Darpa Pushes ‘Mosaic Warfare’ Concept | Hacker News Reader

Darpa Pushes ‘Mosaic Warfare’ Concept

nationaldefensemagazine.org

59 pointssahin44 comments

DARPA being DARPA, they came up with a buzzword to sell it to the brass and to Congress. Read into the actual content, and it's the related ideas that a) military communications equipment should interoperate better than it does now, and b) that command and control mechanisms should be better optimized for combined-arms (and cross-branch) warfare.

Have they provided an API for the meat eating robots?

Lord, "meat eating robots" has to be the most dystopian phrase I've ever heard.

EATR: Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot - https://robotictechnologyinc.com/images/upload/file/Presenta...

Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Phase II Project DARPA Contract W31P4Q-08-C-0292

To be fair, those robots are omnivores. In practice they'd likely be mostly-vegetarian.

'Likely be mostly' is not that reassuring.

Given that fear is a weapon, I don't trust people on a battlefield to not use meat eating robots for psychological effect, if they happen to have them around. If it is possible for people to be fed into the meat eating robot, then they will be.

It is all great till you face an opponent with high end tech capability. The more communications you use the more connected you are the more things to jam, intercept and misdirect. This seems to be the Russian approach.

We will see the preview of the future whenever Israel decides to face their new systems in Syria. No GPS, jamming up the vazoo etc. US is already playing with Russians there to a degree. I think the quote was: "The most hostile EW environment in the world"

They're already taking that into account.

> Retired Navy Adm. Scott Swift, former U.S. Pacific Fleet commander, said at the conference that in future conflict, communications will be degraded. “Windows of communication will open and close rapidly in times that are not under the control of the commander,” he said. That is why the autonomy and the unmanned piece of mosaic warfare is important. Systems must be able to act independently when they are cut off from higher headquarters, he said.

Coming soon to a battlefield near you: drones equipped with AI that can distinguish friends from enemies 85% of the time, combatants from civilians 61% of the time, and capable of firing at will when the satellite link is down.

Then why the hell did we build the entire next generation around the F35? It's like we went all in on production to build carriers but our base is already full of zerglings.

Aren't parts of the F35 built in all congressional districts? That provides the major motivation for anything related to building more of them.

I've always hear this applied to the B-52 but the F35 may be similarly dispersed.

Not quite, at least not according to Lockheed's propaganda page. No "economic impact" listed in Hawaii, Nebraska, Wyoming or Alaska.

https://www.f35.com/about/economic-impact-map

Edit: this source says ~350 districts build components for the F-35. https://www.star-telegram.com/news/politics-government/artic...

My recollection was in error. A little searching confirms your information.

Because every weapons program is also a jobs program .

Why not just create a jobs program directly, rather than inefficiently and with many middleman taking their cut?!

Not palatable to 20th century American cultural mistrust of government aid.

See also the TSA?

how else would well connected people become rich?

Because it also ensures that your weapon systems are made in this country .

Because decades of propaganda that it’s socialism if the owners of capital don’t get a cut in the middle

It's a taxpayer subsidy to the military-industrial complex. That some of that money ends up in the pockets of workers is a sad reality that cannot yet be avoided, but it's hardly "the reason".

That would imply a level of care that is completely incompatible with a lot of things. Take the use of low-IQ troops in Vietnam:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_J2VwFDV4-g

But the defense budget is so people can "put food on their family"? It doesn't even begin to add up.

Before we get around to building half the planned F35s, they'll cancel the program and move on to the next shiny new program. That's how every big defense project works.

Here's how it works. You start out with a giant estimate, for 3,000 planes. That giant estimate is mostly caused by the lifetime cost of maintaining 3k planes. As the years roll by, you start chopping production numbers off, while trying to get some cost inflation per unit somewhere. You end up spending 1/3 less, for 1/2 the planes in the end. 20 years after the first F35 flight, you've moved on to the next big thing. Conveniently justified by an inevitable, possibly dramatic, change in what the military needs.

If "mosaic warfare" actually becomes a thing then the F-35 is actually pretty well suited to participate in it. At least better than legacy platforms which are increasingly difficult to upgrade.

A tile in a mosaic is one small part of a bigger picture. “If you lose one tile, not a big deal,” he said. In this metaphor, a tile equals an individual weapon.

So like microservices, but for killing people.

Exactly my thoughts :)

Also: the F22 datalinks are incompatible and can not easily interoperate with the F35 ones. That problem sound familiar too.

At first I expected the subtext to be "monocultures are risky", but now it seems more like "good munitions but weak management".

Imagine if we spent as much money researching how to combat entropy as we do researching how to induce it.

Figuring out "innovative ways to overwhelm adversaries", "create multiple dilemmas" and "get inside and disrupt its leaders’ decision-making processes" sounds like a re-discovery of maskirovka and reflexive control.

So, someone at the DoD re-discovered the Combined Arms doctrine?

Combined Action/Arms Groups are stupid effective. Armor working with Infantry and Cavalry (light armor) that also have close air-support is a thing to behold.

The thing is, the US military re-tools its organization every 10 to 20 years or so, looking ahead at the conflicts to come. In the late 80s that re-tooling began and the result was methodologies that came to fruition in Iraq and Afghanistan. We take notes from past examples (see Russian occupation of the latter), examine the fight we see coming (insurgent warfare in WWII), and rebuild doctrine to fit.

The special operations groups were part of the process. While we were creating our own future enemies in the 60s and 70s (mujahideen turned into Al-Qaeda and others) we were also getting a first hand look at guerrilla warfare and how ineffective symmetric war concepts were at facing a guerrilla opponent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_warfare

[edit]grammar![/edit]

I don't know. The Marine Corps seemed to figure a lot of that out in its Small Wars Manual from the 1940's. Here is the FMFRP 12-15.

https://www.marines.mil/Portals/59/Publications/FMFRP%2012-1...

In WWII they leaned on understanding from British occupations across the world. Insurgents were a big issue for the British, and they had started to sort out how to fight a guerrilla war as the empire was collapsing.

I wish I could remember the book I read. It details things like how the one person you had to worry about at a security checkpoint was the person with all their papers in order... I want to say it was Western Africa, or a similar holding that the book centered around.

[edit] All that to say I agree with you. A self-sufficient force seems to be, by nature, multi-talented. [/edit]

[edit2] And the book, which is quite good, is "Small Wars" by a Colonel Callwell. https://www.amazon.com/Small-Wars-Their-Principles-Practice/... [/edit2]

> In WWII they leaned on understanding from British occupations across the world.

Nah. The Corps has had plenty of opportunity to acquire the experience organically:

"During about 85 of the last 100 years, the Marine Corps has been engaged in small wars in different parts of the world." --Small Wars Manual (1940 Edition)

Running through the list of the Corps' most revered heroes... I can't think of a single one that didn't face an enemy that employed guerilla warfare tactics. Chesty Puller started out fighting an insurgency in Haiti and then Nicaragua. Before that SgtMaj Daly fought in the Boxer Rebellion. Smedley Butler fought Cuban insurgents in the Spanish–American War (later writing "War Is a Racket"). Archibald Henderson fought in the Seminole Wars...

The Corps has more experience with asymmetric warfare than the stereotypical military campaign. It also has a very long institutional memory where best practices are developed and passed down - I don't remember ever hearing somebody cite British colonialism during a period of instruction, we had our own colonialism to refer back to: the banana wars.

Ooh! Lots of reading for me to do. Thank you!

Except for in this case all vehicles, aircraft, and equipment can communicate with each other. For an adversary that would make it pretty convenient to exploit. One ransomware attack and the battle is finished.

I'm just joking...sort of. It's usually the things that we didn't think of that bite us in the butt.

So, the pilot episode of the Battlestar Galactica reboot?

Given the random hodge-podge of software and firmware that modern military tech runs on, you're not going to see much success in building a magic one-size-fits-all virus that will spread across the entire system.

Rebranded

I always thought of it more like conjoined triangles

This actually feels similar to Russia's hybrid warfare doctrine, albeit without some of the more sinister political manipulation parts. But there is a fair amount of influence here, I think.

Except not at all - it's more about cooperation between different branches of the military (a problem America has more severely than most other countries) than about combining "civilian" and military tactics a la Russia.

Not to be confused with the Mosaic browser.

"More deadlier"...?

So, taco bell programming with coca cola recipes.

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