Description
The United States military has a crippling dependency on civilian commercial contractors, civilian defense contractors, and private telecommunication companies. The DoD’s reliance on civilian based cyber-networks might be a threat to the nation’s defense. There are known cyber vulnerabilities throughout the entire acquisition process due to inadequate security efforts from defense contractors and third-party organizations. Not only do state-sponsored criminals exploit these vulnerabilities to access DoD contractors PII, defense plans, and DoD weapon systems but also cause cyber harm that propagates from small businesses to the DoD. Moreover, non-government companies do not have the ability to defend against state-sponsored or organized cyber-criminal attacks and these companies are likely to become cyber targets due to the entanglement of civilian-military assets. To defend itself from cyber threats such as cyber-espionage the DoD must defend forward by actively protecting commercial and private cyberinfrastructure. Ways of defending forward and also maintaining Defense Support for Civil Authorities (DSCA) inside the United State is certainly challenging, but can be accomplished in a variety of nuanced ways such as DoD requiring compliance to cybersecurity guidelines, monitoring, and audits in order to do business with DoD as simply parts of all DoD contracts. DoD can also partner as it does with other government agencies like NIST to set standards and require all of its suppliers and contractors to abide by these standards to do business with DoD. DoD can also act as cyber diplomats on senior levels like flag officers working with business leaders to establish standards and shared visions of what should be done and by whom. Design of cyber responses for the nation with different players all contributing to the solution for the overall benefit of both the military and civilian world can be done via professional organizations like AFCEA, NDIA, SAME, and many other military-civilian partnerships.
