What Types of Tactical Vulnerabilities Do Future Officers Most Anticipate
By Dr. Aryn Pyke, Dr. James Ness, MAJ Dave Feltner
| April 07, 2023
Modern multi-domain battle involves not only physical threats like IEDs, but also, increasingly, cyber threats. The enemy may jam or intercept communication signals, or hack electronics including navigation systems and drones. Thus, all military leaders - not just signal/cyber specialists - now require some awareness of tactical cyber resources and vulnerabilities. Physical threats come more readily to mind due to their frequency, and because their effects are so salient to the senses. Cyber threats have less historical precedence and are less ‘visible’ (“out of sight, out of mind”). We developed a task (Problem Anticipation Task: PAT) to gauge the degree to which future Army officers automatically anticipate cyber as well as non-cyber tactical threats. They read a hypothetical mission description and tried to anticipate up to 25 problems that could arise. The mission description explicitly mentioned several cyber-vulnerable components (e.g., radios, navigation systems, drones, biosensors). Yet 39% of these “digital native” participants failed to list a single cyber issue, and only 8% of anticipated issues were cyber-related. The PAT allowed us to assess a baseline regarding our readiness to anticipate cyber vulnerabilities, and can be used in future to assess the effectiveness of training interventions to raise cyber situational understanding.
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