Gen. Glen VanHerck is the head of NORTHCOM. (File)
WASHINGTON: In the context of national security, “deterrence” is usually shorthand for “having an arsenal scary enough to frighten another nation and keep them from attacking you.”
But in the modern digital era, that simply isn’t enough, Gen. Glen VanHerck, the head of US Northern Command, warned Tuesday. Deterrence now needs to include signaling and messaging to make sure that a weapon is never launched against the US or its forces.
“Rather than primarily focusing on kinetic defeat, for the defense of the homeland, I think we must get further left,” VanHerck told an audience at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium. “Deterrence is establishing competition by using all levers of influence as I conveyed, and most importantly, the proper use of the information space to demonstrate the will, the capability, the resiliency, and the readiness by creating doubt in any potential adversaries mind that they can ever be successful by striking our homeland.”
And right now, the Pentagon is just too slow to make that happen, the general continued, saying the department needs to change “how we operate in the information space” to be more agile.
“Today, it’s a bottom up process where you come up with a message, a Tweet, and it flows up for approval to release,” he said. “We need to flip that paradigm and use mission command and have leaders provide guidance to [operators] so we can execute in near real time to seize the advantage in the information space— where candidly, we’re getting our rear end handed to us today. So in short, we must embrace the digital culture.”
Of course, information isn’t just about messaging when it comes to defending the homeland. VanHerck reiterated the common refrain from top Pentagon officials that the department is great at gathering data, but terrible at actually using it, stating that “98%” of data collected by the military never gets processed.
As the Pentagon pushes forward with its various All Domain concepts, that simply has to change, VanHerck argued. “It’s left on the cutting room floor. I consider that decision space and I’m trying to gain access to that.”
He later noted that part of gaining access to all the information needed to get a comprehensive picture for homeland defense is better partnership with industry, which is naturally protective of its intellectual property rights.
Asked how industry can help his mission, VanHerck said the first thing is that “proprietary information and data needs to go away. We need to share data, it needs to be available to the government.” And in turn, “government data should [be] shareable across all domains.”
