A panel of four experts from military, finance, cyber and strategy laid out frightening scenarios at the New America Future of War conference Monday that are not far-off possibilities but things that are happening now.

Peter W. Singer, author of the novel “Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War,” and New America senior fellow, told the audience in Washington, D.C., that data breaches, cyber probes and power shutdowns in other countries haven’t been given the attention they truly need. And the enemy is watching that lack of response.

“We will see kinetic attacks on the Internet of Things that will break things and kill people,” Singer said.

Robert M. Lee, a former National Security Agency cyber expert and current CEO of Dragos Inc., pointed to a new development that is a first in cyber attacks.

A piece of malware called Trisis was used to sabotage an industrial control system of an electric company. But it was more than just an attack on electric power.

“It was the first piece of malware specifically designed to kill people,” Lee said.

The malware would allow hackers to access controls that could cause leaks or explosions, rather than simply switching off power to parts of the grid.

But both in that incident and ones preceding it in recent years the actual events garnered little public acknowledgement by government leaders nor responses that would help deter such attacks.

That’s causing a major problem.

“We’re setting a precedence that these attacks are a great investment because they don’t come with the baggage that other attacks do,” Lee said.

At the same time, non-kinetic attacks could have real consequences for troops on the battlefield. Software being used both in research labs and the pornography industry can alter the face of a person on a different body or even use recordings and physical data from online videos to create a speech that never happened.

Such videos and images could be used and have been used in crude ways to alter battlefield footage that distorts what actually happened on the ground.

Singer called it the melding of the fake and real.

“Weapon will be used against U.S. democracy and U.S. military,” Singer said. “We need to do research and development on how to rapidly ID and debunk.”

The 29 series EW force will transition to the 17 series MOS, the career field that is the baseline of Army cyber, said Maj. Gen. Patricia Frost, who leads the Army Cyber Directorate at the Pentagon.

The 29 series soldiers will begin training to give them a foundation in cyber. Effective Oct. 1, 2018, they will transition to the 17 series.

The Army also will be expanding cyber training in the new year. The service will introduce troops to the new Persistent Cyber Training Environment, which was due to be rolled out at the end of 2017, said Lt. Gen. Paul Nakasone, the commander of Army Cyber Command.

The new virtual environment is designed to be a joint training capability across the Defense Department to fill gaps in cyber training platforms available now.

It will essentially be military cyber’s own firing range, supporting multiple training events across the services.

The Army took the lead on developing the Persistent Cyber Training Environment.

The Army is also planning a new combined exercise for February at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, Frost said.

At the exercise, soldiers will interact with Marines to share information in a tactical environment so they all can understand what is happening in that space, Frost told Army Times.

Army Forces Command will designate which unit will participate in the exercise, she said.

Candidates who are accepted for the Army’s new Cyber Direct Commissioning Program will enter active duty as first lieutenants after taking two courses that total 16 weeks of instruction.

A major incentive for civilians with four-year degrees and high-demand technical skills to enter the Army as junior officers is the scale of the mission they will do, said two generals who lead Army cyber and spoke to reporters about the program on Tuesday.

“The most critical incentive that I think will be most attractive to this group of people is every single day you’ll go toe to toe with the best hackers in the world, and you’re defending our nation,” said Lt. Gen. Paul Nakasone, commander of Army Cyber Command. “Whether it’s a nation state or whether it’s a non-nation state actor or it’s a terrorist, if you want that opportunity, come join us in the Army. We have that opportunity every single day.“

The talent the Army wants to attract may come from academia or industry, has experience operating in cyberspace, and has the “drive, dedication and inclination that they want to serve the nation,” said Maj. Gen. Patricia Frost, director of cyber for the Army’s G-3/5/7.

How it works

The five-year pilot program will commission up to five cyber operations officers per year into the active component, Nakasone said. After the first year, the program will expand to the Army National Guard and Army Reserve, he said.

The first board to consider applicants will take place in about a week, and the first class is anticipated to begin in February, Nakasone said. The Army has more than 50 applicants and “we anticipate we will continue to have great interest,” he said.

Once the candidates are accepted into program, they are sworn into the Army Reserve as second lieutenants. Upon training, they enter active duty as first lieutenants, which has been the case with direct commissions into other branches in the past, Nakasone said.

The Army already offers direct commissions to bring officers into medical, legal and chaplain career fields.

“This is a new way of doing business,” Nakasone said about the cyber program. “Like building a school and a career field together, this is another initiative that we think holds great promise.”

Filling the gaps

Direct commissions for Army cyber are intended to fill a number of capability gaps and make sure Army cyber teams can accomplish their missions, Nakasone and Frost said.

The officers will do a range of tasks such as building tools and devices, writing algorithms, ciphers and programs, and doing research to support Cyber Mission Force teams.

Their skills are needed now, but it takes time, even several years, to build cyber operators, Frost said. So the Army is looking to bring in experienced people laterally to add to the service’s technical skills.

Both Congress and the Defense Department see the program as an opportunity to bridge the capability gaps, she said.

Applicants can expect to hear from the Army and be invited for an in-person interview at the U.S. Army Cyber School at Fort Gordon, Georgia. Army cyber leaders see the interview as critical to determining if the applicant is someone who will meet the security needs of the force. The applicants also will be asked to articulate the skills they will bring to the Army. This is a different approach than with typical, conventional accessions, Frost said.

If the interview goes well, the applicant will be sworn in as a second lieutenant and go to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, for a four-week direct commissioning course, then on to Fort Gordon for an abbreviated 12-week Cyber Officer Basic Leadership Course. Then comes their first assignment as first lieutenants, most likely at Fort Gordon or at Fort Meade, Maryland.

The expedited schedule will allow them to bypass the Army’s Basic Combat Training Course, give them fast promotion to first lieutenant as 17A cyber operations officers, and priority for getting the necessary security clearance.

It will take an estimated five months to go from the first look at an application packet to getting the applicant through courses and putting the new officer to work, Nakasone said.

How to qualify

Requirements for becoming an officer through the program include having at least a four-year college degree, ability to complete an Army physical, meet basic fitness standards and hold U.S. citizenship. They will serve a total of eight years in the service, at least three of those on active duty. Applicants must be less than 41 years old and be able to get and maintain a top-secret security clearance.

The direct commission into cyber differs in several ways from getting a commission through Officer Candidate School. Candidates at OCS will have completed Basic Combat Training before attending 12 weeks of tactical and leadership training at Fort Benning, Georgia, and they must not be older than 32. They are not guaranteed to be commissioned as cyber officers even if they request it, but those selected through the direct commission program are guaranteed to become 17A cyber operations officers.

In addition, OCS candidates are commissioned as second lieutenants and typically serve 18 months of service before making first lieutenant.

Bringing in cyber professionals as lieutenants, rather than a higher rank, was determined in the National Defense Authorization Act as the level for each service, Nakasone said.

After the first year of the program, Army cyber will review to see if the program was able to attract the talent hoped for, Nakasone said. The Army also will see if any changes need to be made, including whether to offer monetary incentives such as special pay or bonuses to sign up or stay in.

Learning curve

Once in uniform, the new officers will be paired with mentors, Nakasone said.

“We find that an effective way of developing talent … any time you have that buddy program, we’ve found great success with it,” he said.

Because direct commission officers are a small population, it will be easier to make sure they are taken care of, Frost said. They will be going through the initial course with other directly commissioned officers in other career fields, so they can talk with those officers as well.

“We’ll be able to prioritize what their needs might be,” Frost said. “Having that mentorship program will be key. “

The Army’s program is a pilot for all the services, Frost said.

“We will share lessons learned across the services. How we recruit in the Army may not necessarily be how we recruit in the Marine Corps,” she said, although the types of skills needed may be similar from service to service. “Of any of our joint warfighting functions, I don’t think it gets any more joint than what you’re executing day to day,“ she said.

To find out more about the program and to apply, go to the Army’s cyber direct commission website.

“For those of you in the military who are 25 years old or younger, captains or below, this is going to be a fundamental, significant change that you are going to have to come to grips with, and you are going to have to lead the way,” Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley said Tuesday at the International Conference on Cyber Conflict in Washington, D.C.

Milley spoke directly to the many young soldiers in the audience, including West Point cadets, at the conference presented by the Army Cyber Institute at the United States Military Academy and the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence. The audience also included military leaders, government civilians and innovators from the cyber industry.

“People my age do not have the answer,” Milley said. “We have enough brains, I suppose, to recognize the fact that we are in the midst of change. But we are not savvy enough, we are not smart enough, we are not sophisticated enough, and, frankly, we may not be around long enough to implement the actual changes that are going to take place.”

“That rock is going to go in your rucksack, and we are counting on you for the future,” he said.

The talent and technical ability in Army units is going to reside at the lower level for the next generation as they cycle through, Lt. Gen. Paul Nakasone, the commander of Army Cyber Command, said at the conference.

“I don’t know too many Army units where you go in and you say ‘hey, I know that the E-6 knows more about what they’re going to do than the O-6,’ “ Nakasone said.

Those at the O-6 level and above do still have a job, and they have a responsibility in terms of leadership, synchronization and vision, he said. But he keeps thinking of the talent on the way up.

“It’s very interesting to command an organization where the true talent and brain power is certainly not at the top, but at the beginning stages,” Nakasone said. “It’s the lieutenants, it’s the sergeants, the young captains that have this remarkable talent.”

Best and brightest

To recruit cyber talent into the military, Milley pointed to a pilot program that taps the country’s vast pool of brilliant cyber minds to bring them into the officer ranks through direct commissions, which usually have been reserved for doctors and lawyers.

“What we need to do, we the Army, we need to track those best minds,” Milley said.

They may want an opportunity to serve, but the military has not reached out to them effectively, he said.

Rather than bring in a cyber expert as a private, in the old “linear industrial model of promotions,” he said, why not bring them in laterally, and have them serve for 24 or 36 months.

“Let them serve this country, let them do some good for us, and they’ll feel good, we’ll feel good,” Milley said.

The power of the “super empowered individual” is one of the things Nakasone said he has learned about the people component of cyber in the last 12 to 18 months.

Among those doing critical jobs on the teams, “our best ones are 50 or 100 times better than their peers,” Nakasone said. “Is there a sniper or is there a pilot or is there a submarine driver or anyone else in the military 50 times their peer? I would tell you, some coders we have are 50 times their peers.”

For example, a common narrative a year ago was that ISIS could operate in virtual space uncontested. They could push their message and share their propaganda rapidly, Nakasone said, and “there wasn’t much we could do about it.”

But in the past nine to 12 months “we have taken that on, and that narrative is no longer true,” he said.

Army Cyber is contesting their message every day, and behind an Army cyber team is an individual, the one Nakasone calls “that 50-x coder.”

“He’s the one who has come up with the ideas about social media and how to get after ISIS in that space,” he said. “That’s the power of the super empowered individual.”

The Army has moved quickly to stand up its cyber career branch, with nearly 20,000 soldiers so far, and 41 cyber protection teams.

An “incredible amount of work” has gone into creating Army cyber forces, doctrine and strategy in the last few years, and the pace is faster than expected, Nakasone said.

“We are running faster than our headlights,” he said. “We are learning so much we are well forward of where we thought we’d be.”

Machine speed

Warfighters in the cyber domain are operating at a time when the battle space is becoming more lethal, more complex and with machines on the rise.

The military is seeing a convergence of a variety of technologies, such as artificial intelligence and autonomous vehicles, and, “in combination, I guarantee that they are changing and will change the fundamental character of warfare,” Milley said.

Machine learning opens up potential applications not just for defense but offense, Nakasone said.

“It’s easy to get on a network and look for vulnerability,” he said.

But he can envision a machine that can find a vulnerability, rapidly identify it, work with persistence and do all that at machine speed.

The potential for cyber warfighting may involve a self-healing network, working at machine speed to lock out adversarial persistent threats with a fraction of the workforce used now, Nakasone said.

“Think of the implications for the Army and the nation,” he said.

For the military, it’s not just about the technologies, “but how you use them,” Milley said. It’s a matter of the doctrine, the organizations and the talent, and how you bring them all together, he said.

“We’re not going to get it right,” he said. “What is important is that we get it less wrong than the enemy.”

The key, Milley said, is to have innate ability to innovate faster than the opponent can in the moment, to rapidly adapt and innovate when in contact with the enemy.

The potential adversaries of the U.S. are moving “very, very rapidly,” he said.

“If we, the United States military, are going to preserve this experiment in freedom for the next generation and the generation after, then we too will have to move up smartly, and you can’t move up alone,” Milley said.

The U.S. military is one component of the effort, which will depend on academia, industry and allied and joint partners working together, Milley said.

“This is going to take teamwork and the best minds that America can bring to bear,” he said.