All-Domain Operations: Hubris Unleashed!

Integrate it all!  All-domains!

W.J. Astore

You can always count on the Pentagon to come up with jargon that unleashes hubris.  When I was in the Air Force, it was all about "global reach, global power."  I also heard about "full-spectrum dominance."  Now the latest buzzword is "All-Domain Operations."  "All-domain" means land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace, which are supposed to be integrated by computers, with information being shared at the speed of light, or close to it.  The U.S. military will know so much, be so nimble, and act in such a coordinated fashion that its rivals and enemies won't have a chance.

This is what the Vice-Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had to say about this:

"we’ll have a significant advantage over everybody in the world for a long time, because it’s the ability to integrate and effectively command and control all domains in a conflict or in a crisis seamlessly — and we don’t know how to do that.  Nobody knows how to do that.”

I've been hearing about "seamless" and "global" integration for a long time, and it's never going to happen.  War is fundamentally messy, chaotic, a realm of chance, influenced by what Clausewitz termed "fog and friction," and of course the enemy rarely reacts in ways that are predictable.  No matter.  A "global" vision of "all-domain" dominance has the virtue of justifying enormous defense budgets, so it's likely here to stay.

As an aside, I do like the way the term has grown like Topsy, according to this report:

"Breaking Defense readers have seen these ideas evolve rapidly over the last few years, with even the terminology becoming ever more ambitious, from Multi-Domain Battle to Multi-Domain Operations to All-Domain Operations."

Yes -- who wants only multi-domain battles when you can have all-domain operations?  Let's show some ambition here!

Note how in this vision, there's no talk of national defense or of upholding the U.S. Constitution.  It's all about power projection in the cause of dominance.  It's an enabler to forever war -- one that will be increasingly driven by computers.

What could possibly go wrong with such a vision?

One thing is likely: if there's ever a war of hubristic buzzwords in the future, the Pentagon might finally have a fighting chance.