Breaking Defense:
ARLINGTON: The Russians aren’t just deploying new treaty-breaking, nuclear-capable cruise missiles. They’re also fielding sophisticated cyber and electronic warfare systems that can hack or jam our defenses against such missiles. In fact, no military mission is more dependent on high-speed data networks than air and missile defense — but no military system is more vulnerable than those networks. It’s a dilemma the Army is just starting to wrestle with, even as its air and missile defense force stakes its future on a complex new network called ICBS.
“We’ve been talking in every other meeting I’m going to about how networks are being degraded… but we’re going to rely on this exquisite network to do air defense,” David Johnson, a retired colonel, thinktank scholar, and top advisor to former Army Chief of Staff Ray Odierno, told an Association of the U.S. Army last week. “The question I ask is, what is the backup?”
Needing The Network
“I don’t think there’s a community that needs a network more than this community does,” Lt. Gen. Michael Lundy, commander of the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, told the AUSA air and missile defense conference.
“We can allow some degradation when we’re out there conducting ground maneuver,” Lundy continued. On the ground, most units move at a walking pace, so a brief network outage isn’t crippling, and, in the worst case, young officers can break out their paper maps and march to the sound of the guns. But in air and missile defense, both inbound threats and outbound interceptors move at hundreds of miles per hour. So success requires doing rocket science in real time.
“It’s a matter of minutes and seconds, mostly seconds, that this community deals with,” Lundy said. In the worst mass-casualty incident of the 1991 Gulf War, Patriot missile batteries’ computers were left on too long without rebooting, which allowed minor inaccuracies to compound until the targeting program was 0.3433 seconds off — enough to miss an incoming Scud that destroyed a barracks in Dhahran, killing 28 Americans and wounding 98 more…
