The so-called cyber-special operations forces-space triad or “irregular triad,” is a partnership between the three disciplines to deliver capabilities and outcomes greater than the sum of its parts, leveraging the unique access and authorities of each contributor. While officials explained this fusion of capabilities came about in tabletop exercises years ago, the Army began putting it into practice with its relevant components and it’s now making its way to the joint four-star combatant commands.

The strategic environment for the U.S. military is significantly more complex now than it has been in years past, requiring more and different options to deter adversary activity around the globe.

“Some of our adversaries are demonstrating a degree of skill and effectiveness in their employment of irregular warfare that the United States has difficulty matching and the United States has difficulty dealing with,” Mike Nagata, corporate strategic advisor at CACI and a retired three-star general with decades of special operations experience, said Thursday during a panel at the Special Operations Symposium hosted by NDIA. “Many of our competitors and many of our adversaries are adopting modern, powerful digital technologies faster than the United States is. They are not hesitating to use it.”

Experts explained that America’s adversaries have sought to use unconventional, irregular and hybrid tactics as a means of combating the conventional strength of U.S. forces. Much of this is taking place below the threshold of armed conflict.

“Our adversaries, particularly the Chinese but really all of them, are pursuing irregular strategies … It’s a combination of political warfare, economic warfare and irregular warfare. They are pursuing strategies to achieve objectives without having to go to conventional conflict,” said Ken Tovo, president and CEO of DOL Enterprises and a retired three-star general. “Our challenge is, are we ready to play on that field? While we have talked about irregular warfare, and especially in this community for many years, the reality is there’s a lot of things that have actually inhibited our execution of effective irregular warfare strategies around the world to achieve our objectives.”

Current officials explained that the modern triad provides an existing operational concept that is operating currently and can act as a deterrent capability.

“The irregular triad that we’re talking about here is an operational concept,” said Lt. Gen. Richard Angle, commander of Allied Special Operations Forces Command at NATO and Special Operations Command Europe. “It brings together multi-domain capabilities. This concept can, in fact, enable deterrence, because that’s what we’re talking about.”

Officials explained that the three disciplines aren’t as siloed as they may seem, noting inherent integration currently exists.

For example, the Marine Corps and Navy cyber service components to U.S. Cyber Command are also their service components to Space Command. Additionally, Marine Corps Forces Cyberspace Command serves as the coordinating authority for cyber for U.S. Special Operations Command under Cybercom’s Joint Force Headquarters-Cyber enterprise. Similarly, 16th Air Force/Air Forces Cyber, a service cyber component to Cybercom, is the coordinating authority for cyber for U.S. Space Command under its Joint Force Headquarters-Cyber.

“The area that I’ve been most proud of is the fact that we have aggressively taken this from a conceptual discussion to one where we’re doing operational activities together and doing it routinely and how we are able to come together to bring our respective strengths,” Gen. Timothy Haugh, commander of Cybercom, said. “Overall, where we’ve come together has been driven by we can produce better outcomes together in those situations, particularly on really hard problems, and the fact that the initial investments we’ve made to do that have produced outcomes just reinforces the need for us to be able to collaborate in our planning and also in how we approach problems together. Because it gives different options to the secretary than we would have been able to do independently.”

Angle, who also has cyber experience having previously served as deputy commanding general for operations at Army Cyber Command, explained that through deterrence by denial, the triad can make it difficult for adversaries to achieve objectives below the threshold of war.

But, he said, it has to be employed more often if it is to be successful in the future for deterrence, or if deterrence should fail, for managing escalation and crises.

“You need to employ this capability now if you want options later. You can employ it now at low cost, at fairly low risk with potentially high payoffs. By doing so, you can actually lower the risk later because you’re now holding critical adversary capabilities at risk,” Angle said. “The conversation we have to have is here’s also the risk of not taking action. Because if you don’t employ these capabilities, you won’t hold that critical adversary capability at risk when the time comes. We are doing a lot of things inside of this triad, but we have to find a way to do more. We have to find a way to get to the point where we’re doing things and the adversary is reacting to what we’re doing and we’re not reacting to what they’re doing.”

For Haugh, while there have been positive discussions among the relevant stakeholders and good operational applications, he’d like to improve upon what opportunities exist for tighter linkage.

“Today, we have started to put the right pieces in place. Much of what we could also talk about is, when we miss opportunities, why do we miss them? In many of those cases, it’s about the kit that’s available to us at that moment and are we fully using the opportunity for us to be innovative from a technical solution standpoint that fits the timeline of the opportunity of placement and access and the ability to come together around a specific problem,” he said. “I think there’s some things we could talk about what we’re each doing in that area where we could be also more purposeful to be able to fully leverage our respective authorities and how we innovate and how we acquire.”

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“I actually push back on the notion that that [U.S. Special Operations Command] should be the lead for irregular warfare. I think we need the rest of the department to embrace it as well,” Chris Maier, assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, said at the NDAI SO/LIC Symposium Tuesday.

Maier said that at the most basic level, irregular warfare takes place below the threshold of large-scale armed conflict, or what experts refer to as “the gray zone.” Gray-zone activity has significantly increased in recent years as adversaries have sought to undermine the U.S. and its allies without triggering a robust military response.

What makes irregular warfare so difficult, Maier asserted, is the DOD is focused primarily on major military operations.

“In some of the biorhythms of the department, there’s not a lot of focus on individuals or small units doing asymmetric things — it’s on big formations doing big things,” he said.

“I kind of use the model of counterterrorism a little bit here, where, when we were really focused on counterterrorism as a department, as a nation, yes, SOF was the lead, but SOF wasn’t the only ones doing it. The services were providing tremendous support in the form of enablers, but also operational impacts,” he continued. “I think we need to get to a place where SOCOM may be the intellectual lead [for irregular warfare], may in some cases even be the operational lead, but we’re going to need the rest of the department to embrace this, fund this, enable this. They’re going to have to do a lot of this themselves.”

Top officials at last year’s conference questioned whether there need to be changes to how the DOD conducts irregular warfare and information operations now that the department’s main focus is on great power competition.

Maier believes the DOD is has a lot more work to do when it comes to addressing irregular warfare and asymmetric issues like the gray zone.

“There’s many synonyms for it, which should tell you we don’t even really know in some cases precisely what we’re talking about,” he said.

Moreover, when it comes to information operations, the U.S. has lagged behind others, primarily due to the different risk calculations from senior policy makers on how to use information, according to Maier.

Terrorist organizations don’t use the information space like nation-state actors such as China, Russia and Iran do, Maier said. As a result, there has been varying risk calculations at senior policy levels as to how much the U.S. military should go tit for tat in the information environment.

“How much should the Department of Defense as a core military organization be doing that influence? Some of what we’ve attempted to tighten up over the last couple of years is ensuring that we’re using our information tools towards military objectives. This has given us frankly, a little bit more space then to be able to do things more innovatively from our senior policy makers,” he said.

What sets the Pentagon apart from many of its partners and allies is that the majority of information billets reside within special operations units, making it harder to fill them. This has become especially true given recruitment issues throughout the services, particularly the Army, which had to make cuts to its special operations forces.

“When we talk about Army SOF cuts, it’s not going to be probably news here, but we took some of the unfilled billets off the table, because that made sense to do, not take human beings out and some of those came out of our psyops enterprise because we haven’t been able to fill some of these billets for years,” Maier said, acknowledging these cuts. “If we’re not using these forces in a way that really contributes to our future and our SOF value proposition, we’re probably not going to fill those as much. Then we’re in this situation where we’re not filling them as much, so we’re not able to then project that power in unique and exquisite ways that we need to that. At the end of the day, you’re going to have to be informed by that risk environment we’re in.”

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“What we’re struggling with right now [is] how do we evolve irregular warfare and our understanding thereof for great power competition, for challenging Beijing and Moscow, maybe differently than we were in the global wars on terror over the last couple of years,” Richard Tilley, director of the Office of Irregular Warfare and Competition, whose office is also tasked with force design updates, said during the NDIA SO/LIC Symposium Nov. 18. “We’re in a period of transition where we’re trying to figure out what is irregular warfare in this new era.”

Tilley said that the lessons from the counterinsurgency era are still valuable as the DOD continues to contend with violent extremist organizations and proxy fights will persist into the future, noting that the conflict in Ukraine is providing a “crash course” for a population to resist an invader or occupier.

“We’re going to face the problem that we have in Ukraine probably again and probably several other times over the coming decades. We need to figure out how to play in this information environment, how to influence populations, how to determine what a population’s will to resist is and how to do that,” he said.

Ukraine is also demonstrating that DOD must evolve its understanding of irregular warfare, Tilley said, especially as it applies to understanding a population’s will to resist and succeed.

For instance, the conventional wisdom was that Ukraine would fall very quickly to Russia, he said, noting “we’re trying to figure out why did we get that so wrong,” along with a long recent list of mea culpas. Those include the Iraqis not repelling ISIS from the city of Mosul and the swift defeat of the Afghan army by the Taliban.

“We don’t have a good track record of trying to identify this will to resist in these proxy and surrogate and ally populations,” Tilley said. “But I think what we can hopefully do in the information space is trying to figure out better metrics and better analyses that allow us to understand that better.”

DOD is good at quantitative analysis such as the number of forces or assets, but not at qualitative analysis.

The private sector could be a good place to turn for that given its long history with commercial marketing campaigns.

“You look at marketing, that is qualitative analysis. What makes people drink Coke, what makes people drink Pepsi and how do you market to those individuals? I think the private sector has used the information domain through marketing to the Nth degree because that’s how you make money. That’s how you’re profitable,” he said.

“I think we, as the department and in the national security enterprise, need to be able to pull some of those lessons and try to figure out, how do you quantify and assess within the IC that local population’s will to resist because, quite frankly, proxy warfare is not going anywhere and whether it’s Europe or whether it’s the Pacific, it’s going be back and we need to have a better understanding of how our partners and allies are going to fight, are going to resist because if we keep missing, next time we may not be as fortunate where the Russians weren’t probably as capable as we thought they were and the Ukrainians were a little bit more resilient than we thought we were and they didn’t get overrun,” Tilley added.

Deterrence and ‘active deterrence’

When it comes to developing a future force, Tilley said DOD is looking at creating a joint force that can deter conflict in what officials call the competition phase that exists below the threshold of war. But deterrence and winning are not necessarily synonymous.

“The point is not necessarily to win the war against these adversaries — the point is to deter that war. We have to really think about how are we using the information environment to message and to influence that adversary so they don’t take actions that we don’t want them to do, so we don’t have to get ourselves into it into a war,” he said. “You get through a whole bunch of ways that aren’t warfighting. You do demonstrations, you do exercises, you do reveal and conceal, you do deception. You do all these different things, but we don’t have a good conceptualization of how those things all nest together.”

Nestled beneath one of the DOD’s top pillars of its National Defense Strategy, integrated deterrence, is a new concept being gamed out for the information force: active deterrence.

“As we look at potential near-peer conflict, that phase between competition and conflict right now is called crisis, and that brings into your mind this idea of ‘Oh no, something just happened, what do we do about it?’ We coined a term that is a phase now that we call active deterrence. Now think of this as a military subset of integrated deterrence,” said Thomas Browning, deputy chief technology officer for mission capabilities in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering.  

Behind this concept — which he said is still “mostly in the wargame room right now” — is how DOD can use capabilities such as cyber, electronic warfare, deception, perception management and other information-type capabilities together to change the adversary’s calculus for going to war.

He recognized that active deterrence is a bit of an oxymoron because it’s done after deterrence fails.

“It’s really this idea of how could we put those non-kinetic capabilities together in a way that has a meaningful effect on the adversary, meaningful effect on both their intent and ability to execute conflict,” Browning said.

His office has been conducting a series of exercises called Eloquent Omen that is gaming the concept out.

It is “pulling those threads of how do I take these capabilities and not just prove out that cyber tools could work, not prove that EW could work, but this integration of an information campaign where the cyber is accentuating the EW is accentuating the messaging that I’m trying to bring across,” Browning said. “We’re trying to think through those potential, and I’ll call them plays or capabilities, where we’re taking cyber and EW and making those actual integrated capabilities much in the way you would do with kinetic operations and I don’t think that’s the norm today.”

One key lesson he said they’ve learned from these exercises is that proper and early signaling to adversaries matters.

“A lot of the EW and cyber moves that we made, the adversary didn’t have context for understanding what they were seeing or why they were seeing and it walked us into this understanding that I’ve really got to start messaging early,” Browning said. “I’ve got to start developing understanding in their mind, literally, of how to understand me so as you start developing those non-kinetic tools previous to conflict when you don’t necessarily have the authorities to execute though. There’s the time to actually build that story through messaging and through [information operations] so that as they see the effects, you get the intended response out of the adversary.”

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