As part of an effort to integrate more than a dozen disparate networks under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, the Pentagon plans to use artificial intelligence to predict and simulate enemy attacks and strengthen the security of the resulting networks, a senior Pentagon IT official announced Wednesday.
Indo-Pacom is in the process of consolidating the 17 networks it operates to communicate with allies into a single unified network under a program that Katie Arrington, who serves as Pentagon CIO, calls “Mission Network-as-a-Service.”
Arrington first announced the program in September, saying the effort would be expanded to all combatant commands in support of the department’s vision of integrated command and control across the spectrum. CJADC2, as it is widely known, aims to connect U.S. military sensors and weapons in a single network, enabling rapid data transfer between combat systems and domains. The Pentagon also wants to be able to quickly share relevant information with international partners and allies during a conflict, adding an additional layer of difficulty to achieving this configuration.
The resulting unified networks will be developed based on Zero Trust security principles, which will reduce the attack surface, among other things, but Arrington said Wednesday during a panel discussion at the Google Public Sector Summit that artificial intelligence will also play a key role in hardening the defenses of these networks.
“You’re polishing the surface area, right?” she explained. “We want to make it solid. [we’re] Predictive analytics using AI will help you thwart your adversaries. ”
Arrington explained that unifying security and reducing vulnerability in the attack surface is important because potential adversaries like China “are not going to target one attack vector. They’re going to have multiple attacks at once and they’re going to be invisible. You’re not going to know it’s happening.”
“They condition us to see these small, small blips, and we become accustomed to them,” she said, referring to small-scale outages in power supplies, network connectivity, and even financial institutions.
As a result, it can also be difficult to read between the lines and detect whether something is truly outage or part of a coordinated operation by an adversary. AI can help with that, too, Arrington says.
“So how do you unify security and bring it all together? Use AI to say, ‘No, this is the real issue for all of us right now,'” she added.
The ultimate goal of consolidating and strengthening these networks, Arrington suggested, is to wage war measured in dollars and cents. This is a common concept when using AI to strengthen network defenses.
“If we build defensive capabilities, offensive capabilities need to be more accurate with less money,” she said. “And that’s the game we’re really playing with AI right now: how do we build the ability to defeat their attacks and make them spend more to protect themselves from AI? That’s where we win the war, that’s where we don’t have integrated security, and that’s where we need to get to.”
Arrington continued, “That’s what the adversary wants. And how do you train an AI model to think that way? Whatever you do, make the adversary spend more, waste more time, spend more time trying to gain that luxury so that you can get ahead of them in that environment.”
