Cybersecurity in today's armed forces

5 According to military experts, “current acquisition rules are hampering their ability to respond quickly to a growing number of cyber-attacks the U.S” (Shalal 2014).   Acquisitions rules, meant to encourage competitive bidding among big and small enterprises, have created a bottle neck of sorts in the fight against these threats.   “Current acquisition programs take about two years to initiate and execute”, says Kristina Harrington, director of the signals intelligence directorate and the National Reconnaissance Office.   This would require that a focused mission to combat cyber-threats take a different approach.   Two years is a life time in the cyber world and any solution that is implemented would more than likely be obsolete. The NRO, for those that aren’t familiar, is the premier builder of spy satellites for the U.S military.   They were researching the possibility of using umbrella contracts which would give it more flexibility to respond to cyber-threats.   These contr

With the dawn of the U.S. Cyber Space Command a new era has been ushered into our collective.   It is no longer safe to assume that our enemies only threaten us with conventional weapons.   No.   The new weapon of choice by many nations are found in the cyber space realm.   These weapons, or tools rather, can be used to deceive, manipulate and extract information in order to give foreign governments a perceived advantage over us.   Military leaders face many challenges in combating threats from cyber space.   None more challenging than the thorough understanding of the actual threat. In order to understand the threat, one must appreciate that not all threats are equal in nature nor motivated by the same ideals.   Threats may be espionage, subversion, sabotage, cybercrime, and to an extent cyberwar.   Differences between these threats are minimal once inside a system and amount to nothing more than a few different keystrokes.   However noting the differences is important in regar

3 By now, unless you’ve been living under a rock, you have heard of the egregious mishandling of the personal identifiable information of 143 million consumers by credit reporting agency Equifax.   What you probably have not heard is about the impact that this leak, which occurred between mid-May and July of this year but wasn’t reported until September, will impact the thousands of Americans serving in our armed forces. Finances, in the last ten years or so, has become a hot button topic in the top echelons of military command.   Personal financial responsibility, to be more exact, is being drilled into new recruits going through basic training as we speak.   Why, you may ask?   The reason is simple, most new recruits today come from a rung on the socio-economic ladder where financial responsibility is not addressed either by parents or in school.   This lack of education made it easy for service members in the past to fall prey to predatory lending and other types of financi