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The Cyber Defense Review

 
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To Defend Forward, US Cyber Strategy Demands a Cohesive Vision for Information Operations

By The Honorable Patrick J. Murphy | Dr. Erica Borghard | November 18, 2020

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In 2018, the United States (US) Department of Defense (DoD) published the 2018 Cyber Strategy summary featuring a new strategic concept for the cyber domain: defend forward. It states DoD will, “defend forward to disrupt or halt malicious cyber activity at its source, including activity that falls below the level of armed conflict.”[1] This reflects an important shift in DoD’s strategic posture, compared to the 2015 Cyber Strategy, in two key ways.[2] First, defend forward rests on the premise that to deter and defeat adversary threats to national security, the US could not solely rely on responding to malicious behavior after the fact. Rather, the DoD should be proactive in maneuvering outside of US cyberspace to observe and understand evolving adversary organizations and, when authorized, conduct operations to disrupt, deny, or degrade their capabilities and infrastructure before they reach the intended targets. Implied, but not explicitly stated, in the 2018 strategy summary is the role of information operations, and the relationship between cyberspace and the information environment. According to US doctrine, the former is a subset of the latter.[3] This article builds on our work as members of the US Cyberspace Solarium Commission to offer a conceptual framework and policy recommendations for integrating information operations in the context of defend forward. Many of the Commission’s 82 recommendations are slated to pass in the Fiscal Year 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). 

 

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