Army opening a new cyber campus in Alabama

The Army is setting up a new facility in Alabama dedicated to cyber education and research in support of aviation and missile defense personnel.

Aviation and Missile Research, Development and Engineering Center, known as AMRDEC, at Redstone Arsenal has acquired two buildings to serve as its Cyber Campus to support its customers and “provide cutting-edge research and development of cybersecurity solutions to address their most pressing challenges," Robert Goldsmith, AMRDEC Cyber Lead, said in a news release.

The 66,000-square-foot facility will host cyber personnel with expertise in hardware, software, firmware, networks, test and evaluation, modeling and simulation, forensics, industrial control systems, supervisory control and data acquisition systems, and cyber training. Personnel will work to uncover, dissect and report on system vulnerabilities, malicious hardware, software or firmware, and interface with other government agencies at the highest classification levels, the Army said. 

"Physically co-locating key players will create the level of collaboration on a daily basis necessary to confront the cyber threat," Goldsmith said.

"No single place existed on the arsenal to conduct research and development of emerging cyber threats and technologies applicable to aviation and missile systems," he said. "The fact that we are co-locating red and blue cyber teams in the same building is advantageous to both parties because we can cross train with one another and share insights and intelligence about the threats we discover."

The facility is poised to be fully operational by 2017, and will serve not only AMRDEC but others within the Defense Department as what Goldsmith called “one-of-a-kind” facility.