Denied C4ISR

Secrecy News recently obtained a Defense Department report to Congress that discusses "the readiness of the joint force to conduct operations" in a C4ISR-denied environment.

The unclassified portion of the February 2014 report -- obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request -- answers several questions from lawmakers as mandated by the fiscal year 2013 Defense Authorization Act. One of those questions touched on the changes to tactics, techniques and procedures developed to support denied environment operations:

(U) The [chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] has directed all the CCDRs to execute exercises in realistic environments, including denied environments. Scope and impact of these objectives continue to mature over time, with annual reports on exercise effectiveness, lessons learned, and recommendations for future exercises. All of these activities feed directly into TTP development and refinement.

(U) The [defense secretary], through the CJCS, has tasked the Combatant Commanders (CCDRs) and Services in a separate EXORD to provide a detailed denied cyber assessment in the Spring of 2014, therefore this report does not cover cyber vulnerabilities of C4ISR.

Inside the Pentagon reported last September that denied or contested environments had emerged as a major challenge in unmanned ISR:

The Pentagon must rescope its intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets to operate in contested and access-denial environments of the future as opposed to the more permissive airspace of today, according to a senior Defense Department official.

Filling this capability gap caused by an increasingly diverse and changing threat environment is one of the largest challenges the department is facing in the unmanned and ISR arena, Dyke Weatherington, DOD's director of unmanned warfare and ISR, said in a Sept. 24 interview. Most of the capability the department acquired in the past decade was optimized for a very permissive environment and would not be successful in a more contested arena, he said.

And prior to the counterterrorism activities of the past decade, the department's main adversary was the Soviet Union, which was a large but understandable threat.

"We knew what those guys were," Weatherington said of the Soviet Union. "We knew where their strengths were, we knew where their weaknesses were, and so we could go build systems for that particular capability."

And although the Pentagon was not prepared for the terrorism threat, it spent years building up ISR capabilities to respond to it.