Michelli outlines cybersecurity, AI strategies for DOD

Thomas Michelli, the Pentagon's acting deputy CIO for cybersecurity said his office will soon release three separate strategies to support the National Defense Strategy, cybersecurity and artificial intelligence.

"We're about ready to announce an artificial intelligence strategy. We're setting up several capabilities within the department," Michelli said at an event hosted by GovernmentCIO Media. "Many other departments have a person that's focused on artificial intelligence.... I'm tap dancing here because we're getting ready to make a big announcement in the coming weeks, and I don't want to get ahead of that."

Michelli said the strategies are connected to each other and will be released around the same time.

Michelli's comments follow CIO Dana Deasy's July 11 announcement of his priorities at Defense Systems Summit, where he said cybersecurity "had to be at the center of everything we do," starting with better cyber hygiene and continuous monitoring to minimize risk.

Michelli's speech broadly outlined the CIO's 10 cyber risk areas within the major network modernization priorities -- cloud, artificial intelligence, and command, control and communications (C3) -- emphasizing that DOD needs to improve network capability and resilience.

"One of the parts of the top 10 is the C3 part -- command, control, and communications -- fundamental to that is our networks," Michelli said.

From C2 networks, DOD wants to transition to enterprise cloud and have access to new technologies and capabilities to secure networks, Michelli said. "Having artificial intelligence on the information and access going across networks whether our own or our adversaries [will allow us to] provide information and capabilities at the speed of relevance."