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Alan W. Dowd is a Senior Fellow with the American Security Council Foundation, where he writes on the full range of topics relating to national defense, foreign policy and international security. Dowd’s commentaries and essays have appeared in Policy Review, Parameters, Military Officer, The American Legion Magazine, The Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations, The Claremont Review of Books, World Politics Review, The Wall Street Journal Europe, The Jerusalem Post, The Financial Times Deutschland, The Washington Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Washington Examiner, The Detroit News, The Sacramento Bee, The Vancouver Sun, The National Post, The Landing Zone, Current, The World & I, The American Enterprise, Fraser Forum, American Outlook, The American and the online editions of Weekly Standard, National Review and American Interest. Beyond his work in opinion journalism, Dowd has served as an adjunct professor and university lecturer; congressional aide; and administrator, researcher and writer at leading think tanks, including the Hudson Institute, Sagamore Institute and Fraser Institute. An award-winning writer, Dowd has been interviewed by Fox News Channel, Cox News Service, The Washington Times, The National Post, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and numerous radio programs across North America. In addition, his work has been quoted by and/or reprinted in The Guardian, CBS News, BBC News and the Council on Foreign Relations. Dowd holds degrees from Butler University and Indiana University. Follow him at twitter.com/alanwdowd.

ASCF News

Scott Tilley is a Senior Fellow at the American Security Council Foundation, where he writes the “Technical Power” column, focusing on the societal and national security implications of advanced technology in cybersecurity, space, and foreign relations.

He is an emeritus professor at the Florida Institute of Technology. Previously, he was with the University of California, Riverside, Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute, and IBM. His research and teaching were in the areas of computer science, software & systems engineering, educational technology, the design of communication, and business information systems.

He is president and founder of the Center for Technology & Society, president and co-founder of Big Data Florida, past president of INCOSE Space Coast, and a Space Coast Writers’ Guild Fellow.

He has authored over 150 academic papers and has published 28 books (technical and non-technical), most recently Systems Analysis & Design (Cengage, 2020), SPACE (Anthology Alliance, 2019), and Technical Justice (CTS Press, 2019). He wrote the “Technology Today” column for FLORIDA TODAY from 2010 to 2018.

He is a popular public speaker, having delivered numerous keynote presentations and “Tech Talks” for a general audience. Recent examples include the role of big data in the space program, a four-part series on machine learning, and a four-part series on fake news.

He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Victoria (1995).

Contact him at stilley@cts.today.

For the first time, Cyber Command’s major exercise will use new training platform

Tuesday, June 16, 2020

Categories: ASCF News Bipartisianship Cyber Security

Comments: 0

U.S. Cyber Command’s annual training exercise will rely entirely on a new platform this year, a move that will allow most participants to compete remotely.

This year’s Cyber Flag exercise, which began June 15, will use the Persistent Cyber Training Environment, which has been described as one of the Department of Defense’s most critical projects.

“We are actually getting ready to do Cyber Flag … in PCTE for the first time at a geographically dispersed event,” Col. Tanya Trout, Cyber Command’s PCTE director, said during a webcast hosted by SANS June 5.

PCTE is an online client that allows Cyber Command’s cyber warriors to log on from anywhere in the world to conduct individual or collective cyber training as well as mission rehearsal. In the physical world, military forces regularly go to a training facility such as the National Training Center at Fort Irwin to work on particular concepts or rehearse before deploying. But a robust environment has not existed for DoD’s cyber warriors, creating readiness gaps.

The program is run by the Army on behalf of the joint cyber force.

Cyber Flag is Cyber Command’s major annual training event. For the past several years, it has been hosted at the Joint Staff facility in Suffolk, Virginia. This year’s event, the largest to date, is taking place from June 15-26 and will include DoD, intergovernmental and international partners. Participants typically travel to the facility to participate in the event, though some portions in the past have been remote.

“USCYBERCOM is leading the way in maintaining readiness during a global pandemic — we are meeting operational training requirements, and are prepared to operate and train in this new environment,” a Cyber Command spokesperson told Fifth Domain.

With few exceptions, the entire Cyber Flag exercise will be conducted remotely across several geographic regions, but operationally the exercise will be similar to others, officials said. This means teams will continue to conduct defensive missions on traditional networks and ICS networks against a live opponent.

This marks a milestone for the program as it has scaled from single one-off events to large Tier-1 exercise. Additionally, Cyber Flag will help the PCTE program office take lessons learned for future such events.

Despite the ongoing global pandemic that has caused major disruptions, Cyber Flag leaders had always planned to use the PCTE platform this year, officials said. With units geographically dispersed, they must be able to train as they fight: together.

The platform in the future will allow forces to choose training events from a pre-loaded Netflix-like menu, officials have said, but will also include ongoing tweaks to account for changes in a dynamic environment.

An agile platform

The PCTE program has been running an agile process from its inception, which is atypical of the acquisition process. Officials have leveraged small contracts to date and a set of one off “cyber innovation challenges” to incrementally add capability.

During this process, they also have worked with the user community – the active duty cyber warriors – turning to cyber training events to test and stress the platform while gaining feedback to improve the platform.

The platform is still in the prototyping phase currently. The Army is in the process of awarding a vendor for the final program under what is called Cyber Training, Readiness, Integration, Delivery and Enterprise Technology (TRIDENT), a contract vehicle to offer a more streamlined approach for procuring the military’s cyber training capabilities.

The Army released the request for proposal of the contract June 11.

Cyber Command has also now created something called the Joint Cyber Training Enterprise, which Trout leads as the acting director. She said earlier in June that it reached initial operational capability in February and is the non-material companion to the PCTE platform. It seeks to operate and synchronize training hosted by PCTE for the joint force.

Photo: Cyber warriors at Cyber Flag 19.1 in June 2019. (Photos provided by U.S. Cyber Command Public Affairs)

Link: https://www.fifthdomain.com/dod/cybercom/2020/06/15/for-the-first-time-cyber-commands-major-exercise-will-use-new-training-platform/

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