Friday News Roundup — March 26, 2021
5G and Beyond to 6G; U.S. Army Into-Pacific Strategy; Excerpt Evaluating UK Strategy
Good morning from Washington, D.C., where this week saw President Biden’s first press conference, where he called out measures restricting voting access, set a goal of 200 million vaccinations in his first hundred days, and defended his administration’s handling of a border crisis that has existed not only for the last three months, nor the past four years, but, rather, the past decades. While Vice President Harris may be overseeing the current response, the only long-term fix can come from Congress. As for the president’s agenda and the future of the filibuster, he agreed with those critiquing it, but remained coy about his ultimate position. All of this here in the Beltway, and, with our apologies to Billy Joel…trouble in the Suez.
This week at CSPC, CSPC Chairman Ambassador Tom Pickering hosted a conversation with former NATO Deputy Secretary General Rose Gottemoeller on the future of arms control and dialogues on strategic stability with Moscow and Beijing.
In The Hill, CSPC President & CEO Rep. Glenn Nye and David M. Abshire Chair Chmn. Mike Rogers called for investments in technology and innovation to accompany the recognition of our long-haul competition with China.
We were also joined by Joby Warrick, author of Red Line, which chronicles the response to Syrian regime chemical attacks and the international effort to remove the Assad regime’s chemical weapons. Joshua also reviewed Red Line this week in The Diplomatic Courier. If you weren’t able to join us for these events, please check out these and other events on our YouTube channel.
In this week’s roundup, Dan looks at how we’re already moving ahead to 6G technologies, yet important steps today for 5G are key to 6G leadership. Ethan looks at how the U.S. Army is planning for future operations in the Indopacific. Finally, this week, Joshua covered the UK defense review for The Diplomatic Courier. We briefly excerpt his full work in the roundup.
The 5G Pathway to 6G Leadership
Dan Mahaffee
For many of us, the 5G story has just begun, as new handsets and network upgrades roll out. However, behind the scenes, the race for leadership in 6G network technologies is already underway. With a timeline focused on 6G technology in 2030, the next decade will feature a competition for 6G leadership with many of the same themes of 5G and Geotech competition we already understand, but with an ever hastening tempo and greater magnitude of technological change. As we roll out our 5G networks and lay the hardware, software, and policy frameworks for critical technologies, the decisions we make today shape our ability to lead in 6G networks in the future.
5G and telecom leadership are vital for our economic prosperity. A recent Accenture report commissioned by Qualcomm estimated that “5G will generate up to $1.5 trillion in additional GDP between 2021 and 2025, and will create or transform up to 16 million American jobs, including full-time, part-time and temporary jobs in the United States.” While we mainly see this in the faster connections in new smartphones, the truly revolutionary applications and platforms lie ahead as 5G allows for greater networking and connectivity in agriculture, manufacturing, transportation, and other innovations yet to come. As acting FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel says, “The real revolution when it comes to 5G is not going to be centered on our phones…In fact, if we do this right, our phones may be the least interesting thing when it comes to 5G.”
6G will be the next leap forward in connectivity, and further integrate the digital and physical worlds. This week at CSPC, we convened policymakers from the U.S. and Japan with their private sector counterparts to discuss first steps towards 6G that build on important 5G and Geotech initiatives and proposals already underway.
As 5G and 6G technologies make this bridge and network technologies critical for our prosperity and security, ensuring U.S. and allied leadership in these fields is vital. As this race for 6G takes off, the good news for policymakers is many of the lessons from 5G and the important next steps for 5G and Geotech today are important lessons and first steps for 6G.
One area that is already a concern in 5G is the need for greater vendor diversity and open architectures to break the stranglehold of China’s vendor Huawei. Open RAN lays the groundwork for open and virtualized networks with diversity of software and hardware vendors. Ensuring vendor interoperability and continuing to move towards Open RAN will require continued support from policymakers as well as further opportunities to test hardware and software for integration among various vendors and telecom providers.
Moving faster with support for these testbeds, R&D facilities, and other opportunities for real world testing and deployment of technology helps ensure U.S. and allied first mover advantages, as well as the underpinnings of the innovation ecosystems that ensure leadership in advanced technologies. These innovation ecosystems thrive through fair trade policies, resilient supply chains, intellectual property protection, investments in education, and support for basic research. In addition to these measures, we can also begin a deliberative and strategic approach to spectrum allocation — acknowledging the importance of this finite resource and the need to lead the way in coordinating its global use via standards-setting bodies.
With proposals before it now, Congress has the opportunity to move ahead on measures it has already undertaken — such as full funding the USA Telecommunications Act incorporated into the last NDAA. Furthermore, a package of measures for R&D support, supply chain resilience, and innovation leadership that builds on past proposals like the CHIPS Act and Endless Frontiers appears to be imminent. With bipartisan support for these measures in the past Congress, one can hope that there can be bipartisan agreement on a package to invest in American innovation leadership.
Finally, with the Democracy Technology Partnership Act introduced by Senator Warner and a bipartisan team of co-sponsors, Congress can support the partnerships with like-minded allies and partners that are vital to 5G and 6G leadership. As our discussion this week found, the U.S. and Japan have many shared interests in 5G and beyond, but this conversation can be expanded to include discussion with the Quad and proposed D-10/T-12 framework — measures that can also complement or build on existing dialogues and partnerships.
As we look ahead to the race to 6G, there is the opportunity to learn from where we took our eye off the ball on the race from 4G to 5G. Strategic vision matched with needed investments and policymaking can build on our existing innovation strengths, address our shortcomings, and prepare the way for the innovations that underpin our future prosperity and security.
Army Strategy touts “Hard to Kill” for INDOPACOM
Ethan Brown
The gang is just about all here, as everyone in DoD is talking about strategizing for the Indo-Pacific theater of command. Last year I touched on the Marines crafting their Littoral shock troops for island hopping, last week this space covered the INDOPACOM Combatant Commands posturing for Chinese Communist aggression, and this week, Big Army released its strategy for the same, titled “Army Multi-Domain Transformation: Ready to Win in Competition and Conflict”. Now of course, if I am reading it and have erstwhile hyperlinked the document for the CSPC readership, that means we are only seeing a portion of the actual strategy, while many of the multi-domain capabilities and implements to deter Chinese Communist aggression will remain highly classified. Despite these 39 pages certainly being watered down and heavily vetted for public consumption, plenty of valuable data points can be gleaned from its pages.
Environmental Challenges
The white paper strategy opens with a brief commentary that fairly recognizes the disadvantages which the United States, and particularly its Army ground forces, face within the bubble of PLA Anti-Access/Area Denial methodology. While the Chinese Communist forces enjoy that consistently expanding bubble of deterrent firepower and electronic warfare capabilities, U.S. and allies pushing back face the challenge of setting a picket against expansion into the Pacific, while securing logistics and lines of communications — problems as old as warfare itself. In the Great Powers paradigm, adversaries have a myriad of means to disrupt those critical spiderwebs of support that are not always kinetic or confrontational in nature. By this, the paper identifies the space, cyber, information, and electronic warfare domains as means of upsetting U.S. and allied force projection, which is an exceptionally cost-effective alternative to maritime confrontation for the still emergent PLA Naval forces.
In short, the challenge for the U.S. Army is how to get forces ahead of the ‘fight’, or in crisis, into the ‘fight’, inside the adversarial bubble, and make continued aggression too costly to sustain (the ambition here of avoiding all-out confrontation, i.e. conflict) in order to break the de facto “lines’’ of those A2/AD bubbles and continued expansion into the INDOPACOM theater. The paper addresses the changing construct of Large-Scale Conflict unique to ground forces, citing time and distance as the key challenges.
“The Army will provide combatant commanders [Joint] with land forces that are persistent, cost effective, and survivable…dispersed across archipelagic or continental [which] present a key problem for adversary sensing and targeting” the strategy offers. Survivability is the key point in this broader strategy summary. Ground forces are in fact, hard to kill, especially when considering the delivery of aerial and long-range fires because those forces…wait for it…go to ground. But the days of soldiers taking cover in the trenches of the Somme, the battle lines of Europe in World War II, and even the jungles of Vietnam don’t compare to the sheer lethality of weapons technology today. Further, few of those adversaries challenge the technological supremacy of the United States as a potential Chinese PLA forces adversary will five-to-ten years from now. Cover and concealment are critical core skills for any soldier, but forward staging fighting elements on islands within the A2/AD bubble severely limits the places to find cover.
It’s a Bold Strategy Cotton, lets see how it plays out
The paper briefs well, yet now is the time for a few critiques. The paper suggests that everything hinges on Joint and combined integration, which sets the table for getting soldiers on deck and sustaining operations between elements. While valid, the core competency should be a unified, but decentralized effort built on that preexisting coordination and confidence in allies capabilities. Similar to the manner where Light Amphibious Warships (which the Navy is actively pursuing for its inventory), can forward-stage and provide assault/counterfire/flanking echelons unilaterally, this plan only has merit if the Army forward stages its elements in a manner that enables them to operate independently, but mutually supportive of other U.S. and coalition forces. Those other elements are only effective when they are similarly capable of maintaining pressure under an established, trustworthy command and control paradigm. It’s very much like the proliferation of swarm/drone ideology which is rapidly expanding into the strategy thought circles: make too many targets for an adversary to detect and effectively engage, but it only works if the swarm can move in unison, or in mutually supporting fashion.
Second, no element can self-sustain indefinitely. The strategy discusses altering or “expanding the battlespace’’, and touts 2035 as the final phase gate for when Army MDO capabilities will have rapidly transitioned to an innovative logistic and support construct. While certainly critical (if a little on the nose), a mere single-paragraph on page 25 is the lone mention of how sustainment will be achieved, and frankly, it’s a lot of buzzwords, which rankles me when we are trying to have a serious conversation about strategy flaws and vulnerabilities. The pursuit of Army ground units maneuvering independently challenges an adversaries target acquisition, resource/kinetic fires allocation, and battletracking which places U.S. forces inside the adversaries OODA loop, but those lines of communication going back to the logistics hubs — Hawaii, Japan, Guam, etc. — must be hardened against non-kinetic interference (EW, cyber, space, etc). Even special operations forces cannot operate in austere environments indefinitely or rely on established support zones, they too must be sustained in order to keep pressure on an enemy force.
And now a history lesson from the Pacific theater. What happens when the conflict escalates to open confrontation, and PLA Naval forces begin their own force projection while taking a page out of the U.S. World War II doctrine, and bypass those independent forces entirely on the way to cutting off those critical supply lines? This strategy was expertly detailed in Ian Toll’s Pacific War Trilogy, which should be mandatory reading for any strategist looking into the Pacific theater. The paper addresses long-range capabilities (a major initiative the Army is touting as its strongest GPC force-multiplier), “strike in depth across domains/gain and maintain decision dominance”, but that did not work out so well for a Japanese occupying force conglomerate who watched U.S. and allied task forces sail past on their way to the Imperial lines of support, and their rapidly dwindling offensive firepower was swiftly rendered ineffective by the U.S. Navy’s bypass.
Turning the tide
It isn’t all doom and gloom and miscues as the above critique mentions. The reality is that this strategy offers some decent points for Army resource allocation. The idea of placing competent, (near) self-sustaining forces inside the enemy bubble is without a doubt, critical in competition with Chinese aggression, and has the potential of lynch-pin decisiveness if a conflict emergers from escalation. The strategy hinges largely on pre-conflict movements, or “Expand the Land-power Network” through partnership building for deterrence, an area I critically argued for and examined in-depth recently.
Getting there (and arriving functionally at the 2035 MDO-capable Army landmark) will be achieved through a “continuum of analysis”, where wargames and iterative capability development will drive the innovations necessary to get the Army on par with the challenges of the Pacific theater and Chinese Communist methodology. This continuum will focus on four contexts as the locus for adaptation — Geography, temporal (allied and partner political/social constructs), Strategic (considering ALL of the potential domains that demand Army attentioned), and institutional (how the Army itself must adapt to meet the challenges).
This white paper stems from existing initiatives the Army has prioritized to meet the growing international paradigm, what the Army has dubbed the “Big 6”: long range precision fires, Next-gen combat vehicles, Future Vertical Lift, Network modernization, Air/missile defense, and soldier lethality. Every single one of the priorities will tie directly into this new concept of forward staging unilateral fighting forces whose aim is to contend with, and make costly any escalation on the part of the Chinese Communist Party. The white paper offers a spot of hope for the Army, traditionally the slowest among the DoD cadre to adapt to warfighting changes, for its modernization inside a rapidly evolving competition paradigm. Personally, I just wish some more ink would be spilled on how they intend on solving the sustainment piece.
Global Britain: The Arrival of the Long-Awaited Integrated Review
Joshua C. Huminski
Excerpted from the Full, Longform Piece at the Diplomatic Courier
This week London released the long-awaited and overdue Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy (hereinafter simply the “Integrated Review”). Originally announced in May 2019 and slated for publication in 2020, the Integrated Review was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The report aimed to be much more sweeping in its focus than previous defense and strategic reviews, incorporating non-traditional security concerns. In this, the Integrated Review is successful. It is much broader and comprehensive than traditional defense and security reviews. It takes a more holistic approach to security and foreign policy than previous reviews and includes soft power, science and technology, climate issues and biodiversity loss, pandemic disease, as well as multilateral diplomacy in addition to the traditional tools of state power.
Yet, a critical shortcoming of the Integrated Review is that it tries to be all things to all people. It very much reads as though every ministry and department was asked to provide their top priorities list and the Integrated Review is the result — it is a thorough document to be sure, but it is hardly integrated. Most glaringly, the report contains neither key trade-offs nor a balancing of accounts in the ledger. While the goals outlined in the Integrated Review are laudable, it is wholly unclear how the “Global Britain” mission will be achieved without a concomitant increase in resources — extremely unlikely in this economy and certainly post-Brexit — or a rebalancing of priorities.
At a macro-level, the Integrated Review is to be welcomed in that it does join up the various sheets of music into one hymnal but it fundamentally fails to produce a symphony from the source material. It is broader than simply hard power defense and security issues but fails to elaborate how the government will prioritize its interests in an era of limited resources. The Integrated Review ultimately does not answer the exam question: what is Britain’s role in the 21st century?
News You Might Have Missed
House Dems Consider Rejecting Iowa House Race
Sarah Naiman
In an awkward reversal of roles, House Democrats must decide whether to reject the results of an election certified by state officials. During the November 2020 election in Iowa, Democrat Rita Hart ran against incumbent Republican Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks; she lost the election by six votes. However, Hart claims that 22 ballots were discarded during the counting process, including several that were simply sealed incorrectly. If these 22 ballots were counted, Hart would have defeated her opponent by a margin of 9 votes. This week, both Hart and Miller-Meek submitted briefs to the House Administration Committee, a body designed by the Federal Contested Elections Act to allow the House to review relevant elections and seat its members. According to Committee spokesman Peter Whippy, “It should not be surprising that any candidate in these circumstances would choose to exercise their rights under the law to contest the results.” In fact, over the last 80+ years, 110 petitions have been submitted to the Committee, though only 3 have been upheld. Of course, today’s circumstances remain starkly different than those of the past. In the wake of the January 6 insurrection, during which congressional Trump supporters voted to overturn the results of the election despite the attack on the Capitol, some worry that accepting Hart’s petition could set a dangerous precedent. As Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips tweeted, “Losing a House election by six votes is painful for Democrats. But overturning it in the House would be even more painful for America. Just because a majority can, does not mean a majority should.” Moreover, the results of the Hart-Miller-Meeks race were certified — and not contested at the state level — with bipartisan support by the Iowa State Board of Canvassers.
China is “Danger Close” to Surpassing America in the AI Race
Miles Esters
The People’s Republic of China’s artificial intelligence capabilities are exponentially evolving and pose a credible danger to U.S. technological leadership. The country has accelerated its Made in China 2025 initiative with aspirations of becoming an AI leader by 2030, and is now controlling the global share of scientific papers related to the field, consistently filing more AI patents than any other country. Moreover, China “views technology as a critical component to its future military and industrial power.” During the recent National Defense Industrial Association conference, Lt. Gen. Michael Groen, the Director of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC), discussed this mounting threat to America’s military primacy. He said that it is essential that the Pentagon “move faster to standardize its data, adopt cloud services and integrate AI into operation to keep ahead to China’s prowess in artificial intelligence.” The U.S. military must integrate networks across the Department of Defense, proceed forward with innovative enterprise-level cloud computing capabilities, in addition to common and streamlined data standards to retain its current advantage. Additionally, Lt. Gen. Michael Groen devoted a portion of his symposium to ethical guidelines for AI. He asserted that these restraints and guidelines did not inhibit the development and deployment of AI tools, but more “ethical systems will [gain] the trust of commanders in the field.” In a recent conversation with Defense One, senior officials from the CIA, DIA, ODNI, and JAIC all acknowledged that considering ethics was fundamental to implementation across the federal government. Artificial intelligence does not just have ramifications for America’s national security but will also impact the country’s economy and welfare.
The views of authors are their own and not that of CSPC.