NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.—The pace of cyber threats facing military systems and networks is expanding and evolving rapidly but the ability to quickly acquire and deploy tools to counter these threats remains a challenge, military officers said at the annual Navy League Sea Air Space conference.
Industries that make up the nation’s critical infrastructure are able to acquire new cyber solutions as they need them and shed outdated systems, which “gives them the advantage of staying ahead of the adversary,” Vice Adm. Jan Tighe, commander of the Navy’s Fleet Cyber Command and Tenth Fleet, said during a panel discussion on information warfare.
The Navy has piloted a lot of new cyber security capabilities “in a portion of our network and recognize the goodness of that,” Tighe said, but transitioning that to into a fielded and supported system that is “not going to break other things in the process is something that’s still a little bit elusive.”
For the Marine Corps rapid acquisition for information warfare needs is also a challenge, said Brig. Gen. Loretta Reynolds, commander of Marine Corps Cyber Command and the assistant deputy commandant for Information Warfare.
“You can’t fight in the cyber domain with old acquisition processes,” Reynolds said. “It doesn’t work. The cyber threat is an all-day every day thing [and] we have got to have the ability to put tools on the network to get after the threats as they arrive.”
Tighe’s and Reynolds comments on the challenges they face in acquiring cyber security solutions to match the speed of the threat came a day after the respective chiefs of their services told conference attendees that the military and industry need to get technologies into the hands of warfighters faster and more cheaply to avoid obsolescence when they are fielded.
Tighe said the Navy chief’s comments about acquisition reform are “absolutely true in the information warfare domain” but that acquisition reform isn’t the only stumbling block.
“Because even internal to our own processes, the speed at which we can move to field capabilities in a way that we can trust them and that we know that our operators know how to use them and wield them properly are other pieces of that puzzle,” Tighe said. Tighe in May was nominated to become the deputy chief of naval operations for Information Warfare.
Rear Adm. Nancy Norton, director of the Navy Warfare Integration Directorate within Information Warfare branch, said the requirements loop has to be faster.
“We really need to work on having a faster tighter feedback loop between our operator, our technicians, our engineers and programmers to achieve that high velocity learning that” Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson wants, she said.
Norton said her primary role is being a resource sponsor and that her “biggest challenge is providing the most warfighting capability that I possible can for the least amount of funding that is available to me at any given time. So that means we really have to get the requirements right. We have to know what it is that we want to send out to the fleet and that’s something that I think is most enabled by really a combination of experimentation, prototyping, demonstrations and iterations of the systems that we have available to us and continuing to grow those and rapidly evolve those into the best fit for the warfighter at any given time. That’s the only way we’re going to pace our potential adversaries is if we have the ability to iterate very quickly.”