Soldiers innovating technology, refining tactical concepts, and strengthening partnerships

The U.S. intelligence community’s 2023 Annual Threat Assessment contains some alarming estimates, especially as it relates to the cyber capabilities of the People’s Republic of China. It states that Beijing would “almost certainly consider undertaking aggressive cyber operations against U.S. homeland critical infrastructure and military assets worldwide” if they thought war was “imminent.” These operations “would be designed to deter U.S. military action by impeding U.S. decisionmaking, inducing societal panic, and interfering with the deployment of U.S. forces.” Such warnings are particularly concerning considering we may be in the midst of what some experts call “the decade of maximum danger.”

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The date was May 8, 2021, and the Colonial Pipeline Company announced it halted its operations due to a ransomware attack, which disrupted critical supplies of gasoline and other refined products throughout the east coast of the United States – most notably, the southeast part of the U.S.

In the previous three years from 2018-20, similar ransomware attacks shutdown pipelines and customer communications systems were interrupted at four of the nation’s largest natural gas pipeline companies.

These incidents, and specifically the Colonial Pipeline Company cyberattack, have elevated the concern of security of the nation’s energy pipelines and government programs to protect critical infrastructure.

It is incidents like these that provided Palo Alto Networks, Inc., the world’s largest and leader in cybersecurity protection and software, the inspiration to bring industry and government entities together to collaborate to defend against current and future cyber threats by leveraging the unique communities of the service academies.

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SCHOFIELD BARRACKS, Hawaii – Soldiers from the 11th Cyber Battalion, 780th Military Intelligence (MI) Brigade (Cyber), U.S. Army Cyber Command (ARCYBER) refined tactical Cyber-Electromagnetic Activities (CEMA) concepts for the Army during an Operational Readiness Assessment here in late March 2023.

For the event the 11th Expeditionary CEMA Teams (ECTs) employed innovative technology with assistance from experts from the Army Cyber Institute (ACI) at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, the Army Program Executive Office – Intelligence, Electronic Warfare and Sensors (PEO IEW&S) and industry partners, along with training with the Combat Mission Team, Detachment-Hawaii, 782nd MI Battalion (Cyber).

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Thwarting the social instabilities and political divisions created by bots and other manipulators of information requires creative countermeasures, including aesthetic ones. This belief describes the gameplan of the Department of Homeland Security, which is betting that aesthetics can help safeguard a democracy that has come to seem increasingly fragile.

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The Modern War Institute at West Point hosted a multi-disciplinary panel to discuss how the war in Ukraine is—or is not—changing core assumptions about conflict in the cyber domain. In many ways, the war in Ukraine appears to undermine assumptions about the changing nature of warfare, as the most decisive elements have played out on land rather than in new technological domains. To what extent have actors coordinated cyber operations with other kinetic and non-kinetic military operations? Have they been successful at either the tactical or strategic level? Do cyber operations play an important role in modern large-scale combat operations? Experts from the Army Cyber Institute and their research partners discussed these questions and more, using a unique dataset they created that identifies Russian, Ukrainian, and third-party actors during the ongoing war in Ukraine.

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WEST POINT, N.Y. – Cadets at the U.S. Military Academy are learning the importance of Army space from the Space and Missile Defense’s Space and High-Altitude Research Center.

Lt. Col. Craig Boucher, director of the SMDC Space and High-Altitude Research Center at West Point, said the center’s mission is to provide space and multi-domain operations education and training and provide operationally relevant space- and missile defense-related research projects for cadets. The center’s role is multi-faceted, but they focus on developing space-aware and space-smart leaders for the Army and the Army’s contribution to the joint force.

“Beyond that the vision is to inspire the next generation of Army leaders to pursue careers in space and missile defense,” he said. “On the training and education side of things we provide the space and multi-domain expertise along with the Army Cyber Institute to raise awareness across the corps of cadets on how space enables their tactical actions on the battlefield and reinforce why things like basic land navigation skills are so important when GPS is denied by an adversarial force.”

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RICHMOND, Va. – Approximately 20 Virginia National Guard Soldiers and Airmen took part in the Cyber Fortress exercise with public and private sector partners Sept. 21-30.

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In ancient China, the general Sun Tzu counseled that “all warfare is based on deception.” Could that still be the case millennia later—after an industrial and then a digital revolution have left contemporary battlefields awash with intelligence sensors and digital technology that can offer commanders unprecedented levels of situational awareness? Advancement in thermal imaging can highlight targets concealed to the naked eye, while near constant real-time observation from constellations of satellites and seemingly ubiquitous unmanned vehicles can inhibit maneuver, deliver precision strikes, and provide timely indications and warning. Voluminous twitter threads and uploads of data, metadata, and even curated datasets provide a surprisingly granular understanding of the battlespace, and internet platforms like Google Maps can indicate traffic congestion along main motorways caused by an invasion. This may lead some to consider the fog of war practically dispelled, and, as a consequence, military deception a tool of a bygone, less transparent, and less sensor-laden era. But analyzing recent Ukrainian victories would correct this erroneous point of view. In early September the Ukrainian military accomplished the most major feat of arms in the Russo-Ukrainian war (thus far) with deception at its foundation. Some principles are timeless.

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In the early 2010s, mass protests and riots ripped through the Middle East and North Africa as the Arab Spring gathered support. Longtime authoritarians like Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, and Bashar al-Assad of Syria all struggled to contain the groundswell after decades of rule. The rest of the world watched the human rights atrocities broadcast live on social media directly from those living through it instead of from traditional media institutions or foreign correspondents. The ubiquity of cellular phones and social media had democratized media production and the world had a front-row seat to revolution and upheaval.

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A few weeks ago, Montenegro—a NATO member—was hit with a cyber attack that targeted government servers. Montenegro’s outgoing Prime Minister, Dritan Abazovic, initially hedged about potential responsibility for the attack, stating on August 26: “We do not have clear information about the organizers… Security sector authorities couldn’t confirm that there is an individual, a group, a state behind [the attack].” Nevertheless, later that same day officials from Montenegro’s national intelligence agency attributed the attack to Russia. They also implied that the attack was related to Montenegro’s support for Ukraine and push for membership in the European Union. Yet, the extent of Russian involvement in the cyber attack remains ambiguous, which poses significant political and strategic challenges.

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