Managing for Mission Assurance in the Face of Advanced Cyber Threats

Current cyberspace threats are highly dynamic, complex, and ubiquitous in time and space. Activities to ensure resiliency to adversarial cyber operations throughout the Air Force have organically organized themselves to be somewhat fractionated, with blurred lines of authority and no overall coordinating mechanism to ensure that all related activities are identified, tasked, and implemented and act in concert to achieve enterprise objectives. The authors develop a foundation for better managing efforts to ensure resiliency to adversarial cyber operations at the enterprise level aimed at mission assurance in the Air Force. This structure includes guidance on the allocation of roles and responsibilities for tasks to ensure resiliency to adversarial cyber operations and mechanisms to create a cohesive initiative in which each individual and organization is working toward a common goal. The authors also stress the need for leaders to instill in airmen, civilians, and contractors an understanding that the conflict in cyberspace is ubiquitous in time and space; that operations in cyberspace might be decisive in warfare; that all airmen, civilians, and contractors play a role in ensuring resiliency to adversarial cyber operations; that nothing can be completely secure in cyberspace, which leads to a sense of responsibility to carry on mission(s) in the face of an attack through cyberspace; that connecting one system to another (or to a network) carries potential risks; and that personnel have an obligation to report anomalies in data, nonnominal procedures, and potential cyber incidents.