Ladies and gentlemen, the program will begin in five minutes. Please move to your seats. Prior to the conference, FCA asked our network of industry partners to submit solutions to eight problem statements provided by the Army Cyber Center of Excellence. We received more than 35 responses and selected 17 to be presented this week in the Engagement Theater in the Exhibit Hall.
We have published all those submissions in a compendium you can find by selecting Solution Abstracts under the Program tab on the TechNet Augusta website. At this time, please join me in welcoming to the stage Lieutenant General Susan Lawrence, U.S. Army retired President and CEO, SCA International. And it's not only because it's the end of the conference.
It's been very exciting here this week, and it's great to see you all here with us this afternoon for our last keynote speaker. introduce the speaker I just have to thank once again the Cyber Center of Excellence the team there Eric Gladman and the local I've see a team our RVP Bob Damon and Amy we've seen you everywhere so again thank you so much it takes a lot of work to put this on so let's just recognize that great team So to introduce our keynote speaker, I would like to invite to the stage Steve Wagner, president of Enlighten, which is an HII subsidiary. Enlighten is part of the mission technology for HII.
Hi, sir. Thank you and good afternoon. Welcome to our closing keynote for TechNet Augusta.
As she said, I am Steve Wagner, the president of Enlighten. HII is, Enlighten is part of HII, who is a proud sponsor. sponsor of Tech Night Augusta's event. For those of you that aren't familiar with HII, we provide integrated solutions that enable today's connected all domain force. These include big data processing and analytics, full spectrum cyber platforms and tools.
and EW engineering and expertise in addition to other mission critical capabilities in the defense and federal solution space. Today on behalf of AFSIA I have the honor and privilege of introducing our closing keynote speaker Lieutenant General Maria Barrett, Commanding General of the United States Army Cyber Command. A highly engaged leader, General Barrett comes from a family with a proud tradition of service.
She's a veteran of multiple overseas combat operations. has commanded units at all levels of the US Army, and has served in roles with the US Cyber Command, US Army Cyber Command, US Southern Command, and the White House Communications Agency. Currently, she oversees a team of more than 16,500 cyber warriors who comprise one of the world's most premier digital forces.
Excuse me. Okay, so this is different. That's General Barrett's PAO.
It falls to me to tell you that unfortunately General Barrett had an emergency and sends her regrets. She was able to make a short video before she had to hit the road. So let me introduce virtually Lieutenant General Maria Barrett.
I'm sorry I can't be there in person. I was called away but recorded this short video to thank everyone for all your hard work. You have heard from outstanding thinkers and leaders in cyber signal and electromagnetic warfare. We got a glimpse into possible futures from the Army's... Chief Information Officer Leo Garcega and the Army G6 Lieutenant General John Morrison.
We're joined by new leadership at the U.S. Army Cyber Center of Excellence, Major General Ryan Janovick and the new NETCOM commander, Major General Denise McPhail. Thank you, FCO, for putting on such an excellent conference. I also want to thank Lieutenant General.
Maria Barrett as her avatar replacement. It's an honor to use her voice, face, and influence to prove even the experts in cyber can be fooled. What do you have to say about the new you, Maria? Thanks for letting me have a little fun. Okay, obviously I did not say that.
Two people, there was an Army, Department of the Army civilian and somebody from my staff with little to no skill, no help for me. My voice was actually out on the internet. I gave them less than a week to put that together. The only thing I actually had to help them with was Major General Janevick's name. The AI world has not caught up with that pronunciation.
But as you can see, and if we can go to the next slide, when I start thinking about threats in this area, all you need is a person with a computer and a connection to the internet. That barrier to entry is pretty darn low. And if I went back to the two people who made that video and asked them, have you ever leveraged Deep neural networks. I am positive.
I have five dollars they would say no. That's how accessible it is. Those of you who are actually studying deepfakes, the really, really, really, really good ones, you know how good they are.
That was passable. But this is the area where I am concerned about and it's not just a deepfakes, it's also what is out in the public opinion in the social media sphere and how that takes off and really starting to understand this and what does this mean we see how this plays out with with election interference and some other areas but I I'm starting to think about what does this look like when you're looking at warfighting what does this look like when you're thinking about mobilization We're also seeing attacks in cyber pick up. The attacks against the Dib, either we're getting better visibility into them or they are on the increase. Attacks against operational technology have also gone up, critical infrastructure, and I would be completely remiss if I did not mention the PRC's Volt Typhoon. And so I don't know whether we've just gone numb to malicious cyber actors taking proprietary information from us for the either foreign intelligence or economic advantage.
But now what we're seeing is gaining that access, embedding into our networks for no other reason than to pre-position. I can't think of another reason why you'd want to be in a wastewater plant. than to disrupt it at the time and place of your choosing.
And this isn't too hard to think about. Now think about what does all of this mean when you add artificial intelligence and machine learning on top of it? And this gets very exponential. We're already seeing some of this play out as we watch activities in the Ukraine that...
this ubiquitous technical surveillance atmosphere that we're in, that transparency on the battlefield is a real thing that we have to, commanders on the ground, have to think about and mitigate or counter. Our competitors have invested heavily in these information capabilities and they challenge us with them daily. And we need to look no further than the PLAs.
three warfare strategy, which says they are going to challenge us in the legal realm, the psychological realm, and in the realm of public opinion. And this is where we have to take a different approach to information. The traditional approaches that we have are not going to be sufficient. Next slide. General Stanton and I, we got a present from at the end of the year last year, and that was ADP 313. Thank you, CAC.
But I want to call out a few things. For those of you who have not looked at it, there are a couple highlights. One is that it calls out information as a dynamic of combat power. This means that this is commander's business. It's going to describe how Army forces fight for, defend, and fight with information in order to create and exploit information advantages.
The ADP describes how all parts of the Army are really in this. It's about enabling command and control for our commanders, protecting friendly information in the network, going on the attack to threaten adversary C2, influence our adversaries and affect their behavior, and then inform friendly audiences to foster trust and confidence. Mayor Johnson, in his open...
Opening comments offered us the four M's. General Janovec offered us three A's. Not to be outdone, I'll give you three C's. The ADP framework transforms how we collectively do business in the information dimension. That operations in the information dimension is inherently combined arms.
It is not relegated to a single warfighting function or discipline and we combine them in order to create greater effect. And third, we give commanders a way to describe, visualize, and direct operations in the information dimension through the spectrum of conflict. So think about it, it's campaign, crisis, and conflict. So now that we've got the D and.lmpf done, how do you do this?
And this is where I think you're going to see so much change that's occurring. Next slide. This continuous transformation. I'm going to anchor you to those five elements of information activities, enable, protect, attack, influence, and inform at the PUCS.
If we look back and we think about the first Information Operations Brigade, the success of those small teams ever since the first IO was stood up in 2002. Supporting Joint Force Commanders and Information Operations, they gave us the insights of what information advantage could be. And the question was how can we get this capability into the theaters on a more persistent basis. We don't want the same capability though, going back to that threat picture.
We want an evolved capability. And so it starts with, ironically, deactivating the 1st IO Brigade. Its MTO will deactivate in this next fiscal year.
Army Cyber will take the civilian TDA, and that will form the basis of a digital protection and reconnaissance center that will conduct targeting support and digital force protection tasks for the TIADS when they stand up. Speaking of TIADS... The user and user pack theaters were already itching to get this capability.
So much so that organically they pulled people from different areas in order to really start, jumpstart their campaign of learning going into their second year. So with taking down the MTO or First IO, the Army is able to build three theater information detachments. Two which will support Those theater commanders in USERF and USERPAC. And then the third one, which will be Army Cyber, that will be a trans-regional TIAD and it will bring to bear also the unique capabilities of the Army Cyber Enterprise in the conduct of that mission. Next slide.
But lest you think that Information Advantage is just about information operation, it is not. We continue to grow in the Cyber Mission Force, growing four offensive teams that have already, they are already underway in terms of manning those, and they are in concert with the NDS priorities. The Army structure document also gave us the additional build-out, the completion of the 11th Cyber Battalion.
and their expeditionary SEMA teams. So that will be a total of 12 teams when that is complete. The Airstruck also gave us the partial build of a second battalion, similar to the 11th Cyber Battalion. And so this really reflects the commitment of the Army to bring together an integrated team of cyber, EW, signal, data systems engineers, IO, intel, and psyops.
I didn't put it on the slide, but in that Army Structure document was the build-out of... Final count of five MDTFs, Army National Guard building eight Division EW companies. You heard General Morrison talk yesterday about how the Army warfighting and the technology changes and what is on the horizon.
But our organizations within Army cyber and netcom must change as well. Part of that change is bringing the two red teams from the first Information Operations Brigade underneath the Cyber Protection Brigade. In addition to that, the AARP struck authorized 85 people to be additional red team builds.
Because if you think about all the things that we are layering in over the next few years, this is going to be a home renovation that's going to be going on for a while. We're going to be moving a lot of walls and as we lay in those capabilities, we're going to go out and make sure that they're implemented correctly and that people understand their role in that picture. The ConOps will change.
To that end, Netcom has already moved out in converting the regional cyber center CONUS into the global cyber center. As more and more of the capabilities that we're employing really reach beyond the borders of CONUS or Europe or PAC, wherever you might be, you really need a central synchronizing NetOps and cybersecurity element at NetCom taking a look at this. And the last thing that I would mention is the AARSTRAC authorized the Army Reserves to build a second cyber protection brigade. Bottom line, it's total Army multi-command structure.
to support information activities. Okay, now what are we going to do with it? Next slide. Got to remember why we're here. A lot of capabilities that we're laying in, it's all about setting the theaters.
This is the why and this is the who. General Morrison mentioned the C2 fix and the JRTC vignette in his opening comments. Across the pond we have 1st Cav Division.
Their network data going to the regional cyber center in Europe and also into the USeam and Gabriel Nimbus. This is culture change. This is what the beginnings of a single service provider extending down into the tactical realm looks like.
Is it perfect? No. There is quite a bit of work that we need to do in terms of Adjusting the roles and responsibilities, the CONOPs that General Morrison talked about. Prioritizing some of that data and understanding what it is that we need at Echelon.
So many of the initiatives that will be happening over the next few years, by both the PEOs and by Netcom. Netcom alone has 28 initiatives. that they're carrying in their rucksack. And really, really important ones.
The deployment of USIM. Think about USIM as the close fight of how we're going to visualize our data, and Gabriel Nimbus as the deep fight. Long storage, the ability to look back in time and see and hunt in data. The Army Unified Directory Services. General Morrison mentioned this one.
No longer are we going to have the Earth deploy and reimage their computers upon landing on the other side of the pond. The speed at which Netcom is deploying these capabilities is amazing. Just a couple weeks ago we had the White House directed deployment of Microsoft Defender Endpoint. Two weeks ago it was the test case of a thousand endpoints in user pack. The following week they went to 10,000.
I was walking on the floor yesterday and I was told they're done. This is where we're at folks. This is how much change is going to happen at a speed that probably are you know I know our predecessors have never seen before. Last year when I was up here I spent a good amount of time talking about the enterprise.
talking about defending our networks, and talking about data rationalization. I threw up a slide that we had done. Some of you might remember it.
that showed the complexity of our data environment because I, as the commander of Army Cyber, wanted to understand how we could use our data better. And so having gotten to that point, we moved out in a few directions. One, let's implement a data schema for once and for all, right?
Step one, I walked into Mr. Molenkopf's office, my science and technology advisor, Al, thinking about living off the land, what does this type of attack look like in data? What does this type of attack look like in data? And why can't I see that in time and space and context? That was the initiative behind a prototype, which we call Panoptic Junction.
designed to reduce the complexity of analysts that we have looking for hard to find adversary activity like living off the land TTPs but using the data that we have And we have plenty of it. And I can't rely on an analyst with this particular expertise and servers and an analyst who has this particular expertise to be sitting next to each other for an enduring period of time and finding the one interesting thing. The application of AI in this prototype will help us immensely. The prototype was successful.
The next step is, in this next year, is to find a place to do a limited production test of this. And then behind this is the people. We need to start operationalizing the data through the people by training them on how to ask better questions of the data.
And so we've set up an analytic superiority task force within the Army Cyber Headquarters. our subordinate units and the Army Cyber Institute to get after developing the skills and organizing the data, conducting that in-depth analysis, building analytics and visualizations. All of this will continue to posture us to leverage the technologies you all have been talking about to me this week in better ways. Next slide.
And there is this urgency to adapt. Now, I'll talk a lot about EW in the next section. We had been really focused on counterinsurgency, but back in 2016, as we started to talk about multi-domain operations, large-scale combat operations, we realized that there were some holes in our swing.
And that really began the Army starting to build towards the capabilities that we need to face the threats that we're seeing today. And that was a really concerted effort to strengthen the EW enterprise. That began the approval of growth over the next 10 years of what would be 2,800 EW professionals across the Army. We already have SEMA elements on the staff set, brigade, division, corps, helping leaders think through the EW challenges and incorporating EW scenarios into their training.
We have the multi-domain effects battalion. in each MDTF, ensuring that EW effects are planned within theater army planning and fires. We're accelerating the material development for EW material for our soldiers. Developing the PME that General Janevick talked about, the professional military education for the EW workforce, enlisted warrant officer and officer.
In addition to that, they are developing the EW and counter-EW training strategy. All of this to improve the survivability of our soldiers in combat. Getting more closer to home in Army cyber, the 11th Cyber Battalion is currently supporting an RF data pilot to inform Army policy, training, and material.
If you think about it, when we started out in cyber, We actually had to think about our cyber data and whether or not that was Intel data or Title 10 data and work through those things. We are going to go through the same thing on the EW side of the house. And so this data pilot will illuminate some of those friction points and help us solve them. But it's not only just for us, the Army. We have to share this particular data with the Joint Force.
and we need to be able to share it with coalition partners. We need to be able to deliver it to the commanders to help with that visualization and decision-making that they need, and we need to be able to get this data to the folks on the ground who are going to reprogram the payloads in order to create the effects. This is the RF effect generation. that I think is going to be really critical to our forces forward. Right now, 11 Cyber Battalion soldiers are in Louisiana supporting a 2101 JRTC rotation.
Today is DV day. I can't wait to hear how that went. But no, actually, I already have some feedback of how that's going.
Some anecdotal feedback. that came across my email box this morning was, in terms of the brigade CP signature, the best the COG has seen in 38 rotations. But that's the combination of the 101st and a commander really leaning into this problem, really thinking about a pace plan, really thinking about signature reduction, the capabilities of the ECT that is supporting them. augmenting what it is that they're doing, helping them see themselves in the battle space, and then making the decisions accordingly. And so this is very much, we've been working the ECTs through triad, a number of exercises, project convergence in our training centers.
So it is real, folks. Taking you from the doctrine to the organizational structure to real stuff happening. I think this is a good time to show you what our soldiers are doing, if we could roll the movie.
The Expeditionary Cyber and Electromagnetic Activities Teams of the 11th Cyber Battalion allow tactical commanders the ability to create tactical gains within the electromagnetic spectrum. From these tactical gains, ECTs enable commanders to visualize the battlefield through the EMS and can generate effects within the close and deep maneuver areas to support a commander's scheme of maneuver and their targeting process. ECTs are the Army's only expeditionary cyber and EW force that can integrate and support Army Corps and below formations, such as supporting the Screaming Eagles of the 101st, the Paratroopers of the 82nd, to the armored formations of the 1st Cavalry Division. This effort also highlights how 11th Cyber is supporting the efforts of transforming in-contact by conducting this integration to inform what EW Cyber capabilities are needed at the tactical to operational level.
The integration into modernization efforts also highlights the continued shift of commanders leveraging informational aspects to enable command and control and shape operations. At the same time, this is only a small sampling of the larger support that 11th Cyber Battalion can provide a senior tactical commander. 11th Cyber Battalion, where innovation beats action. Learn more about our capabilities and how you can be part of the future of warfare. Join the fight.
Protect the future. We could cue. There we go. And so I'd close with... We succeed through people.
Every day I come to work at Fortitude Hall, I don't know how you can't be motivated by the innovation, the intellectual curiosity of these soldiers, the persistence of the civilians that I work with to challenge the assumptions of something that might have been done before or has never been done before. I don't know how you come here to an event like this and engage with cadets from Bowie State, small businesses... the vendors, academic institutions, research labs, and not get excited about the opportunities that we have to combat the threats and set the theater. And so, ma'am, thank you very much for giving me the coveted closing. But no, seriously, thank you to you and your team for another outstanding event.
It was a fantastic week on behalf of Army Cyber and all of my people who attended this week. Great panels, great feedback. I can't say enough about this event. I think this was probably one of the best events that we've had in quite a while. So thank you.
Thank you. Thank you, ma'am. We do have a couple of questions from the audience. First question, can you talk at all about how we are posturing and positioning ourselves to deploy cyber CMA capabilities to defeat AI-enabled loitering UAS in theater?
Yeah. So I think this goes to what I was talking about in terms of what the expeditionary SEMA teams are doing to be able to see that environment and really the reprogramming that would need to be done on the fly. Everything that we're working with these days is software defined. radios.
And so that gives us an opportunity. This really is the nexus of where cyber and EW come together. If people want to talk about these two things as separate, or that one takes away from the other, no.
The value is in that they will be together. And yes, going back to my threat. My threat slide, we are thinking about what happens when you are putting AI into it, but AI can be defeated. So we're thinking about what defeat looks like from our perspective and what it looks like from an adversary perspective.
But hopefully that answers your question. Probably not to the detail you wanted. Thank you, ma'am.
One more question from the audience. Will signal officers be considered for command of cyber battalions? I'm going to tell you that I wouldn't rule it out, but... I think there's plenty of opportunity and mission where we're at. I think, going back to the theme of transformation, whatever it is that you think a commander is doing in a signal battalion today, it's going to differ greatly from what you think it is today.
greatly in the future, all of our skills are going to be really increased. And to tell you quite honestly, if you look at the 60th OCO battalion that defends my infrastructure from which I fight. that i bring the cyber fight to the adversary that is commanded by a signal battalion commander so news flash we're already doing it thank you general barrett that was our final question please welcome general lawrence back to the stage There you go. I hear the singing. General Barrett, as always, we do not worry about you being the last keynote speaker because you always fill the room.
And so we very much appreciate the message today. Love the avatar. It is a threat. It's scary.
What can be done out there? there but from the very beginning we heard about the partnership of our CIO of our G6 you the our cyber commander and acquisition community that you all are amazingly synchronized together with the common message common goals and you just closed it out that message today so in the words of mr. Garcega it's real so thank you very much on behalf in lieu of a speaker gift We're going to make a donation in your name to the Signal and Cyber Corps Historical Museum Society, as we did with all of our speakers this week, so thank you so much. Before we close the conference, I would like to invite my wingman, Major General Ryan Jenevick, to the stage to offer an in-month. This is a test.
And the test is this. What does the two star do between two powerful three star voices? And I mean that sincerely. And I think the idea is to find the minor key and just set into the background vocal and take a little bit of an opportunity just to wrap a few things up.
General Barrett and the other General Barrett, thank you for creating the energy. that we needed to bring us to the last mile of this conversation and really then propel us forward. To walk off the finish line today is not our goal.
To take what we did here and invest it in the future excitement for what we're going to do for the next year. So, ma'am, that type of energy, not only at the beginning with your friend in the car, but at the end with the video about soldiers out in the dirt doing hard things, that's exactly what we needed. And General Lawrence, you began this whole conference.
with a kickstart of energy, and we're closing it in the same way. So thank you for that. So as I find the minor key between those two powerful voices, I know that I gave a charge about let's not fail to ask the hard questions and commit to the right answers.
And then I thought, well, how do I measure that success? Do we measure that by the number of business cards exchanged or QR codes exchanged? Do you measure by the barbecue lunch consumption rate downstairs? Do you measure it by the number of squeezy balls that are no longer on the floor and they're in a bag, in a shoulder bag, headed home?
Or might you measure it by the echo of the keynote speakers? I also offered that the power of what we were going to do here today was the seven keynotes. And I spent a little bit of time, and if I can...
read my own handwriting, it could be helpful. Forgive me for checking it out, but what I listened for when I walked around was evidence that the keynotes were resounding. And here's a little bit of evidence. If you read the news paper or the early bird or wherever you consume on Wednesday morning, a lot of what was said on this stage was repeated in the media. Mr. Garcega's messages in particular were carried throughout.
and repeated in a very powerful way. I was down in the open-air chow hall the other day talking to cadets and lieutenants and overheard somebody who's pretty senior so they could get away with saying it the way I will. Hey, Morrison had it right. They're talking about Lieutenant General Morrison.
Morrison had it right. The Army relationships are better than ever. And so he was up here talking about that, the power of it, not because it's fun to talk about, but because it's delivering something to our Army.
In speaking with an industry partner, can we continue to work together to create shared understanding of requirements? Of course we can. Yes, we will. And so just hearing that means we've done something here, that that's what we want to accomplish. And then at a networking tabletop, at an evening event, listening to people talking around that gathering, it's great to be back in Augusta.
We really have irreversible momentum on progress here. And so we've talked about what the mayor said. We've talked about this community.
We talk about the excitement that we have here together. I talked about the crush of industry through AFSEA bringing us together, the Army, and Augusta. And so these are the things that I heard.
I stopped by and saw some of my friends at booth 123. Now there's more people who know where it is, but I asked them, I said, what's the, this was just today, this morning, what's the measure of success? And they said, well, there's a lot more foot traffic. We've seen that throughout the past couple days, but more importantly, they said, it's not about foot traffic, it's about engagement.
The conversations we're having with people are much, much better than we've seen in the past. I credit that to the investment that all of us have made, that the keynotes have made, that the panelists have made, the engagements that we've had, that everybody here, those listening, those you represent have had. It's energy for me.
As a guy who's been in command for three weeks, this is the right type of energy to set the course for what we're going to do and come back together in a year with a lot of hard work in between. I'll be proud to be back with you. I'll be proud to come back and measure success in different ways.
It won't be by barbecue, but it will be what have we done to change the position of the men and women out in the field and improve what they're taking into combat, how they're doing it, and how ready they are. So thanks for letting me stand in between two powerful voices. Thanks for letting me represent all the hard work that went into this team of teams organization. Thank you.
It doesn't end when we're done speaking. Transatlantic, 4-5, December. Put it on your calendar, talk to your colleagues about it, the activity that's going on over there in that theater.
It is very important that we continue to work our mission, and that is to bring the government, the military, industry, and academia together to solve our nation's most complex problems. And there are a lot of complex problems over there in our European theater as we go forward. So please, please mark your calendar for that. Again, it's hard to believe, but we'll be back here August 18th through the 21st next year. Please drive home safely, and I look forward to seeing you next August.
Thank you very much.