Modern warfare mandates that adversaries have the opportunity to engage one another in Multi-Domain Operations (MDO) that span land, maritime, air, space, and cyberspace. To do so effectively, warfighters must not only integrate an array of capabilities, but must also synchronize cyberspace operations (CO) and electronic warfare (EW) across all domains and lines of operations to gain information advantage. To achieve this approach, commanders and staffs must integrate and synchronize CO and EW with other military capabilities (e.g., intelligence, signal, information advantage activities, and fires) through cyberspace electromagnetic activities (CEMA). However, this is an area of simulations and training that is searching for a viable solution. U.S. Army doctrine reveals little about how commanders and staffs envision CEMA tactics and actions working in combination with kinetic operations, and Warfighters struggle to visualize the operational environment through the lens of CEMA. As an initial step to addressing this problem, we developed a CEMA MDO Playbook for Modeling & Simulation that demonstrates how cross-domain capabilities, such as EW, CO, maneuver, and fires, can introduce dilemmas for the enemy while enabling friendly forces to conduct operations in degraded, disrupted, and/or denied operational environments. It includes lessons learned and identified gaps from an ongoing pilot with students and instructors at the U.S. Army War College to adapt the playbook as a training aid for visualizing the role of CEMA in MDO. The playbook can also assist teams to create training exercises or experiments with CEMA effects by integrating known simulations with plays from a common reference booklet. In the future, we envision a playbook supporting visual mappings of blue, red, and gray entities with their activities (CO and EW), actions, and impacts within training simulations and other events.
Keywords
CYBER, ELECTRONIC WARFARE, TRAINING
Additional Keywords
Multi-Domain Operations, Cyberspace Electromagnetic Activities