Cyber Lessons of the Russo-Ukrainian War with Shashank Josi - on Midrats

 

There is still a lot of fighting to be done in the Russo-Ukrainian War, but important lessons can already be drawn from the first 10-months of conflict.

One of the most hyped "new" domains of war the last three decades has been what is generally referred to as "cyber." Its growth in interest and buzz paralleled the decline and neglect of a more traditional form of modern war, Electronic Warfare.

This Sunday we're going to do a deep dive in what we are seeing, what we thought we should have seen but haven't, and how this should inform present support and future policy in the area of cyber.

Our guest for the full hour this Sunday from 4-5pm Eastern will be Shashank Joshi, Defence editor at The Economist.

If you are looking for a read-ahead, "The Digital Front" in the December 3rd edition of The Economist would be a good start.

Join us live if you can, but it not, you can get the show later by subscribing to the podcast. If you use iTunes, you can add Midrats to your podcast list simply by clicking the iTunes button at the main showpage - or you can just click here. You can find us on almost all your most popular podcast aggregators as well.

What Kind of War Does Russia Want to Fight?

I guess to answer this post's title question, we could start by listing to what they are telling us.

It really could be that simple.

If things went sideways in Ukraine, what have the Russians been working on?

They've told us and in places, showed us.

Are we ready?

I'm pondering over at USNIBlog.

Come by and see what the General of the Army has to say.

Forget Your Peacetime Battle Networks

What the Spanish Civil War was to WWII armor and air tactics, the extended conflict in Ukraine and to a lesser extent Syria is to electronic warfare.

There isn't so much "new" that is being developed, but hard lessons forgotten since the fall of the Soviet Union.

The closer you get to Ukraine, the more clear it becomes. Poland gets it.

Polish firm WB Group harnesses low-power radios and quasi-satellites in a scalable and adaptive communication system.

A Polish company has developed a tactical communication system called Cicha Sieć (Silent Network) with a low electromagnetic signature that leverages lessons learned from the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.

WB Group launched Silent Network last month with battalion-level deployments in mind, although it claims the solution can be scaled up for larger formations.

Company VP Adam Bartosiewicz explained that Silent Network originated with two parallel developments in 2013: the Perad personal radio and the deployment of the FlyEye UAS in Ukraine.

What does Sal what to know? What does the USA have in this area?

Also a reminder; what happens in EW ashore also applies to at sea. How do we fight in a contested and hostile EW environment? Are we leaning too much on peacetime capabilities and habits that simply won't be there at war?

I hope we are asking and acting on such questions. 

The Spy in Your Pocket

One of the most compartmentalized areas, rightfully, in the national security apparatus involve the electromagnetic spectrum. Has been true for most of the last century.

Radar, radio, and now IP based systems - they all can either be used to find or reveal your side or the other's location. "War winning technology" is perhaps an overused phrase, but some of these capabilities seem to be close to that. Some are hidden in plain sight, others with elaborate cover stories, some hidden in riddles and spin.

One thing I keep telling myself as I type out my thoughts almost every day, is to remember that what I once knew is with each passing year very dated, and even when in the game, for every bit I was read in to, there was an order of magnitude or more that I was not.

We are very good in some areas; very blind in others. Our opponents the same.

As our electronic devices become more a normal part of our lives, it is only natural that this day to day convenience would, with smart people out there, be turned in to a vulnerability.

Via WSJ; 

In 2016, a U.S. defense contractor named PlanetRisk Inc. was working on a software prototype when its employees discovered they could track U.S. military operations through the data generated by the apps on the mobile phones of American soldiers.

At the time, the company was using location data drawn from apps such as weather, games and dating services to build a surveillance tool that could monitor the travel of refugees from Syria to Europe and the U.S., according to interviews with former employees. The company’s goal was to sell the tool to U.S. counterterrorism and intelligence officials.

But buried in the data was evidence of sensitive U.S. military operations by American special-operations forces in Syria. The company’s analysts could see phones that had come from military facilities in the U.S., traveled through countries like Canada or Turkey and were clustered at the abandoned Lafarge Cement Factory in northern Syria, a staging area at the time for U.S. special-operations and allied forces.

When PlanetRisk traced telephone signals from U.S. bases to the Syrian cement factory in 2016, it hadn’t been disclosed publicly that the factory was being used as a staging area for U.S. and allied forces. Moreover, the company could monitor the movements of American troops even while they were out on patrol—a serious operational security risk that opened units up to being targeted by enemy forces, according to the people familiar with the discovery.

When it saw evidence of U.S. missions in the commercial data, the company raised its concerns with U.S. officials, who were alarmed by the possibilities that others could track American soldiers, according to the people. PlanetRisk was working on a tracking tool with the aim of bringing it to the federal defense and intelligence market. The company, which was beaten to market by other competitors and never finished the work, has since been split up, its pieces sold to other defense contractors.

How many of our Sailors - much less the others services personnel - have wifi and bluetooth enabled devices, phones, watches, fitbit, net work of things, etc?

How many of these are ready to respond the minute they get in range of a transmitter looking for them?  

How do you even tempest check for them on things such as a carrier of thousands?

I am sure that this is a topic better not discussed too much on this net, about defense or offense, but I would like to think in an optimistic moment that we have the right people with the right answers on this topic.

If not, at war, we will find out soon enough.

Tom Wolfe, Tomorrowland, Transformationalism and getting ready for the next naval war.

People who should know better are promising the same miracles they've promised before ... hoping no one notices, no one cares, and no one refuses to send them billions.

I'm controlling my desire to rage over at USNIBlog.

Come on by and grind your teeth with me.

If you speak, you can be heard

I guess this is electronic warfare week at CDRSalamander ... and why not.

Our Navy has a problem; it has gone so long without a serious competitor at sea that we have convinced ourselves that some temporary assumptions we gained after the fall of the Soviet Union have become permanent. We are designing entire systems around assumptions that are fragile and based on peacetime operations and permanent naval supremacy.

At war against any global or regional peer, we need to look carefully at all our assumptions. Most fragile of all are our assumptions that we will have full access to the electromagnetic spectrum, satellite vox and data bandwidth, and the deep sea will be our sanctuary.

The irreplaceable David Larter rolled a little ball of truth a few days ago that would be funny if it were not so serious;

The Navy’s investment in SPY-6 is not without some controversy. Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, said while the Navy needs a radar like SPY-6 for ballistic missile defense, the service still must figure out how to perform passive detection to avoid giving away its location to adversaries that will be able to electronically sniff out a big, powerful radar.

Kremer said he wasn’t comfortable discussing concepts of operations surrounding the issue of keeping electronically quiet with SPY-6. But he reiterated that during active electronic attack, the radar would perform.

“You have to be able [to] operate around electronic attack, and on the active side we have a lot of capability to do that,” he said. “But when you get into that other stuff, you’re really starting to talk about concepts of operations, and I don’t think it’s appropriate for a contractor to talk about CONOPS.”

The enemy gets a vote, and they have capabilities too.

We used to practice fighting in EMCON. Hopefully we have some tricks under our sleeves that will let us. No reason to discuss them on this net, but let's hope.

There will always be smugglers - there will always be war

There is a lot here to consider - and also a lot to be careful of;

For a long time, being out at sea meant being out of sight and out of reach.

And all kinds of shenanigans went on as a result - countries secretly selling oil and other goods to countries they're not supposed to under international sanctions rules, for example, not to mention piracy and kidnapping.

The problem is that captains can easily switch off the current way of tracking ships, called the Automatic Identification System (AIS), hiding their location.

But now thousands of surveillance satellites have been launched into space, and artificial intelligence (AI) is being applied to the images they take.

There's no longer anywhere for such ships to hide.

In peace, we are on the cusp - with AI, big data, and the processing power to fuse multi-spectral data streams - of being able to get a very real comprehensive maritime plot.

There are also a lot of things to ponder beyond just the visual range - but not on this net or this side of the SCIF.

A note of caution - how much do we rely on them? How secure - both physically and access via the electromagnetic spectrum - are these satellites? If we lash our war plans to them - what do we do if they are not there?

Sure, get excited, but also be careful.

It is a dangerous world out there for the complacent, arrogant, and lazy.

The Russians Know Our Critical Vulnerabilities - Do We?

When you look up in the sky, do you find yourself suddenly feeling a growing feeling of foreboding?

Well, you should.

I'm explaining why over at USNIBlog.

Come by and give it a read.

Could you fight like its 1990?

Not all that comfortable with the respect we give to the fragility of our access to the electronic spectrum?

Neither am I.

I'm pondering over at USNIBlog. Come on by and give it a read.

An Army’s Three Cyber Arrogances

Have we learned nothing? Do we remember anything? When it comes to supporting the defense industry to sell multi-billion dollar systems that will be at best no use in war, and more likely a significant risk, I guess not.

How Kris Osborn at TheNationalInterest wrote this without screaming is beyond me.

The Army is upgrading and more widely deploying a cutting-edge battlefield force-tracking technology for dismounted Soldiers, enabling them to know the locations of their fellow Soldiers and more quickly find, identify, target and destroy enemy fighters.

Called Nett Warrior, the technology is a cell-phone-like device showing graphics on a small, digital moving map identifying fast-moving combat information.

Think about all those electrons bleeding out in to the environment? Think about how advanced the offensive EW and EW surveillance capabilities are of our peer and near-peer competitors.

“It provides unprecedented situational awareness at the dismounted level through the map display. The icons show where all the other users are on the battlefield and the device allows for battlefield messaging. Everyone sees the same picture,” Marsh explained. “The battle changes in real time and information can transmit across the force in real time.”

The technology uses a moving digital map display to mark friendly forces, surrounding terrain, enemy forces, targets and other high risk items such as IED locations, Marsh explained.

“As they sweep up into a house, they don’t have to worry about fratricide, because they can see where the other maneuvering forces are. You can track the location of friendly units as you are moving up on a target,” said Jason Regnier, deputy product manager for Nett Warrior.

Do we not know our own history? Units get captured. Items get lost and dropped. This is an order of magnitude worse than broken codes and maps wrapped around cigars. Gobsmacking.

Nett Warrior can even connect with nearby vehicle units who might need to know the location of mobile, ground or infantry units or wish to pass along combat-relevant information, Marsh said.

“Every Nett Warrior display is visible to every other Nett Warrior system. That is the key part. That is the game-changing revolution,” he explained.

While the Nett Warrior device looks like a cell phone or smartphone, it uses what’s called software programmable radio – a technology which sends IP packets of information, such as voice, video and data, across the force using high bandwidth radio frequencies.

The high bandwidth frequencies, such as Soldier Radio Waveform, use computer technology and function quite similar to wireless internet. The cell phone function of the system is turned off. The radio, called the Rifleman Radio or PRC-154, uses NSA encryption to safeguard combat information transmitting across the force.

The technology also uses a technique called a “chem light,” wherein a Soldier can highlight or “light up” a location to pass along key information such as the location of a cleared building or other data relevant to an ongoing fight.

And what about those friendly and allied units that have systems that don’t work, or simply don’t exist? This is even a worse situation than, “Those can’t be friendly units, they aren’t on Blue Force Tracker.”

The platform is now being built with what the Army calls “open architecture,” meaning its software and hardware are engineered to quickly embrace and integrate new technologies or applications as they emerge, Marsh said.

At least our peer and near-peer adversaries don’t have dedicated forces that do nothing but learn to break in to open architecture devices. Good googly moogly.

Meanwhile, important requirements learned in a decade and a half of warfighting remain unfunded and languishing. The only thing this would be of use in, besides micromanaging exercises, is to be used as a textbook example of the Army’s Three Arrogances; access, accuracy, assumption.

That Buzz in Your Ears Isn't Tinnitus

It is something old and something new ... and Russian.

I'm pondering over at USNIBlog.

Hug your gun a little closer .... F-35B/C, I'm talking to you.

It is rather hard to jam lead;

The problem is that many potential adversaries, such as the Chinese and the Russians, have developed advanced digital radio frequency memory (DRFM) jammers. These jammers, which effectively memorize an incoming radar signal and repeat it back to the sender, seriously hamper the performance of friendly radars.

Worse, these new jammers essentially blind the small radars found onboard air-to-air missiles like the Raytheon AIM-120 AMRAAM, which is the primary long-range weapon for all U.S. and most allied fighter planes.

That means it could take several missile shots to kill an enemy fighter, even for an advanced stealth aircraft like the Raptor. “While exact Pk [probability of kill] numbers are classified, let’s just say that I won’t be killing these guys one for one,” the senior Air Force official said. It’s the “same issue” for earlier American fighters like the F-15, F-16, or F/A-18.

Another Air Force official with experience on the stealthy new F-35 Joint Strike Fighter agreed. “AMRAAM’s had some great upgrades over the years, but at the end of the day, it’s old technology and wasn’t really designed with today’s significant EA in mind,” this official said.

Good reporting or bad ... good to ponder your planning assumptions.

The World Burns, TACAIR Reaches Deep to Support Marines in Sinjar, and ye

Here we go.

The Navy has postponed the stand-up of an expeditionary electronic attack squadron as the process awaits environmental clearance, according to a service official.

The stand-up of Electronic Attack Squadron (VAQ) 143, to be equipped with Boeing EA-18G Growlers, had been planned for October at Naval Air Station Whidbey Island, Wash.

“A new date has not been set and will not be set until after the completion of the environmental impact study,” said CDR Jeannie Groeneveld, public affairs officer for commander, Naval Air Force, U.S. Pacific Fleet.

The Navy has been operating aircraft a lot more impactful to the environment than the EA-18G since Moses walked the earth, and will be until the crack of doom ... and yet.

If the government autoasphyxiates itself like that as the world burns, imagine what it is doing to the private sector every single day.

Waking up from the waking up of history

Take a deep breath ... because some of you - MTH call your office - are going to be upset. Join me in a little bit of bone picking with the CNO.

I first got wind of something that made me nod with approval in the latest Armed Forces Journal;

... the service is embracing — or re-embracing — the Cold War-era discipline known as emissions control.

In a recent exercise, for example, the crew of the aircraft carrier Nimitz practiced turning off all its trackable emissions, from radars and navigation systems to computers and even Wi-Fi. What initially took an hour eventually took just three minutes.

It’s a skill once employed against the Soviet Navy, then left to atrophy. Now it is being championed by Adm. Jonathan Greenert, chief of naval operations. “What our potential adversaries are bringing in, more than anything else, is something that finds and tracks a radar,” Greenert told attendees at the Navy League’s Sea-Air-Space convention. “If you control your own emissions, you control the future of warfare.”

Maybe, maybe not. But resurrecting EMCON is a good step.

No kidding. EMCON is one of those things in the last decade and a half we got overconfident on; lazy and sloppy - so it is outstanding news that we are making an effort to, sigh, re-invent the wheel. Wheels are good. It looks like we are going to re-learn EMCON. Good; BZ to all and trophies for everyone.

My second thought was what happened to "those guys" who used to give us a good "EMCON Audit," for the lack of a better description, to let us know if we are REALLY conducting EMCON?  I hope we fully utilized those guys, otherwise we are just doing the EMCON equivalent of writing our own FITREP. All those bluetooth devices and such .... good though, very good start.

Then I found the speech the above quote came from; the CNO's speech at the Sea Air Space Lunch on 08 April 2013.

Like all well mentored Evangelicals, when someone quotes you a Chapter and Verse, make sure and go to the original text and read then 10 Verses before and after so you can get the proper context.

Well, that is when Tigger became Eeyore again. The quote;

But you’ve got to change the mindset. The kids have got to understand the
significance of it because we haven’t really looked at this for well, generations. So many of them sort of understand it. If they’re a cyber warrior they get it big time. But the day - to - day people out at sea, we really haven’t laid that out for them. They don’t understand the idea of real EM hygiene.

They know cyber hygiene now. They know how to put a thumb drive in, at least many of them do, and insert their own virus. But similarly, we’ve got to understand you don’t just turn stuff on. You just don’t start radiating, rotating and radiating.

When I get the intel summaries today and they find out somebody’s got a new whatever, by far what our potential adversaries are bringing in, more than anything else, is some [inaudible] finds and tracks a radar or something that provides a seeker, is a seeker that is outside our frequency band, low probability of intercept, something that we just [inaudible], we don’t have there.
It’s not a new boom as much. It’s in a whole new realm. That’s kind of where a lot of our potential adversaries are going.

You go to school today. If you’re going to study Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles, you’re going to employ it on a ship. Forty weeks. Today if you go to school, we send our kids to school, and you’re going to look at what’s called a SLQ-32 which is our electronic warfare main piece of gear, to a two week school. So we’ve got to get kind of the mindset changed out there and see what we think about it.

No, no, no, and damblit, no!

1. Stop calling young Sailors "kids." These are men and women, all Sailors. Don't sound so bloody patronizing to those who put their lives on the line every day, and tomorrow you may order to kill and be killed, it is disrespectful.

2. It hasn't been "generations" it has been singular - "Generation." We stopped taking EMCON seriously when I was a mid-grade LT, the mid-1990s. If you consider that a generation takes leadership control when they are at roughly the 30-yr of service mark; that would be the earliest cohort who started service in 1965. That would be ... yes; the Baby Boomer generation.  Funny, for a generation that spent the balance of their career in the Cold War, one would think they would cling to EMCON - but oh well, I guess they were going to try to transform out of that hard work. Let's see, Gen-X hits the 30-yr mark in about three years .... 'Nuff said.

3. It isn't that "the kids" don't "understand" EM hygiene - it is that their leadership has not made it a priority and trained them on it. If you fail INSURV, you don't say, "The kids just don't understand PMS .... " Really. Don't blame the younger generation - they are fine - it is the leadership's priority for the last couple of decades that is the issue.

4. So, intel is reminding us that our potential enemies are learning institutions that won't just sit there and let us kill them? You mean they won't grant us supremacy in all warfare areas? How is that fair? Really? What great insight; that must rate a warfare pin or something.

5. TLAM school takes as much time as from Pearl Harbor to the Battle of Henderson Field? Ummmm .... which one is that again? 40-weeks? Really?  As for the SLQ-32 at 2-weeks; I'm OK with that. If you don't like the product - revamp the curricula. BTW, SLQ-32 has been around since the 1960s and the program to replace it was started in the 1990s, I think. I'm not sure how many cancels and restarts we are on this, but SLQ-32 will be around awhile longer methinks. 

I'm sorry, but I'm in a nit-picking mood. If this wasn't the CNO - the most senior uniformed officer in the Navy - and from a navy.mil URL, then perhaps it wouldn't bother me; but .... who is approving the transcripts from the CNO?

So years and year ago, the Cold War, we actually had our mission control down pat. That’s a picture of the America in a fjord, way back in the ‘70s, early ’80s, where we snuck this thing upunder [MCON] and parked her up there. We measured very closely if anybody knew that ship was being followed of [inaudible], if anybody could track this thing, and we found that they couldn’t. We were pretty good at [MCON] and we’ve gone away from it. Now we need to get back.

So recently we took the Nimitz and we said okay, we’re going to, in an exercise called Valiant Shield. We said we want you to turn all of your [EN] stuff off. So they said, in [inaudible] condition and whatever. It took over an hour to get everything turned off. You turn the big stuff off, and it starts coming down, and somebody’s going what the hell is that? Somebody turn that off. What is that? It’s anything from WiFis to computers to you name it that we’re pulling out there.

Hey, I love what they did for VALIANT SHIELD, and I hope they do it as a normal part of workups - but can we first of all take care of something a 1943 WAVE YN3 would never let cross her desk?

Sub-par Staff work people. It is EMCON not MCON. Never say your boss is [inaudible], that is just rude. Talk to the Staff, they'll tell you what he meant. If this is what we do for our top officer, what are we doing for lesser mortals? Very bad messaging.

Oh, speaking of EMCON and aircraft carriers - we've got EMALS all patched up now? How about with rail guns in the future?

With a red hat; targeting with nothing but EW ... a little sporty, but very effective.

EMCON is back? Good - so is tracking ballistic missile submarines in open ocean. If you need some pointers on that, drop me a line.

---

UPDATE: More fail over at SB if you need additional facepalm to get your week started off right.

You Can't Classify Math

This is the kind of thing that interests me about high-effects weapons. 

EMP (from small nuke), like nuclear, chemical, or biological are not only inviting even the person you attack and invitation to "go Roman" in response, it isn't all that hard to do foresics on nuclear material, chemicals, and biological agents in order to find out where they came from - even if you have no idea who hit you. That makes them less likely to happen with "rational" opponents. (yes, I know - a lot of "irrational" terrorists would love the chance).

You can call CBRN "Symetrical Asymetric Warfare." We've been faced with it for awhile. What if there was something that didn't kill anyone, didn't physically destroy anything, left no trace - but in a pass moves you back to the 18th Century? Something that would be exceptionally difficult to make a proportional response to - or any response to if you can't find a "finger print" of what hit you. Something like this;

The Counter-Electronics High Power Microwave Advanced Missile Project (CHAMP), led by Boeing's Phantom works, promised to change the face of contemporary warfare, and its test was a complete success. CHAMP flew over the Utah Test and Training Range last Tuesday, discharging a burst of High Power Microwaves onto the test site and brought down the compound's entire spectrum of electronic systems, apparently without producing any other damage at all. Even the camera recording the test was shut down. Struggling to contain his enthusiasm, Boeing's Keith Coleman says, "We hit every target we wanted to. Today we made science fiction into science fact."

OK. We can make it years before anyone else. We can make it smaller, more accurate and more powerful. But ... make a clunky one. Put it on a GIV. Put it on a tramp steamer. Put it in a semi. What would be the impact of such a "harmless" weapon in NYC? DC? 

With our love of COTS - in the middle to the Strait of Hormuz as the CBG passes through? "Back in the day" we spent a lot of time on EMCON and electronic hardening of equipment - mostly because we also planned for nuclear war. In the late 90s though, it became a lower priority, waived in most cases. Now? You can do the math. What do you need to make such a weapon? Mostly brains and a little access to technology. Give 2nd or even 3rd level nations 20 years. 

Ponder.