The term “non-kinetic effects,” in Pentagon parlance, generally refers to capabilities that don’t blow up or explode such as cyber, electromagnetic spectrum, or space-based tools. They have come into sharper focus in recent years and the U.S. military has sought ways to expand their use and integration as a complement to more traditional weapon systems.

The Navy’s first cyber strategy, released in November, placed significant importance on non-kinetic capabilities for future warfighting, stating that they will be a deciding factor and those who effectively synchronize non-kinetic effects will have a decisive advantage on the battlefield.

“We have now matured that integration of our non-kinetic effects so significantly with the joint force maneuver that there isn’t a difference between what we do and what the traditional joint force and kinetic forces do. In fact, one can’t succeed without the other,” Vice Adm. Craig Clapperton, commander of Fleet Cyber Command, 10th Fleet and Navy Space Command, said last week at the annual WEST conference.

“We have worked very closely with [Indo-Pacific Command], [Pacific Fleet], U.S. Forces Korea and others across the Indo-Pacom theater to integrate these non-kinetic effects, synchronize them in a way that we have never been able to before, and then properly synchronize them into the joint force maneuver so that we’re providing greater battlespace awareness, we’re providing greater survivability and significantly improved targeting and lethality for the integrated force,” he added.

Clapperton, in an interview with DefenseScoop, stressed that what these teams can provide, and what the Navy is looking for, is more than just cyber tools.

“I think initially, everyone got too focused on that a non-kinetic team meant that we were going to do cyber specifically from a ship,” he said. “I’m not saying we’re not going to do that. When we talk about non-kinetic effects teams right now, cyber specifically from a ship, okay, that’s one thing, but there’s a dozen things.”

Those teams could include a mix of space, electronic warfare, and offensive and defensive cyber capabilities that can be deployed from a ship, airborne assets, fixed locations or expeditionary.

“The effects teams, I think you’re going to start seeing them be present in both deployable and expeditionary sites as well as traditional sites. You’re going to start to see more synchronization of the space, cyber and EW capabilities coming together,” Clapperton said.

This could take a variety of different directions. For example, it could be small watch teams of two to five sailors at a headquarters element operating under the authorities of Fleet Cyber Command, or a detachment of 30 to 50 sailors at an expeditionary location.

The Navy has been on a path in recent years to develop its own organic cyber forces and integrate them with additional non-kinetic capabilities.

In 2019, upon becoming the top officer in the Navy, now retired Adm. Micheal Gilday released a fragmentary operations order to the force directing, among many things, the creation of small tactical cyber teams for fleet commanders by 2020.

Last year, officials announced the intent to create fleet non-kinetic effects teams to augment afloat forces with information warfare capabilities.

U.S. Cyber Command owns the offensive cyber capabilities within the Department of Defense, and the services conduct offensive cyber ops through Cybercom and the cyber mission forces that each service provides to the command. Each of the services, in one way or another, has been developing forces and capabilities to deliver tactically focused, on-the-ground cyber and electronic warfare effects, known as radio frequency-enabled cyber.

Clapperton said some of the capabilities on the higher end could be similar to the combat mission teams (CMT) that the services provide to Cybercom — teams that conduct cyber operations on behalf of combatant commands, mostly in the offensive realm.

“Some of them might be more EW focused. Some of them might be more space focused. Then some of them might be EW focused that are not CMT trained, but might work very closely with a CMT mission element,” he said. “Maybe the CMT mission element is deployable with them, maybe they’re back at a traditional site. There’s 100 different ways to mix that combination together.”

As the Navy builds out these forces, Clapperton said it needs an enabling infrastructure between them and his headquarters, given he owns the authorities within the service.

“I don’t want a three-star headquarters trying to command and control, say, an O4 [detachment] across the globe. I need an O5, O6 command structure that enables and guides in between,” he said, referring to lieutenant commander, commander and captain levels in the Navy. “We’ll be following that as we work with [Naval Information Forces] and the Navy of exactly how we want to do the command structure that’s going to go in between it.”

That command-and-control and authority must flow back through Clapperton’s command, given the sensitive nature of many of these digital operations.

While there are some local or proximal effects and operations that cyber can perform, most of them occur beyond traditional geographic boundaries and must be carefully synchronized.

“The majority of those things tend to have effect in a much broader construct, across a significant piece of the [area of responsibility] or a joint operation area,” he said. “If given that that’s the case, you have to be very careful about letting a very small, hyper-focused tactical unit drive that kind of stuff. Because while it might seem like a great idea for them, well in the broader scape, hey, that wasn’t the right time to do it and had you synchronized that with other things and done it a little bit later, a little bit sooner, in a different way, it would have been more impactful. That’s why we get a little worried about trying to drive that down too far.”

Integration of space

While 10^th Fleet had been the Navy’s space entity for years, this past January it officially also became Navy Space, the service’s component for U.S. Space Command. Increasingly, space-based capabilities are falling into the fold of information warfare within the Defense Department. The Marine Corps has also made its cyber component its space component as well.

This approach from the Department of the Navy allows unique insights and integration of all these non-kinetic capabilities.

“From our perspective, bringing that space piece in with cyber — and I think MARFOR sees it in the same way, so in the naval perspective — that yes, it has forced us to think in a very integrated way. Hey, I don’t want to just look at a cyber aspect, I don’t want to just look at an EW or a space or in an information ops aspect. We have authorities across all of them,” Clapperton said. “Putting them all together has really forced us to do that and it sort of empowered us to do it in different ways.”

As Fleet Cyber is building out its space portion and bringing on space personnel — for which the office of the chief of naval operations approved missions, functions and tasks that are driving the manpower — it is seeking to build integrated firing elements to help operational organizations understand and integrate non-kinetic capabilities.

“These integrated firing elements would then be pushed forward to Echelon II and III headquarters and work with that staff,” Clapperton said, which could include a numbered fleet or even a combatant command staff. “The integrated firing element, that’s more of the operational planning and joint fires integration element. They should be in the planning of the O-Plan, they should be in the [concept of operations] development, the CON employment development and then no kidding, actual operationalization of it, but that’s at the staff level.”

The post Navy building out non-kinetic effects teams appeared first on DefenseScoop.

A revised version of Joint Publication 3-12 Cyberspace Operations — published in December 2022 and while unclassified, is only available to those with DoD common access cards, according to a Joint Staff spokesperson — officially provides a definition for “expeditionary cyberspace operations,” which are “[c]yberspace operations that require the deployment of cyberspace forces within the physical domains.”

DefenseScoop has seen a copy of the updated publication.

The last version was published in 2018 and was publicly available. The Joint Staff spokesman noted that five years has been the norm for updates.

The definition, recognition and discussion of such operations are indicative of not only the maturity of cyberspace and associated operations, but the need for more tactical capabilities to get at targets that the current cyber force might not be able to access.

U.S. Cyber Command owns the offensive cyber capabilities within DOD, and the services conduct offensive cyber ops through Cybercom and the cyber mission forces that each service provides to the command. Authorities to launch cyber effects have traditionally been held at the highest levels of government. In recent years, those authorities have been streamlined and delegated. However, most cyber operations are still conducted from remote locations by the cyber mission force (CMF) and primarily focused on IP-based networks.

Many of the services have begun investing in capabilities and forces for their own offensive cyber, however, that is mostly in the blended electronic warfare or radio frequency-enabled sphere at the tactical level.

The updated doctrine recognizes that these capabilities, which will still have to be coordinated centrally, could provide access to targets that remote operators might not be able to get for a variety of reasons.

“Developing access to targets in or through cyberspace follows a process that can often take significant time. In some cases, remote access is not possible or preferable, and close proximity may be required, using expeditionary [cyber operations],” the joint publication states. “Such operations are key to addressing the challenge of closed networks and other systems that are virtually isolated. Expeditionary CO are often more regionally and tactically focused and can include units of the CMF or special operations forces … If direct access to the target is unavailable or undesired, sometimes a similar or partial effect can be created by indirect access using a related target that has higher-order effects on the desired target.”

It also notes that these effects and operations should be coordinated with the intelligence community to deconflict intelligence gain/loss.

Moreover, the updated doctrine recognizes the complexity of cyberspace and how in-demand cyber capabilities might be. Thus, global cyber support might need to “reach-forward” to support multiple combatant commands simultaneously.

“Allowing them to support [combatant commands] in this way permits faster adaptation to rapidly changing needs and allows threats that initially manifest only in one [area of responsibility] to be mitigated globally in near real time. Likewise, while synchronizing CO missions related to achieving [combatant commander] objectives, some cyberspace capabilities that support this activity may need to be forward-deployed; used in multiple AORs simultaneously; or, for speed in time-critical situations, made available via reachback,” it states. “This might involve augmentation or deployment of cyberspace capabilities to forces already forward or require expeditionary CO by deployment of a fully equipped team of personnel and capabilities.”

When it comes to internalizing the new doctrine, the Air Force sees this as additional access points for operations.

“How do we leverage folks that are and forces that are at the tactical edge for access? That’s primarily how I think about the expeditionary capabilities we have … is empowering or enabling the effect they’re trying to create or using their access or position physically, to help enable some of our effects,” Lt. Gen. Kevin Kennedy, commander of 16^th Air Force/Air Forces Cyber, told DefenseScoop at the AFCEA TechNet Cyber conference.

He noted that these access-enabling capabilities could be across the services, but primarily from an Air Force perspective, “I’m looking at looking within the Air Force, from aerial platforms down to ground-based airmen, as well about how we would do that,” he said.

Officials have described how the services are seeking to build their own forces separate from Cybercom.

“There was a lot of language that came out the [National Defense Authorization Act] that talked about force design in general. All the services to one degree or another are really — I’m not going to say rethinking — but evaluating what their contribution to the joint force is, as well as what their own … service-retained cyber teams are,” Chris Cleary, principal cyber advisor for the Department of Navy, told DefenseScoop at the AFCEA conference.

Last year’s NDAA directed the Pentagon to develop a strategy for converged cyber and electronic warfare conducted by deployed military and intelligence assets, specifically for service-retained assets.

As electronic warfare and cyber capabilities are expected to be a big part of the battlefield in 2030 — a key waypoint the Army has been building toward — it recognizes those capabilities can’t be held from remote sanctuary, Maj. Gen. Paul Stanton, commander of the Army Cyber Center of Excellence, told DefenseScoop in an interview on the sidelines of the AFCEA conference.

In fact, the Army’s principal cyber adviser has tasked the Cyber Center of Excellence with clarifying certain authorities and capabilities.

“How do you execute electronic attack to achieve effects? How do you differentiate a cyber-delivered capability that benefits from proximity based on owning the land, owning the ground?Because that’s what the Army does. The principal cyber advisor, Dr. [Michael] Sulmeyer is tasking me with conducting a study to clearly define and delineate where those lines are,” Stanton said. “This study is going to help us be able to clearly define that. I expect to be tasked to kick that off here in the very near future with about 90 days to complete.”

When it comes to service-retained forces and capabilities, the Army has built the 11^th Cyber Battalion, formerly the 915^th Cyber Warfare Battalion, which provides tactical, on-the-ground cyber operations — mostly through radio-frequency effects — electronic warfare and information ops. The unit will help plan tactical operations for commanders and conduct missions in coordination with deployed forces. It consists of several expeditionary cyber and electromagnetic activities (CEMA) teams that are scalable and will maneuver with units and conduct operations on the ground for commanders.

The Navy, meanwhile, is building what it’s calling non-kinetic effects teams, which will augment afloat forces with critical information warfare capabilities. Cleary has previously noted that the service is still working through what cyber ops at sea will look like.

“As we continue to professionalize this, [information warfare commanders within carrier strike groups] will become more and more important as it fully combines all aspects of the information warfare space, the electromagnetic spectrum, command and control of networks, eventually potentially offensive cyber being delivered from sea, information operations campaigns,” Cleary said.

“That job will mature over time, and then the trick is to get the Navy and the Marine Corps to work together because we are back to our roots of being an expeditionary force. Even the Marines through [Commandant] Gen. [David] Berger’s new force design is really about getting the Marines back to being what the Marines were designed to be, which is an expeditionary fighting force that goes to sea with the Navy. We work together to achieve our objectives as a team, and we’re getting back to our blocking [and] tackling them.”

For the Marine Corps’ part, officials have been building Marine Expeditionary Force Information Groups (MIGs), which were created in 2017 and support each MEF within the Corps, integrate electronic warfare with intelligence, communications, military information support operations, space, cyber and communication strategy — all to provide MEF commanders with an information advantage.

The service has also recently established Marine Corps Information Command (MCIC), which was designed to more tightly link the service’s information forces — including cyber, intelligence and space — in theater with the broader joint force across the globe.

Mission elements the Marines have created and sent forward with Marine expeditionary units are “right in line with [Joint Publication] 3-12,” Maj. Gen. Joseph Matos, deputy commander of Marine Corps Forces Cyberspace Command, told DefenseScoop at the AFCEA conference.

“How do we take what we do at the fort, or back at Fort Meade [where Cybercom is headquartered], and be able to extend that out to the services? That’s what we’re in the process of doing right now … We started about two years ago doing that. That capability is starting to mature pretty well,” he said. “It’s to extend Cyber Command out to those forward units.”

Matos said the recently created MCIC will act as the integrator for a lot of these capabilities throughout the force, acting as a bridge of sorts.

The organization will help tactical forces understand the authorities and capabilities that cyber can provide to help them conduct their missions.

“You kind of hit a glass ceiling of the capability [of] the lower elements being able to reach out and do cyberspace operations,” Matos said of the process prior to establishing that entity. “We’re able to say, OK, here’s a team, trained, capable,’ understand the capabilities that we can bring, give them to the deployed forces to say, ‘OK, you want to do cyber operations, here’s how we can help you do that.’ We know who to talk to, the authorities and so on so forth, and we can do that. I think it’s right in line with what the [Joint Publication] 3-12 is trying to do.”

That command essentially acts as the glue between the high-end cyber forces and the tactical elements, bridging the gap between Cybercom forces and the deployed forces.

“The genesis of the Marine Corps Information Command to tie all these elements together is to address that concern, is to be that integration point between the forces below the tactical edge who have these requirements to operate in a rapidly changing environment. But also tie that to the Marine Corps Information Command knows who to talk to at Cyber Command, or at NSA, or at Space Command. To be able to be that touchpoint between the two organizations so you don’t have to have an infantry battalion going all the way to” a combatant command, Matos said during a presentation at the AFCEA conference.

“I think as we operate in this rapidly changing cyberspace world, that Marine Corps Information Command’s going to be a tremendous benefit to the [Marine Air Ground Task Force], but also to the joint world and the intelligence and cyber world,” he added.

The post New DOD doctrine officially outlines and defines ‘expeditionary cyberspace operations’ appeared first on DefenseScoop.

The term non-kinetic effects, in U.S. military parlance, generally refers to digital capabilities or tools that don’t fall under the traditional weapons portfolio of physical objects. Today, much of the Navy’s info-warfare capabilities — which include cyber, signals intelligence, information operations and spectrum operations — are employed ashore. However, officials have noted that the service has been grappling with how to integrate these capabilities — especially cyber — with its forces deployed at sea.

“I think in the maritime, we are still maturing and developing how we might integrate cyber capability,” Vice Adm. Kelly Aeschbach, commander of Naval Information Forces, said this week at the annual WEST conference in San Diego.

Chris Cleary, the Navy’s principal cyber advisor, has also acknowledged the need to look at how the service does cyber for the afloat force.

“The Navy is still working through what does cyber at sea look like,” he said last year. “It’s not that the Navy’s not doing these things. It’s just that we are all struggling with what does cyber really mean to our respective service. The Navy is now working through what cyber at sea — a little more specific to Navy missions — really looks like.”

U.S. Cyber Command owns the offensive cyber capabilities within the Department of Defense, and the services conduct offensive cyber ops through Cybercom and the cyber mission forces that each service provides to the command. Some of the services have begun investing in capabilities and forces for their own offensive cyber, however, that is mostly in the blended electronic warfare or radio frequency-enabled sphere.

The Navy has taken big steps to integrate the depth and breadth of broader information warfare capabilities for the fleet, but it’s now looking at a new teaming concept.

“We have a lot of discussion going on right now on what we call ‘fleet non-kinetic effects teams,’ where we’re evaluating what we do from an information warfare perspective afloat,” Aeschbach said. “We are looking at investing in more capacity for EW, for cyber, for IO, with an anticipation of some of the capabilities — like directed energy — that we talked about, and what we might also need to do not just on the net, but at the net and the unique access we bring from the maritime [domain]. I think we’re progressing in that area. We’ve got a study ongoing this year looking at that capability and the integration.”

Other officials hesitated to call these teams purely “service retained” assets, on par with what the other services are doing.

“I don’t know that it would be service retained, and I don’t know that it has to be service retained,” Vice Adm. Craig Clapperton, commander of 10^th Fleet/Fleet Cyber Command, told DefenseScoop on the sidelines of the conference.

Given all the hats he wears — Fleet Cyber, Joint Force Headquarters-Cyber Fleet Cyber, which conducts offensive cyber operations on behalf of Cybercom for certain assigned combatant commands, Navy Space Command and the Navy Cyber Warfare Development Group, which provides technical research and development to create, test and deliver cyber and electronic warfare capabilities — he can be the coalescence of all those capabilities.

“If they work for me … they could be service retained because I have a lot of those under my service hat, but they don’t have to be service retained and I can use them under my joint capabilities,” he said.

On the cyber front, Aeschbach noted that in the past there have been challenges with authorities holding up certain operations and thus, the service hasn’t put a lot of energy to invest in capabilities they might not have authority to execute afloat.

For a long time, authority to conduct cyber ops was held at the presidential level and it was very onerous to get approval for an operation. As cyber has matured, those authorities have been improved and some have developed more creative ways to conduct operations such as cyber enabled radio-frequency operations.

“I think that’s maturing also in that environment, that opportunity is changing,” Aeschbach said regarding cyber authorities. “Frankly, we deliver world-class, cyber-capable individuals and we are looking hard at how do we ensure we capture that both in our tactical units and at the operational level in our [maritime operations centers].”

Clapperton said the non-kinetic effects teams and concepts are still being built, largely because he is still awaiting official Senate confirmation to be the head of Navy Space, which the service formalized in January after years of designating the commander of Fleet Cyber as the service’s space component.

These teams are “not only the teams that are going to be potentially in my MOCs, potentially at the tactical edge, but also the planners that are in my headquarters and that would move forward in Indo-Pacom, [Pacific] Fleet, U.S. Forces Korea, wherever they need to,” Clapperton said at the conference. “What I sort of envisioned is the perfect scenario is it’s rotational. I have a group back at my headquarters that are getting refreshed and got up to all the latest and greatest. Then I have groups forward that are helping to integrate this on a daily basis with those combatant commanders. That’s in the planning and the operational level.”

Personnel need to “understand the game” and know how to carry out a variety of activities, when needed, he noted.

“That interactive operator needs to be there,” he said, “but we’re going to need to have teams, non-kinetic teams, that know how to do things on net, know how to do things off net, how to do things in the RF spectrum, how to do things in the space spectrum, EW, and bring all those capabilities to bear together in a synchronized fashion.”

“If you’re relying on a specific access path to deliver an effect, but the EW effect or the space effect takes that path out, oops,” he said. “The bad guys don’t need help. We can’t fratricide our own efforts. It’s really important that those teams [that are] forward understand the game as well and that they operate in a synchronized fashion. That’s how I’m thinking about it. That’s [what] we’re trying to work for.”

This is going to take a bit more resourcing to get together, he said, in terms of capabilities and tools.

He added that they have some cyber teams with these capabilities that can move forward and work in the Joint Mission Operations Center.

“As far as the actual full integration with the space and cyber and EW that I talked about and I sort of envisioned, we’re not there yet,” he said.  

Clapperton stressed that the combined power of all these non-kinetic capabilities is greater than the sum of their parts. Alone, they are not as effective.

“No cyber effect on its own is enough,” he said. “It must be synchronized and aligned with space effects. It must be synchronized and aligned with EW effects, information effects. Then you layer that on top … [of] deception and dynamic force maneuvering and decoys, and you create an incredibly complicated environment where we own the electromagnetic spectrum, where we are degrading the adversary’s picture while maintaining ours.”

Ultimately, it’s the combination of kinetic effects and non-kinetic effects that are a winning recipe, in his view.

“Non-kinetics are integrated with the kinetics, and that’s how you win fights in the modern world,” Clapperton said.

The post Navy aiming to better integrate cyber, info-warfare capabilities with ‘non-kinetic effects teams’ at sea appeared first on DefenseScoop.