The Future of Warfare is Today: The strategic advantage from interoperability within and across nations
Midjourney prompt: Modern military soldiers
A two-part recommendation that interoperability demands more investment and greater prioritisation from current military and government expenditures. Reviewing the Deloitte Center for Government Insights recommendations of September 2021 in the light of Ukraine and economic uncertainty, we find that today is the right time to increase interoperability within and across the free world. In this first part, we look at the interoperability rules for future warfare.
Last year, The Deloitte Center for Government Insights reviewed twelve countries and sixty representatives to identify ways and insights to improve effectiveness across key military areas. We identified four leading defence challenges across all respondents:
Peer warfare.
Technology-driven grey zone threats.
Limited-scale warfare.
Defending the rules-based international order.
The goal was to generate discussion to improve global initiatives and demonstrate the realisation that more significant aligned activity was essential for intelligence age warfare. The outputs are collated here under Future of Warfighting.
At the time, very few individuals viewed Ukraine and Russia as a potentially imminent conflict [1], most believing that the conflict would continue to be tense rather than hot[2]. Despite the 2014 invasion, it looked likely that Russia would not be bold enough to strike deeper into Ukraine. Behind the scenes, military leaders feared that any Russian aggression would be short and vicious.
Today, Russia's invasion has accelerated the West's need for honesty to recognise, understand, and respond to pressing international interoperability issues and collectively act to meet the identified defence challenges listed above. Ukraine has valiantly resisted Russian aggression with global support and stubborn bravery whilst offering hard, violent proof for the value of interoperability and international cooperation.
The West cannot wait another year, and Ukraine cannot wait any longer.
Our recommendations start with three simple rules. The first is that Interoperability is not new and that most military operations worldwide are multilateral. Militaries value interoperability and, when pushed, will work hard to resolve any issues. Yet there has been little incentive to make interoperability a top priority until now, despite clear examples in recent military history. For instance, the Anglo-French combined expeditionary forces in the Sahel for Operation Barkhane struggled with basic equipment interfaces and more challenging differences in rules of engagement and command philosophy [3].
In Ukraine, interoperability is now a priority where its forces receive Western equipment in limited packets. Its soldiers learn and integrate these items alongside their own tactics and other equipment. We see the strain on supply, logistics, and operational tempo as they learn these lessons in combat.
No nation has enough precision-guided munitions to sustain a protracted peer engagement [4]
Our second rule is that no nation, even the U.S., can meet today's defence challenges alone. Our research across all twelve countries identified stark shortcomings in the supply chain, stockpiles reduced under budgetary controls, and closed production lines that reduced restocking responsiveness. At the other end of the spectrum, we saw that it was clear that no military can, by itself, address the flood of misinformation permeating social media platforms that characterise intelligence age operations.
Success today requires militaries to operate outside themselves, to be interoperable with other nations, other government agencies, and even commercial industries in new ways. Ukraine starkly shows this rule to be valid, with both Russian and Ukrainian militaries struggling to supply their artilleries, replenish depleted munitions, and train or operate with other nations.
All armies are calculating the ammunition and munition expenditure rate in Ukraine and comparing it to their stockpiles and reserves. The comparison is grim, with even significant forces seeing forecast depletion of all munitions measured in days rather than weeks, whilst restocking from suppliers is measured in months rather than days. Hoping to fight differently to avoid this attrition challenge lacks credibility, as the adversary often sets the nature of conflict as much as the home side.
Nations putting in the challenging work now will meet the demands of the future, whatever they may be.
Our third rule is that Interoperability is more than just a political expedient, a way of growing exports, or demonstrating global reach. Interoperability today is a strategic advantage. Interoperability gives militaries more options, greater strategic agility, with the flexibility to adopt and adapt to the flow of conflict with greater confidence.
Consider the view that Russia saw Ukraine's reach toward the West and NATO as a threat because it delivered this strategic advantage. A Ukrainian military with NATO equipment, operating within NATO's cyber security and intelligence reach, and resupplied from across NATO industries would significantly deter any future Russian interference. Greater interoperability between NATO and Ukraine offered a strategic advantage that Russia could not counter. If completed, interoperability would not only make Ukraine resistant to Russian aggression but also confident enough to reclaim the regions seized by Russia in 2014. This proposition is evident in how NATO intelligence, supplies, and equipment bolster Ukrainian effectiveness today.
Interoperability rules are more relevant today than last year.
We reviewed the political, strategic, and doctrinal documents of twelve countries across North America, Europe, and Asia to determine their leading defence challenges. At the time, conversations around peer-on-peer warfare were considered increasingly irrelevant, with the need for broad-spectrum military, political, and economic warfare highly unlikely. Yet all countries showed strong indicators that peer-on-peer conflict remained a key challenge.
This insight went further than soldiers still fighting the last war or purchasing old capabilities from previous conflicts. We identified convincing evidence that all surveyed militaries were adopting innovative technologies, tactics, and toolsets to face new ways of warfare. We also determined successful adoption often occurred when armies implemented these new tools over existing structures rather than merely replacing systems. An infantry brigade could exploit UAV capabilities far quicker than asking a new UAV brigade to operate alongside the infantry one. The infantry brigade may, subsequently, fight in a way unrecognisable to its predecessors, but the core skill set of peer-to-peer conflict seems to underpin successful capability adoption.
Interoperability provides an advantage within as well as across a military force. Our research [5] examined the scale and demands of interoperability across four military functions at five maturity levels, from Level 1 Baseline (able to interoperate with secure systems and trusted data) to Level 5 Systemic (internationally coordinated responses, with automated tooling and shared cultures). We could see that adopting new capabilities was easier for organisations at the higher levels of interoperability and that these same, higher-level organisations could adapt existing structures faster.
This is a crucial lesson as militaries seek to converge across domains and environments and address multi-domain integration to meet current military threats. Interoperability provides a strategic advantage, a force multiplying effect on performance, and enhances adaptability against threats and change. This alone should justify increased investment, yet we are not seeing this reality.
In the second part, we examine this case for more significant interoperability investment.
[1] The West faces a test of unity over Russia as tensions intensify between Moscow and NATO | World News | Sky News
[2] Kremlin says NATO expansion in Ukraine is a 'red line' for Putin | Reuters
[3] https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/industry/public-sector/future-of-warfare.html#endnote-2
[4] https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/industry/public-sector/future-of-warfare.html
[5] https://www2.deloitte.com/global/en/pages/public-sector/articles/future-of-warfighting.html#:~:text=Interoperability%20functions%3A
