Fight from the Internet

Below is a summarization of the remarks I delivered last night at the Senior Executive Roundtable on Army Command and Control hosted by the Association of the United States Army (AUSA):

The U.S. Department of Defense must stop looking at multi-level security through the lens of the network. Physical isolation is not delivering advantage to national security, and in fact it is divaricating critical investments and surrendering unity of effort. Air-gapped networks will not scale to support the fight in the Indo-Pacific, and modernization is an emergent imperative.

Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are collectively spending $60 billion each year building capital infrastructure, the backbone of the internet. These companies are building for resilience, they are building for scale, and they are building for security. This infrastructure is attacked every day by every manner of nation state and economic opportunist; American innovation, ingenuity and engineering is winning.

As we have seen in Ukraine, the internet is the unified network.

Hiding command and control (C2) signals in the noise of the internet is a way to engineer technological endurance and resilience into the philopsphy of mission command. Investments in the future of globally connected command and control should be investments in the internet. Applying emerging technologies like 5G, low earth orbit (LEO) satellite connectivity, and laser-based optical communications to antiquated network topologies (i.e. SIPRNET) is a wasted opportunity.

Investments in internet infrastructure have value beyond just operational mission capability, they can be cleverly strategic.

In Great Power Competition, America is facing an adversary that fears the internet. China goes to great lengths to block, filter, and control internet access. The Chinese Communist Party is a group of 90 million corrupt elites ruling a population of 1.3 billion good people. Civil unrest is an existential threat to this tyranny and there is no greater perpetuator of civil unrest than the internet.

The time for bold action is now. Integrated assurance requires technological infrastructure, and DoD needs to stop investing precious technology dollars into physical network segmentation. The future of Western Democracy is dependent on a bold new approach. The future fight is already happening, and it is happening on the internet.

As I summarized for my Army brethren at the roundtable, it is time to take SIPRNET out back and shoot it in the head.