Preserving capacity, General Tom Lawson, Chief of the Defence Staff, Keys to Canadian SAR
Issue link: http://vanguardcanada.uberflip.com/i/507045
T Technology www.vanguardcanada.com APRIL/MAY 2015 33 all sorts of new technologies coming at us faster and faster with greater and greater power, and that is particularly hard for orga- nizations that are conventional in their form and design – and sometimes their thinking – to adapt to. There is a vast array of technologies that are game-changers, but while that gives you capabilities that you could not have imagined a generation earlier, it also serves up dilemmas you wouldn't have imagined either. Those dilemmas are everything from questions of tactics, doctrine, organizational design and recruiting, to law and ethics. Q This technological change cuts across every service silo, ev- ery government department. Is there a culture change required as well? Is new thinking needed to understand how/where these technologies can best be applied? Absolutely. We wrestle with that in the book. In cyber conflict, for example, who is the ideal cyber warrior and in what kinds of units will he or she be organized? Is it classic military command where somebody is trained up through the military? Or is it a 17-year-old hacker who is in a cyber militia? What will a group like Anonymous do in this conflict space? Or, if you are look- ing at small unit tactics, how will an individual rifleman operate? What is the proper size of their unit? How about for an a counter insurgent: is it always going to look the same as it is right now? Is the current defence industry organized and structured in a manner that it would actually be effective and useful in a major state-on-state war? In the U.S., we turned to Detroit to serve as the arsenal of democracy in the last world war. Could our current defence industry fill that role? Or would we turn to Silicon Valley? And in turn, how would Silicon Valley respond? We could go on and on. We assume stability in our own struc- tures, in our current technologies, or in what our adversaries are trying to do to us. But that is not set in stone. Q What do robotics and artificial or machine intelligence do to the speed of decision making? Militaries insist there will be a man in the loop when it comes to unmanned or semi-auton- omous systems but does that man, in fact, become the weak link because he can't make decisions fast enough to respond? It both exponentially speeds up, but also time still matters. Let me explain that Buddha sounding statement. In whatever domain of conflict you care about, the OODA loop (observe, orient, de- cide, act) is shrinking to almost infinitesimal scale. In cyber con- flict, for example, the speed is digital speed and the human role is moved into a managerial one. It is the same when we look at something like air defence: 30 different nations have systems that are somewhat autonomous in that they automatically shoot down incoming rocket or mortar fire. When you have speed combined with the diversity of data that is coming in, the model of the commander on a bridge of a warship receiving information and delegating responses – a model that has been the way of naval warfare for hundreds of years and it is equally the vision of the Starship Enterprise – that, frankly, may not be possible in real conflict moving forward. This also has a legal edge to it. The positive role that lawyers have played in putting in a series of deliberations for rules of en- gagement when it comes to airstrikes and use of artillery, that has worked because we have had the luxury of time in most instances. The other side has not contested us in the air, at sea, in space or in cyber space. We may not have that luxury moving forward. The point is, yes, the speed is picking up, but the shear mass of data flows coming at you mean that the human role will certainly change and it may move all the way up to commanders. That's not to say time doesn't matter. When we look at corpo- rate experiences with cyber breaches, what determines their suc- cess or failure, what determines the cost of the breach, is shaped not by what happened in the moment of the breach but by the decisions they made months and weeks beforehand and in the days afterward in how they dealt with the breach. In cyber, where there is not an obvious smoking cloud over a blown up building, sometimes your best response may be, to quote the famous military theorists Taylor Swift, "shake it off" and act like it didn't hit you and leave the other side in question, or study the weapon that they've sent, close up your vulnerabili- ties, learn from that weapon, and then deploy it back. In cyber there is a back and forth of generations of technology, so you want to control the pace of that. So, yes, the decision cycle is be- ing compressed, but there is still a human interaction that is often political or strategic in nature. Q We've heard a lot in recent years about the strategic cor- poral. You raise the prospect of the tactical general who now has greater access to all aspects of the battlefield. What does technology of this nature do to clarity of command? The strategic corporal is the idea of younger and younger troops making decisions that can shape the outcome of the war. The flipside that we don't like to talk about is the tactical general. It's the ability of the technology to allow leaders to reach down into the battlefield and not just monitor what is happening at a specific level, but actually make decisions – the shoot or not shoot deci- Who is the ideal cyber warrior and in what kinds of units will he or she be organized? What will a group like Anonymous do in this conflict space?