School of War - Ep 214: Bryan Clark on the Coming Sensor War with China

Episode Date: July 15, 2025

Bryan Clark, senior fellow and director of the Center for Defense Concepts and Technology at Hudson Institute, joins the show to talk about how a war with China could play out. ▪️ Times    �� •      01:51 Introduction     •      02:00 Submariner     •      10:10 Environmental conditions       •      12:40 State of play      •      20:04 Complacency           •      23:36 Hellscape          •      32:14 Cultural differences      •      37:20 Party control     •      43:40 Degraded environment       •      48:02 Practice now     •      51:45 Deterrence Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

My guest today is giving really serious thought to the nature of war fighting in the Western Pacific in the event of a war with China. In a clash of two modern militaries, each of which will open the fight with excellent visibility of the theater, due to a wide proliferation of many different kinds of sensors, obviously each side will target the other side sensors and their ability to command and to control. So how will that work? What are the major iterations likely to be? Are we preparing for an environment where our ability to see, to communicate?

communicate and to command are suddenly degraded. We discuss these issues and actually much more in what was a really interesting conversation. Let's get into it. ground, and he'll fight in the fields and in the streets, but she'll never surrender. For more, follow School of War on YouTube, Instagram, Substack, and Twitter. And feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today, Brian Clark. He's a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. He's the director there of the Center for Defense Concepts and Technology. He spent a lot of time in and around the Navy. Before that, talk a little bit about that. He's the author of numerous articles and publications on defense

concepts that are really important. I think one of the most recent, and the one we'll spend most of our time on today, is a Hudson Institute publication called Winning the Fight for Sensing and Sensemaking. Brian, thank you so much for joining the show. Thanks, Aaron. It's great to be here. How did you grow up? How did you end up in the Navy? Were you press ganged? What actually happened? Well, I'm from Idaho, and there's not a lot of water there, obviously. And when I graduated high school back in the 80s, the economy wasn't great. I was looking for something interesting to do. And so I cast about and the Navy offered an interesting opportunity.

So I enlisted in the Navy and it was going to be a submariner, went and started that program. It went to various training schools and then went to a submarine. And then I was picked up for an officer program while I was there and then went off to college and was able to finish up college and then come back in as an officer and then did another 20-some years after that. But yeah, sort of, you know, just sort of trying to do something interesting. The Navy was a good opportunity. Submarine force and the nuclear power program offered probably the best pay, which was the most attractive element of it back in those days, especially for, you know, young guy who's enlisted and not looking to, you know, necessarily make a lot of money otherwise.

I find it horrifying personally. I mean, I, like, I would go on a sub, you know, if I had to for business, but the idea of spending long periods of time on one, I used to have, I've probably told the story on the show before, but I used to have midshipmen. It's a strangely high proportion of midshipmen who would be undecided. Yeah. And they're always high quality midshipment. Undecided between, not that there's such a thing as low quality. Undecided between submarines and the Marines.

And it's always so confusing to me because it's two incredibly different lifestyles. And I remember my line with them was, okay, well, here's my advice. Go into that closet there and shut the door and come out in a week. Yeah. And let me know how you enjoyed it. Exactly. And if you enjoyed that, then you should totally go submarine. It sounds great. Obviously, you had a different view of the case.

Yeah, well, it seems, yeah, that the closet exercise is maybe a little bit too, you know, constraining. I think that's obviously going to drive people into the Marine Corps, which is probably your goal as a Marine. But the, yes, I mean, you get busy. I mean, it's just like any job, right? So you get out in the submarine and you just sort of after time, get used to the fact that you're inside all the time and that you're just busy doing your work. And I've only, you know, encountered a few times where somebody really had a problem with the claustrophobic nature of being a submarine. In general, just people get so caught up in the work and then, you know, they're, so busy all the time that really don't have time to get too worried about whether I'm seeing

sunlight or not. And so this is from the mid or late 80s through sort of early 20 aughts that you were? Yeah. So I retired in 2013, 20, yeah, around then. And you were on ship or on the submarine as an enlisted guy or did they pluck you out of training to go to? Yeah. So I was, I went to my first submarine, I was waiting to deploy there and then got plucked out to go to an officer training program and then I went off from there into the officer pipeline. Was this attack stuff or ballistic missile stuff? Both. Yes, I was on attack boats and ballistic missile boats over the course of my time.

Mostly, so I did one, I did some time on the Alexander Hamilton, which was a old rumor that had taken its missiles off and was being used basically to train other submariners or train other people in the Navy. And then I was on the Key West for a while. was on the Georgia and the Alabama for a while. So, so kind of did a range of things. The fact that you as an officer kind of went back and forth between the two, maybe indicates that the answer to my next question is going to be no. But I am curious if there's sort of a cultural difference between the two worlds, the worlds of attack submarines out

there, you know, hunting other submarines and doing all kinds of different missions. Oh, yeah. Obviously the boomers, which I can only imagine what it's like to be on one of those things, actually operational, you know, sitting there off the coast of Russia and China, waiting for our I only know it from the movie Crimson Tide. That's my closest. And Hunt for Red October. There's some great movies out of this community. Yeah.

You tell me your actual experience. Yeah, so definitely the attack submarine community is very different. Your schedule is much more variable. And obviously the job is mostly, I mean, it's really not tracking down any of these submarines anymore. So now it's all this. Sometimes you're tracking submarines, sometimes you're gathering intelligence. You know, sometimes you're doing exercises, whether they're other countries.

So it's a much more of a varied mix of things that you do on the attack. submarines, which makes it interesting, but also means it's really a taxi, obviously, because you're always on chart, right? When you're assigned to the boat, you own the boat no matter whether it's in port or not. And so you're basically tethered to it for that entire tour. Whereas if you're on the boomers, the ballistic missile submarines, then you get time off. Basically, once the boat pulls in and you turn it over to the other crew, you're kind of free of the boat's responsibilities for a while. And you get a couple months where you're just sort of doing training and stuff like that. So it's a very different type of person that's got drawn to each

community and then the lifestyle is very different. Why is it that attack submarines are not hunting other submarines that much anymore? It's just because there aren't that many other enemy submarines or the technology's changed? Right. I mean, because it's the Chinese submarine fleet is not that capable yet. They're pretty numerous and they've got a set of quiet ones that are non-nuclear, but they don't deploy very much or very far rather than they deploy plenty, but they don't go very far away. And they don't necessarily create this challenge for U.S. submarines to go chase after them. We usually do anti-submarine warfare against those submarines with a combination of ships and aircraft. And submarines tend to focus more on the Russian threat, which is really some where the submarines bread is buttered.

And then a lot of strike missions, planning for strike missions, intel gathering, all this other stuff, soft special operations insertions. So there's a bunch of other stuff that the attack submarine fleet does, that they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, mission set has gotten much, much larger over the last 20 years. One of the things I always thought would be cool about being in this world, not to slightly contradict myself in my earlier sense of horror, is this sense of the undersea as a real place. Like if you're a land guy like I am or an aviator for that matter, you know, the ocean is sort of flat and you're aware that there is submarine. You're aware that there's an undersea domain.

Like that's an intellect. That's not surprising to anyone who works on strategy or defense stuff. but the idea that it's a real place with like, you know, elevations and neighborhoods and terrain, it has terrain. Right. Right. It matters. That always struck me as like a really kind of cool. I don't know where to take that comment. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's weather. I mean, there's a whole, there's a whole environment under sea that you have to take into account when you're operating there. So it's not, it's just like, you know, being on the surface where you got to take into account terrain, weather, you know, enemy action, enemy positioning, you know, all the things that you have to do above the water. You have to do. below the water. The only advantage is there's fewer things going on into the water, so I don't have to worry about as many non-combatants running around. I don't have to worry about necessarily as what much enemy forces to deal with. So it's an easier battle problem just from a complexity

standpoint, but it's more difficult now because the sensing is much more limited. So you're not able to see very far away and you're often sort of flying blind, which you don't necessarily do above the water. What is the weather factor underwater? We get a lot of currents and changes in temperature and changes in salinity that drive acoustics. So above the water, you know how atmospheric conditions will drive, whether your radar sees 10 miles away or 100 miles away. Same kind of thing happens underwater with sonar. So if the conditions are just right, the sound is bending away from you and no one's going to be able to detect you. But under other conditions, the sound may be channeled from you directly to where your opponent is and they can

pick you up at dozens to hundreds of miles away. So you have to keep you. You have to keep track of the weather in a way that's much more challenging, I think, because you don't have the same sensing capabilities below the water that you do about the water. So it's very difficult sometimes to figure out where am I in the water column and what's the temperature of the water above me and below me and what's the salinity profile look like? All those things drive the acoustic detection ranges that you're likely to experience. That's totally fascinating to me. I've long had this thought. It's sort of like a very simplistic thought, but a grim one, which is the gradual improvement in sonar technology, but just say undersea sensor technology broadly in the way in which the ocean

is increasingly visible, or maybe invisible is the right way to put it. Yeah, so not really. So what's interesting is the environmental conditions still are a big driver in terms of what you can detect. But what new technology has done is made it so I'm able to, I'm more sensitivity, so I'm able to pick up fainter noises farther away. and I'm able to differentiate background noise from the thing I'm looking for much more easily than in the past. And that's really advanced a lot in the last 30 years.

Since I joined the Navy, we've gone from a guy with a headphones having to listen to the sound to figure out what it is, to now that's all done with computers, right? The computer figures out, is this the blade noise off of a submarine or is this a shrimp, a school of shrimp? So that transition has happened. But still, if the acoustic conditions aren't right, you're not going to hear anything, whether you're really sensitive or not. Well, that's good news. The point I was going to make is, I don't know if the average American or even the average person who sort of is broadly speaking in our thing really, really thinks a lot about how the fact that you can't see submarines or find submarines easily is kind of the cornerstone of strategic stability on the planet Earth. And if it were to disappear, the second strike capability would get very vulnerable.

And we would be in a, we would be back in the world of the late 40s, early 50s when they thought they were going to fight a nuclear war kind of any day now. Right. It was all about who pulled the trigger first. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, on that happy thought.

Happy note. Yeah, exactly. Let's transition to what we were actually going to talk about, which is this really, really interesting work you're doing. You're doing all kinds of different interesting work. You wrote something really interesting about that, you know, so-called Hedge Force. Right. Was that last year that that came out? Yeah, last year.

Yeah, but we can talk about that too. But, you know, a recurring theme on this show, and we've had all kinds of smart people come through and talk about it, people like Andrew Kruppanavich and Tom Anken and others is, you know, this, the mature sensor strike complex world in which we live. And I'll ask you to explain that for those who are catching up or who need a reminder. But the state of playing 2025 where what we did in the Gulf War in the early 90s has now been kind of replicated by everyone in their brother, including the people. Chinese. And everyone's trying to think through what that means and how that actually means a war

is going to be fought and where the advantages and disadvantages lie. This is, this is exactly where you are. This is where your work is. So it's, it's kind of the work. It's like the work that seems to me to really matter. For those who want a bit of a catch up, say a little bit about what this state of play is. And then we'll get into this really interesting work you're doing about thinking through the situation in the Western Pacific and what our advantages and disadvantages are. Yeah, that sounds good, Aaron. So back when I, I was working at CSBA, worked at a think tank previous to Hudson. I worked Randy Krepnevich. He hired me there. And we worked on this idea of the mature maritime precision strike regime,

which is a fancy way of saying, what's the world look like when everybody has long range precision weapons and has the sensing capability to be able to target them at long range. So now you've got an environment where China is able to reach out 1,500 miles away and hit a target that's moving like an aircraft carrier with a ballistic missile that in theory can happen today. They haven't demonstrated, but we can assume they have that capability based on what they've tested. But also you see the Houthis who have ballistic missiles, airship ballistic missiles of their own,

that they can target using a combination of spotters and radar and shoot ships in the Red Sea hundreds of miles away from where the launcher is. So this idea of what happens to the world when everybody that wants them can get a hold of precision weapons that can reach hundreds of thousands of miles away and attack targets at enough scale to where you can hold your enemy at risk. You can see in Ukraine how this is played out where you've essentially got the deep fight happening at the same time as the close-in fight. So the deep fight is keeping both sides for being able to get air superiority or be able to really resupply their forces and generate combat power at the scale. They would need to get a decisive victory. So

that deep fight of having those long-range precision weapons is driving the contours of that conflict. And you could see in the Red Sea what happens when that happens out at sea is you now have this ability to keep shipping out of an area that they've been using for hundreds of years. And now in the Western Pacific, that challenge is even more important because China has built a whole strategy around that concept of, I'm going to have long-range precision weapons, they're based in China. You can't attack them without three. threatening my nuclear command of control and architecture for strategic deterrence. And I'm going to use those to threaten your ships and your bases all across the Western Pacific. And if you want to

intervene on Taiwan's behalf, if I invade Taiwan, then I'm going to attack all those forces. And you're not going to be able to intervene. And you'll probably lose a good chunk of your military in the process. So that's the, that's the calculus that China's trying to create for the U.S. and its Western Pacific allies. So just to step back out of the sort of censor strike discussion for a second, then we'll step back into it. When you look at the Western Pacific, you've spent years and years thinking about this. I presume you probably were bobbing around out there for a while as well. You know, what worries you most in terms of our disadvantages and their advantages? And then we'll switch to what some of our advantages are. And that'll take us into your well.

So this kind of gets to you something that Andy Krapinapit would talk about in terms of what are the enduring advantages or disadvantages? So if you do a net assessment of kind of where we stand relative to China, China has this advantage of being the home team, and they get to base everything that they're using on their own territory, and they can co-locate it with their nuclear infrastructure so that we don't feel free to attack it without the potential for massive escalation. So they're able to use that home field advantage to hold at-risk forces at long range.

That creates a huge disadvantage for us because we're the way to. We have to bring everything with us. We have to put it into the theater, even if we can have some basing overseas. Our industrial base is not there. Our people are not there. So it's still, we're fighting a way game, even if we're fighting it from Korea or Japan or Australia. And then, so that's probably our biggest disadvantage. And then one of the other parts of the home field advantage for China is arguably their ability

to have a sensor network and a communication network that is in a lot of cases hardwired, not vulnerable to traditional sort of cyber or electronic warfare attacks. So we can't interdict it in the same way that we might have gone after the Russians. If they were trying to move into Eastern Europe, we could go after their networks. You can't really do that nearly as well with China because they have a lot of redundancy because they're the home team. In terms of our advantages, we could flip, we should flip and do flip the fact that we're the way team into an advantage in some way. So you can look at the fact that we're spread out over the Western Pacific from the tip of Hokkaido to southern part of Australia. We've got forces that are distributed across that entire area, which gives us a lot of maneuver space.

So if you're China, now you have to think about, I have to hold at risk all of that, and I've got to be able to do it at scale that, you know, has allowed me to threaten U.S. forces. So that gives me a lot of challenges from the Chinese perspective. I've got a targeting problem. I got a distribution problem. I got a mass problem that I'm going to generate, depending on how the U.S. forces array themselves. So that's probably a big advantage in our case. And we can exploit that in a way by playing on that by adding to the distribution,

a counter sensing and sense-making campaign, which is kind of where we get to the study that we did. If you can spread your forces out, play the shell game a little bit, so you're not entirely sure where they might be operating on every given day, you might be able to turn that combined with some counter sensing efforts into confusion and uncertainty on the part of the opponent. So that's probably the biggest asymmetry between the two, two sides. And traditionally that being the away team is treated as a vulnerability for U.S.

forces or a weakness. But in this case, we would want to turn that into a strength. The other big advantage I'll say for the U.S. is we're the status quo power. So if you're China and you're trying to change the status quo with Taiwan, you have to, that's a heavy lift to say, I'm going to make a country capitulate to my system or I'm going to invade it and take over the country, which is obviously a heavy lift. And all we need to do is the status quo power is thwarted. that make it difficult enough to where the cost for China, the potential of failure is high enough that they choose to wait. And that's sort of what Aberpaparro's idea is. How do I just continue to sow enough uncertainty on the Chinese side that they choose to continue to defer the attempt

to revise the status quo? So I'd say those are our two big advantages. And you could see how in Indo-Pacific Command, their planning efforts have played on that. On the status quo, You know, this is where it's been really interesting to watch what's going on in Ukraine and also in and around Israel. A lot of which has been heartening on this theme, that is to say, it does seem that like the mature competing sensor strike complexes, they make it really hard to not be seen, and they make it really easy to strike things that move. And that's all to our advantage in the Pacific into their disadvantage. On the other hand, you know, it's not like it's impossible to move. And this is the point I've tried to make, I don't know if you agree with it, but I've made it repeatedly on the show and things I've written.

But particularly, to me, the most striking example is what the Israelis were able to do in Lebanon in the fall of 24 in the combination of high-tech stuff, old-fashioned deception, decapitation to facilitate very old-fashioned maneuver. And my deepest worry is that for as much that we'll get complacent in our advantage of being the status quo power. And then we will become Hezbollah. We will be the Hezbollah in the Western Pacific scenario because they will figure out ways to operate with ambiguity and deception. and cleverness and leverage intel, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and move and move quickly. Right. Yeah, I agree. You can see the U.S. if it gets complacent and believes that, well, it's just too hard

for them to change the status quo. We're going to kind of live on the fact that we've got sufficient, you know, runoff of a speed bump to where they're not likely to try to drive over it. Well, it could turn out like you're seeing already today, and this is Admiral Paparo, to his credit, has brought this up a lot, how they've been routinely taking these exercises and turning them into rehearsals for a potential invasion or blockade. And so we've been doing a lot of war gaming looking at a quarantine scenario for Taiwan, where one of these exercises just kind of turns into a quarantine,

and they just start squeezing Taiwan and hope that the country doesn't have enough resilience to want to put up with that and will capitulate in some way that both China can call it a win, and then they can adopt a different system. So you can see a world in which she doesn't get like the complete invasion with a exchange of flags in Taipei, but he gets enough to where he can say, I've submitted my legacy as reunifying with Taiwan. And we're just sort of left on the sideline,

because we didn't have a good way to counter that quarantine, and we were just sort of left complaining about it and hoping that the international community would rise up to push China back, which is not going to happen. Well, we'll get to this in a few minutes, but this leads into your thinking on using some of the tech that we're talking about sort of below the level of war or before, before.

actual shooting war. So we'll come to that in a second. So, you know, well, let's, let's actually start with war, like the case of war as a paradigm to understand how this all works. And then we'll get to the more complicated, call it what you want, gray zone stuff. The balloon goes up one way or the other. We're fighting. We're fighting in the Taiwan straight. Who knows, we were fighting in the Coral Sea. Didn't the Chinese do like a live fire exercise? They did. They did. They did. They did. Yeah. Yeah. I took the point to be, this is as far as the Imperial Japanese Navy got, and here we are. Right. We're just operating down here. Yeah, we did a war game. in Australia last year that I'm finishing up, we're doing a fourth design study for Australia.

And we did a war game down there last year. And we included a version of that scenario in the war game. So one of the vignettes we had was that, you know, a Chinese amphibious ready group or a surface action group. I guess it was a combination of the two. Came down and was operating around the Australian islands and the coral sea. And they were threatening shipping lanes. What do you do about that? So it's definitely something that the Chinese are starting to play. play with to say, to demonstrate, they've also done operations where they have circumnavigated

Australia to demonstrate that they've got the reach to come down there and threaten Australia. And so if you're Australia, you definitely have to think twice about, you know, whether you're really ready to push back on Beijing when it comes to some other international, you know, confrontation. Yeah, everyone needs to start, if they haven't already, dusting off their operational histories of 1939, 41 through 45. So the balloon goes up, shooting is started. obviously you don't have to be an expert to recognize that we're not going to have these mature

precision strike, sensor strike complexes pummeling away at each other's targets, but leave everyone's sensors alone. Obviously, everyone is going to go after everyone's sensors. Well, actually, that's a premise that probably needs some testing. Do we go after stuff on the mainland? So there's complexities there. But in general, we're all going to want to go after each other's sensors because why not? And also, we're going to want to go after each other's command and control systems that collate sensor data and turn it into targeting, et cetera. How does that actually work? How does that iterate? This is really where you're thinking. What should we be thinking about when we're thinking about everyone attacking each other's sensors and each other's, you call it sense making? Right. Yeah.

So the, so I just one thing I'll say at the start is this idea that April Paparo's been advancing and they've done a lot of work on that's called the Hellscape, which is what we called the hedge force in our study from last year. That's intended to play on this idea that we're the status quo power, all we need to do is make it harder for the Chinese to invade Taiwan. And so the idea behind that is you put a bunch of uncrued systems in the Taiwan straight, they slow down the invasion, they make it more difficult. And then that an accommodation of long-range fires from US submarines and US bombers should be enough to make it so that that first landing cannot succeed or can't get a lodgment

ashore. They can't get the troops ashore to be able to make their way all the way to Taipei. And the idea is if we can do that, then we need to combine that with this counter-sensing effort because we have to undermine their ability to hold at risk the other forces that we would now need to bring in if we want to continue the fight because then the Chinese will go after the carriers and the bases where the tactical aircraft are operating in Japan and all the way down to Australia. So they'll go after those other targets as soon as they get the opportunity to.

So this counterscensing campaign is designed to go after the sensors they would use to identify which air bases do I target. Where are the airplanes? Where are the airplanes on the bases? is where are the ships at sea, what's the exact solution that they need to be able to shoot them. So what's likely to happen in this fight is as soon as they decide they want to go after Taiwan, the Chinese are likely to use electronic warfare, probably to go after a lot of our space-based sensors.

The Chinese have been made big investments in space-based electronic warfare. So you go up and you jam the sensing, the satellite's ability to communicate with anybody else. So your geostationary signals intelligence satellite that you'd be using to find all the Chinese ships, that's going to get jammed. It can't talk to anybody else now. So even though it's up there, it's useless. And we'll do some of the same thing. We'll use electronic warfare. The U.S. has a lot of ground-based systems or surface systems they would use for that also to try to cut off access to the space, to the military space layer from those terrestrial systems that need that target information.

What's probably not going to happen, though, is there's probably not going to be a lot of, like, destruction of satellites because then you start creating orbital debris and you start opening up the possibility that your own satellites get destroyed in that fratricide. So it would probably be a lot of this non-kinetic attack. So electronic warfare, in some cases, high power microwave that damages the electronics on a satellite. So you come up to the target satellite with your own satellite. it zaps it with a microwave signal that's going to damage electronics on board. Now it's fried and it's just dead flying in orbit. Or the last thing is likely these co-orbital servicing satellites that China has now. They'll sidle up to one of our sensing satellites and latch onto it

and damage the arrays that the antennas that it uses to communicate or it'll mess up the sensor window itself and then they can't see anymore. So they'll do that kind of counter space operation right away. but it'll be likely isolated to our military sensing satellites because there's going to be a proliferated set of mostly Leo low-arth orbit sensor platforms that are commercial. So you've got a bunch of commercial planet labs and MaxR and Black Sky and all these different companies that have these satellites up there

are still going to have their satellites up there. So the sensing will be available. And the question will be with the remaining military sensors that are not damaged or cut off. And then the commercial sensors, can you build a picture of what's happening on the surface? And that's going to be a competition for both sides. China has, like you said, in addition to these space-based sensors, they've got a bunch of sensors on the ground. So they've got over-the-horizon radars in China that can see well out into the Western Pacific, so a thousand miles away.

Australia also has an over-the-horizon radar, the JORN, which is based in Australia or in the northern part of Australia, I can see a thousand plus miles away. I can see all the way up into the South trying to see. So they have these terrestrial sensors, and then you've got whatever aircraft and ships that are out there. They can do sensing as well. So you got this sensing and targeting network that you can rely on to be able to get that information so you can shoot things and do it efficiently.

So if we're able to, the idea would be that early in the fight, both sides are trying to take away the space layer as much as they can because that's the best sensing capabilities that we have. it's, you know, big field of view, and you can look at a lot of things at the same time. And usually the command of control is easier, you know, because it's all coming to some central location. For China, they all come to a central location. So their space-based sensing system is part of their kind of central reconnaissance intelligence network. And then they try to maximize their use of that and then the over-the-horizon radar is because that's all hardwareed,

it's connected to their central command node. They don't like to rely on their deployed forces to be their sensor nodes because that gets into a lot of radio communications that can be jammed. You have to depend on them being in the right place at the right time. And Taiwan invasion, they prefer to not have their naval and air forces out there where they can get shot at. They'd prefer them to be focused on the invasion. So I don't want to have a bunch of ships and aircraft wandering around the South China Sea or the Philippine Sea or the Coral Sea trying to do sensing missions. They want to keep them focused on supporting the invasion.

So the idea would be once we have degraded some of the space layer on China, then we have to do this counter-sensing campaign in addition to that. So you put decoys and jammers out there to start to undermine their contact picture. You put decoys out there that create false targets in the radio frequency spectrum, in the infrared spectrum, also synthetic aperture radar jammers that jammers that jam their synthetic aperture radar satellites. and you create this combination of false targets and then obscured real and false targets with jamming that will create a confusing target picture for the Chinese. You start to do that, though, in peacetime occasionally. So this is not something you just break out, break glass and suddenly I'm doing this counter-sensing campaign.

You would do it in peacetime to start to undermine the confidence that the Chinese have in their ability to execute this operation on short notice in wartime. because if the Chinese now can't say, I'm going to be able to engage or attack all the U.S. forces within the first few hours of the fight over Taiwan, now you might open up the possibility that the U.S. is still in the fight longer than you want, and it starts to undermine your planning. So you want them to start to feel uncertain regarding their ability to efficiently allocate all of their long-range missiles in that first hours or day of the conflict. So that's where that counter-sensing effort is all about. And we'll come back to the, to the, you know, pre-war sort of deterrence mission here in a minute, but sticking with the war for a second, you know, another element of this two-directional campaign

will be going after command and control nodes themselves, which could in certain cases be the same as a decapitation campaign. You go after how the commanders are understanding information and maybe the commanders themselves. I had a guest Tom Carrico on the show a little while ago talking about missile defense. You had a great line that I keep repeating, or he said, you know, everyone's worried about a cyber Pearl Harbor or this Pearl Harbor into that Pearl Harbor. I'm worried about a Pearl Harbor. And, you know, we're going to have command nodes ashore. And it would be kind of shocking, actually, to me, if the Chinese didn't go after them.

And I'm hoping that we are, we are prepared for that possibility because it seems quite likely to me. So all of this is going to be going back and forth. And I took to be an implication of your work or you sort of allude to it a number of times. I thought. I'm curious, you know, to hear it in your own words. but that obviously we're going to want the best picture and we're going to want them to have the worst picture and they're going to want the same for us

and we're both going to be going back and forth with all these different techniques trying to generate that outcome. But I took an implication of your argument to be that actually, I hate to say for cultural reasons, but kind of for cultural reasons, we, the United States and our allies, are likely to fare better in a degraded

or mutually degraded sense, sensor environment than they will because of the nature of command, in the PLA, the nature of mission type command in an ideal world on our side. That's very important caveat clause that I just inserted there. Can you talk, did I sniff that out correctly from what you were saying? And can you say more about it? Yeah, yeah.

So, I mean, it's partly cultural. It's just partly how they've structured their military. So if you start to undermine the sensing picture and then you combine that with this distribution, this more recomposable military that we're building where you have a lot of smaller pieces that you can see all the military services. in the U.S. now are going to this much more distributed structure, where a lot more smaller things, smaller uncrued systems, smaller ships in the Navy's case, smaller airplanes, CCA,

the collaborative combat aircraft in the Air Force case. So you're going to this much more distributed force structure. It's able to mix and match in a lot more ways. You distribute it out more across this vast geography that we've got to play with, and that undermines the sense-making. So now you've undermined the sensing of the Chinese, you undermine the sense-making of the Chinese. And then the question is, are they going to continue to rely, try to centrally control things from the command center in Beijing, which is what they prefer to do, and use their long range missiles to attack all the targets?

Or are they going to defer and kind of delegate to their subordinate commanders that are out in the field to say, go hunt down the enemy targets you can find and engage them, which is sort of how the U.S. would operate. we would just, if the senior commander, if the headquarters is losing the bubble on what's happening out there, they would delegate and say, okay, our picture's not good here. You guys, here's commander's intent. You guys go and you've got authority to continue the fight in your sectors. And that's routinely how we've operated. The Chinese have not operated in that way. They have tended to want to keep things centrally controlled. That's why they've built the reconnaissance strike complex, as we call it. So this long-range missile complex that's all on the mainland with the centrally managed sensor network that's mostly in space. That's all so they can have this sort of

one headquarters that's managing the entire fight. And once that starts to break down, they've not really exercised or created an architecture where it's easy for them to just delegate out to local commanders, the authority and the capability to go pursue, hunt down targets on their own and follow commanders' intent. So a couple of responses to that. The first is to kind of of keep pushing on the point. I had a retired senior officer talk recently about visiting Chinese ships back when we could still do that kind of thing. He had a pretty good line about how we had to stop it because when they came on our ships, they were bringing their tape measures and you know, measuring the distance from this and that and the bridge. In any event, being on their ships

and noticing cameras in the bridge, like surveillance cameras and asking, oh, what are those? And of course, it's not just for the PLA chain of command to keep an eye on things, but it's also for the political officer parallel chain of command. Right. And the, you know, the sort of conclusion when, perhaps complacency inducing conclusion. Right. One draw, in that is, that sounds like a nightmare. Like who would want to fight a war with not only your boss and your boss's boss breathing

down your neck, but indeed the whole CCP for ideological purposes breathing down your neck? Yeah. So what's interesting in Japan, China is different than Russia or the Soviet Union. So we've seen like in Montferet October how that played out with the political officer being a guy you've got to get out of the way once you can be able to do something exactly. But in the Chinese military, that political officer is treated as a co-equal. So that's a military officer with military experience that's gone and done his junior officer tours as a line officer. So it's like we would have in our military, but somebody goes to the non,

to the restricted line. So they go from being a line officer and then they're becoming an 03 or 04 and then they become a political officer instead of going into intel or something. So that that model means, you know, these folks have the operational experience and they're kind of treated as a co-equal member of the command team. But still, in, and now in peacetime, from what we gather and talking to Intel people and talking to people, do open source gathering on this, it seems to work okay, right? These folks will work together and they understand the mission. They're, they're kind of focused on. And the political officer is thinking about, it's almost the political officer is there to think about the crew and the way.

that the people are being treated and operating. So it's in a lot of ways that political officer in practice becomes kind of an HR person as much as they are thinking about the party values and making sure the party values are reflected. So it's not as much of an undermining of the chain of command in the individual units. But it's hard to tell in combat, how does that play out? Suddenly you're having to make quick decisions without the benefit of any feedback from Beijing.

So do that. does now the political officer and the commanding officer, they start to come into conflict because the commanding officer wants to make some hard decisions that probably are not good for the crew or the political dynamics and the political officer is not sure. So, yeah, it remains to be seen how that plays out in combat. But in peacetime, it seems like they've got a system that works. Do you really think, sorry, this is my, these are probably my ideological prejudices coming to bear more than my knowledge of the situation, which is basically nil. I've never, I've never set foot on a PLAN vessel.

You really conceive of the role of these commissars, for lack of a better term. I don't know what the Mandarin for commissar is, but as crew welfare more than state control? Well, it's party control, right? So they're there to represent the party and the party's values. And they're thinking from the political's perspective. So if you think about a command as a political entity, you know, how are your people reacting? how are they likely to treat the situation you're putting them into. So that's why it tends to drive them to think about the crew or the people in the unit

as much as they're thinking about what do folks back in Beijing want to have happen. So we just did a workshop on this a couple weeks ago. Yeah, so it's interesting. It's a little bit more nuanced than I originally thought coming in. But we had several people come in and talk about how this works in the Chinese military. So it's not a cut and dry thing, you know, where this is going to be a source of friction. But I'm sure that in combat, it's going to become, that's going to become a problem, right? I mean, you can't have two COs when you're having to make quick decisions and lives are at stake

and you're probably going to have to sacrifice people or stuff that will not be attractive to the political officer. And it will remain to be seen what does a political officer get on board when that's, you're having to make those kinds of choices because I think that could be a source of friction. I think the bigger problem, though, is just that these, commanding officers and their political officers have not been delegated the authority to go off and do independent ops before. They're not really trained. And there's distrust, right? So the five incapables that President Xi has articulated multiple times talk about his concerns about his ability,

the ability of his military to go execute operations on their own. He doesn't think they're able to delegate command and operate without higher authority constantly giving them feedback. He doesn't think they're able to plan and execute missions when they only have commanders intent. So there's a lot of concern from the senior leadership down that whether it's true or not, it may be that actually the forces would kind of rise to the occasion. But if that's the concern that's expressed by President Xi and the Central Military Commission, we can play off of that. And if we undermine the ability of that central command though to effectively manage the force, now they have to rethink, Do I have to step back and even reimagine how I operate this military?

Because whether it's true or not, that's the concern they've expressed, and we can sort of take advantage of it. One last thought on Commissars, and then we'll come back to this command and control or mission type orders issue in comparative advantage. I'm forever haunted by Vasili Grossman's Stalingrad. Have you ever had the pleasure? It's a thick book. No, I've not read that one yet. Yeah. So it's the prequel to, well, it's the first of kind of a two volume.

The second one is more famous called Life and Fate. It's one of the great 20th century works of Russian literature. But Stalingrad is interesting. You know, Grossman was a journalist. He was at Stalingrad and was this epic sort of Tolstoyan, you know, treatment of it. But, you know, Grossman is a socialist. He's writing, you know, under the party. And he kind of shrugs it all off.

But he doesn't have a lot of things left to give, as it were, by the time he writes life and fate. But he writes Stalingrad for the approval of the censors. And so it's very much a social realist novel. Yeah. And in it, I mean, one of the, I mean, numerous heroes, but one of the main heroes is a commissar. And you see a lot from his perspective. And Grossman's a great artist.

So he kind of, he also knows that some of what he's writing is bullshit. Right. Taking some liberties to keep the party happy. Yeah. It's, a lot of it is BS, but it, you know, he puts his back into it. And there's whole chapters where the commissar is sort of justifying and making the case of himself. Like, well, I had to shoot these guys. Right.

Who were, you know, who were contemplating, retreating. It was the right thing to do. And you sort of get the full argument, you know, with the commissar as hero. And I'm just, it's so creepy and so eerie. And he's a great artist. So it's so sort of well done. It like haunts me. It will forever haunt me.

That's like, yeah. And that's, but that's, and you can see that being the, the challenge of having this dual command structure is that even if that commissar is capable and operationally astute and all of that, they're, they have a different set of mission tasking. And at some point, the, they're tasking and the commanding officer's tasking, may diverge or they may perceive it as diverging. And that's going to undermine their effectiveness because they'll dither or they'll make the wrong choices and fail. So the other side of this coin though, right, is are we really as good as our own talk on distribution? I remember,

here's my gold star for being a student at Quantico almost 15 years ago now. No, more than 15 years ago now is I'm pretty sure it's MCDP6, which is the Marine Corps doctrinal publication on comms in C2 in general. And I actually don't know if it's still, if it's still, is the raining document. But there was a, it's actually, it was one of the better. NCDP aid information is I think that the, you know, but yeah, comms is still in there. Coms is more of the mechanics. I'm pretty sure it was six. And I'm, and I recall it being actually quite well written as this line of documents went.

And there's this long vignette in it or it was the whole thing. I can't remember the details, but there's this vignette in it of, you know, a tactical commander trying to do his thing. And because of the quality of the comms architecture and the sensors, basically, what we're talking about, his battalion commander, regimental commander, whoever it is, is breathing down his neck saying, no, no, no, don't be staying here on the hill,

stand down there. And why do they do it? Even though we know, even at the time MCDP6 is being authored in whatever that was, the 90s or, you know, early odds, we know we're not, that's not how the Marine Corps fights, we know we're not supposed to do that. The whole point of the vignette and why it was kind of a clever thing is why does he do it?

Because he can, because he can, because he can see. And, you know, he's the commander for crying out loud. These are all tight-d-aid people. You're not going to, like, let this guy go often. Totally. Totally. And it was very human and very realistic in that sense.

Yeah. So we talk a good game, and I have some operation. I mean, we do okay in the Marines, but I have some operational experiences of the wrong answer as well. Yeah. Like, you know, we talk a good game about distribution and mission-type orders and, well, we're going to thrive in this environment because they're too top-heavy and top-down and we're not.

Okay. but are we actually practicing? How do our war games or how do our exercises look? Are we practicing a degraded information environment with sort of unplanned moments of autonomy? Sorry, autonomy is a complicated word to use in this context, but commander autonomy? Right. How's that going? Yeah, so we do.

So I'll say, so we do practice that. So we do practice can forces, our forces expected to be able to operate based on commander's intent after they lose touch with headquarters. We do practice that, I think, to PAC Fleet and now into Paycom's credit, they have been pursuing a command of control and communications architecture, so a C3 architecture, that will allow you to understand when you start to lose comms with your subordinate units and automatically delegate authorities based on the fact you're now losing contact. So I can't have all these authorities held at the higher level of command because I know I'm losing touch with because of jamming because of satellite interference because of whatever. I'm now not able to be in contact. And so these systems will automatically delegate using software some of the authorities to the junior commanders. They know, okay, now I've got the ball because I can't talk to my boss anymore. Who can I talk to?

And then figure out who I'm in charge of. Just like in a ground context, you'd figure out something bad happens. you lose touch with everybody, you regroup, you figure out who's the senior guy, who's now in charge, and then figure out a plan from there. You have to do the same thing at sea or in the air, for that matter. So that is something that the U.S. military is actively pursuing. They've been practicing that in terms of maneuver warfare, I guess I'd say, the operation of distributed forces at some kind of scale. What we don't practice very well is at the tactical level. So when we go down and we're going to actually do some So at the operational level, we're planning that loss of comms and how do we delegate authorities

and how do we manage with commanders intent. When you try and do a tactical operation, that's when we're not very good about really imposing a contested electromagnetic environment where now I don't have comms. I don't have any sensors because they're jamming my radar. They're jamming GPS. I'm losing my navigation signals. We don't do a good job of simulating or creating that environment, in part because of the challenges of operating within, you know, airspace that other people use.

So you can't jam all the GPS over Nellus because flights going into Las Vegas like to have their GPS on. And so that ends up being a challenging thing for training environments. So the only place we can really do that now is Alaska. When we do Northern, when we do Operation Northern Edge or the Northern Edge exercise series, we can do a lot of jamming up there and take away people's sensors and other capabilities. And then some of the Western Pacific stuff that we do for Valiant Shield.

But really, it's more limited. So that's, I think, where we run into problems is when you're actually trying to do a, we're going to do a strike mission. We're going to do some kind of maneuver operation. We're going to do some kind of initiative attack from forces ashore. We don't do a good job of taking away that C3 architecture or the sensor networks that we would depend on. But you could still simulate it without messing with everyone else's spectrum. You just have the exercise controller say, hey, turn your stuff off.

Right. And then the challenge that is, you know, are you getting? have a safety of flight issues because what will happen is somebody needs to have the understanding of what's happening in the real world so that you can prevent people from running into each other. So in an undersea context, when we do that, you've got a sensor range and you kind of know where everybody is and you let people kind of fumble around without their sensors because the range controller knows what's happening. And so you can do that and we do some of that. But it's more difficult to do when you're out like in an open ocean exercise and you're telling people just

turn off your radar, turn off your, your navigation signal, because now, you know, we don't know where they are either. My instinct, Brian, and, you know, maybe it's easy for me to say. Oh, no, you can certainly, I'm not defending it. I'm just saying you. No, no, no, no. I'm not criticizing you. I'm more just thinking aloud about the, right, perils that we face that.

Yes. If I were, you know, senior at Indo-Paycom or in the Navy or any position of responsibility with regard to this stuff, I would be wanting to gleefully, I, I, I, I, I, you know, I, I use the word gleefully for a reason, gleefully lean into all of this degraded environment training and assume a lot of risk. If you have to box commercial air traffic out of your space, then just box it out. Because you need to put your guys at risk so they can practice it now rather than die later. Right.

No, you're right. And so that's why if you look at what used to be the Indo-Pacific Command deterrence initiative and then investments that are in the reconciliation bill that just got passed, There's a bunch of investments for range improvements in Indo Paycom. Like a massive amounts of money have been going into range improvements. And that's to create this range complex across the Western Pacific. So basically from Alaska to Hawaii to Midway to down to Australia and then up to Japan. And there's going to be a large collection of ranges that they're building out because they want to be able to force people into these contested environments to have the range basically do the safety.

So I've got a bunch of sensors that are watching. So you can turn off your radar and your GPS and everything else because I'm watching to make sure that you don't run into somebody else. And I'll tell you if you're in trouble. But you need kind of that a range where you can do that, which we do at Nellis. So that's what they do at Nellis to keep people for running to each other. But you can't have the combination of having people on a safe range and also give them some of the realism of the environment of getting jamming and some other stuff that we want to do, which you can only do in that open ocean context. But it's hard. Yeah.

seems to me like that kind of stuff should be just the absolute highest priority. And yes, you need the physical spaces in which to do it safely. I get that. But you know, you also need to then practice so you can cultivate the right command culture. Right, right. Which is actually what will win the day. And your observation, yeah, sure, we do this at the operational level, but not so much at the tactical level. Well, that's a little, I don't know. I don't know exactly what the analogy is I want here. It's like I had a great to do list. But when the time came to do anything, I wasn't really do it. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah, I think it's a good point. that we lose the ability to foster that mission command culture if we don't take away this

the C3 and the sensing that you rely on. And that's a really good point because I think we tend to think of it in the military as it's all about the tactical operation. Like I need to know how to drop the bomb and know where I am without GPS and without my sensors. But that's just the one piece of it. The other piece of it is can I can my section leader come up with a plan to execute this attack if we no longer have contact with the chaos. And I'm having to do it on the fly, literally. And having the right captains and commanders and junior admirals who are going to thrive in those circumstances, identifying them.

Because how do you really know until you've practiced it a few times who's going to thrive and who's going to not? Yeah, that's a good point. And you need to, this has been a recent trend in the military is talking about, how do we test out these senior colonel, senior captains, junior admirals, to make sure you got the right guys moving up into the flag ranks. You have to be these senior operational leaders because you tended to select people for those ranks because of their executive experience or their kind of their skill at being able to manage a bureaucracy

or do the kind of peacetime functions that a senior leader does as opposed to selecting them for their ability to lead in that scale in military combat, which is a totally different bag. Last topic, I want to be respectful of your time, but this is important. and kind of the main upshot of this paper you just wrote, but you alluded to it already. This conversation about messing with the other guy's sensors and ability to integrate information is not just a wartime exercise, but it has a deterrence role. Say a little bit more about that. What does that actually mean? Yeah, so we want to start being able to imply to the Chinese that we can degrade their ability

to have an accurate targeting picture at any time. So we want to create false targets that requires them to investigate, well, what is this, is this a real target or not? And confuse them. We want to be able to jam their sensors such that a real target is obscured and they're not sure what's there. We want to obscure even the false targets. So they have to go investigate a jamming signal to say and then only to find that there's a decoy underneath it. We want to create that kind of confusion in peacetime. So they start to question the accuracy of their sensor picture at any given time.

And there's various, those are very simplified ways. of doing it, there's much more sophisticated ways they get into classified systems and all that. But basically you're talking about generating false targets, generating jamming signals that obscure targets. You're talking about degrading the communications between different sensors that you can't coordinate between sensors very easily. You can also insert false targets through cyber attacks. So like radio frequency enabled cyber where you use a radio frequency signal to insert a cyber tool

that then creates a false target inside somebody's radar computer. And then that goes into the command of control network. So all these tools are tools we want to use in peacetime. And we tend to, we've tended in the past to hold these tools as like the silver bullets that we're going to break out when the war starts. Okay, we're going to start confusing their target picture once the fighting starts. Well, the problem is, one, we let the fight start. The whole point was to deter the fight.

So we failed. Deturance has failed. We're allowing it to fail because we're not doing anything in peacetime to foster it. And then two, you might find that in wartime, some of those tools you thought were going to work, don't work. And then in wartime, the Chinese might just decide to power through, right? Once they've chosen to invade Taiwan, the fact that their target picture goes bad doesn't mean they're going to stop. It just means they'll just throw more weapons at the targets and hope that it works out. So the whole point here is to try to deter the

conflict because once the balloon goes up, China is not in a position to seek an off ramp. They have to kind of go through with it or else it's a huge loss of reputation. So there's going to be a need to do this in peacetime. So the need then is I need a diversity and a number of these different effects that I can generate in peacetime. And it's got to be a changing sort of kaleidoscope of different tools or techniques that you use against them. And there are. There's a vast number of different jamming techniques and decoy things and cyber effects that you can generate. It's just we haven't until recently invested in the supply chain to do that. We have Androl and all these other companies building out large numbers of new, interesting, diverse weapon systems.

but we've not fostered the same kind of ecosystem on the cyber and electronic warfare side, and the DOD wants to do that. And so there's money in this reconciliation bill to build out an infrastructure, a digital infrastructure, so you can have a playground or a sandbox, so that these startups can come in and say, well, here's some cyber tools I created, or here's some electronic warfare techniques I created. How can we use those? And you start to build this deep magazine of these effects,

so you can use them in peacetime to start playing with and undermining the ability of the Chinese to make sense of what they. see in the Western Pacific. And that should have a deterrent effect because it will start to undermine their confidence in this whole recausent strike, mature precision strike regime that they've depending on. The part about the sandbox and the money seems really critical. Can I voice what seems to me to be an obvious objection to what you just laid out in terms of deterrence just to hear your response, which is that's all well and good, but we'll be, as it were, we'll be showing

our hand prematurely. Maybe them knowing that we have the hand in theory, maybe them knowing that we have the hand in In theory has got some deterrent for us, but once we start showing the cards of our tricks, once they start to see our tricks at work, they're going to have a lot of time to, you know, sit back at the HQ and think through what went wrong and in a fairly relaxed environment because there will be no shooting. And they've got months or years to sort of figure out how to defeat whatever it is that we just used on them and over, you know, some dispute over some, you know, Philippine people. No, you're right.

You're right. So how you, so the key there is one, you want to have a deep magazine of these effects. So a lot of these effects that you can pull out. So you want a lot of cards. And you can do that. You can generate a pretty large, diverse array of these effects that you can generate. And you want to maybe not use your best ones right up front. So the US does have some pretty high-end silver bullet kind of tools that they're going to use when the fight starts.

So you kind of keep those to the side and say, OK, the good stuff we're going to hold for when the fight does really start because we need that to get an edge. But we've got a whole bunch of these brass and bronze bullets that we can use in peacetime that we'll just burn through those. and force the Chinese to continue to kind of react and come up with workarounds. Because while they're doing that workaround, they're not invading Taiwan. So the whole point here is, can I continue to push out, like Admiral Barrow said, the day when the she feels like he's competent enough in the whole setup to be able to mount the invasion at acceptable levels of risk. So it's all about creating uncertainty and keeping that uncertainty level up until, you know, you can come up with a different scheme.

Or the Chinese decide, well, the invasion, is just going to be too difficult with all this uncertainty in our target picture, because I can do a blockade or a quarantine or something and not have to necessarily worry about the fires being as accurately conveyed as if I'm doing an invasion attempt. And that's good. So you'd say, well, if they can get them off invasion and put them onto a quarantine as their option, that's preferred because less people die probably, more opportunities for an off ramp, more opportunities for a negotiated solution. So that's the idea here is how do you deter them off of the worst case scenario towards the next one, towards the next one, towards the next one, and eventually dissuade them

into accepting the status quo in some future form? Brian Clark, author most recently, of winning the fight for sensing and sense making, this has been a really, really interesting conversation. A few moments during it, I thought, man, do we really want to be recording this, putting this on the internet, which is a sign that I think it was a high quality conversation and I really appreciate you making the time. Oh, thanks, Aaron. It's great being here. I appreciate you taking me out.

I would take it on. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.