Category Archives: Maritime Security

Unmanned Naval Warfare: Developing a Mechanism for the Future of Unmanned Systems

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By

Vice Admiral (retd.) Vijay Shankar

(This article was first published in Geopolitics Magazine, May 2015.)

The year is 2020. A strategic entente has long been reached between the USA, India, Australia, Japan and the ASEAN to provide cooperative security in the waters of the Indian Ocean and the West Pacific. Japan has since 2018 been unleashed from military strictures imposed after the World War II by the San Francisco treaty of 1951, the Potsdam Declaration of 1945 and the Cairo Declaration of 1943. In the meantime the situation in the South China Sea has reached a flashpoint. China has unilaterally declared the South China Sea as defined by the 9-dash line as a territorial sea while enabling the third island chain strategy to provide security to their energy and trade routes. The third island chain runs an arc from the north of Japan, east of the Mariana Trench passing through the Makkasar and the Lombok Straits extending to the Chagos archipelago. The US installation of ABM batteries in the littorals, series of hot incidents in China’s East China Sea air defense identification zone and the escalating clashes between maritime security forces in the South China Sea has provoked an aggressive reaction from China. In a rapid joint amphibious assault PLA forces have occupied the disputed islands of Quemoy and Matsu in the Taiwan Strait.

In the Indian Ocean, China as a part of their Africa strategy has laid stifling embargos on use by the entente of all “Maritime Silk Road” gateways and infrastructures that they helped finance particularly the TanZam rail corridor and ports of Mombasa and Lamu in Kenya, ports of Dar es Salaam and Bagamoyo in Tanzania and the port of Djibouti. They have similarly denied access to the ports on the west coast of Africa particularly Kirbi in Cameroon. The PLAN have deployed the Liaoning carrier group along with supporting nuclear attack submarines and surveillance elements for SLOC control and security in the North Indian Ocean.

The Indian CCS have accepted the need for joint Entente operations to enhance surveillance and mark PLAN forces. Accordingly the Vikramaditya carrier group has been deployed in standoff mode while several US long endurance surveillance and strike UAVs have been tasked for surveillance of Chinese forces.US unmanned denial forces have been assigned distant ‘marking’ tasks. The composite Entente task force is designated TF 911; it is supported by precision and persistent satellite surveillance, ABM batteries and nuclear attack submarines.

 After a series of fruitless diplomatic exchanges and strident demarches, Chinese high command establishes a 200 nautical mile moving Exclusion Zone around the Liaoning Group. Task Force Commander (TFC) 911 is ordered to challenge this zone. Accordingly he prepares to tighten the surveillance perimeter and bring in his long range strike and surveillance UAVs to maintain shadowing distance of 190 nautical miles by reprogramming their surveillance sectors while deploying his unmanned denial forces to marking range of 100 nautical miles. As the new deployment pattern is executed TFC 911 receives an alarm report that the satellite surveillance picture is snowed out while both UAVs and unmanned denial forces were not under command and had reverted to their default “come home” mode which would navigate them away from the scene of operations to a distant stand by way point.

Cyber attacks unleashed by the PLAN had breached and spoofed the satellite surveillance networks; while the command and control links of the unmanned vehicles had been penetrated, their command computers disabled and control codes hacked into; effectively both UAVs and unmanned denial forces had turned rogue! CTF 911 is faced with a serious operational quandary, should he risk man with material to go in harms way? Would the introduction of manned units comprise an escalation of the situation? Will an engagement involving casualties spin out of control? At a more profound level was a doubt; could the unmanned replace the manned combatant?

To be sure this is a gaming scenario, but the fear of loss of control of remote forces is a reality that no Commander at sea can wish away particularly when cyber security is an inverse function of use, while use is central to efficiency. Also, the gap in singularity between man and remote weapon will always exists as an exploitable vulnerability. The CTFs’ operational dilemma is an existential predicament when the option to use unmanned vehicles is available. His more profound doubt captured the essence of the unmanned combatant; to integrate and enhance rather than replace.

The Battle of Lake Poyang [i]

In 1363 CE a curious battle was fought between the ruling Han fleet of Chen Youliang and the warring founder of the Ming Dynasty Zhu Yuanzhang, the outcome of the battle would decide control of China. Chen had amassed a large Han armada comprising big deep draught heavy artillery tower ships for the investment of the riverine city of Nanchang along the south west bank of the Poyang lake, the largest inland fresh water body in China. The aim was to gain a strategic foothold in Ming territory. Drought conditions and nature of the waters made pilotage difficult due shallows and strong shore setting currents created by the river Ga Jiang that drained into the lake. The Han armada was restricted in manoeuvre to a disproportionately small deep water pool. The Ming fleet however saw tactical advantage in speed, mobility and manoeuvre. Accordingly their fleet depended on agility, shallow draught and lightly cannoned hulls. The engagement between the two was pitched, asymmetric and prolonged without reaching a decision till the Ming Navy introduced small unmanned fire ships into the fray. The crafts were loaded with straw and tinder, dummies were erected to simulate a watch on deck and they were towed stealthily to their release points upstream and upwind of the Han armada. The straw was set afire just as the tow was slipped. With their helms seized the fire-ships drifted rapidly on to the bunched Han armada, ramming and setting ablaze the lumbering tower ships. Nanchang was relieved and the Han never recovered from this defeat.

The Battle of Poyang is important to our study for two reasons: firstly, the use of unmanned war ships is not a new phenomenon in maritime conflicts as the 14th century Zhu Yuanzhang will testify; secondly, planning, coordination and direction is a command function that cannot be left to the ‘intelligence of a drifting fire ship; thirdly, as the Commander of Task Force 911 realized in our creative scenario of 2020, the future of unmanned systems at sea and across the entire spectrum of maritime operations must remain focused on integrating with the manned platform.

Case for Unmanned Combat Platforms

Convergence of three critical factors will impact the development and constituents of tomorrows’ Fleet, and indeed, will form the driving force for the adoption of unmanned combat platforms. Firstly, a convincing argument may be made of how unmanned platforms will improve combat capabilities without the risks involved in committing humans for high hazard operations such as minesweeping, surveillance, low intensity operations and marking of high value potentially hostile units. Secondly, a cost benefit analysis will readily reveal the obvious that payload to platform dimensions is adversely affected by the need to provide safety and hotel services for manned platforms, as a thumb rule this may be taken between 20% to 25% by volume and an equal amount by cost. Lastly, the economics of matching tight budgets with increasing demands on the operational tempo of the Navy will call for cutting back on manpower through increased automation, technology substitutes and incorporating artificial intelligence; this in turn will have a positive effect on reducing bulk, increasing platform lethality and enhancing mobility.

Technology Trends and the Planner’s Vision        

The spectrum of applications where unmanned systems may find use, range from automated systems that ease operator load and in turn reduce complement of crew to completely autonomous platforms that makes decisions based on artificial intelligence and may be programmed for a variety of missions from start to termination without human intervention. However our 2020 scenario will suggest an operational vision that is tempered by four guiding factors:

  • Unmanned systems will augment and not replace existing and projected manned force structures.
  • Unmanned systems will be standardized to four basic design categories: Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAV), Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV), Unmanned Underwater Vehicle (UUV) and Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGV to include sea bed mobility). Mission packages will be modular and will conform to respective design categories. Platform size will be minimized.
  • Unmanned systems will be compatible for operations by all major surface combatants.
  • While automation will be enhanced to give near autonomy to platforms, high level human supervision will, however, prevail. Weapon release will in most cases require human control.

Platform Priority for development may be distinguished by operational needs, a suggested set of priorities are: Priority 1: Scouting, Priority 2: Mine sweeping and hunting, Priority 3: Undersea offensive operations.

Operational Mission Requirements: Unmanned Combat Systems

We have thus far, through the devices of a simulated scenario and historical reference made a macro case for the development, induction and integration of unmanned systems into the Navy of the foreseeable future. While our approach has been evolutionary we have to remain sensitive to the fact that risk aversion and economics alone cannot be the reason for an unmanned orientation. After all from a moral standpoint, armed conflict is a national political endeavour that is characterized by human violence; to remove the human from one side in order to sanitize war fighting is to run the danger of trivializing armed conflict to a video game. The man must not only take responsibility for decisions he makes, but also for the consequences of his action. Because the systems we are dealing with are maritime systems, in peacetime they will be forward deployed in international waters for operations that aim at monitoring and projecting presence to a greater degree than other technologies. As discussed earlier their very character will encourage their use in a wider variety of contexts than current manned units. Both forward deployment and broader applications give to the unmanned maritime systems an operational potential that in theory places them in the vanguard of operational utility. Given such a potential it is extremely important that the Commander at sea envision what transformation the system will bring about and how both man and material must respond. Two factors play a pivotal role in understanding the altered circumstance; firstly, the unmanned system remains a tool in the hands of planners to further, as always, political objectives whether these are humanitarian, economic, surveillance or power projection. Second, most contemporary assessments about these systems build a rationale a that unmanned systems, being defenceless against a well equipped foe, can figure with any prominence only in the Navy’s benign and policing roles without a mention on the impact that it may have on the future operational maritime space. This second consideration is hardly surprising since assessments can only be made with some anticipated use in mind and perhaps the most simplistic is that it extends an existing capability; overlooking the discreet strike role that these systems played in America’s war on terror in Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Pakistan and the surveillance role that they continue to play in disputed waters such as the South China Sea.

Deployments of unmanned systems in numbers particularly space based systems for operational and even tactical scenarios will require changes to our command and control doctrines and structures. This is significantly true in dense and complex situations when the fleet commander and his deployed combatant elements are recipients of combat information from unmanned systems over which they have no control yet will have to respond to. Satellite and long range surveillance imagery are cases in point when the sensors and remote sensing devices could well be national assets that deliver right up to the tactical level. Therefore while defining the mission requirements for the instruments of unmanned naval warfare it is important to keep the larger context of the nature of armed conflict in stark perspective. The primary requirement, within the parameters of the planner’s vision (discussed earlier) is for war fighting. This will include scouting by which is meant missions’ involving search, patrol, tracking or reconnaissance.[ii] All four design categories of unmanned systems may be engaged in scouting operations. It must be noted that when deployed on patrol missions, a strike capability is intrinsic either by a cooperating unit or by the unmanned system. Human supervision is an essential part of our requirements for our unmanned combat systems accordingly a special cadre will have to be raised for control. Tactical and operational assignments may include deception, electronic warfare, information warfare and environment data collection (both meteorological and hydrological) in all three dimensions. The planner will also remind us that operational decisions always carry with them a probabilistic uncertainty much in the mould of CTF 911’s quandary. In the aggregate what the planner behind his desk will do well to pay heed to while defining the mission requirements of the unmanned combat system and the Commander at sea hark back to before deploying his mission is Clausewitz’ insightful message on the non-linearity of warfare, that the “complexity of war is greater than the sum of its parts”.

Mission Packages

Mission packages for the four standard design categories identified earlier must necessarily lead off from the operational mission requirements identified earlier and conform to the considerations that influence the planner’s vision. Platform standardisation, modularity of mission packages that would permit easy role configuration changes within a standard platform as well as between platforms (where possible) as well as adaptation of the technology trends particularly those related to automation, autonomy and control will be central to the realisation of the mission packages. In broad terms, five main mission packages have been identified which may further be de-aggregated to functional modules. The 5 packages are:

  • Scouting, navigation, target acquisition and weapon delivery.
  • Sensors.
  • Meteorology, hydrology, bathythermal and underwater topography.
  • Information warfare, Electronic warfare and communication relay.
  • Battle Damage Assessment.

Conclusion: To Catch the Transformatory Moment

Induction of unmanned combat systems into the Indian Navy has thus far been haphazard. It has neither been guided by an integrated approach between services nor has development of unmanned systems for the navy followed a set of priority driven requirements. The approach hitherto has been, unique designs for stand alone specific missions and a concentration on performance. How else does one explain the sponsoring of the Nishant short endurance UAV, acquisition of the medium endurance UAV Searcher, acquisition of the long endurance Heron and the induction of an assortment of mine sweeping and mine hunting UUVs? There has been no movement towards developing a planner’s vision nor a policy orientation directed at standardisation of platforms, modularity of mission packages, recognising technology trends or creating control compatibility and interoperability. So currently the Navy finds itself with non interactive systems segregated into unique and specific platform “stove pipes” with little or no compatibility with major manned combatants.

In the absence of a mechanism that first, makes a prognostication of the direction that unmanned naval warfare is likely to take and then formulates plans and coordinates the future of unmanned systems; the Indian Navy is quite likely to miss a tranformatory moment in the course of maritime warfare. We began with a hypothetical maritime scenario when the Commander of Task Force 911 was placed on the horns of an operational dilemma through loss of control of his unmanned forces, the situation was more a planner’s lesson that unmanned forces are not intended to replace manned combatants but to integrate and enhance capability. In order to do so a case was made in support of the unmanned combat platform at sea and a tempered operational vision was developed for standardising unmanned platforms. This led to the macro definition of mission requirements in all three dimensions and then zeroed in on the essential mission packages. While emphasising the need for an integrated approach what should not be lost sight of is the perils of viewing the unmanned system as an economical weapon that could avert risks to the man behind the machine, rather the intention is not to replace but combine. In our historical review of the Battle of Poyang we saw how well directed unmanned fire ships delivered victory to an inferior force; the question before us is clear do we choose the Zhu Yuanzhang model and catch the transformatory moment or not.

End Notes 

[i] Dreyer Edward L, The Poyang Campaign, 1363. The Chinese Ways of Warfare edited by Frank A Keirman and John K Fairbank. Harvard University Press 1974. pgs 202-242.

[ii] Allied Naval Manoeuvring Instructions. NATO Publication 1957, Pg 8-3

Strife on the Global Commons

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 This article is a summary of a presentation made by the author at the National Defence College (India) on 20 June 2014.  It was first published in the author’s monthly column on the Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies website on 14 July 2014 

By

Vice Admiral (retd) Vijay Shankar

Keywords: Global Commons, Mare Liberum, Mahan, UNCLOS, China’s Comprehensive Power, South and East China Sea

The run up to the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC) was marked by a  debate held in Sparta amongst the Peloponnesian allies to  determine whether war against the aggressive seapower Athens and the maritime Delian League was to be waged. Leadership of the warlike alliance lay with the powerful yet reluctant Spartan king Archidamus, a man of both intelligence and moderation. He questioned “What sort of a war, then, are we going to fight? If we can neither defeat them at sea nor control the resources on which their navy depends, we shall do ourselves more harm than good.” To Archidamus, clearly, the inability to access and control the Global Commons of his era presaged defeat.

Global Commons is a term typically used to describe international, supranational, and global common pool resource domains. Global Commons include the earth’s shared resources, such as the oceans, the atmosphere, outer space and the Polar Regions. Cyberspace also meets the definition, but for our examination we shall focus on the hydrosphere. The parameters for enquiry necessarily include physical tangibles of Height, Width, Depth and the awkward intangible of human history.

Mahan in “The Influence of Seapower upon History” underscored three prescient perspectives relating to the Commons. First, competition for materials and markets is intrinsic to an ever trussed global system. Second, the collaborative nature of commerce on the one hand deters war, while on the other engenders friction. Third, the Global Commons require to be secured against disruption and rapacious exploitation.

Our understanding of the Commons must not suffer from any delusions that explicit and recognized conventions have evolved over the centuries. On the contrary, till the middle of the last century what passed for a principle was Hugo Grotius’ 1609 notion of Mare Liberum, freedom of the seas.The concept that the sea was international territory and all nations were free to use it. The free-for-all state of the Commons becomes evident in the fact of the seaward limit of national sovereignty being defined by the cannon-shot decree which would suggest that it was the ability to control that defined dominion. By the middle of the twentieth century the collapse of colonial empires and the birth of new nations set into motion a dynamic that demanded a change from cannon-shot rules and lawlessnessto equitability and responsibilities in the Commons along with demarcation of territorial and economic zones. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS I, II & III) met 1954 to 1982 to hammer out and define rights and responsibilities of nations in their use of the world’s oceans. The deliberations concluded in 1982 in and became functional in 1994. Recognizing that that the sea bed is the repository of vast and unguaged quantities of minerals, the Convention provided for a regime relating to minerals on the seabed outside any state’s territorial waters or Exclusive Economic Zone. It established an International Seabed Authority to regulate seabed mining and control distribution of royalties. To date it has been ratified by 165 nations. Significantly, the US Senate has snubbed the UNCLOS. What critically mars the compact is its imprecision, its illusory demand for the supranational and the absence of a structure to securethe Global Commons against disruption and rapacious exploitation.

The current distressed state of the Commons is discernable by the impact that globalization has had; strains of multi-polarity, anarchy of expectations and the increasing tensions between the demands for economic integration and the stresses of fractured politicaldivisions are symptoms. Nations are persistently confronted by the need to reconcile internal pressures with intrusive external impulses at a time when the efficacy of Power to bring on political outcomes is in question. While most nations have sought resolution and correctives within the framework of the existing international order, China emerges as an irony that has angled for and conspired to re-write the rule book.

China’s rising comprehensive power has generated an internal impulse to military growth and unilateral intervention in its immediate neighbourhood in the South and East China Sea and its extended regions of economic interests. It has developed and put in place strategies that target the Commons to assure a favourable consequence to what it perceives to be a strategic competition for resources and control of the seaways that enable movement. The consequences of China activizing artifices such as the Anti-Access and Area Denial strategy and geo-political manoeuvres to establish the String of Pearls in the Indian Ocean Region evokes increasing shared anxieties and resistance by players in the same strategic milieu. Particularly at a time when the North Eastern Passage through the Arctic is emerging as receding ice cuts the Asia-Europe route via the Suez by half (from 23000 kms to 11500 kms) and technology opens the Antarctic to economic exploitation. The paradoxical effects of China’s contrivances are to undermine its own strategic standing, hasten counter balancing alignments and urging a global logic of cooperative politics over imperious strategies.

The Perils of Strategic Narcissism: China

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By

Vice Admiral (retd.) Vijay Shankar

China’s rise has powered an impulse to military growth and unilateral intervention which in turn evokes anxieties and resistance by players in the same strategic milieu. The paradoxical effect is to undermine its own strategic standing.

 Keywords: Franco-German War of 1870, Globalization and China, State Controlled Capitalism, China as a Revisionist Power, New Strategic Alliances in Asia, Cooperative Security Strategies, Third Island Security Chain

Historical Similitude

            The Franco-German War of 1870 forms a watershed in strategic thought. After the annexation of the North German Confederacy in 1866, Bismarck sought the Southern German States.[1] He deceived the French into believing that a Prussian Prince would rule from the throne of Spain as a larger strategy of encirclement. By July 1870, France[2] was conned into a seemingly ‘inevitable’ war. Germany through superior military craft and technology inflicted a crushing defeat on the host. In the process the balance of power in Europe was upset.[3] The War, from deception, to alliances, provocation of crisis and defeat of the enemy forcing a one-sided negotiation could well have been scripted by Kautilya[4] or, more significant to our narrative, Sun Tzu.[5]

German victory ushered a strategic orientation to compete with the principal imperial power, Britain.[6] Three strategic objectives swayed the rivalry: military dominance over land and sea; global economic and technological ascendancy in tandem with unimpeded access to primary resources; and thirdly, diplomatic and political pre-eminence. By 1890, Germany had established continental military dominance and a warship-build programme that would challenge British command of the seas. Economically, Germany had already overtaken Britain in heavy industries and innovation, capturing global markets and amassing capital. This in turn muscled influence and superiority in one sector after another.

A thirty-year projection in 1890, suggested that Germany, home to the most advanced industries having unimpeded access to resources of the earth, best universities, richest banks and a balanced society would achieve her strategic goals and primacy. Yet precisely thirty years later, Germany lay in ruins, her economy in shambles, her people impoverished and her society fragmented. By 1920, her great power aspirations lay shamed between the pages of the Treaty of Versailles. The real lesson was that Germany’s quest for comprehensive power brought about a transformation amongst the status-quo powers to align against, despite traditional hostility (Britain and France; Britain and Russia), to contain and defeat a rising Germany that sought to upset the existing global order.

China in Perspective

Historical analogies are notorious in their inability to stage encores, yet they serve as means to understand the present. Contemporary fears of nations are driven by four vital traumas: perpetuation of the State; impact of internal and external stresses; reconciliation with the international system; lastly the conundrum of whether military power produces political outcomes. The paradigm of the day is ‘uncertainty’ with the tensions of multi-polarity, tyranny of economics, anarchy of expectations and polarisation along religio-cultural [7] lines all compacted by globalization [8].

If globalization is a leveller to the rest of the world, to China, globalization is about State capitalism, central supremacy, controlled markets, managed currency and hegemony. The military was to resolve fundamental contradictions that threatened the Chinese State. Significantly globalization provided the opportunity to alter the status-quo.[9] Against this backdrop, is the politics of competitive resource access and denial, which rationalized the use of force.[10]

China’s dazzling growth is set to overtake the USA. Its rise has been accompanied by ambitions of global leadership. This has in turn spurred an unparalleled military growth. In this circumstance the race to garner resources by other major economies is fraught. But the real alarm is, China seeks to dominate international institutions without bringing about a change of her own morphology. China’s claims on the South and East China Sea; handling of internal dissent; proliferatory carousing with North Korea and Pakistan are cases in point.

The emergence of China from its defensive maritime perimeters into the Indian Ocean is seen as the coming ‘Third Security Chain’. Gone is Deng’s ‘power bashfulness’, in its place is the conviction that the-world-needs-China-more-than-China-the-world.Its insistence on a bi-lateral policy to settle disputes even denies the natural impulse of threatened states to seek power balance in collective security. 

The Sense in Cooperative Security Strategies

            The standpoint that provocation and intimidation can benefit China by persuading the victim to negotiate outstanding issues from a conciliatory position is a strategically mistaken one. India, Japan, Vietnam and the South China Sea Littorals have demonstrated so. Far from acquiescing they have chosen to resist, adopting (in trend) a cooperative security strategy. This includes deliberate negative response to favour Chinese economic monopoly even when the benefits are obvious. While individual action may be insignificant, the aggregate of combined action may impede China’s growth which in turn question’s strategic stability of dispensation.

The parallels with the rise and fall of Germany is complete when we note that China’s Defence White Paper of April 2013 underscores the will to expand offensive military capability in pace with economic growth. Internationally this can only be viewed as acutely threatening. The delusion that menaced States will not align to contend and defy China’s grand design is a strategically misleading notion.

_________

End Notes

[1] Séguin, Philippe. Louis Napoléon Le Grand, Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1990, Pg 390-394.

[2] Encyclopaedia Britannica, updated December 2013, Franco-German War, retrieved 30 May 2014.

[3] Lowe, John. The Great Powers, Imperialism and the German Problem 1865-1925. Taylor and Francis, Routledge, London, New York 1994. Pgs 13, 26, 34.

[4] Kautilya. The Arthashastra, translation by Rangarajan LN, Penguin Classics New Delhi 1990, Part IX pg 498 to Part XI pgs 625-644, 676-679 & 727.

[5]Sun Tzu, The Art of War, translated by Griffith, Samuel B. Oxford University Press, London 1963. Chapter V, pg 39-44.

[6] Kennedy, Paul. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Vintage Books, New York 1987, Chapter 5 pgs 194-274, deals with the crisis of the rise of ‘Middle Powers’ such as Germany (1885-1918).

[7]Fukuayama Francis. “The End of History.” The National Interest, 16 (Summer 1989), pp 4, 18.

[8]Huntington. Samuel, P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of  World Order, Penguin Books, India 1997, pp 30-39.

[9] The World at War http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/index.html.The United Nations defines “major wars” as military conflicts inflicting 1,000 battlefield deaths per year. In 1965, there were 10 major wars under way. The new millennium began with much of the world consumed in armed conflict or cultivating an uncertain peace. Between 1989 and 2010, forty nine wars erupted. As of mid-2005, there were eight Major Wars under way [down from 15 at the end of 2003], with as many as two dozen “lesser” conflicts ongoing with varying degrees of intensity.

[10] Security analysts  have examined China’s efforts to develop weapons systems that can retard or even stop a potential adversary from entering an area of interest. Dubbed “access-denial,” the aim of such a strategy is to use weapons that deter and should the need arise challenge or indeed prevent inimical forces from operating in conflict zones or oceanic areas of interest . The teeth of this strategy is an anti-ship missile. Such a missile, fired from land, sea, underwater or air can cause tremendous damage to an enemy surface vessel. While such technology isn’t new, the effective ranges of such weapons have increased tremendously, along with their accuracy, speed of delivery and precision. Defending against such systems is therefore a major problem for planners.