The distributed topology of cloud environments provides artificial intelligence capabilities and eliminates single points of failure, making them highly attractive for use in complex weapon systems and military logistics. However, this operational configuration relies heavily on cyber capabilities, introducing a broad cyber-attack surface with multiple ingress and egress points and users that are deeply vulnerable to adversary manipulation and degradation in a combat environment.
While requirements to mitigate these threats are mandated by Congress through the Joint Staff and executed by Program Management Offices, current tasking organizations and risk authorization processes are disjointed. This results in uncoordinated mission execution across the Department of the Air Force and a lack of clear priorities for weapon system owners, ultimately manifesting in degraded combat survivability and severe risk to mission execution in a contested environment.
Does the growing dependence on distributed cloud environments (commercial or organic) introduce unique cybersecurity risks to the military and its weapon systems? If so, how can the Air Force prioritize and streamline its cyber survivability efforts, overcome disjointed risk authorization processes, and ultimately mitigate these threats as mandated by Congress to ensure the survivability of these critical systems in a contested environment?
- Kromray, Brian, "Supporting the Warfighter through Secure Logistics in the Contested Cyber Domain," AF Global College, 2025, 50 pgs.
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- Alzahrani, Lt. Col. Khalil, "Cyber Defense and the Protection of Airpower Networks: Lessons from Airpower History and Theory for the 21st Century," ACSC AO 2025.
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Alzahrani tackles this question by emphasizing that protecting the network elements that enable rapid decision-making must be the core priority for cyber survivability, as successful joint military interventions fundamentally depend on securing these systems from manipulation. By applying John Boyd's OODA (Observe-Orient-Decide-Act) loop to cyber operations, he explains that adversaries will attempt to degrade combat survivability by slowing down decision cycles, distorting outcomes, or disabling command access within the loop. To mitigate these threats, he asserts that defensive cyber operations must be streamlined to focus explicitly on ensuring that the information passing through a commander's network remains both accurate and available, guaranteeing that the military can continue to leverage the technological speed required to outpace adversaries.