Wednesday 17 July 2013

Meet the Air Force's Top Cyberwarrior

The military has long believed it plays an essential role in protecting the nation's power grid, water supply, and financial sector from cyberattacks. But until recently, you'd be hard-pressed to find a top military officer willing to say so publicly.
For nearly a decade, protecting the nation's critical infrastructure from hackers and foreign cyberarmies has been the nominal responsibility of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), a civilian agency. Talk of the military operating on U.S. soil raised the specter of militarizing the Internet and the Posse Comitatus Act. But let's be honest.
The technical expertise to fight a cyberwar resides in the Defense Department, where the head of U.S. Cyber Command, Gen. Keith Alexander (who also happens to run the National Security Agency), wants to grow his force of cyberwarriors from 900 to 4,000.
That would dwarf the cyberworkforce at DHS, which numbers in the hundreds and has no authority to launch offensive operations on the Internet. Civilians and soldiers have long known that if the United States went to war in cyberspace, it would largely fall to the military to defend U.S. computer networks -- and to launch a counterstrike.
Now, the officers in charge of the military's burgeoning cyberforces are speaking more freely about their role, aided in part by a new presidential directive that spells out the Defense Department's authority for protecting U.S. computer networks during a national emergency.
The general who oversees the Air Force's online warriors says there needs to be a "frank discussion" among nations to keep misunderstandings in cyberspace from escalating into a broader conflict. "We still have to get our hands around deterrence," said Lt. Gen. Michael Basla, the Air Force's chief of information dominance and its chief information officer, in an interview with Foreign Policy.
There are no hard lines that tell an adversary what response he can expect after taking action against a U.S. network, Basla explained. Nor is there a full understanding of "signaling" by a cyber-adversary -- that is, how to tell the difference between an action that may look provocative, but is actually more benign.
Basla's title reflects how priorities have changed for the Air Force in a short period of time. In June 2012, he became the first chief information officer (CIO) to hold that second title putting him in charge of "information dominance" -- read cyber-operations. In many organizations, the CIO is the guy in charge of keeping the network running. He's like the plumber. Basla's a kind of plumber too, but he's figuring out how to take out an adversary's networks, at the same time that he tries to defend the Air Force's.
Basla's comments about deterrence echo those of other cybersecurity experts who say that there is currently no cyber-analog to the strategy of nuclear deterrence, whereby nations understand what aggressive steps they might take but still stop short of a full exchange of nuclear weapons.
To keep misunderstandings in cyberspace from escalating into full-scale conflict, Barack Obama's administration is taking a page from the Cold War playbook.
The United States and Russia will start sharing information about national-level cyberconcerns through the Nuclear Risk Reduction Center, which was established to let U.S. and Soviet leaders reach each other at any moment and talk their respective countries down from the brink of war.
This system of communications links, popularly known as the "red phone," will also connect cyberofficials at the White House to their counterparts in the Kremlin.
Basla pointed to that development as a positive sign that norms of behavior are starting to be laid out in this new domain of warfare. As far as the Air Force is concerned, these are still early days. "We're still in the forming and storming phase," Basla said.
Basla oversees the range of Air Force activity in cyberspace, from defending its computer networks around the world to what he called the "very exquisite operations piece." In other words, sophisticated, and secretive, cyberoffense capabilities that rely on elite personnel.
Today, nearly all Air Force cyberpersonnel, about 90 percent, are defending the service's networks, Basla said. The operational side is "very small." (Basla said last year that the most classified and sophisticated operators account for less than 1 percent of the overall force.)
However, the demand for those offensive cyberoperators is growing. The nation's top intelligence officials, James Clapper, has warned that a potentially devastating cyberattack on U.S. infrastructure, such as a financial system or the electrical power grid, is now the greatest national security risk the country faces. In March, Alexander, the Cyber Command chief, said that the United States was fielding 13 teams capable of striking at foreign countries if the country's networks were attacked.
The Air Force, like the other military service branches, supports the overall joint cyber-command. But it comes to the fight with a particular perspective, Basla said. It's developing, for example, techniques to neutralize an enemy's air defense systems, so that U.S. aircraft can provide unimpeded support to ground forces. Such a strike could also be delivered with a missile. The result would be the same. "We want to be able to eliminate the threat," Basla said.
The Homeland Security Department doesn't have any missiles in its arsenal. And it's not building cyberweapons, either. If America goes off to cyberwar, there will be no doubt about who's on point.

No comments:

Post a Comment