AI-driven Defense: Intelligence Collection and C2 Applications
Welcome back, defense enthusiasts.
This week, I have two timely reports to share with you all. Their topics include:
How can the US Intelligence Community modernize in an era of rapid technological change and increasing geopolitical tensions?
How should the UK design the command and control structure for ground-based air defenses in the face of current and emerging threats?
Quick Tanks is a weekly collection and summary of the latest long-form analytic content on the topics of US defense, force structure, innovation, and policy considerations. We strive to aggregate all of the key sources of analysis and present brief, neutral summaries to help keep you informed. Should you feel inclined to learn more about any study, please reference the full report via the links provided.
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Intelligence Innovation
Repositioning for Future Technology Competition
By William Usher, Katherin Kurata, Meaghan Waff, Tara McLaughlin, Ylber Bajraktari, Michael Mederios, and Elijah Boles
Special Competitive Studies Project
Link to PDF
Focus: The report focuses on how the US IC should adapt to the rapid advancements in AI and other emerging technologies to maintain a competitive edge, particularly against China. Analysis: The report combines qualitative analysis with some quantitative data. Notable data sources include surveys of policymakers on IC performance, projections on global data growth, and statistics on private AI investments. The report also draws insights from historical examples and case studies of foreign adversaries' tactics.Argument: The IC must urgently transform to navigate the challenges posed by the nexus of technological change and intensifying geostrategic competition. Key pillars of this transformation include rapidly scaling AI use, reimagining intelligence partnerships, accelerating open-source intelligence adoption, and extending IC support for strategic communications.Insights:
1. AI will profoundly impact every stage of the intelligence cycle, necessitating a shift to human-machine teaming.
2. The hub-and-spoke model of intelligence partnerships should evolve into a distributed network architecture.
3. A public-private partnership could help bridge the IC's open-source capabilities gap in the short term.Recommendations: The report offers numerous recommendations, primarily directed at the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and IC leaders. See below for the full list.This SCSP report underscores the necessity for the IC to adapt swiftly to maintain national security and extend its competitive edge, anchoring its transformation in the advancement and integration of AI within intelligence processes, redefinition of intelligence partnerships, and a strategic embrace of both domestic and foreign collaborative efforts.
The Need for Change
The rapid pace of technological advancement, explosive growth of digital data, and intensifying rivalry with the PRC have created an urgent need for the IC to undergo significant transformation. Failure to adapt risks rendering the IC irrelevant and ineffective in the face of evolving threats. Consequently, the report outlines three key "Organizing Principles" to guide this transformation:
Broaden the focus from "national security" to "national competitiveness": the IC should recognize the expanding scope of national security in the face of techno-economic rivalry with the PRC.
Prioritize providing actionable "insight" over mere collection of "intelligence": the Community must leverage vast amounts of open-source information and advanced analytic tools and deliver timely and relevant knowledge to decision-makers.
"Lean in" on digital transformation: the IC should embrace human-machine teaming and AI-enabled capabilities and maximize the IC's potential in the digital age and maintain a competitive edge over adversaries.
Seizing AI as an Intelligence Advantage
The report emphasizes the clear and compelling advantages of leveraging AI in the IC, particularly the emerging field of generative AI (GenAI), which has the potential to revolutionize the way intelligence is collected, analyzed, and disseminated. For example, an intelligence analyst equipped with GenAI tools could rapidly sift through vast troves of open-source information, identify patterns and insights that might otherwise go unnoticed, and generate comprehensive reports in a fraction of the time required by traditional methods.
To capture the advantages of AI, the authors recommend:
Revamping Intelligence Partnerships
Foreign Intelligence Liaison Relationships
The report argues that the current hub-and-spoke model for foreign intelligence liaison relationships is ill-suited for the modern era, as it fosters transactional relationships and overemphasizes secrecy at the expense of strategic influence. To address these limitations, the report advocates for a shift towards a more distributed network architecture, in which intelligence partnerships are characterized by a greater degree of multilateral collaboration and information sharing. Moreover, the report emphasizes the importance of building stronger relations with unaligned or hedging states, particularly in regions of strategic importance such as the Near East, Africa, and South East and Central Asia.
Domestic Partnerships
The report identifies several limitations in the IC's current approach to domestic partnerships, which can hinder its ability to fully leverage the expertise and capabilities of the private sector, academia, and other non-governmental entities. For one, classification restrictions can obstruct the prompt exchange of vital information. Legal boundaries constrain what intelligence agencies are permitted to disclose to partners, especially if it jeopardizes privacy or national security. Finite resources compel the IC to rank partnerships, possibly missing out on useful intelligence sources and expertise. Lastly, the IC's duty to safeguard sensitive sources and methods can conflict with the imperative to build trust and cooperation with US partners.
Despite these challenges, the report emphasizes the critical importance of private-sector relationships, as the IC must find ways to harness the entrepreneurial, market-driven capabilities of the private sector to stay ahead of the curve. This will require a fundamental rethinking of the IC's approach to acquiring and integrating cutting-edge technologies, as well as a willingness to embrace new models of public-private collaboration that prioritize speed, agility, and innovation.
To develop and revamp these intelligence partnerships, the authors recommend:
Os-N-Tel: An Interim Approach
“At the heart of this transformation should be open-source intelligence. Unlocking the power of OSINT should up-end traditional models for intelligence collection and analysis that focused almost exclusively on the IC’s unique, exquisite, and highly-classified intelligence sources and methods. Unlocking secrets will always be an important IC task, but what will matter more in a future high-speed, data-driven tech competition with the PRC will be speed-to-insight, obtained from whatever sources are available. Most of those sources will be openly or commercially available, and the new AI tools to exploit this data will already be trained on much of it. The IC should emphasize greater use of OSINT, making it the INT of first recourse rather than the last. Adopting and normalizing this mindset would put the IC in a better position to keep pace with what industry vendors and academic institutions will be providing U.S. policymakers, and allow it to husband its resources and fragile sensitive capabilities and target them against only the most difficult of targets.”
Recognizing the importance of harnessing openly- and commercially available data for decision advantages, the report recommends the creation of an entity focused on this mission. As a bridge to the establishment of a dedicated Open Source Agency, the report proposes the creation of a non-profit organization called Open Source Intel (Os-N-Tel). Os-N-Tel could serve a crucial role in:
Sharing tradecraft standards between the IC and the private sector, expanding the interconnectivity of insights to benefit both.
Leveraging more bulk open data at scale, using several AI/ML tools.
Standardizing IC approaches to data rights, pricing, and data pedigree.
Serving as an additional mechanism for sharing information with private-sector national security decision-makers.
A More Proactive US Strategic Communications Posture
The report highlights how the US Government's approach to strategic communications has not kept pace with the rapidly evolving information landscape. Notably, the United States' principal adversaries – China and Russia – have developed sophisticated and multifaceted strategies for shaping the global information environment to their advantage. In contrast, US efforts are often balkanized, reactive, and lack a clear purpose.
“Compared to its adversaries, the United States has largely disaggregated its information efforts. The U.S. Government currently has at least seven departments and agencies assigned to handle various subsets of the information mission, though some have argued that U.S. strategic communications and public diplomacy are fragmented among 14 agencies and 48 commissions. These entities also tend to have relatively narrow mandates. They might be focused on a specific objective rather than being a resource for their department or the broader US Government.”
Thus, the report outlines five lines of effort for the US IC to adopt a more proactive strategic communications posture:
Understand emerging platforms and mediums of communications by establishing and updating a baseline understanding of primary foreign platforms, leveraging functional specialists to exploit or disrupt them and regional experts to identify local platforms and inform content development.
Map the adversarial information order of battle by tracking the organizations, individuals, resources, messaging, exchange programs, and people-to-people engagement used by the PRC, Russia, and other adversaries at home and abroad, with regional analytic offices leading this effort.
Disrupt adversary information operations by tracking foreign adversaries' activities, identifying vulnerabilities for US policymakers to direct disruptive efforts, and leveraging regional specialists and functional experts to analyze technological vulnerabilities and develop tech-enabled disruption options.
Modernize covert influence tools to support US policy by continuously updating and refining the IC's infrastructure and approach while avoiding involvement in disinformation.
Assist policy agencies in measuring the effectiveness of strategic communications by helping decision-makers understand foreign audiences' and rivals' responses to US initiatives and policies, tracking visible signs of success or failure, financial transactions, audience surveys, and local actors' actions, and leveraging modern software and connectivity for targeted, continuous global surveys.
The authors’ specific recommendations are as follows:
To fully understand how the IC must change in the modern era, I highly recommend reading the full report.
Requirements for the Command and Control of the UK's Ground-Based Air Defence
By Dr Jack Watling and Dr Sidharth Kaushal
Royal United Services Institute
Link to PDF; Link to Report Page
Focus: The report focuses on identifying requirements for the command and control (C2) of the British Army's ground-based air defenses (GBAD) in the context of the UK's evolving integrated air and missile defense (IAMD) strategy.Analysis: The analysis combines technical examinations of Russian and Iranian air defense threats, observations of Ukrainian air defense operations, field observations of British and NATO air defense capabilities, and interviews with scientific, industry, and military personnel.Argument: The current UK GBAD C2 capabilities are insufficient to meet the demands of modern air threats characterized by their speed, stealth, and multi-vector approaches. This requires a shift from optimizing individual defensive systems to maximizing the efficiency of the integrated air defense enterprise through effective C2. UK GBAD C2 must enable the fusion and integration of sensor data across the force, support interoperability with joint and allied assets, and adapt to incorporate new capabilities as threats evolve.Insights:
1. Air defense effectiveness is increasingly determined by C2 efficiency in allocating appropriate effectors against diverse, simultaneous threats.
2. Essential to this end, GBAD C2 must be able to fuse and integrate multi-source track data of varying quality to counter complex threats. 3. The C2 architecture must be modular, distributed, and adaptable to avoid single points of failure.Recommendations:
1. The British Army should ensure its Land GBAD program delivers a C2 architecture that can integrate diverse sensors, manage heterogeneous data relationships, and adapt to incorporate new capabilities.
2. Strategic Command should influence the Land GBAD program to ensure compatibility with joint and allied systems and address potential fratricide risks.
3. The British Army should expand 7 Air Defense Group's personnel and establish a career structure to develop GBAD C2 expertise and liaison capabilities.As the UK Ministry of Defence is developing an integrated air and missile defense (IAMD) strategy and the army is beginning work on its Land GBAD program, this RUSI paper outlines the trajectory of the future air threat environment and derives requirements for the UK's GBAD C2.
Current and Emerging Threats to Air Defense
Weapons are emerging that straddle traditional categorizations of high-speed and high-altitude versus slower low-altitude threats, complicating defenses optimized against specific profiles. These include supersonic and hypersonic cruise missiles that fly at lower altitudes than ballistic missiles but at extreme speeds, hypersonic glide vehicles with unpredictable trajectories, and quasi-ballistic missiles that blend ballistic and aerodynamic flight.
The risk of having defenses suppressed or destroyed has increased. GBAD systems face a dilemma - they must emit and thus unmask themselves to engage targets, but this enables adversaries to locate and attack them. As shown by Ukraine’s success, even opponents without air superiority can now use UAVs to cue for long-range surface-to-surface strikes to attack GBAD. Put simply, emitting in an era of ubiquitous ISR is increasingly risky.
Advances in precision are enabling mass delivery of effects that were previously only achievable with small numbers of exquisite munitions. Modifications like laser or GPS guidance kits can improve the accuracy of 'dumb' rockets and bombs by an order of magnitude. Specifically, a $30,000 guidance kit can make a $3,000 rocket strike within meters of its intended aimpoint. Precision is no longer determined primarily by cost, so adversaries can field large salvos of sufficiently accurate weapons rather than a handful of exquisite ones.
Very-low-observable (VLO) or 'stealth' aircraft and drones are proliferating. Their reduced radar and infrared signatures allow them to penetrate much further into defended airspace before being detected and engaged compared to traditional aircraft. This compresses the time available for defensive systems to react.
Timely acquisition, identification, and engagement of threats is becoming exponentially harder as more agile and elusive weaponry converges with advanced electronic warfare capabilities. Hypersonic weapons compress reaction times to seconds. Stealthy cruise missiles use terrain masking and erratic flight paths to remain undetected until the last possible moment. Swarms of drones use sheer numbers and electronic warfare to confuse and overwhelm defenses. This makes rapidly detecting, tracking, and assigning the optimal interceptor to each threat exceptionally complex and time-critical.
Implications for Tactical Air Defense
Tactical formations are now far more likely to face sophisticated weapons that would previously have been reserved for striking operational or strategic targets. An adversary's inventory of affordable precision weapons can now be used more flexibly across multiple echelons.
The growing number of threats are significantly less expensive than the interceptors intended to neutralize them:
“The cost of defensive systems aimed at optimising Pk [Probability of Kill] 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.”
Thirdly, iterative adaptations to circumvent or degrade defensive systems are becoming quicker and easier to develop than enhancements to the Pk of exquisite interceptors. Thus, relying primarily on a small number of high-performance defensive systems risks the defensive enterprise rapidly becoming outmatched.
Implications for Operational and Strategic Air Defense
In a conflict with Russia, UK forces must anticipate a formidable and layered air and missile threat throughout all stages of operations, as Russian doctrine emphasizes striking critical targets in the operational rear and strategic depth using a combination of ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, hypersonic weapons, aircraft, UAVs, and artillery. Especially early in a conflict, Russia could attempt complex and integrated strikes on key Western enablers before they disperse. Although Russian long-range assets would need to penetrate NATO airspace to reach many UK targets, reducing their survivability, Russia's Northern Fleet could pose a significant threat to the UK from its defensive bastions with limited warning.
The authors argue factors imply two priority missions for UK GBAD:
Providing a responsive last line of point defense for critical UK infrastructure and strategic enablers in the earliest stages of a peer conflict, before they can disperse or benefit from NATO-wide IAMD coverage.
Contributing to allied defenses of key staging areas, marshaling points, HQs and other vital operational targets on the continent for the duration of a conflict.
Tactical Requirements for GBAD C2:
“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.”
Low-level Threat Countermeasures:
Develop a layered sensor architecture incorporating early warning, elevated sensors, passive tactical sensors, and fire control radars to detect and track low-altitude threats
Field a mix of affordable short-range and high-performance medium-range interceptors to engage diverse low-level threats cost-effectively
Mid-level and High-level Threat Management:
Leverage offboard sensors from higher echelons and the joint force to detect and track high-speed, high-altitude targets like ballistic missiles and VLO aircraft
Coordinate with allied long-range interceptors and develop tactics to force adversary aircraft into sub-optimal engagements
Operational and Strategic Requirements for GBAD C2
Data Fusion and C2 Coordination:
Establish a resilient, distributed C2 network capable of rapidly fusing multi-source sensor data and coordinating complex joint and allied engagements
Enhance interoperability and data sharing with allies through common standards, exercises, and liaisons to build proficiency in coalition operations
Threat Spectrum Management:
Develop comprehensive threat assessments and optimize defensive resource allocation to prioritize the most critical and vulnerable elements of the expected threat array
“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 to operate 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.”
Technical Requirements for GBAD C2:
To act as the backbone for this complex web of GBAD C2 relationships, the report argues the GBAD architecture must:
Rapidly translate data between a wide array of formats to utilize heterogenous allied, joint, and commercial sensors
Allow data to be piped between security domains and networks of differing classifications
Ingest data from partners without requiring access to the source code of their systems
Leverage non-bespoke, readily available tactical datalinks to share information with assets outside integral GBAD channels
Ensure high-priority data can burst through congested lower-priority traffic to enable time-sensitive engagements
To better understand the threats faced by and the corresponding requirements of effective GBAD, I encourage you to read the full report.