Gen. Jeff Harrigian
As we solemnly recognize the 77th anniversary of D-Day and honor the valor and sacrifice of Allied forces who stormed ashore that historic, windswept day, we should pause to consider an often-overlooked question: What did we learn?
There are many ways to answer. But for someone trying to examine those distant echoes for clues to the future, there is one critical lesson as old as conflict itself: To win battles – and wars – against skilled adversaries your odds increase dramatically if you can present an unmanageable number of dilemmas from places (or domains) that they can see and those that they cannot.
The Allies’ D-Day invasion along the Normandy coast was a textbook example of overwhelming force, deception and information advantage applied simultaneously at multiple points, leaving the German defenders few good options to stop attacks from land, sea and air.
Retired Navy SEAL commander:Find your own ways to serve to honor the fallen on Memorial Day
The 160,000 Allied troops who came ashore from their forward bases in the U.K. pressed German forces stretched thin by the war on the Eastern Front. German commanders disagreed about whether to defend the beaches – within range of Allied naval guns – or further inland, where they were more vulnerable to bombing. The invaders kept the Germans guessing about whether the Normandy attack was a feint.
Space, cyber require new tools for war
Even with these tactical and strategic advantages and more than a year of planning, D-Day’s success was a close call, achieved only at an astounding cost of more than 10,000 Allied troops killed, wounded or missing. Tactical and strategic advantage always come at a cost.
Today, the U.S. military and our allies are in a race with China and Russia to achieve similar advantages, now further complicated by the addition of space and cyber as new domains of conflict.
As our adversaries advance their capabilities, time is not necessarily on our side. We must accelerate and adapt to keep pace with technology and adapt to how adversaries may choose to attack or counter us. We owe it to those Americans who serve to build capabilities that deter another bloody conflict – or, failing that, systems that give us the best chance of succeeding without massive loss of life.
A key concept in the American military’s approach to future wars is something called “Joint All-Domain Command and Control.” JADC2 is Pentagon parlance for the ability to gather vast amounts of data, process and share the information, and react faster than your enemy on land, at sea and in air, space and cyberspace.
Our digitized, interconnected world moves fast and has reduced the margin for error in warfare. So much so that having better software and algorithms, and connecting them to your entire force, could be the difference between winning and losing. The ability to locate the enemy, from the depths of the ocean to space, and direct your forces more quickly – the essence of JADC2 – is of foundational importance.
The Air Force is part of a broader effort across the U.S. defense establishment to update policies, tools, technology and practices to command and control forces. The goal is to modernize tactics that were so vividly displayed by D-Day’s unified and coordinated air, land and sea campaign that liberated Europe in the final stages of World War II. But today “all-domain” means adding data, artificial intelligence, machine learning and information sharing at breath-taking speed.
It’s time to wake up:Washington has been asleep on cybersecurity.
The goal of JADC2 and the Air Force’s contribution to the effort, known as the Advanced Battle Management System or ABMS, is that vast amounts of data from air, land, sea, space and cyber are collected in real time, analyzed and assessed with the help of artificial intelligence and machine learning. That information is then shared in real time with a pilot in an F-35, a soldier, a submarine commander, our allies and partners.
‘Speeds no adversary can match’
Our objective is always to deter aggression before it graduates to conflict. Demonstrating the ability to sense and act at speeds no adversary can match will cause them to pause and calculate the risk of attacking.
Sometimes the aggressor will force our hand. It’s my job to ensure we are ready if that day ever comes, and that’s why I am focused on accelerating JADC2 to connect all our mission partners. This includes creating combined networks where joint, allied and partner nation forces are connected from the onset of hostilities, allowing access to even greater amounts of data to gain information advantage.
Then and now, information is the key to warfare when you’re locked in conflict with a peer adversary as the Allies were with Nazi Germany.
Victory belongs to those who can decide and act fastest – decision superiority. Yet, here we are in 2021 and we struggle to leverage oceans of information at our fingertips because connecting systems and sharing data is difficult.
We need to conquer those challenges and deliver JADC2 and ABMS so that when the next D-Day comes, a new generation of heroes have the best tools and information we could give them to fight and win.
Gen. Jeff Harrigian is the commander of United States Air Forces Europe, U.S. Air Forces Africa and Allied Air Command at Ramstein Air Base, Germany.
The post D-Day lessons of overwhelming enemy should guide us as space and cyber join traditional battlefields appeared first on The News Amed.