EMSO Lessons from Iran: What Comes Next

[00:09] KEN MILLER Welcome to From the Crow's Nest. I'm your host, Ken Miller from the Association of Old Crows. As always, it's great to be here with you. In this episode, I welcome back into the studio friend and colleague John Knowles, who is the editor in chief of the Journal of Electromagnetic Dominance, AOC's official monthly publication, also known as the JED. John, it's great to have you back here on the show. Great to hear from you again. How are you doing?

[00:36] JOHN KNOWLES Good, I'm doing really well. First day of fall, and first day of New England Day, and thanks for having me back on.

[00:40] KEN MILLER Yeah, you wait nine months for summer and it only lasts three. I don't know why that is every year, but uh, you know, let that sink in. But uh, I was kind of disappointed that uh summer went by so fast. But uh, glad to be able to kick off a new season with you. I think the last time I had you on was in spring, in April, uh, just prior to uh some of our work on AOC Europe and Asia and some of the episodes over the summer that kind of look globally about what's going on in the world of EMSO. And now, as we're entering the fall here, of course, our attention is going to turn back to a lot of the U.S. We have a lot going on with the budget. We have, of course, from a political standpoint, we have elections coming up, which is shaping how we talk about a lot of these security initiatives and global security matters. And so, I wanted to have you on the show to kind of level set the conversation moving forward as we approach December, where we hopefully will have a new defense budget. We have AOC US coming up. I know you're already thinking about that. As well, from an editor standpoint. And so just thank you for joining me here. About four months, I think, since we've had you on the show, five months. What's been on your mind over the summer as you've been kind of keeping tabs on, I know you were at AOC Europe and you've done some other stuff over the summer. What's been on your mind in terms of developments in the EMSO community?

[02:05] JOHN KNOWLES I think the biggest thing I've been thinking about is that it's really a shift in a way, but in many ways, not a shift. And that is a year ago, I'd be, if we were talking, I'd say, you know, we're thinking about lessons from Ukraine and things like that. And now I'm thinking about lessons from Epic Fury. So I'm thinking about that's informing a lot of a lot of the things that I'm thinking about from or following from force structure and debates, budget, obviously, things like that. So I we are learning some direct lessons now instead of sort of indirectly through the Ukrainians. And so I think that's the, you know, we're learning the things I'm thinking about, big trends that play off of that are we are operationalizing directed energy and going into production with that. So I think that's a big deal. Talked about directed energy for quite a while. And Tony Lesouzo [name unclear], to give you a preview of it, the October JED, he wrote about that. DE, especially high-energy lasers, but also high-power microwaves, they're reaching into full-scale production contracts. That's a, you know, that's a big, I think that's a big moment for the EW community because a lot of that operational directed energy community has largely been an R&D community for almost 40 years. Now we're shifting over to actually practicing it on a larger scale. And that's probably where AOC can really help out the directed energy community in bringing that operational knowledge and experience we have. And I'm not sure how that plays out. You and I have talked about this for years, but I don't know exactly how that plays out. I don't know if you can take an EWO and And you know, but they're probably the closest thing you have to a schooled practitioner of directed energy in the operational world. So, I think that's a big deal.

[03:46] KEN MILLER So, what about Epic Fury is kind of putting the emphasis on operationalizing directed energy in terms of a lesson learned? Because it's interesting that you mentioned that kind of the shift away, not that we're not paying attention, but we've talked a lot about lessons learned in Ukraine and this themes we keep coming up there the same, you know, yeah, it's a it's a spectrum fight and it's overly chaotic and congested, and it's led to mass production of unmanned systems and different exquisite capabilities and different things that need to kind of break through that. But the themes haven't seen, there hasn't been really a lot of change in terms of the conversation with Ukraine. So, are we realizing that maybe we can't adapt to some of the lessons learned? And so, we're trying to look at new lessons that we might be able to win or might be able to make progress on. Or is this how many lessons do we have to learn before we actually make progress? I guess my answer or question.

[04:48] JOHN KNOWLES Yeah, so I've I've spent the last six months waiting for the EMSO debate to spring up about how do we, you know, right now I think what we're doing is we've engaged Iran for six months. We've hit a number of targets that hasn't really translated into power to control like we thought it would or we hoped it would. We have obviously used up certain certain stores of weapons, especially certain kinds of weapons. And now we're about to reinvest in those same weapons and kind of follow maybe a very similar strategy, very kinetic focused strategy. And maybe that will sort of be what breaks the camel's back. Who knows? But I look at that and I think I don't know how the outcome is different unless, you know, unless the state in Iran is much more fragile politically. But I think we need to look at an EMSO strategy. I don't think we have one. And that's been frustrating to not hear that yet.

[05:48] KEN MILLER What kind of concerns me is when we talk about Russia-Ukraine, it's obvious, like I said, it's a spectrum fight. And everything we talk about in terms of lessons, in terms of what we need to achieve for a military advantage, whether it's a coalition advantage, a NATO advantage, Ukrainian advantage, all starts and ends with EW. And the number one kind of outcome of this conversation is we have to change the way that we buy systems. We have to scale differently. We have to leverage commercial, all these massive muscle movements that have to happen in a very antiquated acquisition system that we have. Iran comes around and now it's like, well, we, now we, we, we, our lesson is we just need to produce more conventional kinetic weapons. It's almost like, let's look for a lesson that we know that we can quote unquote learn from and just keep doing the same thing. Like, we haven't actually accomplished what we need to coming out of Russia and Ukraine. And I feel like we're turning attention to Iran and we're making, we're using that as almost a, trying, are we ignoring one set of lessons because another set of lessons is easier?

[07:02] JOHN KNOWLES I think, yeah, I think, I think the last six months has been, to me at least, a lesson in sort of bureaucratic inertia that it's very hard to, and it's part of it, I think, is the actual where the where the pain is inside the DOD or the DOW bureaucracy. And that is that the air defense people are probably the most kinetic culture there is. It's very hard for them, for the air defense community to, and I'm talking like writ large, to not embrace what they know. Right. What they're schooled in, all of that. And they haven't experienced failure yet. Right. They've just experienced, unless you define failure as not achieving your goals. They haven't failed catastrophically where they can't defend targets, but they're defending targets at great expense, right? Defending bases and at tremendous expense. And Iran really hasn't taken the gloves off and going after, say, infrastructure like desalinization plants, other things that are really critical in the Middle East. So they haven't caused enough pain to ratchet up, but that threat is still there. And that's that's where things sit right now. And maybe it's just everybody expects this to end quickly. And again, you mentioned Russia-Ukraine, and it's I don't want to compare the U.S. to Russia, but we are learning a superpower lesson here. I feel that Russia has been learning and ignoring to a certain extent and adapting to in other ways. We are probably in an earlier phase of that process of actually learning that. But if we did not have a $1.5 trillion budget request, and we were under more constraint, I don't know if that would force more thinking into alternative solutions or embracing where does my magazine have more depth? Where is my sensor network? Uh, ineffective. I spoke with one person, it was very interesting because I said, Why are they coming up with these same answers? You and I have talked about you know, just in our when we've run into each other, you know, about bad math or whatever, but they're coming up with a certain set of answers, and it seems to be doubling down on more munitions, more uh interceptors, and things like that. And that's not a bad strategy, it's just an unbalanced strategy, as far as I can tell. And when I think about the fact that you know, these are not stupid people, they understand how to run simulations and war games and figure out what we need to buy, and so I don't think that there's any failure of thinking in the DOD. What I wonder is: do they have the models to give them a better set of answers or not? So, do they keep coming up with kinetic answers because their models don't do EMSO or model the EM operating environment or the physics or the models themselves, the EW models? Are they just not good enough? And this goes back to things I've heard back at the beginning of the third offset strategy, like in 2012, 13, 14. Where somebody I spoke with who I respect a lot, he made a point like, we don't have the models. We just don't have the models yet. And I wonder if that's something that we're running into is there is a big systemic problem going on that just keeps producing kinetic answers instead of looking at non-kinetic investment as well.

[10:04] KEN MILLER Going back to what you were saying in terms of needing an EMSO strategy for Iran and the Middle East. I've mentioned on the show before that I think one of the things that concerns me about Iran over and different from both, I think, Russia and China. Russia and China have centralized planning and centralized execution of a lot of what they do. Now, China has a little bit, I think, has a little bit more flexibility in that model of how they operate, but they're still very centralized, run by the party, everything. In Iran, it's decentralized planning, decentralized execution, but centralized funding. That's a very unique approach. For a threat to the U.S. to have in terms of our experience in confronting. So, what does an EMSO strategy look like in the Middle East as it pertains to Iran, given this different dynamic in terms of what they are, what their goals are in confronting their adversaries, whether it's Israel or the U.S.?

[11:08] JOHN KNOWLES So, I think that when I think of Iran, they're actually playing both a home game and an away game. They're playing an away game through their proxies. They're playing a home game that has some offense across the Persian Gulf to the Gulf states, into the Gulf states. They're able to project power and they're doing it selectively, but their structure is not centralized, as you pointed out. And they actually, I think, have designed that for decades to be able to withstand a large either coalition or U.S. attack. And so far it seems to be effective. And so when I look at Iran, it's interesting that. Again, the sense I get from the U.S.'s leadership is a lot of frustration. So, we can talk about how many targets we hit, but if that's not translating into power, then that's not working. And so, I think that there are things that need to be more persistent than just a strike. There's things that need to be better matched than just kinetic power. So, if you want to take out all those little drones, all those things that are assisting this, you know, that are sort of preoccupying air defense systems alongside the ballistic missiles and the more serious threats with larger warheads, you need to be able to right size your counter-UAS and basically air defense capabilities. And so, you don't want to be again, it's not that you don't need kinetic weapons, it's just that you need a balanced strategy between non-kinetics and kinetics. And it's all somewhat hamstrung by the fact that there are no U.S. troops really in the country, not in large numbers. And so, you don't have a lot of presence there to either intercept or to project power and preoccupy your adversary. So, you haven't really gone over the border with land forces. And that's not, you know, so if you designed your government around resisting air power or taking a lot of shots to the chin. In terms of them hitting targets inside your country, then yes. So I think the U.S. is, again, in many ways, learning that same level of frustration that Russia learned with: hey, they're not playing our fight, they're not fighting the way we designed ourselves to fight. And we've learned that before the Serbs, against a whole bunch of people.

[13:19] KEN MILLER Back in 2001, when we went into Afghanistan following 9/11, which is the 25th anniversary this year, and then we went into Iraq, it sprung a whole debate about. Our paradigm shift into asymmetric warfare and the need to confront counterinsurgency and capabilities and technology that is kind of outside of the conventional military planning and force design. We've had some successes with that, but obviously we didn't realize everything we needed to. And then, you know, obviously EMSO was a huge part of that. And we've had, we had a failed strategy in 2012. We had a failed strategy in 2015, 2016, or I guess it was 2017 when it came out. Like the talk about the EMSO strategy. Yeah. And then a 2020 EMSO, the existing, the current one for record, the electromagnetic, the EMSO superiority strategy, now in its fifth, sixth year of implementation. Why are the lessons that we're learning take us back to just buying munitions and back to old traditional ways of thinking? I mean, after all, after the past 25 years, what is holding up our military leaders' ability to look at the spectrum first because it feels like you're cutting a corner a little bit. You're kind of trying to take the easy, press the easy button when you're just like, let's just buy more munitions. Let's just keep the, let's keep the high cost of interceptors that we have to purchase to shoot down a cheap drone type of thing. That mentality doesn't work. It's never worked. And yet we just keep pressing that button. So what is not happening on the EMSO front, from our community's front, the strategy or whatever, that these lessons or these ideas are just not sinking in?

[15:13] JOHN KNOWLES I think. I think it's this sort of almost paradox that expensive is easy. So buying technology is very expensive. And that is the easiest way if you do not want to, if you want to resist change, you buy more material, but you don't create the organizations or the leaders or do the proper training with an EMS environment. So you're avoiding all these ways to learn lessons that are going to create new units, shift cultures, things like that. So it's ironic that we can, we've always done this. You know, I talk about this over and over again. We will throw wheelbarrows of money at a problem. and call it a fix because it just deals with materiel and the system that absorbs that money and builds those new things and is willing to do that as long as you don't change billets or create organizations or name leadership because that's a more permanent cultural shift. And so that's the, to me, the paradox is that the more expensive it is, the easier it is to do because it's a materiel problem to them. It's EW is way bigger than a materiel problem.

[16:20] KEN MILLER We've talked on the show about AOC's legislative initiative to establish a combat support agency for EMSO. And one of the criticisms that we've heard of that notion was, well, if you, I can't believe I have to say this over the air. If you establish the organization, the agency, and it actually fixed the problem, aren't you just basically investing in planned obsolescence? And that is an amazing thing when you think about

[16:52] JOHN KNOWLES the problem is air warfare, investing in the air force is a terrible investment.

[16:56] KEN MILLER Yeah, it just doesn't make any sense to me. Like, and it's said with a straight face, and it's almost as if if we solve, if we do something that changes the rules of the game, the organization, and it's successful, then what do we do with it? And you're just like, if you're successful, that's a good thing. Like, why is why is success not the marker? Instead, it's how disruptive a change is that drives the debate. And so, from your perspective, I mean, like, how do we take this next step over the next year or two? Whether it's the CSA, I'm not talking everything has to be about the Combat Support Agency, but we have Russia-Ukraine ongoing. We have Iran. We have China on the horizon. Obviously, we're always, that's always the threat that's out there that's driving a lot of the conversation. What do we need to do differently as a community to move this debate, get out of the same constant, almost insane kind of cycle that we're in to actually make progress. Because sometimes it gets discouraging.

[18:01] JOHN KNOWLES So, a couple of things in there. I think one of them is the part that you and I hate, which is the sense that we have to fail more, apparently, because people aren't listening ahead of time. So, in ancient Greece, they had Cassandra, and she had the ability to prophesize, but also no one would ever listen to her. There was a dual, dual problem. So she could tell you what the problem was, but no one wanted to hear about it. And I think sometimes that we are the Cassandra, we're in a Cassandra moment. I think. So again, how do you? Here's my question: is in our community, we can only do so much, right? I don't always blame us that we are unable to inject our understanding into the system. There's times when they feel like it is our fault. I feel like sometimes we hold back, and we're like, okay, when you need us, we'll be ready and we'll do our quick reaction program. And everybody's, you know, looking for that sort of heroic moment. And there's times when I, you know, get I'm unhappy with our community for that. But I think that largely is in our past. And now I think it's just, again, those models aren't there. If the models aren't there, how does the system, how do the people doing planning and war gaming, if they can't see the problem? If they don't have the fidelity in the physics of their in the models to see the electromagnetic environment, you're going to constantly come up with the wrong answer. And again, so you're either going to run out of money or you're going to lose materiel at a level that you can't accept before you start really asking what we can do differently. Right now, we have had to move certain operations out of the Middle East just to get them away from Iranian out of target rings of Iranian ballistic missiles. I do still think we are in a more complacent mode. We have more money than we've ever had in the DOD budget. We aren't absorbing like what the media would tune into, which is large casualty lists, things like that. So where's the pain? Where's the pressure point? Where's it coming from? And I don't think it's there yet. So again, I still think we're stuck in that moment of being right and no one really caring whether we're right or not because it doesn't matter. And so, and the thing is, when by the time it matters, it's going to be very, very bad. How do, how do we get out of that? I don't know. I don't like we have one two-star officer and And then everybody else is an oh six, yeah, or low

[20:21] KEN MILLER at best, yeah, at best, yeah, yeah.

[20:24] JOHN KNOWLES And so, our ability to inject conversation, understanding, things like that in there, uh, it's just it's very, very limited, and and by design, frankly, yeah, not by our design, but by the rest of the DOD's design, they don't want to hear about it. So, so I just feel like it, you know, I sound very pessimistic right now, and I don't want to be pessimistic. I'm usually pretty optimistic about these things, but I can't figure out where the traction is for us right now. I really, I am. I mean, yes, we could do better than the EMS superiority strategy. We could do better at implementing more than what we're implementing.

[21:00] KEN MILLER All right. So, with the time we have remaining, I wanted to kind of shift a little bit and talk a little about some of the content that has appeared recently in the JED, the AOC's Journal of Electromagnetic Dominance. You're the editor-in-chief. And you had a very interesting article that you wrote in the September issue talking about kickstarting a new DOD spectrum policy. And this is kind of one of the underlying elements that influenced how the EMS superiority strategy was also going to be implemented and who was going to be in charge of the enterprise functions and CIO. And there was a lot of talk about what we have to address spectrum policy. Like that's that's kind of the one of the elephant in the room moving forward. We're still doing that and we're still talking about it. So where are we at with DOD spectrum policy and how what are your recommendations for what we need to do to kickstart that to actually make progress in this area? Because I think you talk to anybody who follows this to any degree of, uh, expertise, and they will tell you that this our spectrum policy is antiquated. We are thinking decades decades in the past, and it's not tenable in 2026. So, what do we need to do to kickstart change on that front?

[22:21] JOHN KNOWLES Well, I think if I could be king for a day, I would not have it under the CIO. I think you should have a CSO for spectrum. I don't think that spectrum is just information, and I think that's just you and I have talked about in the past if Congress has asked or something, you know, where should we put this function? We think of all these different parts of the DOD, except. Maybe creating a new one that actually is built to purpose, so it's always a compromise, and where it is right now is a compromise in many ways. So, you're always going to get below par focus and initiative there because that bureaucracy is always going to be focused on something else that isn't spectrum. So, it's been very slow to develop, frankly. And they did, they get some of the most important parts. I mean, everything we stand on is built on that policy, right? Everything commercially depends on White House spectrum policy or FCC and NTIA and those guys. And then there's DOD. By the way, they move it to completely different speeds, right? So the commercial world is like, you know, they're in a Formula One, trying to, you know, move fast and break things kind of thing and get pack as much spectrum usage into the spectrum that they're allowed to have or licensed to have. And then there's the DOD that's camped out on some very valuable, very commercially valuable spectrum that it doesn't want to give up any share of. And so, and so you have a, you've got, again, I don't know what a Yugo in the DOD, and you've got a Formula One going off on the, on the commercial side. And so they, they're obviously going to butt heads on a frequent basis. And the guy that's going to win that always is the commercial guy because they're generating revenue, they're generating taxes, they're generating revenue off licensing and things like that. So when you do all that, the DOD is that's just my sort of preamble to why the situation is the way it is. That said, and DOD, even after they, even after CIO got a good chunk of that sort of enterprise, as you mentioned, and responsibility for policy, they still were very slow off the mark. Uh, and things like that. But now I see at least at least an initiative, you know. And if there was, if there, I will say this: if there were things that were positive that were going on in DOD, they were very, very obscure and very like either you either you couldn't find them or you couldn't understand them or they just weren't happening. But to me, it was like pick one or maybe pick all three. I don't know. But it was very poorly communicated. And now it seems like there's a strategy. And I don't, I don't know what's driving that. I think there's been some pain with the LightSquared. Uh, example of, you know, I've gone and looked at that case not because partly because it deals with DOD and partly because I just want to see how the government responds to that because that's kind of an interesting point. But LightSquared basically, in its previous iteration, incarnation, they licensed spectrum, they pulled together a bunch of licenses, they got a chunk of spectrum, it was near GPS, some GPS frequencies, some L-band. They were criticized for potentially interfering, not because they were going to go out of band, but because other systems near it were going to creep into, you know, we're susceptible to interference. So again, it was antiquated DOD technology more than it was LightSquared putting out its infrastructure. So they worked with them on that. That was around 2018, 2019. Then LightSquared was told with no apparent reason, you know, we're still, the DOD is still opposing this. We do not want you to turn that on. They applied a lot of pressure through Congress, gotten to the NDAA, things like that. And then they found out that really what was happening, at least the allegation that hasn't been proven yet, but it seems to have for a lot of documentation is that the DOD had already camped out in that spectrum that they had licensed. So they were trying to just basically force LightSquared out of that. FCC had licensed it because it was supposed to be available for licensing. Nobody did anything wrong on the FCC or LightSquared side of the equation, but somebody was already using that in the DOD some space systems that weren't registered, weren't you know? So, so then I, so now I've been watching sort of the government's arguments in this case. And some of the interesting things I've seen are the government saying you can license it, but that doesn't mean you get to use it exclusively. And I'm thinking, if you're a company and you license spectrum, I've never heard that argument that the DOD doesn't have to tell you that they're using it. That you whatever you paid for in your spectrum auction isn't actually yours to use under license. And I don't understand how you come up with that answer. That is an incredible, you know, how do you how do you grow your commercial? How do you how do you get companies to feel comfortable? You've just devalued your spectrum auctions because now you're not sure what you're going to be able to use if you do win an auction and get some license spectrum. What does that mean anymore? So there's just been some like really, it's still the craziness is still going on. That's one side of it. I consider that all legacy in the past. What they're doing now is trying to engage in a more coherent. At least come up, you know, get out of your Yugo and at least get into a Corvette, maybe. I don't know. But they're trying to catch up to where commercial is a little more and be more proactive and, frankly, more communicative and more interplay between the commercial and the defense sides. Because I think that the hide in your tortoise shell strategy was failing.

[27:45] KEN MILLER So just to kind of wrap up then on that front, what kind of going back to what you were talking about earlier about models not existing for EMSO? When we get into conflict, are we lacking a model for EMSO as it pertains to spectrum policy and interaction with commercial? Because it feels like they, even in DOD, they don't quite know how we use spectrum militarily, which puts us behind the eight ball because when FCC is making a decision along with commercial, they're not using metrics that resonate with operational military operations and spectrum operations. They're using metrics that represent how the commercial sector and how the public uses the spectrum in terms of the population and bandwidth and who streaming and all that stuff. So, do we not have sufficient models in DOD for how we use spectrum domestically, or what do we need differently?

[28:46] JOHN KNOWLES Well, I think that what we haven't gotten to yet, and what I see DOD making at least the verbal strides toward, if not the actual making actual progress, but maybe getting their mind around the problem, is sharing spectrum. Is shared spectrum. So I think the FCC isn't the problem. It's the entire scheme, right? It was always owning particular frequencies was total. You either had it or you didn't. You were either operating in that frequency or not. And so the idea of sharing spectrum, I think the commercial world can get their mind around that. And I think it was the DOD that was having, they just, why would you, they think in terms of maneuver, right? Why would you take away maneuver space by licensing out spectrum, things like that? And this problem, by the way, I mean, this is a. It used to be not a big problem for the DOD because Indiana was never going to invade Montana. You didn't have worried about training. That was it. It was an operational problem. But now, with Golden Dome and counter-UAS and all the air defense things going on inside, now you've got true spectrum compatibility problems inside the borders of the United States. So this is no longer a, oh, well, we can't train today or we can't do what we wanted to do. Now, now it's about, You know, are we going to prevent a missile attack? Are we going to stop a drone coming over the border? Things like that. So you've seen things like very extreme examples like shutting down the airspace when they're using high-energy lasers along the southern border because suddenly pilots are like there's a laser out there, it's pointing in the sky and it's shooting down things in the air. Like, let's worry about this. And so I think that the problem is becoming more real. And so things that we knew, even without Golden Dome, we knew were a problem have just amplified and become a bigger problem. So I think they're dealing with it. They're still in the very early stages of this. So I don't want to, I don't want to talk this up as a win yet or a success, but we know better.

[30:50] KEN MILLER It's better. Yeah.

[30:51] JOHN KNOWLES It's better that it has been, but it's still far behind need, right? The problem is still well ahead of the set of solutions the DOD is offering, but there's movement. And I applaud that. I think that's a good, you know, it's a good starting point, but it's definitely a game of catch up for the DOD where it has been all along. So.

[31:14] KEN MILLER Well, John, it's always great to have you on the show. That's all the time we have for today. But I do know that we're going to have you back on here in a not too distant future because there's a lot happening in November, December as it pertains to the defense budget and kind of wrapping up Congress. And I love to have you on to kind of tie up the year with all the loose ends. And there are a ton of loose ends. So looking forward to having you back on the show and appreciate you taking time to join me here today to kind of set us on course for a lot of interesting discussions coming up in the next few months.

[31:46] JOHN KNOWLES Thanks, Ken. I always enjoy our conversations.

[31:49] KEN MILLER That is all the time that we have for today. I want to thank my guest, John Knowles, editor-in-chief of AOC's Journal of Electromagnetic Dominance, for joining me. As always, please take a moment to review, share, and subscribe to this podcast. We always enjoy hearing from our listeners. So please take a moment to let us know how we're doing. That's it for today. Thanks for listening.

[32:25] SPEAKER UNCLEAR Last topic of… (clip cuts off at end of file)