116 Joint Doctrine / Unmasking the Spectrum with Artificial Intelligence JFQ 95, 4
th
Quarter 2019
Unmasking the Spectrum with
Artificial Intelligence
By Matthew J. Florenzen, Kurt M. Shulkitas, and Kyle P. Bair
I
magine you are a combatant com-
mander (CCDR) equipped with the
latest capabilities today’s military has
to offer. Your troops are armed with
fifth-generation aircraft, precision-
strike capabilities, advanced naval
forces, and fully networked combat
arms and land forces. From your
command center you can precisely
observe your forces on the battlefield,
and your surveillance equipment allows
unmitigated access to their actions and
communications in real time. However,
when you take this state-of-the-art force
into combat against a near-peer com-
petitor, nothing seems to work. Com-
munications are at best intermittent and
at worst nonexistent, your modern air-
craft and naval assets cannot integrate
operations, and your combat arms are
relegated to utilizing line-of-sight com-
munications to control the battle. The
Clausewitzian “fog of war” settles on
the joint operation, inducing confusion,
ambiguity, and missed opportunities to
advance the mission. At the tactical and
operational levels of war, the ability to
pass real-time decisions is gone, and the
latency of information delays command
decisions for 24 to 72 hours. The
Lieutenant Colonel Matthew J. Florenzen, USAF, is in the Central Security Service at the National
Security Agency. Lieutenant Commander Kurt M. Shulkitas, USN, is the Military Advisor for Cyber and
Information Operations at the Department of State. Major Kyle P. Bair, USA, is an Analyst in the Joint
War Gaming and Experimentation Division at the Joint Staff J7.
Marine Corps cryptologic analyst assigned to 1
st
Radio Battalion,
I Marine Expeditionary Force Information Group, monitors
electromagnetic spectrum during training in support of Command
Post Exercise at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, California,
December 12, 2018 (U.S. Marine Corps/Brendan Mullin)
