Air Force Cyber Command’s Strategic Vision spells out the command’s operational scope and postures. Controlling cyber space is key to national security. This was clearly articulated in the 2008 National Threat Assessment delivered by the Director of National Intelligence to the Congressional Armed Services Committee last week. Major General William T. Lord heads up the command that is provisionally located at Barksdale Air Force Base. The command is slated to begin operations in this fall and become fully operational in 2009.
Supremacy in cyber space is critical across all strategic and operations domains. This new command is currently in the process of acquiring a suite of capabilities that will create the flexible options for military and governmental decision makers. These capabilities sought be Cyber Command include but are not limited to the following:
The ability to deter adversaries
The ability to deny access and operations to adversaries
The ability to disrupt adversaries
The ability to deceive adversaries
The ability to dissuade adversaries
The ability to defeat adversaries
This will be accomplished through a variety of offensive and defensive, destructive and non-destructive, and lethal and non-lethal capabilities being developed and deployed within Cyber Command.
The cyber threat environment faced by the U.S. and our allies represents a new challenge. Cyber command has chosen a holistic approach to meeting this challenge that includes science and technology, research and development, systems acquisition, operations, education, training, and a new operational doctrine. The challenges of standing up a new command are daunting. When you compound those challenges with addressing the complexities of cyber warfare, they multiply and become huge.
The battle being fought by the Air Force is not limited to cyber space. You may have seen the slick new commercials airing on television. This is an offensive move by the Air Force to try and secure the lead position in cyber warfare and defense. The Army and the National Security Agency are also vying for the top spot.
One insider believes that the NSA has already been given the nod. Well, at least unofficially. However, this battle rages on.
This is a critical time for the United States. Our nation, our society, our economy and our businesses are all heavily dependent on Internet connectivity. Failure is not an option and the White House and Congress know it. We must address the threats coming from cyber space. Earlier this year I wrote an article for Eye Spy magazine titled, “The Department of Cyber Defense.” I believe the best way to address this new threat to create a new organization and staff it with a cross functional team for NSA, DoD, DHS as well as the Army, Navy and Air Force. Using this approach, the country gets the best and brightest assembled from all these organizations and stands up a new entity that comes without baggage that is inherent in all organizations.
Completely new, new hybrid, or assign the responsibility to and existing entity — what is your opinion?
Regardless of which structure would be most effective in an ideal world, I think a hybrid organisation would work the best for the situation the U.S. is in now.
INFOSEC and INFOWAR capabilities need to be deployed consistently and cohesively across all appropriate sectors of military and government infrastructure. Given the inter-service politics, I think every relevant service and department needs to be able to buy into the concept and have some sense of investment and ownership in it. I feel that it’d be a lot harder for, e.g., the Navy and Army to make a serious commitment to “Cyber Command” if it’s placed squarely in the Air Force’s domain, or similarly for any service if it’s an NSA baby.
I’m not convinced any of the services are a good choice for leading this cyber command. It seems to me that we need to develop a mindset of a warrior-hacker–someone who can take a commander’s intent and with the trust of his peers and superiors (all of whom are networked, yet independently working towards the same objectives), manage to hack, disrupt, destory, and exploit enemy electronic networks.
Which service has the dynamics required for such a force? I don’t think any of them does. Perhaps the best model would be the Special Operations Executive of the UK (WWII), or the OSS.
The important things here are mindset and freedom from bureaucracy. Technology is important, but hell, even the Air Force flies stealth bombers with 20-year-old technology. The technology for such a cyber force would probalby be commercial, off-the-shelf (COTS) anyways, in order to keep abreast of the latest technological developments in the private sector.
My advice would be to either stand up a seperate service, or, at a minimum, establish a Unified Command with some Title X powers to train-and-equip (like SOCOM).
Monkey wants my burger.Monkey wants my burger!!!!!
Serv to Country.
Given that many of the assets to be protected are civilian — commercial secrets, server farms under denial of service attack, power plants etc — presumably a big factor in cyberwar will be actively encouraging net security in general.
So how much effort is cybercommand putting into encouraging this self defence effort from potential targets? It is after all a question of encouraging behavior that is sensible commercial practice anyway.
As to whether the airforce is the obvious organisation to run this, well that’s a question of logic, empire building, and how important this type of combat becomes. Not many people thought aircraft would be important enough to rate a seperate arm originally either. Time will tell.
All the services should have their own cyber units.But the command should be headed by the NSA
and the only NSA Agencies.
In thinking about it for a moment I think the best approach would be to form a new separate organization, one that specializes in these matters.
The compound of man’s intelligence continues to expand, and with the aid of computers, the speed and complexity of intelligence has surpassed the capability of any group of humans to manage by themselves.
Today, we can define the structure and the design of such needed systems, and then let our machines handle the volume and the complexities. But as machine intelligence continues to evolve, eventually, the structure and the design will be handed over to the machines as well.
In the end all we’ll need to do is just state the objective and our machines will simply do it. Either that or the machines will tell us exactly what we need to do to make it so — if the objective is in fact possible, that is.
It’ll be an interesting journey, and I get the feeling that if our computers could really speak their mind to us today, they’d be complaining constantly about how stupid and unreliable we humans are. And yea, I’m serious.
Well,someones using mine right now and then!Even
futuristically,through clock setters etc…Articles,imperatives are giving you away!
Why leave FBI and CIA out of this? Don’t they deserve a piece of the pie?
I’m waiting for your other article!
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