Speaking at the C4ISRNET Conference, the commission’s executive director, Mark Montgomery, said he foresees the panel’s recommendations that the Pentagon make cyber intelligence sharing and threat-hunting capabilities mandatory for suppliers will “kick into effect.”

“There’s [recommended] language in legislation that allows the [defense] secretary once he’s had a successful report to start taking action on both the threat hunting and information sharing, so I’m excited to see that happen,” Montgomery said.

Congress, in its 2021 defense authorization law, required reports into the feasibility of those requirements. Erica Borghard, a former task force leader with the commission, also told conference-goers she was looking to the reports to tee up further action.

The comments came as the Biden administration responds to Russia’s recent SolarWinds breach, a sprawling, months-long cyberespionage effort that reportedly struck nine federal agencies, along with dozens of private-sector companies.

Earlier this month, the Government Accountability Office reported that the Pentagon had improved cybersecurity for weapons platforms but still struggled to outline cybersecurity requirements in contracts for weapon systems.

“The reality is DoD does impose a lot of requirements on the [defense industrial base] as part of the terms of their contracts,” Borghard said, “and I think that I’m optimistic that we can craft a way of improving public-private collaboration for this particularly unique relationship, in a way that takes into account the concerns of private actors, as well as the government.”

Acknowledging that some companies have been reticent to share data with the government, Borghard said the congressional reporting requirement asked what incentives and liability protections might satisfy the private sector.

Borghard said the intelligence sharing recommendation is meant to build on existing voluntary efforts.

“There are mandatory incident reporting requirements but what we were envisioning was more of a comprehensive threat intelligence program to really get a complete and holistic understanding of the threat environment and threats to the DIB, given that adversaries target across verticals in industry,” she said.

The commission saw the threat-hunting capability required by the DoD’s Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification, or CMMC, as insufficient and believed there should be some threat hunting and mitigation capabilities across the defense industrial base. The commission was indifferent about whether the capability should come from companies themselves, the government or third parties, Borghard said.

“In the last several months we have finalized with the Army and the Navy … what we as all of the services agree are the forces that should be transitioned in,” Gen. David Thompson, the vice chief of space operations, said during a panel at the C4ISRNet Conference.

“You can expect details from both services soon,” he added. “The timeline is in work now, and you’ll see later this year — and continuing into the next year — it will be a phased process by which that transition occurs.”

Thompson pointed to the Navy’s Mobile User Objective System as one example of a mission that will transfer over to the Space Force. MUOS is a constellation of five Ultra High-Frequency narrowband communications satellites, and is currently managed by the Naval Information Warfare Systems Command’s space program office.

“That system, its operation center and the sustainment folks that support it are already in the process of the plan to transfer in, in the coming years,” he said.

As far as what kinds of units will transfer in from the Army, Thompson said he wanted to wait until the Army is ready to make an announcement.

“I won’t go into detail there, because we want to finish the planning,” he said. “We’re going to communicate what’s happening together with the Army. They’ve been a good partner in that.”

The Space Force is set to grow from about 2,400 active-duty members to about 6,400 people by the end of 2021, Chief of Space Operations Gen. John “Jay” Raymond said in December. Some of those new guardians are expected to transfer in from the Army and Navy.

In a February interview with Military Times, Raymond said he expected at least 34 soldiers and sailors to transfer into the Space Force this year, with hundreds more joining them in 2022. However, he stressed that troops would not be forced to move to the new service.

“You can’t order somebody to come in the Space Force,” he said. “It’s all voluntary.”

Spoiler alert: They might sound familiar to those following the problem over the past several years. Here’s a look at what still needs to be solved:

Moving from a platform-centric mindset

The military loves its tanks, planes and ships, but equally important is the ability to push the data collected by those platforms to each other in real time, Capt. Clayton Michaels, the special assistant to the associate director for operations at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, said.

“We have to network our sensors better, our platforms better and, at this point, we are platform-centric, so I know in my own experience in the U.S. Navy we could probably do a better job of linking each platform together to the other ones in the battlespace and then getting that information out there,” he said.

The Defense Department recognizes that it can no longer continue to press forward with expensive acquisition programs with lengthy development timelines and field products that can’t network with each other, according to Mark Tapper, the Air Force’s special adviser to the deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.

“Everything we build has to be involved with a ground component, a maritime component, a sub-surface [component]. They all have to be interoperable,” he said.

Acquisitions and policies will need to change in order to harness the latest technologies in areas like networking, big data analytics and artificial intelligence, Ken Peterman, Viasat’s president of government systems, added.

“There has to be a cultural change and recognition that we need to move more toward an adopt, apply, deploy, evolve kind of a thing and leverage the enormous investment and technology trajectory that the private sector is on,” he said.

Industry doesn’t always feel listened to

There’s a lot of useful and innovative technology already out there, Peterman pointed out.

However, the Defense Department leadership doesn’t seem to be aware of that — in part, he acknowledged, because the private sector doesn’t make their technology road maps public due to competitive sensitivities.

“There has to be a more candid, transparent dialogue so you can see the art of the possible and how affordable it is,” he said.

Data security concerns

The possibility of getting hacked is just a reality of today’s world, and networking many different platforms together offers more opportunities for vulnerabilities.

“How do you protect the data? We’re not exactly sure. We’re looking at that at NGA,” Michaels said.

Peterman pointed out that data security is an area of concern both to the military and to the commercial sector, especially in terms of protecting banking and medical information, as well as intellectual property.

“I think we have enormous horsepower in this country that is yet untapped if we pull the public and private sectors together and recognize that we’re trying to solve problems that have a certain common thread.”

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.

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.

The Army is on the verge of releasing a new network strategy, ordered by Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley. Army officials said at the C4ISRNET Conference on May 3 that strategy would not necessarily fit a massive land war against a near-peer adversary, or as the Army calls it, a “decisive action” scenario.

“The way you fight in a counterinsurgency fight has led to requirements, contrasted with decisive action is different,” said Brig. Gen. Todd Isaacson, the G-6, or top signals official for U.S. Forces Command. The command covers roughly 750,000 active Army, Reserve and National Guard troops.

The Army needs to describe its strategy in the context of the “lethality and dynamic nature of decisive action, multi-domain warfare against a near-peer threat, you have to have mobility like you never had before, protection like you never had before,” Isaacson said. 

Whereas in a counterinsurgency operation, it is valuable for a commander to know where all of his soldiers are, a decisive-action scenario might only require that information for a platoon-sized unit or larger.

“That’s a different problem for the network to consider, and I offer there is an opportunity to re-describe some of its requirements for the network,” Isaacson said 

As the Army reorients, it’s also building strategy to operate in domains where its dominance is not assured.

The new strategy ought to yield a network that lets soldiers control fires and integrate with partner forces — including special operators and foreign troops — in other components, Isaacson said.

Isaacson noted that troops at the Joint Multinational Readiness Center have to fight through lapses in satellite and communications, which is yielding new tactics, techniques and procedures.

Email:  jgould@defensenews.com  

Twitter:  @reporterjoe