The joint U.S. Army/U.S. Marine Corps white paper, “Multi-Domain Battle: Combined Arms for the 21st Century,” dated 24 February 2017, outlining their initial thoughts on the concept is available online at the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) website.
TRADOC also has a page devoted specifically to Multi-Domain Battle.
What do you think about those five domains, specifically land, air, space, cyberspace and maritime? I’m curious specifically about the bundling that sometimes happens, air + space = aerospace, or unbundling, maritime = surface + undersea. Are submarines are sufficiently different in their operational nature to warrant their own domain, or shall a subdomain of some kind be used for analysis?
Furthermore, while I understand the importance of having troops and equipment prepared for cyber-warfare, my thought is that it might be best considered as network links in the physical world, and malicious software is a type of payload that travels along the EM spectrum at the speed of light. If it can be put into this context, then it might become a little more transparent, and analysis can be more easily conducted on effects of cyber attacks on “physical world” objects, and thus we might be able to come up with answers to questions about whether cyber actions warrant “physical” replies. Many predict that the virtual world and physical world will blur in the future, so interoperability and analysis of forces across these domain boundaries becomes fairly important.
This is a good question. I tend to think of domains as an abstraction mainly useful for breaking down the distinctions between them. After all, submarines not only interact with naval vessels, but with aircraft, and with land targets they can strike with missile weapons. Technology seems to be making the domains less exclusive with each passing day.
I agree that physical nature of weapons is less important than their effects. I prefer the description of fires as kinetic and non-kinetic, as opposed to differentiating them by air, land, sea, cyber, space, or information domains. What is really more important is their effects. There is a concept in maneuver warfare, usually attributed to the Russians, known as the interchangeability of fire and maneuver. A combat force can be destroyed in a military sense by being overrun by an enemy force, or by being decimated by an artillery strike. I think this can be extended to kinetic and non-kinetic fires as well. The battlefield effects of a cyber attack can be similar to a kinetic one, even if the impact is not physical. A combat unit can be surprised by having is communication networks taken down by a cyber attack, or it can be surprised by an attack from an unexpected direction. A missile strike launched from a submarine is no different from one launched by aircraft from standoff range, and so forth.
Hi Shawn,
Did you happen to save this paper? The joint U.S. Army/U.S. Marine Corps white paper, “Multi-Domain Battle: Combined Arms for the 21st Century,” dated 24 February 2017
I seem not to be able to download from online.
If you have, could you please share?
Regards
Greg
Greg, yes I did save a copy. You can download it here.