“boon for our adversaries,” Adm. Frank Bradley warned in March, summing up a danger that Rep. Ronny Jackson says now requires a single, department-wide response.
Adm. Frank Bradley and Bradley Hansell on UTS
At a March hearing of the House Armed Services Committee’s Intelligence and Special Operations Subcommittee, Adm. Frank Bradley, head of US Special Operations Command, explicitly called out ubiquitous technical surveillance — UTS — and labeled the information exposed in the digital domain a “boon for our adversaries.” Weeks later, Bradley Hansell, the Under Secretary of War for Intelligence and Security, told the same forum that the Defense Intelligence Enterprise is actively investing to “transform the human enterprise to operate in a world of UTS.” Those two statements, cited by Rep. Ronny Jackson, establish that senior Department of War leaders view pervasive digital data collection as an operational problem demanding institutional change.
The Strava incident and the Charles de Gaulle
Rep. Jackson recounts a concrete example of how ordinary digital behavior can yield operationally sensitive information: earlier this year, a naval officer’s routine use of the fitness app Strava revealed the location of the French nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle while it was operating in the eastern Mediterranean amid the US-Israeli conflict with Iran. No classified system was hacked and no network was deliberately penetrated; instead, publicly available activity data from a personal device produced actionable location information. That vignette underpins Jackson’s central claim: a single benign data point can, in aggregation, expose military movements and operational patterns.
Ubiquitous Technical Surveillance (UTS): the threat defined
Jackson defines UTS as the constant collection and monitoring of digital information through the combination of physical and environmental sensors, cameras, smartphones and mobile devices, fitness apps, financial transactions, connected devices, and countless other technologies that quietly record where people go, who they meet, and what they do. He argues that one data point may seem harmless but, when combined with other signals, can reveal identities, locations, and patterns that are “actionable” for adversaries. He cites another operational example: during the early stages of the war in Ukraine, the Russian military acknowledged that a Ukrainian strike killed scores of its soldiers and blamed the losses on cellphone use that exposed soldiers’ positions — a hard lesson, Jackson says, that “digital discipline is now force protection.”
Section 1098 in the House NDAA: a legislative fix
Jackson says responsibility for countering UTS remains fractured inside the Department of War and that no single office currently has clear ownership of the problem at a department-wide level. To address that, he led Section 1098 in this year’s House National Defense Authorization Act. The provision, as Jackson describes it, would for the first time require the Department of War to designate a single head of an organization within the department responsible for identifying UTS vulnerabilities across the force. Section 1098 would also direct the department to:
- develop a comprehensive strategy for the research, development, and procurement of secure communications and obfuscation technologies;
- develop UTS training and techniques to enhance force protection;
- produce a plan for a long-term program of record to meet counter-UTS needs.
Jackson frames the provision as an institutional measure to transform how the department plans, buys, trains, and staffs against an information environment he calls persistently hostile.
What this means for the Department of War, servicemembers, and Congress
Department of War leaders: under Section 1098, the department would be required to assign clear ownership of UTS mitigation and to produce a strategy spanning R&D, procurement, training, and a program of record. Jackson portrays that as an attempt to move responsibility from a fractured set of actors into a single accountable office.
Servicemembers: Jackson’s examples — Strava activity exposing a carrier and cellphone use blamed for battlefield losses in Ukraine — are presented as evidence that ordinary device use can become a force-protection liability. The prescription implied by the provision is not only technical (secure communications, obfuscation) but also doctrinal and educational (UTS training and techniques).
Congress: as the House and Senate work to conference the Fiscal Year 2027 NDAA, Jackson urges lawmakers to preserve Section 1098 in any final package and to send it to the president for signature. He frames the choice starkly: just as troops are not sent into combat without body armor, they should not be sent onto today’s “digital battlefield” without institutional protections.
Rep. Ronny Jackson advances Section 1098 as a narrow, legally prescribed change: designate a single leader, generate a comprehensive strategy, fund a program of record, and integrate training and procurement to counter UTS. The next step is procedural — preserving the provision in the NDAA conference process — and strategic: turning a series of warnings from military leaders into enduring departmental responsibility.
