Incoming

Long before the federal government charged two defendants in 2018 for ransomware attacks on municipal computer systems—including Atlanta’s—cities found ways to make do during these outages. Police wrote reports by hand, traffic tickets were paid in person and social media kept everyone informed in a way that showcased a city’s resiliency.

My columns so far have centered on various components of modernization and innovation that I think are needed for the U.S. military to reposition itself for success on future battlefields. Emerging technologies, culture, workforce, partnerships—all play critical roles and must be recalibrated for a future that will be increasingly complex and dynamic.

As the Defense Department moves to embrace more innovation, it will change the way our future wars will be fought. Defense planners already are working to understand this in detail, and the vision they have devised is called multidomain operations (MDO).

Just about everybody who has worked for the Defense Department has encountered this: A new technology is deployed—a software application, new hardware, a piece of gear or a tool—and after using it, people discover it falls short of expectations. Perhaps it was difficult to operate. Or maybe it didn’t do what was needed. Or it might have done what was needed but did it poorly. Or it worked well enough for some use cases and not others.

Within the last year and a half, an exciting development has taken place at the Defense Department: It has turned the corner on cloud.

For years, the department had followed a cautious, even wary, approach toward cloud adoption. But after reading the 2018 National Defense Strategy and the department’s new artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud strategies, one can only conclude that top defense leaders now view cloud as the cornerstone of our future military readiness.

In today’s increasingly complex, dynamic and digital-centric world, the Defense Department’s success will hinge on how well it takes on the characteristics of an agile workforce. This requires qualities such as agility, responsiveness, efficiency, resiliency, innovation and hyperawareness of the many environments it inhabits.

Information technology, smartly managed, can deliver all these capabilities. So it is no surprise that in the most successful agencies, technology is leading the charge toward new business models and new ways of thinking and working.

Welcome to the first of a new monthly column I will be writing for SIGNAL!

First, let me say what an honor and thrill it is to be asked by SIGNAL Magazine to contribute a regular column. SIGNAL and the entire AFCEA community have long served as a critical public square for airing the important technological issues that confront the Defense Department, and I look forward to participating in that discussion.

One of the fundamental ingredients to a secure future is having a sustainable and engaged technology-savvy workforce. This means we must be preparing our youth for today’s and tomorrow’s technologies. We need to cultivate the next generation of technology innovators and masters.

While traveling this spring and summer, I met and spoke with many high school and college-age students. I heard quite a bit about their desire to better understand and be more involved in cybersecurity. Specifically, they asked about authentication solutions for mobile applications, better identity management, and how to protect and understand their data.

Second of two parts. Read part one.

Technology can either multiply time or diminish time, depending on how you manage it. Unfortunately, email and text communications are frequently mismanaged. But the technology isn’t at fault. You the leader must own the technology and not let the technology own you.

Don’t be a slave to texts and emails. If an issue isn’t important, then don’t respond to a message immediately.

Be careful about the number of emails or texts you send, and talk with your team about how they are managing emails and texts. Resist the temptation to jump into a discussion if you are copied.

Today, government and industry increasingly are on the wrong side of the cybersecurity spend.

Criminal groups, nation-states and individual hackers often force organizations to spend much more to defend against cyber attacks, or the threat of attacks, than attackers spend to carry them out. How do we slow down this trend and reverse the spend, forcing the attacker to pay a higher price?

Technology and a better-educated workforce will help, but these solutions may not really reduce the spend or increase the cost to the attacker.

The best way to do this is through significantly increased partnering as well as more timely and greater sharing of threat data and real-time attack information.