A U.S. Cyber Command official said that when they examine whether any given operation or even when a strategy has been successful, they’re not looking at metrics, but rather outcomes.

“It’s really about: have we enabled the collective defense of the nation,” Maj. Gen. John Morrison, Cyber Command’s outgoing chief of staff, told C4ISRNET in a July interview.

Roughly two years ago, Cyber Command and the Department of Defense started a paradigm shift for cyber policy and operations. The 2018 DoD cyber strategy tasked Cyber Command to “defend forward,” which is best described as operators working on foreign networks to prevent attacks before they happen. The way Cyber Command meets those goals is through persistent engagement, which means challenging adversary activities wherever they operate.

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Part of the need for a change was that adversaries were achieving their objectives but doing so below the threshold of armed conflict – in the so-called gray zone – through cyberspace. DoD wanted to stop that from happening through more assertive cyberspace action.

Some in the academic community have wanted to see some way in which the command can measure the success of these new approaches. But Morrison explained that these outcomes, or intended effects during operations, could be enabling other partners – foreign or other agencies within the U.S. government – to take action in defense of the nation.

For example, he said that when Cyber Command teams encounter malware they haven’t seen before, they share it with partners in government, such as FBI or DHS, which can lead to the greater national collective defense.

He also noted that building partnerships enables a sense of collective defense in cyberspace and can help significantly in the future against sophisticated adversaries.

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Morrison will be replaced at Cyber Command by Maj. Gen. David Isaacson. It is unclear where Morrison is headed next.

The need for flexibility

As Cyber Command has gained more authorities in recent years, it has been able to conduct significantly more operations and different types of operations as well, Morrison said.

Throughout these missions, leaders have learned they must be flexible, be it in tactics, structure of teams, or the capabilities they need or develop.

“We have thinking adversaries that we go against every single day. That drives us to change how we operate,” Morrison said. “You change your tactics, techniques and procedures but that’s also going to drive changes in how we train and what we train … It drives how we do capability development and development of capabilities and the employment of those capabilities, which again ties back to training at a much faster pace in this space.”

Morrison noted that this includes how teams are organized. He explained the way defensive cyber protection teams were first envisioned when they were created in 2012-2013 is not at all how they fight now.

To keep up with dynamic adversaries, Cyber Command is keeping closer watch on readiness metrics developed by the command for its cyber teams. This is a framework that details standards for how teams are equipped, manned and supplied. Cyber protection teams were detailed first and now Cyber Command has readiness metrics for combat mission teams, the offensive teams that support combatant commands, and intelligence/support teams. Officials are still working through metrics for what are called national teams that are charged with defending the nation.

The command also needs to improve the way it feeds operational requirements into capabilities cyber warriors can use, Morrison said. This includes improving acquisition practices for both of the programs of record Cyber Command is executing through its Joint Cyber Warfighting Architecture — which guides capability development priorities and includes the Unified Platform and Persistent Cyber Training Environment — and the more rapidly developed tools needed on the fly.

“That’s where you’ve got the ability inside the command now to rapidly produce that capability through a variety of means and get it into the hands of our operators as quick as possible,” he said.

In fact, the Army has begun to embed tool developers and coders alongside operators through the Rapid Cyber Development Network to more quickly meet urgent needs. This allows them in almost in near real time to develop or change tools to meet requirements.

“How do we do capability development in a much smoother fashion than we sometimes do today where we’re able to rapidly assess, prioritize, resource operational requirements to produce a capability that we can then get back into the hands of our operators as quickly as possible,” Morrison said.

From these capabilities that are developed for shorter term needs, he said the key will be deciding if they want to move them into a program of record. Will it be a longer term capability, will it adjust tactics, techniques and procedures or training?

“We’ve got to work those pieces,” he explained.

On the longer term, program of record capabilities, he noted officials still want the iterative development associated with more software-centric systems as opposed to more traditional military hardware.

Integration with combatant commands

Cyber is much more ingrained in military planning and operations than it was in years prior, Morrison said, however, work remains.

There is now a closer link between the combatant commands and Cyber Command elements that plan, coordinate, synchronize and conduct cyber operations on their behalf, Morrison said, noting that they are still maturing.

These include the Joint Force Headquarters-Cybers‚ which are commanded by each of the service cyber component commanders, and plan, synchronize and conduct operations for combatant commands they’re assigned to, and new entities being created called cyber operations-integrated planning elements. These are forward extensions of the Joint Force Headquarters resident within the combatant commands to better coordinate cyber planning with other operations for the combatant commander.

These entities all enable a greater central connective tissue from a Cyber Command perspective as they can feed from the theater level back to the command providing a global cyberspace picture.

“You have to take not only a regional view of anything that you’re doing, but, when you can bring the power of a global enterprise behind it, that’s a pretty powerful capability for our nation,” Morrison said. “We are in the process of building every one of our CO-IPEs but I definitely think that we are heading in the right direction, especially as [the CO-IPEs] get built and they integrate closer and closer with their supported combatant commands.”

About Mark Pomerleau

Mark Pomerleau is a reporter for C4ISRNET, covering information warfare and cyberspace.

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