Abstract: The widespread use of sensors and stand-off precision fires is increasingly hampering ground manoeuvre and endangering manoeuvre forces in their staging areas. While some militaries adopt Multi-Domain Operations (MDO)-approaches as a remedy, it might be cheaper and more effective for small and medium-sized powers to disrupt adversaries’ MDO capabilities than to try and replicate them. Instead, drawing on the lessons of hider-finder competitions in the aerial and maritime domains, it offers some initial suggestions on how ground forces can use deception and denial approaches to prevent their adversaries from exploiting the “transparent battlefield.”

Problem statement: As the ubiquitous presence of sensors and C4ISTAR capabilities increasingly create a condition approaching the “transparent battlefield”, how can small and medium-sized forces ensure their freedom of action for ground manoeuvre?

So what?: Small and medium-sized militaries should focus their limited resources on mastering denial and deception to disrupt, degrade, and defeat enemy sensing capabilities that otherwise threaten their ability to conduct ground manoeuvres.

The Virtuous Battlefield

The Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has become a major inflection point of the 21st century. Besides marking the return of conventional land warfare in Europe, it is also said to potentially bring about the demise of the post-Cold War security architecture and the so-called “liberal-democratic order.”[1] From a military point of view, the war in Ukraine appears to simultaneously represent a “shock of the old” and serve as a harbinger of the future battlefield.[2] On the one hand, fighting on the ground has largely settled into positional warfare, with the war’s attritional character prompting many comparisons to World War I.[3] On the other hand, this bogged-down state of affairs the war’s major novel aspect: the integration of large amounts of sensors, particularly, inexpensive UAV platforms (many of them commercially off-the-shelf, COTS), alongside other C4ISTAR (Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition and Reconnaissance) capabilities enable near-continuous battlefield surveillance.[4] Paired with a modern, multispectral recce-precision strike complex, reconnoitred targets can be engaged within minutes.[5] Command posts, arms depots, and lines of communication need to be placed out of the enemy’s weapons range to ensure their survivability.[6] Large-scale military operations seem increasingly impossible as manoeuvre forces can be detected early on and held at risk even while generating combat power in their staging areas.[7] As the former Chief of Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Gen Valerii Zaluzhnyi, put it, “The simple fact is that we see everything the enemy is doing, and they see everything we are doing.”[8] In short, modern warfare may finally approach the condition of the long-anticipated “transparent battlefield”.[9]

The war in Ukraine appears to simultaneously represent a “shock of the old” and serve as a harbinger of the future battlefield.

Such a transparent battlefield, or in other words, a “comprehensive battlefield awareness”, has long been seen as a key enabler for future warfighting concepts.[10] For several years, the U.S. Department of Defence has been working on the so-called Joint All-Domain Command & Control (JADC2) project, which seeks to “produce the warfighting capability to sense, make sense, and act at all levels and phases of war, across all domains, and with partners, to deliver information advantage at the speed of relevance” for the U.S. Joint Force.[11] As part of JADC2, the different U.S. armed services develop their own C4ISTAR projects, including the U.S. Army’s Project Convergence, the Navy’s Project Overmatch, and the Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System.[12] Consequently, the U.S. Army emphasises situational awareness and information advantage as a crucial requirement for mission success throughout its current field manual FM 3-0 Operations, the official doctrine for multi-domain operations (MDO).[13]

According to FM 3-0, MDO seeks to apply kinetic and non-kinetic effects from all domains against enemy layered standoff fire and air defence complexes to enable ground manoeuvre.[14] Beyond the U.S. Army, several European countries are in the process of experimenting with or are already implementing MDO approaches. However, their conceptual foundations and their understanding of what MDO exactly entails show considerable variation.[15] On the one hand, small and medium-sized militaries face significant material constraints, compelling them to try and avoid a military strategy based on attrition.[16] On the other hand, however, it is uncertain whether they could mobilise the resources necessary to develop and employ a comprehensive MDO framework against peer or even overmatched adversaries.[17]

The Origins of the Transparent Battlefield and Multi-Domain Operations

The notion of a transparent battlefield or battlespace, as well as ultimately the idea of MDO, can be traced back to decades-long and still ongoing developments in the so-called “Revolution in Military Affairs” (RMA).[18] According to conventional wisdom, RMA’s origins go back to the United States and NATO’s offset strategy following the Vietnam War, which sought to balance Soviet numerical superiority in Europe with a qualitative edge, made possible by novel technological developments, including microprocessors and lasers.[19] Leveraging these new technologies, “land-, air-, and sea-launched precision-guided munitions, terminally guided to targets at standoff ranges through command, control, and automated reconnaissance and target acquisition systems” were supposed to “break an enemy assault effectively without crossing the nuclear threshold.”[20]

RMA’s origins go back to the United States and NATO’s offset strategy following the Vietnam War, made possible by novel technological developments, including microprocessors and lasers.

While these developments and concepts in the U.S. were mainly viewed as a means to retain a technological advantage versus the Soviet Union, the latter’s defence establishment increasingly perceived them as potentially revolutionary changes altering the character of war. Beginning in the mid-1970s, the Soviets conceived these changes as a “Military-Technological Revolution” (MTR) with the so-called “reconnaissance-strike complex” at its centre.[21]

It was only after studying the Soviet MTR concepts that U.S. defence intellectuals, in particular the Office of Net Assessment (ONA) led by Andrew Marshall, began to incrementally realise the potentially revolutionary changes in warfare, describing them as a “Revolution in Military Affairs” (RMA).[22] At the beginning of the 1990s, following the First Gulf War and research on its “preliminary lessons […] relating to the impact of information technologies on the design and execution of military operations” as well as a comprehensive study about the MTR by the ONA, the U.S. began to increasingly embrace the RMA as the way in which the U.S. would fight and win future wars.[23] The vision at the time was to transform the U.S. armed forces using technological advances in areas such as C4I, stealth, precision guidance as well as ISR.[24] The RMA also influenced related warfighting concepts including “network-centric warfare”, which emphasises the synergies of interconnected platforms, as well as “effects-based operations”, focusing on creating specific “effects” on the adversary’s behaviour to bring about the desired end state rather than to “annihilate the enemy or wear him out through attrition.”[25] Proponents of the RMA have typically pointed to NATO intervention in Kosovo in 1999 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2002-2003 (as well as “Desert Storm” as a precursor) as proof of concept for their ideas.[26]

While the U.S. armed forces enjoyed a competitive advantage in the late 1999s and early 2000s, military strategists and defence officials soon began to warn that this would not be lasting. One contemporary study from the early 2000s identified “increasing battlespace transparency” as one sphere of competition, noting that “given current trends, the ISR information available to prospective adversaries is almost certain to improve significantly over the next two decades. The advantage in this area that the United States enjoys today could diminish considerably in relative terms. Several prospective adversaries, for example, are actively pursuing the development of highflying, inherently low-observable UAVs capable of performing theaterwide ISR missions. A few are building various kinds of remote-sensing satellites (e.g., China), while others are gaining access to high-resolution satellite imagery by purchasing it from commercial suppliers. Hyperspectral and high-resolution, radar-imaging services are likely to become commercially available within the next several years. Many states are also learning how to network widely dispersed, disparate sensors into an integrated system that is more powerful than the sum of its parts.”[27]

Many states are also learning how to network widely dispersed, disparate sensors into an integrated system that is more powerful than the sum of its parts.

Indeed, studying closely the wars discussed above and the U.S. armed forces’ transformation, Russia and the People’s Republic of China (PRC), as well as weaker rivals such as North Korea and Iran, began developing their own solutions to deal with the prospect U.S. power projection, which have been typically characterised as so-called anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) strategies.[28]  While the U.S. and its allies were busy conducting counterinsurgency campaigns throughout the Middle East and the broader Islamic world, peer adversaries such as the PRC and Russia invested in capabilities that would delay or even disrupt U.S. access to and impede manoeuvre within operational theatres.[29]

The emergence of MDO as a warfighting concept has to be understood in this specific context. MDO, in its original U.S. formulation, is the “combined arms employment of joint and Army capabilities to create and exploit relative advantages that achieve objectives, defeat enemy forces, and consolidate gains.”[30] MDO seeks to defeat enemy capabilities, in particular standoff fire complexes and air defence, by “fracturing the coherence of threat operational approaches by destroying, dislocating, isolating, and disintegrating their independent systems and formations.”[31] According to the Bundeswehr, as Phillips notes, MDO is focused on “creating windows of opportunity” that offer freedom of action for manoeuvre by the Joint Force and, in particular, ground forces.[32] Other nations, such as the United Kingdom (UK), have equally embraced MDO as the model for future warfighting, with the British Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Patrick Sanders, in 2022 arguing that “success will be determined by combined arms and multi-domain competence.”[33]

The Challenges of Implementing an MDO Approach

While numerous countries are in the process of adopting or have already implementing Multi-Domain Operations as their warfighting concepts, critical observers have pointed to a number of challenges that they will likely encounter. Generally, warfighting concepts such as MDO are “often highly optimistic, uncoordinated with other services and allies, and lack any clear theory of success.”[34] As has been noted repeatedly, several states have different approaches to what “multi-domain” entails, including in their qualifiers ranging from the British multi-domain “integration” to the French “multi-milieux/multi-champs” and the German “Multidimensionalität.”[35] Establishing a cohesive doctrine with a unified agreed-upon terminology will already prove challenging at the national level between the different armed service branches and much more so at the international or multilateral level.[36] The same issue has been pointed out regarding interoperability and technological integration, not only at the international level between different armed forces but also between classified and unclassified systems.[37]

One detailed study of different MDO concepts found several additional challenges that will impact implementation.[38] First, most concepts exhibit “technological overconfidence”, especially regarding communications where they assume (implicitly or not) assured connectivity at a hardly realistic level.[39] Indeed, efforts to create the required network architecture, such as JADC2, have now barely reached an initial operational capability and are likely still years (or even decades) away from maturity.[40] As such, it is doubtful when and to what extent any state will be able to attain a comprehensive MDO capability.[41]

Most concepts exhibit “technological overconfidence”, especially regarding communications where they assume assured connectivity at a hardly realistic level.

Other observers have also cast doubt on the ability to fight an enemy as envisioned by MDO doctrine, namely “paralysing” and “imposing multiple dilemmas” on him. As Michael Kofman points out, “the operational realities of fights with either Russia or China do not accommodate many of the concepts envisioned,” as war with such peer competitors “is likely to be bloody, costly, and potentially protracted.”[42]

All of these potentials pertain to any country seeking to implement an MDO concept. In consequence, this means that small and medium-sized powers will face even more considerable hurdles.[43] For many smaller and medium-sized militaries, achieving anything even approximating a true MDO capability will likely entail considerable investments across several domains, with their capacity to do so being doubtful. Take, for instance, Denmark, which in May 2023 announced it would invest close to $21 billion in its armed forces, yet in July 2024, the Danish Armed Forces experienced problems paying daily expenses and subsequently cancelled its participation in two NATO exercises.[44] Some MDO proponents advocate investing into “low-cost” surveillance and sensor-to-shooter networks (in particular, COTS UAVs).[45] Yet this raises again the question of integration.[46]

Multi-Domain Denial

In short, investing in an MDO capability will likely be a losing proposition for small and medium-sized militaries. Instead of trying to catch up with potential peers or even overmatched adversaries, they should consider investing in capabilities that can deny their enemy’s MDO’s “relative advantages.”[47] As noted by the Bundeswehr, MDO’s prerequisite and defining feature is “comprehensive and uninterrupted networking.”[48] The operational environment needs “the highest possible degree of transparency” for its own forces to initiate sensor-to-shooter loops (or kill chains, respectively) as quickly as possible.[49]

In other words, degrading and defeating such a network through various denial and deception measures would significantly impede an adversary’s ability to field their multi-domain capability. Consequently, smaller and medium-sized military powers do not need their own MDO concept to retain the capacity for selective manoeuvre. Instead, they need to deny this capability to their own opponent. This is the essence of what we call “multi-domain denial.” Achieving it entails both passive and active measures and likely a combination thereof.

Passive measures include the use of multi-spectral camouflage as well as a range of decoys to deceive an adversary and hide one’s own forces and movement from the latter’s sensor.[50] Multispectral camouflage nets, for example, can hide assets from radar and infrared and are relatively inexpensive, with the French army reportedly signing a contract on the procurement of 3’000 nets for approximately $21.6 million.[51] Furthermore, there is ongoing research to produce multi-spectral camouflage using additive technology, potentially further decreasing costs in the future.[52] Decoys are another passive measure that was widely utilised during the Russo-Ukrainian war.[53] While historically being in use for several centuries, modern decoys are able to emit fake radar and infrared signatures, thus, fooling enemy reconnaissance.[54] While the costs of such decoys vary, a Ukrainian company has produced howitzer decoys resembling the M777 type at around $1’000.[55]

Multispectral camouflage nets, for example, can hide assets from radar and infrared and are relatively inexpensive.

Active measures, meanwhile, include the employment of electronic warfare to disturb enemy surveillance. This can be achieved through numerous techniques, including the jamming and/or jamming of radars, communications, or GPS/GNSS.[56] Researchers have also noted how AI and machine learning can be potentially leveraged by designing “nonsensical images with AI and paint them on the battlespace using decoys, fake signal traffic, and careful arrangements of genuine hardware” that could “render multi-billion-dollar sensor systems useless because the data they collect would be incomprehensible to both AI and human analysts.”[57] Active measures may also include selected kinetic, cyber or other attacks against detected and reconnoitred enemy C4ISTAR infrastructure to facilitate friendly freedom of action.

One of the challenges of carrying out such measures will be coordination and synchronisation across different domains. At the same time, this will be essential considering that in “an era of increasingly widespread, sophisticated, and varied sensors, spoofing only one type does little against an adversary capable of rapidly fusing multiple sources of information.”[58] As such multi-domain denial takes a doubling meaning – not only does it seek to deny the enemy their MDO capability by degrading and disrupting their battlespace awareness, but such denial and deception itself has to occur across several domains.

Learning from the Past

Studying historical examples can further inform the basic tenets of the multi-domain denial approach. One particularly useful case is maritime warfare, particularly the idea of “sea control.”[59]  has been defined as “acquiring and securing the privilege to utilise the maritime space in the period of time as expected.”[60] Naval doctrine has long recognised the spatial and temporal limits of sea control. As the US Navy’s capstone document notes, sea control “does not imply absolute control over all the seas at all times. Rather, control of the sea is required in specific regions for particular periods of time, to allow unencumbered maritime operations.”[61] However, “sea denial”, or the exclusion of “adversaries from utilising the maritime space in an expected period of time and place of choosing” needs to be considered in parallel.[62] While sea control typically includes the capacity to impose sea denial on the adversary, the opposite is not necessarily the case. Consequently, some maritime schools of thought have focused exclusively on denying their enemies the ability to use the maritime domain. The primary example of such thinking was the French Jeune École, which advocated investing in a large fleet of small and fast torpedo boats to attack commercial shipping rather than in a relatively small number of capital ships to seek a decisive battle.[63] As the thought leader of the Jeune École, Vice Admiral Hyacinthe-Laurent Theophile Aube, noted, “Tomorrow war breaks out; an autonomous torpedo boat—two officers, a dozen men—meets one of these liners carrying a cargo richer than that of the richest galleons of Spain and a crew and passengers of many hundreds. [. . .] The torpedo boat will follow from afar, invisible, the liner it has met; and, once night has fallen, perfectly silently and tranquilly, it will send into the abyss liner, cargo, crew, passengers.”[64]

While many of Aube’s arguments were dubious at best, and the torpedo boat soon found its match in torpedo boat destroyers, he correctly anticipated the impact of the torpedo on naval warfare as well as the importance of commercial warfare.[65] Some observers have argued that the Houthis’ interdiction campaign against commercial shipping in the Red Sea may be read as a “new twist” on the Jeune École’s core tenets.[66] “[T]he Jeune École identified the delta in cost between warships and ship-killing weapons,” notes Kevin McCranie, “and since then, warships have become even more expensive and technologies to attack them have proliferated.”[67] After several months of disrupting commerce in the Red Sea, maritime operations by the U.S. Navy and several allied nations still have not managed to contain the threat as “world’s premier navies appear to be struggling to subdue a band of insurgents.”[68]

The Houthis’ interdiction campaign against commercial shipping in the Red Sea may be read as a “new twist” on the Jeune École’s core tenets.

The takeaway is that actors with relatively low capacity do not need to establish control over a certain domain to deny it to their adversaries. Furthermore, as past examples from hider-finder competitions in aerial and submarine warfare show, a wholly transparent battlefield is likely a mirage. Like the development of radar and advanced air defence systems spurred countermeasures from releasing chaff to flares to electronic countermeasures and building low observable/stealth aircraft, so do submarines rely on SONAR countermeasures.[69]

In consequence, the employment of passive and active measures to degrade and disrupt the enemy’s C4ISTAR capability/battlespace awareness (and, as such, reduce the transparency of the battlefield) rather than attempting to implement a fully-fledged MDO approach is a more promising pathway towards attaining the freedom of action to engage in selective manoeuvre, especially when combined with the inherent advantages of the defence such as terrain, or preparation.[70]

What Needs to Be Done

Small and medium-sized military powers looking to improve their defensive potential may be well advised to consider if an operational concept geared towards superpowers such as the U.S. is suitable for them. Instead of simply replicating the American way of warfare, they should attempt to identify the choke points in the MDO approach. As MDO proponents tend to agree, battlespace awareness/C4ISTAR capabilities are one such point, as it is widely seen as MDO’s prerequisite characteristic.[71] Consequently, small military powers should re-invest in their deception capabilities, including passive and active measures.[72] This will necessitate considerable institutional and intellectual change, considering that deception has long been marginalised in Western militaries and their ability to conduct such techniques and tactics has consequently declined.[73] While tactical deception could likely be incorporated into exercises with relative ease, developing deception capabilities at the operational or even strategic level will require far greater efforts.

Small military powers should re-invest in their deception capabilities, including passive and active measures.

It is also important to note the limitations of our paper as our argument rests on certain assumptions about levels of ambition. In other words, the approach we suggest is primarily suitable for armed forces following a predominantly defensive doctrine. On the other hand, members of an alliance such as NATO, which has long emphasised expeditionary warfare and power projection among its major capabilities, cannot aim exclusively for such a conception and will not get around an MDO approach entirely.[74] At the same time, these approaches need not to be mutually exclusive. As NATO, in the words of some of its officials, is shifting from expeditionary operations, the success of a new collective defence posture, “hinges on member nations’ ability to meet these requirements.”[75] Especially smaller allied member states might do well to consider investing in their deception and denial capabilities to meet such expectations.

 

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First Lieutenant Timothy J. Rizza is an officer in the armoured forces, the future commander of a mechanised staff company and a career officer candidate at the Military Academy (MILAC) at ETH Zurich. He recently completed his BA thesis on the utility of military deception in Multi-Domain Operations, which is also one of his main research interests.

Specialist Officer (Captain) Michel Wyss, MA, is a Scientific Assistant for Strategic Studies at MILAC and a PhD Candidate at Leiden University. He is co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Proxy Wars, and his research has been published in International Security, the Journal of Strategic Studies, and International Studies Review, among others.

The views contained in this article are the authors’ alone and do not represent the views of the Swiss Armed Forces or any other agency of the Swiss government.

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[1] Stefan Lehne, “After Russia’s War Against Ukraine: What Kind of World Order?” Carnegie Europe, February 28, 2023, https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2023/02/after-russias-war-against-ukraine-what-kind-of-world-order; Stuart Gottlieb, “Ukraine and the End of the ‘New World Order’,” Journal of International Affairs, Vol. 75, No. 2 (2023), https://jia.sipa.columbia.edu/content/ukraine-and-end-new-world-order; Faisal Devji, “Ukraine, Gaza, and the International Order,” Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, February 6, 2024, https://quincyinst.org/research/ukraine-gaza-and-the-international-order/.

[2] David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Mark A. Milley and Eric Schmidt, “America Isn’t Ready for the Wars of the Future,” Foreign Affairs, August 5, 2024, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/ai-america-ready-wars-future-ukraine-israel-mark-milley-eric-schmidt.

[3] Valerii Zaluzhnyi, “Ukraine’s commander-in-chief on the breakthrough he needs to beat Russia,” The Economist, November 1, 2023, https://www.economist.com/europe/2023/11/01/ukraines-commander-in-chief-on-the-breakthrough-he-needs-to-beat-russia; Pieter Garicano, Grace Mappes, and Frederick W. Kagan, “Positional Warfare in Alexander Svechin’s Strategy” (Washington D.C.: The Institute for the Study of War, April 2024).

[4] Valerii Zaluzhnyi, “Modern Positional Warfare and How to Win in It”, October 31, 2023, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/32129-24-zaluzhny-modern-positional-warfare-and-how-win-i-t-economist-website.

[5] Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds, “Ukraine at War: Paving the Road from Survival to Victory” (London: Royal United Services Institute, July 2022), 7; Shashank Joshi, “The war in Ukraine shows how technology is changing the battlefield,” The Economist, July 3, 2023, https://www.economist.com/special-report/2023/07/03/the-war-in-ukraine-shows-how-technology-is-changing-the-battlefield.

[6] Patrick Tucker, “Ukraine’s Western Arms Have Inflicted ‘Significant Damage’ On Russian Supply, Communications Lines, Top US Officer Says,” Defense One, September 8, 2022, https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2022/09/ukraines-western-arms-have-inflicted-significant-damage-russian-supply-communications-lines-top-us-officer-says/376908/; Mark Espikopos, “No magic US weapon left for offensive Ukraine victory,” Responsible Statecraft, February 1, 2024, https://responsiblestatecraft.org/us-weapons-ukraine/.

[7] Todd A. Schmidt, “The Russia-Ukraine Conflict Laboratory: Observations Informing IAMD,” Military Review, Vol. 104, Space and Missile Defense Special Edition (2024), 22–30; Randy Noorman, “The Return of the Tactical Crisis,” Modern War Institute, March 27, 2024, https://mwi.westpoint.edu/the-return-of-the-tactical-crisis/; Stephan Pikner, “Leveraging Multi-Domain Military Deception to Expose the Enemy in 2035,” Military Review, Vol. 101, No. 2 (2021), 81–87.

[8] Zaluzhnyi, “Ukraine’s commander-in-chief on the breakthrough he needs to beat Russia.”

[9] Jack Watling, The Arms of the Future: Technology and Close-Combat in the Twenty-First Century (London: Bloomsbury, 2023), 15–28; “A New Era of Transparent Warfare Beckons,” The Economist, February 18, 2022, https://www.economist.com/briefing/2022/02/18/a-new-era-of-transparent-warfare-beckons; Headquarters, “FM 3-0 Operations” (Washington DC: Department of the Army, October 2022), 6–12; Randy Noorman, “The Russian Way of War in Ukraine: A Military Approach Nine Decades in the Making,” Modern War Institute at West Point,  May 15, 2023, https://mwi.westpoint.edu/the-russian-way-of-war-in-ukraine-a-military-approach-nine-decades-in-the-making/ It is important to note that the “transparent battlefield” has been envisioned for at least three decades, see B.R. Isbell, “The Future of Surprise on the Transparent Battlefield,” in Brian Holden Reid (ed.), The Science of War: Back to First Principles (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 145–60. One could even argue that original introduction of balloons and aeroplanes led to similar exaggerated expectations, just like the emergence of radar, sonar etc. It is likely that such debates will persist at any point in time in the future.

[10] William J. Perry, “Annual Report to the President and the Congress,” (Washington DC: US Department of Defense, March 1996), 148–49; “DARPA Seeks New Image Understanding Tools for Battlefield Awareness,” Inside the Army, Vol. 8, No. 18 (1996), 19; Colin Gandy, “Time is Always a Constraint: Transforming Headquarters Organization and Employment for the Multi-Domain Battle Environment,” Small Wars Journal, July 20, 2017, https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/time-is-always-a-constraint-transforming-headquarters-organization-and-employment-for-the-m.

[11] “Summary of the Joint All-Domain Command & Control (JADC2) Strategy,” (Washington DC: US Department of Defense, March 2022), 2.

[12] Sean Carberry, “Army’s Project Convergence Goes on the Offensive,” National Defense, March 18, 2024, https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2024/3/18/armys-project-convergence-goes-on-the-offensive; Megan Eckstein and Colin Demarest, “Project Overmatch: US Navy preps to deploy secretive multidomain tech,” Defense News, December 8, 2022, https://www.defensenews.com/outlook/2022/12/05/project-overmatch-us-navy-preps-to-deploy-secretive-multidomain-tech/; James C. Kitfield, “On ABMS, Air Force Steers Between Status Quo and ‘Boiling the Ocean’,” Air & Space Forces Magazine, March 16, 2023, https://www.airandspaceforces.com/abms-air-force-status-quo-boiling-the-ocean/.

[13] Headquarters, “FM 3-0 Operations,” (Washington DC: Department of the Army, October 2022).

[14] Ibid; Dwight “Buzz” Phillips, “Multi-Domain Operations: Passing the Torch” (The Hague: The Hague Center for Strategic Studies, November 2023), 3.

[15] Davis Ellison and Tim Sweijs, “Breaking Patterns: Multi-Domain Operations and Contemporary Warfare” (The Hague: The Hague Center for Strategic Studies, September 2023).

[16] Alex Vershinin, “The Attritional Art of War: Lessons from the Russian War on Ukraine,” Royal United Services Institute, March 18, 2024, https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/attritional-art-war-lessons-russian-war-ukraine.

[17] Ellison and Sweijs, “Breaking Patterns,” 39.

[18] Dmitry (Dima) Adamsky, “The Two Marshalls: Nikolai Ogarkov, Andrew Marshall and the Revolution in Military Affairs,” in Hal Brands (ed.) The New Makers of Modern Strategy: From the Ancient World to the Digital Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023), 895–917.

[19] Michael G. Vickers and Robert Martinage, “The Revolution in War,” (Washington DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, December 2004), 9; Rebecca Grant, “The Second Offset,” Air & Space Forces Journal, June 24, 2016, https://www.airandspaceforces.com/article/the-second-offset/. It is worth noting that some authors have located RMA’s roots even at earlier point, namely following the End of World War II. See Carlo Alberto Cuocho, “The Revolution in Military Affairs: Theoretical Utility and Historical Evidence” Research Paper No. 142 (Athens: Research Institute for European and American Studies, April 2010), 23–24.

[20] Adamsky, “The Two Marshalls,” 898.

[21] Vickers and Martinage, “The Revolution in War,” 11–12.

[22] Adamsky, “The Two Marshalls,” 900–2.

[23] Ibid., 901; Vickers and Martinage, “The Revolution in War,” 12–14.

[24] Elinor C. Sloan, Modern Military Strategy: An Introduction. Revised and Updated Second Edition (Oxon: Routledge, 2017), 123.

[25] Ibid., 128–131.

[26] Adamsky, “The Two Marshalls,” 902; Sloan, Modern Military Strategy, 128–34.

[27] Vickers and Martinage, “The Revolution in War,” 75–76.

[28] Andrew Krepinevich, Barry Watts, and Robert Work, “Meeting the Anti-Access and Area-Denial Challenge” (Washington DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, May 2003); Fabian-Lucas Romero Meraner, “China’s Anti-Access/Area Denial Strategy,” The Defence Horizon Journal, February 9, 2023, https://tdhj.org/blog/post/china-a2ad-strategy/. However, critics have long noted that the A2/AD has become noted that means many things in vastly different contexts, see John Richardson, “Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson: Deconstructing A2AD,” The National Interest, October 3, 2016, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/chief-naval-operations-adm-john-richardson-deconstructing-17918; Robert Dalsjö, Christofer Berglund, Michael Jonsson, “Bursting the Bubble – Russian A2/AD in the Baltic Sea Region: Capabilities, Countermeasures, and Implications” (Stockholm: Swedish Defence Research Agency/FOI, March 2019); Michael Kofman, “It’s Time to Talk About A2/AD: Rethinking the Russian Military Challenge,” War on the Rocks, September 5, 2019, https://warontherocks.com/2019/09/its-time-to-talk-about-a2-ad-rethinking-the-russian-military-challenge/.

[29] Phillips, “Passing the Torch,” 1.

[30] Headquarters, “FM 3-0,” I-3.

[31] Ibid., I-2.

[32] Phillips, “Passing the Torch,” 3.

[33] Patrick Sanders, “General Sir Patrick Sanders, Chief of the General Staff, opens the RUSI Land Warfare Conference with his speech,” British Army, June 28, 2022, https://www.army.mod.uk/news-and-events/news/2022/06/rusi-land-warfare-conference-cgs-speech/.

[34] Davis Ellison and Tim Sweijs, “Empty Promises? A Year Inside the World of Multi-Domain Operations,” War on the Rocks, January 22, 2024, https://warontherocks.com/2024/01/empty-promises-a-year-inside-the-world-of-multi-domain-operations/.

[35] Ibid.

[36] “NATO’s Ambition to Adopt a Common Approach to Multi-Domain Operations: Overcoming Key Challenges,” Battlespace, October 12, 2023, https://battle-updates.com/natos-ambition-to-adopt-a-common-approach-to-multi-domain-operations-overcoming-key-challenges/.

[37] Murielle Delaporte, “Supporting multi-domain operations: ‘Thinking And Living Through MDO’,” Eurosatory, March 07, 2024, https://www.eurosatory.com/en/supporting-multi-domain-operations-thinking-and-living-through-mdo/.

[38] Ellison and Sweijs, “Breaking Patterns.”

[39] Ibid., 26.

[40] Joseph Clark, “Hicks Announces Delivery of Initial CJADC2 Capability,” DOD News, February 21, 2024, https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/3683482/hicks-announces-delivery-of-initial-cjadc2-capability/; Sean Carberry, “Special Report: Joint All-Domain Command, Control A Journey, Not a Destination,” National Defense, October 7, 2023, https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2023/7/10/joint-all-domain-command-control-a-journey-not-a-destination.

[41] Timothy J. Rizza, “Militärische Täuschung auf dem Multi-Domänen Gefechtsfeld” (BA Thesis, Military Academy at ETH Zurich, April 2024), 20.

[42] Kofman, “A Bad Romance.”

[43] Ellison and Sweijs, “Empty Promises.”

[44] “Danish government wants to spend $20.6 billion on defense over 10 years,” AP, May 30, 2023; Ebad Ahmed, “Danish army struggling to finance basic expenses due to austerity measures: State news,” Anadolu Agency, July 17, 2024, https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/danish-army-struggling-to-finance-basic-expenses-due-to-austerity-measures-state-news/3277843.

[45] Franklin D. Kramer, Ann M. Dailey, and Joslyn A. Brodfuehrer, “NATO Multidomain Operations: Near- and Medium-Term Priority Initiatives,” (Washington DC: Atlantic Center, 2023).

[46] Watling, The Arms of the Future, 17.

[47] Headquarters, “FM 3-0.”

[48] Planungsamt der Bundeswehr, “Multidomain Operations für die Bundeswehr: Eine kurze Einführung (Berlin: Planungsamt der Bundeswehr, November 2023), 12.

[49] Ibid.

[50] Huangzheng Zhu et al., “Multispectral camouflage for infrared, visible, lasers and microwave with radiative cooling,” Nature Communications, Vol. 12, No. 1805 (2021).

[51] Elisabeth Gosselin-Malo, “France orders 3,000 camouflage nets for cloaking foxhole radio signals,” Defense News, February 28, 2024, https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2024/02/28/france-orders-3000-camouflage-nets-for-cloaking-foxhole-radio-signals/.

[52] Lucas Ballerstedt and Sarah Trösch, “Multi-spectral camouflage modules from the 3D printer – a successful research project between Switzerland and Germany,” armasuisse, May 30, 2024, https://www.ar.admin.ch/en/3d-printer-camouflage.

[53] Thomas Bachmann, “Tricksen, Täuschen und Verschleiern: Gummipanzer in der Ukraine,” ASMZ, Vol. 189, No. 8 (2023), 20–22; Chris Panella, “A ‘decoy arms race’ is playing out in Ukraine, where deception is getting harder and troops have to treat fakes like they’re real to fool the enemy,” Business Insider, October 2, 2023, https://www.businessinsider.com/decoy-arms-race-playing-out-ukraine-harder-fake-tanks-weapons-2023-10.

[54] Jorge L. Rivero, “Decoy Warfare: Lessons and Implication from the War in Ukraine,” USNI Proceedings, Vol. 150, No. 4 (2024), https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2024/april/decoy-warfare-lessons-and-implication-war-ukraine.

[55] Melissa Bell, Daria Martina Tarasova and Pierre Bairin, “True to life but without the price tag: The decoy weapons Ukraine wants Russia to destroy,” CNN, September 12, 2023, https://edition.cnn.com/2023/09/11/world/ukraine-russia-decoy-weapons-intl/index.html.

[56] “A former EW pilot shares the 10 best forms of jamming,” Hush-Kit, April 6, 2024, https://hushkit.net/2024/04/06/a-former-ew-pilot-shares-the-10-best-forms-of-electronic-warfare-in-aerial-warfare/; Stephan Pikner, “Leveraging Multi-Domain Military Deception to Expose the Enemy in 2035,” Military Review, Vol. 101, No. 2 (2021), 82.

[57] Edward Geist and Marjory Blumenthal, “Military Deception: AI’s Killer App?,” War on the Rocks, October 23, 2019, https://warontherocks.com/2019/10/military-deception-ais-killer-app/.

[58] Pikner, “Leveraging Multi-Domain Military Deception to Expose the Enemy in 2035,” 82.

[59] Trent Hone, “Sea Control and Command of the Sea Remain Essential,” USNI Proceedings, Vol. 147, No. 11 (2021), https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2021/november/sea-control-and-command-sea-remain-essential.

[60] Ching Chang, “The Nature of Sea Control and Sea Denial,” CIMSEC, September 12, 2018,  https://cimsec.org/the-nature-of-sea-control-and-sea-denial/.

[61] Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, “Naval Doctrine Publication 1 Naval Warfare” (Washington DC: Department of the Navy, March 1994), 26.

[62] Ibid.

[63] Dahl, “Net-centric before Its Time,” 114.

[64] Aube in 1885, cited in Theodore Ropp, The Development of a Modern Navy: French Naval Policy 1871–1904, ed. Stephen S. Roberts (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1987), 17.

[65] Dahl, “Net-centric before Its Time,” 124.

[66] McCranie, “Houthi Attacks in the Red Sea.”

[67] Ibid.

[68] Keith Johnson and Jack Detsch, “Why Can’t the U.S. Navy and Its Allies Stop the Houthis?,” Foreign Policy, July 1, 2024, https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/07/01/houthi-red-sea-shipping-attacks-maritime-security-defense/.

[69] Antonio Calcara et al., “Why Drones Have Not Revolutionized War,” 144–46; Clark, “The Emerging Era in Undersea Warfare,” 15.

[70] T.X. Hammes, “The Tactical Defense Becomes Dominant Again,” Joint Forces Quarterly, No. 103 (2021), 11–12.

[71] Robert M. Ryder, “Domain Awareness Superiority Is the Future of Military Intelligence,” Military Review, Vol. 101, No. 6 (2021), 67–74; Planungsamt der Bundeswehr, “Multidomain Operations für die Bundeswehr,” 12

[72] Dilan Swift, “Deception in All that You Do,” USNI Proceedings, Vol. 150, No. 4 (2024), https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2024/april.

[73] Fabian Villalobos and Scott Savitz, “Assemble the Bodyguard of Lies: Strengthening US Military Deception Capabilities,” Modern War Institute, April 11, 2024, https://mwi.westpoint.edu/assemble-the-bodyguard-of-lies-strengthening-us-military-deception-capabilities/.

[74] NATO, “Multinational Projects,” Media Backgrounder (Brussels: NATO HQ, February 2014).

[75] George Allison, “Alliance forces shift from expeditionary ops to defence,” UK Defence Journal, October 18, 2024, https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/alliance-forces-shift-from-expeditionary-ops-to-defence/.