September 20, 2018 | International, C4ISR
By: Mark Pomerleau
In its first formal cyber strategy document in three years, the Department of Defense said it would focus its cyber efforts on China and Russia and use the Pentagon's cyber capabilities to collect intelligence as well as to prepare for future conflicts.
According to an unclassified summary and fact sheet released Sept. 18, the documents lay out a vision for addressing cyber threats and addresses the priorities of the department's National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy, which focused on a new era of strategic great power competition.
“The United States cannot afford inaction,” the summary reads. It notes that China and Russia are conducting persistent campaigns in cyberspace that pose long term risk. The documents also say that China is eroding the U.S. military's ability to overmatch opponents and that Russia is using cyber-enabled information operations to influence the U.S. population and challenge democratic processes.
The DoD's strategy comes on the heels of other major movements in cyberspace from the department. These include the elevation of U.S. Cyber Command to a full unified combatant command — which affords new and exquisite authorities — the full staffing of Cyber Command's cyber teams, an update to DoD's cyber doctrine and new authorities delegating certain responsibilities from the president to DoD to conduct cyber operations abroad.
The summary's lists five objectives for DoD's cyberspace strategy:
- Ensuring the joint force can achieve its missions in a contested cyberspace environment;
- Strengthening the joint force by conducting cyberspace operations that enhance U.S. military advantages;
- Defending U.S. critical infrastructure from malicious cyber activity that alone, or as part of a campaign, could cause a significant cyber incident;
- Securing DoD information and systems against malicious cyber activity, including DoD information on non-DoD-owned networks; and
- Expanding DoD cyber cooperation with interagency, industry, and international partners.
The strategy also describes the need to remain consistently engaged with this persistent adversary and to “defend forward” as a means of disrupting or halting malicious cyber activity at its source, including activity that falls below the level of armed conflict.
While academics have criticized the U.S. response to Russian election interference, the strategy notes that the United States tends to view conflicts through the binary lens of war or peace while competitors such as Russia see themselves constantly engaged in a state of war. U.S. Cyber Command's new leader is taking a different tact.
“We've got to act forward outside of our boundaries, something that we do very, very well at Cyber Command in terms of getting into our adversary's networks. That's this idea of persistent engagement, the idea that the adversary never rests, so why would we ever rest,” Gen. Paul Nakasone said during an August dinner hosted by the Intelligence and National Security Alliance.
Nakasone also has described the notion of defending forward as enabling forces to act outside the boundaries of the U.S. to understand what adversaries are doing in order to better defend against them.
https://www.fifthdomain.com/dod/2018/09/19/department-of-defense-unveils-new-cyber-strategy
April 6, 2022 | International, Aerospace
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December 26, 2018 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR, Security
By: Lolita C. Baldor, The Associated Press WASHINGTON — The sooner-than-expected departure of Defense Secretary Jim Mattisshifts the focus to President Donald Trump's appointment of an acting Pentagon chief and plans for a permanent replacement. Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan will take over as acting secretary on Jan. 1, Trump announced in a tweet Sunday. He had worked for more than three decades at Boeing Co. and was a senior vice president when he became Pentagon deputy in July 2017. In the new year Trump wants to focus on streamlining purchases at the Pentagon, an issue on which Shanahan has already been working, a White House official said. The official asked not to be identified publicly discussing personnel matters. U.S. officials said they didn't know if Shanahan would be Trump's nominee to replace Mattis. During a lunch with conservative lawmakers Saturday at the White House, Trump discussed his options. They were "not all military," said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who was among those attending. Shanahan's biography on the Pentagon's website does not list military experience for the longtime Boeing executive. He earned a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Washington, then a master's degree in mechanical engineering as well as an MBA from the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In addition to work in Boeing's commercial airplanes programs, Shanahan was vice president and general manager of Boeing Missile Defense Systems and of Boeing Rotorcraft Systems. In a March 2016 report, the Puget Sound Business Journal called Shanahan a Boeing "fix-it" man who was central to getting the 787 Dreamliner on track after production problems in the program's early years. An acting defense secretary is highly unusual. Historically when a secretary has resigned, he has stayed on until a successor is confirmed. For example, when Chuck Hagel was told to resign in November 2014, he stayed in office until Ash Carter was confirmed the following February. Mattis, a retired Marine Corps general, had been expected to retain his position as Pentagon chief through February. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, not the president, notified Mattis of Trump's decision to put in place Shanahan, said a senior administration official who insisted on anonymity to discuss personnel issues. The sudden change stripped Mattis of any chance to further frame national security policy or smooth rattled relations with allies over the next two months. But U.S. officials said the reaction to Mattis' decision to leave — it sparked shock and dismay on Capitol Hill — annoyed Trump and likely led to pushing Mattis out. "When President Obama ingloriously fired Jim Mattis, I gave him a second chance. Some thought I shouldn't, I thought I should," Trump tweeted Saturday, foreshadowing his displeasure and the Sunday announcement. He also fumed over the media coverage of his Syria withdrawal order, suggesting he should be popular for bringing troops home. "With me, hit hard instead by the Fake News Media. Crazy!" Trump tweeted. A White House official said Trump decided Mattis should leave the administration earlier than planned to avoid a drawn-out transition when someone on hand whom they consider a qualified deputy capable of running the Pentagon in an acting capacity. The official asked not to be identified publicly discussing personnel matters. While Mattis' resignation followed Trump's announcement that he would soon pull all of the approximately 2,000 U.S. troops out of Syria, officials said that the decision was the result of an accumulation of disagreements. In a stunning resignation letter, Mattis made clear he did not see eye to eye with a president who has expressed disdain for NATO and doubts about keeping troops in Asia. Mattis was also unhappy with Trump's order to develop plans to pull out up to half of the 14,000 U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Earlier Sunday, Trump's acting chief of staff said that Trump had known for "quite some time now" that he and Mattis "did not share some of the same philosophies ... have the same world view." Mick Mulvaney told ABC's "This Week" that the president and his defense chief "just could never get on the same page" on Syria, adding that Trump had said since his presidential campaign that "he wanted to get out of Syria." Mulvaney said the president "is entitled to have a secretary of defense who is committed to that same end." Asked whether Trump wanted a Pentagon leader willing to challenge him or someone in lock step with his views, Mulvaney said "a little bit of both." "I've encouraged him to find people who have some overlap with him but don't see the world in lockstep with him," Mulvaney said. Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., joined leading Republicans on foreign affairs in urging Trump to reconsider his decision to withdraw American forces from Syria and called it "a premature and costly mistake." They asked Trump to withhold a final decision for 90 days to allow time to study the impact of the decision, but Mulvaney told ABC that Trump wouldn't change his mind. Just after tweeting the announcement about Shanahan, Trump said he had had "a long and productive call" with Turkey's president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Trump said they discussed IS, "our mutual involvement in Syria, & the slow & highly coordinated pullout of U.S. troops from the area. After many years they are coming home." Associated Press writers Robert Burns, Darlene Superville and Lisa Mascaro contributed to this report. https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2018/12/24/fix-it-man-shanahan-working-to-streamline-defense-spending
January 4, 2019 | International, Land, C4ISR
By: Mark Pomerleau Europe's increasingly contested environments have required increasingly complex electronic warfare planning tools. Vehicles, however, can't house the power of command posts, so the Army is adapting an existing system for the tactical edge. The Electronic Warfare Planning and Management Tool, or EWPMT, is a command-and-control planning capability that allows commanders and soldiers to visualize on a screen the effects of electronic warfare in the field. As part of efforts to provide soldiers additional capabilities for EWPMT ahead of the program's scheduled add-ons — an effort dubbed Raven Claw — the Army received feedback that troops at the vehicle or platform level don't need the full application required at command posts. This feedback coincided with other observations from the Raven Claw deployment, which officials said were mixed. “It does what it's supposed to do, but it requires a lot of computing capacity and also it requires a lot of inputs from the [electronic warfare officers] right now,” Col. Mark Dotson, the Army's capability manager for electronic warfare, told C4ISRNET in a November interview. In response, a new effort called Raven Feather “will address both processing consumption and critical EW tasks required at the vehicle/platform level,” Lt. Col. Jason Marshall, product manager for electronic warfare integration at Program Executive Office for Intelligence, Electronic Warfare and Sensors, told C4ISRNET in response to written questions. “Raven Feather will provide a more tactically focused Graphical User Interface as part of the EWPMT Raven Claw system mounted in the vehicle or loaded into the Mounted Family of Computer Systems (MFoCS).” Dotson added that the Army is eyeing lighter versions of the capability that could be available for lower echelons that may not need as much modeling and simulation. “We're looking at ways to tailor it specifically to the echelon, and then that will help us with the platform we need to put it on,” he said. The modeling and simulation might be important at the staff officer level, he added, but he questioned whether that computing power is needed at the micro-tactical level. https://www.c4isrnet.com/electronic-warfare/2019/01/03/heres-the-armys-latest-electronic-warfare-project