Future wars will be fought as much in cyberspace as any other domain and the weapons used to fight digital battles will come from the commercial sector rather than governments, the director of the Defense Department’s Strategic Capabilities Office said Tuesday.

“The technologies that are likely to change the whole landscape of national security are not going to be developed by the U.S. government,” Will Roper said at the annual symposium of the Association of Old Crows in Washington, D.C. “Our voice, the government’s voice will be a small voice, maybe an appreciate voice, but a small voice at the table. We will not control when the wave breaks, when technologies turn over. And so either we will be in a place where we can ride the wave or we are going to be left behind.”

As the pace of technology turnover increases exponentially the Defense Department should be looking at the commercial world to carry out development at a swift pace. That way the military can access cutting edge technologies without footing the bill for their development.

“The things that enable fighting in the spectrum don’t have to be paid for by governments, Roper said. “The connecting of things is going to be done whether we want it or not. The fact that our national security apparatus will find it difficult to decouple from it is inevitable.”

“All of that is going to come down the line and my biggest fear is that the [Defense] Department will stay in its 20th century mindset … and that this whole domain that moves at the speed of light or near it will be where most conflicts arise and are settled.”

Air Force Gen. John Hyten, chief of Air Force Space Command, said the military lacks the necessary situational awareness and command and control (C2) to successfully operate in such a complex and ever-changing domain as the EM spectrum.

In 2015 to date, space-to-ground satellite communications have been jammed 261 times, Hyten said. It is likely that none of those disruptions were caused by enemy activity, but instead self-jamming as a result of poor situational awareness of space, he added.

“The moral of that story is that the electromagnetic spectrum is unbelievably complicated and the smallest mistake can create huge strategic impacts,” Hyten said. “So you have to be able to monitor the electromagnetic spectrum from the most tactical all the way up to the most strategic level. The fact that we have not had a focus on that can allow the smallest little event – almost always self-jamming, to create huge strategic impact.”

The U.S. military doesn’t have enough awareness of its own assets and activities in space to keep tabs on enemy space presence, Hyten said. It is a tall order to keep tabs on everything that goes on in 73 trillion cubic miles of space between earth and geosynchronous orbit where most satellites reside.

“I actually have a tough time figuring out how create space superiority and cyber superiority, because space is 73 trillion cubic miles,” Hyten said. “How do you obtain superiority over 73 trillion cubic miles? How do you obtain cyberspace superiority in an environment that changes every minute of every day, all the time and it’s global, it’s everywhere?”

To do that, the Air Force is focused on maintaining information superiority, which Hyten said was relatively easy compared to the overarching goal of dominating space and cyberspace.

“If you think about creating information superiority to allow you to fly, fight and win in those three domains, then it’s not that hard to figure out what you have to do, and one of the things you have to do is be effective in the electromagnetic spectrum.

“You have to know what is there, to defeat adversaries that are there, to protect yourself while you are in there to make sure you don’t go back to 1967,” he said.

Machines and the access they provide to the EM spectrum have offered the military opportunities to gain a technological edge over its adversaries and presented myriad risks, said Rear Adm. Parode, director of intelligence for U.S. Strategic Command. Computers and the electromagnetic spectrum allow for the collection, consolidation and dissemination of information on a scale far beyond human capacity but have rendered individuals, the military and therefore the U.S. government hopelessly dependent on the EMS, Roper said.

“I think it is unlikely, absolutely unlikely if not impossible, for most of us to revert to being dependent solely on our biological senses in order to thrive, and possibly to survive. So important has the electromagnetic spectrum become to human experience.”

The spectrum, for instance, is used to augment physical warfighting with improvements in accuracy, lethality, maintainability and endurance off weapon systems. But commanders must in turn be able to detect and understand every adversary’s potential use of the spectrum that could threaten those weapon systems, he said.

“The creation and application of national power has become almost completely dependent upon the nation’s ability to sense, assess, understand and control the electromagnetic spectrum,” Parode said.

Air Force Col. Charles Schlegel, chief of cyberspace and electronic warfare operations for the Joint Staff, agreed that the military is reliant on cyberspace and the EM spectrum for every operation at every level. Commanders at every echelon must consider dominance of the EM spectrum an essential element of success on the battlefield, he said. Because every soldier and platform is connected to a network, each is both an EW weapon system and a vulnerability.

“We rely on the electromagnetic spectrum for everything we do, not just in warfare but for our whole economy and the global economy,” Schlegel said. “We need to be able to protect that. From a warfighter perspective, I need to have mission assurance that I can operate in those contested environments.”

That assurance, once granted by the superiority of government-developed aircraft, tanks and other weapons, in future will originate in the commercial sector and will be increasingly software rather than hardware based, Roper said. The Defense Department will have to loosen its acquisition strictures to allow swifter integration of incremental improvements in commercial tech, he said.

“That means we are going to finally have to crack doing open architectures, how to work that into our contracting system. That’s no small task, but if we don’t do it the wave is going to break and we are going to be left behind.”

Electronic warfare and operations involving the electromagnetic spectrum will be the domain that benefits from this more than any other, he added. Those operations are likely to become the leading edge of the next war, like the artillery barrage that softened up the enemy positions prior to an infantry attack in World War I.

“The people that deal with electrons and photons are going to be fighting on the very first edge of war, that we’re going to want to try to control the world of sentiment early on – then it’s time to prep the battlefield and we move into cyber and EW and that’s all about trying to gain a relative advantage … so you can bring in the things that are made of protons and neutrons that physically destroy things but that will become increasingly difficult to keep survivable and that take time to get to places we need them to go.”