Airmen work in the the Common Mission Control Center at Beale Air Force Base, California, March 2021. (US Air Force/Shelton Keel)
DUBAI: International air forces could learn a lesson from Netflix about how to use technology to decimate an enemy, the US Air Force’s top general told an audience of international air chiefs on Saturday.
After running Blockbuster out of business by offering DVD rentals delivered to customers’ doorstep, Netflix revolutionized media consumption by creating the first widespread movie streaming service, effectively turning a hardware product into a software product, said Air Force chief of staff Gen. CQ Brown.
A similar revolution could be coming in warfare, as advances in artificial intelligence, supercomputing, cyber weapons and space point to an ever-increased reliance on data and software, as well as a trend toward non-kinetic effects, he said.
“I can’t predict the future, but I would bet the non-kinetic effects will reign supreme,” Brown said during the Dubai International Air Chiefs Conference. “Now we’re somewhere stuck in the thinking that mass needs to be physical. What if we did not have to produce sorties to achieve the same effect? What if a future small diameter bomb looks like ones and zeros?”
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In a world where data is king, the Air Force is still stovepiped, with many of its platforms unable to connect to each other.
The service is currently developing the Advanced Battle Management System in the hopes of linking its sensors and shooters, as well as to integrate emerging technologies like machine learning that can speed up decision making, Brown said.
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But to realize the full potential of how data can be synthesized and processed, the US military must be able to connect with allies and partner nations, and becoming more interoperable is a requirement, Brown said. Right now, that’s too difficult, with too much bureaucratic red tape.
“For those of us here today, thinking differently begins by knocking down archaic policies that prevent us from sharing data, which our warfighters depend upon,” Brown said.
The elephant in the room
Interoperability and all domain command and control were the main themes of the conference, but hanging over the event was the albatross of the stalled F-35 sale to Dubai, which remains unfinished largely due to US concerns that Abu Dhabi’s use of the Chinese 5G provider Huawei could leave the high-tech F-35 vulnerable to exploitation.
None of the officials — including Brown and Maj. Gen. Ibrahim Al Alawi, commander of the UAE Air Force — mentioned or even obliquely referenced the ongoing negotiations. Instead, the two officials made similar points about how military partners must overcome technical and security challenges to be able to share data.
“Security challenges will be present in any shared multi-domain operation environment,” Al Alawi said. “Because of the core of the shared information construct, a certain level of trust has to exist.”
Al Alawi said partner nations need a mutually agreed upon “zero trust” security model to ensure data can move safely across different networks, as well as robust protections against electronic warfare and cyber attacks.
On the US side, Brown agreed that “data security is important and something we must get right.”
He also noted that overclassification is a continued problem, as is the Pentagon’s reluctance to adopt foreign technology platforms, even those developed by trusted partners. Additionally, the United States also needs to design its products to be exportable from the outset, rather than modifying them later on, he said.
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The Pentagon is moving in the right direction with initiatives like the Defense Exportability Initiative Program, which aims to build in technology security features for programs in early development, making them easier to sell to foreign militaries later on, Brown said.
A total of 18 programs have undertaken Defense Exportability Initiative Program feasibility studies or design activities, and the hope is to “save money, improve systems and security and reduce development time and increase interoperability with our allies and partners,” Brown said.
However, Brown did not expand upon how ABMS — or any of its major future acquisition programs — would be engineered to plug into partner nation’s systems and share data, leaving it unclear exactly how the US Air Force will ensure its multidomain command and control system is able to harness data from allies.
