Defense

The United States quickly must adopt a segmented approach to its military forces to ensure that key elements can survive a comprehensive cyber attack, according to a recently released Defense Science Board (DSB) Task Force on Resilient Military Systems. This approach entails a risk reduction strategy that combines deterrence, refocused intelligence capabilities and improved cyber defense. The effort must constitute “a broad systems approach … grounded in its technical and economic feasibility” to face a cyber threat that has “potential consequences similar in some ways to the nuclear threat of the Cold War,” the DSB report says.

The report declares that the United States cannot be confident that its critical information technology systems will work under attack from sophisticated adversaries combining cyber capabilities with conventional military and intelligence assets. In particular, the Defense Department’s dependence on vulnerable information technology “is a magnet” to U.S. opponents. U.S. networks are built on “inherently insecure architectures with increasing use of foreign-built components.” The report states that the department and its contractor base already have sustained “staggering losses” of system design information representing decades of combat knowledge and experience.

No silver bullet exists to eliminate cyberthreats, the report allows. Instead, it recommends an approach analogous to that employed against U-boats in World War II. Risks are not reduced to zero, but the challenge can be contained and managed through broad systems engineering of a spectrum of techniques.

Homeland Security Conference 2013 Show Daily, Day 3

Although many in government are moving as quickly as possible to adopt new technologies, such as cloud computing and mobile devices, individual agencies still face cultural challenges that sometimes prevent them from moving forward, according to officials speaking as part of the Chief Information Officer Council at the AFCEA Homeland Security conference in Washington, D.C.

Richard Spires, chief information officer for the Homeland Security Department (DHS), reminded the audience that DHS was created by joining a lot of disparate agencies, all of whom owned individual networks. While the department is working to integrate the information technology infrastructure and consolidate data centers, officials still meet some resistance at the individual agency level. “There’s still have lot of duplication and in some ways duplication is holding us back. I’d like to say we’re making progress, but I’ll let others grade us on that,” Spires said.

Other officials agreed that they meet resistance as well. Robert Carey, deputy chief information officer for the Defense Department cited a culture of change and said a constrained budget environment can be a power catalyst for action in moving toward a more centralized environment.

Cybersecurity itself can present challenges, according to Luke McCormack, chief information officer for the Justice Department. “Cyber’s hard. The individual pieces of that can be very difficult,” he said. He also cited the need to bring people together on emerging technologies, such as cloud-as-a-service, as a challenging issue.

Significant fuel savings and operational efficiencies are some of the benefits of an intelligent power management system that includes multiple energy sources.

The U.S. Army has tested a proof of concept for a smart electrical grid that would support tactical operations in the field. The concept, which was tested last summer, could save potentially billions of dollars in fuel use at remote forward positions. By eliminating the need to transport fuel for generators at such encampments, the new Tactical Operations Smart Grid also carries with it the potential of saving the lives of warfighters.

The smart grid, which takes advantage of multiple off-the-shelf electrical energy technologies, is being developed and tested by the Army’s Research, Development and Engineering Command’s (RDECOM) Communications-Electronics Research Development and Engineering Center (CERDEC). Along with helping set specifications for a future vendor-developed system, data from the tests also are being compiled as part of the Defense Department’s longer-term program of reducing both manpower and fuel use for energy generation.

“These systems are designed to integrate existing military-standard tactical generators managed by portable electric power systems out in the field, providing the ability to intelligently work within a grid operation,” says Michael Zalewski, a project mechanical engineer with CERDEC’s Command, Power and Integration (CPI) directorate. The tactical microgrid is being developed as part of the HI Power program, for Hybrid Intelligent Power. Newly developed digital controllers allow the system to balance electrical production, storage and demand dynamically, he explains, “and by doing this, we’re able to right-size the production of power to the load and demand at that point in time.”

Officials work to provide a new cloud approach across 
the service as well as the Defense Department.

U.S. Army officials estimate that by the end of the fiscal year, they will go into production on a new cloud computing solution that could potentially be made available across the Defense Department and could eventually be used to expand cloud capabilities on the battlefield. The platform-as-a-service product incorporates enhanced automation, less expensive software licensing and built-in information assurance.

During the past year, officials with the Army’s Communications-Electronics Command (CECOM) Software Engineering Center (SEC), Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, have been working on a cloud computing approach known as Cloud.mil. A four-person team took about four months to deliver the first increment, which is now in the pre-production phase and is being touted to Army leaders, as well as to Defense Department and Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) officials, as a possible Army-wide and Defense-wide solution.

The whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts in a networked software engineering realm.

A network built after its major move to a new base is allowing the U.S. Army Communications-Electronics Command to link diverse communications systems into an overarching network. This enables capabilities ranging from debugging software updates before they are sent to the front to a multinational exercise for validating operational activities.

When the Communications-Electronics Command (CECOM) relocated from Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, to Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, under the Base Closure and Realignment program (BRAC), it used the opportunity to consolidate capabilities and build new facilities from the ground up that would allow the command to take advantage of the latest technologies. Among these facilities is the Joint On-demand Interoperability Network, or JOIN. This network connects with other laboratories and communications facilities, including some in theater, to share resources and solve problems by using all of their capabilities.

The network has existed in some form for more than two decades. Today’s JOIN community includes research, development, testing and evaluation as well as life-cycle support. JOIN serves as the nexus for these diverse elements. It provides two capabilities: services and interconnectivity as a technical hub.

John Kahler, chief of JOIN, allows that the network was established to integrate the entire command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C⁴ISR) community and to provide a technical hub so that organizations could exploit each other’s resources as well as work in “a collaborative, common operating environment.” Participants can conduct research, development, testing and engineering along with life-cycle support.