Mittwoch, 12. September 2012

Army and Marines creating systems for cyber fire support

Posted By John Reed -

The Army and Marine Corps are developing procedures that allow front-line troops to request offensive cyber support the same way they currently request artillery and air support.

For its part, the Army  has fielded the Cyber Effects Request Format, or CERF, a system tht allows combatant commands to request cyber operations from U.S. Cyber Command.

"It's an Air Force model that we deliberately seized on about 19 months ago, a close air support model, to develop a process and procedures by which tactical and operational commanders can leverage these fires in support of their operations," said Lt. Col. Jason Bender, chief of fires for Army Cyber Command on August 15. ("Fires" is the military term for discharging weapons.)
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Requests for cyber fire support will go up through the same chain of command as air or artillery support and will end at cyber operators providing the solutions, according to Bender.

Right now, the CERF allows combatant commanders and operational commanders to request cyber support for their missions. However, the Army would like to expand this so that smaller, tactical level units fighting on the ground can request cyber fire support.

"Just about all the services would like to be able to [provide cyber fire support to tactical level troops], the question right now is, what is a cyber tactical fire," said Bender during a Sept. 7 interview. "Most of the fires that we're doing are at the operational or strategic level of war." Since cyber operations don't have physical boundaries, limiting the effects of cyber fires "to a small tactical area is pretty difficult right now."

However, one of the biggest challenges with providing cyber fire support is making sure that planners throughout the military understand what cyber tools are available to them, how to use those tools, as well as possible unintended effects of a cyber strike (similar to the way military planners must work to avoid civilian casualties from airstrikes).
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"With conventional weapons, it's very easy to say ‘I've got a bridge and I want to deny road traffic or deny a line of communication.' As a weaponeer, I can go look at that bridge, and I've got all these weapons that are available to me and all I've got to do is put six JDAMs [GPS-guided bombs] across the bridge or hit the pylons in a certain way and I'm going to drop the bridge and I'm going to deny that line of communication, that road going across the bridge," said Bender. "That's not always so easy in cyberspace."

Commanders, versed in traditional military weaponry and the effects of those weapons, must know what exactly they want to do from a cyber perspective and understand all the collateral effects of their actions and how they interplay between the cyber and physical domains, according to Bender.

"Consider an unclassified network inside of a ground force headquarters, and we have the ability to infiltrate that network and disrupt their communications on it or do [misleading] message delivery. If we destroy that headquarters building, we also destroy our [cyber] characteristics of the target, so that target ceases to exist in cyberspace," potentially undermining a cyber mission, said Bender.
At the same time, cyber planners must be aware of the needs of ground troops when planning cyber operations, Bender told Killer Apps in a follow-up interview.

To this end, the Army is working to view targets through a holistic lens that takes into account what impact kinetic operations will have on cyber operations and vice versa. Why bomb an enemy into submission when you can simply confuse him into ineptitude for a fraction of the cost?

"Cyber capabilities and effects are instantaneous," said Lt. Gen. Rhett Hernandez, commander of Army Cyber Command on Aug. 16. "However, cyber planning and targeting are resource intensive, our planners and analysts continue to integrate cyber targeting with [military] objectives, the joint fires process, and lethal and non-lethal effects."
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