Defense in the Cyber World
THINKING AHEAD
Northrop Grumman CEOKent Kresahas been pushing the big military contractor ever deeper into defense electronics and information technology. Though aircraft are no longer the company's chief focus, Northrop's B-2 bombers saw service in all-weather bombing of Kosovo. Its JSTARS surveillance aircraft and EA-6B Prowler jamming aircraft also played key roles there. In an interview at the firm's Los Angeles headquarters, Kresa described trends he sees in warfare and in defense contracting.On high-technology warfare: Clearly the use of information and the denial of information is critical in the way we see the future. You could envision a system in the latter part of the next century where you have real-time surveillance of the battlefield, understanding everything that's going on. You could make decisions in virtually real time, on what targets need to be struck, maybe even moving targets, where the data are updated as the target moves. That's a vision [that would] require vast amounts of communications-and one that would make you a formidable adversary.
At the same time, enemies will be looking to develop countermeasures that can put in false data, or jam the system, or otherwise negate that tremendous capability. This cyber world is going to become a much more important area.
On lessons from Kosovo: I believe we're seeing the leading edge of the 21st century in this confrontation. We saw extensive use of all-weather surveillance and all-weather bombing. And it turned out that the United States was the only country that had that capability. The alliance relied on this new capability, and the precision weapons that were being used were really in very short supply. But, they were the ones that represented the majority of the targets killed in Kosovo.
On the capabilities of air warfare: Of course, without ground forces, you can't hold territory, you can't do a whole bunch of things. But certainly taking down a country's infrastructure and their will to fight can literally be done from the air and with precision capabilities. And any adversary has to recognize that we can absolutely devastate their way of life.
Certainly on our side the ability to have lower casualties is a necessity- in a world where America is not threatened directly. People will wonder why they should sacrifice their children to a situation in another part of the world which has no direct bearing on the United States of America. If you had a World War II, there would be an entirely different sense and casualties would be more allowable, [but now] there is more and more need to have very low casualties if you are going to use American forces overseas.
On bureaucratic delay and acquisition reform: I think industry has welcomed all the initiatives to reduce the amount of micromanagement that has gone on, the thousands of people that are involved, and the enormous number of meetings.
Government is somewhat behind industry [in streamlining], in part, I think, because it is more conservative since it's dealing with the taxpayer's money, plus Congress is just ultra-conservative. And as the board members of the system, [they establish] lots of rules and regulations by law. So you can only take the streamlining so far.
Acquisition reforms have had a very positive effect. Senior people have worked so hard at this, have driven the idea down through the systems so that people have a different attitude. A lot of this is attitude: the difference between being a traffic cop-a person who says no-versus a person who tends to implement-to say yes, to help. We're getting to the point where we're having the government operate as a team member. Is there more to do? Absolutely.