Military Superiority in an Interconnected World

[Valin]

War On The Rocks:

Bob Butler and Jim Gosler

March 9, 2015

 

 

“ … The Department of Defense depends on cyberspace to function. It is difficult to overstate this reliance; DOD operates over 15,000 networks and seven million computing devices across hundreds of installations in dozens of countries around the world … Our reliance on cyberspace stands in stark contrast to the inadequacy of our cybersecurity.” –– DOD Strategy for Operating in Cyberspace

 

“The United States cannot be confident that our critical IT systems will work under attack from a sophisticated and well-resourced opponent utilizing cyber capabilities in combination with all of their military and intelligence capabilities (a full spectrum adversary.)” –– Resilient Military Systems and the Advanced Cyber Threat

 

 

How do our commanders prepare for conflict against a peer adversary in the face of such great uncertainty? For nearly 50 years – since the creation of ARPANET – the U.S. Department of Defense has been focused on maintaining military superiority through the development, testing, and fielding of the most advanced weapon systems and strategies, taking advantage of the latest information technology innovations in microprocessors, software, and networking. Since the end of the Vietnam War, American military victories have depended upon these systems and information technology-based strategies for timely intelligence and integrated operations on the battlefield. These successes have increased demand for utilizing advanced technologies and thereby, deepened our dependence on these capabilities.

 

Repeated successes on the battlefield have led America’s adversaries and competitors to study our approach in order to best understand how to counter and negate our advantage. As recently noted in two separate Defense Science Board task force reports published in January 2013 and again in a 2014 paper by former Secretary of the Navy Richard Danzig, our adversaries have learned how to turn our information technology strengths and innovations to their advantage, creating the ability to seemingly exploit our information technology systems at will for the purposes of military data theft, mission disruption, and/or system destruction. As noted in the DOD Strategy for Operating in Cyberspace, there is a growing awareness of our warfighting dependency on these information technology advances, but the U.S. government is struggling to “adjust course” because of both system complexity and organizational bureaucracy. The Defense Department has a higher assurance for being able to operate effectively in cyberspace with the creation of a Cyber Command, collocated with NSA and supported by budget and manpower increases. However, DoD’s success is dependent upon civil critical infrastructure that needs great protection, an issue that still needs to be addressed by the White House and Congress.

 

While beyond the scope of our article, the relationship between the private sector (infrastructure owners) and the federal government must be re-assessed. To varying degrees, there exists distrust among the citizens, the infrastructure owners, and the government. Because of this distrust, a system of rules, checks/balances, and oversight was developed and has evolved to keep the system in equilibrium. Unfortunately, in the face of a top tier threat, it is not evident that infrastructure owners can effectively protect their domain. They must receive support from the government – technology, intelligence, and operations conducted against the adversary. They will likely need to provide the government insight into their operations, technology, and sensor feeds. Any of these moves has the potential to negatively impact the delicate equilibrium. This challenge is recognized, and efforts are underway to find effective moves (to protect the infrastructure) that result in a new and acceptable equilibrium to all parties.

 

(Snip)

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One way to think of this...There is a UAV flying over (say) The South China Sea monitoring a foreign navy, it is being controled from a base outside Las Vegas. Question: What would happen if a foreign power were to hack into the communication system of the UAV? Now obviously no foreign power would ever think of doing something like that!

 

Welcome to the XXIst century.....fasten your seatbelt.