August 21, 2020 | International, C4ISR, Security
WASHINGTON — As the U.S. Defense Department matures its cyber force and training, it wants greater visibility over the readiness of its teams and a more realistic training environment that replicates the entirety of the internet, including social media.
These two areas were the focus of the latest industry day for the Persistent Cyber Training Environment, or PCTE, which is U.S. Cyber Command's online client that allows worldwide cyber mission force teams to connect and conduct individual and team training as well as mission rehearsal.
The Army is running the program on behalf of Cyber Command and the joint cyber force.
The Aug. 19 industry day specifically focused on what the PCTE program office is calling Cyber Innovation Challenge 4. Officials have said that Cyber Innovation Challenge 4 differs from its predecessors, partly because how the program office has matured and better integrated with the operational force at Cyber Command and the service cyber components.
The challenges are ways to deliver incremental capability to the training platform. They also serve as competitions to award contracts and layer new technologies onto the platform, oftentimes involving smaller, nontraditional defense companies. There were 78 companies registered to the industry day — 25 percent of which were new to PCTE competitions and cyber innovation challenges.
“What do I need from you? The two major areas we're focused on today are cyber mission force assessment, which is improving our ability to assess our training of the force, and two, traffic generation. Increasing the realism of operating [in] the internet,” Lt. Gen. Stephen Fogarty, commander of Army Cyber Command, told the industry audience during the remote event.
These two focus areas emerged from multiple discussions with Cyber Command and the service cyber components, officials said. Part of what is driving the greater need to assess the force and understand its readiness is new reporting requirements from Congress.
“The assessment functionally must be able to incorporate defined training standards which will enable USCYBERCOM to accurately measure and maintain team and mission readiness, which has become even more critical with the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act directing quarterly reviews of the cyber mission force's readiness,” said Col. Tanya Trout, the outgoing director of the Joint Cyber Training Enterprise, which is the nonmaterial component to PCTE at Cyber Command. “Being able to demonstrate how we're impacting readiness is the gamechanger.”
A staffer for the House Armed Services Committee said the quarterly assessment is set to be delivered along with the quarterly briefing on cyber operations, as mandated in a previous NDAA. However, due to the ongoing pandemic, the committee has been unable to schedule the briefing. The staffer added that despite not having the report in hand, the committee is encouraged to see the Pentagon has made progress in creating metrics to evaluate the cyber mission force.
Commanders also want a better way to see how their forces perform during training so they can review scenarios and modify it as needed.
Specific requests to industry include planning tools, a scoring engine, an assessment repository and data collection, analytics dashboards and aggregation, and external reporting.
“These capabilities will give commanders better tools to assess their force. Commanders will be able to look at data and assess individual ... and unit readiness. These capabilities will also give training managers planning tools to meet commander's goals,” Fogarty said.
Regarding traffic generation, Fogarty said there's a need for forces to be able to operate across the continuum of the information environment, not just within a certain set of networks. These include friendly space, gray space — which refers to the neutral area of the broader internet — and adversarial networks (known as red space).
“The environment that PCTE replicates has to actually replicate the real-world environment,” he said. “We need a way to define, shape and record realistic traffic emulation capabilities that mirror real-world activities and terrain across the cyber domain. But also, very importantly, in the information environment, that includes social media because it would be very simple for us if all we had to do was worry about just the network. What we have to worry about is the entire information environment.”
The program office is now looking for host/user-based traffic activities, cyber traffic terrain, network traffic layers, information operations and social media layers, and traffic command-and-control dashboards.
August 16, 2023 | International, Naval
An exclusive look at operations on board the USS Eisenhower aircraft carrier, as Carrier Strike Group 2 performs a Composite Training Unit Exercise.
October 12, 2018 | International, Land, C4ISR
By: Adam Stone A world of interconnected everything is just around the corner, and the military wants a piece of the action. Global investment in the Internet of Things, or IoT, will top $15 trillion by 2025, according to analysts at Business Insider. The Defense Logistics Agency estimates more than 20 billion IoT devices will be in use by 2020 in homes, businesses and government, and the agency sees a military opportunity in this coming wave of connected devices. “IoT is not just hardware for the sake of hardware, It's a way to capture more data, and we can have an enormous number of potential uses for that,” said Air Force Maj Ricky Dickens, deputy program manager for the Distribution Modernization Program (DMP) at the Defense Logistics Agency. The modernization program is looking to leverage IoT in support of warfighter needs. Tagging everything From a logistics perspective, IoT offers the possibility of giving planners deeper, more consistent insight into the location of needed equipment and supplies. It starts with an effort to deploy electronic tags to make materials on the move more readily visible to automated tracking. “We are look at passive RFID tags and bluetooth tags, different technologies that can give us better visibility on our material as they make their way through our facilities and our processes,” Dickens said. Such a capability speaks directly to issues of force readiness. “We are looking to tag commonly used equipment like forklifts. If management could see that they had four forklifts in the building, they could bring two back over here in order to better manage their resources,” Dickens said. IoT-based tracking could help the military to better manage the flow of the tens of thousands of items – from guns to tanks to uniforms – that are in transit daily among forces positioned around the globe. “As material goes through our facilities we want to see where things are bottling up, where there are process chokepoints and inefficiencies that can eliminate,” Dickens said. “You can see where your faster-moving items are and where your slower-moving items are. You can do efficiency studies to see time for moving material based on where it is located in the warehouse and then you can make better decisions about how things are distributed in your facilities.” Watching industry As DLA looks to IoT to enhance logistics, the military is takings its cues from the private sector. Analysts at Market Research Engine expect the market for logistics-related IoT to be worth $10 billion by 2022. Ahead of retail, automotive and healthcare, the analysts identify aerospace and defense as the top emerging end-user of these capabilities. “What's exciting in industry is that they already have this base of IoT and equipment providing more data. The analysis they can do is astounding,” Dickens said. “Some industries are using artificial intelligence to network with this data to see underlying information that isn't readily available, and some of the outcomes have been game-changers for industry.” DLA's own early implementations include pilot projects slated to deploy soon at Red River Army Depot in Texarkana, Texas and at Anniston Army Depot in Bynum, Alabama. “We are going to roll out a real-time location system to be able to provide more visibility into the materials stored at those locations,” Dickens said. At Anniston the system will be used to track a vast inventory of small arms, while at Red River the system will be used to help manage outdoor vehicle storage. “There are tens of thousands of vehicles there over multiple square miles,” Dickens said. As DLA implements an IoT approach over the coming months, facility operators should gain a much finer-grain view of that operation. In the long term, DLA officials say they would like to incorporate some 12,000 commercial suppliers into their IoT-based approach, covering everything “from windows to bolts to air compressors,” Dickens said. Whether, or when, that will happen depends largely on the shifting price of these emerging technologies. “We need to see the pricing curve come down. There is a lot of technology out there but right now it can be very expensive, especially when you consider the scale of DoD operations: We manage 6 million line-items,” Dickens said. “There will have to be a business-case analysis so we are not putting $10 sensors on 5 cent bolts.” https://www.c4isrnet.com/it-networks/2018/10/12/the-answer-to-battlefield-logistics-problems-could-be-iot
December 31, 2018 | International, C4ISR
By: Mark Pomerleau The Air Force is beginning to build specialized cyber teams across the service whose primary mission is to defend local installations and critical mission tasks from cyberattacks. These teams will ensure that a particular wing or smaller organization can complete their mission from a cyber perspective, Maj. Gen. Robert Skinner, commander of 24th Air Force/Air Forces Cyber, told Fifth Domain in a November interview. For example, Skinner said if a wing has an F-16 unit that's responsible for offensive counter air or defensive counter air support, mission defense teams will understand those weapon system and everything that goes into making those air sorties successful as a way to defend that mission from a cyber standpoint. As an example, an eight-man team at the 2nd Weather Group within the 557th Weather Wing monitors the network and recently discovered several “bogus” account requests. The commander, Col. Patrick Williams, said the team was able to figure out that many of the requests were either bots or foreign requests that “had no business being on that network.” By working with the Network Operations and Security Center to eliminate that activity, the number of requests dropped by 80 percent, a huge win, Williams said. He added this was done with just a nascent mission defense team given that the teams are just being filled out across the major commands now. Skinner said each major command is at a different point in activating the teams. In addition, Air Force leaders said the service hopes to achieve efficiencies within its entire IT and cyber defense enterprise. The officials pointed to the Air Force's “enterprise IT as a service” pilot, which examines what efficiencies can be gained by having commercial companies conduct the IT services as opposed to having airmen maintain the IT infrastructure. One benefit of such a move could be that it frees up personnel to spend more time on cyber defense. “Our core strategic theme is moving from IT focused delivery into mission defense teams,” Bill Marion, deputy CIO of the Air Force, said during a keynote presentation in early December. Skinner said the service will likely be able to “re-mission” workers from their IT positions and assign them to these more active defensive roles such as mission defense teams. These mission defense teams are different from cyber protection teams that the Air Force, and other services, provide to U.S. Cyber Command. “In my eyes the [mission defense team] is a [cyber protection team] lite,” Skinner said. "We're very proud of our cyber protection team training and I think that the more of that I can get with our mission defense teams, the more successful they'll be and then our cyber protection teams can be really focused on the high end, the big threats that we'll run into in a peer competition and peer adversaries.” https://www.fifthdomain.com/dod/air-force/2018/12/27/air-force-begins-to-roll-out-special-cyber-defense-teams