Cyber Challenges

Navy Vice Adm. Michael Rogers, nominated to become the next head of U.S. Cyber Command, was asked by the Senate Armed Services Committee what he saw as the biggest challenge that will confront CYBERCOM's commander. Here's his answer, submitted in advance of his nomination hearing this week:

I believe the major challenge that will confront the next Commander, U.S. Cyber Command will be dealing with the changing threat in cyberspace. Adversaries today seek persistent presences on military, government, and private networks for purposes such as exploitation and potentially disruption. We as a military and a nation are not well positioned to deal with such threats. These intruders have to be located, blocked, and extracted, sometimes over long periods of time. We have seen the extent of the resources required to wage such campaigns, the planning and intelligence that are essential to their success, and the degree of collaboration and synchronization required across the government and industry (and with our allies and international partners). We in DoD are creating capabilities that can adapt to these uses and others, but we have some key capability gaps in dealing with increasingly capable threats. Our legacy information architecture, for instance, is not optimized for defense in its current form, and our communications systems are vulnerable. U.S. military forces currently lack the training and the readiness to confront advanced threats in cyberspace. Finally, our commanders do not always know when they are accepting risk from cyber vulnerabilities, and cannot gain reliable situational awareness, neither globally nor in US military systems.