Military forces around the world have had to contend with political issues between their nations for thousands of years. In the early days of our world, wars would be fought over land, property, kingdoms, resources, and differences in belief systems. The world has evolved over the past several centuries between the bronze age, renaissance and industrial revolution.
Many scholars and industry experts paint our current age as the information age. This means that instead of gold, oil, precious metals, data, and information holds an extremely high value. What types of data are we talking about here? We are talking about weapons research data, pharmaceutical intellectual property, financial data such as the purchasing power of companies, governments and other data of high value are the vast amounts of data tech giants such as Google and Meta collect on individuals.
Risks of Connected Devices in the Military
In this information age we find ourselves in, we have also seen a rapid adoption of connecting many everyday devices and even military equipment to the internet. This includes weaponry, GPS, supply lines and military vehicles. Without a plan, without any controls of these data sources and connected technologies, adversaries of our military and governments will be able to track troop and vehicle movements in real time and develop effective counter measures against any attempted offensive or even defensive maneuvers.
Critical Threat Alert
Without proper controls, adversaries can track troop movements in real time and develop countermeasures against any military maneuvers. This creates unprecedented vulnerabilities in our defense infrastructure.
Why Should Military Branches Care?
For several decades, state-sponsored actors have worked on destabilizing the world in attempts to coerce sole control of trade routes, territory and intellectual property from both world governments and private industries. Also of concern and note is the over-reliance and deals leaders have made to allow foreign entities to create and have direct access to sensitive military weaponry down to the chips and hardware utilized to build them.
In Hybrid-Warfare, the threats are not only bullets, artillery, and kinetic attacks, but we live in an age where significant damage and harm can and is caused by hacking and compromising networks and anything connected to the internet within our military branches. This can and has caused harm in response times as well as led to the disclosure of sensitive troop movements to foreign adversaries.
Strategic Approach
Long term and short term there are many strategies and approaches we can take at the squad level to the whole of the military to increase our mission readiness and lethality and take back control. The goal is to highlight current gaps and strategic concerns hurting our nations and hurting our mission readiness from Operational Security to hardening our supply chains for every component used in our personal and military lives.
The Path Forward
Despite the current landscape, the actions we can take can help make drastic improvements and it is highly encouraged these steps be actioned immediately to ensure mission readiness and that the collective defense is improved. Key areas of focus include:
- Supply Chain Security: Auditing and securing every component in military systems from chips to software
- Network Segmentation: Isolating critical systems from general internet connectivity
- Real-time Monitoring: Implementing comprehensive logging and threat detection
- Personnel Training: Educating all personnel on cyber hygiene and operational security
- Incident Response: Developing rapid response capabilities for cyber incidents
Read the Original Article
View on SkyRadarDefense Sector Cybersecurity Consultation
SPMA provides specialized cybersecurity consulting for defense contractors and government agencies, including CMMC compliance and insider threat programs.
Schedule a Consultation