Pentagon looks to the past to counter digital warfare of the future | McClatchy Washington Bureau

For some U.S. servicemen and women, it’s back to digging foxholes, camouflaging camps and learning celestial navigation.

Just as the Pentagon acquires ever more whizbang technology, military leaders are preparing for what happens when their high-tech wizardry no longer functions.

Potential U.S. adversaries are growing more adept at disruptive digital warfare. They can shoot down satellites, jam communications and sever digital links between operators and their killer drones. Pentagon officials refer to what might happen next as “going dark” – a condition that could endanger U.S. military dominance on the battlefield.

“The idea of going dark is that you’re thrown back to a pre-digital age,” said Peter W. Singer, a military consultant and co-author of a 2015 novel, “Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War,” that has been placed on suggested reading lists for some midlevel Army and Navy officers.

In such a scenario, stealth jet fighters remain grounded, robotic drones lose their human guides, GPS goes haywire and ship-to-ship communications can be reduced to semaphore and beacons flashing Morse code.

“You’ll be operating like a soldier back in World War I or World War II, where you may not know where the enemy is. You may not know where your fellow units are. You may not even know where you are,” Singer said.

So a “back to basics” movement is gaining steam in all the services, even as the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force seek to build a layered network that is more resilient than ever to attack.

For the past 15 years, the U.S. military has enjoyed dominance in the digital domain. The skies and airwaves belonged to the Pentagon to the point that soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq could carry personal cellphones and use them practically at will.

But in future conflicts with a more capable adversary – say, Russia or China – networks could go dead, and adversaries might find themselves battling in digital obscurity.

“I call this primitivization, and that is the ability to operate in an unconnected world,” said retired Navy Adm. James G. Stavridis, the dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

That’s why Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Robert Neller is making sure training includes both sophisticated cyberwarfare and the most elemental traditional skills.

“You’re going to dig a hole, you’re going to camouflage, you’re going to turn off all your stuff, and you’re going to sit there and try to sleep,” Neller told a forum earlier this month. “And you’re going to try not to make any noise, and you’re going to have absolutely no signature. Because if you can be seen, you can be attacked.”

Neller said recent U.S. combat in the Middle East and Central Asia had offered conditions that did not reflect likely future battles. Soldiers and Marines operated out of fixed positions, returning each night to operating bases.

“We have not lived off the land. We’ve been eating at chow halls and drinking Green Beans coffee,” Neller said.

As U.S. reliance on military digital technology has risen, so has the desire of smaller adversaries to disrupt it.

“Everybody’s thinking how to keep the U.S. military off their space. . . . Even having a modest capacity to jam things has a big payoff,” said Thomas Donnelly, a defense and security policy analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research center in Washington.

In March, the head of the Air Force Space Command, Gen. John E. Hyten, told a congressional panel that China and Russia were refining technology to destroy U.S. satellites with ground-based lasers or covert space vehicles that can slam into the satellites.

A more likely attack, Donnelly said, would be aimed at blocking the U.S. military network in a limited geographic area. “You may lose some capability but not all capability,” Donnelly said. Still, that’s something a determined foe can take advantage of.

Jamming and technical know-how on disrupting communications are rising in other nations, said Kathleen Hicks, a former deputy undersecretary at the Defense Department who now is senior vice president at the Center for Strategic & International Studies.

“The challenge to the U.S. military is how do you continue to use that advantage that the U.S. has, protect those networks but then also train your folks to be ready to operate should you fail to secure those networks,” Hicks said.

It is a particular test for the Navy, the service with the greatest geographical spread, a crucial nuclear mission and deep reliance on digital communications.

Stavridis, who retired in 2013, said the Navy had brought back training for some personnel in celestial navigation and other techniques to cope with disrupted communications.

“Not only is it good ethos for the service but it also could be necessary in an environment in which cyberattacks had rendered our systems incapable of connecting to the GPS grid,” Stavridis said.

Maritime charts are getting dusted off, a significant change from the recent past, when, Stavridis said, “a ship would deploy. You would draw a load of paper charts but they would sit quite undisturbed in the back of the navigator’s office while the ship merrily went about its way navigating electronically. Today, those charts are out in frequent use.”

Whether those charts are up to date and whether other basic navigational training should extend to all sailors is the source of some friction between Capitol Hill and Navy leaders.

“The failure to have a requirement for updated paper charts, and the lack of training for enlisted sailors, show this concern is not as widespread as it should be given increased electronic warfare threats from our adversaries,” Sen. Joni K. Ernst, R-Iowa, said in a statement to McClatchy.

Taking up a requirement that had been dropped in 2006, all second class (juniors) midshipmen at the Naval Academy must complete three hours of fundamentals in celestial navigation. Those taking a navigators course at the Surface Warfare Officers School in Newport, Rhode Island, now get 26 hours of such training, using sextants and nautical almanacs.

The ancient technique has serious drawbacks. The theoretical limit of accuracy is no better than 1 mile. And navigators are dependent on somewhat clear skies

“If you have a navy that can only operate on sunny days, it’s going to lose the war,” said Frank Reed, a celestial navigation instructor who teaches out of Mystic, Connecticut.

Reed said that if principal and multiple backup navigation systems failed aboard Navy ships, “they just become barges. If you’ve lost your electronics to that degree, evacuate.”

A spokeswoman at the Naval Education and Training Command, Lt. Cmdr. Kate Meadows, provided a written question-and-answer information sheet that denied that some ships sail without charts. “We have not stopped this practice,” the sheet says.

On the broader issue of whether the back-to-basics mindset in all services is enough, experts remain uncertain.

“We’ve done a lot,” said Singer. “The question is unanswerable as to whether it’s enough until after the conflict.”