Diverging command and control profiles?

According to speeches and remarks by senior military chiefs around the West, command and control sits near the top of priorities for modernisation; budget allocations favour anything with digital, C2, AI, LLM or data in their title. Observing contemporary conflicts and the varied challenges protagonists are facing, it seems peculiar that Western militaries place C2 so high up their respective lists. Weapons stocks, ammunition, resupply tools, individual and team training, IAMD systems, technology integration, autonomy, spectrum management, platform recapitalisation, industrial production, recruitment and retention all have greater need and urgency. Yet C2 still manages to sit near the top of prioritised lists for resources. In the United States, spending on C2 across the branches lies somewhere between $13.3 billion and $18.3 billion annually. By 2031, global spending on C2 is expected to reach $54.3 billion.

Driving these figures are two factors: first is the hyperbole about what improved C2 can achieve (faster decisions, decisive results, and shorter wars); C2 has become the totem for the way the US envisages fighting through Multi Domain Operations (MDO). To make that doctrine complete a centralised command system is a necessity: If that is not present then coherence, co-ordination, synchronisation, and targeting all fail – and so too does the military campaign plan that depends on it. Second is the belief that everything and anything in the military produces efficiencies when it is connected to everything else. There is merit in both these arguments and there is also evidence to support these presumptions. Yet that evidence is not overwhelming. Both presumptions work against certain adversaries but not against others. Ways of war are successful when they adhere to the context and the specifics of the war and the adversary; Generic strategies have less than mediocre success rates – hence why many wars tend to be both indecisive, prolonged, and adaptive. The origins of MDO lay in postulations about a potential US fight against Russia (mid 2010s timeframe), but that same doctrine has been transplanted as the chosen doctrine for the potential fight against China nearer to 2030. In gearing up for the PLA as their primary threat vector, the US military may be becoming less successful at fighting adversaries that do not adhere to the way of war MDO was created for. In Iran and in Yemen, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, Western militaries followed their doctrines of decapitation, manoeuvre, and sought decisive battles through uber connected targeting and C2 systems. Success was illusive.

This is not to say that the US is certainly wrong in its approach to war: military leaders may be entirely correct in determining that C2 and MDO are central to success in a conflict with the PLA. Yet neither of those approaches has suited Ukraine in attempting to evict Russian forces from their illegal invasion (twice). As in 2011, when NATO forces ‘helped’ the Ukrainian military modernise for COIN and CT operations (and in doing so destroy their conventional forces, stockpiles, and deterrence posture), now NATO commanders advise their counterparts in Kyiv to ‘be more manoeuvrist’, ‘use more data’, ‘centralise command decision-making’, or ‘be faster’. These hallmarks of an MDO-style approach to war don’t seem to work against the Russian operating system.

The hard-won lessons from Ukraine are that C2—even with an excellent system underpinning military and national security operations—breaks down and becomes fragmented in combat. The EM spectrum does not allow for seamless and perfect connectivity. Databases are corrupt even when LLMs tell you they are not. Agentic AI cannot replace human agency in targeting. Faster decision-making does not inherently make such decisions better (nor do they become decisive). Transparency on the battlefield is not a forgone conclusion of more networked inputs. Autonomous systems are not a single, ubiquitous answer to all combat scenarios. But interoperability has become vitally important on this battlefield.

The DELTA C2 system in Ukraine is built on the hard-won lessons of four years of war. There are a variety of applications hosted on that medium, many required and developed by operators themselves. And it works (mostly). Primarily this is because interoperability sits as the core facet with the operating system. Yet it is also true to say that many of DELTA’s applications have been dropped too. It is not a fixed architecture but a dynamic one. Nor is it perfect and the Ukrainians have been at pains to pull in the best from elsewhere to make it work for them and this specific war.

In listening to leaders in Ukraine (as opposed to talking at them and calling it advice), one does not hear demands for C2 fixes. Their concerns focus more on platforms (both small and large); on medical and logistics support; and increasingly for the raw materials that can sustain their war effort. C2 is not their top military issue. They (like most Western states) know how to build and train commanders – even mediocre one.  Moreover, they understand that Joint Commanders have had significant resources poured into efforts to give them better situational awareness at the theatre level, but that this has done little for those at the front, nor has it changed the course of the war.

Independent market analysis believes that a huge amount of money will be spent on C2 in Western militaries. There is a sharp difference between what the US military plans to spend it on and the rest of the world. Most predictions agree that the US will continue centralising information and ‘decision support systems’ for higher commands; the expectation globally is that other states will focus on improving C2 access for tactical commanders and below. It will be an interesting divergence, but in both cases—as in Ukraine—interoperability will need to remain at the centre.

Photo by Marek Studzinski on Unsplash