Air Force Suspends Cyber Command Program

AFCyber writes "The Air Force on Monday suspended all efforts related to development of a program to become the dominant service in cyberspace, according to knowledgeable sources. Top Air Force officials put a halt to all activities related to the establishment of the Cyber Command, a provisional unit that is currently part of the 8th Air Force at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, sources told Nextgov. An internal Air Force e-mail obtained by Nextgov said, 'Transfers of manpower and resources, including activation and re-assignment of units, shall be halted.' Establishment of the Cyber Command will be delayed until new senior Air Force leaders, including Chief of Staff Norton Schwartz, sworn in today, have time to make a final decision on the scope and mission of the command."

Coincidence?

Perhaps just coincidence that they shut it down the day after this look inside Cyber Command [popularmechanics.com]was published online:

"The black boxes are ClearCube computer terminals, and the fact that there are two of them at each station points to perhaps the most important defensive strategy of the Pentagon's Global Information Gridâ"known to its operators as the GIG. The box on top is plugged into the Nonclassified Internet Protocol Router Network, or NIPRNet, which is linked to the public Internet. The other black box connects to the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, or SIPRNet, which contains the military's classified information. There are no physical connections between the two anywhere in the Defense Department's 5 millionâ"computer network, yet in the AFNOC, the Ethernet jacks are only 1 1/2 in. apart. That proximity got me wondering. 'What if someone connected them?' I asked information officer 2nd Lt. Mike Forostoski. He laughed in disbelief, as though I had asked him what would happen if a flaming nuclear blimp headed for the building. Then he answered with cautious understatement: 'That would be bad.'

Re:Coincidence?

What a load of rubbish, the black boxen are ClearCube "Digital Fiber C/Port" thin terminals connected to a workstation somewhere in a cabinet, if you were to swap them around you'd have the computer connected to the top-secret network on the other side of your desk.

It's not like if you did that packets would magically leak out and allow Chinese hackers to read their e-mails...

This is quite a neat setup because everything can be stored away, centrally managed and physically secured from a single location.

Re:Coincidence?

What a load of crap. There are many multilevel systems that hook to multiple classification networks at the same time. One box, connected to both SIPR, and NIPR, for example.

Here's one of them, Radiant Mercury: http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/systems/radiant_mercury.htm [globalsecurity.org]

Here's another. DTW, the DoDIIS Trusted Workstation. It has the capabilty to hook up to many networks at the same time, from NIPR to SCI: http://www.sun.com/solutions/documents/business-cases/go_DTW_cc.pdf [sun.com]

But, hey. Truth doesn't sell magazines, does it? Ironically, the technology that allows more than one classified network to hook to another is pretty freaking awesome. PopMech should take a look at that, instead.

Re:Coincidence?

I have a SIPR machine sitting a foot or 2 away from me right now as I type this on a NIPR machine... SIPR is a completely separate network that never touches the Internet. They both are monitored very heavily and if traffic from one showed up on the other, it would get noticed very quickly and fixed. It would be bad and heads would roll, but it wouldn't be the end of the world.

The U.S. military world wide has setups not unlike this, it's nothing new in the slightest, along with appropriate systems and procedures to protect them.

 

Missing out

A lot to be learned right now on cyberwar from Russia.

profit!

Step 1) Release public statement regarding creation of cyber command to all nerd websites
Step 2) Recruit all the nerds that got interested in step 1
Step 3) Publicly announce the cancellation of the project
Step 4) Continu.......

(Connection Terminated)

disaster

This is a potential disaster. Millions, or even billions, of cyber warfare dollars are at stake that cannot be allowed to fall into the hands of the Army or Navy.

Re:disaster

Yes, leave some of those monies for poor little phishers and hacking groups like us :)

Air Force losing relevance?

Philip Coyle, senior adviser with the Center for Defense Information, a security policy research group in Washington, said he believes the Navyâ(TM)s Network Warfare Command and the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center have led the way in cyberspace. The Army engages in cyberspace operations daily in Afghanistan and Iraq, said Coyle, who served as assistant secretary of Defense and director of its operational test and evaluation office from 1994 to 2001.

I've never understood why the Air Force had to be split from the Army. It just ads more bureaucracy and as a result more overhead and costs to the taxpayer. I don't see any reason to keep the Air Force as a separate branch anymore. It should be folded back into the Army.

I think it would also improve its effectiveness. I'm greatly impressed with the air and ground integration of the Marines which, from what I've read, is lacking with the Air Force and Army. Reading some military history, many battlefield problems were the direct result of the lack of communication between ground and air: Has to go up one chain of command (Army), then over and down the other chain of command.

And now with "Cyber warfare", the other branches are currently doing the job; whereas, the Air Force is just getting started. WTF were they doing the last decade?

At least this is the way I perceive it.

Re:Air Force losing relevance?

It just ads more bureaucracy and as a result more overhead and costs to the taxpayer. I don't see any reason to keep the Air Force as a separate branch anymore. It should be folded back into the Army.

Well, I stated my reasoning in another post in this thread, but did not explain it well or clearly, so apologies for some repeated material...

The military, as an institution, is pretty resistant to divergent thinking. People complain about the groupthink here at slashdot, but I imagine anyone with military experience would snigger at what gets called groupthink here.

The one thing that the Air Force provides that cannot be done by another branch of the military is an external thoughtline. The extra branch of the military creates more opportunity for different opinions, different strategies, and different analyses of strategies. It allows the high command an extra input for decision-making.

The downside of having the Air Force conatained within other branches is that it risks being a bastard stepchild, neglected for surface vessels and ground units. The Air Force has been a deciding factor in a lot of engagements, and I question whether the Navy's air capability would be anywhere close to what it is now without the Air Force looking over its shoulder. Having the Air Force as a separate branch has allowed, and will continue to allow, lots of focus on ensuring we use our air capability effectively, and continue to develop new capability.

Dismantle? No way, now its a black program.

I think this is more likely a response to the Georgia-Russia "cyberwar". Having a public cyberwar program invites others to do so and provides a way to study and attack your program.

I think now this will be a black program to avoid drawing attention. They are probably doing this to prevent others from learning from our public information.

-molo

WTF Air Force has to do with Cyber Security

Look at the background of some of the prominent folks in the IT Security field. People like Ron Gula (Dragon IDS, Tenable) came from an AF background. The AF has some very smart people (smart enough to join the AF and not get shot at) with lots of strong ties to NSA. That is why they should be heading up military presence in cyberspace.

they disbanded due to laughter

They would walk around the halls with their fist at their waists, and heads looking upward and off to the side and periodically bark nonsense like:

I'm Captain John Doe of... (then look off in the other direction) THE CYBER COMMAND!!!!

When people from other parts of the building would ask them - "hey where do you guys work?" They would, in unison, put their fist at their waists, look up to the left and say "We work for..." and then look in the other direction and shout "CYBER COMMAND!!!!"

And then promptly burst into fits of giggling...

The whole idea was so stupid they couldn't stand themselves - it was like Buck Rogers without the cool costumes. They all knew the Real Heavy Lifting was being done at the NSA, and this was just an offshoot of the White House being a bunch of paranoid dicks who didn't trust the Pentagon brass, especially after they consistently scolded the WH upon retiring - combined with forces within the Air Force looking for relevance when clearly the future belongs to drones.

Other than mobile airbases (ACC's) I don't even understand why you need people on boats, for the most part... The only military than can't be replaced with machines and "at a distance" command is infantry.

CYBER COMMAND!!!!

BWAHAHAAAAAA...

RS

Momumentallty stupid

I say that without fear of hyperbole. Perhaps senior command missed how Al Qaeda is running circles around us online, how China bats around like a cat toy in cyber-space, and how even Georgia and Russia are firmly entrenched in cyber-war right now.

The US has more to lose in a cyber-war than our enemies, we're more vulnerable, and we're not even going to try and focus on that battlefield.

Monumentally stupid.

Outsourcing

they will announce tomorrow the outsourcing of the Cyber Command operations to India

As the saying goes...

We are always prepared to fight the previous war. If the US ever goes against any country with a significant tech base, we will not be prepared. To be fair, though, the US is prepared to fight without the internet, it will just be an inconvenience. The Future Warrior program was supposed to rely heavily on digital information systems, but it is now mostly canceled. The military is still using the same methods they did in the 80's and 90's (dedicated sat-links and voice channels)before the net got so integrated into daily life. The real problem would be on the civilian front where massive cyber-attacks could blackout good-sized chunks of infrastructure. But, the civilian sector already has to deal with that from botnets attacking a company's online presence to coerce money out of them. Therefore, there is already defenses being designed to combat this. Maybe the military is just going to keep things totally separated from the net to make it hard for any attack to even start to cause problems.

Complete Waste of Time

In six months, Obama will be president, and this program will get changed yet again by yet another chief.

Since every Bush "Cybersecurity Czar" has resigned in disgust since Bush created the office, that entire program will also have to be ripped out, too.

America's Internet defense system also has to protect us from nonmilitary lawbreakers like phishers, crackers and leakers. Plus those somewhere between, like the Russian mob crackers who joined Russia's government to attack Georgia this week, but spend most of their time just breaking banks and extorting corporations and individuals.

I'm really glad that we're going to get a new president who's actually smart for a change. We're really dodging a bullet with the Internet-illiterate WcCain offering a third term of Bush's catastrophic failures to protect anything except his own ass. Heckuva job, brownnose!

Sadness for Shreveport/Bossier

This is sad for the North-Western part of Louisiana, which is where I live and where Cyber Space Command was supposed to be put into place at Barksdale. I know many of the local universities have been pushing hard to put toghether cyber security circulums etc to give those in the local community a chance to work at this place once it was constructed. While I am sure it is not all for naught I do imagine a lot of time and money will have been wasted in the community by people other than the air force that were counting on this as a new job market especially with the layoffs we are having at our local GM plant and many other factories ( Not that the same people would work at these places )

On Hold Because...

I think AFCyber may just be on hold because a new Chief of Staff of the Air Force started work yesterday and he want to see what this is before it goes any further. It's likely this may be part of a larger review of all the services cyber-warfare programs to make sure they don't overlap or compete in the same space.

Also, this new CoS isn't a fighter pilot like the last 20 years of AF leadership, he's a special ops guy who flew cargo aircraft. He's probably more interested in business management than flash and, with a special ops background, may belive that if you're going to build a secret ninja hacker cyberforce, you might want to do it with a somewhat lower public profile.

Re:The Air Force is doomed

We just don't need them anymore. We have better missiles, and better drones.

Reminds me of an old short story I read in the 80s...

The premise was that two superpowers, in a state of constant war, launch programmed missiles at eachother, since it was decided that manned craft were not necessary, and it was not worth risking pilot lives. However, the defenses for the superpowers were able to adapt quickly, and therefore very few missiles ever got through the defense systems.

Eventually, one of the superpowers decided to make the missiles human pilotable, in order to defeat the defenses; they lost many pilots on their suicide missiosn, but obliterated their opponent and won the war.

The point is, human action is less predictable, and harder to defend against.

Of course, remote piloting and drones provide the capability of human piloting without all the mess of needing to carry meat, but the air force as a separate command is a different issue.

The Air Force will, IMO, always be needed, if only as a balance to the other two major forces. An additional chain of command leadin to the top means that a different insititionally biased way of thinking comes into play, and it is more likely that a dissenting (but not necessarily wrong) opinion will be heard at the highest level.

Reducing the number of branches in the command structure will lead to even more institutionalized thinking, which, IMO, would hamper the ability of the military to come to the best solutions to problems it faces.

Re:The Air Force is doomed

Reducing the number of branches in the command structure will lead to even more institutionalized thinking

More or fewer branches has little effect on the amount of institutionalized thinking, it just varies the amount of parochialism. The Air Force was formed in 1948 on the premise that the US Army shouldn't be in the business of strategic bombing and air superiority. Unfortunately, the agreement that split the AF off from the Army also forbade the Army to operate aircraft. As a result the Army still has trouble getting the AF to provide adequate close air support. Under consideration at the same time was a proposal to attach the Marine Corps to the Army (where it more logically belongs) and transfer naval aviation assets to Air Force control; but Navy Secretary Forrestal had spent WW2 building up the Navy into his own little self-sufficient kingdom with its own air and ground assets. It's a completely asinine duplication of effort, but he had enough pull to kill the consolidation proposal. As a result of this sort of bureaucratic feudalism, we have:
4 1/2 air forces
Air Force, Naval aviation, USMC aviation, Coast Guard aviation, and Army helicopter aviation

1 1/2 armies
the real Army, and the Navy's light infantry, the USMC

2 1/2 navies
the Navy, the Coast Guard, and all the small watercraft operated by the AF and Army to fill the gaps the Navy won't cover.

So you see, while splitting up the services seems like it should promote efficiency by allowing each service to specialize, what you end up with is services narrowing their focus to the stuff that's completely "theirs", while neglecting the "overlap" areas where other services need their support. As it turns out, the Army is inevitably the biggest loser in all of this. They are the backbone of any sizable conflict, but can't get decent close air support or timely theater airlift support from the Air Force, and are forbidden by law to provide it for themselves. Likewise they can't get theater level waterborne transport from the Navy. Meanwhile, naval aviators whine about the Air Force getting to drop all the bombs in Iraq, when the justification for having them flying over Iraq is already weak at best. Then there's the USMC lobbying to be given sole operational responsibility over Afghanistan because they want to get out of Iraq, as their tactics there have only resulted in a greater casualty rate, rather than "upstaging" the Army as is their normal goal.

The root of the problem is that all the branches are run by politicians. They may wear uniforms full of ribbons and stars, but they're no different than your typical pork-barrel politician. They're always looking for some way to expand their power base so they can justify a bigger bite of the defense "pie". This silly Air Force "Cyber Command" is just more of the same. The Air Force hasn't a single justification in its charter for claiming "cyberspace" as their own, but they hope to get it by virtue of being the only service with applicable combat assets in-theater when the time comes to decide whose responsibility it is. Frankly, I think the military is ill suited to the job. I reckon the NSA is the better tool for the job. I wouldn't be surprised if at some point the Air Force was told "your Cyber Command is a needless duplication of assets already fielded by the NSA--- kill it". Heck, they may have been told that already...

Re:I wondered about this

Ummm... Wi-Fi and Satellite. Yea it kinda vague. I think the air force had more command experience with high end technology. I much rather be in the air force in a nice chair doing my code then in the army in a tent with a laptop, trying to setup a network connection with the chances there are people who want to shoot me.

Home of the "Cybercommand"?

Why the Air Force? It seems like such a reach outside their normal scope. I would think that the Army would be the proper place for such a command.

The whole "Cybercommand" thing was yet another attempt by USAF to dominate an emerging military technology. It was a power grab. After WW II, they argued against other services having airplanes. They managed to get missiles and fixed wing aircraft taken away from the Army. They got the Army's Cheyenne gunship helicopter killed because it looked too much like a fighter plane. In Vietnam, they got SecDef McNamera to issue an order stating that Marine F-4's were to be limited to ground attack only... the fighter mission inland was for USAF alone. They could defend themselves if attacked by MiGs, but could not go MiG hunting on their own. Last year they tried to monopolize robotic aerial drones. And Cybercommand tried to monopolize military computer ops. USAF has a long history of not only protecting their turf, but moving in on others if it benefitted them. They have a reputation for arrogance. The Air Force Association's description of the branch was "first among equals"... as if any such thing could really exist.

Just like any other military tactic or technology... intelligence, airpower, any single military technology... each service should have their own "cybercommand", with a unifying leadership and authority over all branches at DOD. And I think we're heading in that direction, with SecDef Gates sacking the USAF leadership recently. There was a lot of resentment in the other branches at the Blues' attempt to hog the cyber mission, and I think this stand down is at least partly attributable to Gates trying to bring USAF leadership back on the reservation and play nice with the other kids.

Re:What a waste!

Did they ask any of the five people running for President what their opinion on it was?

Five people? Did your reality filter break again or do you just need new glasses?

Re:What a waste!

Actually, "Mighty Yar" is right when (s)he says "There are at least 13 people running - at least according to Wikipedia" [slashdot.org].

I found a large list [politics1.com] that is broken into the two major parties - the Democrats and Republicans; the three major "third parties" - the Libertarians, the Greens, and the Constitution Party. There are a long list of other paties running.

The corporate media tells you that a vote for anyone but a Republican or Democrat is wasted because the others have no chance of winning. Well, since I think Obama has no chance of winning I should go ahead and vote for McCain? That's just retarded!

The Democrats and Republicans are all solidly for the Bono Act (AKA the "steamboat willie preservation act"), DMCA, PATRIOT act, FISA; are for outlawing drugs, prostitution, and gambling, while I am against all of these things.

Why should I waste my vote on a candidate whose views are diametrically opposed to my own?

I know the Libertarians are on the ballot in 49 states, and IINM the other two "third parties" are on the ballot in enough states to win should they carry them.

Right now the only major party candidate in any race I can in good conscience vote for is Dick Durbin.