March 30, 2017

Necessary Audacity: A Case for a U.S. Cyber Academy

On March 21, 2017, Foreign Policy published an article by Dr. Mark Hagerott and Admiral (Ret.) James Stravridis entitled “Trump’s Big Defense Buildup Should Include a National Cyber Academy.” The authors recommended “the creation of something audaciously different but critical to winning the wars of the future: a U.S. cyber academy.” They explicitly endorse a national cyber service academy much like the US Military Academy (USMA), Naval Academy, and Air Force Academy.

March 28, 2017

Cyberspace in Multi-Domain Battle

For months, a nation state has covertly infiltrated a neighboring state’s critical networks while massing armored forces along its common border with a US ally. While the adversary prepares to launch a massive cyber-attack on its neighbor state, its tanks are readied to roll over the border.

March 21, 2017

Cyber (In)Security: Decision-Making Dynamics When Moving Out of Your Comfort Zone

“Every assumption we hold, every claim, every assertion, every single one of them must be challenged.” — General Mark A. Milley, 39th Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army. This paper focuses on how the dynamic speed of change and the compression of time in cybersecurity move individuals and organizations out of their comfort zones.

March 1, 2017

Joint Interagency Coordination: How Can the Reserve Component Be Better Utilized to Defend Our Nation in the Cyber Arena?

In a time of constrained and reduced resources and to fortify the protection against the ever-increasing global cyber threats, the United States (US) must do more with less and better utilize its existing resources. The Reserve Components (RC) of the US military are filled with cyber expertise gained through civilian and military training as well as job experience. If the Department of Defense (DoD) can develop a program to better utilize the experience and skills resident in the Reserves, the US military can improve the nation’s cyber capabilities and better protect its networks.

Feb. 28, 2017

Book Review: Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War

Writing a history of anything without clear or accepted chronological boundaries, such as cyber war, is a challenging undertaking. Even with a definite start and stop points, Winston Churchill still felt that he needed six enormous volumes, eight years, and a team of contributing authors to tell his history of the easily demarcated Second World War. British wartime codebreaker turned Cambridge historian, F.H. “Harry” Hinsley, in some respects had a more modest task than Churchill—to write a history of World War II examining only the intelligence aspect. Like Churchill, however, Professor Hinsley found that he required several research and writing assistants, many years of work, and four volumes to tell his history of World War II secrets, not to mention the benefit of over a quarter century of time—much-needed hindsight and cooling off of intelligence sources and methods—to place intelligence and code-breaking operations into their wartime context.

Feb. 15, 2017

Countering Hybrid Threats in Cyberspace

For almost two decades, cyberwar has posed various challenges to military organizations. Doctrine has hardly defined the scope of cyber activities and how military forces can act or react in that specific new battlefield. Highly technical by nature, the cyber defense mission was, at first, to counter major cyber threats, thus the focus was, and is, to protect critical infrastructures and networks. Building up a cyber force was, therefore, a move to militarize cybersecurity by transferring methodologies and skills.

Feb. 1, 2017

The Cyber Defense Review: Rising Cyber Threat

The year 2016 is likely to be remembered for many reasons, particularly as a notorious and profitable year for hackers of both nation and non-nation-state varieties. Over the last year, we have witnessed an Internet of Things (IOT) enabled Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack that exceeded 1 terabyte per second, a resurgence of cyber information operations and a ransomware attack that impacted over 2,000 systems in the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. Corporate offices, public agencies, Olympic athletes, political candidates, and tech CEOs were all directly targeted during a rather volatile year, all of which served to remind us of the personal nature of this fight. Aptly, Hackers were named as Time magazine’s runner-up for Person of the Year.

Dec. 28, 2016

After Twenty Years of Cyber – Still Unchartered Territory Ahead

The general notion is that much of the core understanding of cyber is in place. I would like to challenge that perception. There are still vast territories of the cyber domain that need to be researched, structured and understood. I would like to use Winston Churchill’s words: “it is not the beginning of the end; it is maybe the end of the beginning.” In my opinion, the cyber journey is still in a very early stage. The cyber field has yet to mature, and the big building blocks for the future cyber environment are not yet in place. The Internet and networks that support it have increased dramatically over the last decade. Even if the growth of cyber might be stunning, the actual advances are not as impressive.

Dec. 28, 2016

WarTV: A Future Vision for a Common Operating Picture

1 MAY 2011 – ABBOTTABAD, PAKISTAN – Abbottabad, Pakistan is less than a two-hour drive from the capital city of Islamabad and 3.1 miles from the Pakistan Military Academy to the southwest. In relative terms, Abbottabad is a much less busy place than Karachi, Pakistan, and is very attractive to tourists and those seeking higher education for their children. Despite Abbottabad’s relative inactivity compared to the bustling Karachi, there were signs of digital life in 2011.

Dec. 3, 2016

Beyond Capabilities: Investigating China’s Military Strategy and Objectives in Cyberspace

Samuel Klein — United States government officials and policymakers regularly warn that China will launch destructive cyberattacks against critical US civilian infrastructure, including electrical grids, water supply stations, and transportation networks. However, they base such predictions on analysis that emphasizes China’s cyberwarfare capabilities, while ignoring the country’s cyberwarfare strategy and objectives. While China may possess the capacity to carry out devastating cyberattacks, does the country want to? Accurately predicting Chinese cyberattacks requires a holistic analysis that considers not just China’s capabilities, but its strategy and objectives as well. This paper relies on military reports and academic articles produced by senior PLA officials to uncover, organize, and ultimately distill Chinese cyberwarfare strategies and objectives. In addition, secondary analysis conducted by Western military experts on China and intelligence gathered by the US government help identity key trends and anomalies found in the primary sources. These documents reveal a Chinese cyberwarfare strategy that calls for cyberattacks to be used during military conflicts in a preemptive manner to disrupt enemy logistics and communications networks. The strategy does not call for the destruction of civilian infrastructure during peacetime. Framing China’s cybersecurity threat within a broader context of strategy and objectives emphasizes that the country may not be the most likely perpetrator of future destructive cyberattacks. This discovery has significant implications for current US national security policy, which is heavily focused on confronting a major Chinese cyberattack.