Feb. 9, 2015

Paradoxes of (Cyber) Counterinsurgency

The U.S. Army’s Field Manual 3-24, Counterinsurgency, broke the mold for Army doctrine, providing insights into counterinsurgency operations that were largely unknown to U.S. military professionals and offering techniques that could be applied at both the operational and tactical levels to improve local conditions. The manual also highlighted the complex nature of counterinsurgency operations, providing a list of paradoxes, or seemingly contradictory truths, that highlight the difficulties inherent in this type of military operation. Many parallels can be drawn between counterinsurgency and cyber operations, and practitioners of both face challenges even more complex than those encountered in more traditional, kinetic military operations. Herein we provide a list of cyber paradoxes in the spirit of the counterinsurgency paradoxes given in FM 3-24. Through these paradoxes, we hope to highlight the inherent complexity of cyber operations and provide insights to those who hope to be successful in this new operational domain.

Jan. 23, 2015

A Year of Cyber Professional Development

The nation that will insist upon drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking by cowards. – Sir William Francis Butler, 19th-century British Lieutenant General After more than a decade at war, the Army is not the same institution that I joined before the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Traditions that bound generations of service members together have been forgotten and institutional knowledge has vanished. The development of leaders in a fiscally constrained environment is one of the key skills that has been lost. With military budgets shrinking now, the art of developing leaders prepared to handle diverse situations seems a daunting challenge. We have relied on mobile training teams, scripted rotations in the box[1], and deployments in sustained bases to train Soldiers and Leaders to handle typical scenarios. All of which incur expenses that are no longer sustainable, while none of them truly focus on stretching leaders’ skills and capabilities to handle the unknown.

Jan. 23, 2015

Broadening Opportunities for Cyber Officers

In a recent trip to Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD, members of the Army Cyber Institute (ACI) visited the Communication-Electronics Research, Development and Engineering Center (CERDEC) of the US Army’s Research, Development and Engineering Command (RDECOM). Led by Director Henry Muller’s, CERDEC’s six directorates support its mission to develop engineering technology solutions for America’s Soldiers. On this particular visit, the ACI met with Mr. Kevin Boyle, Chief Technology Officer of the Intelligence and Information Warfare Directorate (I2WD) and Dr. Paul Zablocky, Director of the Space and Terrestrial Communications Directorate (STCD). The visit included not only command briefs from senior leaders of their respective organizations, but also tours of several of CERDEC’s labs and facilities. The ACI discovered some great opportunities for collaboration with these very talented Civilian Engineers, Scientists and Technicians.