Stratcom command structure
Posted by Tim Stevens on 15 May 2008
An interesting graphic from Intelligence Online in a short article, How the Pentagon is Organizing its Cyber Warfare System (requires free registration), showing the command hierarchy of USSTRATCOM:
The NATO equivalent, the Cyber Defence Management Authority, is not yet up and running, despite its launch being expected at the Bucharest Summit last month. If anyone can point me to something concrete about its proposed organisational structure, I’d be most interested. NATO’s Centre of Excellence for Co-operative Cyber Defence in Tallinn, Estonia is also not operational yet.
15 May 2008 at 9:23 pm
…and they’re still keeping mighty quiet about the biggest actual threat they face: hundreds of thousands of miles of unprotected fiber optics, and tens of thousands of unsecured DNS servers and core routers.
15 May 2008 at 10:19 pm
I agree. Whilst AQI, Taliban, Hezbollah, or whoever, are busy blowing up economics and communications infrastructure whenever and wherever they see fit, these new policies still focus too heavily on the ‘cyber’, rather than the physical networks that support it. As we have seen in COIN more generally, both the kinetic and the human (psychological, political, intelligence) are now firmly enshrined in US doctrine, if not always in practice. As conflict moves into other domains, such a two-pronged approach to the Virtual and the Real should not be overlooked.
The US Joint Task Force (JTF) Global Network Operations is charged with ‘protecting Pentagon’s strategic networks, particularly the Global Information Grid on which all network-centric and C4ISR [Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance] operations depend’. They are also meant to ‘install’ it, which hints that perhaps they haven’t grasped that the battleground, if you like, is already up-and-running. I find it hard to believe the US military haven’t addressed the protection of physical ICT infrastructure - perhaps we should wait to hear more (?).
15 May 2008 at 10:36 pm
Well, I suspect they’re in no rush to publicize one of their only real strategic weaknesses.
And I agree, it’s utterly impossible to believe they’re not working behind the scenes to address this. I was introduced to this vulnerability by a paper that was written in 1998, after all.
15 May 2008 at 10:48 pm
Would you able to provide me with that reference?