THE CASE FOR COTS IN 5TH GENERATION WARFARE

By Aaron Paseur, a retired U.S. Navy SEAL and Jared Febbroriello, an Industry expert in security and government contracting.

The decision to integrate Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) technology into military applications marked a significant shift from traditional bespoke solutions designed exclusively for defense purposes. This paradigm shift was driven by the rapidly accelerating pace of technological change in the commercial sector. This article is not designed to discuss the inherent advantages/disadvantages of COTS – rather it is to provide a perspective from a Military end-user and combat/battlefield viewpoint.

Introduction

Improvements in additive manufacturing and rapid prototyping technologies offer advanced capabilities that even small commercial teams can now leverage to maintain a strategic edge in their product development. These capabilities (if available historically) would have been cost-prohibitive.

If time is the most valuable commodity, then speed is the great equalizer. Inexpensive generative AI, machine learning and other emerging technologies will continue to accelerate development, driven more by the vision and work ethic of the development team than by resource availability.

Yet, with all these advancements, the knowledge gap between commercial design teams and military end-users continues to widen. A good example of the blending of COTS product solution and real-world, combat requirements is General Micro Systems (GMS) fully-featured, wearable Spider Man Pack for real-time “tip of the spear” image and signal-processing (see sidebar for details).

The adoption of COTS products comes with a complex set of challenges for the military end-user. Most COTS products, while cutting-edge and cost-effective are not designed to survive demanding military environments and may cause casualties when signals are detected and intercepted by an adversary.

Operational realities necessitate a comprehensive pre-evaluation and modifications to COTS products prior to fielding, which can negate their utility value or frustrate the purpose of adopting these technologies to a real-world combat environment. This process requires experienced military end-users with broad knowledge of sensitive military initiatives, programs and target applications that have considerable combat experience.

 

In the era of 5th generation warfare, the lines between commercial and military combatants continue to blur. The rapid evolution of radio direction finding technology, drone warfare, loitering munitions, smart artillery, and the increasingly autonomous kill chain have changed warfare forever. The difference between life and death on the battlefield is now determined by an anomalous radio signature, a suspicious data pattern or even simply the wrong SIM card in the wrong phone. These modern tactics first began in 2014 when the Gerasimov Doctrine was applied in Ukraine. However, an overemphasis on technology instead of tactics may be a miscalculation.

While technology and tactics are inextricably linked, history is replete with examples of technologically superior forces being defeated by an underdog. From the British Red Coats and their “Brown Bess” Musket to Eugene Stoner’s development of the M-16 in Vietnam, the lesson seems to be that great technology rarely defeats great tactics.

The first shots of 5th generation warfare were not fired from a gun; they began with advanced cyber tactics used to disrupt Ukrainian communications and infrastructure in February 2014. The world woke up to a new pervasive Universal Threat Environment bolstered by misinformation propagated through hacked information systems. These emerging information warfare tactics sowed confusion and economic pressure without provoking a full-scale, conventional war. Networked sensors, integrated surveillance, and precise targeting systems were used to effect rapid tactical strikes and establish overmatch on the battlefield. OSINT bolstered by poor operational security was leveraged to target the family members of commanding officers, who were then socially engineered to elicit electronic communications that were rapidly traced to GPS coordinates for a precision airstrike on the officer in the field.

Eight years and five trillion dollars of NDAA appropriations later, we continue to believe that all we need to win the day is more money and better technology.

Reassessing the Role of COTS in 5th Generation Warfare

Our armed forces are not exempt from the universal laws of time, speed, and intelligent resource management. Just like every other organism in the known universe, our military will either adapt to these natural laws of technological evolution or perish. Thus, the rapid integration of COTS technologies into military systems is not an eventuality but a tactical certainty.

Intelligent and effective leveraging of COTS is the only way for our modern armed forces to maintain a technological edge with respect to military-grade equipment. As the pace of innovation continues to accelerate, forces that do not capitalize on the latest technological innovations will become extinct. This is a harsh reality that the operations side of the defense community, where the cost of failure is paid for in blood, has already begun to witness first-hand.

A Patriot PAC-3 Missile Segment Enhancement (MSE) sent to theater costs approximately $6,000,000, while a Shahed-136 loitering drone costs approximately $30,000. This economic disparity exemplifies a 5th generation warfare tactic of economic death by 1,000 cuts. The real challenge lies in redefining the long-term strategic vision of military command objectives and a false worldview that the economics of warfare are irrelevant to the mission. This is where the long-term strategic vision of commercial leadership objectives and the development of COTS can play a key role.

The Opportunity for Intelligent Teaming

All technology begins with a concept, and it is the risk-taker who gets to choose which technology concepts they want to support. Someone has to pick winners and losers in this technology race. A winning concept gets funded and potentially developed into viable technology, while everything else remains a concept or disappears into obscurity.

By definition, military commands cannot control the long-term strategic development plan for COTS because this is driven by supply and demand within the commercial market. Why not embrace this rather than fight it? Imagine what the commercial market could do with a trillion dollars of NDAA money. Moreover, if we took only $500 Billion and invested it into promising technology companies, critical industries, and talented development teams, we would probably dominate the commercial and military markets of the world and receive a shareholder dividend.

The 5th Generation Warfare Blended Design Team

The idea that war ends at borders is antiquated. Everywhere, from our world to the quantum world, the cyber world, and beyond our atmosphere, it is all fair game. Whether we recognize it or not, our security, our institutions and our Western values are being tried by fire.

The argument can therefore be made that design teams should include a military or security liaison. The distinction between military and commercial interests is one that our adversaries never had. In communist countries, the party comes first, and everyone, including companies, military commands, and organizations work towards a uniform goal. While we don’t advocate for a similar system, we cannot ignore its existence. Recognizing this mindset requires us to reassess the role of military consulting and military spending in support of COTS development.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/CxqO0zOheDg/

The best way to bridge this gap is to realign the structure for financial incentives among the military and commercial markets. The current military procurement environment for COTS has led to poor market performance. Procurement is replete with gaps in communication, funding, problems involving information security and weak supply chains. We are constantly taking a reactive approach to these issues and our national security suffers. It makes little financial sense for any company intent on remaining solvent to jump through the military procurement hoops before developing products for the commercial market. By providing financial and other incentives in the form of investment capital, access to controlled and sensitive information systems, access to machinery and equipment, and free access to SMEs and consulting teams that can assist with integration and product development, we can create a more conducive environment for COTS development. In the words of Charlie Munger, “Show me the incentives, and I will show you the outcome.” Rather than incentivizing new entrants to these markets, we are currently punishing them by mandating increasingly complex systems of compliance and more hoops to jump through just to bid on contracts. Why would we think these incentives would produce anything other than a mediocre outcome?

If the military wants to pick winners and losers, it needs to share risk and have skin in the game or don’t be surprised when industry deems military interests and security concerns to be irrelevant. All systems and potential vectors of attack must be hardened to ensure success in a Universal
Threat Environment. Securing our supply chain, critical industries, and developing talent for the future is a national security concern. By offering investment capital for growing companies and tying that investment capital to military-trained security professionals, the military can have a seat at the table and secure its own defense industrial base, while providing valuable experience to the next generation of military leaders. Embedded personnel would also foster sensitive information sharing among commercial and military entities, while ensuring that shared information is kept safe.

COTS solutions that are responsive to real-world operational problems will also benefit significantly from SME input during the design, engineering, and fulfillment phases of the product lifecycle. While these gaps exist, we advocate for three functional roles within blended design teams: engineers, military operators (SMEs), and expeditor translators. To facilitate collaboration and support difficult design choices, the expeditor translator can act as a liaison between engineers and SMEs or act as a final arbitrator when tough decisions between competing interests must be made. As technology advances, the opportunity to weaponize or abuse emerging tech will continue to grow. Since these increasingly complex systems will rely on dual-use technologies, the distinction between commercial and military interests will become irrelevant. The way forward is to collectively embrace these new tactics and rapidly adapt to this changing threat landscape.

The X9 Spider Manpack is a “tip of the spear” rugged battery-powered mobile computer that offers office-style computer workstation performance in a small, portable package designed to be worn on the battlefield. The Manpack is mounted into a rugged enclosure that provides intelligent cooling appropriate for manpack-wearable systems. Intended to provide embedded computing at the individual, squad and platoon level, it provides sensor, video and artificial intelligence (AI) processing while on the move in “dis-mounted” formation.

The Manpack ensemble provides hours of battlefield operation for applications such as Blue Force Tracking, tactical/moving maps, JADC2, IVAS, Nett Warrior interoperability, command and control, joint sensor review and display, and any application such as Minotaur that would run on a server or high-performance workstation computer. Plug-in GPGPU technology from NVIDIA adds battlefield AI into the system for target tracking, image enhancement/recognition, gDVE to see through smoke/dust, and audio processing such as live translation. Built with a MOSA-inspired Distributed Computing Architecture, the Manpack uses Intel/Apple’s open standard Thunderbolt 4 technology that enables it to share common COTS/civilian interfaces with all X9 Spider products as well as any Thunderbolt or Ethernet product or system. This provides easy additional capabilities, technology refresh/preplanned product improvement, modifications to meet different mission profiles, and future obsolescence mitigation.

 

BIO Profile

Article has been co-authored by Aaron Paseur, a retired U.S. Navy SEAL and Jared Febbroriello, an Industry expert in security and government contracting. Mr. Paseur has tested numerous systems ranging from underwater propulsion, navigation and other sensitive projects, which utilize COTS or modified COTS systems adapted to military use. Mr. Febbroriello’s focus is on compliance, export control and strategic acquisitions – including red team penetration testing, information security, electronic security testing, and the export of firearms, explosives and USML weapons systems. His expertise spans SIGINT, OSINT, HUMINT, GEOINT, digital foot printing, and probing of financial and logistics systems.