Realizing the Potential of C4I Fundamental Challenges (1999) / Chapter Skim
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Executive Summary
Executive Summary
Pages 1-26
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Joint operations are now the norm, and in many cases, U.S. military operations are combined with those of allied and coalition forces.
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, the Military Departments and the Military Services within those Departments, the Joint Chiefs of Staff dCS) and the Joint Staff, the Unified and Specified Combatant Commands, the Defense Agencies and DOD Field Activities, and such other offices, agencies, activities and commands as may be established or designated by law, or by the President or the Secretary of Defense." This report adopts this convention, and the use of the term "DOD" without other qualification refers to all of the constituent elements described in this directive.
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The committee sees three major challenges to the effective exploitation of the potential offered by C4I technology interoperability, information systems security, and DOD processes and culture involving C4I. This report is focused on these three challenges.
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For each area, a high-level goal is stated. Principles relevant to achieving that goal then follow; these principles are derived primarily from the committee's professional experiences and expertise in the civilian and military worlds set against what the committee saw and learned in its briefings and site visits.
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Future U.S. military operations will inevitably involve elements from more than one service.
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First, the domain must be sufficiently bounded that progress can be made before the key players, mission requirements, or technology change significantly. An effort that is too large will simply never reach closure.
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Technical standards are one way of planning for the future. Compliance with technical standards is an investment that makes future interoperability easier, though by no means certain.
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Both formulation and implementation have gaps and shortfalls. The DOD technical interoperability strategy (adopting an architectural approach, building to standards defined by the Joint Technical Architecture, and developing a common, defense-wide "public utility" infrastructure)
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Recommendations Some of the interoperability challenge stems from the broader issue of the distributed, horizontal structure and organization of DOD itself, as established by Title X The recommendations that follow do not assume any changes to this fundamental framework.
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Current DOD activities for promoting C4I interoperability should be augmented in three areas: cross-service testing starting early in the development process, ongoing interoperability assurance in operational contexts, and interoperability support for deployed forces. The joint C4I integration and interoperability activity would do this work, taking development, testing, and training roles in peacetime and providing support during exercises and operational deployments.
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civilian information infrastructure on which DOD C4I systems often depend) is only one of many possible asymmetric attacks, but one for which the United States must be adequately prepared.
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Furthermore, senior leadership must take the lead to promote information assurance as an important cultural value. Top-level commitment is not sufficient to ensure good security practices.
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should be able to function effectively despite local security failures. · Manage the tension between security and other desirable C4I attributes, including user convenience, interoperability, and standardization.
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With a culture that values the taking of the offensive in military operations, the military may well have difficulty in realizing that defending against information attack is more critical and more difficult than conducting an information attack against an adversary. Senior DOD leadership must therefore take the lead to promote information systems security as an important cultural value for DOD.
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Accountability depends on the availability of adequate tools that make good security possible with reasonable effort; ongoing education and training in security practices; incentives, rewards, and opportunities for professional advancement for promoting compliance with good security practices; continuous measurement of security; and sanctions for violations of good information assurance practice that are applied uniformly and consistently to all violators, regardless of rank. Recommendation S-3: The Secretary of Defense, through the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Cal, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the CINCs,6 should support and fund a program to conduct frequent, unannounced penetration testing of deployed C4I systems.
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Recommendation S-5: The Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Technology and the Assistant Secretary of Defense for C3I should direct the appropriate defense agencies to develop new tools for information security. Aligning DOD information security practice with the best practices found in industry today would be a major step forward in the DOD information security posture, but it will not be sufficient.
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(A "compromised" system or network is one that an adversary has penetrated or disrupted in some way, so that it is to some extent no longer capable of serving all of the functions that it could serve when it was not compromised.) However, despite this assumption, most of the C4I systems connected to the compromised components should be able to function effectively despite local security failures.
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DOD PROCESS AND CULTURE Goal: A DOD culture and management system that fully reflects the importance of C4I in future military operations and the pace at which the underlying technologies evolve. While both C4I interoperability and C4I security have technical and non-technical elements, DOD process, culture, and military doctrine are not issues of technology per se.
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They enable new ways of conducting military operations that may be at odds with established doctrine, and if not managed properly they run the risk of being obsolete before they are available for use. Decision makers will never have anything approximating perfect knowledge of how a C4I system will be used, and so risks must be accepted as part of the decision-making process.
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Findings Finding P-1: DOD processes dealing with the acquisition of C4I systems have not been adequately restructured to account for the rapid pace of development in the commercial information technologies on which such systems will inevitably build. The current acquisition system is particularly ill-suited to C4I systems.
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Well-trained C4I professionals are essential to the successful operation of modern military weapons such as jet fighters, warships, and sophisticated ground-based weapons. However, DOD is not succeeding in creating either the environment or the incentives to attract and retain such human resources.
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Recommendations Recommendation P-1: The Secretary of Defense, working with the service Secretaries and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, should establish in each of the services a specialization in combat information operations, provide better professional career paths for C4I specialists, and emphasize the importance of information technology in the professional military education of DOD leadership. Today, the treatment of the technical force in DOD relegates C4I specialists to the second-class status of support, rather than line functions.
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The purpose of the proposed institute would be to facilitate intellectual risk taking by bringing together for extended periods of time combat operators, military information technologists, and civilian information technology experts from academia and industry in an environment where innovative ideas for using information technology to support military needs could be explored relatively freely.
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As new commercial information technologies and applications emerge that can significantly improve military capabilities, management and budgeting must make it possible to exploit them. High-value C4I applications may emerge quickly (e.g., as the result of experiments or demonstrations such as the Joint Warrior Interoperability Demonstration)
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. Recommendation P-7: The Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff, the CINCs, and the service Secretaries should sustain and expand their efforts to carry out experimentation to discover new concepts for conducting information-enabled military operations.
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Metrics are a major motivator of human behavior and have been demonstrated to be an essential element of making improvements: they are the base for driving continuous progress. Management metrics measure the characteristics or performance of an organization and are used by senior management to assess the effectiveness of the organization and its leadership.
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