Breaking Defense
WASHINGTON: The problem with secret weapons is that almost nobody knows about them — including people on your own side who might really need to use them. That’s the self-inflicted wound the Pentagon is struggling with as it tries to apply highly classified capabilities in cyber and electronic warfare to the notoriously tough challenge of missile defense.
Cutting-edge technologies hold the potential to hack into an adversary’s command-and-control network so his missiles never get the order to launch. They could jam his radars and navigation systems so the missiles that do launch go harmlessly off target. Such “non-kinetic” techniques — expending no ammunition except electricity — could reduce the number of incoming missiles and thus the number of multi-million-dollar interceptors the US has to fire at them.
No less a figure than Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work has said bluntly that EW and cyber held more promise for missile defense than the traditional method of shooting down one missile with another. “It doesn’t have to be a kinetic solution,” Work said in March. “Hell, I don’t really want a kinetic solution. It’s got to be something else.”
So that’s the promise — but when I’ve tried to get any specifics, I get polite demurrals that the topic is too classified to talk about. But it’s not just reporters who have this problem. People in the military who really need to know about these capabilities, as a matter of potential life and death, aren’t always allowed to learn about them either.
“We need to have enough people who understand what each of them is [and] a way to use them when the time comes,” said Rear Adm. Archer Macy, retired director of the Joint Integrated Air and Missile Defense Organization (JIAMDO). “The fact that only very few people know what [some of these capabilities] are make that very difficult.”
“We need to have the conversation to figure out…how do you most effectively bring all these pieces together,” Macy told me after speaking on a panel of retired missile defense commanders at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
On one level, Macy said, “this is not new. We’ve been doing this in warfare going back to when we figured out, ‘okay, do you use the archers first or the knights on horses?” But Henry V never had to coordinate so many different moving pieces. He certainly never had to deal with half his nobles not being authorized to know what a longbow was…
