The conflict in Ukraine offers unexpected insight into a military construct that had previously been mostly theoretical. Ukrainian ground forces, fighting beneath an information domain dominated almost exclusively by American intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities, while no U.S. forces fight in the conflict, is what military theorists and strategists in the 1990s described as a vertical coalition. They conceived it as the future of American warfare, during a brief period in which violent ground-based conflict among powerful states was believed, by some, to be vanishing from the world. The correlating concept of sovereign identity, as the founding principle of nation-statehood, was considered by these vanguard thinkers to be malleable or changing in historically unprecedented ways. Tracing the brief history of vertical coalitions reveals the unravelling of an entire way of seeing the world, even as the construct makes its first appearance in the most unexpected war of the 21st century. That history offers a live study in how truth, hubris, and reality trade blows through the lens of military technology and concepts under modern conditions.

Vertical Coalitions

Accompanied by the misappropriation of several insights from the natural sciences, lots of talk in the 90s within the U.S. national security and strategy communities centred on what advantages could be expected from the future of networked digital information technologies.[1] As essentially the owner and administrator, the U.S. stood peerless atop this regime of tech. No other nation approached the American military’s capacity to sense and shoot with rising precision. But how would such dominant battlespace knowledge be translated into military and strategic outcomes? Serious heads such as the late Andrew Marshall and his pupil Andrew Krepinevich frequently counselled on the need for technological innovations to be culturally and organisationally materialised for advantage to accrue, lest their value be squandered.[2] One answer spanning the gamut from tactics to strategy was the concept of vertical coalitions.[3] Vertical coalitions offered a U.S. military enterprise wielding dominant battlespace knowledge the prospect of greater strategic value, for lower operational cost, and reduced political risk.

Vertical coalitions were a military adaptation of the vertical alliance concept in corporate business. There it describes a business-level strategic relationship between a firm and its suppliers or distributors aimed at improving competitive advantage. Vertical alliances deepen relationships between the firm and its suppliers and distributors through the exchange of knowledge and commercial intelligence to mutual benefit. When a supplier or distributor agrees to work exclusively with a firm, it can bring about a lock-out dynamic that further enhances the firm’s competitive advantage by denying valuable commercial intelligence to rivals. Suppliers benefit by becoming actively involved in product design and distribution arrangements. A supplier might only agree to being locked in if it sees for itself a strategic advantage in doing so, for example where a firm might have a powerful market position or, better yet, a monopoly. Choosing the right partner is an important factor in the success of the strategy, making common intentions and compatible visions of the business a must. In the business world, actors considering a vertical alliance analyse each other’s corporate cultures to map learning opportunities and avert communication problems. It’s easy to see why military thinkers considering the implications of the digital networked age would be attracted.

One of the chief thinkers on vertical coalitions for the military was Martin Libicki. He described the way U.S. air power and expeditionary forces were used in combination with a beleaguered ally that was expected to provide the bulk of ground forces. In contrast to horizontal coalitions, which involved two or more brigades fighting side-by-side, Libicki thought that future military coalitions would be decidedly more vertical and that the emerging concept of dominant battlespace knowledge would be the critical enabler. In sum, it was a vision for how the United States would fight and win in the future. In 1995, Libicki wrote:

We would supply overall intelligence on the whereabouts and movements of distant echelons. Our overhead systems (both space and air breathing) would permit pinpointing of enemy platforms. Our distributed sensor systems would be put in place to operate, analyze, and convert data into fire-control solutions. This would permit friendly forces to take precise measure of the enemy, providing them with real-time one-shot, one-kill capability. We might even control the targeting once they have fielded the weapon. In some cases, the United States might be able to tilt the contest to one side without unambiguous proof that we had intervened at all. The use of stand-off sensors as a substitute for forces also frees us from the necessity of overseas bases; they permit more operations to be planned and conducted from international waters.[4]

Critically, vertical coalitions offered partner states a quid pro quo. As the predominant actor in the information domain, the U.S. was conceivably able to provide access to otherwise unavailable information to partner states. In this way, the dominant battlespace knowledge concept was plausibly scalable. It did not apply only to high-intensity warfare. The U.S. could provide information on everything from environmental degradation, law enforcement particularly in the maritime domain, transportation, transnational crime, disaster relief and so forth. In return, U.S. sensor systems require access to such entities as open skies, extant monitors and databases, supply lines and logistics would be granted. Libicki sensed the underlying political tension. He thought that such an arrangement was contingent on the provision of information at such a level of detail that the U.S. could not be accused of only giving access to information that only supported  its objectives.

Nonetheless, the status of the U.S. would have a subtle but pervasive effect on what partners saw when they plugged into the system. It guarded U.S. sensitivities, emphasised strengths, and acted as a powerful moderator by reinforcing some transparency. Broadly speaking, Libicki enunciated a vision of the illumination of the battle space and the unbundling inclusion of allies and partners to keep alliances and coalitions together, drive down risk and mistrust, and increase cooperation.[5]

This expansive vision had a technical Achilles heel. How would vertical coalitions turn out in a world where cyber vulnerability became the defining condition of the electromagnetic spectrum? Further, was it a realistic prospect when politics among nations returned to historical norms, after a brief and hubristic post-Cold War hiatus? Either way, few military analysts anticipated we would get the chance to see a vertical coalition in action, let alone in a war with the Russian Federation in the 21st century. The fate of nation-states in vertical coalitions with the U.S. should now be front of mind in every capital in which the digital age progresses apace, because we are watching the construct operate in the furnace of battle. 

Sovereignty in Networks

Tear-lines and NOFORN classifications have long been a reality of coalitions. The political and technical logistics of information sharing carry a rather tortured legacy in military operations, even among the closest of allies. Today, governments frequently espouse their commitment to the importance of, from an Australian example, “full knowledge and concurrence” regarding the use of national military forces, platforms, personnel, and territory. A closer look reveals moving hands.[6] The functionality of information systems has been a chief critique over the past three decades since Libicki wrote. It is easier to point out the vulnerabilities in cyberspace than it is to tackle the question of sovereign accountability within networks. Knowledge and concurrence is arguably understood to be a matter of administrative confidence in the systems. It’s still about what the system spits out, and what actions we take. People under sovereign government care about why their government acts.

Several features of the war in Ukraine raise new questions in the discourse on vertical coalitions of the 1990s. Few envisioned the senior partner supplying all the armaments, and at such draining cost. U.S. dominance in high-end weapons was not expected to be accompanied by the drain on basic artillery stocks witnessed in Ukraine. In addition, the vertical nature of the coalition is underpinned by the horizontally dispersed geographical footprint of the digital stack that drives digitized warfare. A targeting system developing fire-control solutions is part of the military kill chain, is thus a legitimate target in war, and is happening outside local territory.[7] In this way, vertical coalitions create horizontal risks.

Crucially, the increasing use of statistical inference software for intelligence products and decision-making within U.S.-led coalitions introduce new political questions. Beyond tear lines and the use of a NOFORN classification, the inscrutable nature of statistical inference products buries issues of knowledge and concurrence for sovereign governments deeper. The private sector entanglement enjoins a sprawling commercial ecosystem of digital stakeholders, vulnerabilities, and influences of interest to governments sending forces into battle without transparent access to intelligence tools. Indeed, the inscrutable nature of vanguard automated data science may present the greatest challenge within coalitions we have seen to date. To return to Libicki’s political tension, in the age of statistical inference, the system administrator may be unaware of the origins of certain features of an intelligence output, let alone able to present itself as transparent. In other words, the way the intelligence might support parochial interests is buried too. If it arrived via a neural network of mathematical probabilities, who would know? Don’t ask the data scientists because they cannot tell you.

One thing is known. The disciplines of security studies and international relations are not yet in possession of the explanatory tools to grapple with these issues. Until they are, our understanding of politics among sovereign nation-states—allies, partners, and enemies—is mired in an opaque interregnum. Political leadership can only be downstream from this, democratic accountability even further. This is dangerous, because sovereign people will demand their government acts in ways that do not violate their political identity. If governments can’t say why they acted, because the reason was a probabilistic inference spawned from the fusion of poisoned and leaking data, the absence of an answer is not an answer. Not when lives, and the meaning of those lives as political actors, are at stake.

Zac Rogers is a writer and researcher based at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia. He is currently working on a defence-funded research project examining the use of advanced data-driven decision-making tools by the military.

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Header Image: MQ-9 Sunset Flight, Creech Air Force Base, Nevada, 2018 (Senior Airman Christian Clausen/DVIDS)

Notes:

[1] See for analysis of the misappropriation of insights from the natural sciences Sean T. Lawson, Nonlinear Science and Warfare: Chaos, Complexity and the U.S. Military in the Information Age (Routledge, 2013).

[2] Most recent see Andrew F. Krepinevich, The Origins of Victory: How Disruptive Military Innovation Determines the Fates of Great Powers (Yale University Press, 2023). See for overview of Marshall, Andrew F. Krepinevich and Barry D. Watts, The Last Warrior: Andrew Marshall and the Shaping of Modern American Defense Strategy (Hachette UK, 2015).

[3] See Martin Libicki, “DBK and Its Consequences,” in Dominant Battlespace Knowledge (National Defense University, 1995), http://www.dodccrp.org/files/Libicki_Dominant.pdf.

[4] Libicki, p.13.

[5] Zac Rogers, “Networked Security in the Western Pacific: A Web Without a Spider” (Flinders University of South Australia, 2018), https://flex.flinders.edu.au/file/fe4756db-277d-457e-9f8c-23a6233002fe/1/ThesisRogers2019Open.pdf.

[6] For Australian government definition of “knowledge and concurrence” see Clinton Fernandes, Sub-Imperial Power: Australia in the International Arena (Melbourne University Publishing, 2022), 44.

[7] Cabinet Ministers of Ukraine, “Government Approves Decision to Introduce Delta System in the Defense Forces,” Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, February 4, 2023, https://www.kmu.gov.ua/en/news/uriad-ukhvalyv-rishennia-shchodo-zaprovadzhennia-systemy-delta-v-sylakh-oborony.