Is there a zero-day gap?

In preparation for a Cyber War, ammo supply is critical. Put simply, whoever has the largest number of vulnerabilities (unpatched, of course), and has turned them into exploits, will win. There's a lot of evidence that the United States and China have both compiled large arsenals, and tested a lot of their stuff. Other countries are players as well, but the US and China appear to be the superpowers of Cyber War.

In the United States, some police agencies have been known to at least open up communications channels with Internet criminals. If only for intelligence purposes. But in wartime, offers of employment might be made as well.

Raiders of the Lost Exploit

I take the "flight of a lifetime" on an F-4 Phantom fighter jet and am scared witless. But I'd do it again just to experience six G's.

Ask the Pilot | Salon Technology

A year after the National Security Agency nearly maxed out its electrical capacity, some offices are experiencing significant power disruptions as the agency confronts the increasingly urgent problem of an infrastructure stretched to its limits.

The issue has become a top priority for the NSA's director, Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander. In recent testimony, he warned that the agency would have to shut down significant amounts of equipment and resort to rolling blackouts if drastic action were not taken.

Power supply still a vexation for the NSA

Today’s strategic environment implies an obligation to preserve innocent life when possible and to rebuild that which war destroys. Urban areas are the keys to nations; people make nations just as, as Thucydides wrote, men make cities. This study aimed to reveal tools that will better enable military and civilian alike to meet national policy objectives by more effectively conducting urban combat and restoration.

Three Overarching Synthesis Observations:

* The "Three-Block War" Is the Reality During Modern Urban Operations
* The Importance of Orchestrating Urban Military and Civil Activities in Support of Strategic Objectives Is Fundamental to National and Coalition Success
* Urban Operations Increasingly Characterize the General Character of U.S. and Coalition Undertakings

Beyond the three overarching observations, we provide 25 other observations and highlights organized using the joint urban doctrine operational construct of understand, shape, engage, consolidate, and transition.

'People Make the City': Joint Urban Operations Observations and Insights from Afghanistan and Iraq

Assistant Secretary of Defense for Networks and Information Integration and DoD Chief Information Officer John G. Grimes signed the “DoD Information Sharing Strategy” today and established a new information sharing vision for the Department of Defense: “Delivering the power of information to ensure mission success through an agile enterprise with freedom of maneuverability across the information environment.”

The DoD Information Sharing Strategy will be supplemented with additional integrated guidance to synchronize the many information sharing activities, initiatives and investments supported by the DoD.

It seeks to guide the Department’s exchange of information with ... tribal ... organizations.

New DoD Strategy Outlined For Information Sharing

To assist in moving intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) planning and execution forward from a fixed target and deliberate planning focus to one centered on emerging targets, the authors propose enhancing the collection management process with a strategies-to-tasks and utility framework. By linking collection targets to operational tasks, objectives, and top-level commander’s guidance with relative utilities, planning for the daily intelligence collections and real-time retasking for ad hoc ISR targets could be enhanced. When current tools are modified to provide this information, planners will be able to link collection targets to top-level objectives for better decisionmaking and optimization of low-density, high-demand collection assets, and intelligence officers will be better able to deal with time-sensitive, emerging targets by rapidly comparing the value of collecting an ad hoc collection with the value of collecting opportunities already planned.

A Strategies-to-Tasks Framework for Planning and Executing ISR Operations

Does the United States need a new information service to wage an information war?

Recruiting is not merely meant to fill operational needs. It is an end in itself: It aims at creating a new mindset.

... Self-radicalization begins the day that an individual seeks out jihadist websites.

... The message from the global jihad is aimed directly at the
individual.

Submission is voluntary. ... A component of our counter-recruiting strategy must be to always offer a safe way back from the edge.

... the US Army is reportedly preparing an assault on jihadist websites.

Testimony by Brian Michael Jenkins, presented before the House Homeland Security Committee, Subcommittee on Intelligence, Information Sharing and Terrorism Risk Assessment on April 5, 2007.

See also, Unconquerable Nation: Knowing Our Enemy, Strengthening Ourselves:

Brian Michael Jenkins presents a clear-sighted and sobering analysis of where we are today in the struggle against terrorism. Jenkins, an internationally renowned authority on terrorism, distills the jihadists’ operational code and suggests how they might assess their situation very differently from how we might do so. He distills the jihadists’ operational code and outlines a ferociously pragmatic but principled approach that goes beyond attacking terrorist networks and operational capabilities to defeating their entire missionary enterprise by deterring recruitment and encouraging defections.

Jenkins believes that homeland security should move beyond gates and guards and become the impetus for rebuilding America’s decaying infrastructure. Americans need to adopt a realistic approach to risk and get a lot smarter about security. We need to build upon the nation’s traditions of determination and self-reliance. Above all, we need to preserve our commitment to American values. Preserving these values is no mere matter of morality, he argues; it is a strategic imperative.

Jenkins brings to his prose the driving rhythm, no-nonsense language, passion, and energy of a warrior, and he brings to his analysis the steady, informed perspective of a historian. Unconquerable Nation is a rallying cry from a man who has dedicated his life to defending America, who has been dismayed by the propagation of homegrown terror, yet who refuses to surrender his faith in what he believes are America’s finest, unconquerable values.

How America deals with the terrorist threat is one of the major challenges of this century. Jenkins points the way forward.

Building an Army of Believers: Jihadist Radicalization and Recruitment

What should a robust acquisition investment strategy look like — one designed to perform well against all anticipated threats? How should the Army acquisition community assess the appropriateness of its investment strategy over time?

Developing Strategies for an Uncertain Future

This news is ten years old, but I only learned of it recently, in the AFA article on Cyber Command.

Russia retains the right to use nuclear weapons first against the means and forces of information warfare, and then against the aggressor state itself.

Do you think Polonium counts?

Hack Russia, Get Nuked

Anyone want to place a Long Bet on when the DoD will establish a Nano Command?

When the Air Force formed Air Force Space Command in 1982, it marked formal recognition that space was a distinct operating arena. The first commander, Gen. James V. Hartinger, said, “Space is a place. ... It is a theater of operations, and it was just a matter of time until we treated it as such.”

Meanwhile, around that same time, sci-fi author William Gibson published a novel entitled Neuromancer, a work that gave the world a strange new term—“cyberspace.” The book didn’t call cyberspace “a place” but a “consensual hallucination” of billions of humans. Few military men gave it much thought.

Nearly a quarter of a century later, though, it’s deja vu all over again. The Air Force has come to recognize cyberspace, like “regular” space, as an arena of human activity—including armed activity. It is, to reprise Hartinger, a theater of operations.

Cyber Command has in place systems and capabilities for integrating cyber operations into other Air Force global strike options. All that is lacking, according to one top official, are the “organizational and operational constructs” to integrate cyber ops with those of air and space operations.

John Arquilla worries about a “wildcard” threat: “individual hackers of very great skill.”

Wynne said the American “information mosaic”—the sum of data from all sensors that can be “collected and downloaded and cross-loaded for use by all in the fight”—is the key target of Air Force adversaries and a key cyber vulnerability.

...

At least one Russian official has said that a cyber-attack on Russia’s critical transportation or power infrastructure would warrant a nuclear response.

Yes, you read that correctly. See Deterring Information Warfare: A New Strategic Challenge for more background on the subject.

War in the Third Domain