[ISN] Navy Amasses Digital Armada

http://www.afcea.org/signal/articles/templates/Signal_Article_Template.asp?articleid=2816&zoneid=334

By Robert K. Ackerman
SIGNAL Magazine
December 2011

The sea service is marshalling its forces to cruise the cyber realm.

The U.S. Navy is operationalizing cyber throughout the service as it 
reconfigures both its force and its overarching network. The goal is to 
pull cyber operations out of the corner and into the middle of daily 
force activities as part of the Navy’s information dominance mission.

Achieving this goal will require substantial changes in both training 
and operations. Cyber activities must continue unabated as a host of 
potential adversaries threaten the network. And, success may depend on 
how well the Navy balances security requirements against the need to 
innovate on the fly.

These issues include where cyber fits into the concept-of-operations 
plan; where it fits into the operational plan; and how the tactics, 
techniques and procedures for information dominance in the cyberdomain 
affect changes—particularly for achieving kinetic and nonkinetic effects 
early in a conflict that would preclude the need to move to a higher 
level of warfare.

“The next step of taking information dominance forward is 
operationalizing it down to the core,” declares Rear Adm. Gretchen 
Herbert, USN, commander of Navy Cyber Forces. “What we don’t want is for 
cyberspace and cyber operations to be relegated to the domain of a 
specific job area. We want to make it part of everything that we do 
throughout mission planning and warfighting.”

The aim of this approach is to have necessary cyber information readily 
available for the commander without that leader needing to extract it 
from a niche position in the realm of operational information. For 
example, if a commander sees that battlespace communications are 
hampered in a particular sector, he or she would be able to determine if 
it was caused by adversarial actions and respond accordingly. Because 
that cyber information was not stashed in a specific realm, such as 
communications or intelligence, the commander would be able to 
understand second- and third-order effects of cyber.

[...]


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