AI, Cyber Warfare and The Digital Battle Field

Last week, Lt. Gen. Robert Skinner — the lead for DISA (Defense Information Systems Agency) — stood up at a defence conference in…

AI, Cyber Warfare and The Digital Battle Field

Last week, Lt. Gen. Robert Skinner — the lead for DISA (Defense Information Systems Agency) — stood up at a defence conference in Baltimore, Maryland. His mouth barely moved, but the first 45 seconds of his speech was generated by a machine that had been trained for just 30 minutes of training. After which he announced that:

Generative artificial intelligence, I would offer, is probably one of the most disruptive technologies and initiatives in a very long, long time.

Overall, DISA define their mission to plan, monitor, prototype and deploy, and within key focus areas (Lines of Effort — LOE):

For this, we see the core classification areas of the state of development of the technology:

Deploy: NextGen Enterprise Mobile Management, Infrastructure as Code and Enterprise Grey Core.
Prototype: RPA, Containers as a Service, SAR, Data Catalog, Cyber Anonomy Detection, Thunderdome, Quantum Resistant Cryptography, Classified Mobile Capabilities and Reverse Browser Isolation.
Plan: 5G, Edge Computing, Automated Coordination, Data Tagging, Big Data Analytics and Visualisation, Continuous Monitoring, and Generative AI.
Monitor: Composable Security Architectures, Extended Detection and Response (XDR), Encrypted Traffic Analysis, Automated Pen Testing, IoT Security and Defence, and API Registry and Security.

As we see, the new areas include Generative AI and Continuous Monitoring, while the Thunderdome zero-trust architecture and post-quantum cryptography are now in the prototype phase and will soon move into the planning phase [here].