Top-to-bottom adaptations offer solutions, but add new risks.
The commercial sector and the military are linked inexorably by the information technologies they exploit and confront. The exploitation comprises new capabilities and technologies that are emerging at an increasing rate; the confrontation entails the challenges these new technologies bring, including security and adaptation.
These and other issues were discussed in three days of panels and speakers at MILCOM 2010, held in San Jose, California, November 1-3. Among those speakers was Lt. Gen. Dennis Via, USA, J-6, the Joint Staff", who described several items high on his wish list for military communications. These ranged from technologies and methodologies to improved efficiency in existing systems.
The general called for information and services from the edge to be joint, integrated and operational "out of the box." With U.S. forces expected to be deployed virtually anywhere in the world, Gen. Via cited a need for global network access with a single sign-on.
Technology must serve the user, not the other way around, he emphasized. Some existing capabilities are exploited to about only 25 percent of their full capability. Industry should help leverage those systems to a greater degree of use.
Above all, the military must leverage "the significant investment" made over the past decade. Gen. Via added. This effort should entail spiral development and technology insertion so thut the force can increase the benefits it receives from existing systems and technologies.
The future will feature persistent conflict, constrained resources and compressed decision cycles. So. forces must be able to "fight upon arrival" in theater, he emphasized. Troops have to be trained well so that they will be effective when they get on the ground. They should not require time "to try to sort it out."
Spectrum must be taken into consideration when acquiring new systems. Not only is spectrum a finite resource, systems must be able to work anywhere in the world during a deployment, which requires spectrum compatibility, the general pointed out.
Jake MacLeod. executive vice president. Powerwave Technologies, described the ideal communications system as one that will provide realtime, high-speed secure broadband to the warfighter. A fatter pipe will be needed for backhaul - the cell to the core network, he added.
One potential solution platform would be unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs. David E. Anderson of Insitu Incorporated described how a class of small UAVs may be able to provide vital communications, surveillance and reconnaissance for warfighters. These UAVs fall into a niche between large, long-endurance craft and personal UAVs that arc launched by hand. The small UAVs would incorporate many of the best features of the other two classes.
He continued that they would give a battlefield commander - primarily in a division or a battalion - an organic capability for providing intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance with a small logistical footprint. The UAV would offer electro-optic/infrared mid-wave sensing to provide a degree of persistent surveillance.
And, handheld units now are allowing warfighters to receive UAV imagery. Doug Bowen. former vice president. L-3 Communications Syslems-West. described how one UAV can provide imagery directly to individuals using a handheld device. It also can connect with vehicles using a terminal that can link with thai handheld device. The vehicle terminal creates an infrastructure across multiple bands, and the complete system can provide voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), chat, file transfer and video downstream or upstream, as well as a John Madden-mode whiteboard that allows individuals to circle an item on a display and send it on to others.
Even individual warfighters have gotten inlo the innovation act. Col. Pat Rayermann, USA, National Security Space Office, reported that U.S. Army soldiers are adopting Android phones and apps as part of their everyday business. Soldiers have taken to their Android phones and are winning awards for writing new apps for them, he added. These soldiers take their phones back to their barracks at night, where they often use them to review training materials.
Soldiers likely will need more communications capabilities, not less, the colonel noted. "They naturally use these devices, they are collaborative, and we owe them an infrastructure," he declared.
Jeffrey Kroon. director, network waveforms, Harris Corporation, said that activities such as chat. Web portal access and texting are driving development of new systems and improved capabilities. And, many more emergent applications likely will appear in the near term. "Collaboration toois are being used on the SIPRNET [secret Internet protocol router network] that we haven't seen." he related. "People are getting pretty clever about them."
With warfighlers driving these advances, the Army is about to change the way soldiers are trained in communications. Maj. Gen. Mark Bowman, USA, director of architecture, operations, networks and space. Army chief information officer (CIO)/G-6, revealed thai the traditional way of teaching signal soldiers how to operate boxes will change to accommodate the inherent knowledge they bring to the force. This knowledge includes social media and other capabilities.
Another driver for this change is the Army's adoption of VoIP. The Army will have fewer specialized technologies and systems as it adopts VoIP for all of its voice traffic.
Overall, the Army will have fewer military occupational specialties. The general offered that the Army does not need as many as it has today. "Everyone needs to be cross- trai ned," he said.
Ultimately, all soldiers will receive some degree of communications training. "It would be irresponsible not to teach basic communications skills to everyone in the Army," Gen. Bowman declared, noting that any soldier may have to step in to operate a basic communications system in an emergency.
Changes Needed for Procuring Military Information Technology
Many experts speaking at MILCOM 2010 called for broad reforms in the way the military procures information technology. Dr. Robert Hermann, former principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for command, control, communications and intelligence (C3I) and a former National Reconnaissance Office director, declared that military technology has not reached its full potential because the business of applying information technology is embedded in military acquisition - and that process is seriously flawed. He cited bad management policy and organizational structure for hindering technological progress in the military.
Hermann charged that the Defense Department has not given primary responsibility to those tasked with completing missions. For example, a combatant commander should have visibility into financial data for context, he said.
The cause is structural. The department is a function of two elements, Hermann stated. One element is the Army/Navy/Air Force, which supplies the force. The other is lhe combatant commanders, who accept those forces and arrange for them to operate in a coherent system. Both elements report to the secretary of defense, who has a role in both areas. Both organizations have different ideas, and they need to engage with each other and hold clear thai they are responsible for separate things, he said.
The process has led to inevitable growth in cost and risk, and no one believes that this is acceptable. Hermann continued. The result is a complex, technology-rich, intensely interconnected system that only reaches the field as separate forces integrated upon arrival. This complex force mus� be managed accordingly. To resolve these complexity issues, combatant commanders should have the means of knowing and manipulating the force in the system, he offered.
Lt. Gen. Dennis Via, USA, J-6. the Joint Staff, stated that, "We can't continue to procure [information technology] systems the way we procure weapon systems." He believes that senior-level work underway at the Defense Department should lead to changes soon.
The pros of using commercial gear include significantly lower cost, the latest common research and development, continuous technology updates, easier development of specific form factors, simpler network maintenance, priority access assignment and interoperability, offered Jake MacLeod, executive vice president. Powerwave Technologies. The cons include security challenges for sensitive communications, dependence on commercial entities to deliver service-level agreements. uptime, coverage areas and reliance on the international supply chain.
MacLeod advised government procurement officials against lowering the hammer during negotiations with industry. "Negotiate, but don't destroy" the company with harsh terms, he warned. Government should seek an acceptable and logical deal for both sides.
Dr. Ronald Jost. former deputy assistant secretary of defense for C5I, Space and Spectrum, said that building effective future C1I systems will require tighter control of processes by appropriate experts. He outlined severat steps needed to ensure effective C1I.
First, any future C3I must be built around a strategy that is defined, crisp and quamifiably measured, he said. Second, a framework is needed. This would be an architecture that defines today's systems and future directions. Land. sea. air and space elements must be fused via a chronological sequence.
The third step involves system engineering, and Jost emphasized that it must start with a design and set of specifications. Planners must work with detail designers Io ensure that a concept is incorporated and then integrated and tested. This effort must feature assessment in a quantitative manner.
The fourth step emails execution to determine that these efforts produce a fused information environment. Jost stressed that the people involved in this step must have direct experience executing programs. "You're balancing the elements." he pointed out.
Satellites Still Hold The Keys to the Future
Space-based communications systems likely will continue their dominant role in linking military forces, particularly as forces become more mobile and operations are increasingly decentralized.
Dr. Scott Sadler, head of communication systems and cybersecurity at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Lincoln Laboratories, suggested that the U.S. Defense Department could benefit from building smaller but more numerous military communication satellites.
While large satellites would be more cost-effective in terms of on-orbit weight, medium-size satellites would cost less than their bigger counterparts, which would make the program less subject to btidgel-driven cancellation. Contracting for a number of mediumsize satellites also would increase competition and reduce the cost of launch failure, he said.
Sadler outlined several reasons why building a constellation of several medium-size satellites would be better than building a few large orbiters. He did point out that simply launching the equivalent in medium satellites would lead to quicker on-orbit access, bul ultimately the constellation would deliver 33 percenl less capability than a constellation of large satellites. However, if incremental advances are incorporated into the medium-size satellites throughout the program, then their final capability would match that of their larger brethren - and at less cost.
Satellite communications demand siili is outstripping capability, said Richard Williams, assistant vice president. LinQuest Corporation. It provides a capacity of about 10 gigabytes per second, compared to fiber's capacity of about 4.000 gigabytes per second. However, past satellite investments are coming to fruition, and by 2025 satellite communications capacity will increase substantially, he said.
Williams added that integrating satellite and terrestrial communications, along with the airborne layer, is critica! for bringing end-to-end capability. Col. Pal Rayermann, USA, National Security Space Office, noted that airborne and space layers can be used together by the warlighting force. Experts are looking at satellite communications and the Joint Airborne Network to send information back to the core Global Information Grid (GIG). The colonel emphasized that satellites and aerial layers are bridges to the GIG - not an inherent part of the GIG.
Above All, Security Dominates Cyber Challenges
The threat to Cyberspace - and, by connection, to the vital infrastructure - remains a significant problem that grows more serious each day. Solutions may be at hand; however, many offer potential problems of their own if they are implemented without consideration of unintended effects.
One key to providing greatly enhanced cybersecurity also may eliminate one of the Internet's greatest characteristics, and a middle ground may be difficult to achieve. Carter Bullard. president and chief executive officer. QoSient, said that technologies are needed for three elements - attribution, mitigation and deterrence. Attaining attribution and mitigation will lead to deterrence, he maintained.
A key means of attribution is nonrepudiation, which he described as having the potential to go after the entire threat matrix. This discipline would provide comprehensive accountability thai prevents any interlopers from concealing the fact that they attacked, thus creating the concept that a hacker can get caught.
Bullard bemoaned the fact that no one is building technology for nonrepudiation, calling it "the most misunderstood countermeasure."
However. Elliot Proebstel, on the technical staff of Sandia National Laboratories, warned that building in nonrepudiation might threaten valued Internet freedoms. The existing anonymity that every Internet user takes for granted might disappear, as every user could be identified. This would be a boon to dictatorships that seek to identify and stifle Inlernet users opposed to their regimes, he offered.
Sandia uses cybersecurity tools developed in house and commercially. Proebstel continued. One approach he recommended is deep packet inspection, which can reveal embedded malicious code. Sandia also is looking at modeling human behavior on the networks as a way of improving cybcrsecurily. Ultimately, he stated, building in security from the ground up "is the only way to go."
Common security practices are full of holes that could be exploited by malevolent cybernauts, according to Eric Rescoria. founder of RTFM. He stated thai many routine security operations may increase the threat to a network.
''Users are careless, installing software from untrusted sources." Rescoria said. "How many download over TLS [transport layer security] or check hashes? Also, many operators never change the keys even after employees leave."
Most of the network attacks observed today are "fairly primitive." he continued. 'Taking down the Internet is easy; it happens semi-regularly by accident."
And. security experts are not even using (he strongest measures available. One well-known security firm uses 70 bits of security for 1 ,024-bit keys. In the pipeline are 128 bits and beyond, he added.
The U.S. Defense Department is focusing on protecting information rather than on the network that carries it. The department is developing "a black core with a transport mechanism" to secure vital information, according to Dr. Ronald Josl, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for command, control, communications and intelligence (C3I), Space and Spectrum.
Jost noted that the department's wireless edge is extremely secure. It is the wireline that is vulnerable, and the solution is not another high wall but ail integrated security and information assurance approach. The network needs a layered defense - not just one high wall, which is not sufficient for security, but three or even four walls integrated with network management. One solution does not work, as managers can assume that foes can get over one or two high walls.
Jost said that the use of tokens is working. The key is that an adversary cannot change data, he explained. Networks also can benefit from persistent monitoring, in which managers knowwhere everyone is going in the network and whether they touch data. If he could have one capability emerge from research and development, it would be a solid, cross-domain solution that is impenetrable, Jost declared.
John Mallery from the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) called for introspective systems that self repair or adapt: resilient, attrition-aware information technology architectures; metrics for resistance against multispectrum adversaries; and a national transformation research and development effort. He pointed out that brittle information technology architectures fail under attrition, and most systems and networks rely on unsecurable commodity technology that often is sourced overseas.
The evolving technology environment may bring about its own changes, Caleb Sima, chief executive officer. Armorize Technologies, related how tweeting by soldiers revealed their locations because of a Twitter geolocation capability.
Sima predicted that the latest trend is back toward thin clients. Cloud, he said, is another word for mainframe thin client; and the device is the interface, not the processor or the storage unit.
And, security issues may be tied to interoperability challenges. Brig. Andy Bristow, former chief G-6 and director of command and battlespace management. Headquarters U.K. Land Forces. said the key to both may lie in establishing electronic trust. By treating people as individuals, not on the basis of their nationality or unit, forces will be interoperable because they encrypt their information instead of their hardware.
"Call it Bristow's Equation," the brigadier said. "Interoperability is inversely proportional to the number of security domains."
He also warned against complacency when it comes to network assurance. "There is no such thing as guaranteed reach-back." he said, adding that any number of malevolent or innocuous actions could bring down a reach-back network.
Social Media Provides Glimpse of Future
Trends in social media use are shaping the path for technology development for both public and military use. Researchers are learning more about how users exploit the new technologies as well as how those technologies change their behavior, which in turn is affecting technology development.
Bernardo Huberman, senior fellow and director. Social Computing Lab, HP Labs, said that experiments have shown how this data can predict marketing success. One test allowed experts to predict the box office revenues of movies before they opened, based on tweets about the movies. Ed Leonard, chief technology officer, DreamWorks Animation, added that he and his colleagues are able to predict precisely how a movie will fare over the next 10 years based on just a few hours of box office reports.
Russ Daniels, vice president and chief technology officer, cloud services strategy, Hewlett-Packard Company, described how just knowing locations - geolocation data is being revealed by more devices and applications - can reveal patterns of behavior. By understanding location of actions over time, a user can understand intention. By capturing data such as where people are hailing taxis in a city in a given time frame, marketers can �fter services tailored to that activity.
People also are changing their Web habits as they become more comfortable with personal handheld media devices. Systems such as iPhones. iPads and BlackBerry and Android phones are becoming the preferred interfaces with the Web instead of desktop or laptop computers. This trend is changing the way that people manage their lives.
Steve Yankovich. vice president, Mobile & PBS Group. eBay, related that his company is seeing rapid growth in its mobile business and is bridging the gap between online and mobile shopping. The company does not offer its entire menu in the mobile realm, but instead it tailors sei-vices to the mobile user who is away from his or her computer.
"A huge paradigm shift is happening as people engage the small screen more than they do their computer." Yankovich declared. '4It has transformed eBay"
[Sidebar]
Lt. Gen. Dennis Via, USA, J-6, the Joint Staff, gives the audience a glimpse of the future of military communications at MILCOM 2010.
[Sidebar]
"Think Human," Says Apple Founder
The key to designing new technology systems is to put the human ahead of the technology, according to ihe co-founder of Apple Computer. Steve Wozniak told a MILCOM 2010 plenary address audience that keeping the user in mind is essential to developing new technology products successfully.
"How do you make products that are so good and easy to use?" Wozniak offered. "If the technology is the most important, you pile on technology and force people to learn it. If the human is most important, you make the software work the human way."
Wozniak related how an early inspiration came from a visit to Xerox PARC, where he first saw the mouse and icon human interface. That became the basis for Apple's Macintosh operating system that now defines the company's desktop and laptop line of computers.
Ironically, long before Apple introduced the Macintosh, the fledgling company's lack of money and resources were something of a blessing. Wozniak related that Apple Computer did not begin with a surge of investment capital or resources. In fact, the company's earliest systems owed their simplicity to a lack of support and choices.
Not having vast financial or technical resources helped Apple focus system development on simple interfaces and components. Wozniak noted that, when he and Steve Jobs were designing the Apple 1, other computer kits for the most part featured large components and static memory. Apple opted for dynamic memory and small, simpler components built around a keyboard, not a big box.
This followed Wozniak's design philosophy that had evolved over his Jtears of electrical engineering and innovation. "My advantage was that I had very little money, so 1 had to design things that cost very little money," Wozniak related. "It forced me to come up with good solutions."
Steve Wozniak, co- founder of Apple Computer, relates that the secret to a successful information technology system is to place the customer first when designing it.
[Sidebar]
(I to r) Thomas C. Reed, former secretary of the Air Force and former director, telecommunications and C2 systems, U.S. Defense Department, discusses C3I issues with fellow panelists Dr. Robert Hermann, former principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for C3I and a former National Reconnaissance Office director; Dr. Ronald Jost, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for C3I, Space and Spectrum; and panel moderator John Stenbit, former assistant secretary of defense for Networks and Information Integration/Defense Department chief information officer.
[Sidebar]
Brig. Andy Bristow, former chief G-6 and director of command and battlespace management. Headquarters U.K. Land Forces, describes how interoperability and security are inexorably linked.
Maj. Gen. Mark Bowman, USA, director of architecture, operations, networks, and space. Army CIO/G-6, describes some of the changes sweeping through Army communications and information systems.
[Sidebar]
Panelists discussing the changes wrought by information technology are (I to r) Ed Leonard, chief technology officer, DreamWorks Animation; Bernardo Huberman, senior fellow and director, Social Computing Lab, HP Labs; Caleb Sima, chief executive officer, Armorize Technologies; Steve Yankovich, vice president. Mobile & PBS Group, eBay; and moderator Russ Daniels, vice president and chief technology officer, cloud services strategy, Hewlett-Packard Company.
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