A soldier holds a PD-100 mini-drone during the PACMAN-I experiment in Hawaii.
The nature of warfare is changing to meet the demands of the great-power competitions of our modern era. The large, exquisite weapons platforms of today are beginning to disaggregate into smaller, attritable/disposable platforms across all military service branches and domains. It is a worthy exercise to consider how well this trend aligns to the mosaic warfare strategy concept and explore its parallels to modern software application microservices architectures that are being implemented across the DoD today.
The strategies we develop today around microservices architectures and Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) in the DoD may very well facilitate the migration towards a future potentially dominated by mosaic warfare strategies and recomposable warfighting capabilities. As military stakeholders explore the challenge of architecting JADC2, it is becoming apparent that defining every kill-chain and C2 pathway a priori may be too great a challenge in the timescales required to succeed in great-power competitions. Instead, building just-in-time, modular, recomposable capabilities may give us a more achievable pathway towards the agility and flexibility needed to counter unpredicted adversarial dilemmas.
For those of us in the field, it is worthwhile to view mosaic warfare as a natural evolution of current USAF and Navy DevSecOps initiatives which are already accelerating warfighting software development/deployment capability deployment via containers and microservices. Looking further into the future, we may even start to see the physical builds/deployments of mosaic “kill web” nodes become a stage in a Continuous Integration /Continuous Deployment warfighting pipeline as materials science and 3D printing (additive manufacturing) evolve.
Before we explore what this future could look like, let us compare the goals and definitions of both microservices architecture and mosaic warfare, starting with microservices:
“Microservices are an architectural approach to building applications. What sets a microservices architecture apart from more traditional, monolithic approaches is how it breaks an app down into its core functions. Each function is called a service, and can be built and deployed independently, meaning individual services can function (and fail) without negatively affecting the others.” (See Red Hat, “What are microservices?”).
Now, compared with mosaic warfare:
“Functional capabilities, such as radar, fire control, and missiles, that once had to be hosted on a common platform, like a sophisticated combat aircraft, can now be disaggregated into their smallest practical elements. In the mosaic concept, platforms are ‘decomposed’ into their smallest practical functions, creating collaborative ‘nodes’ in a networked kill web that is highly resilient and can remain operationally effective, even as an adversary attrits some of the web’s elements…Functional decomposition is a methodology that reduces operations down to their practical functional and technological pieces to illuminate how the elements work together. ” (See The Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, “Restoring America’s Military Competitiveness: Mosaic Warfare.”).
At their core, both concepts represent the very human strategy of solving complex challenges: breaking monoliths down into smaller, more manageable pieces. At a deeper level, both concepts espouse the use of horizontally scaled, lightweight components, the aggregate of which is a resilient and agile architecture.
Another aspect of mosaic warfare that emerges from building a disaggregated platform is that each “node,” because it is so specialized, can be much more lightweight, affordable, and expendable than larger and more complex “exquisite” platforms:
“Disaggregated platforms, even those with advanced capability, will likely be more affordable and can be procured in greater numbers than highly capable platforms…Decreasing the quantity of sensors on future platforms could help decrease their size, weight, complexity, and overall unit cost. Lower program costs will allow DOD to buy more new systems and grow its force capacity. ” (See The Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, “Restoring America’s Military Competitiveness: Mosaic Warfare.”).
Taking this idea further, future advances in 3D printing and materials science could enable forward-deployed “asset factories” which build cheap and disposable on-demand assets of whatever type is needed, such as extending the ABMS attritableONE construct to even more attritable assets. For example, if additional “observation nodes” are required, or the adversary attrits their effective population, a mosaic orchestrator component of JADC2 would simply instruct the closest asset factory to instantiate new physical nodes, imbue them with the requisite software, and deploy them. We are already seeing the beginning of near-real-time 3D printing emerge, and advances in energy collection techniques and self-charging batteries which may someday power sensors or other devices.
Additionally, if the initial software and/or hardware build of the nodes are found to be inadequate or new intelligence is acquired, new hardware/software templates can readily be pushed to the asset factories and a “rolling upgrade” of the existing nodes can be performed. Eventually, this “node evolution” will likely be driven by AI/ML, building new capabilities in real-time based on what those models learn about the adversary. These asset factories may ultimately be unmanned, putting nearly unlimited swarm-generating capabilities anywhere needed without risking warfighters’ lives.
This strategy is closely aligned with how microservices and software container orchestrators like Kubernetes operate and integrate with software development pipelines, and may eventually be simply one more stage in such a pipeline, where 3D object templates are promoted along with software images to an asset factory. Explorations of 3D printing by the USAF are already occuring, and while this is still a nascent field, new revolutions in technology could make this a reality faster than we expect.
While we are likely years away from this potential end-state of fully automated factories populating the all-domain battlespace with assets, it behooves us to consider the benefits of this future, and drive current initiatives in that direction. This end-state will require deliberate engineering not only of the attritable assets and their software, but also of the way these assets communicate and exchange data being generated at ever increasing volumes, varieties, and velocities.
References
- Mosaic Warfare: Air Force Magazine (https://www.airforcemag.com/article/mosaic-warfare/)
- Restoring America’s Military Competitiveness: Mosaic Warfare (http://www.mitchellaerospacepower.org/single-post/2019/09/10/Restoring-Americas-Military-Competitiveness-Mosaic-Warfare)
- DoD Enterprise DevSecOps Initiative (DSOP) (https://software.af.mil/dsop/#problemstatement)
- Compile to Combat in 24 Hours (C2C24) (https://www.sae.org/events/dod/attend/program/presentations/JackRichard.pdf)
- Joint All-Domain Command and Control: It’s all about the data https://defensesystems.com/articles/2020/09/01/jadc2-data.aspx
