it's a multi-generational threat it's about an incredibly important uh rule in international order that big countries don't get to swallow up small countries just because they can it's a strategic threat that will impact if we're not careful on our way of life in a way that that hasn't really happened in many generations this is one of those pivotal points where we and all of our allies and partners need to act on that and that's where the five eyes comes to the fore you're seeing five nations able to share and access frankly the best intelligence that there is in the world [Music] Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine is a severe and enduring test for NATO for Western intelligence one counter to the threat posed by Russia is the collaboration fostered by the arrangement known as the five eyes the five eyes is an intelligence sharing agreement it has been the Bedrock of national security for the five countries involved for more than 75 years it risked on the fact that when the chips are down the five participants trust each other at a political and cultural level it's a trust not just in the present generation of leaders of a country it's a trust that goes down the generations now the five eyes are really interesting and that there's a long history of shared language culture behavioral Norms today that's still as true as ever on a warm Summer's morning in London in June 2018 an expert panel gathered at a policy exchange event to discuss the importance of the five eyes arrangement among the panelists were two former Prime Ministers a former NATO Secretary General and a former U.S permanent representative to Nato all were unequivocal about the importance of five eyes intelligence to the National Security of their respective Nations when you arrive at your desk one morning and you are reading through the intelligence and one or two bits of this intelligence are labeled at the top and the bottom five eyes what that means is you stop whatever you're doing you pause you pay particular attention and you read this very carefully that's because five eyes is the gold standard in intelligence but what exactly do we mean by the term five eyes and just how did an intelligence sharing agreement that emerged from the closing stages of the second world war become the foundation for much of the military cooperation we see today with the rise of increasingly assertive Rivals like China and Russia the five eyes allies are preparing their militaries for an uncertain future the Canon Arrangement forged to meet the demands of Cold War Espionage adapt to new technological threats to a world of cyber attacks electronic warfare and contested Networks foreign [Music] [Music] the five eyes Arrangement is an intelligence sharing partnership comprising Australia Canada New Zealand the UK and the US the arrangement traces its roots back to the second world war when Winston Churchill and Franklin D Roosevelt secretly met to share intercepted Communications this meeting formed the foundation of what would become the five eyes this exclusive Club grew to include Australia Canada and New Zealand and the bonds only strengthened further throughout the Cold War today the five eyes partnership remains as strong as ever providing unmatched actionable and reliable intelligence to the five allies against an increasingly hostile information landscape but for the militaries of the five countries the grouping has also become the Bedrock of their ability to operate together the five eyes will continue to be the foundation of military operations Communications and connectivity in an increasingly unpredictable world [Music] the original kind of nucleus of the five eyes partnership was on signals intelligence but it obviously very rapidly moved to Encompass other forms of intelligence the core are the five what one might call the anglo-speaking countries that share common values have supported one another through a number of international conflicts and have a similar approach to the business of National Defense and intelligence it allows you to step that relationship from being fundamentally and intelligent sharing relationship to a relationship where you're sharing activity whether it be capability whether it be Finance whether it be access you still come back to trust being at the heart of that so how important is the five eyes according to those in the know the arrangement is a unique and special relationship five eyes is the gold standard whether you're in the field as a serving United States military officer whether you're at the Pentagon or whether you're in the White House situation room or whether you're at NATO headquarters when you see five eyes you pay attention when Australia was involved in military operations in both Afghanistan and Iraq the level of access that was available from MI6 and the CIA drove home to me on a personal level just how much it was seen as a special Arrangement and that intelligence collaboration across these five democracies superchargers that intelligence because it's checked it's double checked and so forth the trust between the Nations has seen the level of cooperation extend well beyond the intelligence World indeed the ability of the five eyes Nations to work together also has a range of practical military benefits that's the thing to under the line here with five eyes is that while it isn't a grouping that's underscored by a treaty or these formal structures that we would typically recognize it is underscored by a level of trust that is kind of unparalleled it's a relationship that's founded on on really deep trust you know it comes from Decades of deep intelligence sharing and it's an environment where Nations can probably be the most open that they can I think it's quite clear what they're trying to achieve in the original purpose and that is to have standardization and interoperability of procedures of terminology and all of those things across the five countries so that they can work together more easily so at the senior level you had the richest conversations with a group of people within the Five Guys context because of that trust and because you understood not just each other's perspectives but also where they had strengths but also whether they had vulnerabilities to the Armed Forces where the relationships are equally deep and almost equally as long it's not about sharing intelligence it is really about the ability to work together and so each of the Armed Forces have a huge range of working groups that look at specific issues of interest to them all the benefit of such cooperation comes down to what those in the military call the force multiplier effect in other words if the militaries of the five eyes Nations can seamlessly operate together that would be greater than the sum of their parts at the operating level just being able to infuse multiple countries militaries together obviously has an operational advantage in terms of bringing a greater scale of force to bear in a in a conflict situation but kind of further Upstream from that is I suppose incapability development where countries are able to pull their resources pull their knowledge in a way to achieve capabilities that can't realistically be achieved by single countries anymore so we need the ability to flex and move and react and that interoperability and being able to use each other's resources and leverage each other's resources and be a force multiplier for one another is the way that you're going to Prevail in terms of military um I think the first step is is to have a shared awareness of what that threat is and that's where the five eyes comes to the full you're seeing five nations able to share and access frankly the best intelligence that there is in the world I think what's most important uh is to just communicate to our adversaries that we really do have this tight connection that that actually I think strengthens our deterrent posture with you know some of these potential adversaries like Russia and China they they shouldn't think about you know being able to act unilaterally against any one of us uh that we're all going to be involved at some level the reason it matters is because our peer adversaries are so sophisticated we're not guaranteed to have dominance in all domains like we have in the past but being able to operate seamlessly together or achieving what the military call interoperability comes with many challenges even for the five eye Nations we have to agree on what are our shared conops what are the shared elements of the operational picture we we want to share with one another because you know we're allies but not everybody shares every single thing we're doing given the threats that we're facing particularly from Russia and China there are a lot of other close allies that we need to bring into this kind of arrangement as well and it would be mutually beneficial I think for all of it so we have to decide what things are shared and what aren't shared and what we need from one another we have to decide on essentially the medium of interoperability the five eyes face a rapidly shifting strategic environment the militaries of the five nations are preparing for this uncertain future through A New Concept multi-domain operations what do we mean by multi-domain operations the U.S and its allies are developing the concept to ensure tactical advantage on the future Battlefield the concept is also known as joint all domain command and control Jad C2 in the U.S or multi-domain integration in the
UK [Music] according to military commanders in the event of any future conflict with Rivals such as China or Russia it is unlikely that our militaries will retain control over all elements of the battle space threats will be dynamic occurring in each domain from cyber to space and across air Land and Sea multi-domain operations will unite all domains in joint operations and deliver multiple simultaneous tactical dilemmas to an adversary the concept will also allow Coalition forces to work together more effectively interoperable systems will be vital to this success enabling units to communicate effectively no matter how contested the environment the true source of Battlefield Advantage will come from our ability to sense understand and orchestrate across domains at a Tempo faster than the enemy we are part of a joint and increasingly combined and Allied Endeavor to face the challenges presented by China and Russia Russia's invasion of Ukraine has made the threat of pure Warfare very real for five eyes Nations multi-domain operations will be Central to any future conflict with Communications and connectivity a crucial technological Focus but why has the need for decision dominance on the battlefield become so essential why should we care about multi-domain integration one word threat the threat isn't diminishing in fact the security Outlook is more perilous than it was two years ago mdo solves problems presented by China and Russia through the application of three tenants calibrated Force posture multi-domain formations and convergence and this means a digital Force software-defined Hardware enabled a force that harnesses pervasive sensors resilient networks cloud and Edge Computing one that applies machine learning and AIS to exploit data support decision making and enable Expendable autonomous systems and swarming ultimately the US Army will retain and expand overmatch with China and Russia through decision dominance where commanders since understand decide act and assess faster and more effectively than their adversaries we all especially in the five eyes but NATO as well recognizes the importance of operating together in this space we realize that that no one can do it alone in the information environment building wider networks of allies presents challenges however it's not just a problem to overcome but can also bring a range of operational and technological advantages as we double the number of things that are connected we probably have a four times increase in Effectiveness and so the the network is the full force multiplier and so the more things we can bring together and the more data we can move around the more successful we're going to be and so if we are going to be able to compete uh in this future contested and complicated complex information environment we're going to need the military networks uh to support those activities to keep Pace to achieve information superiority and and more importantly decision superiority uh over our adversaries the next conflict probably isn't going to be won by Whoever has the best ships or the best bombers or the best tanks it's gonna be won by whoever can process data most effectively so how are the five eyes militaries adapting to this new world one U.S army effort is known as project convergence a campaign of learning with situational awareness and connectivity at its core this effort looks to solve the challenges of convergence in convergence related problems through future warfare experiments and capability demonstrations for example project convergence 20 successfully digitally passed ground targets through an F-35 and vice versa to the ground to our various fires systems we have a significant amount of momentum that we are starting to move forward as we get into speech range convergence and really the Big Ideas how do we accelerate the ooda loop and the decision cycle we continue to underscore the future battle space is going to be a lot about robotics a lot about autonomy a lot about artificial intelligence what's going to underpin that is is our networks and our data at the heart of the concept of multi-domain operations is the notion of a connected battlefield but what does that actually mean it's going to look a little bit like you know cell phones that anticipate our routes and give me the the right route to take to avoid traffic because if it knows if I'm going to work or if I'm going to school or if I'm doing something else the interconnectedness and Automation and predictive behavior is going to be the key and again this is all based on data and having the right data at the right place at the right time is what's going to be the most important thing of the next conflict are we concerned about losing Communications with our forces or deployed forces and and I guess the answer is yes we always have been and you know there are a number of things that we're trying to do to to avoid that very situation and of course redundancy is one of them um having multiple systems or layered systems that you can rely on to to have primary alternate contingency and emergency communications networks what will this future operational environment demand in technological terms with a growing threat to Communications there will be a strong need for Reliable and secure Gateway systems to enable multi-domain operations you're never going to get a sort of grand unified Communication System where everybody uses the same Technologies and they they use the same transport layers and so really what's important is Gateway functions and functions that translate between one type of communication system and another type of communication system to allow that interoperability and so common data standards uh common communication protocols standards amongst the five eyes and NATO nations are going to increasingly be important and so we need to agree on the standards both for security and for communications and make sure that we're able to apply them to all the projects so that so that we can achieve success when you start to scale and have millions of sensors and large numbers of soldiers you can't have a person on the loop this all has to be done in machine time and it has to be done reliably and whoever does that best is who's going to win as important as Ukraine's sovereignty is what's at stake is more than that it's about a a incredibly important uh rule in international order the big countries don't get to swallow up small countries just because they can Russia's invasion of Ukraine was understandably high on the agenda when the U.S intelligence Community presented its annual threat assessment Russian military capabilities have been used to violate the sovereignty and Independence of Ukraine and they pose an existential threat to U.S national security and that of our
allies Beyond its invasion of Ukraine Moscow presents a serious cyber threat a key space competitor and one of the most serious foreign influence threats to the United States The Invasion has demonstrated Russia's intent to overturn the U.S led rules-based postcode War International order expand its control over the former Soviet Union and reclaim what it regards as its rightful position on the world stage Russia isn't the only focus in this new strategic environment the U.S regards China as a significant security challenge turning to China it remains a pacing threat and major security challenge Beijing has long viewed the United States as a strategic competitor China is capable of combining its economic diplomatic military and technological power to mount a sustained challenge to a stable and open International System it's it's a multi-generational threat and it's it's a strategic threat that will impact if we're not careful on our way of life in a way that that hasn't really happened in in many generations the challenge for Nations is what are you going to do about it it's great to have the rhetoric and we've seen quite a bit of rhetoric but Nations have to do difficult things to counter that that threat to our way of life in assessing the the thing the five eyes and its allies military commanders regard the Cyber realm as a severe technological vulnerability the thing about the Cyber domain is how fast it moves and the things that were yesterday's in the domain not only state-sponsored intelligence agencies could create the things we call advanced persistent threats yesterday's advanced persistent threats you can buy them for twenty dollars on the dark web today offensive cyber does not have to mean highly complicated and advanced sorry you can achieve quite a lot with a very low complexity attack a district in Iowa service attack for example is not complex expensive or hard to do but it can at the right scale have significant impact and so it's very easy for individuals even sort of criminal organizations to do things that only intelligence agencies could do just a year or two ago facing a rapidly shifting strategic environment the five eyes allies have one crucial advantage the game-changing Technologies developed by their commercial sectors the state of the art in many Technologies you know 40 years ago it was the military um and the commercial world was informed by military Technologies that's flipped a lot of times military Technologies are now informed by Cutting Edge technologies that are developed for for commercial uses whether it be five eyes or not the role of the commercial sector is absolutely Paramount um and than if the West if our way of life is to survive in a way that is appropriate um then the commercial sector have really got to step up it is they that are going to deliver battle-winning capability and technology and so the ability to leverage the trillions of dollars that are being spent in commercial research and development which is many many times the defense budget of all the five eyes Nations put together being able to take that research and development budget and that Innovation and apply it to defense problems that's a way that you can sort of still create that economic advantage the Russian invasion of Ukraine has Illustrated the advantages of the commercial sector Ukraine has been able to maintain widespread internet access thanks to the availability of commercially provided satellite-based internet I think the one lesson that I've seen is that by adding and integrating in commercial capabilities that you're going to diversify your architecture and make it much more resilient and so that's really been a great piece of the puzzle to actually watch happen how a commercial commercial technology commercial capability has added resiliency along the way what we're seeing as a result of their ability to to be prevented from using space capabilities is also a reflection of these new proliferated architectures that are very difficult to deny overall you may be able to deny a piece of it but you can't eliminate the capability writ large and as we look we're beginning a new Force design activity to look at the future of space-based communications and data relay not only bringing in commercial capability but absolutely that proliferated architecture that makes a network that's very difficult to defeat in total is another element of what I think we're learning from you we've come to the point that we understand that these Technologies aren't produced by States anymore that they're produced by the private sector that's where Innovation comes from in the most Central sense but I don't think we've actually given enough thought to what that means for what what power looks like in a modern Age and and who who can wield it how should they wield it and where are the barriers to those and who should be responsible for setting what the acceptable behaviors in cyberspace are the danger for the five eyes militaries is that adversaries will be able to develop and feel disruptive Technologies faster than their ability to adapt that vulnerability scares military commanders particularly given the current threat landscape this really is an interesting moment in history what is going on in Europe what has been going on in Asia and continues to go on in Asia there's a fundamental threat to our way of life those words are said a lot the These are times where Nations actions Alliance actions will be positive or negative to the way that we and future Generations will live speaking at dsei in September last year the UK's chief of Defense intelligence argued that for the military staying competitive means not just doing things differently but doing different things in other words the five eyes need to question the fundamental assumptions about how their defense organizations operate thank you the bottom line is in today's world data wins conflicts [Music] it's not chips it's not airplanes the ability to process data from thousands or even millions of sensors to move it around securely understand which data is real which data is trustworthy which data isn't trustworthy process that make decisions on that and then move the intelligence from that to the right place where it needs to go that's that's what's going to win the next conflict
2022-09-22