By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR
AFA: The Air Force wants artificial intelligence to track and react to cyber and electronic threats, to update countermeasures against enemy hackers, radars, and missiles faster than human minds can manage. But first you have to fix the basics.
Today, the Department Of Defense Information Network (DODIN) is really not a single network, but a quasi-feudal patchwork of often incompatible local networks. It’s the Holy Roman Empire of cyberspace. There are so many dark corners and hidden vulnerabilities that no amount of intelligence — human or artificial — can monitor them all, let alone defend them.
“It’s hard to do things at scale across a fragmented set of networks (that) grew up over decades as separately managed, separately architected networks,” said Lt. Gen. Kevin McLaughlin, deputy commander of Cyber Command. If you tried to introduce artificial intelligence cybersecurity now, he told me after his remarks at the Air Force Association conference here, it couldn’t do what’s envisioned, “not efficiently, not at scale.”
“So we are moving more and more as a department to the ability to see across all of our terrain at the same time,” McLaughlin told me. Critical steps include overhauls like the Joint Information Environment (JIE) and new cybersecurity standards for weapons systems. “As you connect (systems) into the DoD environment, we’re gonna make sure that you can see across all of those things.”
Read the full story at Breaking Defense