The Pentagon is focusing on integrating cyber into all its operations, and wants to make sure it integrates security into artificial intelligence usage from the outset, the Defense Department’s top cyber policy official said Tuesday.
Recent conflicts have made clear how important cyber is, said Katherine Sutton, assistant secretary for cyber policy and principal cyber adviser at DOD — especially when it’s paired with physical force.
Defense officials have noted that there’s been a cultural shift on the importance of cyber at the department since the war in Iran and the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro.
“Information is becoming more and more important on the battlefield, so having the ability to integrate space, cyber and other non-kinetic effects to be able to degrade that information advantage is something that’s going to be critical and foundational to any future conflicts going forward,” she said at the GDIT’s Emerge: Battlespace of the Future conference, hosted by Scoop News Group. “We have to fully pull cyber out of its silo, which means not just integrating the effects, but starting the integration from day one with operational planning … and built in from the beginning, and not something that we strap on as we’re going to execute.”
Brandon Pugh, principal cyber adviser for the Army, backed up that message at the same conference, saying that cyber “being considered in a silo is not where it’s most effective,” and is more effective “when we see cyber blending in the kinetic operations while still being an option in its own right.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has given Pugh oversight of all defense critical infrastructure, both physical and cyber, which Pugh said emphasizes how the department sees the two linked. The Army brought agencies together last month for an exercise to contemplate threat scenarios across domains.
By the same token, security needs to be interlaced with artificial intelligence, Sutton said. It’s a truism in the cybersecurity world that the internet wasn’t built with security in mind. As advanced AI models grow in usage at the Defense Department, Sutton said the Pentagon can’t make similar mistakes.
“As we adopt these new tools, we’re also creating a new threat landscape for adversaries to attack us and to exploit these new capabilities, so we need to start thinking about how we’re going to secure them,” she said. “One of the challenges we have often had with tools is we adopt them, and security is an afterthought, or we realize that we didn’t think about security from the front. I just don’t think we have that luxury with AI going forward.”
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