Tag: War Laid Bare

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126. Nowhere to Hide: Information Exploitation and Sanitization

[Editor’s Note:  In today’s post, Mad Scientist Laboratory explores how humankind’s recent exponential growth in interconnectivity will continue to affect warfare in the Future Operational Environment.  Using several contemporary use cases, we identify a number of vulnerabilities that have already been exploited by our adversaries.  The U.S. Army must learn how to sanitize its information signatures while simultaneously exploit those presented by our adversaries.  As previously stated on this site by COL Stefan J. Banach (USA-Ret.),  “Virtual Space is the decisive terrain and securing it is the decisive operation.“]

Internet of Battle Things (IOBT) / Source: Alexander Kott, ARL

The timeless competition of finders vs. hiders is a key characteristic of the Future Operational Environment (FOE). Through the proliferation of sensors creating the Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT), ubiquitous global communication, and pervasive personal electronic devices, the finders will be ascendant on the battlefield. They have more advantages and access than ever before – with the ability to make impactful non-kinetic action – and the hiders are creating bigger, enduring, and more conspicuous signatures. In the FOE, our ability to wade through the petabytes of raw sensor and communications data input to generate a Common Operating Picture and arrive at actionable courses of action will be significantly challenged. Will we be able to sanitize Blue Forces’ signatures to prevent our adversaries from detecting and exploiting similar information, while simultaneously seeing through Red Forces’ deception measures to strike decisively?

A recent example highlighting the inherent and unpredictable vulnerabilities presented by these emerging technologies is the incident involving personal fitness devices that track users via GPS. Many military personnel have used these devices to track personal performance while conducting physical fitness training.  The associated tracking information was transmitted back to fitness-tracking company Strava, where it was aggregated and then published as maps that were then made available to the public. Unfortunately, these maps contained articulate outlines of PT routes in and around military bases, the locations of which were not intended to be made public. This now publically available information inadvertently provided our adversaries with sensitive information that, in years past, would have required considerable time and other resources to acquire.

In response, the DoD issued a memorandum through Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan effectively banning the use of geolocation capabilities in operational areas. While there was swift policy resolution in this case, albeit after-the-fact, there are a number of continuing and emergent threats presented by the information age that still need to be addressed.

In the previous example, the culprit was a smart watch or fitness tracking device that is a companion piece to the smart phone. Removing or prohibiting these devices is less detrimental to the overall morale, spirit, and will power of our Soldiers than removing their cell phones — their primary means of voice, data, and social media connectivity — oftentimes their sole link with their family back home. Adversaries have already employed tactics designed to exploit vulnerabilities arising from Soldier cellphone use. In the Ukraine, a popular Russian tactic is to send spoofed text messages to Ukrainian soldiers informing them that their support battalion has retreated, their bank account has been exhausted, or that they are simply surrounded and have been abandoned. Taking it one step further, they have even sent false messages to the families of soldiers informing them that their loved one was killed in action.

Russian 9a52-4 MLRS conducting a fire mission / Source: The National Interest

This sets off a chain of events where the family member will immediately call or text the soldier, followed by another spoofed message to the original phone. With a high number of messages to enough targets, an artillery strike is called in on the area where an excess of cellphone usage has been detected.

Similarly, a NATO red team was able to easily infiltrate their own forces through information gathered on social media sites – amassing locations, dates, and other data – to influence their Soldiers’ behavior.  Facebook and Instagram allowed them to track Soldiers, determine exact locations of exercises, and identify all members of a certain unit.

Hamas employed a similar tactic against Israeli Defense Force soldiers, using fake accounts to pose as attractive women in honey trap operations to access sensitive operational information.

Each of these examples illustrate recent, low-cost, and effective means of deception. Device exploitation, the over-sharing of sensitive data, and the challenge in determining information credibility will only increase as connected devices continue to both proliferate and transition from being portable and wearable to embeddable and implantable. The following questions must be addressed by the U.S. Army:

– How can we sanitize ourselves to mitigate these and other vulnerabilities from adversely affecting us operationally on future battlefields?

– How do we ensure that the information we are receiving and processing is legitimate and that we are not being spoofed?

– How are we preparing to exploit similar vulnerabilities in our adversaries?

Fictitious 1st Army Group patch. Commanded by then LTG George S. Patton, to deceive the Germans prior to the invasion of France

– Is this even possible in a hyper-connected and complex battlefield or are we destined to be on the wrong side of some future Operation Fortitude, where effective military deception helped ensure the success GEN Eisenhower’s Great Crusade to liberate Europe from the Nazis in World War II?

One final thought — geolocation information and high resolution remote sensing capabilities, which only a short decade and a half ago were limited to a handful of national intelligence services, have entered into a new, democratized era.  As recently demonstrated in three warzone use cases, anyone (including non-spacefaring nations, non-state actors, and super-empowered individuals) can now access current and past imagery to generate high resolution, three dimensional views for geolocation, analysis, and (unfortunately) exploitation.  The convergence of this capability with the proliferation of personalized information signatures truly means that there is “Nowhere to Run, Nowhere to Hide.”  (Crank it up with Martha and the Vandellas!)

If you enjoyed this post, please also read the following blog posts addressing the weaponization of social media, the future of battlefield deception, and virtual warfare:

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123. Decision in the 21st Century

[Editor’s Note: Mad Scientist Laboratory welcomes returning guest blogger Matthew Ader, whose submission builds upon his previous post regarding the demise of strategic and operational deception and surprise.  Given the ascendancy of finders, Mr. Ader argues for the use of profoundly decisive impacts, achieved through information operations and minimal kinetic force, to “generate maximum hysteria” and bend the will of our adversaries’ populations in order to achieve our objectives.]

The future battlespace will be dominated by the finders, not the hiders. Finder capabilities are effective and are only growing more so, leveraging cross-domain surveillance through cheap satellites, unmanned systems, and open source intelligence. This is augmented by the ongoing proliferation of precision long-range fires. In this environment, large unit manoeuvres to achieve decision favoured by the Joint Force will not be possible. Instead, kinetic action should be used to catalyse fear and dissatisfaction among the enemy civilian population, leading to pressure for a negotiated end to conflict.

Why is decisive kinetic manoeuvre no longer possible?

Operation Desert Storm required enormous logistics support / Source: Wikimedia Commons

Logistics. Specifically, the practicalities of supplying a force in a finder dominated environment. During Operation Desert Storm, the fuel consumption rate per day for the U.S. VII and XVIII ABN Corps was about 4.5 million gallons. Ammunition requirements were about 14,000 tons a day.1 Logistics support at this scale can neither be foraged nor arranged ad-hoc. Modern warfare depends on a robust supply network to deliver the requisite food, fuel, ammunition, and spare parts, when and where they are needed, to sustain the fight. In the First Gulf War, that was achieved by a handful of well provisioned logistics bases close to the line of advance. In the Second Gulf War, logistics ran on a just in time model, with supply dependent on “frequent, reliable distribution rather than on large forward stockpiles.”

Depot explosion at a military base in Kalynivka, west of Kiev, Ukraine / Source: Gleb Garanich, Reuters)

Both of these models are no longer viable in the future operating environment. Large logistics bases will be highly vulnerable to cruise, ballistic, and conventional artillery fire. Drone attacks will also pose a significant challenge, aptly demonstrated in Kalynivka, Ukraine in 2017, where a single Russian quadcopter ignited a Ukrainian depot, destroying over 83,000 tons of ammunition.  Challenges to air supremacy complicate the just in time delivery model. In a situation where units have only a few days of organic fuel and ammunition, a handful of missed convoys due to enemy air interdiction would prove disastrous. The unmanned threat is also present here. Autonomous ‘mobile mines’ could be deployed by air or artillery (à la Family of Scatterable Mines or FASCAM) onto lines of communication to complicate supply efforts.

This is not to say that logistics will be impossible. Promising innovations, particularly in using autonomous vehicles, could help with sustainment operations. Nevertheless, from a volume standpoint, the division-sized forces envisioned to achieve decision in a contested environment may not be viable.

What do we do instead?

War is about compelling our opponent to fulfil our will. Up to this point, the most efficient way to do this in a conventional war has been, bluntly, to kill people and blow things up until the enemy government surrenders. Due to the limitations on logistics imposed by the finder’s world, this is no longer possible. We need to find a new way to compel our opponent to fulfil our will.

On June 9, 2014, 150 ISIS militants routed the 75,000 Iraqi Army forces in Mosul / Source: Andolu photo

Luckily, modern information technology provides the Army with a new way.  51% of people with social media access (about 2.5 billion) use it as a source for news. Both of these numbers are likely to grow as connectivity increases in the developing world. However, news on social media is often accompanied and preceded by a bow wave of hysteria, rumours, and conspiracy. This can have direct real-world impact – #AllEyesOnISIS caused much of the Iraqi force defending Mosul to flee before they saw the enemy. That was a profoundly decisive impact, achieved through minimal kinetic force.

The U.S. Army currently considers information operations to be an important adjunct to kinetic action. However, in a finder dominated environment, this should be flipped on its head. Small kinetic offensives (the smaller, the easier for likely highly degraded logistics networks to support) designed to generate maximum hysteria among the enemy population should be the watchword. The result will be viral fear and significant internal pressure to accede to U.S. demands.

In the digital, connected age, all the world is a stage. The Army must learn to weaponize theatrics.

If you enjoyed this post, please also read the following:

– Mr. Ader‘s previous post War Laid Bare.

– Our review of Mad Scientist P.W. Singer and co-author Emerson T. Brooking’s book LikeWar — The Weaponization of Social Media.

– COL Stefan J. Banach‘s complementary posts on Virtual War – A Revolution in Human Affairs (Parts I and II).

Mr. Matthew Ader is a first-year undergraduate taking War Studies at King’s College London.

1Pagonis, LTG William G., with Cruikshank, Jeffrey L., Moving Mountains: Lessons in Leadership and Logistics from the Gulf War, Harvard Business Review Press,  1 August 1992.

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119. The Queue

[Editor’s Note:  Mad Scientist Laboratory is pleased to present our next edition of “The Queue” – a monthly post listing the most compelling articles, books, podcasts, videos, and/or movies that the U.S. Army’s Mad Scientist Initiative has come across during the previous month. In this anthology, we address how each of these works either informs or challenges our understanding of the Future Operational Environment (OE). We hope that you will add “The Queue” to your essential reading, listening, or watching each month!]

1. How Satellites the Size of a Grilled Cheese Sandwich Could Change the World, by Aaron Pressman, Fortune (via Yahoo! Finance), 24 January 2019.

One of Swam Technologies’ miniaturized satellites / Source:  Swarm Technologies

Space is rapidly democratizing and the death of tactical and operational surprise might be the casualty. Sara Spangelo and her startup, Swarm Technologies, is on a quest to deliver global communications at the lowest possible cost. This is a shared objective with companies like Elon Musk’s Starlink, but his solution includes thousands of satellites requiring many successful rocket launches. Swarm Technologies takes the decrease in launch costs due to commercialization and the miniaturization of satellites to the max. Swarm Technologies satellites will be the size of a grilled cheese sandwich and will harness the currents coursing through space to maneuver. This should reduce the required cost and time to create a worldwide network of connectivity for texting and collecting Internet of Things (IoT) data to approximately 25 million dollars and eighteen months.

The work at Starlink and Swarm Technologies only represents a small part of a new space race led by companies rather than the governments that built and manage much of space capability today. In the recent Mad Sci blog post “War Laid Bare,” Matthew Ader described this explosion and how access to global communications and sensing might tip the scales of warfare in favor of the finder, providing an overwhelming advantage over competitors that require stealth or need to hide their signatures to be effective in 21st Century warfare.

Eliminating dead zones in global coverage / Source: Swarm Technologies

The impact of this level of global transparency not only weighs on governments and their militaries, but businesses will find it more difficult to hide from competitors and regulators. Cade Metz writes in the New York Times “Businesses Will Not Be Able to Hide: Spy Satellites May Give Edge from Above” about the impact this will have on global competition. It is a brave new world unless you have something to hide!

 

2. New Rules Takes the Guesswork out of Human Gene Editing, by Kristin Houser, Futurism, 14 December 2018.

Subtitled, “This will fundamentally change the way we use CRISPR,” the subject article was published following Dr. He Jiankui’s announcement in November 2018 that he had successfully gene-edited two human babies. Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) associated protein 9, or CRISPR/Cas9, has become the “go to” tool for genomic engineering. When Dr. He announced that he had altered (as embryos) the twin girls Lulu and Nana’s genes in order to make them HIV-resistant, there was a global outcry from scientists, bio-ethicists, and politicians alike for a variety of reasons. One was the potential imprecision of the genetic editing performed, with the associated risk of unintended genomic damage leading to future health issues for the twins.

With the publication of “Target-Specific Precision of CRISPR-Mediated Genome Editing” in the scientific journal Molecular Cell by research scientists at The Francis Crick Institute in London, however, this particular concern appears to have been mitigated with a set of simple rules that determine the precision of CRISPR/Cas9 editing in human cells.

“The effects of CRISPR were thought to be unpredictable and seemingly random,” Crick researcher and group leader Paola Scaffidi said in their news release, “but by analysing hundreds of edits we were shocked to find that there are actually simple, predictable patterns behind it all.”

Per Scaffidi, “Until now, editing genes with CRISPR has involved a lot of guesswork, frustration and trial and error…. The effects of CRISPR were thought to be unpredictable and seemingly random, but by analysing hundreds of edits we were shocked to find that there are actually simple, predictable patterns behind it all. This will fundamentally change the way we use CRISPR, allowing us to study gene function with greater precision and significantly accelerating our science.”

As predicted by Stanford’s bio-ethicist Hank Greely at last March’s Mad Scientist Bio Convergence and Soldier 2050 Conference in Menlo Park, CA, “killer apps” like healthier babies will help overcome the initial resistance to human enhancement via genetic engineering. The Crick Institute’s discovery, with its associated enhanced precision and reliability, may pave the way for market-based designer eugenics. Ramifications for the Future Operational Environment include further societal polarization between the privileged few that will have access to the genomic protocols providing such enhancements and the majority that do not (as in the 2013 film Elysium); the potential for unscrupulous regimes, non-state actors, and super-empowered individuals to breed and employ cadres of genetically enhanced thugs, “button men,” and super soldiers; and the relative policing / combat disadvantage experienced by those powers that outlaw such human genetic enhancements.

 

3. Radical Speaker Series: Countering Weaponized Information, SOFWERX and USSOCOM / J5 Donovan Group, 14 December 2018.

SOFWERX, in collaboration with USSOCOM / J5 Donovan Group, hosted a Radical Speaker Series on weaponized information. Mass influence operations, deep fakes, and social media metrics have been used by state and non-state actors in attempts to influence everything from public sentiment on policy issues to election results. The type and extent of influence operations has laid bare policy and technology gaps. This represents an emerging new threat vector for global competition.

As discussed in the TRADOC G-2’s The Operational Environment and the Changing Character of Future Warfare, Social Media and the Internet of Things has connected “all aspects of human engagement where cognition, ideas, and perceptions, are almost instantaneously available.” While this connectivity has been a global change agent, some are suggesting starting over and abandoning the internet as we know it in favor of alternative internet or “Alternet” solutions.  LikeWar authors Singer and Brookings provide examples of how our adversaries are weaponizing Social Media to augment their operations in the physical domain. One example is the defeat ISIS and re-capture of Mosul, “… Who was involved in the fight, where they were located, and even how they achieved victory had been twisted and transformed. Indeed, if what was online could swing the course of a battle — or eliminate the need for battle entirely — what, exactly, could be considered ‘war’ at all?”

Taken to the next level in the battle for the brain, novel neuroweapons could grant adversaries (and perhaps the United States) the ability to disrupt, degrade, damage, kill, and even “hack” human brains to influence populations. The resulting confusion and panic could disrupt government and society, without mass casualties. These attacks against the human brain facilitate personalized warfare. Neuroweapons are “Weapons of Mass Disruption” that may characterize segments of warfare in the future. These capabilities come with a host of ethical and moral considerations — does affecting someone’s brain purposely, even temporarily, violate ethical codes, treaties, conventions, and international norms followed by the U.S. military? As posed by Singer and Brookings — “what, exactly, could be considered ‘war’ at all?”

 

4. Nano, short film directed by Mike Manning, 2017.

Nano / Source: IMDb

This short film noir focuses on invasive technology and explores themes of liberty, control, and what citizens are willing to trade for safety and security. In a future America, technology has progressed to the point where embedded devices in humans are not only possible and popular, but the norm. These devices, known as Nano, can sync with one’s physiology, alter genomes, change hair and eye color, and, most importantly to law enforcement and government entities, control motor functions. Nano has resulted in a safer society, with tremendous reductions in gun violence. In the film, a new law has passed mandating that all citizens must be upgraded to Nano 2.0 – this controversial move means that the Government will now have access to everyone’s location, will be able to monitor them in real-time, and control their physiology. The Government could, were they so inclined, change someone’s hair color remotely, without permission or, perhaps, more frighteningly, induce indefinite paralysis.

Nano explores and, in some cases, answers the questions about future technologies and their potential impact on society. Nano illustrates how with many of the advantages and services we gain through new technologies, we sometimes have to give up things just as valuable. Technology no longer operates in a vacuum – meaning control over ourselves doesn’t exist. When we use a cellphone, when we access a website, when we, in Nano, change the color of our hair, our actions are being monitored, logged, and tracked by something. With cellphone use, we are willing to live with the fact that we give off a signature that could be traced by a number of agencies, including our service providers, as a net positive outweighing the associated negatives. But where does that line fall? How far would the average citizen go if they could have an embedded device installed that would heal minor wounds and lacerations? What becomes of privacy and what would we be willing to give up? Nano shows the negative consequences of this progression and the dystopian nature of technological slavery. It proposes questions of trust, both in the state and in individuals, and how blurred the lines can be, both in terms of freedoms and physical appearance.

 

5. “Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humans,” by Janna Anderson, Lee Rainie, and Alex Luchsinger, The Pew Research Center, 10 December 2018 (reviewed by Ms. Marie Murphy).

Source: Flikr

The Pew Research Center canvassed a host of technology innovators and business and policy leaders on whether artificial intelligence (AI) and related technology will enhance human capabilities and improve human life, or will it lessen human autonomy and agency to a detrimental level. A majority of the experts who responded to this query agreed that AI will better the lives of most people, but qualified this by noting significant negative outcomes will likely accompany the proliferation and integration of AI systems.

Most agree that AI will greatly benefit humanity and increase the quality of life for many, such as eliminating poverty and disease, while conveniently supplementing human intelligence helping to solve crucial problems. However, there are concerns that AI will conflict with and eventually overpower human autonomy, intelligence, decision-making, analysis, and many other uniquely “human” characteristics. Professionals in the field expressed concerns over the potential for data abuse and cybercrime, job loss, and becoming dependent on AI resulting in the loss of the ability to think independently.

Amy Webb, the founder of the Future Today Institute and professor of strategic foresight at New York University posits that the integration of AI will last for the next 50 years until every industry is reliant on AI systems, requiring workers to possess hybrid skills to compete for jobs that do not yet exist. Simon Briggs, professor of interdisciplinary arts at the University of Edinburgh, predicts that the potential negative outcomes of AI will be the result of a failure of humanity, and that “in 2030 AI will be in routine use to fight wars and kill people, far more effectively than humans can currently kill,” and, “we cannot expect our AI systems to be ethical on our behalf”.

As the U.S. Army continues to explore and experiment with how best to employ AI on the battlefield, there is the great challenge of ensuring that they are being used in the most effective and beneficial capacity, without reducing the efficiency and relevance of the humans working alongside the machines. Warfare will become more integrated with this technology, so monitoring the transition carefully is important for the successful application of AI to military strategy and operations to mitigate its potential negative effects.

 

6. “Automation Will Replace Production, Food, and Transportation Jobs First,” by James Dennin, INVERSE, 28 January 2019.

A newly released paper from the Brookings Institute indicated that the advent of autonomy and advanced automation will have unevenly distributed positive and negative effects on varying job and career sectors. According to the report, the three fields most vulnerable to reduction through automation will be production, food service, and transportation jobs. Additionally, certain geographic categories (especially rural, less populated areas) will suffer graver effects of this continuous push towards autonomy.

Though automation is expected to displace labor in 72% of businesses in 2019, the prospects of future workers is not all doom and gloom. As the report notes, automation in a general sense replaces tasks and not entire jobs, although AI and autonomy makes the specter of total job replacement more likely. Remaining tasks make humans even more critical though there may be less of them. While a wide variety of workers are at risk, young people face higher risks of labor displacement (16-24 year olds) partially due to a large amount of their jobs being in the aforementioned sectors.

All of these automation impacts have significant implications for the Future Operational Environment, U.S. Army, and the Future of Warfare. An increase in automation and autonomy in production, food service, and transportation may mean that Soldiers can focus more exclusively on warfighting – moving, shooting, communicating – and in many cases will be complemented and made more lethal through automation. The dynamic nature of work due to these shifts could cause significant unrest requiring military attention in unexpected places. Additionally, the labor displacement of so much youth could be both a boon and a hindrance to the Army. On one hand, there could be a glut of new recruits due to poor employment outlook in the private sector; contrariwise, many of the freshly available recruits may not inherently have the required skills or even aptitude for becoming Warfighters.

If you read, watch, or listen to something this month that you think has the potential to inform or challenge our understanding of the Future OE, please forward it (along with a brief description of why its potential ramifications are noteworthy to the greater Mad Scientist Community of Action) to our attention at: usarmy.jble.tradoc.mbx.army-mad-scientist@mail.mil — we may select it for inclusion in our next edition of “The Queue”!

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115. War Laid Bare

[Editor’s Note:  Multi-Domain Operations (MDO) describes how the U.S. Army, as part of the joint force, can counter and defeat a near-peer adversary capable of contesting the U.S. in all domains, in both competition and armed conflict.  MDO provides commanders numerous options for executing simultaneous and sequential operations using surprise and the rapid and continuous integration of capabilities across all domains to present multiple dilemmas to an adversary in order to gain physical and psychological advantages and influence and control over the operational environment.

Today’s guest blog post by Mr. Matthew Ader, however, addresses the advent of inexpensive CubeSats, capable of providing global surveillance at a fraction of the cost of legacy spy satellites, and how they could usher in the end of covert movement for combat units and their associated logistical support, and with that the demise of strategic and operational deception and surprise.]

One of the key factors of war since time immemorial has been uncertainty. The dispositions of the enemy, the strength of their industry, the will of their people – all have been guessed at, but rarely known for certain. Thanks to a pair of companies in California, that is about to change. Deception is dying.

Planet Labs operates a constellation of around 180 CubeSats – shoebox sized satellites in low earth orbit. Each day, they photograph the entirety of the globe, sending 6 terabytes of data to Earth for use. That capacity alone is valuable, but the sheer volume of data makes it impossible to analyze quickly.

For a human.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) image analysis is not so limited. This has been recognized and operationalized by Orbital Insight, a company specializing in AI image analysis. Partnering with Planet Labs, Orbital Insight delivers unique intelligence – for example, counting cars in parking lots to determine market movements. If they can count cars, they can certainly count tanks.

And, unlike conventional satellites, CubeSat imagery is cheap. It costs about US$100,000 to put one into orbit. The cost of a Planet Labs satellite is not easily available, but a similar sized CubeSat costs an estimated US$30,000. A 180-satellite constellation would therefore cost US$24.3 million, around a third of the price of a single F-35. If more timely imagery is required, buying more satellites is not an obstacle. It’s harder to find solid numbers for AI, but Project Maven, DoD’s flagship image analysis research program, was budgeted at $93 million a year.

Therefore, it’s not implausible that given some years for technology to mature and a few billion dollars investment1, any national military will have the capability to persistently surveil the entire Earth. A combination of camouflage and low-resolution satellite cameras will probably preserve tactical deception. But strategic and operational deception, the covert movement of battalions and carrier strike groups, will be impossible. That is a revolution in military affairs.

In particular, logistics will become very difficult. The depots and truck convoys required to sustain a modern army will be easily visible. Long range, uninterceptable hypersonic weapons can then strike these targets with impunity. Even absent high-tech hypersonics, conventional missiles and rocket artillery can still have a serious impact. The result is that deploying and sustaining any sizeable force against an enemy with a large CubeSat constellation will be very difficult.

In trying to predict the future of war, it is easy to fall prey to LTG H.R.  McMaster’s ‘vampire fallacy’ of thinking new technology will deliver bloodless, decisive victory. Certainly, there are a range of factors which could mitigate the incredible intelligence advantages of CubeSat constellations. These could range from better cyberwarfare to degrade enemy intelligence sharing, to more effective missile defense, to directly attacking the CubeSats themselves.

These mitigating factors do not occur in the wild. It will take years of hard work to develop and deploy them. The U.S. military, in partnership with its allies, must take the lead on developing its own CubeSat constellations and countermeasures. Because if they don’t, someone else will – and the results for U.S. power could be potentially catastrophic.

If you enjoyed reading this post, please also see our related discussions regarding Concealment in the Fundamental Questions Affecting Army Modernization post and Finders vs Hiders in our Timeless Competitions post…

… and our Star Wars 2050 post by Ms. Marie Murphy.

Mr. Matthew Ader is a first-year undergraduate reading War Studies at King’s College London.

1 Accounting for ground receiving stations, CubeSat replacements, additional staff and other associated costs.

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