By Dr E. Anders Eriksson, Division of Defence Analysis, Defence Research Establishment, Sweden.
DISCLAIMER: The views expressed in this presentation are those of the author. They are not necessarily held by the Defence Research Establishment or the Swedish Government.
Introduction
The starting point of this paper is that human conflict changes with society. This by itself is not a particularly original statement. I think, however, that most of the debate on Information Age conflict - or with the label I prefer: Network Age - is too confined to applying new technologies to situations reminiscent of, say, the Cjulf War or the situation in former Yugoslavia. In the first part of my paper, therefore, I will try to assess the possibilities for societal change - comprising technological, institutional and cultural elements - leading to change of a more structural nature in the field of human conflict. In the second part I will pursue a more detailed discussion of military innovation - or perhaps better ‘security related innovation’ - in this context of Network Society conflict. I will not discuss specifics of any technological or industrial field, but rather how the innovation process itself is being re-invented, and the consequences this may have for defence organisations. To add some credibility and reality to the notion of re-inventing the innovation process already here at the outset, let me cite a historical case in point. Thomas Alva Edison’s numerous inventions - foremost electric lighting - all hinged on an institutional invention, viz. the industrial research lab as first organised by Edison at Menlo Park. It has been said that the most important thing Edison invented was - invention.
Emerging Network Society in a historical perspective
In the view of many, myself included, we are now probably in the early phases of a major societal transformation, at least of the same order of magnitude as the two Industrial Revolutions commonly associated with, respectively, steam power and railways, and electricity and the automobile. Many even argue that Network Society is likely to be an even more dramatic change. The reason for my preference for the label ‘Network Society’ is that by many standards the most advanced parts of world have been ‘information economies’ already for a long time (e.g., measuring by the tertiary sector’s share of the economy, if I remember correctly, London is said to have reached this situation already in the 19th century and California around 1920). The Network Society, in contrast, stands for a situation where the daily lives of many people - in the advanced regions - are structurally affected by network-related novelties. Compare the changes in location and interaction patterns brought about by the introduction of railway and the automobile in their time. The present counterpart would be Internet interaction substituting physical mobility. Although traditionally new technology has been seen as the prime force of change, there is an alternative point of view provided by the Schumpeterian tradition in economics. According to this view, to which I subscribe, technology, institutions, and culture, values and perceptions interact in more complex, unpredictable ways. An ‘in’ word, taken from biology, for this type of process is co-evolution. Therefore, technology, institutions, and culture are equally worthy of study in these contexts, cf. Table 1.
As technological 'innovation today is a global process, and as culture, values and perceptions are hard to change at will, from the perspective of a state, a region, an organisation or a corporation it can be argued that the key factor to success in Network Society is the adoption and development of effective institutions. For a state, I believe, key to this is finding arrangements which allow public interests to be pursued in ways which utilise, rather than hamper, the innovativeness and entrepreneurship of private actors. This very much applies to the containment of IT related threats. A main objective of this paper is to start a discussion on what type of institutions a medium-sized state like Denmark or Sweden will need to cope with - broadly defined - military innovation in Network Society.
The security context of Network Society
Also in security terms the two Industrial Revolutions brought considerable change, see Table 2. In sum, Industrial Society meant first a strengthening of the states’ monopoly on violence and then a further concentration of power up till the bipolar world of the Cold War.
Some would argue that in Network Society the concentration has gone even a step further, with the US being the only full member of the global security club. China, of course, is the likely runner-up. The future role of great power dispute is, however, not the focus of this paper. Instead I will argue that Network Society has a potential for smaller scale conflicts being pursued by ‘scaleable’ and largely deniable means of warfare - in particular information operations and clandestine forms o f ‘kinetic’ special operations.
Of course such forms of warfare cannot lead to traditional results like establishing and maintaining military control over an adversary’s territory. Obviously such archaic objectives of warfare are still perfectly real, e.g., in former Yugoslavia. I will concentrate, however, on the potential for something like military conflict between Network Society actors. In that setting, in contrast to the masses of troops and standard materiel typical of armed forces of Industrial Society, we can see a world where the counterpart of military power is primarily a matter of expertise and financial resource. Already in today’s world this would mean a club comprising some states, but also some non-state actors, say, combining criminal activities and legitimate (or at least overt) business operations. This is a version of an argument for reduced exclusiveness of the community of states as the world actors par excellence. In Europe the situation with the state as the most potent power base has prevailed since ca 1500, and therefore one label attached to this possible new state of world affairs is the New Medievalism. To Network Society club members - be they states or non-states - seizure of land is hardly a major concern. First, their key resource bases are not territorial in nature. Second, being a club member means interdependencies with other club members. The consequences of overt acts of hostility are therefore likely to be costly. Therefore, criminal activity or clandestine operations are better paradigms for Network Society warfare between club members then is traditional war. So then, perhaps, I should be addressing a police rather than a defence academy? I think the important thing is not to be caught in an old conceptual framework. There is a distinct possibility of something emerging which is not war in a traditional sense, yet may threaten national interests to a considerable degree, and being too high-performing in a technical and tactical sense, and to sophisticated in terms of strategic concepts to be within the traditional confines of policing. A third audience of relevance might be the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I think that building an international governance structure to cope with the new types of security threats which may emerge with Network Society is absolutely a high priority. However, I do not think that it will be possible to effectively outlaw information operations. Rather I think international agreements and institutions must work in conjunction with defensive measures and deterrence. Furthermore, it is imprudent of a small advanced state to leave this field entirely to major powers, as many of us did for good reasons in the case of nuclear arms. If I am right on the scaleability and deniability of future IT weaponry they may be perfectly suited for use against, e.g., Danish or Swedish interests also in cases where those are not shared by major powers, and therefore help likely to be, at best, limited. To be able to act purposefully with regard to IT related threats to national interests - in international negotiations, in building defences, or in actually defending herself against an attack - a state like Denmark first and foremost needs to keep abreast with developments in a very dynamic field. The rest of this paper will be devoted to the problem of understanding this dynamism and pondering over institutional responses.
Innovation: Industrial Society vs. Network Society
According to the traditional view, innovation is a matter of a technological invention being implemented in a straightforward fashion. Modem students of innovation processes tell much more complex stories. The above picture of coevolutionary societal change is a macro version of these stories. We now turn to the somewhat more detailed level of analysis needed to start understanding what military innovation in Network Society can be like. In Industrial Society the typical innovation pattern has been relatively short and hectic periods of what can be termed concept innovation alternating with typically more extended periods where a prevailing concept undergoes more incremental change. During the concept innovation phase, typically a set of more or less new technological opportunities are combined in a variety of ways to match potential consumer demand as perceived by prospective suppliers. In the process, demand becomes more articulate - for a major innovation like the car this typically includes emergence of new life styles and value changes - and technical solutions become more refined. Also problems of organisation of production and distribution, finance, insurance and legislation have to be solved. These processes are very much a matter of learning from trial and error where business failure is the norm - also for entrepreneurs who finally come out as winners like Henry Ford. The notion of concept innovation has unclear boundaries to system innovation. I will make the provisional distinction that concept innovation focuses on the broader market and societal context of what services a novel artefact provides and how it networks with other parts of society. System innovation then is a more narrowly technical process where a novel, complex solution develops to a conceptually reasonably well understood problem. However, system innovation often transcends that boundary, as when Edison’s electric lighting system gave rise to the much broader process of electrification.
Military innovation in the interwar years
The US DoD Office of Net Assessment has commissioned a sequence of studies dealing with military innovation in the interwar period. Particularly successful cases of such innovation include the development of mechanised warfare in Germany - as opposed to developments in the same field in Britain and France; carrier based naval airpower in the US - again with the UK as a less successful actor; and radar based air defence in the UK - here Germany was a less successful competitor. In all cases the key to success was the integration of technology, operational and tactical concepts, organisation, training and the emergence of a professional community marked by realistic perceptions of the new form of warfare and an ability to learn from mistakes. Technological superiority by itself was not sufficient for success - the key lay in getting a balanced system of systems.1 Mechanised warfare and carriers were both pioneered by Britain during WW I. At least in the case of mechanised warfare UK innovativeness continued into the mid 20’s. It was, alas, the Germans who used the lessons to be learned from those experiments. Hence we see that being first is no certain route to later success. British air defence differs from the other cases in that it was a much more rapid development, guided from the outset by a relatively clear vision. Utilising the previously introduced distinction one could perhaps say that here, in contrast to the other cases, concept and system innovation were here highly integrated. It is also interesting that here civilian scientists played such a significant role - this, of course is the birthplace of operational research. Arguably the UK air defence was the first in a new generation of systems of systems entailing unprecedentedly complex Command & Control and information processing. It was at understanding this level - requiring conceptual thinking going well beyond previous war experience - the British outperformed the Germans, despite their radar stations’ being technically superior, at least according to some judges.2 A fourth area of interwar military innovation should perhaps serve as a caveat for us in the information warfare business, viz. strategic bombing. In current parlance this area was, by all accounts I know of, ‘hyped’, particularly in Britain and America. If many of the other non-success stories have to do with indecision and vested interests in old forms of warfare, the strategic bombing case is almost opposite. Here strong new interests groups formed around a warfare concept which was flashy but essentially premature. Interwar strategic airpower thought lacked realism on precision and vulnerability. Also, the desire of airmen to win a future war by themselves diverted interest and resources away from areas where airpower could have contributed more, such as close air support.
I, at least sometimes, see parallels between the interwar airmen’s single-minded preoccupation with just one of many possible applications of military airpower and the IW community’s concentration on infrastructural warfare.
Cold War military innovation - a historical exception
The interwar years - at least the first part - was a period of modest military spending. Therefore, quite naturally military innovation was based on component and sub-system technologies developed in the commercial sector. Also, in terms of process military innovation was similar to its industrial counterpart, although perhaps the British air defence case went beyond that standard. By that time, of course, WWII was already becoming a distinct possibility. During WW II, quite naturally, defence became the main arena of innovation and technology development. During the Cold War this developed into a situation with an essentially military specific hi-tech sector down to the component level in conjunction with an acquisition process very far removed from commercial practices. There may be many more or less irrational explanations for this, but also some quite rational ones. One such argument of particular interest to this paper could be based on the combination of system complexity and ‘cut-throat competition’ - potentially in a literal sense - prevailing in the military field. The answer to managing extreme system complexity in late Industrial Society3 was to go through a succession of more and more detailed system designs over an extend period of time, then manufacture and finally deploy. This was a process of successive decision-making where the costs for back-tracking became quite high already early in the process - at least in terms of time to deployment since redoing an early phase like studies or product definition involved relatively few people but a lot of calendar time. This process can be said to be a planned analogue of the typical Industrial Society innovation process, with both processes sharing the property of lock-in, i.e. as the process goes on the set of economically feasible choices narrows down rapidly. Hence, in the military systems context, due to the necessity of doing a number of time consuming design activities in sequence, key system parameters had to be set long before the system’s active life, based either on already existing technologies, likely to be relatively obsolete already by the time of deployment, or on projections of future technological developments. The typical problem of the latter case is that when a system critically hinges on component performance which does not turn out to be commercially available, defence typically has either to develop such components itself at high cost or accept major reductions in system performance, and potentially defeat in the ultimate competitive environment - the battle field. In my view this is a key cost driving mechanism in the traditional military acquisition process, now up for betterment under labels like ‘Acquisition Reform’ and ‘Smart Procurement’. Against the historical background presented in this paper it should be clear that ‘traditional’ military acquisition does not have a really long tradition. So perhaps Acquisition Reform and the like should just be a matter of going back to the 20’s and 30’s? Valuable as the studies of interwar military innovation are for thinking about future innovation, I still think the answer is distinctly no. Too much has changed in technology, organisation of business activities and markets, in culture and values... We are at the end of an exceptional era of military technological exclusiveness, but the commercial mainstream that military innovation is now returning to has itself undergone dramatic changes.
Reinventing innovation: systems management in Network Society
Perhaps a few words are needed here about different perceptions of concepts like Acquisition Reform, dual use, and commercial-military integration. Certainly in Sweden many interpret these primarily as increased use of COTS components and subsystems. Some combine this with the view that military systems engineering should essentially remain the same as during the Cold War. Others seem to think that in the near future officers can just go to the shop next-door and buy computers and mobile phones and what have you for their units, such that professional systems engineering will not really be necessary any more. I will argue in contrast to both these views that military systems engineering must change profoundly, but will remain more important than ever. The basis for this view is Network Society developments in systems engineering and systems management. As for technology there are two main facets to these developments. One is connected with concepts like standardised interfaces for interoperability, ‘open systems’ and ‘evolutionary systems development’. Key examples are the PC standard based on Windows operating systems and Intel processors, and the Internet standard - used also in intranets and extranets. The other has to do with modelling and simulation. Modelling and simulation has a dual role in this story. They function as design tools, but they also enable people to prepare and train operations of systems not yet fully realised.
The latter aspect of modelling and simulation leads us over to the institutional side: institutions that enable people to familiarise themselves with conceptually new systems, and eventually train to use them and perhaps discover new uses, are key to any concept innovation process. As for corporate and market structure, the key development in my view is the emergence of network organisations. Rather than ‘hardwiring’ a specific task structure and production technology into an organisation, which will then be an impediment to change, one tries to maintain a broad network of potential partners for a variety of tasks that one may want to perform in the future. Each unit in this organisational web - where it is not necessarily so important where the legal corporate boundaries are - focuses on developing its core competence and finding new ways of putting it to use. This emerging network paradigm is also mirrored on the cultural level. This means that more and more people do not define their carriers in organisational terms, but rather try to develop their competencies and sense of fulfilment by engaging in a succession of projects while developing their personal networks. Of course also in this new framework every successful design and implementation process will exhibit the convergence from an early concept definition phase to later phases where a chosen concept is implemented in hardware, computer software, training of personnel etc. In Network Society, however, this convergence is not identical to the system becoming locked in. On the technical level it is easy to see, given standardisation of components and interfaces, how a broad set of concepts going in different directions can be supported at a given time without running into prohibitive logistical and system integration problems. The institutional and cultural sides are more difficult, but the developments I have just outlined enable a much increased ability to cope with variety and change also in these respects. Thus we can see a world emerging where concept innovation can become routinised to a considerable degree. As I already alluded to, Edison’s invention of the industrial lab can be a useful comparison. What that achieved was to routinise system innovation by bringing together all the different types of expertise needed to develop fairly quickly a complex technical system, like electric lighting. Previously that would have taken very long to develop by trial and error - or perhaps, in the absence of marketable intermediate results, would have been beyond the feasible. While the Edisonian paradigm remained best practice for a century, in the Network Society context, standardisation, open systems, and modelling and simulation enable a much faster and simpler system development process, where many tasks can be outsourced rather than performed in an integrated organisation. Under the Edisonian paradigm concept development was a relatively separate process, at one end supplying system development with - in the military context - staff targets, on the other end receiving a finished technical system for the development of tactics, organisation, training and the like. In the Network Society context, the previously two distinct varieties of concept development and system development can be performed in a much more concurrent fashion. I will refer to this new possibility by the catch phrase routinised concept innovation.
Security challenges from routinised concept innovation
The leaders in Network Society concept innovation and systems management are to be found in such areas as telecom, Internet services, media, and financial services. The public sector is hardly leading the way, and - albeit the US DoD has been a quite successful promoter of many key Network Society technologies including Internet - defence organisations are no exception to this. In spite of this I believe that the military field, broadly defined, is an area where the opportunities for routinised concept innovation are likely to be heavily exploited. This is best understood starting from the threat side. As already discussed the types of threat I primarily want to consider here are not traditional military ones aiming at territorial objectives. High performance crime is a better starting point and I will therefore briefly take on the hat of a strategic analyst working for a sophisticated crime syndicate. Then I would argue for a test programme in the form of a virtual factory - obviously network based - for production of 10 concepts, training and execution of operations, with a strong feedback loop to capture experience for the benefit of new developments. A cyber counterpart of von Seeckt’s German general staff of the 20’s. This would likely benefit the syndicate’s present core businesses by increasing the ability to conduct counterintelligence and other defensive activities against law enforcement organisations and competitors. But it might also give rise to a business unit in its own right, performing operations for direct financial gain against, e.g., the financial industry, or doing contract work for other crime organisations, terrorists, states or overt businesses. Somewhat inspired by our money laundry and fraud operations, I would argue for a strategy of routinised concept innovation such that a compromised product line can swiftly be replaced by brand new concepts. So going back to the good guys: if my thought experiment managed to catch anything of the business logic we have to face, it is not like the interwar years when there were a handful of innovative concepts. Instead we may be up against new concepts being launched weekly - or hourly. The traditional military planning cycle and organisational structure do not seem an appropriate response to the type of situation I tried to outline where studies, planning, systems development, training, and operations happen almost concurrently on the adversary side.
I think a final useful comparison for defence entering Network Society is with other traditionally labour intensive service industries like insurance. In that setting, in the old world a conceptually new product required retraining of - an army - of salesmen before the novelty could reach the market. Now such information can be disseminated via digital networks - and perhaps the corps of salesmen as we now know them will even disappear. Likewise, military training has developed over centuries for a meticulous but slow dissemination of centrally developed concepts out to eventually tens or hundreds of thousands of soldiers. The difference is that in insurance the speed of change is not decided entirely by the fastest competitor - there is considerable inertia in the customer base. I would not bet on friction on the cyber battlefield playing a similar role.
Fodnoter
1 Much of the work on interwar military innovation commissioned Office of Net Assessment is summarised in Murray, W, Millett, AR (eds) Military Innovation in the Interwar Period. Cambridge UP, 1996. This and the following paragraphs rely particularly on the chapter Watts, B, Murray, W. ’’Military innovation in peacetime,” pp 369-415.
2 Beyerchen, A. ’’From radio to radar: Interwar military adaptation to technological change in Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States,” pp 265-299 in Murray & Millett op. cit.
3 Some non-defence areas displayed levels of complexity approaching that of defence - e.g., telecom and electric power - and similar innovation processes. However, during most of the Cold War defence and closely aligned fields like space - first and foremost in US, of course - undoubtedly lead the field.
