The Future of War, and How It Affects YOU (Multi-Domain Operations) - Smarter Every Day 211

• Hey, it's me, Destin. This is hard to explain. So let me just start here. Everyone has a unique world view, and that world view is shaped by different perspectives. Perspectives are shaped by how you choose to spend your time.

For the past 15 years, I have been a federal employee, specifically something called a Department of Defense civil servant, and as part of that, I took an oath to defend the Constitution against all threats foreign and domestic. I've been using math and science to do just that. I've been doing that in the role of something called a Missile Flight Test Engineer for the Army Test Evaluation Command. We, the men and women of the Army Test Evaluation Command, have been tasked with a job of protecting soldiers by testing their equipment to make sure that if someone's gonna use an offensive system against them, they can defend themselves.

In order to do that, you must first become an expert on the offensive systems. Does that make sense? This is the part that's hard to explain, but for the last however long, I've been learning how to use these systems. For example, this is me operating a mortar, and I have to learn everything about this thing. This is me operating a Mini gun. Now, it looks like you're just shooting, but that's not what's happening here. This is me learning failure modes, how to operate it, the capabilities and limitations of the system.

This is me learning common jams that happen, how to clear those jams. There's a lot of stuff going on here. It's not just shooting out of a helicopter. (machine gun firing) This is me in a Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle, firing the M242 25 millimeter cannon. That's something I spent a lot of time doing. The thing that I spent the most time on was missiles and rockets.

This is me participating in a test of a Javelin missile system. - [Soldier] Windows open. 3-2-1 FIRE! (missile hissing) (missile exploding) (missile exploding) - Footage like this goes on forever, and it's hard to believe that I was blessed enough to do this job. I took it very seriously, and my teammates who are still doing it are some of the most amazing people I've ever worked with. The men and women there are brilliant.

Now you know me. The world is interesting and amazing, and one of my favorite things to do is to be handed a complex question and work with a team of competent individuals to arrive at a solution to that, and then afterwards, I love sharing that path of discovery with others. I was talking about perspective earlier, and this is why. Over 15 years, you can kind of understand major trends and shifts that are happening.

For example, in 2003, the main issues were terrorism, okay? Slowly, that started to shift, and I noticed that over time, here in the last couple of years especially, the US is mostly concerned about major state actors. You can imagine how difficult it's been going into work every day, working on huge problems that matter and that have huge implications, and then not being able to talk about it with anyone. Well, this video changes that.

I'm going back to school, right? On my way out the door, I get this call from a four-star general, and he said, "Destin, would you like to film your last mission and after your mission come to my office and interview me, a four-star general, and we'll just talk about what you've been doing all this time and how your little piece of the puzzle fits into the overall bigger picture?" And then he told me that we can make that a publicly releasable video. So yes, I'm excited about this. Let's go to Hawaii, and let me share with you my last mission.

For my last mission, I was told I'd be filming a mission in the Pacific, off the coast of Kauai as a part of RIMPAC. RIMPAC is the Rim of the Pacific exercise. It is the largest naval exercise in the world, and it happens every two years in Hawaii and involves countries from all over the world. Often with RIMPAC, they'll do what they call a sink ex. It's an exercise which involves actually sinking a ship. In this case, the USS Racine.

My job was to fly out in a helicopter, over the Pacific, dozens of miles away from shore, as they're hitting this thing with missiles, rockets, bombs, and torpedoes, all that stuff. I'm gonna be in the helicopter up top, and my job is to get footage of impact. So, that's why I had to go through dunker training with the Marines because that helicopter, if it goes down in the ocean, there's nowhere to land, so you have to be able to figure out how to get out and survive.

It took us about an hour to get out to the ship. We flew out over the water, which felt like forever, and we finally got there, and we realized that we have some challenges. Number one, we had to loiter at 10,000 feet, which meant we were like looking through a soda straw 'cause we had our lenses zoomed all the way in, and with the rocking of the helicopter, that made it really hard to focus on the ship. So I was really concerned that my shot would be out of focus.

Another issue is we didn't know exactly when the impact was going to take place. We knew that there was this window of time, which meant that me, on the high-speed camera, and the Barking Sands Missile Range guy to my left, who was operating a stabilized camera, we had to just focus on the ship the entire time, but we couldn't look at it with our naked eyes. So we didn't know when impact was gonna happen. We had to rely on the pilot to cry out, "Impact! Impact! Impact!" whenever he saw smoke.

So thankfully, he was very attentive, he did his job well, we did our job well, and we were able to capture the images and get the engineers' data that they needed. They wanted to know what the warhead effects were. They were trying to do a specific thing with this specific Norwegian strike missile. It's a Norwegian missile that was operated by the US Army, which in itself is a fascinating thing, using targeting data from other systems. So this is really a big interoperability test. It was fascinating.

That was the first thing that happened, and then over the course of the day, the Racine just got walloped. It was monitored by a US Army Gray Eagle. The Australians hit it with a Harpoon. The USS Olympia, a submarine, they hit it with a Harpoon, and then the Japanese Defense Forces, they hit it with a surface-to-ship missile, so I had another opportunity to film that in slow motion as well, and that was hard because again, we had the same problems.

We didn't know exactly when it was gonna hit because it was so far from shore. I almost missed it. We got it right as it approached the ship, but I was very thankful we got the data that we needed. I wish I had triggered it just not even a hundred milliseconds earlier, but thankfully, we did get the bare-bones data requirement that we needed.

The USS Racine had a really bad day. After we hit it with all these missiles and stuff, some Apaches came all the way out from shore, and they did some work on the deck with rockets and 30 mike-mike, and then after that, the grand finale, a Mark 48 torpedo fired from a US sub, and this is something I will never forget.

In a helicopter, over the USS Racine, we could get down closer because there's not a huge safety fan issue like there was with missiles flying at you. You can be right there on it. I chose to get the 4k camera and just get right on that ship and just hold it as best I could, and boom. You can see it happen. The cool thing to me is you can see that big air bubble form under the ship, and then it just breaks the keel. It's like breaking the spine of the ship, and that thing is done.

Later it was finished off by some aerial stuff, but the USS Racine is no more. I'm gonna level with you here. I speak rocket, I speak missile, and I'm not intimidated by those things. This was an intimidating exercise for me personally because I don't understand how to coordinate battlefield maneuvers.

Now I understand that people in the military do know these things. I don't. I asked my friend Captain Mackenzie Harp to help me get smarter on the topic. So she took me to speak with someone from the Asymmetric Warfare Group, which is a part of TRADOC.

Alright, this is Lieutenant Colonel Davis with TRADOC, Training and Doctrine Command, right? - That's correct. - How does the battlefield work these days? - So right now, when you think about the modern battlefield, what you're thinking about is you're thinking about chess pieces moving on a map. Could we create a new version of that, that is three-dimensional?

Some of us grew up on Star Wars, even my kids grew up on Star Wars. There's a famous scene that keeps getting repeated where they are playing chess with these little creatures on a map, and they're in three dimensions, and they're playing this three-dimensional chess. Well, when I was a kid, I always wanted to play three-dimensional chess. That's what we're trying to do now with this battle space.

So there are five acknowledged domains right now, and arguably there's a sixth, but the five domains, and just go from lowest to highest 'cause it's typically easiest that way. There's sea, there's the land, there's the air, which are our traditional domains, which is why we have Navy for the sea domain, the Army for the land domain, and then the Air Force for the air domain.

And what we've realized in the last couple of years is that there's also the space domain, and then we also have the cyber domain. Because as we all know, the internet has changed the connectivity of our planet, and it's also changed not only the way we exchange information, but the way that we are going to interact with our environment.

• [Destin] So you're saying the battlefield is not land, with Abrams tanks, or sea with a ship or something like that, or an airplane flying overhead. You're saying it's more than that now? - Yes. - [Destin] The battlefield is different? - The operational space has changed, just like the world has changed.

• Like a futuristic commander, he could be fighting a cyber war or cyber battle to his left, and he can have a naval battle to his right, and he's also thinking about the air battle. So he could be fighting multiple battles at once in the same conflict? - Absolutely. - [Destin] And that's called what? - Multi-domain operations, and then you would be doing cross-domain maneuver within that multi-domain operation.

• [Destin] Explain a cross-domain maneuver. - We in the military would define a maneuver as the ability to shoot and move, and often we add communicate to that because you can't do one without the other. The ability to shoot, move, and communicate within multiple domains.

Air, land, sea battles, our traditional way of thinking of warfare, is a cross-domain maneuver when we are shooting from the sea through the air to the land. That is a cross-domain maneuver. Now we have soldiers who have the ability to see through the cyber domain, by using the space domain, i.e., a satellite, in order to conduct a ground movement inside of a city.

• You are working with how people interact with each of these domains. I need to find the person who is basically playing the chess game. And who would that be? - So, this is Four Star General Robert Brown, which is a really big deal. Sir, thank you. - Well, I don't know about that but, yeah. - For even considering talking to me. What I've noticed, when I started 15 years ago, we were fighting insurgencies, - Right. - Terrorism, things like that. - Right. - It's changing.

• Yeah, sure. - [Destin] So from your perspective, what I've learned about talking to all these other folks that work for you is something called multi-domain - Operations. - [Destin] Operations. - Yeah. - [Destin] And can you explain that to me? - So multi-domain operations, I will tell you it's, I am positive, one thing I am positive, it's the way of the future in warfare and we're either going to do like we are now, innovate and move towards multi-domain operations, to either win a conflict in the future or prevent it because nobody'd be stupid enough to fight against us, or we're gonna be forced to do it because we lose someday pretty badly, and we're going to have to do it, and I hope that's not the case.

• [Destin] You're trying to get ahead of the curve. - Get ahead of the curve, not fight last fight but fight the future fight, and in fact, maybe not have to fight because we're so darn good nobody can match us. So this is an evolutionary thing. You go back to the Civil War, the Battle of Vicksburg, the Army had to work with the Navy in a river in that case, to win at Vicksburg.

• [Destin] Grant actually diverted the river. - There you go. Exactly. - [Destin] Grant's Canal. - And so you got domains in play there, a little bit of maritime and land. However, things have changed as you know as well as anybody. The world's gotten so complex, and now there are these other domains out there. Cyber, space, I would also count the human domain as well, I think is the most important.

• [Destin] What do you mean by that? - What I mean by the human domain is that when you look at conflict, it's a contest of wills, and people are involved. It's about people. I mean, there may be machines going against each other, some people say, oh, it'll all be autonomous, AI, and all machines in the future. I certainly don't believe that.

There'll be autonomous vehicles, there'll be a lot that's done, but people are always gonna have to be involved, that's the nature of conflict and so it's influence over those people. What we're seeing today is, you can influence someone before you're even at conflict with them, and you can influence them in the cyber domain, and you can influence them in the space domain, and you can influence, and there are no boundaries in these domains.

• Forgive me, Sir. You're a four-star General, - Yeah. - You're a very important individual (General laughing), but I'm a simple man, and so I need it broken down for me. - Okay. - For example, I've been keeping up with the news and I know that there's huge social media campaigns that occur before an actual battle ever occurs now. - Right. - Is that true?

• Well, they call it the gray zone effect. You look at what some nations are doing. Russia's pretty darn good at it. China as well where, in what we used to call Phase Zero, pre-conflict. I don't like that term at all. There's always gonna be competition, and we're in a hyper-competition now, always. You're exactly right. They will be working to shape and influence people's perceptions before a conflict even occurs.

What happens is, it's a fait accompli that before we even fire a bullet, they've already won. If you look at Russia and Ukraine, little bit of that. We call them little green men. They took off their patches, claimed they weren't Russians, just to put just enough doubt, cyber stuff happening, events happening, and it wasn't quite, just staying right below the threshold of conflict but yet - [Destin] And then as soon as it was time to turn conflict, it was already over. - Already over. They already had the territory, they already had what they wanted, now they hold onto it.

So this is new. There are other aspects that are new. I would tell you that the speed of human velocity, of human interaction, is at a rate never before seen. You can put out a video and millions look at it. When I was your age, there was no way I could get millions of people to look at anything. I have a private that does something in, I have 106,000 people in the US Army in the Pacific. I have a private that does something that's on CNN tonight, worldwide impact, influence. Good or bad. That's changed.

The speed of perception. I was talking this one time, and someone confronted me and said, well, things moved fast in the Civil War, by telegraph, things moved fast. They might have moved fast; they didn't diffuse rapidly. Now you can diffuse. Send a tweet, and halfway around the world, billions of people are paying attention to it, right? So this has an impact in conflict, it has an impact in everything in our society. Business, sports, military conflict, it's a huge impact.

So you've got all the domains: air, land, sea, space, and I think around all of them is this human domain that is the most complex, the most important. Let's get back to multi-domain operations; we're going all over the place. I wanna try and simplify it best I can for you. It's an evolutionary process.

Over time we've had air, land, air, land, sea. We're evolving, but it's a revolutionary impact where you're maneuvering in all domains to a position of relative advantage. So what we were just talking about was maneuvering in cyber to a position of relative advantage pre-conflict, maneuvering in space to a position of relative advantage, and to take advantage of multi-domain operations, if you truly work together, one of our strengths, we're more joint than any force in the world, the US Military.

We're still not joint enough. We've got to work where it's not the exception where we're working really well together, not a joint integration, I'm sorry joint interdependence, but joint integration. - Let me ask you this. So yesterday, I was over the water, watching an engagement by a foreign nation, engaging a target with information from US satellites provided on a different type of communication network. I just see the engagement. I'm a missile tester. I test the missile, but I don't get to see the chess games. I'm a little too close to the board; I'm the pawn.

• So think about in the past if the services are in stove pipes, and you can do things in your service pretty well, but if you have a menu of options of all the service capabilities, like you saw yesterday. There was a missile that launched from the land, could destroy a ship at sea, and it was controlled by an Army element, but using Navy, Air Force, Marine, and as you mentioned, some national satellite means, things never before used to pull it together and enable it to talk and work together; that gives you more options against an adversary.

Anybody would want more options. It allows you to present multiple dilemmas to an adversary instead of a linear, here comes the land force, here's the maritime forces, here's the air; we're working together, it's very linear and predictable. It's very unpredictable, multi-domain operations.

• [Destin] So that's the goal: to be unpredictable. - Unpredictable, present multiple dilemmas to your adversary that they have to deal with, and then multiple options to your leadership, and that's what you saw, a little taste of yesterday. Now picture if that ship is trying to skirt into the littorals to avoid our strength at sea that our Navy, the best in the world has, so they're trying to skirt around it.

Well, the Army can engage that ship now and destroy it, so now it has to go back out to sea and be right in our engagement area, where we're going to destroy them. So you're pairing up together, all domains, maneuvering to a position of relative advantage and each domain working together to create those windows of opportunity where you can dominate your adversary.

The other good thing is, and the reason I talk about the human dimension, the human domain in all this, you can't do this if you can't empower people. - [Destin] What do you mean? - If you've got someone that you tell them a task and that's all they can do, this would never work. You have to have the ability to empower, what we call in the Army mission command, but the other services have similar versions, where I can give someone an outcome I want. They figure out how to get there, they'll amaze you with what they do.

Talented young leaders, our people, are our advantage. The best non-commissioned officers in the world. The best leaders that are taught to thrive in ambiguity and chaos. - Multi-domain battle, we have multiple layers are playing 4-D chess, but you're saying it's like the chess pieces are alive themselves. - Yeah. - And they can think on their own. - Good analogy. - [Destin] What move is best? - Yeah, it's not you.

There's no longer the central figure moving that piece; it moves too rapidly. Those pieces are empowered and can move themselves but work together and know how to work so they're integrated because they practice together all the time, just like we were doing yesterday, and just like you saw, historically for the first time, doing that on a regular basis.

You really develop a web of options that you can use to keep an adversary completely off guard and you're completely unpredictable on that. So you're using all domains, all angles you can, to present those multiple dilemmas, and that requires incredible joint integration. That's not natural 'cause we all grow up in stove pipes; 37 years I've been Army, trained in Army schools.

I did joint time; I was on the Joint Staff and stuff, but I think of an Army solution first. So you gotta get out of those stove pipes. Maybe there's a better air solution. Maybe a better cyber solution. Maybe a better maritime solution. - I think I see what's happening right here, Sir. This is US Army Pacific. - Right. - You're the guy in charge of the 4D chess board? - Yeah.

Well, portions of it maybe. - Portions of it. If multi-domain operations, we've got land, sea, space, air, cyber. Is this video a weapon? - Absolutely. - What? So I just made a weapon? - Yeah, pretty much. Well, if it can help folks understand, number one, if it can deter those that would do us harm, it's a hell of a weapon, and if it can help those who are working this understand it a little better, support it a little better, then it's a heck of a weapon.

Yeah, I guess you could almost say that, that's why you're doing this. Pretty clever with these analogies here, yeah. - I don't know what to do with this information now. That's pretty amazing. So war is changing. - Yeah, there's no question, we're at an inflection point, and some of the things, the reasons we go to war may be not changing, but the character of war, with technology, I mean, significantly changing.

• I'll be honest; when I was growing up, the stereotype of an American soldier was a tough person with big muscles that could run far and pick up big things. - Yeah. - Now it's a hyper-intelligent individual? - I wouldn't go away; physical prowess is key for a soldier, 'cause it's still tough work.

And I would say in all the services, being physically fit is still key. In fact, we just developed a new Army combat physical fitness test that's excellent. It helps you prepare you for what you will face in combat. So you still have to be physically fit; you've got to be more of a holistic person, but you've got to learn, and I wouldn't say it's hyper-intelligence; I'd say it's the ability to solve a complex problem in a timely manner with a creative solution, the ability to thrive in ambiguity and chaos, that's not necessarily hyper-intelligence.

That's the ability to make the right decision, know when you have enough information, know when you don't have enough information. It's common sense, it is intelligence, but it's training education that we have to do, and we're doing it differently than we did in the past. We might have told somebody in the past, here's your task, here are the exact steps you need to take to accomplish it. Shouldn't do that anymore. Here's the outcome I want, you figure out how to get there. That's the difference.

• War is changing. Thank you very much for your time. - [General] Absolutely. - I feel like you're the game master or something. - I don't know about that. - There's a huge, not a game; war is not a game. - One thing I am positive though is if we do this right, if we truly come together and integrate in a joint manner, as the United States, along with our international allies, are so key, that's why, as you saw, we had a Japanese Ground Self-Defense Force involved and our great allies around the world are critical.

We're not gonna do anything alone. But if we come together and we truly get multi-domain operations right, it'll be an absolute key to peace and stability in the future because no one would be foolish enough, and some of these nations we've been talking about, many out there, they don't have the people, the ability to empower people, the way we do, and it's that American Spirit that is a huge advantage. It has been for a long time.

We can't handcuff those folks. We gotta empower them, and that's what multi-domain operations is all about, and I sure wouldn't want to go against us when we do it right. Nobody wants to fight. The best thing would be again, the deterrence where we never have to fight because nobody'd be foolish enough to go against us. So that's the best thing.

I thank you for being interested in this, flying around in a helicopter, above a missile being fired, several missiles being fired. - [Destin] It was awesome. - Pretty gutsy, and coming out and seeing some of these things, just a small taste of it, got a lot to connect, a lot of work to do, pull all the pieces together, but if anybody can do it, the United States military can.

I feel very confident, and I'm very proud of the United States Army leading the way with multi-domain operations. - The General mentioned that this video could be a weapon, and I hope it is. I hope it's a countermeasure. The one thing I want you to take away from this video is that multi-domain operations are the future of warfare. I find it fascinating that General Brown, a four-star General, a person who wields incredible military might, is concerned about the cyber domain.

You heard him say it, right? Several times. The cyber domain and the human element affected by the cyber domain. Let's think about what's different about the cyber domain. If you roll up into a bay in a ship and you start shooting stuff, people are gonna notice, right? But how do maneuvers take place in the cyber domain? They're more subversive than that, right? People don't wear uniforms on the internet. Surfninja385 is not declaring his intent to be hostile before he does something.

Maneuvers and actions in the cyber domain don't make loud noises. This type of conflict is based on deception, and the most important deception is to convince you that you're not at conflict. Heck, even a couple days ago, I was tweeting something asking about this stuff, and I was accused pretty quickly of tinfoil hattery. I think the reason that is, is because we like to think about this place that we gather, the internet place here, as just a fun, consequence-free place where we can like and upvote and comment and subscribe and all that kind of stuff, but come on.

We can all feel it; we just don't know how to say it. I feel this us versus them thing, and I've seen really smart friends fall into it, and I'm guilty myself. Something's happening. I just had a four-star General tell me that the cyber domain, and specifically, the human elements, us, affected within that cyber domain, is one of the five most important components to modern warfare.

There's an old saying from when I was a kid: knowing is half the battle, and it totally applies here. Think about it. Just knowing that the cyber domain is a battle space and I'm in it, is huge. So what about the other half of the battle? Straight-up. I believe the biggest threat right now is division. They're gonna find the division within our society, and they're gonna try to amplify it.

I would like to submit for your consideration a countermeasure. A way to get through this modern bombardment, in this new battle space that we haven't experienced before. If they're trying to divide us, I think the way to get around this is proactive, intentional unity. We can all do this. We all need to be more conscious of what types of content we're consuming online. What are we liking? What are we sharing? How is that affecting our minds?

Is it affecting the way we treat people, both online and offline? If we extend patience and political grace, not just to those people we like, but also to those with whom we disagree, these maneuvers in the cyber domain meant to divide us simply will not work. Political grace, basically the art of disagreeing well. This is the ultimate countermeasure to this kind of attack.

Thanks for watching this video.