistical support to manage many moving parts. Perhaps most important, if it fails to move in time, a mobile MTF is much more likely to be destroyed. While dispersal will reduce the likelihood of a strike being mission-killing, it is unlikely to be hardened to the same degree as a static facility, and so there will be losses. + +#### Adapting TTPs to Enable Mobility + +Surgery cannot yet take place in the face of vibration and sudden movements. While a static facility can operate continuously, a mobile unit can only deliver care when stationary. That said, Defence Medical Services surgeons have confirmed that most DCR procedures could be tactically paused for 10 minutes, given five minutes’ notice to move, allowing doctors to “cross-clamp” major blood vessels and then secure safety harnesses. This would allow a targeted vehicle to rapidly relocate, then apply the brakes and continue the procedure. Clearly this would not meet the NHS standard of care – and will likely result in worse outcomes for some than if the operation was never interrupted – but on a battlefield, it offers the best balance of urgency and safety. + +Treatment would need to be reconceptualised in tactical bounds, interspersed by very short-notice moves. This applies equally to tactical medical evacuation (MEDEVAC). In Ukraine, enemy air defence coverage means that patients must be transported by ground vehicles; terrain (and the time needed to cross it) becomes critical in determining what treatments can be undertaken and when. Delivery of care in ambulances moving on roads is difficult; over rough terrain it is impossible. The holy grail of “in-transit care”, which brought such improvements in survival in Afghanistan and Iraq, will at best be replaced with “interrupted transit care”. + +Timelines must also be re-evaluated. For logistical enablers, MEDEVAC will compete with the forward movement of ammunition. Commanders will prioritise the latter, as ammunition scarcity will increase casualties through reduced suppression of the enemy, perhaps even leading to defeat of the force, whereas delayed evacuation of casualties will only impact the minority of salvageable wounded. This calculus, along with the practicalities of movement under fire, has at times pushed casualty evacuation in Ukraine to over 15 hours. While enhancements to Role 1 facilities and the continuing focus on prolonged field care will mitigate this problem somewhat, fundamentally, the force must either accept clearly preventable deaths, or move advanced care forward. + +Risking scarce medical expertise forwards will demand clarity on who these personnel are there to care for. The human body is remarkably robust and survives most injuries, even if care is significantly delayed – 99.2% of all UK armed forces personnel treated in the hospital at Camp Bastion survived. Sadly, some will die, regardless of the proximity and capability of medical services, as their injuries are simply too severe to recover from. Of all UK service personnel killed in action in Afghanistan, 87% died before reaching hospital – two-thirds within 10 minutes of injury. Even with the current pace of innovation, it is unlikely this figure will improve significantly in the foreseeable future, as access to the necessary advanced care inside that timeframe will rarely be feasible while in contact. The patients who will benefit from advanced medical care in this environment are those who will die if untreated but are “salvageable” given the right level of care (DCR) in the right timeframe. These patients hide among the 35% who were not killed immediately, but died in what is currently the pre-hospital stage. + +How long do they have to reach DCR? There is a 33% survival benefit if surgery is accessible within an hour, but the ideal timeframe is probably shorter; giving blood only improves survival within 36 minutes of injury. Experienced military pre-hospital doctors did not believe they could keep salvageable patients alive for two hours pending surgery. The inescapable conclusion is that salvageable patients need advanced pre-hospital care surgery, well within the first hour, not the two proposed in NATO doctrine when the medical system is under strain. + +![image01](https://i.imgur.com/W5pBJH1.png) +_▲ __Figure 1: Analysis of Time to Death for Those Killed in Action.__ Source: Stacey Webster et al., “Killed in Action (KIA): An Analysis of Military Personnel Who Died of Their Injuries Before Reaching a Definitive Medical Treatment Facility in Afghanistan”, BMJ Military Health (Vol. 167, 2021), pp. 84–88. Reproduced with permission._ + +Each DCR vehicle would probably only have space for one surgeon, an assistant and an anaesthetic practitioner. Single-surgeon teams always run the risk that they are the “wrong” specialist for a given problem; for example, an orthopaedic (limb) surgeon faced with an abdominal wound or a general (abdominal) surgeon treating an amputation of a limb could not typically deal with the injury completely within their normal scope of practice. But in Defence, both can be made competent in the immediate control of any bleeding, even if it is not in their specialist area. The “clamshell thoracotomy”, taught to all UK pre-hospital doctors (who are typically not surgeons at all) is one such technique. With minimal equipment, the practitioner opens the patient’s chest to access the heart and main blood vessels. Once the bleeding is controlled – on average 4.6 minutes later – they have bought some time for rendezvous with the ideal team to continue. + +These modules could operate in “pods”, with multiple surgical vehicles supported by a mobile intensive care ward (which could also undertake MEDEVAC). If patients need a larger or reconfigured team, the vehicles could come together for a short period, reorganise to provide the interventions needed and then disperse again. Fresh modules can be en route (bringing critical resupply) while full modules can MEDEVAC back to the next echelon of care. This would also build resilience in the event that a vehicle is hit; the remaining surgical and critical care capability will still endure, ready to be fully regenerated by vehicles moving from another area to support, or battle casualty replacements arriving. In the event of mass casualty incidents (MCI), multiple pods could converge on the affected areas, boosting medical cover at critical moments in a way that static facilities never could. + +![image02](https://i.imgur.com/Ueukfab.png) +_▲ __Figure 2: Patient Movement Towards Modular vs Traditional Role 2.__ Source: Author generated._ + +Containerising these modules allows them to be delivered by any platform “fitted for, rather than with”, enabling far greater transport flexibility. If an operation required them to take up a static position, they could be placed into dug-out scrapes or underground, dramatically increasing their protection. For concealment and deception they could be sited anywhere a container would not look out of place, such as a supermarket supply entrance, ready to be picked up and redeployed when needed. Two-operating table collapsible versions of such modules exist (within standard 6-m ISO-container dimensions). While these cannot contain patients while “collapsed”, they illustrate the feasibility of the concept. + +The natural state of the MTF should be dispersed over a kilometre or more, operating within 30 minutes of the units for which it is providing support, and either in motion or moving frequently (and able to change location immediately). If static, it should be hidden and/or protected. It can be in the vicinity of defences and enablers (excavators and so on), but dispersed enough to not draw fire. + +#### Precision Triage, Treatment and Palliative Care + +This construct only provides the care necessary to save lives that would otherwise be lost. Most medical care falls outside that definition. Disease and non-battle injury will continue to be the predominant source of medical work (and thus logistical effort), as it has for centuries. In general, these risks are predictable and well understood, and force protection (while heavily reduced over the years) remains effective. In contrast, unpredictable demand will normally be driven by enemy action. The general threat of attack is predictable, but the timings and impact of attacks will be highly variable. Intelligent demand planning will enable more routine rather than emergent resupply, but as the enemy always has a say, the system will have to be ready for large and unexpected spikes. NATO modelling suggests high-tempo combat operations might reasonably result in 600 to 1,000 casualties per day, which anecdotally is close to the Ukrainian experience. In such MCI, the 50% or more triaged to the lowest urgency (“walking wounded”) have a survival rate of over 97%, even if care is delayed. Given that small, mobile surgical teams are extremely limited in their capacity, patients who do not need DCR cannot go to them, or they will be overwhelmed almost immediately. Three other treatment and evacuation pathways are therefore needed in parallel to DCR: treatment of minor injuries, returning the soldier to the fight; non-time-critical injuries that exceed the capability of Role 1 and so must move to high-capacity hospitals in the rear; and providing a comfortable, dignified death for those who will succumb regardless of treatment, without consuming resuscitation capacity that others need. + +To manage four treatment pathways, Role 1 must be empowered to triage patients accurately, putting patients into the correct pipeline as early as possible. While triage is easy in concept, it is very challenging in reality. The systems taught in NATO are designed for the lowest levels of medical provider. They are simple, but that constrains their accuracy. Because medical resources were abundant in recent conflicts, triage was optimised to be sensitive – trying not to miss someone who needs DCR. Sensitivity is bought at the cost of specificity; the ability to protect resources by not allocating them to people who do not need them. Current systems are around 60% sensitive and 70% specific; in a 100-patient incident with “classical” casualty distributions (where 10 need DCR, 20 can be delayed and 70 are walking wounded) these tools would send 12 patients to the Role 2. Unfortunately, six of those would be “over-triaged”, not needing DCR, but displacing six others who did. + +Over-triage can be mitigated by forward deployment of enhanced pre-hospital care. Existing force structures allow for two such teams in every medical regiment, led by an emergency medicine (EM) doctor. Thus far their role has been poorly articulated and rarely exercised. EM doctors have vast trauma experience and are highly capable of selecting out the patients who need DCR. Typically, they operate around 90% sensitivity and 85% specificity; in the above scenario they would also have sent 12 patients to DCR, but nine of these would have needed it. With enhanced capabilities such as ultrasound they may well be even more accurate. This layer of precision triage must be applied as soon after injury as possible, which will require real-time sharing of video and physiological measurements. This will obviate the need for casualties to be physically concentrated at the Role 1 for triage to take place. Forward EM can also start DCR at Role 1 for those who need it (assuming the Role 2 is not able to access them directly, faster), and will increase the capacity of Role 1. Casualties who exceed the capabilities of a reinforced Role 1 but do not need DCR typically require only limited medical input in the forward areas. They need to move to the rear as soon as it is safe. In many cases this might be facilitated by remote advice and monitoring from the enhanced Role 1. + +The capacity of Role 1 to return soldiers to the fight must also be increased. At the moment, even relatively minor wounds (for example a 30 cm laceration) would normally move back to an Role 2/3 for management. Advances in pain relief; the ability to cleanse large and complex wounds; and the advent of smart dressings and splints, which could reduce pain, encourage healing and even warn of developing infection, may play pivotal roles in the rapid return to duty. Unfortunately, these areas are not privileged in terms of research funding. There should also be a focus on the “lowest capable provider” concept, artificially increasing the available workforce by protocolising treatments and innovating delivery mechanisms that make treatments safer and easier to administer, making them accessible to lower-trained personnel. + +Palliation is a normal part of hospital medical care, but to be effective in war it needs to be firmly established at Role 1. It must be supported by effective training and development of protocols and equipment that allow patients to die in comfort and dignity, even in adverse and austere conditions. + +#### Digitising Medical C2 + +The changes proposed above depend on data and effective C2. Mobile Role 2 and highly interconnected Role 1 telemedicine will come at huge cost in terms of bandwidth and assured communications. This will only get worse when commanders harvest the real-time information benefits of wearable devices (such as smart watches). If these become a normal part of the C2 architecture, it is inevitable that medics will take advantage of the ability to monitor the physiological state of the force. Closely linked to the problem of exponentially increasing information is the requirement for the medical C2 system to degrade gracefully in the face of electronic warfare. The system must assume that at times it will not be able to pass information freely, and so effective backup systems will be necessary. These challenges must not be taken on by Defence Medical Services alone, but rather must be rolled up into the similar and far larger problem faced by logistics as a whole. The capabilities and TTPs outlined above should improve the provision of medical support to deployed forces under modern battlefield conditions. + + +### IV. Maintenance, Recovery and Repair + +To use vehicles and equipment in combat is to have them damaged. Furthermore, high pressure, heavy weights and sudden travel on uneven surfaces put stress through vehicles and systems that guarantees failures. This is inevitable, irrespective of how well-designed a platform is, with or without the enemy. When the effect of fire comes into play, especially during offensive manoeuvre, it is evident that vehicles will be damaged in large numbers. Being able to recover and repair these damaged vehicles is the difference between the force being able to sustain its operations and degrading rapidly, losing mobility and combat power. Decisive damage to enemy formations is often achieved when maintenance areas are overrun. This chapter, therefore, explores how maintenance and repair can be improved. + +#### Digital Twins and Predictive Maintenance + +There are different approaches to maintaining complex systems around the world. The Soviet model was to track how long a system had been used and replace components at specified intervals. The assumption was that within a given period, some components would have become compromised, but the probability that enough components were damaged to impair the functioning of the device was acceptably low. This allowed for a systematic push logistics system for sustaining complex equipment like helicopters and electronic warfare platforms. NATO’s approach has largely been to continually check systems and repair them based on the identification of faults. This approach is maintenance intensive but allows for the fielding of more precise systems as the tolerances for a system where a proportion of parts are expected to fail are necessarily greater. The NATO system also requires spares to be called forward responsively when faults are discovered. + +The concept of a digital twin has been pursued for some time. A digital twin is a digital representation of a system that accurately reflects how it is operating. The concept is becoming increasingly viable for two reasons. First, as platforms increasingly depend on software for their operation, the data they collect during operation on their own functioning is built in. It is not adding complex functionality, but exploiting what is already enabling the system to function. Second, as design has become digitised, files are also created against which the functioning of the system can be compared, so that digital twins can be calibrated at the point of manufacture. Comparison of the data received and the ideal performance characteristics can not only identify what exactly has broken but, as stress begins to move across a system to compensate for the irregular functioning of a component, detect that components are going to fail in the future. + +The increased efficiency of predictive maintenance based on accurate mission data is best illustrated with helicopters. Using digital twins, Sikorsky has had the approved fatigue life of critical components in its helicopters extended by the Federal Aviation Authority by up to 75%, owing to the accumulation of precise data on fatigue over time compared with the assessed probable fatigue rate based on mathematical projections during the initial testing of the airframes. Using such models, it becomes possible to not only preserve functioning components for longer and reduce the time and tooling required in vulnerable positions to diagnose faults, but also to anticipate what may break, and thereby push forward and cache relevant spare parts before they must be changed. Digital twins therefore offer the opportunity to both reduce the forward logistics required by maintainers and to limit the footprint of those areas where vehicles are maintained. + +Digital twins require that maintainers can plug into the system and download its mission data for transmission to update the twin at periodic intervals. One problem is that this reduces the viability of modifying vehicles in ways that cannot be represented in the twin. If additional armour or armaments, for example, significantly alter the pattern of vibration or weight distribution, there is a risk that faults will appear when the system is operating normally. Furthermore, basic mechanical systems that lack internal monitoring will not be able to generate the data to support digital twins. For this, and a range of other reasons, digital twins will likely be prioritised for those systems that are highly software enabled, such as air defences, and for complex systems such as helicopters. Autonomous vehicles will also be prime candidates to follow this process. Many platforms – where the aim is to reduce their unit cost and to ruggedise their performance – will not have a digital twin nor the sensors to self-monitor. It is therefore important that while this capability is seized where it adds value, it is not pursued by militaries in a manner that drives spiralling complexity and cost. + +Managing an effective digital twin requires a different approach to intellectual property (IP) in contracting. During war, the adaptation of platforms must happen rapidly in response both to threat and to industrial pressures and supply chain disruption. If this adaptation cannot be paired with the digital twin, the system of predictive maintenance breaks down. However, if a company owns the digital twin, it essentially has a monopoly and a great deal of leverage in any adaptations to the platform. Militaries may argue that as they are buying the physical product they should also receive and own the digital product. The problem is that the digital product also necessarily contains IP that companies will wish to retain. The need to avoid being locked in to a single vendor must, therefore, be balanced against offering protection to companies’ IP. + +#### Additive Manufacture and Modularity + +With digital twins only relevant for a proportion of military systems, simpler mechanical systems and components can be repaired and maintained by other means, while similarly reducing the signature of facilities and the pattern of life caused by a constant flow of forward supply. The two most relevant methods are additive manufacturing and modular platform design. + +The ability to hold large containerised 3D printers forwards means that mechanical parts can, as long as digitised drawings are available, be printed in response to need. Thus, if a vehicle suffers damage or a component fails, this can be reported and printed at the point of repair, with no need to hold large stocks of spares, locate them and transport them to the front. This reduces not only the movement of materiel but also the number of pieces of information that must be transmitted within the support system. There are issues with the longevity of 3D printed parts, and a risk that different heat treatment may displace stress to another part of a system, cascading damage. Advances in 3D printing will improve the fidelity of the parts, and often the longevity issue surpasses the anticipated life of the vehicle in combat, even if this is a sub-optimal approach for a fleet being maintained in peacetime. 3D printing does require raw materials to work. Raw materials can, however, be moved forwards more efficiently than finished parts. They generally pack more efficiently, and because a body of raw material can be turned into a wide range of parts, there is less wastage through the movement and stockpiling of parts that end up not being needed. + +Many vehicles today contain complex systems that are not likely to be 3D printed forwards. Although additive manufacture is being used to print circuitry into the body of systems, for example, this requires highly sophisticated machine tooling that would not be economical to push forwards. Thus, while mechanical components can be printed and replaced on systems, electronic subsystems likely cannot. As the sophistication of these components increases, the skills and tools required to repair them also increase. Rapidly, the maintenance system begins to suffer from workforce constraints. The efficiency of the maintenance system can, however, be greatly bolstered through modular design. For example, vehicles are increasingly carrying complex sensors, from electro-optical balls to radar. These can and will be damaged if the vehicle comes under fire. They are very precise components and the tolerances involved mean that these sensors are unlikely to be able to be printed. The vehicle is also likely to be uncompetitive without its sensors. However, if the vehicle has a hard-point interface for the sensor, with contact surfaces that transfer power and extract data from a sensor, the maintainer can simply remove the entire damaged sensor, replace it with a new sensor and send the damaged sensor rearwards for it to be repaired in a location where appropriate equipment and trained personnel can be safely based. Unlike medical support, time for these repairs is non-critical. Modularity also enables the change of the sensor payload over time, noting that this may require updates to the mission data files on the vehicle to be able to ingest and display different kinds of sensor data. + +The virtue of modular components in terms of the survivability of repair and maintenance is that they significantly reduce the time window during which maintainers are concentrated with the damaged vehicle. Rather than working on the platform, it becomes possible to simply approach it, remove the damaged modular part, replace it and withdraw with the damaged part. The standardisation of components, and in particular the hard-point interfaces, across a force can further facilitate this process, as it reduces the range of parts that must be held by the logistics system. + +#### Deception as Force Protection + +Despite the reduced signature and increased tempo of repairs achievable through precise systems monitoring, predictive maintenance, additive manufacturing and modular design, many vehicles will need to receive attention for a protracted period and may also require equipment with a large footprint. Changing the engine on a large armoured vehicle, for example, likely requires a crane, and even once a power pack is replaced, it often takes time to confirm that wiring and other sub-systems are interfacing with the system properly. Cranes have a large signature. Many of the systems used by maintainers – additive manufacturing, for example – also rely on power, so there must be an electromagnetic spectrum signature. + +If it is accepted that repair systems are critical for maintaining tempo, then having repair sites in the indirect fire zone is unavoidable. One of the best means of protecting these facilities is through deception, rather than concealment. One of the advantages that repair workshops have in this context is that they have some of the best decoys possible: actual vehicles that have either been battle damaged or cannibalised and are therefore now disposable. The difference between a damaged or destroyed vehicle and one that is damaged and awaiting repair is not analytically easy to determine. It is also possible for functional vehicles to conceal themselves as damaged. Since maintainers have the tools for moving vehicles, they can hide in the noise of battle damage. + +Even with these measures, however, there is a growing tendency for militaries to strike damaged vehicles to prevent their recovery. In many instances, vehicles can be more cheaply immobilised or damaged than destroyed, but once immobilised they can be economically destroyed when the battle allows. Again, deception is a key technique for preserving damaged vehicles from follow-up strikes. For example, the burning of tyres, or similar material, next to a damaged vehicle will product black smoke, which is almost always perceived as an indicator that the vehicle is on fire and will therefore suffer warping and other permanent damage from heat that will render it non-recoverable. This, and similar techniques like reporting the vehicle as destroyed over communications systems, can allow for damaged vehicles to remain in place for later recovery. + +Even with these techniques, recovery and repair workshops will likely be pushed back. It will also therefore be essential to find protection from overhead observation for key equipment such as cranes. The use of industrial buildings, for example, is ideal because it provides overhead cover, as well as being mainly empty space. Battle damage assessment through corrugated iron roofs, for example, is difficult. Energy provision, meanwhile, can partly be handled through burying generators or drawing from civilian infrastructure in depth. The problem with this approach, like field hospitals established in hardened infrastructure, is that it is not dynamically available for different axes. However, unlike casualties, vehicles do not deteriorate rapidly over time once damaged, so the extended timeline to reach maintenance is not a mission critical constraint. + + +### Conclusion + +This paper has assessed the challenges presented to tactical sustainment operations during high-intensity warfare. The paper posits that the capacity to find and strike throughout operational depth makes sustainment functions increasingly vulnerable. Past procedures, from centralising sustainment hubs for efficiency to consistent handover points between echelons, and the combat arms setting the demand for sustainment functions, all exacerbate the threat and thus the sustainability of the force. To mitigate these challenges, this paper has argued that clusters of technologies are allowing the expanded application of well-established principles, including dispersion, deception and convoys. + +The proposed adaptations to the sustainment of the force may make the force more resilient, but that does not mean that the planning assumptions with which combat arms plan and execute operations are unaffected. The volume of materiel that can be accumulated from dispersed caches, the duration of the window of opportunities to push or pull materiel along contested GLOCs, and the scale of operations at which genuine ambiguity is achieved all necessarily have significant implications for how the combat arms approach the expenditure and commitment of their units. Attempting to reach exact conclusions on these questions in this paper would be premature. It would require extensive wargaming and experimentation to produce a robust answer. However, several hypotheses as to the impact of contested logistics on combat arms activities can be suggested for further enquiry. + +One critical question is the impact of the system described upon the tempo of operations. Mobile medical capability should enable medical provision to keep pace with advancing forces. By contrast, the ability to achieve ambiguity of cargo and to disperse reduces dramatically as caches must follow an advancing force. It follows that even using these techniques, a force has a limit of advance before its logistics can be targeted and its momentum severed. The critical question, therefore, is how far combat arms assess that they can punch, and how wide a salient must be before ambiguity and dispersion of support functions can be maintained. + +Another critical question that arises for combat arms is the judgement of how much equipment can in fact be recovered. Once equipment is pulled back behind the FLOT, the techniques described in this paper may be able to obscure the repair process sufficiently to bring vehicles back into the fight. However, if recovering damaged vehicles proves non-viable, given the ability to cheaply and precisely deliver follow-up strikes, it may be that the proportion of equipment that is destroyed rather than damaged increases. If this is the case it may have profound implications for how vehicles are designed, for if it is not anticipated that they will be recovered and repaired, there will be a drive to minimise the number of specialist systems mounted on them. + +There is also the question of the tail’s tail. A Role 2 hospital that must constantly traverse rough terrain is going to have breakdowns and may need mobility support to cross certain obstacles. A logistics system premised on dispersing caches off road needs a high level of mobility, but will wear out vehicles. Dispersed forces also need greater organic firepower for force protection. There will be a point at which the logistics system is consuming too much materiel and is limiting the efficiency of the force. Finding the balance is critically important. + +The combination of understanding how many logistics vehicles can be efficiently sustained and how many caches can be pushed into an area before the logistics system loses its protection gives an indication as to how much materiel can be held within a given area. This in turn determines the size of combat arms that can be supported for a given front. This is a vital equation, because it sets the force density that the combat arms must be optimised to deal with, and thus the levels of mutual support, lethality and ammunition consumption that the force can sustain. Getting this equation wrong risks having the force overmatched along the front. + +The point of these concluding observations is that far too often force development starts with the combat arms and then allocates sustainment resources based on their anticipated supply requirements. There is still merit to this process, but it is also important – now that sustainment functions are themselves directly threatened – to work in the other direction. Without calculating what size of forces can be sustained, over what distances and at what tempo, the risk is that armies try to build combined arms formations that lack stamina in the fight. Sustainment may be a means to an end rather than an end in itself, but if neglected, it will still lose a force a war. + +--- + +__Jack Watling__ is Senior Research Fellow for Land Warfare at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI). Jack works closely with the British military on the development of concepts of operation, assessments of the future operating environment, and conducts operational analysis of contemporary conflicts. + +__Si Horne__, Colenel, is the Chief of the General Staff’s Visiting Fellow at RUSI. An Army Emergency Medicine doctor, he has supported operations in Northern Ireland, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone and South Sudan as well as serving as the Emergency Medicine lead for the Army. diff --git a/_collections/_hkers/2024-04-16-central-america-nearshoring.md b/_collections/_hkers/2024-04-16-central-america-nearshoring.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..3a65fef4 --- /dev/null +++ b/_collections/_hkers/2024-04-16-central-america-nearshoring.md @@ -0,0 +1,114 @@ +--- +layout: post +title : Central America Nearshoring +author: Daniel F. Runde, et al. +date : 2024-04-16 12:00:00 +0800 +image : https://i.imgur.com/F1BRfHY.jpeg +#image_caption: "" +description: "Expanding Workforce Development to Enable Nearshoring in the Northern Triangle" +excerpt_separator: +--- + +_The Northern Triangle of Central America holds potential as a nearshoring destination for U.S. companies. Multiple stakeholders have the opportunity to address labor market challenges by expanding and creating workforce development initiatives._ + + + +### Introduction + +The Northern Triangle of Central America (NTCA) — composed of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras — holds promise as a potential nearshoring hub for U.S. companies with facilities far abroad. With a predominantly youthful population, close proximity to the United States, and emerging sectors such as textiles, agribusiness, manufacturing, and business process outsourcing (BPO), these countries have the potential to achieve higher levels of development similar to Costa Rica or Panama if they can attract significant domestic and foreign direct investment (FDI) and develop their workforces. + +Investing in human capital — that is, people’s knowledge, skills, and qualifications — and attracting companies into the region are long-term strategies worth pursuing. Since 2019, over 2 million people, particularly youth, have emigrated from the NTCA in search of opportunities elsewhere, mainly in the United States. Attracting new companies and investing in workforce development initiatives could help stabilize the region by providing people with jobs, income, and future opportunities for training and career growth. The U.S. government and the private sector have signaled commitment to increasing investment in the region through the Partnership for Central America and the White House’s Call to Action in the NTCA. Workforce development is not an easy or quick fix and must be a long-term interest for U.S. companies and development agencies as they engage in the region. + + +### The Untapped Potential of Economic Sectors in the NTCA + +There are many economic development opportunities that would help NTCA countries increase formal employment and promote cross-sectoral linkages, thus creating compounding economic growth in the region. Among the most promising sectors with high growth potential are agribusiness, textiles, and manufacturing (e.g., in auto parts and electric components), as well as services such as BPO and tourism. + +- __Business Process Outsourcing:__ BPO refers to services such as accounting, information technology (IT), call centers, payment platforms, and others that larger companies can outsource. About 48,000 Guatemalans, 80 percent of whom are bilingual, are employed by the customer service outsourcing and other BPO services. El Salvador hosts more than 70 call centers and BPO operations, employing 26,000 people, while Honduras has 47 call centers that employ more than 17,000 people. According to a report by the International Finance Corporation titled Digital Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Central America, BPO and financial services firms tend to be the first adopters of technology, including cloud computing, real-time market information tools, cybersecurity technologies, and e-commerce platforms. The report also showed that technology-using firms tend to grow the fastest. To capitalize on these sectors, workers need to be equipped with specific skills, including language competencies, digital literacy, and other “soft” skills such as customer service and good communication. + +- __Textiles:__ The textile and garment sector generates 270,000 direct and indirect jobs in El Salvador, 180,000 in Guatemala, and 105,000 in Honduras. Companies such as Fruit of the Loom, SanMar, Elcatex, Parkdale Mills, and Crowley have established operations in the NTCA and have taken advantage of incentives from the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR) with the United States, which took effect in 2006. For example, yarn used to produce garments is covered under CAFTA-DR, and the cotton used is of U.S. origin. President and CEO of the National Council of Textile Organizations, Kim Glas, announced in February 2023 that apparel imports, many containing U.S. textile inputs, had increased 24 percent in the past year. Moreover, the Covid-19 pandemic provided additional incentive for U.S. companies to nearshore U.S. textile trade with China to NTCA countries. + +- __Agribusiness:__ A quarter of the population in the Northern Triangle works in the agricultural sector. Honduras has a variety of microclimates that allow for a diversification of production, and nearly 70 percent of Guatemala’s territory is used for agricultural purposes. All countries in the region enjoy duty-free access for the entry of fresh fruits and vegetables to different markets due to various free trade agreements, including DR-CAFTA. Smallholder farmers in the Northern Triangle account for about 50 percent of agriculture exports, including commodities such as coffee, sugar, bananas, and other tropical fruits. Although there is a lot of potential within this sector, these countries still rely on products with little value added. + +- __Manufacturing:__ In 1965, Mexico’s maquiladora policy was adopted by the Northern Triangle countries. The policy, which enables producers and investors “tax-free importation of raw materials and intermediate inputs which they process and/or assemble and then reexport, again tax-free, to the United States,” paved the way for more FDI in the region and regional trade agreements such as NAFTA and CAFTA-DR. According to 2022 survey data from the International Labour Organization (ILO), manufacturing, as defined by the International Standard Industrial Classification, accounts for 13.7 percent of total employment in both Guatemala and Honduras and 14.5 percent in El Salvador. + +Companies in these sectors need to continue to hire qualified workers that possess a variety of skills. For example, to conduct BPO services, employees need to master languages, in this case both English and Spanish, and need to know how to use information and communications technology (ICT) equipment. Similarly, to be able to operate specific machinery and technology, workers need to possess technical skills and different levels of digital literacy. To conduct more sophisticated engineering projects or work in advanced technical trades, workers need training in science, technology, engineering, and medicine (STEM) fields. + +Many of these skills, competencies, and knowledge can be imparted at schools, universities, and training institutions, while others can be learned with practice, working on the job. However, proxy studies suggest that citizens from these countries are not likely to be proficient in English and would benefit from higher levels of education achievement. + +Companies that operate in these countries find it hard to hire and retain qualified workers. While the chronic underdevelopment of human capital is preventing many economic sectors from growing, this challenge is not insurmountable. Development institutions, the U.S. government, private companies, and governments in the Northen Triangle have the aligned interest of wanting to see a thriving, self-sufficient market-based economy simultaneously fueled by and contributing to a highly skilled workforce. + + +### Labor Market Challenges in the NTCA + +Weak human capital is a barrier for firms operating in the region. According to the World Bank’s Human Capital Index, which examines a combination of education, health, and employment metrics to assess human capital levels in a country, all three NTCA countries score slightly below the 56 percent average for Latin America and the Caribbean. Guatemala’s Human Capital Index score is 0.46, which means that the average child born in 2020 is estimated to be 46 percent as productive when they grow up compared to if the child enjoyed a complete education and full healthcare. Honduras and El Salvador score 48 percent and 55 percent, respectively. + +Moreover, results from the 2016 World Bank Enterprise Survey show that private firms in Honduras recognize human capital as a significant hurdle. In particular, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) face challenges such as lack of entrepreneurship training and skill development programs, burdensome labor regulations, and financial illiteracy. In Guatemala, SMEs perceive that they are unable to attract talent because they cannot compete with the pay scales of larger companies. At the same time, companies that offer quality technical training often find that individuals have such low levels of primary education that the technical education is too advanced for their mastery of the material. A worker’s inability to absorb technical training due to a low-quality or nonexistent education stifles many career prospects. The private sector is unable to further train workers for in-demand jobs if there is a failure to achieve basic educational standards. + +Both access to education and the quality of schooling are major challenges in the NTCA. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) for 2022, students in Guatemala and El Salvador achieved mean mathematics scores of 344 and 343, respectively, well below the OECD average of 472. The 2022 PISA assessment for reading and math shows that El Salvador and Guatemala rank at the bottom of the list. In countries with such low performance, many students drop out and find informal jobs. For example, much of Guatemala’s youth and adolescent populations do not reach high school, with 45.8 percent of secondary education students (typically considered ages 12–17) not enrolled in or attending school. A high dropout rate for high school suggests that education is perceived to have little utility for gaining future employment. In NTCA countries, early school dropout rates are, on average, 22 percent higher than in the rest of the Latin American and Caribbean region. + +To complicate matters, students who do not complete high school are more likely to find low-quality employment. Reinforcing this trend is a high correlation between educational attainment and employment in the formal sector. In Guatemala and Honduras, studies have found that workers who only reach lower secondary education are more likely to get jobs in the informal economy than workers with greater levels of education. Furthermore, unemployment and underemployment are common among younger age groups, and many young people remain idle, meaning they are not searching for education, training, or employment. + +Beyond human capital deficiencies, the region’s business environment scores very poorly and has not been able to attract significant FDI. Stringent labor market laws are a disservice for both workers and companies trying to recruit talent. Labor markets in all three NTCA countries are characterized by high levels of informality, a feature that can be attributed in part to overbearing labor regulations. For example, in Honduras, there is strong evidence to suggest that economic actors in the county bypass the constraints of the regulatory environment by maintaining few full-time employees, hiring a higher proportion of temporary workers, or avoiding formalization entirely. Data from the 2016 World Bank Enterprise Survey show that 72.5 percent of Honduran firms compete directly against unregistered or informal firms. + +Current labor laws preventing flexibility in the workplace needlessly add opportunity costs for workers, especially for young professionals and women. “Ordinary” working hours add rigidity to the labor market, as they limit the amount of work that must be completed during a certain window of the day. For example, in Honduras, standard working hours cannot exceed 44 hours per week and must be completed between 5:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m. This creates scheduling challenges for students that may need to attend classes during the day, or for parents wanting to work while their children are in school during the day and after they go to bed at night. Night work, a separate classification of labor, is performed between 7:00 p.m. and 5:00 a.m. and cannot exceed 36 hours per week. Guatemala has the same maximum of 44 hours per week for daytime workers but classifies a daytime worker using a smaller window of work occurring between 6:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. Such outdated labor laws remove the flexibility enjoyed by remote workers elsewhere. + +Moreover, working on a part-time basis or seasonally is not always allowed in the region. Guatemala did not ratify the ILO’s Part-Time Work Convention until 2017, only to have its constitutional court later suspend the framework. The Honduran congress created the National Hourly Employment Program in 2010, which allowed hourly contracts, but the program has since been met with resistance by labor unions, the Honduran Association of Labor Lawyers (AALH), and political opposition. Currently, only indefinite-term contracts, fixed-term contracts, and project contracts are permissible in Honduras and Guatemala. In an attempt to protect workers, these regulations are eliminating options for workers that would make education, skilling, and training outside of work more feasible. + + +### Improving Education and Easing Labor Market Barriers + +These challenges should not deter action or investment. The U.S. government and the private sector have an opportunity to work together to eliminate impediments and energize the labor market. There are three areas that require policy intervention to improve labor market outcomes in the region: (1) improving the business environment, including worker flexibility, (2) enhancing the quality of work and addressing informality, and (3) supporting educational institutions and workforce development initiatives. + +1. Improve the business environment. + + Rather than pursuing piecemeal reforms for particular sectors, countries in the region should take a less prescriptive approach by prioritizing legislative reforms that would benefit any sector of the economy. The World Justice Program’s 2023 Rule of Law Index, which includes 142 countries, ranks El Salvador 108th, Guatemala 111th, and Honduras Above regulatory reforms for specific sectors, NTCA countries should prioritize building better business environments. + + The private sector demands predictable government regulation to allow for more flexible hiring. Hourly wages and other business-friendly adjustments to labor law in the region would allow the workforce to expand in high seasons or work during peak hours only. Requiring all employees to be salaried restrains employers and employees from achieving the most mutually beneficial transactions. Not only would these measures entice prospective companies to invest in the region, but they would also help existing companies and workforce programs scale in size and impact. + +2. Improve working conditions and address informality. + + Second, there is also a need to improve the quality of the jobs and working conditions in the region. Studies show that people employed in the formal economy earn 19 percent more than those in the informal sector. In addition to job-matching programs and workforce training, private sector leaders can support formalization in their own supply chains, and governments in the region can lower administrative costs and help informal business navigate requirements for formalization. Likewise, local governments can incentivize corporate social responsibility through tax exemptions and other benefits. + + Increased digitization is an opportunity to promote formalization, delivery of services, and transparency in the enforcement of contracts. Digitization would help small informal businesses, including in the agricultural sector, to register and conduct operations beyond immediate markets through e-commerce. In addition to expanding market size, digitizing informal businesses can also improve access to credit and risk assessments. This is an important pillar of U.S. vice president Kamala Harris’s Call to Action to remove barriers to private sector investment in the Northern Triangle. El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras ranked 107th, 114th, and 180th, respectively, out of 193 countries in the United Nation’s 2022 E-Government Development Index, an assessment of country-level digital government landscapes. Moreover, the digitization of customs processes would save time and costs, encouraging further investment. Converting bureaucratic processes such as land and business registration to paperless interfaces would also help in the fight against corruption. + +3. Support educational institutions and workforce development initiatives. + + Finally, better education and workforce development efforts should be a high priority. Not all of these programs have to be led by large multinational companies. Supporting local businesses with a high potential to create employment is another avenue to enable private sector growth and job creation. Moreover, development agencies that have a significant footprint in the region, including the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Inter-American Development Bank, can be force multipliers for companies and governments in the region by absorbing some risk and providing capital. The United States has recognized the strategic significance and economic potential of the region and intends to support efforts to make technical training programs more relevant to employers’ needs. Training programs, boot camps, and other workforce initiatives have been implemented in the region to redeem the situation and provide better opportunities for workers. These initiatives can be replicated and scaled in other sectors (see Box 1 for a list of some of these initiatives). + + Collaboration among government entities and the private sector has led to the design and implementation of low-cost, high-reward training programs, helping to guarantee job formalization. For example, Advance, funded by USAID, is a workforce development program in Guatemala and Honduras (as well as the Dominican Republic and Jamaica) that brings together stakeholders from the educational and private sectors to identify priority economic sectors and strengthen technical education to meet labor market needs. + + Technical and vocational education and training (TVET) programs overseen by employers can also help guarantee that workers are equipped with the right sets of skills required to succeed in their field. Companies can provide technical expertise in curriculum development so that students are motivated to complete school knowing they will have the tools to succeed in the labor market. In addition, technology is shaping the labor market and redefining what skills are in demand. Ensuring TVET programs remain relevant amid technological changes requires continual curriculum development. + + However, those who would benefit from programs may not be aware of the opportunity. Local governments and schools should coordinate with those offering workforce development programs to advertise the availability of existing programs, whether through social service professionals or social media campaigns. Low enrollment in existing quality workforce development offerings is a missed opportunity for all parties. Raising awareness of current initiatives could spur further investment and boost enrollment. + + In addition, investing in bilingual education can reap significant benefits to build the region’s human capital. In Honduras, bilingual education used to be offered only in private institutions, but the Honduran government has recognized the value of bilingual education and is pushing for the country to be more attractive for bilingual companies. The Honduran minister of education is committed to opening bilingual teaching training centers in pursuit of his vision to have Honduras be a bilingual nation by 2032. A World Bank study found that bilingual students in Guatemala had higher attendance rates, lower dropout rates, and received higher scores on all subject matters. The incentives for school systems to equip students with language skills are clear. + +> #### `Promising Workforce Models` + +_`Domestic private sector leaders have partnered with higher education institutions to ensure that training is equipping students with the skills and knowledge needed to excel in the workplace. Below are several examples of promising models:`_ + +- _`Textiles: No formal textile training exists in the region despite industry demand for tens of thousands of workers. Think HUGE, a job creation business council for the region, has partnered with Universidad Tecnológica Centroamericana (UNITEC) in Honduras and the Wilson College of Textiles at North Carolina State University to establish an educational network for the textile industry. The agreement outlines plans for developing professional training courses, certificate programs, degrees, and funding for scholarships, fellowships, and internships.`_ + +- _`Electric Components: Yazaki North America announced a pilot-project factory in Guatemala in January 2022, becoming Guatemala’s first automotive parts manufacturer. The company also already operates in El Salvador. Yazaki chose to expand nearshoring efforts after experiencing supply chain difficulties during the Covid-19 pandemic. Another reason Guatemala was attractive for Yazaki was the commitment of El Instituto Técnico de Capacitación y Productividad (INTECAP), a leading Guatemalan organization with the mission of promoting employability and technical development, to create training programs specifically for Yazaki. Dozens of Guatemalan workers have already completed courses on topics ranging from industrial Ethernet and Profibus networks to mechanical and electrical measurements. Yazaki collaborated with USAID and the Guatemalan Ministry of Economy in making the investment.`_ + +- _`Value Chains: The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) approved a project in 2021 aimed at strengthening regional value chains in the Northern Triangle. It aims to foster talent development in the three countries by providing finishing school programs to equip workers with English and IT certifications. These skills will be highly valuable for success in the BPO sector, as well as the enhancement of regional and global integration in value chains.`_ + + _`Moreover, Alterna, in partnership with USAID, supports small and growing businesses by providing business and technical services. As of March 2024, 85 businesses had completed Alterna’s cultivation processes to improve business-market intelligence, gain strategic-financial knowledge, hone digital and soft skills, and access value chain connections and financing opportunities.`_ + +- _`Software: The Kodigo Academy for Creative Technology and the IDB Laboratory, the innovation laboratory of the IDB, invested $1.5 million into launching a software training program. The program aims to train 1,500 people by offering courses in various branches of the growing digital sector. In an era where many existing jobs are under threat of being replaced by artificial intelligence and automation, it is important to develop skills that will remain relevant as technology advances.`_ + + +### Conclusion + +U.S. companies looking to outsource production closer to home are usually turning to Canada and Mexico as their first choices for relocation. They should also consider NTCA countries as potential nearshoring locations. U.S. companies hesitating to invest or expand in the region due to workforce challenges can be a part of the solution, working in tandem with development organizations and international supporters to reduce security risks, energy costs, infrastructure insufficiencies, and corruption. + +One of the prerequisites to invest or expand operations in the NTCA is a skilled workforce. Governments, private actors, and donors must work in coordination to reduce barriers for investment while creating and expanding workforce development initiatives. A comprehensive approach is necessary, one that combines the private sector’s expertise and the international community’s access to finance with the public sector’s ability to build inviting regulatory environments and infrastructure. The U.S. government, other international partners, and multilateral development banks should champion the needed policy changes and use their funding of workforce development programs to get commitment from governments in the NTCA to pursue pro-business reforms. By supporting the stated ambitions of all Northern Triangle governments through the Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity, the U.S. government is investing in increasing the availability of meaningful economic opportunities for citizens in the NTCA. Building a shared vision and investing in proven programs can help the region stem the outflow of people, further stabilize, and unlock its full economic potential. + +--- + +__Daniel F. Runde__ is a senior vice president, William A. Schreyer Chair, and director of the Project on Prosperity and Development at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C. + +__Romina Bandura__ is a senior fellow with the Project on Prosperity and Development at CSIS. + +__Austin Hardman__ is a research assistant with the Project on Prosperity and Development at CSIS. diff --git a/_collections/_hkers/2024-04-17-uks-air-defence-command-and-control.md b/_collections/_hkers/2024-04-17-uks-air-defence-command-and-control.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..8665b021 --- /dev/null +++ b/_collections/_hkers/2024-04-17-uks-air-defence-command-and-control.md @@ -0,0 +1,345 @@ +--- +layout: post +title : UK’s Air Defence C2 +author: Jack Watling and Sidharth Kaushal +date : 2024-04-17 12:00:00 +0800 +image : https://i.imgur.com/Dhb6J7H.jpeg +#image_caption: "" +description: "Requirements for the Command and Control of the UK’s Ground-Based Air Defence" +excerpt_separator: +--- + +_This paper identifies requirements for the command and control of the British Army’s ground-based air defences within an integrated air and missile defence construct._ + + + +The purpose of this paper is to identify requirements for the command and control (C2) of the British Army’s ground-based air defences (GBAD) within an overarching integrated air and missile defence construct. The context is that the Ministry of Defence is developing an integrated air and missile defence strategy, and the army is starting work supporting its Land GBAD programme. This paper seeks to outline the trajectory of the future air threat environment, as well as the components critical to meeting that threat, thereby deriving requirements for the C2 construct within which the UK’s GBAD will operate. + +The future threat environment is characterised by diversifying and converging threats. Historically, air threats have been optimised by their range and cost to strike targets at varying depths, and have largely fallen into two categories: systems that seek to evade defences by flying low to avoid detection; and those that fly fast at high altitude. Defensive systems had therefore been optimised to maximise their probability of successfully intercepting the specific threats aimed at the targets they were defending. Increasingly, these categories are being blurred, both in terms of the targets against which munitions are assigned, and their flight characteristics. The result is that future air defences must be designed to maximise their efficiency as a system, allocating appropriate interceptors against simultaneous, multiple threats. The sustainability of an air defence system is therefore increasingly determined by C2 efficiency. The challenge is how to establish a robust, layered air defence capability that can identify, classify and assign the most appropriate mechanism to defeating complex salvos. + +In order to track these diverse threats, the force must avoid being dependent on a small number of dedicated ground-based radars, which can be suppressed, or isolated and deceived. Instead, the air defence system must be able to fuse and integrate data tracks of varying quality and sensitivity from across the joint force’s sensors. This will include both radar on assets such as the E-7 Wedgetail and the F-35, which are optimised to track air threats, as well as sensors of opportunity normally focused on other targets. Acoustic sensors, for example, are likely to proliferate across land formations, intended to identify the source of fire. These systems are also able to provide tracks for low-flying air threats, if the data can be accessed. Accessing such data requires GBAD C2 to be bearer agnostic, and able to ingest data of varying kinds, delivered by a multitude of means. It will also be necessary for the system to be able to integrate new kinds of sensor and effector, either as new capabilities are fielded, or as novel capabilities are brought to bear in response to evolving adversary tactics. + +These characteristics are especially important because UK GBAD systems are not currently equipped to be able to defeat many kinds of air threat. UK ballistic missile defences are operated solely by the Royal Navy, for example. Wherever the UK deploys, whether alongside NATO Allies or partners further afield, it must be able to contribute to and benefit from both joint sensors and effectors, and multinational C2. The diversity of UK partners with whom the UK – as a force that is expeditionary by design – would need to integrate means that the C2 architecture must be able to publish tracks to subscribers without sharing source code. + +It is noteworthy that the UK currently lacks GBAD C2 capacity. 7 Air Defence Group has a very small cadre of personnel who might be considered professional air defenders, since the career structure in the Royal Artillery does not keep many officers in this area for a sustained period. Interoperability, however, places a premium on experience in dealing with multiple systems, and so professionalising air defence and expanding liaison opportunities is critical. It is also important to note that the two regiments of 7 Air Defence Group are currently configured to be able to provide a C2 node at division. The UK, however, aspires to have a NATO Reserve Corps and two Divisions. It is also evident – given the lack of organic capabilities – that liaison functions across the joint force and multinational allies and partners are vital. 7 Air Defence Group currently lacks the mass to maintain this many C2 nodes. + +A further requirement is that the air defence C2 architecture be modular and mobile, without a single point of failure. This is achievable, and decision support tools mean that it is likely to become more so over time. Nevertheless, the C2 system must support air defence coordination from multiple small cells, able to be packed up and moved rapidly. + + +### Introduction + +For decades, air defence has been a low priority for European NATO, which has been operating with uncontested air and fires superiority. The UK, meanwhile, despite maintaining a robust maritime air defence capability, has seen its ground-based air defence (GBAD) reduced in priority – a point best illustrated by the downgrading of the task from a brigade-level function with four regiments, to a joint headquarters commanding single-service-operated systems with two assigned regiments. Now, however, several concurrent factors have prompted a renewed focus on the importance of air defence. + +To begin with, the modernisation and proliferation of highly capable Russian and Chinese air defences mean that NATO air forces must prioritise the suppression and destruction of these barriers before they can contribute directly to joint effects. This means that other elements of the force must be able to fight without air superiority – and potentially without any air cover – for limited periods. Furthermore, Iranian and Russian collaboration in developing and employing a wide range of threat systems (from low-end loitering munitions to cruise and quasi-ballistic missiles) means that air threats will remain a persistent concern, even with air superiority. A further challenge is that whereas air attack could previously be partly deterred through the psychological impact of the presence of a limited number of surface-to-air missile systems (SAMS), this cannot deter uncrewed strike systems, and consequently the credibility of a defence increasingly correlates with magazine depth and engagement efficiency. + +The threat will manifest in two ways for land forces. The first is the risk of destruction at the tactical level when forces have engaged with an opponent. The second threat is that of air interdiction: the destruction of forces before they have joined the fight, or the disruption of their enabling rear area infrastructure and logistics. The risk of interdiction is one that will also be faced by other elements of the joint force, and in certain circumstances ground forces may help offset it for other force elements. + +The relationship between the terminology of air attack and land concepts is a fluid one, determined by factors such as which formations are conducting the tactical battle (which determines the depths beyond which forces might be considered to have not joined the fight). The terminology used in this paper derives from that used in the context of the doctrine of AirLand Battle, where air activity beyond corps depth was typically treated as being operational. The basis for adopting this terminology is that the European theatre within which the British Army may have to operate is characterised by distances and, increasingly, force sizes similar to those of the Cold War. It is acknowledged, however, that the definition of operational depth may differ between expeditionary contexts. + +There is also the question of which targets should be defined as strategic, as this term is typically reserved for the defence of either civil infrastructure or infrastructure with war-making potential (such as industry). Though the distinction is doctrinally valid, in the context of the UK, this paper presumes that the defence of both military and non-military targets in the homeland (where strategic targets reside) will be treated as part of a single zonally defined mission coordinated by HQ Air Command at High Wycombe, and thus the paper groups all defence of the homeland under the rubric of defence at strategic depth. + +Against Russia, identified as the UK’s most acute threat by the Integrated Review, British forces in the field are likely to face air threats at every stage of their deployment. Operational rear areas will be held at risk by ballistic and cruise missiles, while forces will also be threatened by UAVs, rockets and crewed aviation as they approach the forward line of own troops (FLOT). Russia will also pose a long-range strike threat to the homeland. Other putative opponents, such as Iran or its proxies, will be less likely to threaten the homeland, but will still pose a robust and layered threat to fielded forces. Against Iran, which can disseminate strike capabilities to proxies, the threat will exist in both the operate and warfight postures, as illustrated by proxy-led attacks on US forces. + +While the Royal Navy (RN) and the RAF can provide defences against cruise and (some) ballistic missiles for both the homeland and fielded forces, they are also required to provide – with limited fleets – their own organic force protection. Moreover, certain types of targets, such as many UAVs, which are relevant in a land context, are not ones the RN or RAF focus on countering in planning and training. Finally, a land component, depending on how far inland it is, may not be able to draw on naval support. The British Army’s GBAD capability should, then, be able to provide a degree of organic protection for fielded forces at the divisional level (and below) against short-range tactical threats. It should also, if needed, be able to reinforce national and Alliance capacity against some operational and strategic threats. The first goal can be achieved by capabilities that the army should itself be able to field. Drawing on joint force and allied assets will reinforce the effectiveness of these capabilities, but will not determine their ability to meet missions. For the second goal, the army must be integrated by design: it must find specific roles that it can play to reinforce any integrated air and missile defence (IAMD) system of which it is a part. Adding resilience to C2 mechanisms and optimising against a subset of threat types are the areas where the army can add greatest value to partners and the joint force in the army deep (300 km) and beyond. + +In response to this challenge, the British Army has initiated a Land GBAD programme aimed at delivering short-range air defence (SHORAD), medium-range air defence (MRAD), counter-small aerial target and counter-small uncrewed aerial system (C-UAS) capabilities to protect the UK’s deployed forces and to potentially contribute to the defence of bases in the homeland. Beyond these core platforms, however, it is notable that as threats diversify and develop, the layered defences – comprising interceptors which operate at different altitudes and ranges (and with different characteristics in terms of seekers and payloads), as well as soft kill capabilities – will also need to adapt. Furthermore, while some of these capabilities will be specialised air defence assets, the sensors and effectors for others will be distributed across units. The C2 infrastructure for such an enterprise, encompassing both the technical means for coordinating assets (control) and the organisational structures and authorities which determine their allocation against tactical tasks (command), needs to be robust, but also adaptable, such that it can integrate a wide range of sensors and effectors. + +This paper outlines the diversity and trajectory of threats that the Land GBAD programme will need to manage, the sensors and effectors it will need to coordinate, and the requirements this imposes for connectivity and decision points to be enabled. The purpose of the paper is to identify requirements for a suitable C2 architecture to both support the short-term air defence capabilities to be fielded by the British military, and to coordinate a developing set of systems as novel effectors become available and greater connectivity across the force expands the range of sensors that can be leveraged. + +The evidence base for this paper is diverse. Firstly, it relies on the technical examination of Russian and Iranian threat systems employed in the Middle East and Ukraine. This includes examination of all classes of munitions and components of key platforms, mainly recovered from the battlefield, including Kh-47M2 Kinzhal aero-ballistic and 9M723 Iskander-M quasi-ballistic missiles. It also draws on the experience of observing the evolution and coordination of the Ukrainian Air Defence Network over the course of the war, and lessons derived from the Air Defence Working Group of the Ukrainian General Staff. In addition, the paper relies on field observation of British air defence capabilities in operation, of NATO air defence C2 in operation, and of experimental capabilities for both attack and defence in the UK, the US and NATO. The research is also based on participation in live exercises in the US, where novel systems and C2 tools were tested, and on interviews with scientific technical personnel, industry and commanders of air defence units. Because of the sensitivity of much of the underlying data, the report itself outlines the concepts, rather than the technical details of the requirements, but it is informed by hard data. The paper is divided into three chapters: the first examines threats; the second analyses sensors and effectors; and the third outlines the implications for the C2 capabilities needed to stitch these sensors and effectors together as an integrated system. + + +### I. Charting a Diversifying Threat Landscape + +To make any assessment of the requirements for the C2 of the British Army’s future GBAD, it is necessary to examine the threats against which British forces must protect themselves (and others). The threat landscape may be broken into two problem sets. First, there is the requirement to protect against tactical threats targeting deployed forces. Second, there is the requirement to protect strategic and operational targets, including sea ports and air ports of embarkation and sea ports and air ports of debarkation (SPODs and APODs), bases, and headquarters from the corps level and above. There is also – per the 2023 Defence Command Paper – an imperative to protect critical national infrastructure (CNI) and centres of habitation from adversary strikes, but as regards GBAD C2, this is a similar problem set to the defence of targets in operational depth. + +These problem sets already existed during the Cold War, but they have converged in recent years. During the Cold War, the primary conventional air threat to frontline forces was Warsaw Pact aviation, while cruise and ballistic missiles such as the OTR-23 Oka were largely prioritised for targets in operational depth, such as airbases. Missiles were useful against a narrowly defined set of static and soft targets. Improvements in the accuracy of cruise and ballistic missiles mean that they can now be used both against tactical targets and against a wider range of operational and strategic targets, allowing them to threaten several military targets, in tandem with aircraft. In effect, well-defined threat categories which could previously only be used at the tactical, operational or strategic levels have converged as a function of increasing accuracy. Meanwhile, capabilities such as loitering munitions and one-way attack UAVs have, given their low cost and different flight profiles, added another dimension to this threat landscape. Despite this, the missions of defence at each level of warfare still differ, and the UK’s GBAD programme must have a C2 architecture that controls an appropriate mix of sensors and effectors to function both across different parts of the battlespace and across the continuum from competition to conflict. This chapter will first explore the diversifying kinds of threat system, and then consider how they manifest at tactical and operational depths. + +#### Air and Missile Threats in the Future Operating Environment + +Historically, air threats could be divided according to two parameters: altitude and speed. Although higher-flying threats such as ballistic missiles were faster, they could be detected earlier and followed predictable parabolic trajectories, whereas more manoeuvrable threats capable of flying at lower altitudes, such as aircraft and cruise missiles, were slower but harder to detect. + +This binary categorisation remains valid, but is now complicated by two additional factors. The first is the emergence of weapons which straddle the categories of high speed and comparatively low trajectories, including supersonic and hypersonic cruise missiles and hypersonic glide vehicles (HGVs); quasi-ballistic and aero-ballistic threats which fly at lower altitudes than traditional ballistic missiles also fit within this category. The second factor is the emergence of especially slow and low-flying objects, such as UAVs, which fly at speeds that would normally see objects excluded from the Doppler gate of radar. + +This target complexity means that the attendant two-tier categorisation of sensors and effectors – with upper-tier systems interdicting fast, high-altitude targets and lower-tier systems engaging their slower counterparts – is now being challenged. A system may, for example, need to track a fast-moving target across multiple altitude brackets. This complexity of air threats is compounded by the near ubiquity of electronic warfare (EW) and decoying. In Ukraine, radar decoys have been deployed by the 3M-14 cruise missile, the 9M723 quasi-ballistic missile, and by groups of UAVs (with one UAV acting as a decoy). The detection and classification of complex targets will require the fusion of data from a broader variety of sensors to better contend with threats built to confound radar-centric defensive systems. Self-contained systems built around dedicated radar optimised against specific threats must thus be integrated both with each other and with other sensor categories. + +The second challenge to existing air and missile defence systems is the risk of suppression and destruction. While this capability was once the province of the stronger air force, conflicts such as the ongoing war in Ukraine have illustrated that a state without air superiority can still suppress an opponent’s GBAD by leveraging the growing accuracy of, among other things, surface-to-surface threats cued by UAVs. Moreover, even weaker air forces can use standoff capabilities to pose a risk from within the relative safety of their own GBAD networks. + +The third challenge is that of mass. The gulf between capabilities which can be used at scale and more bespoke precise capabilities is shrinking. Modifications to the guidance of previously “dumb” systems can increase their accuracy by an order of magnitude. In addition, capabilities such as loitering munitions can provide a cheap avenue with which to strike targets with precision. + +In terms of suppression, capabilities such as Spear 3 and other precise air-launched missiles will be the most severe threat for GBAD. At present, Russia does not possess capabilities equivalent in sophistication to Spear 3, although it does use the Kh-31 in this role to some effect. In the future, Russia may obtain advanced air-launched effects from its growing collaboration with China, such that People’s Liberation Army Air Force capabilities must be a planning assumption for UK GBAD C2. The challenge posed by these capabilities is that they are specifically tailored to striking GBAD systems, are fast, manoeuvrable, can utilise an aircraft’s active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar to course correct and engage moving targets, and can therefore constrain air defence tactics. Air defences must unmask and engage other air-launched threats, but in doing so, GBAD systems risk falling victim themselves to munitions tailored for SEAD/DEAD (suppression or destruction of enemy air defences). + +This threat will be compounded by the emergence, as launch platforms, of very low observable (VLO) aircraft with significantly reduced radar cross-sections. It is likely that even those states without access to high-end stealth technologies will be able to produce aircraft that can push further into defended airspace before becoming trackable. This will accelerate if there is a proliferation of uncrewed combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs), as their shapes can be far “stealthier”, owing to the lack of a crew compartment and associated life-support systems. These stealth profiles, combined with EW, make it possible for air targets to come much closer to defensive radar than is comfortable for defenders, which will be a particular challenge as the effectors carried gain range. + +There is also a threat of destruction by surface-to-surface fires. Missile systems such as the Iskander and Tochka-U and multiple-launch rocket systems (MLRS) such as the GMLRS (guided multiple-launch rocket system) have demonstrated their utility in the context of DEAD missions at divisional depth (and beyond, for the Iskander). When cued in by UAVs as part of what in Russian parlance would be called a reconnaissance-fires complex (for MLRS) and a reconnaissance-strike complex (for missiles), such capabilities can strike mobile SAMS within minutes, particularly close to the FLOT, where UAV coverage is greatest. + +The second challenge that air defenders will face is a shrinking delta between capabilities which can be used en masse and those which are more precise. Previously inaccurate threats – including air-launched glide bombs and rockets – are likely to increase in accuracy by an order of magnitude. This, in turn, will make it possible for putative opponents to achieve lethal effects with platforms which might previously have represented a marginal threat. + +This threat will likely emanate from adversary fourth-generation fast air, with its reach extended by relatively cheap standoff weapons. Legacy air defence systems have demonstrated that they can pose sufficient threat to aircraft at medium altitude to significantly degrade the accuracy of delivered effects. Modern man-portable air defence systems (MANPADS) can, meanwhile, effectively deter penetration by fourth-generation fighters at low level, because of the unpredictability of the location of MANPADS teams. Finally, an adversary aircraft operating over the FLOT faces a considerable risk of being destroyed by defensive counter-air patrols. However, the nascent ability of fourth-generation aircraft to attack with large volumes of reasonably precise standoff munitions from within the safety of a friendly air defence network can alter this dynamic considerably. + +The advent of guidance kits and glide kits, even at the most basic, is proving that inaccurate iron bombs can now achieve ranges of up to 70 km when lofted, and that they are likely to become highly accurate in the near future, with only limited investment. Although unsophisticated, these munitions pose a serious threat to static or point targets because they can have an explosive payload in excess of 500 kg and thus cause considerable damage; moreover, these munitions are cheap, plentiful and can be released in volume. Although they must be lofted from medium altitude (where the launch aircraft may expose itself) to achieve maximum range, the flight profile prior to loft may be lower and, if launched against targets in shallow depth, can offer a very narrow window for air defences to threaten the aircraft. Guidance kits can also be fitted to older, inaccurate surface-based systems to create a more precise capability – as Iran has done for Hezbollah’s unguided Zelzal-2 rockets, effectively transforming the 200 km-range rocket into a short-range ballistic missile (SRBM). This type of transformation could see the scale of the tactical ballistic threat increase by an order of magnitude. + +Attack aviation such as the Russian Ka-52 helicopter provides another launch vector for massed guided and unguided fires. Though less capable of reducing its signatures, attack aviation is likely to remain a serious threat to tactical ground formations due to the ability to hover and operate at extremely low altitude, as well as terrain mask. To retain survivability, attack aviation aims to fire munitions with ranges in excess of 10 km, taking themselves out of the MANPADS threat envelope. Efforts are also underway to field air-launched effects – essentially UAVs and other complex weapons – launched from helicopters to enable the pilots to direct complex attacks on targets. As the cost of these munitions increases and the survivability of airframes diminishes, countries may reduce the emphasis placed on attack aviation, but for now the main threat they pose is that they can carry and orchestrate a wide range of effects with very little latency between launch and strike. For a commander, attack aviation offers the flexibility of being able to manoeuvre precise firepower quickly from point to point as an anti-tank reserve. While attack aviation may primarily be a threat at the edge, it can inflict disproportionate attrition on a manoeuvre element that is not effectively protected by GBAD. + +The third challenge for future air defenders is that of timely threat detection and classification against complex targets. This will be driven by a convergence of the systems already discussed with threats such as cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, HGVs and loitering munitions. Each threat is optimised to reduce defenders’ warning times in different ways, meaning that solutions optimised against one are likely to be inapplicable against others. In themselves, most cruise missiles are large, and are usually subsonic for most of their flight. Given that they fly low, in dense air, supersonic flight limits their range, though supersonic cruise missiles such as the P-800 Oniks can still be effective out to 400 km. Hypersonic cruise missiles, which must carry both a rocket propulsion system and a scramjet engine to achieve hypersonic flight, are likely to be even more limited in their range, compared to comparably sized missiles. Though supersonic and hypersonic cruise missiles will be restricted in terms of range, manoeuvrability, and in some cases payload, they will be difficult to intercept and will have the kinetic energy on impact to penetrate hardened targets. They will pose a challenge at tactical depth and can also pose one at operational and strategic depths if a launch platform such as a cruise missile submarine (SSGN) escapes detection. Their cost, however, limits the number of targets that justify their use. Subsonic cruise missiles are a much more common threat. These are relatively easy to intercept, but are difficult to track, because of the complexity of their flight paths and the fact that they can employ penetration aids and accelerate at key phases to complicate engagements. Given their accuracy, cruise missiles must be engaged. + +While most cruise missiles are difficult to find but relatively simple to intercept once tracked, ballistic missiles are easy to detect but are often difficult to intercept, due to their speed, and are likely to become more challenging targets. Short- and medium-range ballistic missiles are relatively easy to intercept at present, as illustrated by the success in testing of THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defence), as well as by Saudi Arabia’s intercept rate against Houthi SRBMs with Patriot and Ukraine’s successes with Patriot against SRBMs and air-launched ballistic missiles. Longer-range missiles are considerably faster and thus harder to engage. Moreover, even SRBMs are becoming more survivable. Like cruise missiles, they are liable to dispense penetration aids, complicating targeting, with the caveat that they move fast enough to mean that a penetration aid can only provide a short window of protection. Furthermore, more and more ballistic missiles will adopt quasi-ballistic trajectories, defying simple interception mapping – as seen with the 9M723 and the North Korean KN-24. The separation of warheads from the missile body in the terminal phase on some ballistic missiles can create a further complication, as defensive systems must distinguish between the missile body and the warhead. + +HGVs may be understood as combining the challenges posed by cruise and ballistic missiles. Ballistic missiles descend on their targets at hypersonic speeds, but because they fly with a high arc, they are visible to radar for much of their flight. An HGV, in contrast, may achieve a much shallower angle of attack and alter course, reducing the time available to plot its trajectory. HGVs – unlike air-launched ballistic missiles such as the Kinzhal – are unlikely to become cheap enough to be available in large numbers. This is partly because the speeds involved impose non-symmetrical friction on the missile surfaces, leading to a requirement for highly complex materials to be employed in the body of the munition. + +Air defenders will face competing dilemmas, as they will be confronted by both missiles and loitering munitions. Loitering munitions may be understood as lower payload, simpler cruise missiles – they fly low and slow, usually carrying payloads below 40 kg (still sufficient to cause substantial damage to most tactical targets). Simple loitering munitions able to strike throughout operational depth can cost as little as $30,000. The trajectory of development for loitering munitions is likely to see several areas of growing sophistication, without significant increases in cost. First, loitering munitions are likely to attain improved hardening of their navigation systems. Second, the use of software-defined radios should enhance their ability to collaborate (there is a cost to the software development, but it does not lead to a massive increase in unit cost for hardware). It is also likely that, at a cost of around $100,000 per unit, loitering munitions can retain a command link and thereby have a full motion video guidance capability in their terminal phase, enabling strikes on mobile targets. Thirdly, the low speeds of loitering munitions and some UAVs mean that they can be sifted out by the Doppler gates of radar as clutter – as occurred with Russian Pantsir radar against Turkish TB-2 UAVs early in the conflict in Syria. Radar operating modes can be altered – Russia quickly did this in March 2022 – but this imposes cognitive load on operators (from clutter), and increases training burdens. Although loitering munitions can be brought down by crew-served weapons if shooters are properly positioned, having shooters in the right place is a significant C2 challenge. + +The attack systems described above are all, in themselves, beatable. Collectively, however, they impose conflicting imperatives on a defensive architecture. For example, the task of engaging low-flying fast air requires a different set of sensors and effectors to that of intercepting VLO aircraft. Similarly, the interception of threat types that can be fielded en masse demands interceptors which can be expended at scale, while defence against cruise and ballistic missiles requires more expensive effectors with the manoeuvrability and sensor payload to engage these targets. The need to avoid suppression, particularly close to the FLOT, imposes a different dilemma. Avoiding suppression is best achieved through passive methods of detection, such as passive coherent location, as well as non-radar-based solutions. However, the delivery of track-quality data over wide areas still requires the use of active radar, at the risk of suppression or destruction. + +#### Implications for Tactical Defence + +Historically, air defence in tactical depth has primarily been concerned with penetrating aviation and strike aircraft. Cruise and ballistic missiles – being expensive and consequently scarce assets – have been a concern for operational headquarters and other higher-echelon targets. Because aviation and strike aircraft were necessarily even more expensive than cruise missiles, maximising the probability of kill (Pk) by deploying highly sophisticated air defence munitions was a sensible investment. Air defence thus became a question of maximising Pk, and extending range to be able to engage strike aircraft enablers. Tactics evolved around aiming multiple missiles at a given aircraft to force the pilot into sub-optimal trade-offs against differing threats. The effect of maximising Pk is not just that it makes attempts to strike tactical targets extremely dangerous, but that this in itself deters attempts, increasing the enablement necessary to prosecute strikes with a reasonable probability of scarce aircraft surviving. This therefore limits the number of sorties that can be mounted. North Vietnamese SAMS, for example, imposed a requirement on the US Air Force to generate some 80 combat aircraft to conduct a raid on a given target. + +The approach of maximising the Pk of air defence systems is now being fundamentally challenged, for three reasons. Firstly, the range of threats to tactical formations is expanding to include threats which might previously only have been encountered with conventional payloads at the operational/strategic levels. Secondly, many classes of threat are drastically cheaper and thus more plentiful than legacy defensive missiles. The cost of defensive systems aimed at optimising Pk against high-end threats necessarily reduces the diversity of systems that can be afforded and deployed. For example, a hit-to-kill missile with an infrared (IR) seeker optimised for ballistic missile defence (BMD) in the upper atmosphere is not an ideal means of intercepting air-breathing and quasi-ballistic threats at altitudes where IR seekers do not work well at the high speeds achieved by BMD interceptors. Radar-equipped missiles with blast fragmentation warheads work well against air-breathing threats, but are a sub-optimal tool for BMD: each type of missile has a price in the millions of US dollars and is fired from a bespoke system. As high-end threats diversify, the characteristics of systems optimised for detecting and engaging them diverge, driving a tendency towards holding multiple missile types that are industrially expensive to develop and retain. For example, it has been estimated that a point defence of Guam with the layered defensive systems needed to counter the full spectrum of likely threats would cost $5 billion. The third challenge is that an air defence approach that prioritises the maximisation of Pk against high-end threats is more difficult to develop iteratively and quickly than the systems that are intended to spoof or otherwise degrade defensive efficiency. This means that in any conflict, the Pk of a system risks diminishing over time. + +The measure of effectiveness at the tactical level, then, should not be the Pk of individual systems against specific threats, but rather the ability of the air and missile defence system as a whole to deliver enough protection within a given time period for specific tasks such as concentration for an attack. This is a departure from the metrics that predominated in the past, because capability is measured at the system level, not the platform level, and is bounded by time and by task. A high Pk in initial engagements is of limited value if the air defence system is exhausted through inefficient use of interceptors such that Pk subsequently collapses. To a significant degree, therefore, the effectiveness of an air defence system is increasingly determined by the capacity of the C2 system to allocate effectors against appropriate targets. + +#### Threats in Operational and Strategic Depth + +At the operational and strategic levels, in a European context, the scenario used to frame the discussion is a Russian Strategic Operation for the Destruction of Critically Important Enemy Targets. This is not the only context in which the UK can expect to employ its GBAD capabilities, but it is the one most likely to involve risks to targets at both operational depth and at strategic depth within the UK. Military targets likely to be prioritised by an adversary at operational and strategic depth include SPODs and APODs and command nodes at the corps echelon and above. Assets upon which the functioning of the joint force depends, such as airbases and CAOCs (combined air operations centres), are also likely to be targeted. In addition, critical civilian infrastructure, including power generation facilities, is likely to be targeted. These targets may not all be in significant depth, but a critical mass of them are likely to be rearward of the corps. + +The threat environment at the operational and strategic levels is different from the tactical threat environment in several ways. On the one hand, the range needed to strike targets at depth and the payload requirements needed to inflict meaningful damage on facilities such as airbases limit the utility of many platforms which might be tactically useful. One-way attack UAVs, for example, can be useful as a terror weapon, but given their payload limitations (a Shahed-136 carries around 40 kg of explosive material), they have limited utility against critical targets that have appropriate protections, unless part of a complex strike where they are used for reconnaissance or to strike defence systems. + +Up to 500 km, the threat at the operational level will be complex, combining SRBMs, cruise missiles, attack aircraft and UAVs. In many respects, this is similar to the tactical-level threat environment: the ranges involved, as well as the presence of protected or hardened high-value targets such as command posts and ammunition storage sites, will see the number of cruise and ballistic missiles at these depths increase relative to UAVs. A greater premium is likely to be placed on large payloads and a higher probability of penetration and the presence of high-value targets at these depths justifies more expensive forms of attack – which is why, for example, Ukraine has used Storm Shadow cruise missiles against operational-level targets, to much greater effect than its salvos of UAVs. + +Beyond 500 km, and particularly at strategic depth, the ballistic threat picture will be circumscribed, as the most likely adversaries do not field large numbers of intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs). Russia, for example, has only the Kinzhal for use at intermediate ranges, having cancelled the RS-26 Rubezh IRBM. Moreover, even states with large numbers of ballistic missiles typically use them to enable other capabilities. For example, China intends to use its ballistic missiles to trap US aircraft in their hangars by cratering runways, enabling follow-on attacks by cruise missiles. For Russia, which has fewer intermediate-range ballistic options and needs to conserve these options for sub-strategic nuclear use, the need to use capabilities such as Kinzhal and the Kh-BD judiciously will be more acute. The most likely use cases for ballistic missiles involve either enabling the effective use of cruise missiles, or strikes upon command nodes. As such, the challenge beyond 500 km is in certain ways more bounded than the tactical challenge, and will largely revolve around cruise missiles enabled by a more limited number of medium-range ballistic missiles and IRBMs, which trap their targets or eliminate defensive systems that engage cruise missiles. + +In some ways, the threat at the army deep and beyond is more potent. Since many targets likely to be deemed valuable at operational and strategic depth are static, it is simpler to achieve the convergence of different capabilities moving against them at different speeds. While this level of convergence against mobile targets is discussed at a theoretical level by militaries such as China’s People’s Liberation Army, it has already been demonstrated by Russia in its attacks on Ukraine’s energy grid, which have combined UAVs, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles. + +Geography and force laydowns are a consideration in any European context. Most Russian threats to the UK homeland emanating from the Western Military District would need to traverse the airspace of several NATO members, raising the probability of intercept well ahead of their reaching the UK. Moreover, on this flank, the surface vessels of the Baltic fleet which serve as launch platforms for cruise missiles such as the 3M-14 Kalibr are not survivable in a full-scale conflict involving Russia and NATO. However, this is not to say that all approaches to the UK are equally well covered, with the assets under Russia’s Northern Fleet Joint Strategic Command (OSK Sever) in particular presenting a credible threat to the homeland, as they can strike from positions relatively close to Russia’s bastions. Over time, as NATO stands up a maritime component command in a crisis, the northern flank would also become comparatively more secure. + +That said, some launch platforms for Russian strike capabilities are more survivable, and could theoretically conduct strikes against the UK, giving defenders very limited warning – for example, the Yasen-class SSGN, which is equipped with 40 vertical launching system (VLS) cells and which can launch a variety of cruise missiles, including the 3M-14 Kalibr and the hypersonic Zircon. Platforms such as the Yasen or the older but still quiet Akula class can, if they escape into the Atlantic, launch strikes against targets such as airbases at ranges that would leave little room for aircraft hosted there to scramble. This would create a “flaming datum” – a last known location of the submarine, which would increase the risk of destruction; consequently the range of targets that might justify risking the use of a high-value asset in this way is limited, with the most likely candidates being fifth-generation aircraft, maritime patrol aircraft bases and critical C2 nodes, the RN base at Faslane, and CNI. As a conflict progressed, aircraft might well be dispersed, making suppression more difficult, and as such the threat would be most acute in the early stages of a conflict. + +In addition to high-value capabilities, Russia has developed containerised versions of missiles such as the Klub-K, which can be fired from the decks of cargo vessels, a mode of operation that could allow it to strike targets inside the UK with limited warning. Russian-flagged vessels and those that have left Russian ports are likely to be closely watched in a conflict, meaning that this kind of attack could only be attempted once (or at the commencement of fighting), but should even a fraction of vessels armed in this way strike militarily significant targets before being interdicted, this would represent a militarily useful effect for the loss of disposable assets. Finally, there is the threat from Russia’s long-range bombers, which can launch salvos of cruise missiles. Given NATO’s relative superiority in the air, such strikes would be unlikely to be repeatable, but early in a conflict would pose a risk of a strike against key sites from relatively close range. + +There are also several long-term risks to be considered. Russia’s exit from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty means that it can now more openly build ground-launched cruise missiles such as the SSC-8, as well as IRBMs. The launchers of such capabilities will likely be more survivable, and thus impose limits on left-of-launch solutions. Furthermore, if VLO UCAVs such as a successor to Russia’s Okhotnik or the Chinese GJ-11 become a part of their arsenal, the Russian Aerospace Forces may have an improved ability to strike targets such as air-defence radar, leading to the threat to emitting radar – currently primarily a problem at the tactical edge – becoming an issue at the operational and strategic levels. If, similarly, Russia develops a much larger intermediate-range ballistic arsenal (potentially through its increasing industrial collaboration with Iran and North Korea), the ballistic missile threat at strategic depth could become more significant. + +The threat to the homeland is likely to be most potent early in a conflict, when the value of strategic surprise is highest and NATO Joint Force Air Components (JFACs) and Maritime Component Commands are being stood up. After this, high-value targets will have dispersed, and many of the approaches to the UK will be covered by assets in the maritime domain, or by allies’ air-defence networks. The most important role for GBAD in a homeland defence context will thus be early in a conflict, when it can act as a last layer of point defence for critical targets. The ability to disincentivise surprise – which could be possible if a ship or submarine slipped allied maritime nets – will be an important pillar of deterrence. + +The threat to ports, APODs, fuel and munitions storage sites, and command posts in Europe beyond the homeland will likely persist over the course of a conflict. Buried targets such as command posts will primarily need to be defended against HGVs, ballistic missiles and, to a lesser extent, cruise missiles. In contrast, softer-skinned targets are more likely to be engaged with a spectrum of threats, including one-way attack UAVs. Forward bastions such as Kaliningrad could allow Russia to use shorter-range missiles such as the 9M723 or the P-800 against targets that would normally have required medium- or intermediate-range missiles. Of course, not everything can always be protected, and priorities for protection will be determined in line with a Joint Prioritised and Defended Assets List. Air defences including GBAD will likely be most important in the early phases of a conflict, when a force is deploying, and near those nodes that are both critical and which cannot be defended by passive measures such as concealment, hardening or dispersion. + +In effect, then, there are two major roles for UK GBAD at the operational and strategic levels within Europe: + +- Providing a last layer of point defence for critical facilities within the homeland in the very early stages of a conflict. + +- Contributing to the defence of operational-level targets such as APODs, SPODs and headquarters in continental Europe for the duration of a conflict. + +In an expeditionary context, shorter-range threats may have operational-strategic significance. This stems from the fact that many theatres do not have the depth that Europe possesses. Additionally, in expeditionary contexts where power projection typically depends upon a local coalition partner, the homeland of this (usually nearby) state becomes a strategic target in the way one’s own homeland would in a territorial defence context in Europe. + +For example, in the Persian Gulf, UAVs, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles are all capable of striking operationally and strategically relevant targets. The diffusion of precision strike capabilities means that many of the air threats currently emerging within Europe will likely also be faced in a wider range of contexts. For instance, Iran currently fields ballistic missiles such as the Zolfaghar, which has a CEP (circular error probable) of 10 metres, and the Fattah, a quasi-ballistic missile comparable to the Kinzhal. The proliferation of commercially available satellite imagery can, moreover, make the surveillance of fixed infrastructure and well-known chokepoints with relatively low data latency viable for a range of opponents, and not just peers. Finally, in geographically constrained theatres, comparatively cheap assets with a limited field of view (for example UAVs such as the Chinese-made Wing Loong) can also be used for surveillance and battle damage assessment near fixed infrastructure, enabling more responsive targeting. + +Having described the threat environment, we now turn to the question of the tools with which defenders can contend with the range of threats they will face, and the ways in which these tools can be integrated. + + +### II. Surveying the Tools of the Defence + +The preceding survey of the threat landscape that the UK’s IAMD must be able to contend with highlights some of the characteristics that are necessary for an effective defence. The spectrum of threats described necessitates a shift away from functional localisation – in which each system performs a defined task – towards a more distributed approach. In the latter context, effectiveness is determined at the system level, rather than through the platform-level metrics that presently characterise IAMD (such as the distance at which a target is detected, the number of shots possible, and missile Pk). + +This shift in focus implies the following sub-criteria for effectiveness: + +- Because the sensors needed to classify the full spectrum of threats cannot be held at all echelons, British IAMD must be able to assign or leverage a range of British and allied systems (some of them not purpose-built for air defence) to detect, classify and track threats. + +- British IAMD must also be able to assign the best positioned and most economical effector to engage a given threat. + +- The IAMD architecture must not be premised upon single points of failure. + +- To meet evolving threats, the defensive architecture must be able to incorporate new sensors and effectors as these are iteratively developed. + +Within this context, British Army GBAD will need to be designed around the following criteria: + +- Army GBAD must be able to both draw on and contribute to a joint and Alliance-level recognised air picture that enables assets organic to manoeuvre formations to leverage data from higher echelons (and vice versa). + +- Since the army will not immediately own the range of effectors needed to intercept the full spectrum of threats, it must be able to contribute to a joint and allied defensive counter-air effort by reinforcing system-level effectiveness. It can do so by optimising against converging lower-tier threats, thus allowing other platforms to optimise against elements of the threat spectrum that still require bespoke solutions (such as ballistic missiles or HGVs). It can also accomplish this by reinforcing the resilience and agility of the overall C2 architecture. + +- Since new capabilities may be fielded, the army’s GBAD system must be sufficiently flexible to integrate systems it was not originally designed to incorporate. + +To assess how best to integrate the various components, it is first necessary to consider the sensors and effectors most relevant to engaging the identified threats. This too must be broken into tactical and operational-strategic targets, as there are different assumptions that can be made about the availability of power and the distances involved, which alter the available sensors. + +#### Tactical Defensive Systems and Capabilities + +Defensive systems can be categorised in line with the threats that they counter, each of which presents different requirements: + +- Low-level threats. +- Medium-level threats. +- High-level threats. + +__Low-level threats__ comprise tactical aviation, loitering munitions, cruise missiles and low-flying aircraft. In essence, these threats try to minimise their detectability and therefore targetability by using the curvature of the Earth and terrain masking as they approach their targets. The targeting methodology for countering these threats must be based upon detection and tracking over as great a distance as possible to understand their route before moving appropriate assets into position to interdict them. A system of mutually reinforcing methods of detection to enable this might be comprised of four layers, as described below. + +Firstly, the force would benefit from early warning left of launch through national technical means. Understanding that a strike sortie is being prepared from an airbase, or that orders have been distributed to fire a loitering munition salvo in depth – whether through satellite imagery or signals intelligence (SIGINT) – allows the alert status of relevant systems to be brought into readiness. For example, US Northern Command expects to fuse data from multiple sources to detect preparations for ballistic missile launches several days in advance. If air defence assets are likely to have to move to be in position to achieve an intercept, early warning allows these mobile groups to prepare to move once an axis has been identified. This will be easier to achieve against some threat types, such as air-launched cruise missiles such as the Kh-101, which are launched from strategic bombers. While it is possible to track the launch platforms of submarine- and ground-launched cruise missiles, these are comparatively elusive. Even here, however, national technical means – particularly in areas like SIGINT – will be invaluable. The challenge is to distribute information to deployed GBAD headquarters at the appropriate classification, since Above Secret traffic is often hard to move forward. + +Secondly, a sensor picket needs to have sufficient coverage to be able to detect and track threats as they approach their targets. Tactical echelons can draw on sensors likely to be held at the corps level or by other services. For example, an AN/TPY-2 radar organic to the THAAD system can spot relatively low-radar cross-section objects above 10,000 feet over a wide area at ranges of 250 km. The THAAD system is likely to be held at theatre level (or at the corps echelon at the very lowest), and operated by allies, but can provide critical early warning to tactical air defences. Airborne or elevated payloads able to provide track data to an effector can considerably expand a system’s reach without exposing operators on the ground. Such a sensor might be mounted on a balloon, a UAV, a helicopter or a mast. This class of sensor also includes airborne sensors such as the AN/APG-81 radar on the F-35, which are capable of effective discrimination against low-profile targets. Crucially, not all these sensors will be controlled by the Land Component Command, but their data, when available, will be important for target discrimination. The purpose of such a system would be to enable higher-end munitions to have track-quality data against low-flying targets such as helicopters and cruise missiles if they evaded the laydown of effectors on their anticipated flight path, and where the defensive system is not sitting as point defence for the intended target. This kind of integrated sensor picture should become easier to maintain as AESA radar proliferate, providing multifunctional payloads. Although such a multifunctional radar may not provide track-quality data, improved analytical tools are increasingly able to turn sub-track-quality data into a sufficiently reliable track to guide an intercept. + +The third layer of situational awareness is drawn from sensors held by the tactical formations with which GBAD systems will operate and which they will protect. Since system-level effectiveness requires leveraging multiple types of data, GBAD can often benefit from drawing on sensors which are part of other formations, particularly when operators wish to avoid unmasking. These sensors include spectrometers (able to identify loitering munitions through their control frequencies and attack aviation through communications), acoustic sensors (able to detect the engine sound of low-flying objects), and passive coherent locating radar. There are a wide range of uses for these kinds of sensors. Spectrometers will be held by EW troops, while acoustic sensors can be used by artillery for counterbattery fire, and by manoeuvre elements for identifying enemy firing positions; if mounted on vehicles, they can also be distributed across the depth of a defence to provide updated tracks on munitions such as cruise missiles. Passive coherent location is more specialised, but is likely to become significantly more widespread, because of the requirement for units to self-protect from uncrewed aerial systems (UAS), while avoiding detection via direction-finding methods that can allow their positions to be inferred based on the signals they emit. The question is whether the detections from these sensors can be provided to the air defence system to offer a track for low-flying targets. This track is not sufficient to guide effectors, but is likely sufficient to accurately predict course and speed, and to cue other sensors. + +The final component of the system may be understood as the sensors directly linked to effectors on the platforms attempting to achieve an intercept. An obvious example would be the Giraffe radar organic to a system such as Sky Sabre. In the case of UAVs, heavy machine guns on remote weapon stations should be able to slew to engage if appropriately programmed, using their electro-optical sensors; the trick would be to place these effectors on the flight path identified. In the case of MANPADS, which can be an economical means of engaging more capable UAVs and engaging cruise missiles, the electro-optical clue is sufficient. For aviation, high velocity missiles and lightweight multirole missiles are both viable munitions, as are 40-mm CTC cannon and other systems, provided the platform is aligned to anticipate the threat. This is easier said than done, however. In many instances, threats such as cruise missiles will be programmed to use flight paths that use terrain masking, and which allow them to approach their targets on circuitous routes, reducing warning times and confounding efforts to align platforms with threat vectors, thus reinforcing the importance of leveraging data from offboard sources. + +__Medium- and high-level threats__ comprising ballistic missiles and VLO aircraft (among others) will depend on a similar sensor architecture. The primary difference is that defending against these targets will impose a greater reliance on bespoke, rather than general, solutions. (Consideration of the threat from ballistic missiles is similar to the defence of operational-strategic assets, and so will be covered in the next section.) + +Regarding VLO aircraft, different VLO implementations will have different exposure. The challenge lies in understanding the unique signature of these platforms, and in sifting that signature from the noise. One of the hardest things for an aircraft to mitigate, however, is its visual signature against the sky, such that image-recognition algorithms and electro-optical sensors can be paired to pick out VLO aircraft. Even so, the visibility of these aircraft does not necessarily mean that a missile can acquire a target: it may require beam riding or other solutions to enable an electro-optical camera to guide the munition. + +In addition to a layered architecture for detection and classification, an IAMD system needs an appropriate mix of effectors. This mix includes: short-range solutions with high performance to defeat fast targets such as cruise missiles; short-range solutions with low performance to defeat threats such as loitering munitions; medium-range solutions able to close down approach axes to aviation and fast air; and long-range solutions that are able to defeat aircraft at high altitude, as well as providing point and area defence against tactical ballistic missiles. + +The British Army is unlikely to own the full spectrum of effectors, given the current budgetary allocation for GBAD. Many effectors relevant to tasks such as long-range air defence and BMD (Patriot, for instance) will be operated by allies. In terms of command relationships, medium- and upper-tier air defence systems will often fall under the control of the air and missile defence commander within the JFAC who exercises control over maritime platforms capable of BMD. This means that the army will also need to plan around the eventuality that some of the systems that it owns are not always protecting manoeuvre formations. + +However, even when the British Army does not control allied and joint assets, the ability to draw data from them will be critical to performing many air defence functions, especially when the full spectrum of interceptors is not available because the air defence commander has tasked them elsewhere. As illustrated by the Iranian attacks on Al-Asad and Erbil, where early warning from the US’s Space-Based Infrared System and the Turkish-based AN/TPY-2 radar gave unprotected US forces time to take cover, an integrated system creates avenues to pursue reversionary mechanisms when resources are scarce. + +Furthermore, land sensors can provide early warning and occasionally track to other systems under the JFAC. The G-AMB radar on Sky Sabre, for example, can provide data on an overflying cruise missile to an offshore destroyer to enable a remote engagement (interceptor ranges typically exceed sensor ranges). As such, those air defence capabilities that are organic to British ground formations and nearby allied forces can produce data for the theatre commander, rather than just ingesting it. In contexts where the British Army is providing a C2 structure for an allied ground force in a given part of a theatre, this necessitates the ability to both ingest data from British and allied assets and to pass it to the JFAC in a timely manner. + +#### Defensive Systems and Capabilities at the Operational and Strategic Levels + +A similar layered sensor architecture is likely to be needed at the operational and strategic levels. Where possible, launch platforms will be identified by national technical means, while maintaining tracks on manoeuvring targets over a wide theatre will necessitate a reliance on offboard sources, including air-based systems. The primary differences between systems relevant to threats to targets in tactical and operational depth is that the latter requires tracking fast-moving targets such as ballistic missiles, which necessitates a greater reliance on dedicated radar, typically operating between the S-band and the X-band. The high speed of targets like ballistic missiles and HGVs makes the rapid acquisition of track-quality data a priority. Thus, the sensors relevant to this part of the detection and classification cycles must be activated and cued as quickly as possible. This, coupled with the relatively low risk of suppression at depth, incentivises a greater reliance on active radar organic to a system. That said, non-radar-based sensors will still be needed for tasks such as discriminating targets from decoys in their terminal phase. + +The type of UK GBAD equipment likely to be procured under the current equipment plan will not have the organic sensors needed to track many of the threats the UK will face, and the interceptors to deal with several classes of threat will also be lacking. For example, under current plans, the UK will have no ground-based BMD or counter-hypersonic capability, creating a capability gap which will need to be addressed as part of a wider IAMD strategy. Under present assumptions, the land-based component of UK IAMD will only be functional at the operational and strategic levels of warfare, in tandem with joint force and allied assets. This is not to say that UK GBAD cannot play an important supporting role, however. + +As discussed in previous sections, cruise missiles constitute the primary threat at the strategic level. Assuming that the RN is able to provide at least one Type 45 (or, in the future, Type 83) destroyer for BMD missions, the army and the RAF can facilitate the RN’s limited VLS capacity being allocated to BMD by respectively providing point and area defence against cruise missiles. The RAF, which can respond across a wide area with its Typhoon aircraft, is best suited to area defence, while army MRAD and SHORAD can provide point defence for key nodes. If the threat evolves to include a larger number of adversary IRBMs or a limited number of conventionally armed HGVs, there may be a case for a national BMD or counter-hypersonic capability equivalent to Arrow-3 (which Germany has purchased for this role). Given the difficulties inherent in developing a domestic solution, this would mean a potential requirement to integrate new (and likely non-UK) capabilities. + +It is worth noting that the Land GBAD programme could have a disproportionate cognitive impact on enemy planning for operational and strategic strikes. If, for example, the enemy assesses that key RAF bases are undefended, then the risk/reward calculus in conducting a small-scale raid with long-range bombers may appear more attractive. Although the strike platform could be lost, the probability of effect on target if the missiles were launched would be high. If, by contrast, the enemy must plan on the basis of GBAD providing point defence to these facilities, then the size of sortie that must be generated to be confident of achieving an effect alters the risk/reward calculus. Moreover, the inability to determine which munitions would succeed in striking which targets – even as part of a large salvo – would make the impact on the target unpredictable. In this way, relatively small investments in GBAD have the potential to significantly alter how attractive targets in the UK appear to the enemy. + +At the operational level within Europe, as well as on expeditionary missions, the threat environment will be more complex, comprising SRBMs, cruise missiles, loitering munitions and fixed-wing threats. In these contexts, in addition to providing sensors and effectors against certain threat types, the British Army can add greatest value to what is likely to be an Allied or coalition system by reinforcing that system’s capacity to coordinate its disparate elements and to retain its coherence in the face of disruption. In terms of effectors, it is worth noting that Sky Sabre is particularly well-suited to being assigned intercepts of cruise missiles targeting key sites, and this layer of defence is something the British Army can offer to allies. The key requirements for UK GBAD at the operational/strategic levels are: + +- Providing a data fusion node and reversionary C2 mechanism to coordinate sensors and effectors that reside under the joint force or allied control. + +- Countering the lower-tier elements of the threat spectrum to allow other assets to optimise against upper-tier threats. + +A similar classification of target types – high-, medium- and low-altitude – can be adopted to that used at the tactical level, with the caveat that at the operational/strategic level, targets such as HGVs will blur distinctions. The balance of relatively bespoke sensors needed to track many operational threats means that they will be national or Alliance assets. Moreover, planned ground-based platforms will not, for the foreseeable future, carry hit-to-kill interceptors, meaning that the UK’s BMD capability will be primarily maritime. Effectors that can be used in counter-hypersonics, such as glide phase interceptors, are also not currently envisioned, and will likely be held by allies (and potentially by the RN). + +In terms of C2, key capabilities at the operational/strategic level will likely fall under a NATO Air Component Command (ACC). This could be true for Sky Sabre, if authority over it is transferred to the NATO C2 structure, but also for lower-tier capabilities that may be required to act as “gate guardians” protecting long-range air and missile defence systems from low-flying threats – such as UAVs that underfly their radar. The UK has insufficient Sky Sabre systems at present, and would face severe overstretch in trying to protect a combination of UK sites, deployed forces and NATO. In exercises, the assumption is often that UK Sky Sabre would be under divisional command. This is not a sound planning assumption. + +While in many instances, British land forces will not directly command joint and allied assets, they can reinforce the resilience of joint and allied C2. The allied C2 nodes that provide overall coherence will likely be targeted and may be struck; to degrade gracefully, a system must have nodes which can control locally adjacent assets in the absence of higher-level C2, and coordinate with other similarly situated command capabilities if needed. This requires the existence of reversionary command posts, and for the bearers to transfer data to and from them. For example, in the context of the Russian integrated air defence system, battalion-level data fusion and C2 nodes such as the D4M1 Polyana and the 55K6E can allow both the coordination of assets and the fusion of data even if higher-echelon command posts are knocked out. Developments in areas such as software-defined signal processing, illustrated by programmes such as DARPA’s (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) Dynamo, show the ways in which improvements in processing power will make networking across waveforms easier over time. The US Army’s Integrated Battle Command System has coordinated multiple disparate assets at its engagement operations centres, routing data either through gateways or through third-party platforms that can receive certain waveforms and retransmit them at compatible frequencies. + +Even if the army C2 construct supporting air defence does not own many of the most relevant sensors and effectors, it should be able to reinforce the resilience of an allied or coalition system by coordinating elements of an operational-level defence over a given sector of a theatre (within Europe) or the entirety of a smaller theatre (at reach) on a reversionary basis. + +In addition to reversionary C2, the British Army should be capable of contributing to a shared recognised air picture at army deep and beyond. In the context of cruise missile defence, the army can do this with its own sensors; when forward deployed with manoeuvre formations, these sensors can feed data back about targets – such as cruise missiles which overfly them. In the context of BMD missions, the army’s lack of BMD-capable radar can be offset by a C2 architecture that allows it to incorporate data from BMD-capable allied tactical assets (such as the G/ATOR), enabling it to relay this information to higher echelons when it is needed without their being overwhelmed by data. + +Since it is uneconomical in terms of data management to have these platforms feeding into CAOCs or maritime air operations centres on a persistent basis, one way for their utility to be leveraged when they are needed for IAMD is for the GBAD C2 architecture to mediate data flows. As such, both BMD and counter-hypersonics require that UK GBAD C2 must be capable of distributing relevant data to higher echelons on a time-sensitive basis. It may also become necessary to share data with national civil defence authorities (much as the Israel Defense Forces do with Israel’s Home Front Command), especially if not every inch of national soil can be defended. In undefended areas, air defence can still contribute to warning mechanisms, as in the app-based systems used in Israel and Ukraine. + +Finally, army air defences can optimise for point defence against cruise missiles, aircraft and loitering munitions. This will be important both to allow other joint and allied force elements to optimise against upper-tier threats, and to defend the very systems that enable tasks like BMD (since many defensive systems optimised for higher-tier threats are themselves vulnerable to low-flying ones). Consider, for example, a 2017 incident in which a North Korean UAV was found crashed near South Korea’s THAAD site, having flown there unobserved. Several types of sensor may be relevant to this function. First, radar can be combined with methods of detection such as electro-optical and IR sensors. These sensors can usefully aid discrimination against targets that carry countermeasures optimised to defeat radar. Secondly, and as at the tactical level, elevated radar can considerably expand coverage and thus system alertness (the British Army holds several G-AMB radar, unattached to Sky Sabre batteries, that could contribute to this role). While radar suppression at depth is relatively unlikely, the fact that it may become more likely could also incentivise drawing on sources such as civilian radar to complicate the task of suppression and limit the time for which a dedicated military radar must emit. + +The range of capabilities needed to contend with a complex threat environment makes their effective coordination a complex organisational and systems-engineering task. It is to the question of how this task might be accomplished that the paper now turns. + + +### III. Requirements for Land GBAD C2 + +Having considered the span of threats that a future Land GBAD C2 architecture must be able to manage, and the breadth of sensors and effectors that tackling these threats may need to draw upon, it becomes possible to outline some characteristics of a future-proof C2 architecture. This chapter outlines these requirements, both in terms of the systems the C2 architecture must integrate, and where decision-making is located. + +#### Moving Beyond Integral C2 Relationships + +The British Army is fundamentally an expeditionary force, and this is critical to its utility to the British state. By offering partners and allies reinforcement, the British military allows threats to be contested at reach. The challenges of force projection mean that the British military often finds itself deployed without all its equipment, and that the exact timeline on equipment availability is shaped by the distance at which it is projected and the available infrastructure. Furthermore, while land forces may provide a key contribution in some theatres, the capabilities relevant to tasks such as defence against tactical ballistic missiles may be maritime, or a partner capability. The key point is that when the UK fights, it necessarily does so as a joint and multinational force – and this is especially true in the context of air defence. + +As well as having an expeditionary character, the British military is also becoming more dependent upon – and integrated with – its partners and allies. During the First World War, Lord Kitchener directly instructed that the British Expeditionary Force was to remain under independent command, such that deconfliction with French and Belgian forces was largely achieved through the allocation of battlespace. Processes have moved on since then, and NATO C2 has long functioned on the presumption of combined air operations, multinational joint effects, and Alliance-level planning. Nonetheless, C2 has – historically – been simplified by echelons and battlespace being divided between countries. This approach has made sense, since different echelons operating fixed areas of interest could be determined by the range limitations of their sensors and effectors. Today, however, all echelons can reach and strike into operational depth, while all echelons also have access to ISR into strategic depth. In a context where effects from all echelons can be applied across one another’s boundaries, battlespace management has thus become more complicated. + +The criticality of being able to integrate or at a minimum interoperate with allied systems is further demonstrated by the implications of a protracted conflict. It is possible, for example, that a high-performance system with limited interoperability could offer a tactical advantage early in a conflict. But experience in Ukraine has demonstrated that as a war becomes more protracted, new systems are developed, and that dependencies on allies change as stockpiles, production rates and rationalisation change both what is available and what is produced. This dynamic may even extend to adapting air-to-air munitions to fire from the ground, or using air-to-ground munitions to fire against air targets. It follows, then, that the C2 system must be able to continue working with sensors and effectors, even as the assets assigned to the system change over time and are adapted to meet demand. + +Even a cursory examination of the sensors outlined in the previous chapter demonstrates that some of them are exquisite air defence assets (and likely permanently under the control of the air defence formation). The majority of sensors are, however, primarily tasked against other problem sets. A vehicle’s acoustic sensors, for example, are placed on the combat vehicle to detect enemy vehicle movement and origin of shot; that these sensors can provide a screen to detect enemy UAS is invaluable, but only if the C2 system can enable data to be moved to the relevant effector. Another element of the challenge is that against a low-flying threat such as a cruise missile, a passive radar on a C-UAS system forward may be able to track the munition for as much as 60 km of its flight, even while a higher-echelon air defence radar is prevented from doing so by terrain or by system characteristics – and yet it may be the higher echelon system that has the effector. Whether the track data can be passed from the forward sensor and refined sufficiently to provide a guidance solution is dependent upon latency and on the compatibility of data between systems. + +Similarly, effectors may be held either by the air defence organisation organic to a manoeuvre formation or by an ACC. In addition to dedicated effectors, there is also a plethora of non-dedicated systems such as jammers, multispectral smoke and DRFM (digital radio frequency memory) decoys, which will not be under the direct control of the air defence organisations at any level, but which can nevertheless contribute to air defence. Coordination with these capabilities will be critical to ensure deconfliction and the economisation of interceptor expenditure. + +As the battlefield is increasingly flooded with sensors, many mounted on uncrewed platforms, opportunities will emerge for 7 Air Defence Group to reach beyond its own capabilities. However, the battlespace will also become more cluttered, particularly at the FLOT, as more elements of the force employ UAS. Indeed, UAS are destined to become ubiquitous at all echelons in the British Army, and the tactical context of their employment means that most UAS flights will not be cleared with the CAOC or planned in accordance with the air tasking order (ATO). In Ukraine, a significant proportion of higher-echelon UAS losses derive from friendly fire (for Russian and Ukrainian forces alike). Nor is it necessarily viable to have IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) as a widespread capability on UAS, both because they are likely to be captured in significant numbers, creating opportunities for the adversary to pass themselves off as friendly, but also because of the price-point dynamics on most UAS platforms. + +For the UK, the central point is that Strategic Command must exercise influence over C2 for the Land GBAD programme to ensure that it is compatible with developments within the army and across the other services, and critically that the UK’s Multi-Domain Integrated Systems programme addresses the problem of blue-force tracking in the context of expanded UAS and C-UAS coverage across the battlefield. The risk of fratricide in an environment saturated with aerial objects is real, and is amplified as air defence elements become required Tom Keatinge is the Director of the Centre for Finance and Security at RUSI.tooperate in isolation. During the invasion of Iraq in 2003, for example, isolated Patriot batteries – lacking wider situational awareness – were responsible for shootdowns of friendly aircraft. Brokering situational awareness to minimise the risk of misclassification of targets will be a major task for air defenders. + +In the light of these requirements, an effective fire-control C2 architecture must be able to manage three kinds of data relationship: + +- Integral. +- Habitual. +- Incidental. + +__Integral__ relationships can be thought of as the fixed, low-latency C2 links between air defence assets held under organic command by the headquarters. This is the type of relationship with which air defence operators across the force are currently most familiar. + +__Habitual__ links, meanwhile, constitute air defence assets whose primary responsibility is the point defence or force protection of other elements of the force. These elements would usually be subordinated to the unit they are supporting, but they would benefit from the common air picture, and sometimes may also benefit from warnings provided by higher-echelon sensors under the control of the air defence headquarters. On occasion, however, these assets’ sensors may be critical to a successful air defence engagement overflying their area of responsibility, or their effectors may need to be moved to put them in position to intercept a threat against higher echelons. These units, therefore, must become habituated to having their systems periodically connected to the air defence C2 architecture, with as low a latency as possible. An obvious example would be the relationship between air defences afloat and those ashore – a relationship that should also extend to GBAD. In an Alliance context where UK GBAD platforms find themselves reallocated alongside Allied systems to support the assessed main line of effort, habitual relationships with Allied platforms will emerge, such as between Sky Sabre and Polish SA-6 systems. + +__Incidental__ links differ from the other two categories because they comprise those units that are not primarily responsible for air defence, but which may become reliant on the air defence command for the purposes of synchronising and timing their countermeasures, or because they have incidentally collected information relevant to air defence and are seeking to share it with the headquarters. Latency requirements in this context may be more relaxed. Bearers are almost certainly non-bespoke and are used by many parts of the force, but there must be a means for priority information to be routed appropriately when these situations arise. An obvious example of such a relationship would be with the sensors of aircraft that share the battlespace with GBAD systems. The incidental relationship can also run the other way, with data from air defence radar being used to extrapolate launcher locations and thus enable suppression by artillery or an over-the-horizon aircraft, for example. This approach is central to both Israeli concepts of operations and to South Korea’s “Kill Chain” system of IAMD and strike assets. While some radar are explicitly designed to determine launch points, even those that are not can narrow the search parameters for other sensors if they can track enough of a missile’s trajectory. + +#### The Technical Demands of Context-Driven C2 + +There are three organisational/technical barriers that must be overcome if British GBAD is to manage the requisite range of relationships. First, data must be passed across alliances and coalition partners which operate a range of systems. In the context of maritime BMD, data sharing between allied systems has proven to be a considerable (but not insurmountable) systems-engineering challenge, a point illustrated over the course of multiple iterations of Exercise Formidable Shield. National caveats are also a concern. One example of these (albeit not from the world of IAMD) is that in the past it has been difficult for allied assets to plug in to a US carrier battlegroup because SIPRNet was a no-foreign-nationals network; even when this ceased to be the case, foreign access remained tightly controlled. Classification boundaries will also need to be surmounted within the joint force if data from sources such as the F-35 is to be leveraged. Alongside the challenge of processing data, a GBAD system will need to move and receive data across heterogeneous networks, where the available bearer is dependent on the line of effort that it is supporting. + +A final challenge that will need to be overcome is the likelihood of capability growth that cannot be perfectly anticipated. For example, the army might invest in an upper-tier defensive system if the task of BMD becomes too much of a drain on RN resources, or it might incorporate directed-energy weapons into its SHORAD architecture. Critically, if SHORAD solutions against C-UAS become highly effective, the demand for UAS to be fitted with IFF will increase, thus expanding the need for C2 over these capabilities. A C2 system’s effectiveness will be determined by its capacity for iterative adaptation such that it can incorporate new sensors, effectors and processes. One of the great successes of the Aegis system, for example, is that its design process presumed that the system would prioritise the capacity for iterative change as new baselines were introduced, even if this meant setting initially conservative goals in capability terms. + +Based on these three challenges, the following design principles for army C2 for air defence assets can be derived: + +First, the system must be capable of translating data across formats at pace. The heterogeneity of the systems operated by allies and coalition partners with which the air defence network must integrate, as well as the need to draw data from a range of sources within the joint force, makes this a sine qua non. In coalition contexts, the heterogeneity of systems will be even more significant, as potential partners such as the UAE operate the Korean L-SAM and the Russian Pantsir. It is also important to emphasise the importance of being able to fuse the feeds from sources that are incidentally related to air defence with organic sensors and effectors. For example, if the effector that is most likely to intercept a target is an organic one, but the rough track data is being provided by a joint asset, while precise track data is being enabled by lining up sensors along the vector of threat, then data from several sources needs to be fused to provide a target solution to the effector. + +Since coordination in capability development across the joint force and allies is unlikely, it follows that the system must depend on backwards integration. This necessitates an architecture that can be regularly updated with middleware to provide additional translation layers as required. As an example, we might think of how software such as BMD Flex was designed to connect Aegis and non-Aegis systems afloat. Another example could be the recent tests by the US Army at its White Sands Range, which connected Patriot with both F-35s and a range of bespoke systems from beyond the army. The hardware requirements that this approach introduces in areas such as processing power will create requirements for thermal and electromagnetic shielding. + +Secondly, the data processing architecture of the system must be able to receive data without access to the commercially and militarily sensitive underlying source codes that underpin a given system and its architecture. Without this ability, it will be largely impossible to receive data across coalitions, given likely sensitivities about data exposure, and this may even create impediments within an Alliance context. To the extent that partners can share messages without foundational knowledge, this will be easier. This logic underpins publish/subscribe models in the commercial world, where an enterprise integration bus facilitates the translation of data across formats and acts as a messaging broker. Such systems rely on each publisher placing its raw data (messages) within a shared environment from which they can be translated and pushed on to hosted subscriber platforms. This model requires minimal compatibility in terms of data structuring, and is generally flexible in terms of the specific language types that can be incorporated. Because messaging is brokered through a central data environment, it does not require subscribers or publishers to receive data from one another directly – simplifying the systems engineering challenge that emerges from the addition of new system nodes (sometimes referred to as the N-squared challenge) because platforms do not need to “talk” directly to each other. The use of a central data environment also means that specific coalition partners do not share information directly (an issue that can sometimes prove politically challenging). Examples where this kind of integration already exists include the US military’s universal C2 interface. Any system will also need mechanisms for moving data across classifications within the joint force (for example, the US tests linking F-35s to Patriot were facilitated by an Einstein box on a U-2 Dragon Lady aircraft). + +The network architecture for air defence must be a heterogeneous one, since the fusion of sensor data and the distribution of a common air picture to units not habitually part of the air defence structure will have to rely on the bearers they already possess, rather than on bespoke bearers. Even for those systems that have habitual but not integral relationships with one another, the fact that a defensive system’s deployment will partly be determined by the forces it is supporting means that the operators of these systems cannot control precisely what bearers may be available at a given time to route information to the air defence headquarters. + +Several solutions are possible. The most obvious would be a software-defined system that can incorporate multiple waveform cards at a central node. However, other palliatives might be more appropriate. Data can be routed to a common node via third-party platforms that receive and retransmit waveforms. This will be especially important when the sensitivity of a network such as MADL (Multifunction Advanced Data Link) means that not every system can have a receiving terminal. Software-defined signal processing might be another way of allowing a system to receive data across multiple waveforms without a requirement for an unmanageable number of waveform cards. + +Latency requirements present another challenge: when a habitual connection is taken under command by either the air commander or the headquarters of a formation-level air defence, that connection must take priority on the bearer of opportunity it adopts. The disruption this could cause makes it important that the air defence command exercises restraint and maturity over when it asserts this need for priority, otherwise commanders will likely seek to shield their comms from being available to the air defence headquarters. + +#### Organisational Requirements for the Command Team + +So far, this paper has focused on the system being commanded and how its multiple components must be able to interact. The future threat environment, however, also imposes constraints on the size, disposition and structure of the command team that must operate the GBAD C2 system, and it is important to capture these requirements. + +Firstly, there are a series of vital nodes that the GBAD enterprise must be able to liaise with and draw data from. This is most realistically achieved through established data links, but also through liaison cells with terminals that can replicate the air defence command’s displays and from which data can also be inputted. The relevant points of presence across the force are likely to be: + +- The Joint Effects cell in the divisional headquarters responsible for planning and controlling divisional fires. In some instances, destroying enemy strike systems on the ground may be a better means of sanitising airspace, and so the air defence organisation may cooperate on triangulating the location of threat systems. There is also the need to be notified of UAS orbits and EW plans. + +- The Allied Rapid Reaction Corps (ARRC) headquarters, and its J5 and J3 fires elements, to ensure that the air defence laydown protects points critical to the corps, and to avoid fratricide, in terms of both air defence engagements and route planning. It is notable, for example, that the defensive plan for 1 German Corps in 1988 Federal Republic of Germany war plans saw the corps logistics area accidentally co-located with the Luftwaffe’s hawk batteries, due to a failure to compare the schemes of manoeuvre between these respective formations. + +- The CAOC where the ATO is generated must be a priority liaison, both to ensure that blue forces are accurately tracked and to benefit from the vast ISR capacity within the air operations enterprise. + +- The commander of the Maritime Component Command, both to benefit from maritime ISR, and because the UK’s BMD capability both for forces at the edge and targets at depth will be, for now at least, at sea. + +- 1 Aviation Brigade, as an organisation that will be generating sorties in support of land forces and controlling air-launched effects, must also be closely tied into the enterprise. Defence of aviation assets on the ground also creates a key responsibility for GBAD units. + +- Representation in the G5 and G3 shops of the divisional headquarters is critical, so that the distribution and laydown of air defence assets can be planned and deconflicted, and be complementary to the divisional scheme of manoeuvre. It also allows the enterprise to plan the resupply and sustainment of air defence units. + +- Allied formations and air defence units also require liaison personnel to share a common understanding of the environment and to deconflict or coordinate engagement where effector or sensor coverage overlaps. In NATO this can be formalised, but in the Middle East or other operating environments liaison may have to be ad hoc. + +- There is also a range of sensors built into civilian infrastructure (and operated by civilian agencies) in a number of states where the UK might operate, which could provide critical situational awareness and which would require liaison. + +The UK’s GBAD C2 structures have, historically, met the following obligations: + +- The capacity to provide a corps-level command element subordinate to HQ ARRC air branch. + +- A divisional air defence command formed around one of the air defence regiments. + +- A brigade-level air defence cell. + +- Liaison with national air defence C2. + +If the C2 of army GBAD is to expand its span of control to provide a wrap for joint and allied capabilities, there is an inherent challenge: the regular force, as it currently exists (12th and 16th Regiments of the Royal Artillery within 7 Air Defence Group) is too small to staff all the liaison functions outlined above. Moreover, air defence officers in the British military are largely generalists, on account of the career structure within the Royal Artillery, whereas the expertise needed to understand partner C2 systems sufficiently to function as an effective liaison requires extensive specialist knowledge and experience. A critical requirement for robust C2 of future GBAD, therefore, is a career structure that can produce staff with the relevant experience and expertise. The expanded responsibility of UK air defence is not simply an army aspiration, or gold plating, but a UK obligation under the country’s commitment to NATO, which includes the ARRC as a Reserve Corps headquarters. As the army is also seeking to field two divisions, the planning assumption for the staffing of 7 Air Defence Group – that it contributes to the fielding of one warfighting division – is no longer valid. The interface of GBAD with the corps echelon is also reinforced by the growing emphasis on corps operations among allies, as a result of US Multi-Domain Operations and the aspiration to leverage data from F-35 and other capabilities, which is difficult to achieve at the divisional level. + +Instead, an alternative command structure might include: + +- The technical basis for a corps-level command element, along with a skeleton staff that can be augmented by partners. + +- A divisional-level command formed around a regiment, and brigade-level cells below it. + +- The aforementioned liaison network. + +There are several ways in which the headcount required to deliver these capabilities can be minimised. Firstly, automation (while not a panacea) can reduce specific burdens and extend an operator’s span of control. A formation of destroyers, for example, has six officers on watch in each destroyer, with the anti-air warfare officer supervising a team of as few as two to three personnel. This formation is expected to perform theatre air and missile defence over areas sometimes spanning hundreds of kilometres. Although this is partly a function of overall command being held elsewhere, it also reflects the fact that most modern destroyers are capable of operating on a partially or fully automated basis, meaning they can independently conduct an air defence battle over an area comparable to a corps’ – or even a field army’s – area of responsibility. While the power and processing requirements involved have historically made this more applicable to the maritime domain, where large ships could support this model, the continued miniaturisation of microprocessors is making significantly greater computational capacity deployable in distributed ISO containers. + +Secondly, liaison officers to allied air defence formations and other allied formations, or to air and maritime component commands, can, if the role is professionalised, act as a force multiplier for joint planning (an analogy might be drawn with the way tactical air controllers are trained within the army). Having such individuals in post would represent an important bridge across organisations and, moreover, cycling officers through liaison roles could provide the organisational capital needed to create a skeleton air defence cell into which allied officers and liaisons from across the joint force could be plugged, if needed. A more ambitious approach to personnel interoperability might see officers from the navy and air force sit alongside army officers for training as part of a joint air defence course (as Joint Terminal Attack Controllers from the British Army and RAF do), so that they can be moved afloat or ashore as appropriate. + +A complicating factor for C2 activities is that, historically, these activities would have occurred at fixed locations where the air defence headquarters could have a presence. However, owing to the threat from long-range precision fires, many of the constituent parts of the C2 system are themselves being dispersed in smaller packets. This places a premium on data transfer and compatibility between these formations’ C2 tools and the air defence system. There is also a trade-off to be made: although officers in distributed C2 nodes can gain access to the wider data sets from other similarly distributed nodes, they are unable to physically meet with other elements. The ability to ingest and dispense data becomes critical, therefore, to their utility to both the air defence command and the headquarters to which they are attached. + + +### Conclusion + +Adversaries’ expanding capacity to reach into tactical and operational depth means that air defence is now a critical enabler for ground forces, even after the establishment of air superiority. Moreover, given the number and diversity of low-cost air threats, and the competing dilemmas imposed by more capable threat systems, C2 has become the means by which an air defence system can gain the required efficiency to protect the force. This efficiency is derived from assigning appropriate effectors to the different kinds of threat being confronted. + +To achieve the requisite efficiency, the C2 architecture for British GBAD must be able to distribute track-quality data to a diverse array of organic/inorganic systems and joint/combined assets. Given the increasing number of low-altitude threat systems, this track-quality data will often need to be based upon a composite track derived from numerous bespoke and contingent sensors. The collection and distribution of this data must, moreover, be bearer agnostic, reflecting the fact that partners may use an array of communications systems, and that the best-placed sensors might be embedded in units that are not organically subordinated to the air defence formation. + +A further consideration is that both effectors and sensors are likely to adapt rapidly over the course of a conflict in anticipation of and response to an evolving threat. Expenditure of munitions will also invariably drive the use of increasingly irregular interceptors as a conflict protracts. The C2 architecture must therefore be adaptable, so as to be capable of interacting with new systems via software updates. + +The C2 architecture itself must be distributed, both to bolster its own survivability and because it must have liaison outposts in disparate formations. Moreover, as the number of friendly UAS and effectors in the operating environment expands (many lacking synchronisation through the CAOC), the ability to access friendly planning cycles to aid with the classification of air targets is vital if the air defence system is not to engage in widespread friendly fire. Another major consideration is the mobility, signature and power requirements of the C2 system, since it risks being targeted if it has a distinct signature. + +This paper has not covered C-UAS capabilities in detail, focusing instead on loitering munitions and one-way attack UAS, as these target air defences or the sites they defend. The layers of tactical UAS that are likely to become organic to all echelons, however, have not been discussed, because defence against these systems is a localised all-arms requirement, rather than something to be managed centrally. Nevertheless, one of the key ancillary questions is how the air defence network can make opportunistic use of the sensors and effectors distributed throughout the force to provide all-arms C-UAS without saturating tactical networks or hijacking a critical enabler of manoeuvre elements. + +The Land GBAD programme gives the British Army an opportunity to future-proof air defence across the joint and combined force, with £1.6 billion committed to the project. But realising the programme’s goals will depend on having an open-architecture C2 capability that can integrate the increasing numbers and types of sensors that are proliferating across the battlefield. + +--- + +__Jack Watling__ is Senior Research Fellow for Land Warfare at RUSI. Jack works closely with the British military on the development of concepts of operation and assessments of the future operating environment, and conducts operational analysis of contemporary conflicts. + +__Sidharth Kaushal__ is Research Fellow for Sea Power at RUSI. His research at RUSI covers the impact of technology on maritime doctrine in the 21st century, and the role of sea power in a state’s grand strategy. diff --git a/_collections/_hkers/2024-04-22-newcomers-bring-new-rules.md b/_collections/_hkers/2024-04-22-newcomers-bring-new-rules.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..867f3328 --- /dev/null +++ b/_collections/_hkers/2024-04-22-newcomers-bring-new-rules.md @@ -0,0 +1,253 @@ +--- +layout: post +title : Newcomers Bring New Rules +author: Jon B. Alterman and Lily McElwee +date : 2024-04-22 12:00:00 +0800 +image : https://i.imgur.com/7KyywyD.jpeg +#image_caption: "" +description: "Shared Leadership in a More Multipolar World" +excerpt_separator: +--- + +_The world’s challenges are increasingly complex. Borders could not stop the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic, but Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine demonstrated that the kinds of national wars that characterized the 20th century were still relevant._ _Ideology has faded, and the states of the Global South have grown larger and wealthier. They now expect a larger share of the global pie. While cooperation has become more necessary, the world has entered an era of increased national contestation._ + +In this CSIS report, Jon B. Alterman and Lily McElwee argue that robust multilateral cooperation is central to creating opportunities and improving global conditions. Layers of organizations that bring together like-minded governments, businesses, and nongovernmental organizations across multiple venues and alliances will be necessary to tackle the complexity of today’s international challenges. The report draws from a series of meetings CSIS conducted with 30 senior experts around the world throughout 2022 and 2023. + + +### Introduction + +Wars reveal fault lines in international relations. They raise stakes, they bring government decisions under greater scrutiny, and they force governments to decide whom to support and whom to oppose. Wars cause governments to appeal to other governments for aid, and when that aid is not forthcoming, governments’ actions — and inaction — send their own messages. + +Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine was a clarifying moment. Over the previous three decades, economic integration had sharply increased around the world, global living standards rose dramatically, and connectivity blurred international boundaries and allowed billions of people to tap into almost limitless pools of information at almost no cost. + +The rapid spread of the Covid-19 pandemic, in some ways, was a consequence of that world. A disease that began in a provincial capital in China became a global phenomenon within weeks. National and international organizations mobilized to encourage the development and distribution of vaccines, and international financial institutions buttressed shaky economies. While the costs of the pandemic were astronomical — one estimate put its cost in the United States alone at $16 trillion — and supply chains were shattered, the pandemic did not force a breakdown in international ties, let alone anything resembling armed conflict. Many states felt abandoned by the international system, yet that system endured without deep scarring. China is the largest trading partner of 120 countries, and the United States is both an innovator and a norm-setter. Size insulated both. It was unthinkable not to seek ways to work with China to manage the consequences, frustration, and anger that the pandemic provoked, or to cut U.S. ties over dissatisfaction with vaccine distribution. + +Yet, the Ukraine invasion was a sign that old patterns of conflict persisted. Tanks rolled and missiles flew. Soldiers died — as did tens of thousands of civilians. The United States worked to rally global support to push back on Russia, with mixed results. Much of Europe was enthusiastic about aligning with the United States on a threat to regional security, while China was circumspect about giving a boost to U.S. global hegemony. U.S. partners in Northeast Asia, such as Japan and South Korea, hewed closely to the U.S. line. + +But for many governments — including many with close ties to the United States — the war in Ukraine was not their fight. Some, such as Israel and Turkey, had complicated relations with Russia that inhibited their action. But many others saw little advantage in being drawn into rising “great power” competition. These governments did not see Russia’s invasion as a violation of Ukrainian sovereignty that threatened the principle of sovereignty everywhere. Instead, many viewed it as part of a century-long shadow war between the United States and Russia, exacerbated by a reckless Ukraine. Others still saw it merely as a tiresome continuation of centuries of European warfare intended to nudge borders one way or the other. In this view, the insistence on stark national boundaries combined with the narcissism of small differences to make conflict inevitable, with states once again fighting to unite isolated minorities with their purported homeland. + +While the United States proclaimed the importance of defending a rules-based order, these countries said they saw something more self-interested at stake: a U.S. effort to preserve decades-old advantages for the United States and its closest partners. They saw these advantages continuing to enrich a small number of countries at the expense of an increasingly populous, increasingly wealthy, and increasingly consequential fraction of the world’s population. + +It is not merely U.S. competitors who seek to portray the global order this way. Close partners to the United States increasingly question the indispensability of U.S. leadership, as well as its wisdom and durability. Decades of long and inconclusive wars, increasingly polarized U.S. politics, and ever larger oscillations between successive U.S. administrations’ foreign policies have led many governments to be more cautious. But another element is many governments’ insistence on recovering their own agency and on advancing their own self-interest. + +___`While the United States proclaimed the importance of defending a rules-based order, these countries said they saw something more self-interested at stake: a U.S. effort to preserve decades-old advantages for the United States and its closest partners.`___ + +The world today is at a crossroads. Rising global integration has exacerbated challenges that swiftly transcend borders. Disease, climate change, the trafficking of persons and goods, and informal migration are just a few of the issues that no government can solve in isolation. Similarly, an increasing number of economies are tied to changes in transportation, communication, and finance that elide distance and connect cosmopolitan centers to remote villages and everything in between. + +Yet, despite closer ties, we also have entered a new period of national contestation. While greater connection is broadly irreversible, the terms of those connections, the boundaries of acceptable behavior, the structures of coordination, and the methods to resolve differences and enforce agreements are all increasingly in question. Great powers have given up the struggle over ideology, which consumed the middle of the twentieth century. Yet, they struggle to control norms of international behavior as much as they ever did. Equally importantly, although the world’s largest economies remain dominant, rising powers have a greater share of money and influence than ever before. They are increasingly assertive in their efforts to reshape the international order and to take their own measure of what advances their interests, irrespective of the demands of great power partners — and especially of the United States. + +The structures needed to handle this emerging reality will be even more complicated and cumbersome than those that emerged at the end of World War II. Rather than tightly integrated blocs of states bound by mutual treaty obligations, we are moving toward a world in which each state must coordinate a wide range of overlapping ad hoc ties. While this system produces more friction, it also holds the promise of bringing every country into a web of interlocking relationships. For the United States and its partners, the challenge is not to resist this trend, but rather to ensure that the benefits of this comprehensiveness compensate for the complexity of these networks and the efforts required to maintain them. + +This report will begin with an overview of the frameworks for internationalism and international cooperation, many of which have roots that are centuries old. It will then consider the strategies that great power competitors have adopted to limit the constraints that internationalism might place on their actions. The discussion then turns to the growing salience of the Global South: not only are such countries gaining in income, population, and power, but their cooperation is necessary to address a widening array of global issues. Alternative structures for international cooperation are considered, as is the potential incorporation of nontraditional participants into multilateral cooperation (such as nongovernmental organizations and the business community). After a brief consideration of the strategic shape of the future, the paper concludes that much more robust engagement across a range of modalities would deliver better outcomes for all. + + +### The Origins of Internationalism + +Multilateral institutions are a recent innovation. Early multilateral efforts such as the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia and the 1814 Congress of Vienna were exercises in conflict management with a narrow remit on issues of warfare, and neither did much to coordinate European powers’ pursuit of common interests. Yet, sharply increased communication, travel, and trade in the nineteenth century forced new modalities. The International Telegraph Convention in 1865 and the Universal Postal Convention in 1874 helped integrate communications networks. The First International Sanitary Conference in 1851 was a European effort to standardize quarantine regulations against the spread of cholera, plague, and yellow fever, in a clear recognition of the importance of international cooperation in combating contagious disease. The latter effort took four decades, as periodic gatherings of scientists and diplomats finally led to an agreement to notify fellow member states of disease outbreaks and to comply with internationally recognized disease prevention procedures. + +The innovation here was that the resultant agreements legally bound the signatories, each of which benefited from the compliance of the whole. While accession was mostly limited to Europe, the expansive global footprint of Western powers gave even intra-European sanitary efforts global impact. In addition, many of these early agreements and conventions created durable institutions for follow-up, enforcement, and further cooperation. + +A trend toward “structural” multilateralism, which created legally binding obligations on participants, picked up after World War I. International conventions on topics such as narcotics, trafficking in persons, citizenship, and trade then led to binding agreements. But it was in the decades following World War II that structural multilateralism really took off. From the ashes of a war that was genuinely global, a flurry of treaty-based international organizations was created that aspired to be genuinely universal. The UN General Assembly was the most sweeping of them, but agreements and institutions flourished, expanding their reach in issues from public health to economics to aviation, both within UN-affiliated structures and well beyond them. + +“Coalitional internationalism” grew in the same period. These more flexible modes of international engagement allow groups of countries to coordinate efforts to advance individual and collective preferences outside the constraints of treaty-based multilateral institutions. The first G-grouping, the G7 group of market democracies, was initiated in 1975, and it provided an avenue for ideologically like-minded and economically compatible countries to bring their political leaderships together. Twenty-four years later, in the wake of the Asian Financial Crisis, the G20 brought together finance ministers and central bankers from the world’s 20 largest economies. In 2009, it began to gather political leaderships, too. + +Some coalitions are even more ad hoc. Indeed, the George W. Bush administration hailed its “coalition of the willing,” encompassing the countries offering either military or political support during the 2003 war in Iraq and the subsequent U.S. military presence there. The United States has been an especially effective convener of such ad hoc groups. As Stewart Patrick has written, informal arrangements outside multilateral institutions provide the “world’s most powerful country . . . greater maneuvering room and control over outcomes” than formal multilateral institutions. + +The great strength of structural internationalism is found in its normative qualities. International organizations embody values and teach them forward to new leaders. Yet, that same structure simultaneously creates weakness, as these institutions are only as strong as the signatory states are willing to tolerate. Powerful signatory nations determine in advance what remit they will tolerate in the new institution. + +These same institutions have also succumbed to a creeping brittleness over time. Treaty-based international institutions rarely reopen the founding framework to adapt to changing power dynamics in the world. For example, the UN Security Council still awards veto rights to the same five countries it did three-quarters of a century ago, representing the victorious powers in World War II. Those five countries did represent the center of mass of geopolitical power in 1946. But while the rise of new global and regional powers — Japan, Germany, India, and Brazil, just to name a few — brings a new power geometry, the Security Council remains frozen in time. In the views of one close observer, “To a growing proportion of the world’s governments and citizens, the council today is both feckless and unjust, dominated by irresponsible and unrepresentative powers inclined to abuse their position rather than safeguard the peace. + +___`In the views of one close observer, “To a growing proportion of the world’s governments and citizens, the council today is both feckless and unjust, dominated by irresponsible and unrepresentative powers inclined to abuse their position rather than safeguard the peace.”`___ + +#### Objections from Great Power Competitors + +Even to those who are super-empowered by the post–World War II institutions, those institutions’ arrangements can appear problematic. While one can argue that they have given primacy to both China and Russia — especially in the case of the UN Security Council — both countries remain wary of a world in which U.S. wealth and military strength, when combined with that of Europe, gives the United States hegemonic power. + +After all, what many in the United States have come to refer to as the “rules-based international order” is, in practice, the postwar, U.S.-led liberal order. It was united by three things: overwhelming U.S. global power, a U.S. commitment to ensure that benefits were widely shared among its adherents, and a durable threat to that order by an ideological challenger with universal aspirations. For U.S. allies and partners, the United States and the system it advanced served as both a benefactor and protector. + +Because both Moscow and Beijing appear convinced that — even after the end of the Cold War — U.S. strategy remains predicated on seeking their weakness and isolation, each has adopted a three-pronged strategy: to aggressively defend their interests in existing multilateral organizations, to invest in newer multilateral organizations that exclude the United States from membership and in which they have relative primacy, and to align more closely with what they see as a “rising Global South” and enlist those countries in an effort to challenge U.S. hegemony. The stated goal of this behavior is not so much to undermine global order writ large as it is to ensure that the order that emerges is not a unipolar, U.S.-led one. + +__ENSURING THEY ARE NOT A TARGET__ + +The first prong of that effort has deep roots. Cold War skirmishes colored the early days of the Security Council, and difficulties resolving the Berlin blockade in 1948–1949 were an early indicator that the council “was not likely to be an operational body.” Division persisted through four decades, although the end of the Cold War and the global response to 9/11 created an unprecedented sense of common purpose among the great powers. That sense of optimism crashed with the Arab Spring in 2011. In the early days of the Libyan civil war, in response to the Qaddafi regime’s use of lethal force against civilian protestors, the Security Council authorized a no-fly zone over Libya, as well as “all necessary measures” to protect civilians and civilian-populated areas. It was the council’s first authorization of military force based on the responsibility to protect (RTP) doctrine. Vigorous lobbying by important regional bodies such as the Arab League and the African Union persuaded Russia and China to abstain, rather than veto the resolution in March 2011. But Moscow and Beijing soon regretted their unexercised vetoes, given the scope of NATO’s ensuing air campaign and what they saw as a clear end goal of toppling Qaddafi’s government. For these capitals, U.S. enthusiasm to support citizens rebelling against an authoritarian government was both naïve and threatening: naïve because the United States did not appreciate how the crushing of governments would unleash radical forces, and threatening because they identified with the authoritarian governments that swiftly fell. They had learned their lesson and would no longer leave the United States and its partners a loophole to wage war under UN sanction. + +As noted earlier, the West’s focus on the Russian war in Ukraine has heightened global divisions. In March 2022, a Russian-sponsored Security Council resolution demanding civilian protection and unhindered humanitarian access in Ukraine was only able to garner Chinese support. Thirteen other Security Council members abstained and defeated the measure, arguing that the most straightforward way to relieve civilian suffering was for Russia to end its assault on Ukraine. Russia has complained loudly of a double standard, since the United States and its allies went into Iraq in 2003 absent a UN mandate. But this complaint has aligned with a resentment throughout much of the world that Ukraine garners so much attention and resources from the West, while the rest of the world’s problems — from security to economics to refugees to disease — are seemingly neglected. + +China has been more circumspect in its efforts to engage in the United Nations. It has joined about half of Russian vetoes in the Security Council since 2000 (generally on Syria), and it has not cast any vetoes independently since that time. Unlike Russia, which has pursued a visible course of confrontation and disruption, China has worked assiduously to develop what some analysts call “discourse power.” That is, China seeks to have phrases that the Chinese Communist Party favors — such as “shared future” and “win-win cooperation” — incorporated into UN documents, while lining up countries to support noninterference in China’s internal affairs. As James Kynge wrote in the Financial Times in August 2023, “rather than seeking to create a whole new order, Beijing’s aim is to repurpose the UN’s authority to more squarely serve China.” + +In so doing, China’s approach is to defang the United Nations and to make it a friendlier venue for Chinese power. What is notable about China’s efforts, especially in contrast to Russia’s, is China’s seeming interest in inserting its ideas into the UN process rather than bending the organization to its will. In this way, China seeks to legitimize alternate paradigms of governance and human security that in turn legitimize China, rather than seek to delegitimize efforts that the Chinese see as seeking to delegitimize China. The value proposition, from a Chinese perspective, is that many developing countries gain legitimacy through these Chinese-supported paradigms and see them as ammunition against Western hegemony. + +Arguably, China’s actions serve to resurrect patterns of relations that prevailed in East Asia for centuries. According to one account: + +> “Sovereignty,” when the term is applied in Asian history, was mostly divisible, layered, and relative, as were allegiance, loyalty, and subjection. So the package that comes with the modern concepts and language of sovereignty, statehood, legitimacy, and the like impedes real understanding of the past and often only serves to legitimize political agendas in the present. + +Seen through this prism, China is not seeking to displace the United States but rather to build support for an order that plays to Chinese strengths, gives China primacy in its near abroad, and allows for ambiguity in ways that increase Chinese power. + +___`China is not seeking to displace the United States but rather to build support for an order that plays to Chinese strengths, gives China primacy in its near abroad, and allows for ambiguity in ways that increase Chinese power.`___ + +__ENHANCED MULTILATERALISM__ + +The second prong of Beijing’s and Moscow’s approach is to pursue a wide range of newer multilateral groupings — BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the Collective Treaty Security Organization, and a whole range of others. Generally centered in Asia, these organizations work on issues running the gamut from security to trade. While some incorporate U.S. allies and partners, none are centered around them, and they have the collective impact of creating organizations where U.S. influence is only indirect (if it exists at all). One could argue that these are both the appropriate and necessary counterparts to the sorts of U.S.-led institutions — starting with NATO and continuing to the World Bank and beyond — that the United States has created for three-quarters of a century. One could also argue that such organizations are focused on issues and countries that the United States and its closest partners neglect but that are nevertheless important to participants. Of course, their incorporation of countries that the United States and its allies sanction — not only Iran and increasingly Russia, but also several countries in Central Asia — helps reduce these countries’ isolation. The steady expansion and invigoration of such organizations in recent years has the effect of diminishing U.S. global predominance even if it does not necessarily enhance Russian and Chinese influence. For both Russia and China, even that can represent a win. + +__ALIGNMENT WITH THE GLOBAL SOUTH__ + +The third prong may be the most potent, and that is to seek alignment with rising powers that are deeply dissatisfied with the global status quo. Many in the Global South have come to resent what they see as the presumptiveness of wealthier nations. This attitude was well-captured by a remark the Indian minister of external affairs made in Bratislava in early June 2022: “Europe has to grow out of the mindset that Europe’s problems are the world’s problems, but the world’s problems are not Europe’s problems.” Former Indian national security adviser Shivshankar Menon argued in a recent piece in Foreign Policy that for many states in the Global South, “the existing order does not address their security needs, their existential concerns about food and finances, or transnational threats such as climate change.” + +___`Many in the Global South have come to resent what they see as the presumptiveness of wealthier nations.`___ + +Further, there is a widespread sense that Western powers have used the status quo to advance their own narrow interests. As a former Arab foreign minister remarked, “The West, with America at its lead, basically believed it has the right to American exceptionalism, and it has used force outside of its borders much more than anybody else over the years, and frequently without any legal basis.” Resentment of a double standard has manifested itself in complaints about Western support for Israel as it sought to push Hamas from Gaza in the autumn of 2023. Many in the Global South saw the war as yet another attack on Palestinians, with scant attention to international humanitarian law or the laws of war. Seen this way, Western states emphasize these rules only when they serve Western interests and conveniently ignore them when it suits their purposes. + +Sanctions policy is another area where many states in the Global South believe that Western-led efforts to enforce global rules are merely a cover for advancing narrow Western interests. As sanctions have emerged as an increasingly important part of the Western tool kit to shape international behavior, the growing instinct among a widening array of countries is to find ways to circumvent sanctions (either through explicit sanctions evasion or through efforts to develop payment methods that do not touch dollar-based institutions and are thus insulated from U.S. enforcement efforts). Chinese-Iranian trade is strong, and China is the destination for about two-thirds of Iranian oil exports. In the Ukraine case, we see not only robust Russia-China trade despite U.S.-led sanctions against Russia, but also steep increases in Russian trade with India, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates. While these countries argue that, rather than taking the Russian side, they are preserving their neutrality, the assertion of neutrality in the face of Western unanimity to advance norms and values undermines the centrality of those norms and values. + +Amid sentiment that global institutions are ineffective in addressing the world’s most important challenges — and that the countries empowered by those institutions contributed to creating those problems in the first place — China and Russia invoke their own narratives of struggle against the wealthier nations of the West and sharpen their own grievances. Even if not seen as either exemplars or saviors, Russia and China can build some currency with states that share their distrust of Western intentions and their suspicion that Western prescriptions will leave them permanently lagging behind. + + +### The Salience of the Global South + +Plainly put, the support of countries in the Global South is vital to the world’s ability to address a widening array of global problems. The complexity and interrelationships of global challenges, expanding economies, rising mobility, and the sheer population of the nations making up the Global South make them vital partners. Yet, many factors conspire to undermine cooperation: the Global South’s lingering historical grievances, a strong belief in the continued unfairness of the distribution of wealth and power, and a concern that the Global North’s regulations will sabotage the Global South’s urgent need for economic growth. + +At a time of rising great power tensions, the North-South divide can serve both to exacerbate global challenges and undermine efforts at collective action to address shared priorities. Yet, while the Global North often considers the Global South an exception, for most people in the world, the Global South is the norm. It constitutes some 80 percent of the world’s population and an increasing share of the global economy. Whereas in 2000 the countries constituting the Global South represented about 40 percent of world GDP, the OECD estimates that the global economy was equally divided in 2010, and the Global South will constitute almost 60 percent of world GDP in 2030. Large populations in India and China are a driver here, and governments in both places have lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty. These countries are not wealthy, however, and wealth as it has become known in the Global North may perpetually elude them. In fact, the number of countries that have followed Western patterns of development and economic growth in the last century and achieved wealth as a consequence is small. + +In the 1970s and the years since, leaders in the Global South have accused bankers from the Global North of profiting while millions of their countrymen continue to toil. As they see it, a generally impoverished Global South provides raw materials and cheap manufactured goods to the Global North, while scarce southern funds flow north for technology and services that the Global North insists are necessary to compete internationally. + +China, especially, has sought to enhance its reputation as a country that brought hundreds of millions out of poverty by following its own star. Keenly conscious of the country’s “century of humiliation” at the feet of many of the same global powers that retain influence in the global system today, China puts forward its remarkable growth over the last 30 years as a model and inspiration for its partners. In addition, China’s emergence as a “near peer” to the United States despite very different values, political systems, and economics represents to many a crack in the purported monopoly of G7 countries. + +__BEYOND THE G7 PURVIEW__ + +For countries with established global leadership, many of their most vexing problems intimately link the Global North with the Global South and will require broader engagement between them. Migration is one such issue. Disease, climate change, and economic despair all drive people to leave what they know and seek better lives elsewhere. For some in the Global North, large immigrant communities from the Global South represent an incipient threat, bringing crime and extremism and threatening national cohesion. At the same time, some of those leaving the Global South are among the most highly skilled and trained of their population. They can gain entry to wealthier countries, earn higher pay and benefits, and enjoy a brighter future than in their countries of birth. As a consequence, their departure can make it harder for the Global South to develop local solutions, and it can perpetuate the Global South’s dependency. + +___`For countries with established global leadership, many of their most vexing problems intimately link the Global North with the Global South and will require broader engagement between them.`___ + +Yet, a much larger fraction of the displaced never make it out of their own country, or out of neighboring states. The United Nations estimates that, at the end of 2015, more than 85 percent of the world’s 16 million refugees, and more than 90 percent of the 64 million people forced from their homes around the world, remained in their regions of origin. Overwhelmingly, those areas of war and displacement are located in the Global South. And while states in the Global South are legally bound by international norms on refugee treatment — including but not limited to the principle of non-refoulement, which bars the forcible return of refugees — they have no leverage to elicit support from northern states to abide by their respective normative obligations. Put quite simply, the “stronger actor has little direct interest in cooperating, and the weaker actor has so little bargaining power that it can either accept what is offered or disengage entirely,” in this case taking “what is offered or simply harm[ing] themselves by refusing all assistance for the refugees they host.” Their option is to appeal to other interests of the Global North. The most obvious is allowing an increase in irregular migration, which has its own political impacts in destination countries. Appealing to destination countries’ security interests that the origin countries can hold at risk is also in play. What is clear is that this is an area of tension that needs to be managed — between wealthier states that wish to keep the bulk of the challenge at arm’s length and poorer states that feel they bear the brunt of the burden. + +__ADAPTATION, LOSS, AND DAMAGE__ + +For many middle- and low-income countries, the unfolding of the global energy transition is a manifestation of their disenfranchisement. Resentful that wealthy countries became wealthy without any constraints on their emissions (and oftentimes while exploiting raw materials in the developing world), some complain that they, too, should be allowed to pursue industrialization and urbanization at the lowest possible cost, irrespective of emissions. As they look at the increased costs of electrifying their economies, reducing agricultural burning, cleaning up industries, and moving away from domestic coal and toward either imported fuels or renewable infrastructure with imported components, they feel entitled to financial support for their economies to transition to a low-carbon future. In addition, many seek external support for adaptation — that is to say, making their countries survivable through a period of greater weather extremes, which they see as brought on by centuries of rampant emissions growth from the world’s wealthiest economies. A 2009 UN commitment to “mobilize” $100 billion per year for developing countries, set to expire in 2025, fell well short of its goal, but also well short of projected needs. According to a recent UN analysis, “developing countries require at least $6 trillion by 2030 to meet less than half of their existing Nationally Determined Contributions.” + +Large as these numbers are, another issue is liability for losses and damages suffered as a consequence of climate change. For example, 2022 floods in Pakistan alone may have inflicted $40 billion in losses, destroyed more than two million houses, and damaged 13,000 km of roads. Every study suggests that the worst is yet to come. One estimate calculates that loss and damage from climate change in the developing world will total between a half-trillion and one trillion dollars by 2040, and between $1.1 and $1.7 trillion by 2050; an even more expansive study puts the toll at $4 trillion by 2030. And those are just the fiscal costs. A growing body of work seeks to assess the non-economic sources of loss and damage, including loss of territory, cultural heritage, indigenous knowledge, biodiversity, and a host of other factors. + +For affected states, the math is compelling. Pakistan contributes less than 1 percent of global carbon emissions, yet it is at profound risk for catastrophic loss due to climate change. Similarly, Africa contributes less greenhouse emissions than other continents, but 1.2 billion Africans are among the people most susceptible in the world to climate change. + +At issue, then, is not merely what countries will do to restrict their carbon emissions. There are a whole host of questions of who will pay the cost of adopting new energy systems, who will pay for adaptation to reduce vulnerability to natural disasters, who will pay the costs of natural disasters (and who will determine which of those have human causes, and how much of a role human activity played), and how countries will be compensated for other forms of loss that they suffer. Many wealthier countries argue that they not only have their own impressive climate-related costs to pay but have also already put billions of dollars into developing countries. At least some argue that “one reason people living in poor countries remain especially vulnerable to climate change is because government thievery and incompetence have held back the economic growth,” and that even if there were a large financial commitment by wealthier states, “very little of the money would likely reach the citizens who are suffering the brunt of weather disasters.” + +No formula can resolve the host of issues that have disproportionate impact in the Global South, and there will continue to be significant disagreement over the terms of their resolution. As the Global South gains in income, population, and power, however, its voice in the handling of those issues will rise. Up to now, Russia and China have put significant efforts into cultivating support in those states, arguing that what they need is a departure from the status quo that the United States and its allies and partners have imposed. The resultant solidarity gives some benefit to the affected states, while also providing benefit to Russia and China. + + +### Other Forms of Cooperation + +Important and populous though the rest of the world is, the world’s largest economies — and its largest military powers — retain outsized influence in global affairs, and they have a unique ability to genuinely threaten each other’s security. In recent years, many have proposed that major powers — including but certainly not limited to the United States and China — create an ongoing process of dialogue and consensus building. The Concert of Europe inspired one suggestion, put forward by then–Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass, that “concert members recognized their competing interests, especially when it came to Europe’s periphery, but sought to manage their differences and prevent them from jeopardizing group solidarity.” Haass and coauthor Charles Kupchan envisioned a permanent headquarters with representatives from China, Russia, the United States, India, Japan and the European Union, along with observers from four regional organizations: the African Union, the Arab League, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and the Organization of American States. Their goal was creating a system that provided both “political inclusivity and procedural informality,” eschewing both the democracy-promoting inclusivity of the G7 and the sometimes-excruciating diplomatic exactitude of the G20, to create “major power consensus on the international norms that guide statecraft.” + +Harvard professors Dani Rodrik and Stephen Walt put forward another proposal, in which major powers would agree to place issues in one of four buckets: prohibited actions, actions in which states agree to alter their behavior in exchange for others’ altered behavior, actions which states can take unilaterally, and actions whose efficacy requires broad multilateral compliance. + +Both proposals seek to build some guardrails around areas of mutual cooperation, ensuring that competition among major powers — let alone antagonism — does not undermine actions that advance mutual benefit. Yet, in periods of sustained conflict and low trust, countries tend to ascribe malign intent to even benign initiatives of their adversaries. This is in part because countries tend to see themselves as the central focus of adversaries’ foreign policies, and thus see adversaries’ efforts to thwart them as the central motivation of their actions. But it is also because, in low-trust environments, agreements are presumed to contain loopholes and trapdoors that advantage adversaries at their expense. While a focus on advancing shared interests is constructive — and, frankly, at the core of every diplomat’s tool kit — it is unrealistic to think that any single organization or dialogue structure can make significant headway between major powers when they are at loggerheads. Similarly, when there is general comity between major powers, the utility of a single structure amid myriad engagements is also diminished. + +Even so, the idea of putting boundaries around national behavior is constructive. Especially promising areas to explore are those surrounding dual-use technology, autonomous weapons systems, and the weaponization of financial instruments. While competition in some of these areas is desirable and can drive innovation, unconstrained rivalry is more likely to be destabilizing. Putting limits on what governments will do, and creating confidence that those limits will be observed, reduces tensions and slows escalatory spirals. Yet, beneficial as such actions are, they need to be merely a piece of a much larger set of efforts. + +__PLURILATERAL__ + +Ambition can be a rare commodity in the multilateral sphere. Washington’s frequent instinct, as well as the instinct of many allies, is to make moderate reforms to existing institutions and arrangements in order to make them fit for purpose. Yet, the reform process is fraught. Meeting the aspirations of rising powers while reducing the U.S. ambit as well as that of its closest allies requires both sides of the equation to make what they consider to be significant concessions. Doing so when great power competition is the prevailing paradigm creates strong disincentives for such action. It is not a promising environment for ambitious adventures of diplomatic architecture. + +___`It is not a promising environment for ambitious adventures of diplomatic architecture.`___ + +More worthwhile is an effort to supplement the existing system, enveloping it in a web of complementary, sometimes overlapping, and often less-formal arrangements. In a way, this represents an effort to supplement twentieth-century agreements with additions that are more reminiscent of the nineteenth century. + +There have already been efforts to invigorate what might be called “plurilateralism,” in which states set up smaller, more flexible, voluntary, and often temporary arrangements to break down complex cooperation problems and address specific governance challenges. Coalitions vary greatly in size, function, and format, and they address discrete problem sets and issue areas in which interested parties have a stake. Former Indian national security adviser Shivshankar Menon has called this growing form of internationalism “coalitions of the willing and able,” reflecting the fact that coalition members often have both an interest in addressing the shared challenges at hand and a willingness to devote resources toward them. When working well, informal arrangements enable swift cooperation on shared challenges — something in increasingly short supply within treaty-based multilateral forums. Smaller groupings mean fewer diverging interests at the negotiating table, which arguably makes it easier (and quicker) to define agendas and set goals in discrete areas of global problem solving. And because membership can be tailored to those with an interest in the issue at hand, states often come to the table with greater willingness to negotiate solutions. + +Plurilateral coalitions have become more common across multiple domains of international problem solving, particularly as the prevalence and visibility of transnational issues has grown and geopolitical tensions and recalibrated modes of international engagement have made more formal arrangements less effective. In the environmental realm, for example, informal “climate clubs” are gaining traction as the international climate agenda expands and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) — the chief multilateral body for environmental negotiations — faces gridlock. Some groupings are designed to enable stronger international agreements. The Major Economies Forum of Energy and Climate Change (MEF), for example, was formed in 2009 to facilitate negotiations among developed and developing economies on the minimum required contributions necessary to make the 2010 UN Copenhagen climate summit successful. The MEF — which includes China, the United States, and other major polluters — has resumed meeting under the Biden administration. + +Coalitional governance in global health has also grown, especially in light of gridlock in the WHO made evident by the Covid-19 pandemic. In March 2021, for example, the “Quad” grouping of four maritime democracies across the Indo-Pacific (the United States, Australia, Japan, and India) established a vaccine partnership to assist countries in Asia with their Covid-19 pandemic responses, expand vaccine manufacturing, and administer 1.2 billion vaccinations globally. Meanwhile, under Beijing’s chairmanship in 2022, BRICS — Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — launched a vaccine R&D center aimed at deepening cooperation in pandemic prevention as well as vaccine development, production, and distribution. + +In the economic domain, too, coalitional approaches are on the rise. The G20, formed in 1999 as a coordination mechanism among major global economies, held its first summit in 2008 as the world plunged into the largest financial crisis since the Great Depression. By choice, states in the former G8 began investing in the G20 as the “premier forum for . . . international economic cooperation,” recognizing that avoiding global crises (economic and otherwise) would require coordination among a wider set of states. China has been active in coalitional arrangements in this sphere. In 2013, it launched the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to support infrastructure development overseas and expand and coordinate its bilateral economic partnerships, along with the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), to put its stamp on regional infrastructure financing. + +The informal and ad hoc nature of coalitional arrangements can facilitate problem solving. For example, while China (now the largest creditor to developing nations) has refused to join the Paris Club — an informal group of mostly Western official creditors that has met regularly since 1956 to address repayment challenges faced by debtor countries — it recently joined Paris Club members in a new initiative, the Global Sovereign Debt Roundtable, to discuss coordination on sovereign debt restructuring and debt sustainability. + +Global cooperation is arguably most effective when pursued as a set of concentric circles, in which the innermost circle features deep patterns of cooperation enabled among like-minded societies. As tensions have intensified between Beijing and Washington over the past decade, coalitional arrangements have emerged as a key vector for parties to extend and reinforce partnerships among like-minded states, expand material and normative influence, and set multilateral agendas in line with policy preferences. + +___`Global cooperation is arguably most effective when pursued as a set of concentric circles, in which the innermost circle features deep patterns of cooperation enabled among like-minded societies.`___ + +__UNITED STATES, ALLIES, AND PARTNERS__ + +Many plurilateral groupings pursued in the global West have begun to emphasize “like-mindedness” or ideological solidarity as an organizing principle. Deputy Prime Minister of Canada Chrystia Freeland has argued that democracies need to deepen mutual ties and drop “the pretense, or the self-delusion, that most of our relationships with authoritarian regimes can have a win-win outcome.” This idea is made explicit in the Biden administration’s U.S. National Security Strategy: while recognizing the importance of building coalitions that are “as inclusive as possible” to address global challenges, the strategy repeatedly emphasizes that “democratic nations who share our interests and values” will be “at the core of our inclusive coalition.” Such ideas are echoed in the national security strategies of key U.S. allies and partners, including Japan and Germany. + +The United States and like-minded partners are indeed leveraging coalitions to address perceived threats from China’s more assertive international behavior. Consensus about challenges to regional stability and prosperity served to resuscitate the Quad; the group was established first in 2007 but was reestablished in 2017 and meaningfully reinvigorated during the Covid-19 pandemic, due to strategic adjustments from India arguably tied to the Ladakh border crisis with China. Shared values are a core ingredient of the Quad. As Indian foreign minister S. Jaishankar put it, “the Quad nations are all democratic polities, market economies and pluralistic societies,” a fact which generates “natural understanding” between coalition members. + +The revitalized Quad joins a growing set of partnerships and groupings forming what the Biden administration describes as a “latticework of strong, resilient, and mutually reinforcing relationships that prove democracies can deliver for their people and the world.” AUKUS, a trilateral partnership designed to enhance strategic coordination and technological integration between the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia, is another example. AUKUS leaders are united by a desire to “protect . . . shared values and promote security and prosperity,” including a stable, free, and open Indo-Pacific. Similarly, the U.S. and EU trade and technology consultation mechanism, launched in June 2021, aims to coordinate economic and technology policy based on shared democratic values. + +Not all U.S. coalitions are anchored around a shared set of values. Some help the United States solidify new partnerships. The I2U2 grouping established in 2021, for example, links the United States with the United Arab Emirates, Israel, and India — states of different sizes, regime types, and development levels — centered on a broad agenda spanning from infrastructure development to food security to waste treatment. + +__LAYERING__ + +It is important to note that none of these approaches to multilateral cooperation need be exclusive. For example, states may simultaneously seek to create legally binding agreements between themselves (requiring both treaty commitments as well as domestic legislation for implementation), summit meetings of political leaderships, a permanent secretariat to sustain activity between summit meetings, and dedicated multiyear funding for shared projects. An example of the latter is the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which has spent over $100 billion worldwide in the last 20 years. While such layered efforts can be made among like-minded states, one could also argue that the approach approximates many elements of U.S.-Soviet (and later, U.S.-Russian) arms control agreements. Because comprehensive agreements often require domestic support, and because legislative processes may be drawn out and have uncertain outcomes, governments may favor pursuing multiple pathways simultaneously. Doing so can both build momentum for domestic legislation and lock in agreements when the requisite domestic support is not assured. + +At the same time, it is important to note that congeniality and effectiveness do not always go hand in hand. As a former Asian foreign minister observed, “The inclination is to have like-minded groupings of countries that exclude [other countries] . . . but I think that type of . . . comfortable, cozy, like-minded setup, while effective in decision-making. . . doesn’t allow for difficult conversations to be had.” + + +### Non-state Actors + +One way to invigorate a world with plurilateral arrangements is to supplement them further with a broader variety of actors. More and more, global problem solving demands the participation and resources not only of governments and intergovernmental organizations but also of corporate, civic, and philanthropic actors. The Covid-19 pandemic highlighted this new dynamic: while some governments pushed politically driven narratives and restricted information flow, public health experts, universities, and foundations shared data and remedies across borders. Accordingly, growing attention is being paid to the question of how to optimize integration of intergovernmental, national, sub-national, and non-state efforts in what UN secretary-general António Guterres has called more “inclusive multilateralism.” Anne-Marie Slaughter argues, “humanity cannot afford to go back to a world in which only states matter,” and Charles Powell draws attention to three “unconventional constituencies” — cities, citizens, and corporations — whose leadership will be required to meet the climate challenge, including by encouraging and facilitating policymaking. + +Non-state and sub-state actors have emerged both as problem-makers and problem-solvers in the twenty-first century. An early indication of this trend arose from the actions of al Qaeda at the turn of the century: according to Henry Kissinger, the 9/11 attacks immediately prompted questions of “how to establish international order when the principal adversaries are non-state organizations that defend no specific territory and reject established principles of legitimacy.” The leveling power of technology has increasingly enabled non-conventional actors to inflict disruption or lethal harm on states, such as through cyberterrorism and election interference. A hacker in one country can shut down a pipeline on another continent. + +These developments, many experts argue, challenge traditional notions of sovereignty that have historically formed the basis for order-building. As U.S. national security advisor Jake Sullivan put it in conversation with Michael Fullilove, the expanded capacity of non-state actors to inflict disruption and harm across borders has to some extent made the “Westphalian system of state-to-state diplomacy and engagement feel an increasingly distant thing.” Ian Bremmer foresees a “technopolar moment” in which big technology companies rival nation-states in their provision of national security, their delivery of digital and analog products necessary to run a modern society, and their ability to shape interactions and behaviors of citizens. As Dr. Kissinger frames it, “the very definition of state authority may turn ambiguous . . . [when] a laptop can produce global consequences.” + +Due partially to the resource demands of addressing growing transnational challenges, multilevel and multi-stakeholder approaches to global problem solving are on the rise. The private sector brings enormous financial resources. In 2020, the combined market capitalization of just five major U.S. technology companies exceeded the GDP of every nation but the United States and China. Financial incentives for private sector actors to align themselves with global efforts, such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals, are rising as shareholders of major multinational corporations increasingly prioritize environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues. + +___`As Dr. Kissinger frames it, “the very definition of state authority may turn ambiguous . . . [when] a laptop can produce global consequences.”`___ + +Additionally, actors at the subnational level, such as provincial and city governments, are increasingly indispensable in addressing transnational challenges. This is particularly true for issues such as pandemics and climate change, which disproportionately affect urban environments. In many countries, local authorities were on the frontlines in Covid-19 pandemic prevention and control: distributing tests, personal protective equipment, and vaccines, as well as issuing stay-at-home orders. + +In the climate arena, cities are now responsible for over 70 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. As a result, new arrangements have emerged to leverage these stakeholders as partners in problem solving. In 2014, for example, UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon and UN special envoy for cities and climate change Michael Bloomberg announced the “Compact of Mayors” designed to support mayors and other city officials who pledged to reduce local greenhouse gas emissions, enhance local resilience to climate change, and transparently track their progress. In 2016, the Compact for Mayors merged with an EU-focused initiative to become the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy (GCoM), a partnership between the European Union and Bloomberg Philanthropies, which has brought together over 12,500 cities and local governments across six continents. + +The GCoM offers an example of an emerging form of multi-stakeholder internationalism that more formally incorporates philanthropies, civil society, mayors, governors, and the private sector as partners to address pressing challenges. State-based coalitions and treaty-based institutions such as the United Nations and International Monetary Fund alike are increasingly working alongside businesses, NGOs, and civic society organizations through what Slaughter and LaForge call “impact hubs.” An implicit premise of such hubs is that treaty-based institutions and states bring legitimacy and convening capacities, but non-state and local governmental actors are essential partners in financing and implementing steps to address shared challenges. + +Examples of this multi-stakeholder approach are proliferating across transnational issue areas such as global health, food security, and climate change. A prominent example in the realm of global health is the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI). Established in 2000, GAVI facilitates the delivery of affordable vaccines to low-income countries. GAVI was specifically designed to be a “new type of international organization, one that sought to be representative, nimble, and effective all at the same time.” While GAVI’s objectives are aligned with UN Sustainable Development Goals, and international institutions anchor the alliance, non-state actors remain central to the enterprise: the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation contributed initial seed money in 1999 and has a permanent seat on the 28-member board, alongside civil society organizations, research and technical health institutes, donor countries, and international organizations such as the WHO and the World Bank. GAVI worked alongside UNICEF and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) — another multi-stakeholder group — on the COVAX effort during the Covid-19 pandemic, which distributed nearly 2 billion vaccines to 146 countries. + +Examples of this multi-stakeholder approach are found in a range of other realms. In food security, for example, the UN secretary-general recently launched the Food Systems Coordination Hub to better coordinate the work of UN bodies, international financial institutions, civil society, and private sector actors to support food systems transformations at the national level. The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), which seeks to reduce corruption and regulate information disclosure in supply chains for extractive industries (oil, gas, and mineral), is another example. Funding comes from implementing countries, international development partners, and private firms, and the board is composed of civil society organizations, firms in the industry, institutional investors, and implementing and supporting countries. + +In the energy and climate space, a prominent and recent multi-stakeholder initiative is the Global Energy Alliance for People and the Planet (GEAPP), which aims to catalyze and channel major public and private investments to improve the availability of affordable clean power. GEAPP has three types of partners: anchor partners, including foundations responsible for setting the strategic vision and providing seed capital; multilateral and regional development banks, which “amplify” philanthropic and private capital; and organizations and individuals with technical and regional expertise. Just as GAVI was established with support from the Gates Foundation, GEAPP was set up by the Rockefeller Foundation, which — with partners — invested $10 billion at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in November 2021. A multi-stakeholder approach was inherent in its design: GEAPP “recognizes that to create major change, a new approach is needed. Multiple players — governments, investors, innovators, power companies, philanthropies, and more — must come together to ensure access to electricity for all people.” + +As these examples suggest, broader coalitions of diverse stakeholders share many of the same advantages and disadvantages of state-based coalitions. Their flexibility encourages participation and allows for adaptation, and their modularity offers the ability to advance specific objectives. A unique advantage of bringing non-state and sub-state actors into the equation is that greater resources are brought to bear in addressing each challenge. This makes investments more sizeable, but also more stable: even as political dynamics within countries make broader cooperation difficult, non-state actors such as NGOs and corporations may still be able to work across borders and advance progress toward shared challenges. + +One implication of what Slaughter and LaForge call “opening up the order” to non-state and subnational actors involves influence over international norms and rules. Compared to the Global North, many countries in the broader Global South have relatively weak civil societies. Most sizeable philanthropies and civil society organizations, and many large corporations, are from the advanced economies of North America, Asia, and Europe. Arguably, this means that many multi-stakeholder arrangements may actually reinforce the wherewithal of developed countries in global governance, providing them with additional avenues to impose preferred norms. + +Beyond this, multi-stakeholder arrangements come with their own set of risks. National governments are often suspicious of other types of actors working on issues they see as within their sovereign remit. And without coordination, having too many actors involved in solutions provision risks gridlock and redundancy: “In most areas of global problem solving,” Slaughter and LaForge argue, “the challenge is not too few actors but too many.” These considerations clarify the challenges of developing multistakeholder arrangements that not only incorporate a range of stakeholders but efficiently channel their resources, know-how, and technology into global problem solving. + + +### Looking Forward + +While much of the foregoing analysis describes responses to the world as it is, it does not necessarily describe the world as it will be. As the United States and its partners look toward the future, it is important to anticipate that the nature of great power conflict may change, and perhaps in large ways. In the nearer term, the termination of the Ukraine war could leave Russia isolated, poorer, and some even suspect with new leadership. Some scenarios, however, would leave Russia strengthened, and a crumbling of Western support for Ukraine could change the nature of global solidarity with the United States. Either would cast a large shadow on U.S.-Russian competition. In the longer term, however, it is hard to see how the energy transition will leave Russia stronger, and Russia’s demographic challenges pose a persistent threat to its global power. + +China’s demographic challenges are even starker. Not only has India overtaken China as the world’s most populous country, but China’s population will both age and shrink over the next half century in ways that will certainly affect its economic growth. It remains unclear if China’s current economic slowdown is a harbinger of growing structural issues or a temporary consequence of its Covid lockdown, but assuming China’s global ascent will continue uninterrupted through the twenty-first century would be a mistake. While China may indeed continue to grow in global influence, barriers to that growth are increasingly visible. Whereas it once seemed fanciful to wonder if China would grow old before it grew rich, the question is an increasingly salient one. + +___`While China may indeed continue to grow in global influence, barriers to that growth are increasingly visible.`___ + +It is possible that a decline in the prospects of great power competitors — including the United States — could provoke governments to be less risk-averse as they seek to stave off decline. Yet, it is also possible that great power competition, which is currently at the core of U.S. global strategy, may soon be joined by the need to manage a subtler competition among rising powers for a greater share of the global pie. In this analysis, Russia’s and China’s military and intelligence capabilities mean they will remain important, but their relative importance may diminish while the growing ambitions, appetites, and independence of countries such as India, Brazil, and Saudi Arabia may grow even more salient. One former Asian national security adviser suggested, “Parts of the South now have developed capabilities they didn’t have, and hard power capabilities. If you look at it geopolitically, the contentions that matter are in the South, not in Ukraine, which is not going to change the central global balance [between China and the United States] . . . I think what we’re going to see is increasing movement by the South towards strategic autonomy.” + + +### Conclusion + +The Ukraine war, which started in a period already marked by great power competition, has highlighted global divisions in international affairs. Great power cooperation has fallen to its lowest level since more than half a century ago, when the United States began strategically engaging China to isolate the Soviet Union. Because there is ongoing proxy warfare between the United States and Russia in Ukraine, and because Chinese and U.S. tensions over the South China Sea in general — and Taiwan in particular — are rising, efforts to put guardrails around great power conflict are fraught. Each side fears that efforts to limit escalation are merely covert efforts to convey advantage. Meanwhile, rising direct sanctions against Russia and U.S. efforts to deprive China of access to cutting-edge U.S. technology have the effect of disentangling trade and reducing incentives for cooperation. Simultaneously, even countries close to the United States have signaled a desire to distance themselves from great power competition — absent a global ideological threat, attracted by the idea of greater agency over pursuit of their individual interests, and feeling that they benefit from a diversity of relationships. Global solidarity is becoming harder to achieve. + +There is no single reform or formula that can recover the shared sense of purpose that characterized much of the world in 1945. The world is more intimately connected than ever before, and the problems have multiplied even faster than the number of stakeholders. The appropriate response is to expand the instruments of consultation and cooperation, creating multiple forums for shared action. The foregoing essay has made clear some of the advantages of doing so, which date back to the nineteenth century’s earliest efforts at internationalism: incentivizing cooperation, coordinating the pursuit of shared interests, and enabling outcomes that individual countries’ actions are unable to achieve. + +___`There is no single reform or formula that can recover the shared sense of purpose that characterized much of the world in 1945.`___ + +Such efforts must overcome two challenges, however. The first is that they can succumb to advancing the “least common denominator” in international forums, devoting energy to issues and partners where there is broad agreement while diverting it from important areas where there is less agreement. Such an outcome would deliver small marginal benefits, but also leave unmanaged much more important — and potentially even threatening — problems that divide important countries. A central discipline throughout this process must be to ensure that contentious issues and troubling partners continue to receive sustained attention, partly through direct engagement and partly through using broadened partnerships to help build coalitions that can push back on any single country’s excesses. + +The second challenge is that the whole process could become completely unwieldy, with so many simultaneous initiatives taking off in so many directions that they dissipate energies rather than collect them. With a limited number of senior policymakers and limited time, there must be prioritization of efforts and partners. + +Russia’s efforts to advance its agenda aggressively in every forum have not won it success but have helped stave off abject failure. The government has been able to use its position and its influence to block efforts to constrain its behavior, and it has reached a sort of understanding with China that advances common goals, or at least common defenses. China’s efforts in this space have been more successful in addressing the second set of challenges than the first. Schemes such as the Belt and Road Initiative and the Global Development Initiative have drawn wide attention and broad participation, even when their parameters are unclear — and perhaps because of it. China has done an extraordinary job framing issues, supplying vocabulary, and advancing partnerships on its own terms. On the first set of issues — a watering down of collective action — China has also been largely successful, not least because it is comfortable in a world that gives wide ambit to sovereign governments and pushes collaboration mostly into the bilateral sphere. That suits China well, since in every bilateral relationship except the one with the United States, it is the dominant partner. + +As the United States and its allies and partners approach this issue, they have several innate advantages. The first is that they have allies and partners, bound by treaty and by shared interests to pursue common goals. That is to say, they have a head start. Second, they are better positioned to make consequential and positive change: technology and know-how, combined with massive capital, makes a great deal possible. Third, they have organizational and institutional capacity, between governments and with civil society organizations. Seventy-five years of joint action have created institutional memory and institutional capacity. + +Yet they must develop their capacity along two lines. The first is humility. The world’s wealthiest countries have devoted hundreds of billions of dollars to efforts that they said were devoted to global prosperity. Yet, many of the targets of that aid remain poor, and some, like China, that received little aid prospered. As countries that have felt historically exploited — by colonial powers, by extractive industries, by multinational corporations, by global financial institutions, and by the dominant states that shape those institutions — gain power and agency, more powerful countries will need to weigh the wisdom and efficacy of coercive efforts against weaker ones. This is not to say that there will not be moments when pressure is essential; rather, countries will increasingly find alternatives to compliance. + +The second element that must be developed is creativity. Because the United States and its allies and partners created the status quo, they have an instinct to preserve it. Yet, the very act of doing so reinforces the dissatisfaction of those who object to it. A strategy that searches creatively for common interests, builds common goals, and aligns common efforts both in rhetoric and action can break through that dissatisfaction and build durable patterns of cooperation. + +None of this will eliminate great power competition nor resolve the growing set of issues that divide the parts of the world that are still grasping for prosperity and the parts that are trying to preserve what they have. But a robust set of institutions and initiatives that encompass a wider range of actors will help create tools to manage tensions and create opportunities for efforts that make conditions far better for all. + +--- + +__Jon B. Alterman__ is a senior vice president, holds the Zbigniew Brzezinski Chair in Global Security and Geostrategy, and is director of the Middle East Program at CSIS. + +__Lily McElwee__ serves as deputy director and fellow in the Freeman Chair in China Studies at CSIS, where she researches Chinese foreign policy, U.S.-China relations, and EU-China relations.