The challenge of integrating cyber operations with cyber electronics

In today’s asymmetrical warfare environment in which enemies of the United States have used Internet capabilities to prosecute their own goals, the challenge for the Army is to master a domain that, in many instances, is not even fully defined.

“The enemy is not coming through the wall jack, they’re coming through the electromagnetic spectrum,” said Col. Wayne Parks, director of the Army Computer Network Operations-Electronic Warfare Proponent at the Combined Arms Center at Ft. Leavenworth in Kansas. “Our solutions aren’t working holistically on the whole problem because we don’t have a full description of what cyber is.”

A start is the definition Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England presented in May. It states: “Cyberspace is a global domain within the information environment consisting of interdependent networks of information technology infrastructure, including the Internet, telecommunications networks, computer systems, and embedded processors and controllers.”

According to Parks, cyber is not just about information, it’s about the machine-to-machine challenge created by cyber electronics.

Cyber-electronics is “a comprehensive concept that includes the integrated use of computer network operations, electronic warfare, space superiority, network operations and network warfare in order to achieve effects on and through cyberspace and across the broader electromagnetic spectrum,” Parks said.

Helping the Army get a better grip on understanding all the parameters of the cyber challenge is the Great Plains Cyber-Electronic University Consortium, an organization of the Big 12 colleges such as the University of Nebraska.

"We’re talking with their graduate students about some interesting facts we hadn’t though of,” Park said.

University minds are helping the Army come to grips with how to use cyber-efforts for commanders at all levels -- not just at the strategic level, but down to the tactical level.

They are also helping to conceptualize how to link offensive and defensive efforts in cyberspace from the standpoint of operational capabilities, organizational resources and rules of engagement.