Defense Operations

Building off some early successes with robotic process automation, or RPA, the U.S. Air Force is deploying the capability on a greater scale. Assisted by the Air Force Robotic Process Automation Center of Excellence, the service most recently has been testing out the application of RPA in its Department of the Inspector General, or IG.

As the unified combatant command responsible for conducting operations in, from and to space, the U.S. Space Command works to deliver space combat power for joint and the combined force; defends U.S. interests in space with its allies and partners; and deters conflict—and if necessary, will defeat aggression. The Defense Department stood up the command’s functional aspects shortly after its establishment in August 2019 so that it could perform this mission right away.

The two-year-old U.S. Space Force is growing its research and development community through partnership agreements with select U.S. institutions. Following the latest memorandum of understanding executed on Veterans Day with the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, the Space Force’s cadre of academia partners now stands at 11 universities.

The Space Force’s University Partnership Program includes:

The U.S. National Guard has an ever present international mission, with the U.S. state-based militaries growing their relationships with other nations. In some cases, the partnerships with certain countries have been established for decades, shares Gen. Daniel Hokanson, USA, chief of the National Guard Bureau.

The adjutant generals, or leaders of the U.S. state guards, work with a country’s military, their top military leaders and oftentimes directly with the president or ruler of a nation. The partnerships serve as a way to share information, techniques and how the U.S. National Guard responds to national events, medical or natural disasters.

As China continues to push the envelope and flex its economic, diplomatic and militaristic muscles toward an endgame of global dominance, other nations looking to curb the world’s most populous nation’s advancements are developing smart strategies of their own—chief among them is the alliance between four key democracies in the Asia-Pacific region.

The U.S. Army seeks to enhance the effectiveness of local cybersecurity defenders—and ultimately the joint force cyber warriors—by revamping organizational design, fielding the best technologies and improving training, Lt. Gen. John Morrison, USA, U.S. Amy deputy chief of staff, G-6, told the audience at the TechNet Cyber conference in Baltimore.

“Here’s my thesis: we have a lot of folks that are doing cybersecurity work, but we are not optimized across the entire joint force to conduct cybersecurity operations,” Gen. Morrison declared.

The Department of Defense's Office of the Chief Information Officer, or DoD CIO, is pursuing several efforts to make sure the U.S. combatant commands have the fundamental tools to enable artificial intelligence and machine learning to aid their operational command and control.

The U.S. Defense Department is deploying teams of data and artificial intelligence experts to the various combatant commands as part of its efforts to implement the joint all-domain command and control (JADC2) vision. The combatant commands host some teams for relatively short visits—a matter of days—while others will remain onsite for three years.

Kathleen Hicks, deputy secretary of defense, launched the AI and data acceleration (ADA) initiative. The teams include both data and artificial intelligence experts. The chief data officer and the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) coordinate and lead the effort.

As part of its transformation back to a maritime force, the U.S. Marine Corps is focusing on greater integration with naval and joint forces. This will require information technology systems that are extremely mobile, can work anywhere and operate in a denied environment, according to the Marine Corps deputy chief information officer (CIO).

The former chief of staff of the U.S. Army, Gen. Raymond Odierno, USA (Ret.), died October 8 at age 67 after battling cancer. He was chief of the service from 2011-2015, the 38th such leader since the position began in 1903.

Over his 35-year illustrious career, Gen. Odierno led troops in every echelon and deployed to lead overseas operations in Germany, Albania, Kuwait and Iraq. He is most known for his leadership during Desert Shield, Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Under an agreement with the U.S. Air Force Civil Engineer Center and telecommunications carrier AT&T, the Air Force will add FirstNet to 15 of the service’s bases to better support base first responders. For the next 21 years, AT&T will deliver FirstNet connectivity to the facilities, the company reported October 5.

Built in response to first responder and public safety needs following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, FirstNet is the nationwide, high-speed broadband communications platform for police, fire, emergency medical and public safety personnel. It was constructed in 2018 with AT&T in public-private partnership with the First Responder Network Authority.

In this infocentric age of all-domain warfare, DISA truly has a challenging mission and critical role in the defense community. DISA must focus on security and serving customers ranging from the president of the United States to the combatant commanders and the individual warfighters on the tactical edge. DISA is a critical player in the world of joint, all-domain command and control (C2).

The U.S. Army is moving beyond a forward-operating base ideal and is preparing for communications and operations geared instead toward near-peer competition in a contested environment. This winter, the Army’s Program Executive Office Command, Control, Communications- Tactical, PEO C3T, will conduct a new pilot program that will begin to identify what kinds of communications and network technologies could successfully be applied to moving armored vehicles to support soldiers in such an environment. The work is part of PEO C3T’s Capability Set 2025 (CS25) iterative effort to harness industry innovation and add tactical communication solutions in two-year sprints.

In preparation for a contested near-peer environment, the U.S. Air Force is working to send forces and assets to austere locations on short notice as part of its agile combat employment concept. The service’s ability to support the greater Joint Force’s dynamic force employment will provide a range of air-related military options and quickly deployed forces when needed in response to emerging requirements. To sharpen its skills in providing a more lean, agile and lethal force that can generate airpower from smaller and more dispersed locations in the Indo-Pacific Command’s area of responsibility, the service’s Pacific Air Forces, also known as PACAF, conducted Operation Pacific Iron 21 during the month of July, ending last Friday.

As the strategic focus of the U.S. military shifts away from the counterinsurgency operations of the war on terror and toward great power competition, so the focus of its biometrics programs is changing as well, Defense Department officials told AFCEA’s 2021 Federal Identity Forum and Expo Tuesday.

The U.S. Army needs to conduct five essential tasks to achieve the kind of information advantage that will allow commanders to make faster, more effective decisions than their adversaries. Those tasks are to enable decision making, protect friendly information, inform and educate domestic audiences, inform and influence international audiences and conduct information warfare.

The tasks were approved as part of a larger “logic map” during a February forum of one-, two- and three-star generals, according to Brig. Gen. Paul Craft, USA, commandant, U.S. Army Cyber School. Gen. Craft moderated a panel during the AFCEA TechNet Augusta conference in Augusta, Georgia.

The commander of the U.S. Space Force’s new Space Systems Command, or SSC, is prioritizing the budgetary funding, technology preparations and partnerships as a few of his early goals. Lt. Gen. Michael Guetlein, USSF, set the stage for the SSC’s future during the U.S. Space Force’s official stand up of the new field command last week. The command—which was redesignated from the U.S.

The U.S. Space Force officially stood up the Space Systems Command, or SSC, today. Leaders spent the last year developing the new field command redesignated from the Air Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center, Los Angeles Air Force Base.

The SSC stand up cleared one of the last hurdles with the U.S. Senate’s July 26 voice vote approval of SSC’s first commander, Maj. Gen. Michael Guetlein, USSF, to become lieutenant general. The commander, who had most recently served as the deputy director of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), took lead of SSC during a ceremony at the base today; Lt. Gen. John Thompson, USAF, the commander of SMC, retired July 27.

All of the U.S. military services are modernizing their forces to counter the rise of peer rivals and the onset of new game-breaking technologies. The Army, in particular, is facing difficult decisions as it tailors its structure for a new type of combat. Yet its challenges actually could open the way for the Army to set the pace for the rest of the U.S. military, and there is historical precedent for this possibility.

Connectivity is at the heart of today’s modern military operations. To conduct complex, distributed multidomain operations at speed and scale, U.S. and allied forces need seamless connectivity to enable real-time communications and high-fidelity data flows.

But the military services have wrestled for decades with the challenge of communicating and sharing data securely with each other, let alone with non-DoD partners and allies. To take a few examples:

The novel 2034 by James Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman perpetuates a fundamental misunderstanding of how technology should be employed and managed in future conflicts.

The continuing narrative is that we should purposely degrade our systems in a conflict with a peer competitor because of the possibility of a degraded spectrum, cyber attacks, space-based detection and jamming. But if we preemptively degrade our technology in a peer conflict, we will lose.

In the novel, after a conflict with the Chinese Navy in which the U.S. technical systems were incapacitated, U.S. ships preemptively disabled “any interface with a computer, a GPS or [any interface] that could conceivably be accessed online.”

Officials with the 2nd Cavalry Regiment have found a unique solution to a software challenge while fielding the Warfighter Information Network-Tactical Increment 2. The validation of the process could pave the way for other units to implement the fix if they encounter a similar issue.

Mission command is the critical component in ensuring success under a large-scale combat operation. As the senior sustainment commander and sustainment coordinator within the Army’s only forward-stationed Stryker Brigade, the 2nd Cavalry Regiment, unfettered access to all elements within the regiment is required.

The U.S. Space Force (USSF) this week plans to announce the first transfer to its ranks of 50 sister-service members who are leaving the Army, Navy and Marine Corps to become Space Force guardians, said Lt. Gen. Nina M. Armagno, USSF, director of staff of the Office of the Chief of Space Operations of the Space Force. 

“It’s important to know that as we grow, we’re bringing over missions, systems and personnel from our sister services, and this week, we’re going to announce the first 50 interservice transfers,” she said during an interview this week.  

Rear Adm Hugh Wyman Howard III, USN, commander, Navy Special Warfare Command, made the case today that keeping a combat-ready active-duty force in reserve for combat or contingency operations around the world will provide opportunities for greater experimentation with tactics, techniques and procedures.

“[We’re] very focused now on the fleets, key operational problems, and how we can be distinctive in providing support to the fleet in the strategic competition continuum but also in crisis and conflict ... .”—RADM Wyman Howard, USN, cdr, NSWC#WEST2021