Their target – critical Ukrainian government data.

As the multi-pronged invasion commenced, cruise missiles struck a Ukrainian governmental facility housing servers full of important data. At the same time, Russian cyber operatives conducted “wiper attacks” on computer networks – attempting to delete all the stored information.

Despite the sophisticated and holistic nature of the Russian attack, the Ukrainian data survived the onslaught. For a week earlier, it had been virtually smuggled out of the country. The data which had once singularly been stored on physical servers, had been uploaded to the cloud.

“The key to a country’s digital resilience in wartime is the ability quickly to move data outside the country while still connecting to and relying on it for a government’s digital operations,” according to a report from Microsoft on the cyber lessons of the Ukrainian war. “One reason these kinetic and cyberattacks have had limited operational impact is because digital operations and data have been disbursed into the public cloud,” it said.

Microsoft, which competes with Amazon, IBM, Salesforce and other software and computer networking companies in providing cloud services to governments, published the report, “Defending Ukraine: Early Lessons from the Cyber War,” on June 22.

Prior to the Russia-Ukraine war, a data protection law prohibited the Ukrainian government from utilizing the cloud to store and process data, forcing all the data to be centralized and vulnerable, according to the report. The law was amended just days before the invasion to permit the very same information to be housed on the cloud.

The cloud is a system of decentralized, networked computer servers spread out all over the world. Stored data, often encrypted and secure, is housed in duplicate across multiple servers and can be accessed via the internet from any location. The redundancy means that even if one server is destroyed, the data is not lost because it is copied elsewhere.

Governments around the world have been exploring the idea of adopting the cloud for official use. The Pentagon awarded Microsoft a contract for just that reason in 2019 before rescinding it less than a year later. New DoD contracts for cloud computing are expected to be awarded this year.

“It’s also important to think about the longer-lasting lessons that come from these efforts,” the Microsoft report said. “The last few months in Ukraine illustrate the very different defense needs that prevail during a war.”

But could it also set off alarm bells for other nations that the U.S. is preparing to use offensive cyber operations in a new way?

That was a question posted to two top cyber officials from the Pentagon during the annual Federal Times CyberCon Tuesday. And their message to those who might share those concerns was simple: don’t worry.

Click here for more coverage from the 2017 CyberCon event!

“It’s a nuanced change, the elevation. There has been a United States Cyber Command for a number of years now, there will continue to be [in the future], and I don’t see it as escalatory at all,” said U.S. Air Force Col. Todd Stratton, director of the AFCYBER Forward group.

“There’s a lot going on out there in the domain and the establishment of the sub-unified command of CYBERCOM in 2010 didn’t change any of that, and I don’t think there are any red lines that will be crossed there,” he added.

His fellow panelist — Air Force Brig. Gen. Timothy Haugh, director of intelligence at CYBERCOM — concurred, adding that the elevation for CYBERCOM needs to be viewed through the group’s priority list.

The top priority remains securing the DoD’s information networks, or as he put it: “From our perspective, the bulk of our force is still engaged in making sure we have assured communications, defended networks, trust in our data and the ability to operate in all domains.”

The second priority is to protect the nation from cyberattacks. And the third element is to give defense leaders opportunities where “we should just be presenting increasing numbers of options for them in that domain.”

“So I wouldn’t view that as any escalation,” Haugh said. “I view that as just really practical in terms of the situation we face today.”

Rafnson is part of the Air Force’s newly formed Directorate of ISR Future Warfare, which the service formed to “break ourselves away” from budget planning “and just start asking basic questions about what are the threats in 30 years? … What is ISR going to look like?”

“We don’t have the brainpower to do [all of] that ourselves, because we’re only 10 people,” Rafnson said, but he hopes the directorate can lay the groundwork for a future ISR enterprise capability collaboration team (ECCT).

The Air Force has set up ECCTs to help guide the service as it makes big decisions about the future makeup of its force. The first ECCT looked at how it should maintain air superiority into the 2030s, and helped inform development of the service’s next fighter, called Penetrating Counter Air.

An ECCT is currently assessing how the Air Force approaches “multidomain command and control” and could influence how the service decides to replace weapons such as the RC-135V/W Rivet Joint or E-3 airborne warning and control system. From there, the service could conduct one on “global integrated ISR,” Gen. Mike Holmes, currently head of Air Combat Command, told Defense News last year.

“If the next one is an ISR ECCT, that organization would have the horsepower to really put on some meat on [the question of] what is ISR in 30 years,” Rafnson said. “We’re trying to get that ready so that if this thing does happen, we can start running as opposed to start from a standstill.”

By December, the RCO had approved a strategy for a “phased” way ahead to rapidly prototype electronic warfare capability.

“It was very clear that the strategic gap [in EW] was the ability for NATO and the American participation in NATO to be able to do ground maneuver in a contested environment,” Wiltsie told Defense News in an interview at the C4ISRNET Conference on May 3. “So what we are focused on is being able to field a capability that will allow the maneuver force — so think the brigade and below — the ability to ground maneuver in a contested environment.”

So the RCO developed a prototype and sent it over to Europe to help soldiers better view the EW picture, Wiltsie said. What is in Europe now is the “phase zero” version, he added. “Phase one will be over in July, and then the last element of it will arrive in October.”

The prototype will be tried out in an operational assessment during the Saber Guardian exercise in Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria.

The Army will run another operational assessment in October and then take the information to the RCO’s board of governors for a decision on whether to field the capability to designated units, according to Wiltsie.

The second element in the prototype will have an offensive capability, Wiltsie said.

“Everything looks very, very good,” he added. “It’s providing soldiers the ability to understand the electromagnetic spectrum that they are in, are you being jammed, or what other radios/emitters are in your environment.”

Feedback from phase zero has so far resulted in a better understanding of what is wanted in a display, what they can visualize and how they can use the information to interpret what the environment looks like, according to Wiltsie. “We are working some better user interfaces with them to allow them to move quicker in understanding what signals are out there,” he added.

The next phase, Wiltsie said, will tackle how to integrate the EW prototype onto a vehicle and how troops will use it. “One of the questions that we have to be able to answer to the board is: Could you do this with the existing organizations and troops that you have, or do we need to augment troops in order to be able to do this?”

An element of the EW solution would incorporate cyber capability, Wiltsie said during a speech at the conference, but the RCO is also working with Army Cyber Command on both offensive and defensive capabilities with more of a focus on the defensive side first.

The RCO has delivered an infrastructure solution to cyber forces and is working on a situational understanding capability, Wiltsie said. That capability currently is in source selection, and an award will be made soon.

For position, navigation and timing — or PNT — the RCO is looking at five to seven different technologies “to see which one gives us either the best performance or is the fastest that we can incorporate,” Wiltsie said.

The RCO is looking at both mounted and dismounted solutions for PNT because in the European theater the Army has armored brigades, Stryker brigades and infantry combat brigades, so the solution has to work on various platforms within those brigade combat teams, Wiltsie said.

For PNT, “the idea is to spend very little money on a multitude of options to take them to some kind of assessment and then come back to the board and say: ‘We believe this one or these two are the ones that we want to go forward with,’ ” he noted.

The RCO has also set up an Emerging Technologies Office to understand the art of the possible and what is out there, “which is a huge challenge for us,” Wiltsie said. The office will allow collaboration with the Pentagon’s Strategic Capabilities Office, other services’ RCOs, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental.

And it will also allow the office to tap the commercial space and get a sense of innovation occurring there, he said, and identify what technologies could be prototyped for military organizations such as big-data analytics, artificial intelligence, autonomy and machine learning.

When dealing with more sophisticated adversaries that might have multiple jammers, more expensive complements such as anti-jam antennas might need to be brought into the fold.

With a near-peer or peer adversary, Coggins explained that secure radio frequency power technologies controlled from the ground rather than space are an option, though that route would also be expensive. The beauty of this, however, is that only a small number are needed, he said — not every soldier requires such a capability.

With threats to PNT and cyberspace, forces might have to revert to more primitive technologies when denied. Reynolds said she was encouraged when recently visiting Okinawa, Japan, for the III Marine Expeditionary Force exercise, as some in the division were using maps and single-channel radios.

“They know how to do that, and we used to do that all the time, and so bringing back those old skills and know that if all else fails,” Marines can use a single-channel radio, she said.

Similarly, Rear Adm. Dannell Barrett, director of Navy Cyber Security Division with the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, said during the conference that one of the skills being taught at the Naval Academy is celestial navigation so that sailors don’t rely on a computer if communications or GPS are denied.

“We are conscious about keeping costs down and being efficient. But there is a cost when you lose our ability to conduct fires or talk or maneuver. We’ve got to balance that out,” Coggins said.

He also noted that there will be three requests for information released in June within the assured PNT program, with an industry day to follow.

An intelligence enterprise will need to move at a faster and faster pace, and analysts are already being given the technology to make decisions or assessments faster. What used to take an airman three hours can now take 15 minutes, Maj. Gen. Bradford “B.J.” Shwedo, the commander of the 25th Air Force, said at the conference. Some of that is due to airmen taking the initiative to improve the technology they use, according to Shwedo.

But moving quickly still requires processing the intelligence coming in with a “suspicious eye,” especially acknowledging the limitations of technology. “You have to constantly go, ‘OK, what am I missing here? I can’t trust that piece [of intelligence.’ “

Steve Cook, the program manager for battle management, command and control at Northrop Grumman, is currently tasked to focus on innovative solutions to help optimize the massive defense intelligence enterprise for users like the 25th Air Force.

Cook said Northrop is focused on data analytics and finding actionable intelligence out of “big data” — massive amounts of information streaming in from countless sensors and sources.

From a soldier with a video camera all the way to satellite capability, “there is a lot of data,” Cook said, and the challenge is sorting through all of it.

Other technologies that could aid the enterprise include:

• Computer automation, where the computer can do more of the easy, shallow tasks and leave the deep thinking and decision-making to the intelligence analyst

• Cognitive machine

• Artificial intelligence

• Autonomy

Man-machine teaming is another area that could be developed and implemented in the intelligence enterprise.

“What thinking can I turn over to the computer so I don’t have to,” Cook asked, and how can the machines be controlled or commanded using such things as gestures like a hand movement.

There are few challenges related to incorporating innovative technology into the intelligence enterprise.

Trust is a big one, according to Cook. Users of such technology need to understand the gap in terms of human thinking and machine processing. For instance, Cook said, there’s the example of an Alexa, Amazon’s voice controlled system, ordering a dollhouse for a little girl because it overheard a conversation in the other room.

Overtrusting a system is another issue and can lead to fratricide when a human trusts the computer is thinking more than it can, Cook noted.

And there’s the issue of assuming nothing’s there if sensors aren’t picking anything up or transmitting intelligence to the right place. “How do we know what we don’t know,” Cook asked.

Lynn also discussed ballistic missile defense, noting the audience may have heard about this in the news recently. All the things that command and control the intercontinental ballistic missiles rely on networks. “That’s war fighting and we have to make sure it works — that’s what we do,” Lynn said.

Additionally, Lynn noted that both war fighters and senior leaders rely on command and control devices. This includes cellphones, which senior leaders use when they travel to communicate. They have to work and be wired tight, Lynn said.

The Enroute Mission Command (EMC) tool

for the communications portion of Warfighter Information-Tactical  Increment 1, or WIN-T Inc. 1, provides the ability for deploying airborne units supporting urgent missions to receive critical updates while en route on aircraft. The system allows receipt of critical command, control and intelligence information that will enhance situational awareness and mission success upon arrival at the intended location.

Through the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s

NSG Mapping Enclave

, known as NOME, crowdsourcing campaigns have had a positive effect on NGA’s humanitarian relief and disaster response and special mission planning efforts. Those efforts include support to first responders during the 2015 Nepal earthquake, the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro and the crisis in South Sudan. NGA’s use of volunteered geographic information and NOME is challenging conventional geospatial collection and dissemination methods, reducing costs and enhancing mission planning and performance across the intelligence community, Department of Defense, countless disaster relief organizations and countries throughout the world.