Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work on Wednesday outlined the Pentagon’s plans for an advanced war-fighting strategy involving robot weapons and remote-controlled warfare.
In a speech to the Army War College Strategy Conference, Mr. Work said the “third offset strategy” will rely heavily on autonomous systems that will allow machines and U.S. technological superiority to win wars.
The strategy follows two earlier “offsets” — the use of asymmetric means to counter enemy advantages. During the Cold War, strategic deterrence and tactical nuclear arms were used to offset the Soviet Union’s ground force numerical advantages. In the 1970s, precision-guided conventional weapons were deployed to offset the quantitative shortcomings of foreign conventional forces.
SEE ALSO: Iran creating ‘suicide’ drones that threaten Israel, U.S. Navy: Pentagon
Mr. Work said precision-guided warfare is reaching the end of its shelf life as foreign states have developed countermeasures.
The third offset will be designed to defeat states like China, which is developing niche, offset weapons such as anti-ship ballistic missiles and anti-satellite arms.
“The real essence of the third offset strategy is to find multiple different attacks against opponents across all domains so they can’t adapt, or they adjust to just one, and they died before they can adapt again,” he said.
Mr. Work said defense strategists are divided between those who seek to continue to focus on low-end conflict and those who say future wars will require high-end forces for use against competitor states with large militaries, like China and Russia. “We don’t have an answer right now” on which direction the Pentagon will go, he said.
The deputy defense secretary said the offset strategy calls for adapting “three-play chess” to modern warfare, in which U.S. military forces will employ highly skilled people operating advanced technological machines against less-capable forces.
Mr. Work said the “Air Sea Battle” concept, designed to break into Asia against Chinese missiles and submarines, has evolved into “Air Land Battle 2.0.”
“Air Sea Battle, in my view, kind of went wrong,” said Mr. Work, one of the concept’s architects.
The revised concept will involve avoiding being targeted by massive Chinese missile salvos or submarine attacks through “getting into their networks, blowing them up and keep them from seeing you,” he said.
Next, salvo attacks will be countered with defenses designed to hit missiles and destroy submarines and missile-carrying bombers before they fire. Last, after surviving the massed strikes, joint assault forces will be injected to make it an “air-land battle.”
“I believe that what the third offset strategy will revolve around will be three-play combat in each dimension,” Mr. Work said. “And three-play combat will be much different in each dimension [air, sea, land], and it will be up for the people who live and fight in that dimension to figure out the rules.”
“We will have autonomy at rest, our smart systems being able to go through big data to help at the campaign level and to be able to go through big data at the tactical level. So autonomy at rest and autonomy in motion,” he said.
The most difficult domain for robots is the ground.
“Just getting robots to move over terrain is one of the most difficult things you can imagine,” Mr. Work said.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon’s high-tech development center, is working on a program called Squad X that is focusing on human-machine interaction at the tactical level. The program includes ground robots, microdrones and squad-sized military units equipped with intelligence and super-lethal weapons that can cover large areas.
“And this is not as far away as you might think,” Mr. Work said, noting that the Army is conducting experiments with “manned and unmanned teaming” of Apache attack helicopters.
Robot-driven vehicles also are coming, along with human-sized robots used as porters, firefighters, countermine robots, and countersniper robots.
NORTHCOM ASSESSES ISIL
The key threat posed by the al Qaeda offshoot terrorist group Islamic State is not the infiltration of fighters crossing the U.S. southern border but the group’s sophisticated social media recruitment effort.
That’s the conclusion of Navy Adm. William Gortney, commander of the Colorado-based U.S. Northern Command, which is charged with defense of the homeland.
“I don’t believe that it’s ISIL that we have to worry about infiltrating through our southern approaches,” Adm. Gortney told reporters at the Pentagon on Tuesday, using an acronym for the terrorist group.
“They are a threat to us because they’re using a very sophisticated social media campaign to incite American and Canadian citizens to do harm against American and Canadian citizens,” he said. “That’s how they are trying to attack us in that regard, through that very sophisticated social media campaign.”
In addition to frequent posts seeking recruits placed on Facebook and Twitter, the terrorist group has launched a slick English-language magazine called Dabiq that lists email addresses and an encryption key for potential recruits to contact the Islamic State.
The FBI is engaged in a major law enforcement campaign to stop would-be jihadis in the U.S. from traveling to Syria and Iraq to join the Islamic State.
FBI Special Agent Andrew McCabe, head of the FBI’s Washington field office, said the bureau is struggling to keep up with related cases, including seven people in the past two weeks linked to the Islamic State group. Other cases involve people in their early and middle teens who want to travel overseas.
“It’s not hard to anticipate that, as numbers begin to grow, at some point our traditional investigative approaches and capabilities will be outstripped by the sheer numbers we’re facing,” Mr. McCabe told CBS News on Tuesday.
Adm. Gortney said the border security problem involves “seams” in defenses that enemies are exploiting.
“And they’re going to move through those seams people, drugs, money, weapons or something even greater,” he said. “And that’s why we work so hard looking down there and trying to close those seams with our homeland partnerships and with the other geographic combatant commanders.”
OFFICIALS: VERIFY IRAN DEAL
Paula DeSutter, assistant secretary of state for verification, compliance and implementation in the George W. Bush administration, said Congress should request a formal assessment of whether the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran will include adequate verification provisions to prevent Tehran from cheating.
“Congress has the authority to request a verifiability assessment of the agreement from the administration but has not done so,” Ms. DeSutter told Inside the Ring.
Sen. Bob Corker, Tennessee Republican and chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, has introduced legislation that would require the Iran agreement to be submitted to Congress.
Under the Constitution, the Senate has the power of advice and consent on foreign treaties and agreements.
Ms. DeSutter added that, based on the preliminary framework made public last week, adequate verification does not appear possible.
“Transparency measures” announced as part of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action will facilitate violations at known locations but not at secret undeclared sites, she said.
Fred Fleitz, an ex-CIA analyst and former State Department arms control official, also voiced concerns about verifying Iran’s compliance with the nuclear deal.
“I believe the verification provisions in a nuclear agreement with Iran, based on the new framework, will fall far short of what the Obama administration claimed last week,” Mr. Fleitz said.
“Intrusive inspections of Iran’s nuclear program only appear certain for its peaceful program,” he said. “Inspections of possible military-related nuclear activities would take place under the IAEA additional protocol.”
Iran has said it would adopt a limited “provisional application” of an International Atomic Energy Agency protocol, which Obama administration officials have said is the key to stringent verification.
A formal agreement is to be drawn up by June 30.
“Given Iran’s record of covert nuclear activities and apparent loopholes in the framework on requiring inspections of reports of such activities, I question whether an agreement based on the framework can provide adequate verification to assure that Iran is not pursuing a nuclear weapons program,” Mr. Fleitz said.
• Contact Bill Gertz on Twitter at @BillGertz.
