AFLCMC commander talks cyber resiliency at symposium

  • Published
  • By Patty Welsh
  • 66th Air Base Group Public Affairs
NEWTON, Mass. --  Cyber resiliency, and how to incorporate it into traditional weapon systems, was the topic of this year's New Horizons Symposium keynote speech, March 1.

After emphasizing how the Air Force views cyber as a domain, Lt. Gen. John Thompson, Air Force Life Cycle Management Center commander, discussed challenges and ongoing efforts.

"We have ways to be cyber resilient in the network realm," he said, "but we haven't spent a whole lot of time on, or making changes to, traditional weapon systems."

He said whether it's an F-22, a Joint STARS or a Distributed Common Ground System, it is a collection of other systems with connectivity back to a network layer and, therefore, an inherent vulnerability and risk.

Thompson defined cyber resiliency as being able to maintain mission effective capability while under attack; if the system is in duress mode, does it still operate as intended?

"We need to manage risk exploitation of our systems from those who intend to do us harm... We do great on the network side, but how do we operationalize cyber on the traditional weapon side?"

Highlighting the Air Force Cyber Campaign Plan, Thompson identified various areas, or "Lines of Action," that are being looked at and told the mainly industry audience that they are areas where the Air Force could be looking to gain insight.

One area is performing mission thread analysis. Another is determining how to "bake-in" cyber resiliency in the engineering stages of a program. 

"Right now, we're in the bolt-on mode; we're not baking anything in," Thompson said. "We need to make sure we incorporate cyber security and cyber resiliency into our existing systems engineering processes."

Recruiting, hiring and training a cyber workforce was another area covered where Thompson emphasized the need for everyone, in all functional areas, to be "cyber aware."

Having open architecture was a way he mentioned to help address the improvement of weapon system agility and adaptability. Developing a common security environment was next, including the need to be able to share and transfer lessons learned and best practices.

Thompson noted that a number of Air Force aircraft are more than five decades old, making it a significant challenge requiring the assessment and protection of the fielded fleet. A final area is to provide cyber intelligence support.

"Cyber resilience impacts all Air Force missions and we have to do our best to address and tackle it - and do it realistically."

Additionally, he expressed how industry could help define and address challenges, as long as solutions are realistic and efficient for both the warfighter and the taxpayer. 

Also as part of the symposium, the three program executive officers from Hanscom Air Force Base provided upcoming business opportunities within their portfolios of Battle Management; Command, Control, Communications, Intelligence and Networks; and Nuclear C3.

Key leaders from Air Force Research Laboratory, the Mass. National Guard, the U.S. Army Natick Soldier Systems Center, the MITRE Corp. and MIT Lincoln Laboratory addressed the symposium as well. The forum also featured a panel discussing UAVs impact on military and commercial airspace.

The New Horizons Symposium is an annual event sponsored by the Lexington-Concord Chapter of the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association helping provide opportunities for government, industry and academia to engage on topics of interest.