HONOLULU—Nine months into the second Trump administration, an acting defense secretary from President Trump’s first term said he thought “we’d be a lot further along” toward a nimbler military.
“I’m seeing a lot of marketing coming out of the department, and not a lot of outcomes,” Chris Miller said during a panel at the AFCEA TechNet Indo-Pacific conference last week.
Miller, who served as acting defense secretary from November 2020 to January 2021, said today’s Pentagon leaders are taking “an approach where if you have experience inside the Beltway, somehow you’re suspect and not worthy. And what I’m seeing are a bunch of like, quote-unquote brilliant business people that do not understand the plumbing of the most bureaucratic, Byzantine organization, probably since [the] Byzantine [Empire], and we’re losing opportunities because there’s a lack of focus.”
Amid a shift in national security strategies from the Indo-Pacific to the southern border, the former Special Forces colonel also criticized the push to focus on one adversary or challenge at a time. “Where’s the leadership? We spend a trillion dollars a year on national security. We can do more than one thing.”
Miller offered his comments during a discussion on ubiquitous digital surveillance in the region, where Sean Berg, a former deputy commander of Special Operations Command Pacific, said China “is already in phase three of that war: dominate” while “we still think of ourselves in phase zero: shaping.”
But when quantum decryption becomes practical, Berg said, China will be able to read untold oceans of once-secure messages that it has intercepted and filed away, then use them to gain unprecedented understanding of the patterns of U.S. forces.
“Whoever gets quantum first and is able to use that metadata to go back and figure out and predict every single move that the U.S. is about to make, whether it’s an air crew landing and going to the same hotel, whether it is the fleet gearing up, and all the Copenhagen being bought out from 7-Eleven from a Ranger battalion,” he said.
The challenge of open data and ubiquitous surveillance is particularly relevant in the Pacific, where Rob Christian, the former command chief warrant officer for 311th Signal Command, pointed out that China “is the largest technically advanced enemy we’ve ever seen and could imagine, and they also own the majority of the infrastructure.”
Twenty years ago, operators could use burner phones, get local SIM cards, or even turn phones off to “hide in the noise.” But “hiding in the noise now is much more difficult when you think about the layer of AI and analytics on top of things that are out there and all the stuff we’ve dumped out there through our travels,” Christian said. “I think the challenge is slowly kind of morphing into, ‘OK, you’ve got to project, but you’ve also got to protect’.”
Panel moderator Mike Stokes, vice president of strategic engagements and marketing for Ridgeline, called the issue one of “digital signature warfare.”
“It’s almost its own domain, where we need to think about the adversary’s capabilities to collect on us and our ability to counter those threats as its own doctrine and policy,” Stokes said.
Berg said that one problem is that success looks like nothing is happening. Even if the U.S. government funded an identity-management campaign “that had all of the both offensive and defensive capabilities that would be integral in the technical surveillance to both protect and then understand how we’re being surveilled, the metric that would come out of that is nothing. Nothing would happen. Adversaries would not violate people’s sovereignty. There would be no crossing the border. There would be no economic coercion that would happen. There would be no bilateral manipulation of currency happening. And when you are fighting for dollars, telling the HASC or the SASC or the Appropriations Committee, ‘Yes, for the $1.3 billion, how much nothing would you like, Madam Senator?’ It’s a terrible argument to make.”
Additionally, the “bread and butter” of special operations is working with partner nations, and in every exercise, “you go into the [Joint Operations Center], you throw up your slides, and the first thing all the partners do is this,” he said, holding his phone up high above his head and pretending to take photos of the listening audience. “They start taking pictures of the slides and then sending them over Line or WhatsApp. That’s the end-to-end encryption on a Huawei backbone… The entire digital infrastructure and economic backbone of this entire theater is owned by the PRC.”
So what can commanders do? Christian suggested they “train and try…and then let yourself be exposed and fail forward, because that’s the only way your troops are gonna learn.”
Miller’s advice to commanders: “Stop saying you don’t have any money. That’s complete bull,” he said. “I do believe operational commanders should have a lot more money to work through their things, but…please, I’m begging commanders to stop saying that.” And, he said, meet with companies that may have solutions to their problems.
“Right now, all we’re trying to do is fight World War II in the Pacific. That’s exactly our operational concept,” Miller said. “There are pockets of brilliance, kids that get it, but you know, we’re still fundamentally organized to refight the Cold War, which really was refighting World War II in the Pacific. So…we’re fighting an uphill battle on that.”
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