Enhancing Non-Kinetic Capabilities in the Ready Force

At the 22 May 2025 Sir Richard Williams Foundation seminar, GPCAPT Maria Jovanovich, Chief of Staff of the Vice Chief of the Defence Force, underscored a crucial approach for enhancing the combat capability and success of the ready force.

This is the ability of deceiving the adversary to the point whereby they simply do not know where best to strike and to not be confident of their knowledge of your plans and your targeting operations.

At an earlier Sir Richard Williams seminar, one held in September 2023, she spoke of the nature of the C2, ISR and Counter ISR dynamic and highlighted her involvement at the NAWDC or Fallon Resolute Hunter exercises. This exercise is run by the MISR officers at the naval ai wing training center, and my recent visit to NAWDC last October highlighted how the U.S. Navy is working hard to accelerate their ISR/Counter ISR capabilities.

In part they are doing so because of the priority which the INDOPACOM commander, Admiral Paparo, has placed on these activities. Admiral Samuel Paparo, who assumed command of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command in May 2024, has made counter-Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities the cornerstone of his strategic vision. His stark assessment of future warfare challenges conventional thinking about military priorities and highlights a fundamental shift in how America must prepare for great power competition.

Admiral Paparo’s most striking assertion is that modern conflicts will be won or lost before traditional kinetic operations even begin. In his view, counter-ISR operations in space and cyberspace represent “the first battle” that will determine whether U.S. forces can operate effectively or whether adversaries gain the upper hand through information dominance.

“If and when conflict comes, it is C5ISR in space and cyber, that shall be the first battle and will be either the enabling capability for the joint force, or the Achilles heel for the PLA if that day comes,” Paparo told lawmakers during his confirmation hearing in February 2024.

This assessment reflects a fundamental evolution in military thinking. While previous generations of commanders focused primarily on platforms and firepower, Paparo emphasizes that victory in the 21st century belongs to whoever can “see, decide and act faster” than their opponent.

In her presentation, GPCAPT Maria Jovanovich introduced the subject through highlighting historical examples of the importance of kinetic effects.

On June 1, 1944, as Allied forces prepared for the most ambitious amphibious assault in history, Japanese Ambassador Hiroshi Oshima sent an encrypted message to Tokyo. The transmission revealed Hitler’s confidence that the real Allied invasion would come at Pas de Calais, not Normandy — exactly where German forces were waiting in strength. What Hitler didn’t know was that his “understanding” was the product of one of history’s most sophisticated deception campaigns, demonstrating the extraordinary power of non-kinetic warfare.

Operation Fortitude, the centerpiece of the Allied deception strategy known as Bodyguard, achieved something remarkable. With just 4,500 personnel—including radio operators broadcasting fake traffic, engineers constructing dummy installations, and aircrew flying deceptive sorties—the Allies kept 345,000 German troops pinned down in Norway and elsewhere, away from the actual Normandy battlefield.

The operation’s genius lay not just in its scope but in its integration. Fake radio transmissions simulated entire armies preparing for invasions that would never come. Inflatable tanks and wooden aircraft populated Scottish airfields and English ports. Double agents spread carefully crafted narratives. Even General Patton, whom the Germans considered the Allies’ finest commander, was used as unwitting bait to sell the deception.

The asymmetry was staggering: less than 1% of the Normandy invasion force managed to neutralize forces twenty times their size. In one subsidiary operation called Ironside, just four double agents kept an entire Panzer division away from the real battle, convinced they needed to defend against a fictional landing near Bordeaux.

Fast-forward seventy years, and the principles remain remarkably consistent, even as the tools have evolved dramatically. When ISIS began terrorizing the Middle East in 2014, their sophisticated online propaganda machine proved as dangerous as their conventional forces, recruiting followers worldwide and coordinating attacks across continents.

The response came through Joint Task Force Ares, a coalition effort that mapped ISIS’s digital networks and identified ten critical nodes that controlled their entire online presence. Operation Glowing Symphony, launched in 2016, demonstrated the modern incarnation of Fortitude’s principles: comprehensive intelligence, precise targeting, and devastating effect. ISIS communications collapsed, stolen passwords exposed sensitive data, and their propaganda apparatus—crucial to their recruitment and coordination—simply vanished.

Like Fortitude, Glowing Symphony succeeded because it integrated cyber capabilities with traditional military operations, creating synergistic effects that amplified the impact of kinetic operations on the ground.

Non-kinetic effects—encompassing cyber operations, electronic warfare, and information operations—offer modern militaries unprecedented opportunities for asymmetric advantage. These capabilities can operate simultaneously at tactical, operational, and strategic levels, often with cost-effectiveness that traditional kinetic operations cannot match.

Yet despite their proven potential, most militaries struggle to integrate these capabilities effectively. The reasons are both practical and cultural, rooted in institutional biases that favor conventional weapons over more subtle forms of warfare.

She argued that military culture celebrates the dramatic: fighter jets breaking the sound barrier, precision missiles finding their targets, elite units conducting daring raids. These kinetic capabilities capture imaginations, drive recruitment, and shape how militaries think about warfare itself.

This bias has profound consequences. While most people can name Operation Overlord or Market Garden, few have heard of Operation Fortitude — despite its arguably greater impact on the war’s outcome. The seven-person London Controlling Section that orchestrated the entire Fortitude deception remains largely unknown, their extraordinary achievement overshadowed by more conventional military legends.

This cultural preference for “things that fly fast or go bang” influences everything from capability acquisition to operational planning. Training exercises either exclude non-kinetic effects entirely or treat them as afterthoughts. Doctrinal development focuses on the integration imperative without providing practical guidance on implementation.

She argued that although current military doctrine acknowledges the importance of integrating kinetic and non-kinetic effects but it stops short of explaining how to achieve this integration effectively. While specific doctrines exist for cyber operations, electronic warfare, and information operations, these remain largely isolated stovepipes rather than integrated capabilities.

A 2024 RAND Corporation study of the U.S. Air Force found identical problems: doctrine that lacks explicit integration guidance, training scenarios that inadequately represent non-kinetic capabilities, and assessment procedures that fail to measure non-kinetic effectiveness.

Historical successes like Fortitude and contemporary operations like Glowing Symphony point toward five critical requirements for effective non-kinetic integration:

Long-term strategic planning is essential. Fortitude’s success built on intelligence assets and deception networks developed over years, not months. The overarching Bodyguard strategy was conceived in July 1943, with consistent objectives maintained through execution nearly a year later.

Proactive rather than reactive approaches allow militaries to shape conditions rather than merely respond to them. Non-kinetic effects require extensive preparation and cannot be improvised at short notice.

Multi-level integration ensures that tactical actions support operational objectives that advance strategic goals. Fortitude succeeded because individual deception operations reinforced the overall narrative at every level.

Centralized planning with decentralized execution balances coherent strategy with tactical flexibility. The London Controlling Section maintained strategic direction while allowing subordinate commands to adapt execution to local conditions.

High-fidelity intelligence feedback enables real-time adaptation and effectiveness assessment. Ultra intercepts allowed Fortitude planners to monitor German reactions and adjust their campaign accordingly—a closed-loop system that maximized effectiveness.

Integrating non-kinetic effects also raises profound questions that extend beyond traditional military concerns. As societies become more digitally dependent, the technologies that enhance military capability also create new vulnerabilities. The U.S. Navy’s recent decision to resume teaching celestial navigation reflects this reality—recognition that GPS-dependent forces need backup systems when facing adversaries capable of sophisticated electronic warfare.

Information operations pose particular challenges for democratic societies. When entire populations become targets of information warfare, traditional boundaries between military and civilian responsibilities blur. Nordic countries’ “inoculation” programs against disinformation represent one approach, but questions remain about the appropriate role of military forces in what amounts to cognitive warfare.

Perhaps most fundamentally, democratic militaries must reconcile the use of information operations with their societies’ values. As one scholar noted, disinformation represents a double threat to liberal democracies: being targeted by such operations undermines democratic institutions, but employing them may have similar corrosive effects on public trust and social cohesion.

Despite these challenges, the strategic imperative for integrating non-kinetic effects continues to grow. Modern conflicts increasingly feature adversaries who exploit the seams between kinetic and non-kinetic domains, using cyber attacks to complement conventional operations, information warfare to undermine social cohesion, and electronic warfare to degrade high-tech military systems.

The asymmetric potential of non-kinetic effects — demonstrated from Normandy’s beaches to ISIS’s digital networks — offers military organizations opportunities to achieve decisive advantages with relatively modest investments. But realizing this potential requires overcoming institutional inertia, cultural biases, and doctrinal gaps that currently limit integration efforts.

The lessons of Operation Fortitude remain as relevant today as they were eighty years ago. Success in future conflicts will likely depend not just on the ability to project kinetic force, but on the wisdom to integrate that force with non-kinetic effects that can shape, deceive, and disrupt adversaries in ways that pure firepower cannot achieve.

The question is not whether militaries will eventually master this integration — the strategic necessity is too compelling to ignore. The question is whether they will do so before the next conflict tests their capabilities in the crucible of combat, where the price of unpreparedness is measured not in missed opportunities but in lives lost and objectives unachieved.

As the ghosts of those seven planners in the London Controlling Section might remind us, sometimes the most decisive battles are won not by those who fight, but by those who think — and who understand that in warfare, as in chess, the most powerful moves are often the ones your opponent never sees coming.