How to Understand Air Force Information Warfare Using Football

AURORA, Colo.—As deputy commander of the 16th Air Force, the organization responsible for information warfare, Maj. Gen. Larry Broadwell has a difficult task explaining what he does to outsiders.

“It’s hard to really understand the importance of it,” Broadwell said March 4 at the AFA Warfare Symposium. “I was trying to explain this to my dad at the breakfast table one time, and he just wasn’t getting it.”

Broadwell’s father isn’t the only one; a 2024 report by the RAND Corporation said information warfare in the Air Force lacks clear roles and responsibilities, adequate resources, and a unifying identity, which can contribute to unclear expectations of what information warfare can do and how it fits into the joint force.

“Airmen cited a sense of paralysis related to this issue, noting, ‘without a [socialized] definition of IW, everyone in the USAF IW community is unsure of how to proceed, what it means, and what is expected of them,’” RAND wrote.

Information warfare involves using military capabilities in or through “the information environment” to affect adversary behavior and protect against adversary attempts to do the same. It encompasses several fields, including cyber operations, electromagnetic spectrum operations (EMSO), public affairs, intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), and weather, but none of that really rolls off the tongue.

Broadwell realized he needed an analogy, so he created one using America’s most popular sport: football. While U.S. military leaders frequently use football terminology to make a point, Broadwell’s analogy was unusually elaborate and took about two minutes to explain during a panel discussion.

It starts with the offensive coordinator, the coach who manages a football team’s offense. The offensive coordinator calls a play and relays it to the quarterback via a radio in the quarterback’s helmet. The quarterback briefs the plan with the rest of the offensive unit in a huddle, but the quarterback can change the play based on what he sees on the line, also known as calling an audible.

“He gets to the line, looks across at the linebackers, he says, ‘Hey, looks like the linebackers are kind of soft on their heels, they’re probably going to drop back into coverage,’” Broadwell said. “I’m going to call an audible, I’m going to hand it off to the running back.”

The quarterback hands the football to the running back, who runs the ball two yards before being tackled by the defending team.

“A success? Maybe,” Broadwell said. “So that’s kind of where we are today, but where I see information taking us in the future is a much more enhanced position.”

The analogy starts the same way: the quarterback gets the play from the offensive coordinator and goes to the line. But instead of guessing what the defense will do, the quarterback gets the intercepted play that the defensive coordinator sent to the linebacker.

“So he knows not what it looks like, but what they’re actually going to do,” Broadwell said.

This time, the quarterback can call a more effective audible because he knows exactly how to evade the defensive linemen. In Broadwell’s analogy, the quarterback fakes a handoff to the running back to distract the linebackers, which buys him time to throw the ball.

“Here’s where it gets good,” Broadwell said. “He looks across the field and he doesn’t have to decide who’s open. Information tells him who’s open. So the 1.34 seconds an NFL quarterback has to make a decision, he makes that decision immediately.”

Stretching the analogy even further, information warfare enables mid-flight updates to the football, telling it to adjust to a different receiver if the original is about to be covered by a defending player.

“So as that safety crashes down, now there’s an in-flight update provided to the football, and it no longer goes to the star receiver who was running a 10-yard out,” Broadwell said. “You see where this is going, it goes to the open receiver to score a touchdown.”

Information warfare, Broadwell summed up, “is the difference between a two-yard gain and a touchdown.”

Timothy Jackson breaks a tackle from Jaylon McClinton on Nov. 2, 2019 during a game against Army at Falcon Stadium. U.S. Air Force photo/Trevor Cokley

Now What?

The football analogy makes the case for information warfare, but the tough part is how to implement it when the football is a fighter jet, a pallet of humanitarian aid, or some other effect.

“The trick for us is to figure this out, because information is going to be readily available to us,” Broadwell said. “It’s figuring out what information in this analogy gets to the quarterback, what information makes it to the football so that we can score the touchdown.”

Indeed, decision-makers may find themselves overwhelmed by all the information coming from sensors in space, underwater, and everywhere in between. Other officials made similar points at the symposium.

“If you’d asked me five years ago, I’d have said our analysts need more data,” said Greg Ryckman, deputy director for global integration for the Defense Intelligence Agency. “Today, I would tell you that they’re swimming in data, and they have to figure out how to make sense of the data.”

The 16th Air Force launched the Phoenix Initiative to develop better information management solutions with industry and academia.

“The white hot areas of innovation are areas where the tactical expert is confronted with a problem and he meets with academia and/or industry to solve the problem,” Broadwell said.

But there are still challenges in terms of organization, funding, and focus. Last year, RAND critiqued the Air Force for not publishing formal, actionable requirements laying out the exact roles and responsibilities for IW organizations, which frustrates and confuses both IW Airmen and the non-IW groups they work with, RAND wrote. 

The Air Force also plans to elevate Air Forces Cyber to a service component command, which leaves question marks over the future of the 16th Air Force, since AFCYBER is a significant proportion of the 49,000-strong unit. 

“We’re elevating our cyber forces and there are a lot of intertwined capabilities where we and [National Security Agency] particularly work together,” then-Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall said during a visit to 16th Air Force in October. “At the end of the day what drives the decision is going to be what’s going to make us more competitive, what’s going to put us in a better position to compete with China, not just in near term, but over long-term strategic competition.”

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