Summary
Our primary function as service chiefs is to organize, train and equip our forces for employment. We owe the combatant commanders who use these forces the capabilities that produce a warfighting advantage now and into the future, not simply greater quantities of existing equipment unsuited to competition or conflict with great powers. Achieving this goal will require accelerating investments in capabilities, including hypersonic weapons; AI-enabled remotely piloted aircraft; long-range penetrating strike; truly joint all-domain command and control; unmanned, low-cost, expendable ground, surface and air vehicles; long-range mobile ground-launched missiles; and better integrated air and missile defenses.
—Charles Q. Brown Jr. and David H. Berger, 20211
DATA DEVICES AT THE EDGE NEED ENERGY
As noted in the Future of Defense Task Force Report 2020,2 “advancements in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, quantum computing, and space, cyber, and
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1 See D.H. Berger and C.Q. Brown Jr., 2021, “To Compete with China and Russia, the U.S. Military Must Redefine ‘Readiness,’” Washington Post, February 1, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/02/01/brown-berger-military-readiness/.
2 See House Armed Services Committee, 2020, Future of Defense Task Force Report 2020, https://armedservices.house.gov/_cache/files/2/6/26129500-d208-47ba-a9f725a8f82828b0/6D5C75605DE8DDF0013712923B4388D7.future-of-defense-task-force-report.pdf.
electronic warfare, among others, are making traditional battlefields and boundaries increasingly irrelevant.” A critical finding in the report was that significant advances were needed to improve national security and competitiveness by harnessing the growing power of information technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics.
There are ongoing, significant efforts within the U.S. Air Force (USAF) to do just that. Product and process technologies are being researched, experimented with, and integrated into future warfighting concepts and plans. A significant part of this effort is focused on integrating operations, from the strategic to the tactical and across all lines of effort. A question that must be asked in considering these future warfighting concepts is: how will the devices that enable the knowledge-based future be powered?
More precisely, how will the devices that are farthest from stable and permanent locations manage their energy needs? The abundant energy supplies that characterize peacetime operating environments may not be readily available at the far reaches of the force projections—the tactical edge—during conflict. Understanding the energy challenges associated with continued data collection, processing, storage, analysis, and communications at the tactical edge is an important part of developing the plans for meeting the future competition on the battlefield.
CONQUERING THESE CHALLENGES
The committee consulted with technical experts in academia, government, and industry to identify challenges and issues associated with energy needs at the tactical edge as well as any potential for solutions to be considered in the future to help address these challenges. There are near-term, mid-term, and long-term efforts that are needed to understand, address, and routinize the integration of energy considerations into operational capabilities. The recommendations in this document address understanding these requirement needs and the cascading effects of not meeting those needs, integrating energy needs for data processing into mission and unit readiness assessments, and research into product and process technologies to address energy-efficient computation, resilience, interoperability, and alternative solutions to energy management at the tactical edge. These recommendations are summarized below.
ENERGY NEEDS AND MISSION READINESS
The core of these recommendations falls under the issue of how much energy will be needed for functionality of data processing and support to combat operations at the tactical edge. Fundamentally, the answer to this question is not currently comprehensively known. It stands to reason that an obvious recommendation
would be that the energy needs associated with data processing to support these missions be systematically analyzed and documented.
Recommendation 1: The U.S. Air Force must include energy needs in readiness reporting metrics for all weapons systems.
Concomitant to a comprehensive analysis of the energy needs associated with data processing at the tactical edge, it is important to understand the impacts of energy availability and quality to these functions and what the impact would be to larger mission functions and weapons systems should the energy needs not be met, either at all or in a timely manner. The impact on operations associated with a temporary or sustained loss of power to data capabilities at the tactical edge must be understood, ranging from logistics to management to enabling effects on target. The ability of units to execute mission requirements can be greatly undermined by the inability to collect, process, analyze, and communicate critical data, thereby impacting both unit and mission readiness.
Recommendation 2: In the emerging data-driven operational environment, the U.S. Air Force resource and capability readiness assessments should include the availability of adequate and appropriate energy to data capabilities at the tactical edge.
PULL-THE-PLUG EXERCISES
Field exercises and training often assume that power is available at all times and for any demand requirement. This is also a standard assumption for communications systems, networks, and other support infrastructures. In a forward-deployed situation or in a contested battle space, it should be expected that power and other infrastructures will be targets of attack and therefore will not be continuously available or will be intermittent. Losses may stem from existing poor commercial infrastructure or enemy denial; lack of maintenance; lack of fuel; or human error. To simulate a realistic future environment, the USAF must include a “lights out” situation in training and exercises. These pull-the-plug exercises for tactical units and dynamic basing can reveal dependencies associated with expectations of data availability to the tactical-edge missions.
Recommendation 3: The U.S. Air Force should conduct pull-the-plug exercises for all realistic field exercises, and the effect on tactical-edge data expectations should be documented and relayed to the mission plan developers.
Recommendation 4: The results of pull-the-plug exercises on tactical-edge data capabilities should be used to revise and update mission readiness assessments.
EXPLICIT ENERGY REQUIREMENTS
At present, energy needs for computational support, either on-premise or off-premise, are not currently defined in any major weapons system or mission profile. The use of both advanced information technology (IT) capabilities, such as AI, and massively distributed small devices and communications nodes, impact the energy needs at the tactical edge and have implications for the operational readiness and performance of both missions and weapon systems. These energy needs must be defined as requirements for all missions and systems.
Recommendation 5: The U.S. Air Force should include energy needs associated with data expectations, both for support and internal to the mission or system, as explicit requirements for all missions and systems. The terms and conditions for contracts should include language that requires specific and complete descriptions of energy needs, types, and compatibility with logistics support.
Recommendation 6: The U.S. Air Force should explicitly address energy minimization, power consumption monitoring, and energy generation for the tactical-edge information environment, including all small devices and Internet of Things capabilities.
MANPOWER
The manpower skill sets needed to support the energy needs associated with the compute/store functions dispersed across the tactical, operational, and strategic level of warfare, are significant and are a barrier to the successful implementation of data-driven operations. The USAF does not have the organic manpower (manpower that is already within the organization) to manage, lead, supervise, or solve the challenges of energy consumption tied to data-driven operations. Without the organic manpower that understands the entire spectrum of energy needs, including in highly specialized fields such as radio frequency (RF) engineering, the USAF may never achieve a solution that strengthens its operational goals and instead will subject itself to substantial tactical, operational, and strategic risk. This manpower challenge includes recruiting, educating, training, and optimizing the contractor/ military blend, and incentives for education.
Recommendation 7: The U.S. Air Force should establish a manpower program to recruit, educate, assign, and train both military and civilian personnel to address energy challenges associated with data-driven operations.
Recommendation 8: The U.S. Air Force should incentivize energy engineers, particularly specialists such as antenna and radio frequency engineers.
ENERGY RESILIENCE AND INTEROPERABILITY
While technology interoperability of deployed American forces in foreign countries is a well understood problem, these issues must be a specified consideration when developing or procuring new power sources or distribution systems. Ideally, new systems should automatically adapt and interoperate with a foreign environment with little or no mechanical switching or reconfiguration.
The challenge of delivering energy to deployed forces is complicated by logistics, which tend to favor simplicity over complexity and large users over small users. At the tactical edge, small users may have a larger role in data collection, analysis, and communication under the Joint All-Domain Operations (JADO) concepts, which would make them a dependency for the operational readiness of the larger units. There are implications for joint or multiservice operations that bear analysis, including cooperation on strategy development across all services.
Recommendation 9: The U.S. Air Force should develop an economic benefit model exploring the utility, opportunity costs, risks, and benefits for different energy delivery modes.
Recommendation 10: The U.S. Air Force should explore the options associated with vehicle-to-grid (V2G) implementations in tactical field exercises.
Recommendation 11: The U.S. Air Force should consider the logistics tail for energy types and methods of delivery from the perspective of cost-efficiency of energy delivery and operational costs associated with single energy sourcing (e.g., using drones to deliver batteries to small users, as opposed to conventional fuel convoys).
Recommendation 12: The U.S. Air Force should consider interoperability with foreign nation power systems and partner military forces (e.g., the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) when designing power systems (more than transformers) including standardization of certain elements and “plug and play” capability.
RESEARCH
As data-driven operations become more critical to operating concepts, the energy implications should be explicitly part of the planning process, including research on how to reduce energy usage, energy source exposure to hostile activity, and improving energy resiliency.
Algorithms and application space to reduce energy consumption have been shown to be very promising. Research has been performed to create energy consumption-aware algorithms at the operating system level and the application level, and it appears that this line of work has great potential for reducing energy needs for computing systems operating at the tactical edge. While it is known that clever algorithm design can yield energy savings, there is still more research that needs to be performed to yield practical and deployed energy-aware algorithms. Needed research includes conversion of theoretical algorithms to practical deployable software. In addition, further research is needed on the role of approximation techniques to reduce energy usage while not compromising accuracy. It is also known that how systems are architected, including details such as types of antennas and transmission strategy, can have an overall impact on energy usage, which means that research into systemic use of energy would be useful. These research efforts could support the operational security goals of reducing signal emanations and heat signatures.
Recommendation 13: The U.S. Air Force should invest in future research in both product and process technologies associated with reducing energy usage, minimizing energy logistics risk, and improving energy resiliencies associated with data operations at the tactical edge.
Recommendation 14: The U.S. Air Force should invest in research into using energy-aware algorithms in practical deployable software.
Recommendation 15: The U.S. Air Force should invest in the development of approximation techniques in software algorithms that are effective in energy reduction without compromising accuracy to unacceptable levels.
Recommendation 16: The U.S. Air Force should conduct experimental campaigns in realistic scenarios, including variety of systems and deployment characteristics of tactical-edge units, to guide the research directions and implementation potentials.
THE PATH AHEAD
These recommendations offer the USAF an approach to integrating energy needs into planning for the future battlefield. Should energy requirements not be explicitly planned for and integrated into operational readiness assessments, it is possible that critical outages will occur that could have cascading effects across the connected battlefield. Executing the agenda described through the recommendations will be challenging, but the results will greatly improve the potential for successful deployment of next-generation technologies to the tactical edge.
