{"id":19426,"date":"2021-05-20T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-05-20T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/defensenews\/uncategorized\/2021\/05\/20\/the-pentagon-needs-a-plan-to-get-punched-in-the-mouth\/"},"modified":"2026-08-18T20:53:36","modified_gmt":"2026-08-18T20:53:36","slug":"the-pentagon-needs-a-plan-to-get-punched-in-the-mouth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/defensenews\/commentary\/2021\/05\/20\/the-pentagon-needs-a-plan-to-get-punched-in-the-mouth\/","title":{"rendered":"The Pentagon needs a plan to get punched in the mouth"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\u201cEveryone\u2019s got a plan until they get punched in the mouth,\u201d Mike Tyson said of disrupting opponents\u2019 thinking through violence. Today, China and Russia channel Tyson through strategies that attack U.S. military information and command systems and exploit the resulting cognitive and psychological disruption. They believe that degrading these systems and functions will turn traditional U.S. strengths into weaknesses and allow them to win limited, local conflicts, or deter the United States from fighting altogether. This belief isn\u2019t misplaced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Pentagon will soon unveil its solution to this challenge, Joint All-Domain Command and Control, which envisions an overarching network-of-networks enabled by artificial intelligence and cloud data storage. In theory, this hyper-network will restore U.S. information dominance by linking every sensor to every \u201cshooter\u201d across vast theaters to deliver converging effects from dispersed forces, thereby presenting multiple insoluble dilemmas to Chinese or Russian armed forces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After 30 years fighting below its so-called weight class, the Pentagon has largely forgotten how to deal with opponents that can disrupt its information and command-and-control systems. U.S. armed forces desperately need a new network architecture, but this vision is simultaneously too ambitious, and not ambitious enough. China and Russia have spent decades developing capabilities and operational concepts to disrupt U.S. information and command systems in space, cyberspace and the electromagnetic spectrum. Countless wargames, simulations and historical lessons suggest these domains will be highly contested, and systems operating within them will be heavily degraded. Regaining the information dominance U.S. forces enjoyed during the post-Cold War era is a chimerical goal. Instead, the Pentagon should aim for degradation dominance: operating effectively enough with degraded systems. Put simply, the Pentagon needs a plan for getting punched in the mouth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rather than connecting every sensor to every shooter across a theater \u2014 likely impossible given Chinese and Russian countermeasures \u2014 degradation dominance would emphasize building networks that, when degraded, can reliably connect enough<\/i> sensors to enough<\/i> shooters over relevant<\/i> distances. Instead of an overarching system with strict interoperability standards, this approach would use universal data translators to build flexible, ad-hoc mesh networks that could pass information across multiple paths and degrade gracefully under attack.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

New networks are necessary, but they won\u2019t be enough to achieve degradation dominance. Chinese and Russian strategies target information technology as a means to disrupt U.S. forces cognitively and psychologically. Passing data more quickly between U.S. forces won\u2019t matter if personnel can\u2019t understand what they\u2019re seeing or act quickly enough under attack. Improving the cognitive function of command will require much more difficult and far-reaching reforms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

U.S. armed forces must be organized differently for degraded operations. The proliferation of precision-guided weapons is driving U.S. forces to disperse to evade enemy targeting. Concurrently, emerging operational concepts emphasize the need to coordinate effects across operating domains from space to under the sea. In wargames, Chinese and Russian attacks on communications networks routinely sever communications<\/a> between widely distributed, multidomain forces. Rather than fighting cohesively, dispersed U.S. units fought alone and, without access to multidomain support, often died alone.<\/p>\n\n\n\t