That work is increasingly important for the U.S., which is racing against China to shape the next iteration of wireless telecommunications, known as 6G. These more advanced networks, expected to materialize in the 2030s, will pave the way for more dependable high-speed, low-latency communication and could support the Pentagon’s technology interests — from robotics and autonomy to virtual reality and advanced sensing.

Staying ahead means not only fostering technology development and industry standards but making sure that policy and regulations are in place to safely use the capability, according to Thomas Rondeau, who leads the Pentagon’s FutureG office. Staking a leadership role in the global competition, he said, could give DOD a level of control over what that future infrastructure looks like.

“If we can define those going into it, then as we export our technologies, we’re also exporting our policies and our regulations, because they’re going to be inherently part of those technology solutions,” Rondeau told Defense News in a recent interview.

The Defense Department started making a concerted investment in 5G about five years ago when then Undersecretary of Research and Engineering Michael Griffin named the technology a top priority for the Pentagon.

In 2020, DOD awarded contracts totaling $600 million to 15 companies to experiment with various 5G applications at five bases around the country. The projects included augmented and virtual reality training, smart warehousing, command and control and spectrum utilization.

The department has since expanded the pilots and pursued other wireless network development projects, including a 5G Challenge series that incentivized companies to move toward more open-access networks.

The result has, so far, been a mixed bag. Most of the pilots didn’t transition into formal programs within the military services, Rondeau said. Several of the failed efforts involved commercial augmented or virtual reality technology that wasn’t mature enough for DOD to justify continued funding.

Among the projects that did transfer, Rondeau highlighted a pilot effort at Naval Air Station Whidbey Island in Washington to provide fixed wireless access to the base. The project essentially replaced hundreds of pounds of cables with radio units that broadcast the communications network to the personnel who need it. Today, the system is supporting logistics and maintenance operations at the base.

“This could be a huge benefit for readiness, but also I think it should be very cost-effective way to slim down on everything that you pay for cables,” Rondeau said. “That will be a continued, sustainable project.”

This and other transitioned pilots will likely make their way into a formal budget cycle by fiscal 2027, he added.

DOD also saw some success from the 5G Challenges it staged in 2022 and 2023 to encourage telecommunication companies to transition to an open radio access network, or Open RAN. A RAN is the first entry point a wireless device makes into a network and accounts for about 80% of its cost. Historically, proprietary RANs managed by companies like Huawei, Ericsson, Nokia and Samsung have dominated the market.

“They’re driving a world where they control the entire system, the end-to-end system,” Rondeau said. “That causes a lack of insight, a lack of innovation on our side, and it causes challenges with how to apply these types of systems to unique, niche military needs.”

The 5G Challenge offered companies a chance to break open that proprietary model by moving to Open RAN — and according to Rondeau, it was a success. The initial challenge then expanded into a broader forum that addressed issues like energy efficiency and spectrum management. Ultimately, the effort reduced energy usage by around 30%, he said.

Rondeau said that while much of the focus of these initiatives was on 5G, the work has informed the Pentagon’s vision and strategy for 6G, which the department believes should have an open-source foundation.

“That is a direct result of not only my background and push for some of these things, but also the learnings that we got from the networks we’ve deployed, from the 5G Challenge,” he said. “All these things come into play that led us towards an open-source software model being the right model for the military and, we think, for industry.”

One of the FutureG office’s top priorities these days, a direct outgrowth of the 5G Challenge, is called OCUDU, which stands for open centralized unit, distributed unit. The project is focused on implementing a fully open software model for 6G that meets the needs of industry, the research community and DOD.

The office is also exploring how the military could use 6G for sensing and monitoring. Its Integrated Sensing and Communications project, dubbed ISAC, uses wireless signals to collect information about different environments. That capability could be used to monitor drone networks or gather military intelligence.

While ISAC technology could bring a major boost to DOD’s ISR systems, commercialization could make it accessible to adversary nations who might weaponize it against the U.S. That challenge reflects a broader DOD concern around 6G policies and regulation – and drives urgency within Rondeau’s office to ensure the U.S. is the first to shape the foundation of these next-generation networks.

“We’re looking at this as a real opportunity for dramatic growth and interest in new, novel technologies for both commercial industry and defense needs,” he said. “But also, the threat space that it opens up for us is potentially pretty dramatic, so we need to be on top of this.”

“I’m happy to share that I’m starting a new position as Acting Chief Information Officer at United States Department of Defense,” Beavers wrote in July on LinkedIn. The department’s website now lists her as acting CIO.

A spokesperson for the Pentagon did not immediately return a request for comment.

As the primary IT adviser to the defense secretary, Beavers is taking over from former CIO John Sherman, who stepped down in June to take a position outside government as dean of the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University.

Previously serving as the principal deputy CIO at the Pentagon, Beavers is well acquainted with the Defense Department’s many ongoing initiatives meant to secure the defense-industrial base, develop 5G technologies and explore artificial intelligence.

Since she came to the department, Beavers has worked on landmark endeavors like Project Herald, the Pentagon’s plan to transform digital intelligence sharing, and Fulcrum, the recently announced IT transformation strategy. The latter is where she is most focused now on building momentum, she said in her LinkedIn post.

“[That] gives you tangible steps to turn that strategic vision into an operational reality,” Beavers said at the 2024 TechNet Cyber conference in Baltimore, which took place June 25-27. “It’ll be followed by an implementation plan, which will give some more information.”

The former Air Force intelligence officer and retired brigadier general comes to the position at a time when the DOD is beginning to put many of its theories around zero trust, cloud computing, machine learning and cybersecurity into practice.

The department for several years now released guidance thanks to the help of working groups and testing approaches via pilots. Now, officials say, it’s in a position to actually phase in solutions. The department has a goal to come up with a data tagging and labeling strategy by the end of the calendar year.

Beavers also said at TechNet Cyber that she anticipates growth in the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability procurement vehicle as other contracts begin to expire.

At the same time, challenges persist for Beavers and her office, including cyber workforce shortages, unpredictable funding and technical debt that separates the services from the modern approaches they’re after.

All the while, China looms as a major U.S. adversary on the digital battlefield, and attacks on public infrastructure underscore the urgency of predicting and intercepting cyberthreats.

The DOD is seeking $14.5 billion in fiscal 2025 for its cyberspace programs. According to the DOD’s website, Kevin Mulvihill is the new acting principal deputy CIO.

An FBI investigation revealed that Teixeira, a 22-year-old who ran a server on Discord called “Thug Shaker Central,” spent much of his life online, talking primarily with other young men via message, video calls and voice chats. He chatted about guns and military gear, threatened his school, made racist and antisemitic jokes, traded conspiracy theories, discussed antigovernment sentiments, and in a bid to show off, shared some of the military’s most closely guarded secrets about the Russia-Ukraine war and the Middle East.

By the time the young airman was arrested in 2023, media scholar PS Berge had been studying Discord and its users for three years and had created an online consortium of other academic researchers who were doing the same. That an intelligence leak occurred on the site, creating a national security incident, didn’t come as a shock to her.

“My response was, ‘Of course. Of course this would happen on Discord,’” Berge said. “Because on a platform like this, you share everything with your people. Everything about your life. So, why not share national security secrets?”

Teixeira pleaded guilty in March to six counts of willful retention and transmission of national defense information. His sentencing is scheduled for September, and prosecutors are asking that he serve between 11 and 17 years in prison.

The same month Teixeira agreed to a plea deal, the FBI revealed it had investigated another service member in 2022 for leaking information on Discord.

Former Air Force Staff Sgt. Jason Gray, who served as a cyber analyst at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska, admitted to running a Facebook group for followers of Boogaloo, a loosely organized, antigovernment movement that advocates for a second Civil War. Gray was disgruntled with his military career, and he discussed his dissatisfaction with the U.S. government in several Discord channels created for the Boogaloo movement, according to a 2022 FBI affidavit that was unsealed in March.

Gray, who used the account name LazyAirmen#7460, was accused of posting a classified image in a private Discord channel that he “likely obtained” from his access to National Security Agency intelligence, the affidavit states.

Investigators said the image could’ve been shared “in furtherance of the Boogaloo ideology,” but didn’t elaborate on the image’s details. It’s uncertain whether the FBI is still investigating the potential leak. But while searching Gray’s electronic devices for evidence of an intelligence breach, authorities discovered hundreds of images of child pornography. Gray is currently serving five years in federal prison on multiple child pornography charges.

Oversharing is a hallmark of Discord, an online world where members of certain channels talk all day, every day, and even fall asleep together on voice calls, said Megan Squire, a computer scientist and deputy director for data analytics at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

People who study the platform agree that it’s not inherently bad — it’s used by millions of gamers, students, teachers, professionals, hobbyists and members of the military community to communicate and socialize. However, extremists have hijacked a part of the platform to radicalize and recruit others to their causes, said Jakob Guhl, senior manager for policy and research at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.

Following the leak of national security secrets and other high-profile, nefarious uses of the platform in recent years, researchers are grappling with what to think of the platform’s small but headline-grabbing dark side, and many disagree on whether Discord as a company is doing enough to root out bad actors.

“It’s always a bit difficult to strike the right tone between not scaring people off the platform, because the majority of users are completely fine, but also highlighting that there is an actual issue of radicalization,” Guhl said. “It’s not the biggest or most offending platform, but it definitely plays a crucial role among this network.”

‘Not inherently evil’

The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, known as START, studied decades of violent extremist attacks and found a military background to be the most commonly shared characteristic among those who committed or plotted mass casualty attacks from 1990 through 2022, more so than criminal histories or mental health problems.

Researchers from START said the study revealed why extremist groups tend to focus recruitment efforts toward people with military service records: Even a small number of them can have an outsized impact inside extremist movements.

While such recruitment occurs on Discord, Guhl, Berge and Squire agreed that the mere presence of service members and veterans on the platform isn’t a cause for concern.

“It’s a popular platform and not inherently evil,” Squire said. “I’d be much more concerned about military folks on 4chan, Telegram, places like that. Nothing good is happening on those platforms, but Discord could be useful.”

In fact, Berge said, it can be a valuable forum for marginalized people to foster a sense of community. On its “about” page, Discord describes its mission as one that helps users find a sense of belonging.

“Discord is about giving people the power to create space to find belonging in their lives,” the company’s mission statement reads. “We want to make it easier for you to talk regularly with the people you care about. We want you to build genuine relationships with your friends and communities close to home or around the world.”

That’s what the veterans group Frost Call is doing on the platform. The nonprofit encourages veterans and service members to stay connected through gaming, one of its founders told Military Times last year. As of June, it boasted 390 members.

“When we founded Frost Call, we built an organization around this idea of bringing veterans together, helping to improve camaraderie that’s missing from military service,” Marine Corps veteran Wesley Sanders said last year. “It serves an enormous mental health need, but also … an existential need for a lot of veterans.”

Moreover, when new users join Discord, extremist elements of the platform are not easily visible.

Discord is made up of millions of servers centered on various topics. Users can join up to 100 servers, and each server has numerous text, voice and video channels. When a new user creates an account and searches servers to join, the platform will suggest “its most popular, most successful, public-facing communities,” rather than any disquieting, invite-only communities, Berge said.

“If you are a standard user, and if you’re signing in to Discord for your general interests — maybe you’re looking for fellow students or fellow veterans — 90% of the time, you’re not going to accidentally stumble upon an extremist group,” she said. “They actually go through a lot of effort to make these spaces insulated, to make them difficult to find.”

When using Disboard, a third-party search platform for Discord servers, prompts such as “Nazi” or “white supremacist” won’t elicit results like they used to, Berge said. In a 2021 study, she found thousands of Discord servers that marketed themselves on Disboard as hateful and Nazi-affiliated spaces.

“You used to be able to search for those terms and find communities. It was horrifying,” Berge said. “Those servers still exist, but they’ve changed the ways they’re identified, and in some cases, we know that high-profile, toxic communities have been shut down.”

Extremists find a foothold

Founders Jason Citron and Stan Vishnevskiy created Discord in 2015 as a way to allow friends around the world to communicate while playing video games online. Its popularity exploded during the Covid-19 pandemic, when lockdowns went into effect and many people became more isolated than ever before.

Just two years after it launched, Discord gained notoriety as the platform of choice for facilitators of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Organizers, including some veterans, used Discord to share propaganda and coordinate the protest, which turned deadly. James Fields was convicted of killing Heather Heyer when he drove his car into a group of counterprotesters. Fields had joined the Army in 2015 but was separated quickly because of a cited lack of motivation and failure to train.

In 2022, Discord made headlines again after a mass shooting at an Independence Day parade in Highland Park, Illinois, where seven people were killed and dozens more injured. The suspected shooter ran his own Discord server called “SS,” where he complained about “commies,” short for “communists,” according to posts archived by the nonprofit website Unicorn Riot.

That same year, an 18-year-old white gunman killed 10 Black people at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. The gunman, Payton Gendron, spent months writing plans for the attack in a diary he kept on a private Discord server, visible only to him. About 30 minutes before the attack, Gendron sent out invitations for others to view the diary, and 15 people accessed it, according to Discord.

The platform again faced scrutiny following Teixeira’s leak of national security secrets.

“It’s periodic. Every couple of years, it seems like there’s something,” Squire said. “There are other platforms that are worse, but Discord keeps coming up over and over again.”

Research institutions such as the Institute for Strategic Dialogue found that Discord serves as a hub for socializing and community-building across far-right groups, including Catholic extremists, the white supremacist Atomwaffen Division and the antigovernment Boogaloo movement.

Extremist groups value the platform’s layers of privacy and anonymity, as well as its chat and video functions and collaborative nature, Guhl said. Berge described it as a walled garden, or an online environment where user access to content can be controlled. Servers come with the capability to assign hierarchy to different members and allow some members to access information that others can’t, the researchers said.

“In, say, a Twitter direct-messaging thread or Facebook DM, you don’t really have levels and hierarchies,” Squire said. “Discord really allows you to have more fine-grained ranking structures.”

Another reason for the prevalence of extremists on the platform stems from its roots in gaming, Guhl surmised.

Rachel Kowert, a globally recognized researcher on gaming and mental health, has spent five years researching extremism in video game communities. Though gaming itself is a powerful tool for connection and growth, extreme and hateful ideologies are now commonplace in those spaces, Kowert said.

“If you’re spending a lot of time in the social or gaming spaces where misogyny is commonplace, that can in turn start to internalize in the way you see the world and interact in it,” Kowert said.

Fighting a dark legacy

The existence of far-right groups on Discord — and the high-profile instances of extremism on the platform in the past several years — has spawned its “extremist legacy,” one from which it’s now trying hard to distance itself, said Berge.

Discord said it removed more than 2,000 far-right-affiliated servers following the “Unite the Right” rally. After the Buffalo killings, it removed Gendron’s server and worked to prevent the spread of content related to the attack, the company said. At that point, Discord agreed it “must do more to remove hate and violent extremism.”

“We created Discord to be a place for people to find belonging, and hate and violence are in direct opposition to our mission,” the company said in a statement at the time. “We take our commitment to these principles seriously and will continue to invest in and deploy resources.”

Earlier this year, the company reported that 15% of its staff works on its user safety team, which cracks down on harassment, hateful conduct, inappropriate contact, violent and abusive imagery, violent extremism, misinformation, spam, fraud, scams and other illegal behavior.

During the investigations into Teixeira and Jason Gray, Discord officials immediately cooperated with law enforcement, a company spokesperson told Military Times. And in recent months, Discord has leaned on machine-learning technology to moderate content.

“We expressly prohibit using Discord for illegal activity, which includes the unauthorized disclosure of classified documents,” the spokesperson said.

The company publishes reports each quarter showing actions taken against various accounts and servers. The latest report, published in January, says Discord disabled 6,109 accounts and removed 627 servers that espoused violent extremism during the last few months of 2023.

Squire and Guhl agreed that Discord is “pretty good” at responding to extremist content. Guhl credited the company for including extremism and hate speech in its community guidelines, as well as for deleting servers on a regular basis that breach its terms of service. Discord also created a channel where Squire could flag questionable content on the platform, and the company has been receptive to the concerns she’s raised, she said.

“I credit where credit is due, and I have to give them credit for that,” Squire said. “I think it’s taken seriously, and there are other platforms that I could not say that about.”

Extremists are ‘absolutely still there’

Berge applauded Discord for ramping up the technology behind its moderation and for introducing IP bans, which restrict a device from accessing the platform, rather than just an account. Still, she sees room for improvement.

Discord should place more emphasis on educating moderators and users about how to recognize when someone is being radicalized and pulled into an extremist space, Berge said. She also criticized the platform for disbanding a program in 2023 that included hundreds of volunteer moderators.

“It wasn’t Discord’s automated flagging systems that caught national security secrets being leaked by Jack Teixeira. It took other users and community moderators digging into it and someone finally reporting it,” Berge said. “Elevating people and giving them tools to moderate is absolutely central to protecting the platform, and that’s one area where I think they’re taking a step back.”

Berge is still researching communities on Discord, four years after she first uncovered a network of white supremacists using the platform as a recruitment ground. Despite its community guidelines and efforts to remove offending servers and accounts, Discord still serves as a meeting place for pockets of extremism.

“They’re harder to find, but they are absolutely still here. We’re still finding them,” Berge said. “It is still one of the most popular spaces for people to congregate, share and be in community with each other, for better or for worse.”

Discord remains the “platform of choice” for some hate groups, noted Squire, who described the company’s fight against extremists as playing whack-a-mole: As soon as one is removed, another pops up. A lack of institutional knowledge among far-right extremist groups is partly to blame, she said.

“Everybody’s always fresh, and they don’t have any structure for teaching one another and learning from mistakes of the past,” Squire said. “That’s convenient for us, because as we keep amassing knowledge, they make the mistake of reusing the technology that’s most convenient, rather than being strategic.”

This story was produced in partnership with Military Veterans in Journalism. Please send tips to MVJ-Tips@militarytimes.com.

DIU, whose mission is to help the U.S. Department of Defense better leverage commercial technology, worked with two computing firms on the 18-month effort: Rescale, headquartered in San Francisco, and Parallel Works, based out of Chicago.

The companies partnered with DoD’s High Performance Computing Modernization Program, which is working to make decision-making tools enabled by supercomputers more accessible across the department — from researchers and acquisition officials to operators in the field.

The military uses supercomputers to quickly process large amounts of data that can be used to inform decisions or simulate complex scenarios. For example, a unit could use high-performance computing to understand how the weather forecast might impact a planned ISR operation. Or an engineer designing lighter body armor for soldiers could use it to research materials.

The Pentagon relies largely on physical computers — which are expensive to buy and maintain — to perform this work. Through the DIU effort, Rescale and Parallel Works demonstrated that they could provide these computing tools on the cloud, which means users don’t have to have access to a physical computer to take advantage of the capability.

“Researchers are [now] able to access cloud resources when appropriate to augment their work at on-premises centers,” Benjamin Parsons, chief technology officer for the High Performance Computing Modernization Program, said in a June 27 statement. “This has given them access to a wider variety of hardware, and the ability to scale resources beyond what is currently possible, all within one secure, easy to use, environment.”

Both firms are poised to receive production contracts later this year to scale their high-computing platforms to more users.

Matt McKee, Rescale’s chief operating officer, told C4ISRNET in a July 3 interview that cloud-based computing platforms have played a key role in the private sectors, which have used these tools to significantly reduce engineering cycle times for new product releases.

Those capabilities, he said, could change the way DoD develops, tests and fields new systems over the next three to five years.

“You’re seeing that type of thing reverberating through the private sector industry — so, how do we make sure that the U.S. government also has that agility,” he said. “We need to be able to incorporate everything new that is available to us and put all those resources to bear.”

Well known examples include the Human Genome Project, space exploration, Silicon Valley, and biomedical research. Further, in the ever-evolving landscape of science and innovation, the U.S. stands as a beacon for global talent, attracting brilliant minds to its research institutions and universities. This influx of international scientists and engineers has undeniably enriched the nation’s scientific endeavors, leading to countless breakthrough discoveries, transformative innovations, and advancements.

However, amidst the celebration of diversity and collaboration lies a growing concern – the need to balance the openness of the U.S. research enterprise and maintain the nation’s competitive edge on the global stage with the imperative to safeguard national security interests.

Revelations and discussions from this year, as articulated in a GAO Report on Research Security released in January 2024; in remarks made by the Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, in her March 2024 testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence; and in widely reported revelations by the FBI, have highlighted the potential risks associated with foreign researchers working on sensitive projects.

Now, especially as we approach the election, the conversation has turned to how best to protect intellectual property and prevent the unwanted compromise and nefarious exploitation of critical technology by foreign adversaries and other bad actors, including terrorist groups and those that mean to do harm to our national well being. While this is not an easy tension to navigate, it is one we can indeed manage consistent with our national values as we continue to forge ahead with advanced scientific research and technology development to the benefit of all people, everywhere.

At the heart of the matter lies the challenge of finding a solution that does not stifle the flow of talent while ensuring that the nation’s interests are protected. This delicate balance requires a departure from conventional approaches to risk assessment, which often rely on simplistic country-based criteria or blanket restrictions that paint various foreign researchers with the same brush of suspicion.

Instead, what is needed is a nuanced and agile approach – one that leverages technology to identify and mitigate potential risks swiftly and effectively and supplements the work that teams focused on innovation and national security are already doing. Enter the concept of a triage tool – a sophisticated mechanism that incorporates AI capabilities designed to assess the risk posed by international scientists and engineers while expediting the entry of low-risk individuals into the U.S. research ecosystem.

The ideal triage tool, tied to policy that favors the fast tracking of the many scientists who will provide valuable contributions without jeopardizing national security, would possess several key attributes: it must operate without bias, respecting the diversity of backgrounds and nationalities among applicants; it should be automated, ensuring swift processing and scalability without compromising accuracy; and it must prioritize privacy, abstaining from intrusive data collection methods such as biometrics or personally identifiable information.

Furthermore, the tool should complement existing vetting processes, seamlessly integrating into the fabric of U.S. research institutions and agencies. It should be cost-effective, offering significant savings in both time and resources while delivering reliable results with minimal false positives or negatives.

By implementing such a tool, the U.S. can achieve a delicate balance between fostering international collaboration and protecting its national security interests and by establishing robust mechanisms for protecting sensitive information, the U.S. can bolster trust and encourage fruitful collaboration between domestic and international partners. This would not only enhance the experience of foreign researchers seeking opportunities in the U.S. but also provide reassurance to domestic institutions and agencies tasked with safeguarding sensitive information.

The U.S. stands at a crossroads, where the nurturing of global talent is not merely an option but a strategic imperative. Embracing international scientists and engineers is not only a testament to our commitment to excellence but also a catalyst for driving forward the frontiers of human knowledge and ingenuity. In the end, it is not about erecting barriers or shutting the door to international talent – it is about striking a harmonious chord between openness and vigilance, rather than a forced tradeoff between the two.

By embracing innovation in risk assessment and vetting processes, and thereby welcoming the contributions of international talent, the U.S. can continue to lead the world in scientific discovery, address the existing skill gaps, foster global collaboration and culture exchanges, while safeguarding its technological edge for generations to come and fortifying the country’s position as a leader in innovation.

Donald (Don) J. Blersch is Clearspeed’s SVP of Government Innovation. With multi-agency experience, including NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), the Missile Defense Agency (MDA), and the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, Blersch led the implementation of technology innovation while advising the executive leadership bench on a wide range of security disciplines, enabling the department to meet vital national security responsibilities with a well-vetted and trusted workforce, hyperfocused on the protection of sensitive, classified information.

Published recently, the “Vision for the IC Information Environment: An Information Technology Roadmap” articulates the pressing need for transformation within the IC, emphasizing how the current strategic environment is vastly different from that of September 2001.

Today, we face adversaries ranging from peer nations to non-state actors, each seeking to challenge our national interests and security. This dynamic environment demands that our information technology infrastructure not only keep pace but also provide a strategic advantage.

The roadmap aims high and purposefully so. It outlines five key focus areas, each designed to fortify, assure, enable, enhance, and accelerate the mission through a comprehensive IT strategy. These areas include:

— Fortify the Mission with a Reliable and Resilient Digital Foundation.

— Assure the Mission with Robust Cybersecurity.

— Enable the Mission with Modern Practices and Partnerships.

— Enhance the Mission with Data-Centricity.

— Accelerate the Mission with Advanced Technologies and Workforce Readiness.

One of the most exciting aspects of this roadmap is Focus Area 4: Enhance the Mission with Data-Centricity. This section highlights the importance of managing and securely using data effectively to expedite mission outcomes and maximize intelligence value. Of particular note, it stresses three main objectives:

Realizing End-to-End Data Management: To achieve data-centricity at scale, the IC must govern and manage data cohesively, at every point of the data lifecycle. This involves comprehensive data management planning, which aligns complex data lifecycle management activities with critical mission architectures. Whether you’re gathering sensor data or video footage in a remote location or extracting insights from that data in an air-gapped facility, such plans will increase the adoption of IC Data Services and applied advanced analytics and AI.

Implementing a Data-Centric Architecture: Valuing data as a strategic tool requires establishing common data standards, models, services, and enterprise digital policies so that everyone is handling mission-critical information in a cohesive way, aligned with the appropriate protection and sharing of each data object. This will facilitate a decentralized data ecosystem, enabling seamless data exchanges and fostering advanced AI/Machine Learning capabilities. Ultimately, this architecture will streamline data sharing and collaboration within the IC and with external partners.

Transitioning Sensitive Data Silos to Data-Centric Enclaves: Sensitive data within the IC is often siloed, making it difficult for analysts to access and utilize information across different enclaves. By transitioning to data-centric enclaves, the IC can break down these barriers, allowing authorized users to discover and access relevant data more efficiently and effectively.

As a whole, this focus area encapsulates the IC’s shift from traditional processes to a data-centric approach. The report details, “Timely, accurate, well-informed insight is key to delivering enhanced mission outcomes. The IC must shift from an organization- and system-centric paradigm to one that is data-centric; preserves organizational equities, authorities, and rights; implements legal/compliance frameworks; and enforces security.”

Centering the data changes everything

Let’s give credit where it’s due; this vision for data-centricity is transformative. Aiming to shift the IC from a paradigm of isolated data silos to an integrated, agile, and efficient data environment, this transition is crucial for enabling analysts to derive actionable insights swiftly and accurately, thereby enhancing the overall intelligence process. By implementing a data-centric architecture, the IC can ensure that data is not just a byproduct of operations, but a core asset that drives decision-making and operational effectiveness.

One of the most critical aspects of this transformation is bringing data-centric security down to the data object level using technologies like the ODNI’s Trusted Data Format and the recently approved Zero Trust Data Format by the CCEB. By doing so, the IC can ensure that data remains secure and can be effectively shared and utilized across various platforms and with international partners and allies. This granular level of security is essential for maintaining the integrity and confidentiality of sensitive information while promoting interoperability and collaboration.

The “Vision for the IC Information Environment: An Information Technology Roadmap” provides a robust framework for modernizing the IC’s IT infrastructure. By prioritizing data-centricity specifically, the IC can unlock the full potential of its data assets, enabling more informed decision-making and more effective operations, which will ultimately prove to be critical for maintaining a strategic edge in a data-driven world and ensuring the United States remains protected.

The roadmap’s vision is ambitious, but with commitment and collaboration, it is well within reach. Together, we have the opportunity, talent, and determination to close IT gaps and open new mission horizons, securing our nation’s future.

Shannon Vaughn is general manager of federal at Virtru, a data security company.

At the TechNet Cyber conference presented by the Armed Forces Communications & Electronics Association International in Baltimore, leaders from the Pentagon discussed capabilities for public, private and hybrid networks. Officials acknowledged there’s a natural appetite for the most exclusive, secure networks in the national security space. And sometimes there is no wireless network infrastructure available in remote warfighting locations far from population centers.

So as the services determine appetite for private networks that offer more control over information sharing, the DoD is guiding them to use open radio access networks, or ORAN, said Juan Ramírez, the director of the 5G Cross-Functional Team at DoD.

“I think what industry wants to hear is there’s actually going to be requirements that come out that … necessitate an open RAN architecture,” he said at the conference. “So you’ll start to see those come out in the next couple of years, pending budgets.”

Certainly, private networks aren’t the only way to go. In fact, sometimes that’s not the best solution, said Lt. Col. Benjamin Pimentel, who leads the Camp Pendleton 5G experiment for Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations.

“Think about when we deploy in a theater,” he said. “A lot of countries that we go to or locations that we go to already have roads and bridges, and it’d be silly to then go and build my own private roads and my own private bridges separate and apart from that to get where I need to go. If those roads and bridges meet my transportation requirement, and they’re not going to fall under the weight of a ‘seven ton,’ we’re going to drive over it.”

But, somewhere like the first island chain, for example, may not have adequate coverage to put up sensors for long-range precision fires. In cases like those, he said, it would make more sense for units to bring private capabilities.

Given China’s rising aggression and U.S. efforts to deter it in the Taiwan Strait, what Pimentel described is the type of environment where current threats seem to colocate.

Regardless, to ensure there is connectivity wherever the need is, Ramirez said the department is looking at ORANs, which allow multiple vendors to operate as one network and provide more flexibility to scale.

ORAN is something the DoD has been pushing aggressively to explore as it simultaneously journeys toward more standard 5G adoption on military installations and “smart bases.”

Ramirez said the department is hopeful it will get additional support from Congress via future defense spending bills that will backup forthcoming requirements with dollars.

The Pentagon’s 2024 budget requested $143 billion in research, developing and testing of emerging technologies including 5G, but also artificial intelligence. Much of the spending in recent years has been for prototyping, and though the Office of the Secretary of Defense has the lion’s share, Ramirez said his office is offering direction to the services for them to budget for 5G.

“We think that pursuing ideas like [ORAN] advanced by the ORAN Alliance all the way to fully open-source code … provides the feature velocity the DoD needs and the ability to innovate quickly,” said Pimentel.

On June 20, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks approved the strategy, and the department announced it on June 25, coinciding with the 2024 TechNet Cyber conference presented by the Armed Forces Communications & Electronics Association International in Baltimore.

“Fulcrum describes ‘what’ the DoD must achieve with respect to advancing IT for the warfighter and ‘why’ it matters,” according to a department statement.

The strategy offers specifics on broad, sweeping goals by the Pentagon to communicate faster and more securely with warfighters and allies. To date, the government has issued a number of strategic plans and frameworks to double down on cybersecurity and accelerate the military’s development of tools like AI, but this plan takes that a step further by prioritizing user experience and scalable, agile investments.

“It’s called ‘fulcrum’ because it sits at the nexus between our national security strategy, our strategic management plans — our really ‘big thinking’ strategies,” said Leslie Beavers, principal deputy chief information officer, on Tuesday.

With so many tools coming to market from different vendors and small businesses also hoping to break in, the strategy gives leaders guideposts for how to assess what tools and internal resources are needed.

Critically, it also devotes a category to developing the workforce, specifically by broadening the DoD Cyber Workforce Framework to focus more intently on roles for data, AI and software engineering.

The DoD has long said this is an established need.

“There is a recognized shortage of skilled cyber personnel that could potentially impact operational readiness across the Department and put national security at risk,” according to the department’s 2023 Cyber Workforce Strategy. “Despite the vast expansion of cyber educational and experiential opportunities, the nation’s cyber talent pipeline remains limited.”

As in the private sector, government, too, is struggling with too few tech practitioners that make new cybersecurity practices difficult to implement. At the same time, much of the technical guidance handed down by experts in tech shops is written for the actual programmists, not senior executives, so there needs to be an available reserve of workers, DoD officials said at the conference.

“Leadership is a force multiplier and to outpace [adversaries] we have to maximize the talent from our broad array of partners, and recruit and retain our own talent,” said Gen. Timothy D. Haugh, commander of U.S. Cyber Command and director of the National Security Agency, at the conference.

Finally, the new strategy also seeks to streamline governance and enhance use of data to backup decision-making and identify cost savings to deliver joint warfighting capabilities faster amid high-tempo, multi-domain operations.

“We must challenge legacy approaches and move move toward rapid innovation for them,” said Haugh. “We cannot succeed when our existing processes move slower than the rate of innovation change.”

While the document reveals some modified imperatives, the DoD’s new strategy “draws on lessons learned from years of conducting cyber operations and our close observation of how cyber has been used in the Russia-Ukraine war,” as stated by Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy John Plumb. “It has driven home the need to work closely with our allies, partners, and industry to make sure we have the right cyber capabilities, cyber security, and cyber resilience to help deter conflict, and to fight and win if deterrence fails.”

The DoD cites four areas where it plans to focus its efforts: Defend the nation, prepare to fight and win the nation’s wars, protect the cyber domain with allies and partners, and build enduring advantages in cyberspace. Let’s delve a bit deeper into what this means for our nation moving forward.

The DoD’s Focus Areas: A Closer Look

The summary report gives a 50,000-foot view of the department’s vision going forward. There are no key performance indicators, no indication where the new strategy starts or when it ends and nothing that necessarily describes what “success” looks like. And that’s understandable, as this is not the classified version with detailed milestones and tactics.

What the report does say, however, is that there is a new battlefield. Just as the Navy focuses on sea dominance, the Air Force controls the sky and the Army establishes ground supremacy, cyberspace has become a new domain where battles will be fought, and the military unveiled its general plan to establish dominance here as well.

Proactive defense in cyberspace

A new code of conduct is required for proactive defenses — simply responding to incoming cyberattacks will not be enough. This is a sea change in that it says we will explore all aspects of the web to see what’s going on, gather threat intelligence and then determine a preemptive course of action.

We also can choose to allow the intelligence to play out, should that be appropriate. Additionally, the nation-state enemies of the United States have advanced the sophistication of their own cyberattacks greatly over the years. The strategy indicates that we will invest in shoring up defenses and identifying threats and vulnerabilities with an eye to eliminating these threats in the cyber domain where they exist.

Certainly, the U.S. has been active covertly on the internet; most nations have been. But these likely have been small teams, probably from the National Security Agency or a similar entity. What this document lays out are the ground rules for a national, public effort to defend ourselves, our allies and our partners. We will be defending forward.

I expect this new effort will operate the same way that the military operates. If they think that a country or group is doing something illegal against U.S. interests, they will send in a covert ops team, verify it, validate it and gather as much intelligence as they can. When they find it, they want to tap into the source. So, if you look at this from the cybersecurity personnel and functional standpoint, they will operate in cyberspace just as they operate other branches of service.

If we look at this holistically, we will find where a potential attack is coming from and attempt to eliminate it at the source. There likely will be a status of forces agreement, a legal framework that establishes how U.S. military personnel operate in a foreign country. The military will be working within the law, but the difference is they will be doing so proactively, rather than waiting for a cyber version of Pearl Harbor to the nation’s or an ally’s critical infrastructure.

New rules of engagement will be defined for this unregulated space, and layers upon layers of cybersecurity and network defenses will protect the nation’s IT systems and major commands just as the other services protect their domains.

Domestic implications and challenges

We will undoubtedly see the Defense Department enforce more rules on itself to harden its own environment. The DoD is a prime target for threat actors from unfriendly countries. Will it be making a concerted effort to reduce its own vulnerabilities and invest in more cybersecurity defenses to make itself less of a target? That is unknown for now, but it would be a very big task.

The DoD is a huge organization with diverse IT systems. Getting Congress to invest in the network upgrades required by the new cybersecurity guidance will be challenging. However, this summary document and its implications are necessary first steps in shifting our nation’s military focus on cyber threats from primarily defensive to a more proactive stance, where the potential for offensive efforts in defense of the country, its allies and partners are mandated.

Kevin Paige is CISO & VP of Product Strategy at Uptycs.

Researchers asked a group of students, none of whom had specialized training in the life sciences, to use AI tools, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4, to develop a plan for how to start a pandemic. In just an hour, participants learned how to procure and synthesize deadly pathogens like smallpox in ways that evade existing biosecurity systems.

AI cannot yet manufacture a national security crisis. As Jason Matheny at Rand reiterates, while biological know-how is becoming more widely accessible through AI, it’s not currently at a level that would substitute for a lack of biological research training. But as biotechnology becomes both more advanced — think of Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold, which uses AI to predict how molecular structures will interact — policymakers are understandably worried that it’ll be increasingly easy to create a bioweapon. So they’re starting to take action to regulate the emerging AI industry.

Their efforts are well-intentioned. But it’s critical that policymakers avoid focusing too narrowly on catastrophic risk and inadvertently hamstring the creation of positive AI tools that we need to tackle future crises. We should aim to strike a balance.

AI tools have enormous positive potential. For instance, AI technologies like AlphaFold and RFdiffusion have already made large strides in designing novel proteins that could be used for medical purposes. The same sort of technologies can also be used for evil, of course.

In a study published last year in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence, researchers demonstrated how the AI MegaSyn could generate 40,000 potential bioweapon chemicals in just six hours. Researchers asked the AI to identify molecules that are similar to VX, a highly lethal nerve agent. In some cases, MegaSyn devised compounds that were even more toxic.

It’s possible that bad actors could one day use such tools to engineer new pathogens far more contagious and deadly than any occurring in nature. Once a potential bioweapon is identified — maybe with the help of AI — a malicious actor could order a custom strand of DNA from a commercial provider, who would manufacture synthetic DNA in a lab and return it via mail. As experts at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown University has posited, perhaps that strand of genetic material “codes for a toxin or a gene that makes a pathogen more dangerous.

It’s even possible that a terrorist could evade detection by ordering small pieces of a dangerous genetic sequence, and then assemble a bioweapon from the component parts. Scientists frequently order synthesized DNA for projects like cancer and infectious disease research. But not all synthetic DNA providers screen orders or verify their customers.

Closing such loopholes will help, but we can’t regulate away all of the risk. It’d be wiser to beef up our defenses by investing in AI-enabled early-detection systems.

Today, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Traveler-based Genomic Surveillance program partners with airports nationwide to gather and analyze wastewater and nasal swab samples to catch pathogens as they enter our borders. Other systems are in place for tracking particular pathogens within cities and communities. But existing detection systems are likely not equipped for novel agents designed with AI’s help.

The U.S. intelligence community is already investing in AI-powered capabilities to defend against next-generation threats. IARPA’s FELIX program, in partnership with private biotech firms, yielded first-in-class AI that can distinguish genetically engineered threats from naturally-occurring ones, and identify what has been changed and how.,A similar technology could be used for DNA synthesis screening — with AI, we could employ algorithms that predict how novel combinations of genetic sequences might function.

We have barely begun to tap the potential of AI to detect and protect against biological threats. In the case of a novel infectious disease, these systems have the power to determine how and when a pathogen has mutated. That can enable the speedy development of vaccines and treatments specifically tailored to new variants. AI can also help predict how a pathogen is likely to spread.For these technologies to play their vital role, leaders in Washington and around the world must take steps to build up our AI defenses. The best way to counter “bad AI” isn’t “no AI” — it’s “good AI.”

Using AI to its full potential to protect against deadly pandemics and biological warfare demands an aggressive policy effort. It’s time for policymakers to adapt. With adequate foresight and resources, we can get ahead of this new class of threats.

Andrew Makridis is the former Chief Operating Officer of the CIA, the number-three position at the agency. Prior to his retirement from the CIA in 2022, he spent nearly four decades working in national security.