The convergence of cyberwarfare and electronic warfare on the battlefield foreshadows threats which NATO must grasp, argues a new report.
Intelligent Consulting is emerging as a much-needed voice regarding the evolution of tactical communications across allied nations. In February Armada profiled an analysis written by the company’s director Suzanne Button which examined the myriad of failings of the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence in seeking to replace the tactical communications used by UK land forces. Intelligent Consulting has now turned its attention towards tactical communications across the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). In Future Battle Comms: Why EW/CW Convergency Demands a Complete NATO Architecture Rethink Ms. Button examines the convergence between cyberwarfare and Electronic Warfare (EW) on the battlefield and its implication for NATO tactical communications architectures. This convergence is a key challenge for the alliance, Ms. Button told Armada: “Stakeholders often fail to see EW and cyberwarfare as a holistic, cross-cutting problem because they tend to focus only on technical and physical layers, while underestimating the procedural and personnel dimensions that glue the capability together”.
The report commences with a stark warning: “When electronic warfare and cyberwarfare converge, tactical networks do not simply degrade; they collapse”. On contemporary and future battlefields, jamming signals will not just carry interference, and fake traffic, but may also convey malicious code. Such is the synergy between tactical, operational and even strategic Command and Control (C2) systems and radio communications that the latter risks becoming an effective vector to deliver devastating cyberattacks. The potential for battlefield dislocation and discombobulation therein is almost incalculable. As. Ms. Button’s writings continue “(f)uture battle communications must be understood as a contested mission system that sits at the centre of command, sensing, decision-making, fires, logistics and sustainment”.
The story so far
Until the advent of the digital revolution, best exemplified by the massed global uptake of the internet and worldwide web from the 1990s, the key factors degrading radio communications on the battlefield were “terrain, weather, range and occasional interference” says the report. Like the civilian world, militaries digitised and increased their reliance on Internet Protocol (IP) traffic. While this has brought untold benefits in terms of C2 efficiency, IP reliance has created vulnerabilities: “EW creates opportunity for cyberwarfare and cyberwarfare amplifies the effects of EW”, the report continues. To exacerbate matters, as IP-based C2 systems have proliferated “complexity has often increased faster than resilience”. One could argue that this latter factor is the result of an overconfidence in Electromagnetic Superiority and Supremacy (E2S) possession. NATO and allied nations have effectively ‘owned’ the spectrum in the operational theatres where they have fought over the past 35 years since the end of the Cold War. Whether above the Balkans or Libya, or in Iraq and Afghanistan, allied adversaries have largely been incapable of interfering with US- and NATO-led coalitions using the local spectrum as they desired. This tactical and operational reality risks creating a false sense of security.
The realities of the electromagnetic battle in Ukraine indicate that NATO will have to fight for every hertz if plunged into conflict with Russia, or other near-peer adversaries. “There is a mix of institutional inertia and policy reluctance, rather than outright hostility, toward fully accepting that NATO will fight in a heavily congested and contested electromagnetic environment” Ms. Button continued in her Armada interview. “Many institutions acknowledge in doctrine that spectrum contestation will occur, but they do not translate this into budget, career paths, procedures or procurement rules that force the physical, procedural, personnel and technical layers to align”.
Working together
Intelligence Consulting’s report posits that EW and cyberwarfare convergence brings key challenges for tactical networks and C2. The speed of contemporary electromagnetic combat means that a headquarters “may have only minutes, or even seconds” to understand whether a communications outage is the result of local propagation problems, jamming and spoofing, compromised management “or all four at once”. Discriminating between a communications failure and a cyber incident may complicate diagnosis. These challenges can be deepened when forces are fighting in coalition and/or multinational contexts: “National systems may appear resilient in domestic testing but once connected into multinational forces structures the number of interfaces, trust assumptions, policy caveats and interoperability compromises multiply rapidly”. Worryingly, “what was tolerable nationally can become fatal at coalition scale”. The cyberwarfare and EW convergence challenge is applicable to sea, land and space operations as much as it is to the land domain.
The remedy
Ms. Button makes some important recommendations regarding how the cyberwarfare and EW convergence challenge should be addressed across allied nations. She advocates that NATO’s Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence (CCDCOE) in Tallinn, Estonia, has a key role to play in providing an environment where resilience can be stress-tested. The results of these efforts can feed into NATO tactics, techniques, procedures, doctrine and policy. Likewise, NATO’s Allied Command Transformation (ACT) organisation in Norfolk, Virginia can help develop “doctrine, force development and future C2 concepts” to address the convergence.
The response must also be national: “(D)efence ministries must align procurement and readiness incentives. Operational commands must demand degraded-mode competence … Training establishments must stop teaching EW, cyber and tactical communications as separate mental models”. This last point chimes perfectly with the need for all individuals, civilian and military alike, across national defence enterprises to be ‘spectrum minded’ at all times. Industry must also play its part and “stop selling ‘integration’ while delivering single points of failure that maybe vulnerable to converged EW and cyberwarfare action.
The efforts of the CCDCOE, ACT, national defence ministries, armed forces, defence enterprises and industry can only be part of the solution to the cyberwarfare and EW convergence threat, Ms. Button argues. She writes that the 3PT (Physical, Procedural, Personnel and Technical Architecture) approach which treats “communications resilience as a mission assurance discipline” should be prioritised. A communications network’s physical layer “must be redesigned for survivability, mobility, distribution and graceful degradation”. Procedural, as opposed to purely technical, resilience should be fostered: “(T)hresholds, triggers, fallback states and authority boundaries” must be defined by procedural architecture which should also fuse EW and cyber reporting. Personnel architecture stresses the spectrum mindedness discussed above: “A credible personnel architecture would include cross-domain training pipelines, role-based decision authority, surge staffing models, embedded cyber-watch functions within communications elements, and exercise design that forces leaders to manage ambiguity”. Finally, the technical architecture “must support trust, adaptation, segmentation, observability and recovery in tactical conditions”. Ms. Button advocates that radios and their networks should be treated as “cyber-physical systems”. Waveforms, firmware, routing logic, update processes and remote management interfaces are all potential points of vulnerability: “A technical architecture that secures the payload but not the control plane is not secure”. Ms. Button added in her interview that “to truly ‘bake in’ 3PT, NATO, ministries of defence, procurement authorities and services must define and enforce 3PT aligned criteria from the outset of requirements and keep them visible through the whole procurement process”.
Intelligent Consulting’s report argues that EW and cyberwarfare convergence must be treated as one of NATO’s most pressing problems. Future communications networks do not simply need to work under pressure, but must “preserve command coherence, mission trust and operational effect when the spectrum and the software stack are both under attack at once”. Ultimately, “(t)he forces that adapt first will not necessarily be those with the most advanced equipment. They will be those with the clearest resilience model”. Intelligence Consulting can be contacted at [email protected].
by Dr. Thomas Withington
