The Great Cyber Convergence in 2015: AFCEA Speaks

By MICHAEL WARLICK

December 31, 2014 

Technology is moving too fast to keep track of everything, but there’s one overarching trend that policymakers must not miss in 2015. Call it “convergence.”

Cybersecurity is no longer its own specialized function for tech geeks to take care of off to one side while the rest of the organization gets on with the real mission. To the contrary, cybersecurity is becoming an increasingly central concern for more and more institutions, from Sony Pictures to the US Army, from Marine Corps drone units to Pentagon cloud computing contractors. Integrating the new technology into operations will require new concepts, sustained funding, and open communications between government and industry — none of which is guaranteed in 2015.

We’ve seen something like this before. Back in the 1990s, organizations dealing with data — with networks, computing, and all things digital — converged with those that dealt with communications — until then an analog business — to create a unified approach to digital communications. It wasn’t easy, but we did it. Now there are positive signs we’re rising to the challenge once again. In 2014, for example, the US Army merged its Cyber Command with the Signal Center at Fort Gordon, creating a new Cyber Center of Excellence to integrate cyber warfare, electronic warfare, and communications.

In fact, all of the military services are beginning to integrate information technology positions — chief of information operations, commander of a cyber unit, and so on — with traditional operational skills such as aviation, intelligence, or artillery, because each military branch must develop the capability to support at least defense cyber operations and, in some cases, cyber attack. Commanders know that failure to stop a cyber threat may lead to mission failure, destruction of critical infrastructure, and even loss of American lives. That means the military must seamlessly integrate cybersecurity into both training and operations.

Consider cloud computing, which grew rapidly in the military in 2014. The combination of ever-larger amounts of data and ever-smaller budgets means that reliance on cloud computing will only increase. But if your data moves to the cloud, you need constant, reliable access to that cloud to do your job — which means you need cybersecurity. The Defense Department must engage closely with cloud service providers to figure out costs, risks, and requirements so the military gets solutions that are both cost-effective and safe.

DARPA Sees Future of Cybersecurity in Transparent Computing

By Aaron Boyd

December 18, 2014

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is trying to get ahead of the sneakiest and most persistent threats in cyberspace and is putting up $60 million to find truly innovative ideas.

The research agency posted a request for proposals for a Transparent Computing program designed to shine a light on malware hiding in the depths of complex computer systems and actively adapt to new threats.

Skilled hackers attacking a network often work in the background over a long period of time, slowly infecting the systems with code masked in the normal ins and outs. This type of breach — called an advanced persistent threat (APT) — is difficult to detect and expose, particularly in large, complex networks made up of many entry points.

A Transparent Computing system, if successful, would give security managers a granular view of the network, including detailed information on where data are coming from.

Specifically, DARPA is looking for a program that can:

■ Record and preserve the provenance of all system elements/components (inputs, software modules, processes, etc.);

■ Dynamically track the interactions and causal dependencies among cyber system components;

■ Assemble these dependencies into end-to-end system behaviors; and

■ Reason over these behaviors, both forensically and in real-time.

In practice, the program would identify all incoming connections and active processes, learn which are malicious (or at least arbitrary) and move to remediate.

"By automatically or semi-automatically 'connecting the dots' across multiple activities that are individually legitimate but collectively indicate malice or abnormal behavior, TC has the potential to enable the prompt detection of APTs and other cyber threats," the RFP states.

Per many DARPA initiatives, "It is expected that this prototype will provide a starting point for technology transition," sparking a new wave of cybersecurity, according to the RFP. Proposers are warned against offering "evolutionary improvements" to current cybersecurity methods.

Forget the Sony Hack, This Could Be the Biggest Cyber Attack of 2015

Patrick Tucker

December 19, 2014

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Patrick Tucker is technology editor for Defense One. He’s also the author of The Naked Future: What Happens in a World That Anticipates Your Every Move? (Current, 2014). Previously, Tucker was deputy editor for The Futurist, where he served for nine years. Tucker's writing on emerging technology ... Full Bio

On Friday, December 19th, the FBIofficially named North Korea as the party responsible for a cyber attack and email theft against Sony Pictures. The Sony hack saw many studio executives’ sensitive and embarrassing emails leaked online. The hackers threatened to attack theaters on the opening day of the offending film, “The Interview,” and Sony pulled the plug on the movie, effectively censoring a major Hollywood studio. (Sony partially reversed course, allowing the movie to show in 331 independent theaters on Christmas Day and to be streamed online.)

Technology journalists were quick to point out that, even though the cyber attack could be attributable to a nation state actor, it wasn’t particularly sophisticated. Ars Technica’s Sean Gallagher likened it to a “software pipe bomb.” The fallout, of course, was limited. And while President Barack Obama vowed to respond to the attack, he also said it was a mistake for Sony to back down.

“I think all of us have to anticipate occasionally there are going to be breaches like this. They’re going to be costly. They’re going to be serious. We take them with the utmost seriousness. But we can’t start changing our patterns of behavior any more than we stop going to a football game because there might be the possibility of a terrorist attack; any more than Boston didn’t run its marathon this year because of the possibility that somebody might try to cause harm. So, let’s not get into that — that way of doing business,” he said at a White House briefing on Friday.

But according to cyber-security professionals, the Sony hack may be a prelude to a cyber attack on United States infrastructure that could occur in 2015, as a result of a very different, self-inflicted document dump from the Department of Homeland Security in July.

2015: The Year of Aurora?

Here’s the background: On July 3, DHS, which plays “key role” in responding to cyber-attacks on the nation, replied to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request on a malware attack on Google called “Operation Aurora.”

Unfortunately, as Threatpost writer Dennis Fisher reports,DHS officials made a grave error in their response. DHSreleased more than 800 pages of documents related not to Operation Aurora but rather the Aurora Project, a 2007 research effort led by Idaho National Laboratory demonstrating how easy it was to hack elements in power and water systems.

THE CYBER THREAT IN 2015: 10 TWISTS ON HACKERS’ OLD TRICK

By Aliya Sternstein

December 31, 2014 

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Hacking trends are not like fashion fads. They don't go in and out each year. They withstand defenses by advancing, in terms of stealth and scope.

So there will be no 2015 "What’s Hot and What’s Not" list of cyber threats confronting federal agencies.

Instead, here is a list of hacker "Old Faves and New Twists" that feds should be mindful of.

Old Fave #1: Distributed Denial of Service, or DDoS, attacks that shut down agency systems temporarily by bombarding them with bogus traffic 

New Twist: Wiper attacks that destroy and leak government data. A wiper virus allegedly was used against Sony to copy and erase company hard drives.

This development is not new. In 2012, bad guys wielded the so-called Shamoon virus to wipe clean 30,000 employee work stations at Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company.

What is new is the potential magnitude of the devastation, says Dave Aitel, a former NSA computer scientist. "I would say this is the No. 1 threat that U.S. corporations, critical infrastructure, state-local governments and the federal government should be concerned with," he says.

Trend Micro Chief Cybersecurity Officer Tom Kellermann, a former World Bank data risk analyst, puts it bluntly: Now, "hackers burn the house down after burglarizing it.”

Experts still expect DDoS attacks to pose a threat, as they evolve in sophistication. There is a growing underground market for "rent-a-bots,"hordes of hacked computers that criminals can borrow, for a fee, to amplify their attacks, Aitel says. "DDoS extortion and DDoS as cover for a more serious attack," such as data removal, "are just a few updates on an old attack that should be taken seriously going forward," he says. 

Old Fave #2: Malicious insiders that leak data, like ex-federal contractor Edward Snowden and former soldier Chelsea Manning, who both exposed classified intelligence

New Twist: Unwitting insiders that leak data, including third-party contractors that leave network passwords lying around.

"Everybody is worried about service providers, from the HVAC providers to professional services firms," says Alan Raul, lead for Sidley Austin's privacy, data security and information law practice. Target’s HVAC vendor, for example, allegedly fell for a phishing email that stole his passcode to the retailer’s payment system.

Gaza Is Nowhere

Roger Cohen

DEC. 30, 2014 

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/31/opinion/roger-cohen-gaza-is-nowhere.html

GAZA CITY — You trudge into Gaza from a high-tech Israeli facility through a caged walkway that brings you, after about 15 minutes, to a ramshackle Palestinian border post; and then, formalities completed, on you go, through dust and the reek of sewage, past the crumpled buildings and the donkey carts, to arrive at last in the middle of nowhere.

Gaza is nowhere. Very few people go in or out of the 140-square-mile enclave. Most people want to forget about it. The border with Egypt was closed in October. A handful of travelers negotiate the labyrinth of inspections at the Israeli border and proceed into the Jewish state.

I watched a young man passing sand through a sieve as the surface of a road was laid beside the sea in Gaza City. He’d shake the sieve, watch the sand drop through and, finally, tip out the remnants. Again and again he did it, in the dust. He is among the more productively employed of Gaza’s 1.8 million citizens.

International affairs and diplomacy. 

There is another war waiting to happen in Gaza. The last one changed nothing. Hamas rockets are being test-fired. A Palestinian farmer has been shot dead near the border. Tensions simmer. The draft Security Council resolution at the United Nations, championed by the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, seeking a withdrawal of Israeli forces from the West Bank by 2017, amounts to an elaborate sideshow. The real matter of diplomatic urgency going into 2015, for the Palestinian people and the world, is to end the lockdown of Gaza.

“People are mad, frustrated, they have nothing to lose,” Ahmed Yousef, an adviser to the Hamas Gaza leader, Ismail Haniyeh, told me. “We are dying gradually so it is better to die with dignity.”

The only dust-free environment is the compound of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. I went to see its director, Robert Turner. He told me that initial estimates of war damage belittled its extent: 96,000 homes of refugee families (against initial estimates of 42,000) are either destroyed or damaged, and 124,000 houses in all. But very little rebuilding material is available. “There’s a vacuum.” he said.

The supposed reconciliation between Abbas’s Fatah and Hamas has proved worthless. At the hospital, contracts for cleaners and food are not being paid. Hamas and Fatah blame each other. Turner described “a drift toward more radical groups.” None of the causes of the conflict had been addressed. “Fatah and Hamas and Israel can avert a descent into new violence, but I don’t think that window will stay open for long,” he told me.

Nobody wants to talk about Gaza because it reeks of failure — the failure of Israeli withdrawal; the failure of a long-ago election that ushered Hamas to power; the failure to achieve the Palestinian unity necessary for serious peace talks; the failure to prevent repetitive war; the failure of the Arab Spring that led to that sealed Egyptian border; the failure to be coherent about Hamas (negotiated with by Israel to end the war and to secure the release of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit but otherwise viewed as a terrorist group with which negotiation is impossible); the failure to offer decency to 1.8 million trapped human beings.

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FBI Seeks Ethical Hackers to be 'Cyber Special Agents'

Such agents, the FBI said, should have the skills to "conduct multi-faceted investigations of high-tech crimes, including cyber-based terrorism, computer intrusions, online exploitation and major cyber fraud schemes."

BY BECKY YERAK

DECEMBER 30, 20140

(TNS) -- To battle hackers, you have to think like one.

The FBI said Monday it's seeking technology experts — including those with experience in "ethical hacking" — to become "cyber special agents."

"Cyber permeates every aspect of what we do, whether it's counterterrorism, criminal investigations or traditional cyberattacks, as we've seen in the recent past," the FBI said.

North Korea, for example, is at the center of a confrontation with the United States over the hacking of Sony Pictures. The hacking is believed tied to Sony's movie "The Interview" about the assassination of North Korea's leader.

"The FBI seeks highly talented, technically trained individuals who are motivated by the FBI's mission to protect our nation and the American people from the rapidly evolving cyber threat," Robert Anderson Jr., executive assistant director for the bureau's criminal, cyber, response and services branch, said in a statement Monday

In its job post, which is open until Jan. 20, the agency said it has "many vacancies" for cyber special agents.

Such agents, the FBI said, should have the skills to "conduct multi-faceted investigations of high-tech crimes, including cyber-based terrorism, computer intrusions, online exploitation and major cyber fraud schemes."

Preferred backgrounds and work experiences include computer forensics, computer programming and "ethical hacking," according to the job posting. One way to get a resume to stand out at the FBI: Get certified in ethical hacking.

The EC-Council, which provides certification in information security and e-business fields, offers, for example, a "Certified Ethical Hacker" course as a way to get professionals to think like a hacker.

"To master the hacking technologies, you will need to become one," EC-Council says on its website. Students in the council's training will "scan, test, hack and secure their own systems."

Some companies hire ethical hackers to try and bypass their own computer security systems. They aim to locate weak points that could be exploited by malicious hackers.

The annual salary range in the FBI's job posting is $59,340 to $76,568.

Prospective cyber special agents are expected to meet the same threshold as special agents. Key requirements to be a special agent include passing a background check and fitness test. Agents must be at least 23 and no older than 37.

Applicants for the cyber special agents job must also have at least a four-year degree from an accredited college or university. Preferred degrees include applied and computational mathematics; digital and computer forensics; and computer information systems.

How the Internet of Things could transform the value chain

December 2014

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In this interview, the CEO of software company PTC, James Heppelmann, explains how connected products may help companies become more proactive and efficient.

Why does the Internet of Things matter? What’s the value of placing sensors in mining equipment to measure product performance and operating conditions? Or giving “smart pills” to cows to monitor their vital signs? In these short videos, the CEO of computer-software company PTC, James Heppelmann, explains how the network of smart, connected technologies that make up the Internet of Things improves how products are created, operated, and serviced. In addition, he has pointed out that these innovations aren’t concentrated in Silicon Valley: they’re happening in the engineering and service departments of manufacturing companies across the United States, China, and Germany. An edited transcript of Heppelmann’s remarks follows.

Interview transcript

Internet of Things

The term Internet of Things doesn’t actually communicate much. It’s a catchy phrase and we all like it, but it’s not clear what it means. But when we say “smart, connected products,” then I think it becomes a little bit more tangible, and people really understand that much of the excitement here isn’t about the Internet—it’s about the things.

If you step back and say, “Why would people connect things to the Internet? What’s the point?”—I think there are three killer applications. The first is that you can service things better if you can communicate with these things and have feedback loops. You can be proactive. You can be efficient. You can maintain higher degrees of uptime. Better output with lesser input.

The second thing you can do is you can operate these things better—operate them remotely for reasons of safety, efficiency, accessibility, you name it. And the third thing is that you can make them better. You can have feedback loops into the engineering and design processes to understand if the customers use the product like you thought they would. How does the design perform in actual use for the customer? So I think that this will have a transformative effect on the way things are created, operated, and serviced. And a tremendous amount of efficiency and differentiation and value will be created as a result.

How it could affect the value chain

I think the idea of smart, connected products will have a dramatic impact on value chains because we’ve always thought of the value chain as being around the product and that the product was just a dumb stone, if you will, moving through some smart value chain. But now, the product’s actually a first-class participant in its own value chain. It’s talking to its creators in engineering and manufacturing. It’s talking to the people who are supposed to service it. It’s talking to its operators. It’s even talking to the sales and marketing department about what the customer is thinking.

The product becomes, for example, a sensor in the relationship with the customer. And this challenges the conventional concept of CRM. The idea of customer-relationship management is that customers will talk to you about their feelings about your product. And now, in this new world, we’re going to have products that are early-warning devices that tell us about what value the customer is getting or not getting. What’s the degree of utilization? What kind of problems are customers having? What are the opportunities for upsell? When are customers going to need a replacement product, a consumable? You name it. The product becomes a sensor in the relationship with your customer. That will change a lot in terms of how things are created, sold, serviced, operated, and so forth.

What you should do

Making connections: An industry perspective on the Internet of Things

byMark Patel and Jan Veira

December 2014 

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The CEO of semiconductor company CSR, Joep van Beurden, discusses the progress—and growing pains—of the Internet of Things market.

Semiconductor executives are closely monitoring the development of the Internet of Things—in which physical objects are equipped with sensors and other devices that allow them to share and receive data through a network. Examples of applications in this area include smart watches, fitness bands, and home- and industrial-automation tools. Some are predicting a multitrillion-dollar market opportunity. Joep van Beurden, chief executive officer of CSR, a fabless semiconductor company that produces wireless technologies, agrees but notes that the Internet of Things still hasn’t reached its tipping point. “I don’t think it has been overhyped by any means. I just think widespread adoption will happen later than we expected,” he says. In this edited conversation, Mr. van Beurden discusses growth in the Internet of Things market and the implications of this connectivity trend for semiconductor companies.

McKinsey: How would you assess growth in the market for Internet of Things applications relative to the industry’s expectations?

Joep van Beurden: In relative terms, you might say the growth is impressive, but the base is still very small. In absolute size, the market for Internet of Things applications is much smaller than what everyone predicted three or four years ago. Of course, the same sort of thing happened with Bluetooth development in the late 1990s: every year analysts predicted we would see a significant increase in Bluetooth-enabled devices, and every year it didn’t happen—until the early 2000s, when Bluetooth was adopted by leading cell-phone manufacturers and the technology took off. We’re all still waiting for that inflection point with the Internet of Things.

McKinsey: Which applications do you see as having the greatest promise?

Joep van Beurden: It’s hard to predict. Everyone was initially excited about the promise of wearables but, looking at that market a year and a half later, the uptake has been relatively slow—certainly nowhere near the 100-million-plus device market required to bring the Internet of Things to scale. Many companies are hedging their bets across different industries and shipping reference designs and development kits to a variety of players, small and large. Those players are working on innovative ideas in home automation, medical devices, automotive, and other industries. But it’s been a struggle to identify the one Internet of Things application that is going to take off.

McKinsey: What is inhibiting growth in the Internet of Things today?

Joep van Beurden: A lot of analysts have evaluated the potential financial value that Internet of Things applications may create over the next five to ten years—it’s a $300 billion or $15 trillion opportunity, depending on whom you listen to. When you drill down, however, you see that about 10 percent of this value is created by the “things,” while 90 percent comes from connecting these things to the Internet. The Internet of Things is not just about storing information in the cloud; the data only become interesting when you combine them with sensors and analytics. But a certain degree of alignment must happen for those connections to take place and for the Internet of Things to take off. The industry must adopt common standards and business models, and it must address issues relating to privacy and security.

Getting alignment in all these areas is easier said than done. Consider connectivity efforts in healthcare. Having an Internet of Things–based ecosystem in which medical information is stored in the cloud and accessible by individuals and healthcare professionals from anywhere in the world looks good on paper. But the multiple hospitals and healthcare organizations involved will likely use different protocols for exporting information into the cloud. And not all medical institutions and individuals may be interested in sharing their information. There needs to be alignment on how to collect information and from whom, how to port it to the cloud, how to encrypt it, who will access it and how, and so on.

We are not in that aligned world today. It will happen eventually, because the prize is so large, but it will take time.

McKinsey: Semiconductor players are quite far down in the Internet of Things application stack. How important will this network be for semiconductor growth in the coming years?

The Great Cyber Convergence in 2015: AFCEA Speaks

By MICHAEL WARLICK

December 31, 2014

Technology is moving too fast to keep track of everything, but there’s one overarching trend that policymakers must not miss in 2015. Call it “convergence.”

Cybersecurity is no longer its own specialized function for tech geeks to take care of off to one side while the rest of the organization gets on with the real mission. To the contrary, cybersecurity is becoming an increasingly central concern for more and more institutions, from Sony Pictures to the US Army, from Marine Corps drone units to Pentagon cloud computing contractors. Integrating the new technology into operations will require new concepts, sustained funding, and open communications between government and industry — none of which is guaranteed in 2015.

We’ve seen something like this before. Back in the 1990s, organizations dealing with data — with networks, computing, and all things digital — converged with those that dealt with communications — until then an analog business — to create a unified approach to digital communications. It wasn’t easy, but we did it. Now there are positive signs we’re rising to the challenge once again. In 2014, for example, the US Army merged its Cyber Command with the Signal Center at Fort Gordon, creating a new Cyber Center of Excellence to integrate cyber warfare, electronic warfare, and communications.

In fact, all of the military services are beginning to integrate information technology positions — chief of information operations, commander of a cyber unit, and so on — with traditional operational skills such as aviation, intelligence, or artillery, because each military branch must develop the capability to support at least defense cyber operations and, in some cases, cyber attack. Commanders know that failure to stop a cyber threat may lead to mission failure, destruction of critical infrastructure, and even loss of American lives. That means the military must seamlessly integrate cybersecurity into both training and operations.

Consider cloud computing, which grew rapidly in the military in 2014. The combination of ever-larger amounts of data and ever-smaller budgets means that reliance on cloud computing will only increase. But if your data moves to the cloud, you need constant, reliable access to that cloud to do your job — which means you need cybersecurity. The Defense Department must engage closely with cloud service providers to figure out costs, risks, and requirements so the military gets solutions that are both cost-effective and safe.

We also need new ways of looking at Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Long associated with Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR), drones are being increasingly used for other purposes, for example as communications relays to extend line-of-sight radio and data links. Such an “aerial layer” can reduce the military’s dependence on expensive (and potentially vulnerable) satellites. But as UAVs become more common in the skies, we need better command and control networks to keep them and manned aircraft from colliding by accident — and those networks had better be secure against cyber attackers who might make them collide on purpose.

Taking Stock of the Public-Private Partnership in Cybersecurity

Cherian Samuel

December 31, 2014

2014 was a relatively quiet year for India as far as reported cyber security breaches went. Nevertheless, the reported breaches highlighted the continued vulnerability of critical information infrastructure networks to cyber attack. There were reports that hackers had broken into the server of the Airports Authority of India (AAI) and wiped data from an entire server in July 2014. A Pakistani cyber espionage campaign against Indian networks was highlighted in a report by Fireeye in August 2014. Though the researchers could not identify the specific victim organizations, they based their deductions on malware bundled with decoy documents related to Indian issues. The malware sent data back to a US server to “make it seem like the attack originated from a US server.” The government’s digital certificate Certifying Authority (NICCA) had to stop issuing digital certificates after its software was tampered with by unknown entities. And in November 2014, a tranche of Snowden documents released indicated that the UK intelligence agency GCHQ had actively intercepted data from the Reliance undersea cable network at a landing point in the UK.

Elsewhere in the world, most of the attention was focussed on the Sony hack, and particularly on its geopolitical fallout with the United States accusing North Korea of the hack. But this was by no means the most serious cybersecurity breach of 2014, in that nothing was lost by way of payment information. That trophy went to the retail outlet Home Depot, with the hack on that company resulting in almost 56 million credit card details being compromised. Nonetheless, it was the geopolitically motivated acts that continued to garner attention, with the intermittent internet outages in North Korea being seen as a US response. Another American response – the indictment of serving Chinese military personnel by the FBI in a US court for conducting cyber espionage and stealing intellectual property – led to the China’s suspension of the U.S.-China cyber working group meetings. China has also accelerated its efforts to wean itself away from US technology and maximise the use of Chinese technology and Chinese products in sensitive areas.

In this backdrop, the importance of cybersecurity to overall national security cannot be underscored enough, particularly as the government is looking to cyberspace as a major enabler of its many initiatives, from governance to education to financial inclusion. Delivery of many of these services is in partnership with the private sector which makes a close partnership with the private sector also crucial to securing cyberspace. Effective cybersecurity calls for a close partnership between the government in its role as custodian of the nation’s security, and the private sector, in both roles of information infrastructure provider as well as the provider of many critical services.

A Joint Working Group (JWG) on engagement with the private sector on Cyber Security was established in July 2012 under the direction of the Deputy National Security Advisor. The JWG released a report in October 2012 detailing the guiding principles underpinning this exercise and outlining a proposed roadmap for greater cooperation and coordination. Amongst other things, the report called for firming up of an institutional framework for partnership, capacity building, cyber security standards to be established and implemented, and the creation of testing and certification facilities for products. Nearly two years on, while there has been some progress, the roadmap still has many miles left to cover.

With information sharing being crucial to combating cyber threats, the road map called for the establishment of Information Sharing and Analysis Centres (ISACs) in various sectors. ISACs established in critical sectors such as banking, telecommunications and power are in various stages of development but are largely dependent on the nodal agencies/companies that have been identified in the various sectors. Unless the teething problems are identified and resolved, information sharing will only remain a nominal activity.

The Internet of Things: Sizing up the opportunity

byHarald Bauer, Mark Patel, and Jan Veira

December 2014

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This connectivity trend is now recognized as a source of growth for semiconductor players and their customers. Here we consider the opportunities and constraints for components manufacturers.

The semiconductor industry has been able to weather the fallout from the global financial crisis and realize several years of healthy growth—in part because of the widespread adoption of smartphones and tablets, which created demand for mobile and wireless applications. The industry’s average annual growth rate between 2010 and 2013 was about 5 percent. Could the same sort of growth result from widespread adoption of the Internet of Things? Many semiconductor players have been asking themselves just this question.

The Internet of Things refers to the networking of physical objects through the use of embedded sensors, actuators, and other devices that can collect or transmit information about the objects. The data amassed from these devices can then be analyzed to optimize products, services, and operations. Perhaps one of the earliest and best-known applications of such technology has been in the area of energy optimization: sensors deployed across the electricity grid can help utilities remotely monitor energy usage and adjust generation and distribution flows to account for peak times and downtimes. But applications are also being introduced in a number of other industries. Some insurance companies, for example, now offer plans that require drivers to install a sensor in their cars, allowing insurers to base premiums on actual driving behavior rather than projections. And physicians can use the information collected from wireless sensors in their patients’ homes to improve their management of chronic diseases. Through continuous monitoring rather than periodic testing, physicians could reduce their treatment costs by between 10 and 20 percent, according to McKinsey Global Institute research—billions of dollars could be saved in the care of congestive heart failure alone.

In each of these cases, the connected devices that transmit information across the relevant networks rely on innovations from semiconductor players—highly integrated microchip designs, for instance, and very low-power functions in certain applications. The semiconductor companies that can effectively deliver these and other innovations to original-equipment manufacturers, original-device manufacturers, and others that are building Internet of Things products and applications will play an important role in the development of the market. That market, in turn, may represent a significant growth opportunity for semiconductor players.

Indeed, semiconductor executives surveyed in June 2014 as part of our quarterly poll of the components-manufacturing market said the Internet of Things will be the most important source of growth for them over the next several years—more important, for example, than trends in wireless computing or big data. McKinsey Global Institute research supports that belief, estimating that the impact of the Internet of Things on the global economy might be as high as $6.2 trillion by 2025.1 At the same time, the corporate leaders polled admit they lack a clear perspective on the concrete business opportunities in the Internet of Things given the breadth of applications being developed, the potential markets affected—consumer, healthcare, and industrial segments, among others—and the fact that the trend is still nascent.

In this article, we take the pulse of the market for Internet of Things applications and devices. Where along the development curve are the enabling technologies, and where can semiconductor players insert themselves in the evolving ecosystem? We believe components manufacturers may be able to capture significant value primarily by acting as trusted facilitators—it is their silicon, after all, that can enable not just unprecedented connectivity but also long-term innovation across the Internet of Things.

Sizing the opportunity

GRAIL WAR 2050, LAST STAND AT BATTLE SITE ONE

JANUARY 1, 2015 

The nation state had decided not to invest in robotic armies. Autonomous killing machines were beyond their ethics. However, the enemy had no problem building autonomous robotic killing machines.

The enemy robotic land assault caught the nation state by surprise. The enemy forces especially sought to destroy the nation state’s treasure nicknamed “The Grail Project.” The enemy’s battle plan sought to overcome the human defenders at the various Grail Project sites by overwhelming swarms.

The tactical fight went badly against the solely human forces defending the outlying Grail Project sites. The horde of enemy robotics on land, sea and air were the perfect attrition strategy. Soul less killers, mass produced, networked together and built cheaply with advanced 3D printers in secret production facilities were deadly.

The nation state had not pursued the robotic armies but went a different route. HAL and Major Wittmann were the first experimental AI/Human team at training site “One” adjacent to one of the remaining Grail Project sites. They were a prototype weapon – human and AI bonded together as a weapon system team within the tank with a shared neural network. However, this tank was unlike early 21st century tanks. This tank had advanced weapon systems – a tank on technology steroids.

Improving Leader Education: Team Building, Mission Command, and the Command and General Staff Officers Course

by Kevin E. Gentzler

December 30, 2014 

Improving Leader Education: Team Building, Mission Command, and the Command and General Staff Officers Course

When we think of teams we often think of a group of people coming together with a common purpose to win a championship. Perhaps our minds move toward remembering a time when a leader created a team to solve a particularly difficult problem. Teams have become an essential part of organizations that seek success (Cohen & Bailey, 2001). Army leaders have a wide range of reasons for, and methods of, developing teams. In this article I will provide an examination of current thought on how to build a team capable of performing at a high level. This paper examines four elements of teams and teamwork related to organizational-level leader responsibilities within the United States Army. The paper begins with a review of current United States Army doctrine related to team-building. The next element describes the importance of building trust in a successful team-building organization. Trust gives way to a description of the difference between team-building activities and building teams. The final portion of the paper includes brief reviews of different team-building models including a description of the model for building high-performing teams taught at the United States Army Command and General Staff College.

Current Doctrine

The latest Army doctrine has produced a number of changes across the Army. No change, though, has been as far-reaching as the development of Mission Command as the philosophical underpinnings of most Army doctrine. In conjunction with establishing the philosophy of mission command the senior leaders in the Army also published The Mission Command Strategy FY 13-19 which describes various strategic end states (SE). SE -2 states, Commanders and staffs effectively execute Mission Command Warfighting Function tasks. This establishes the link between philosophy and action. It also emphasizes the importance of ensuring each leader understands how to use the philosophical principles to succeed in a complex, ambiguous environment.

Understanding team-building is important to properly understand Mission Command as a philosophy. This is because the first doctrinal principle of Mission Command is centered on team-building - “Build cohesive teams through mutual trust” (Department of the Army, 2012a). The prominence of this principle in a construct afforded the publicity and emphasis of Mission Command displays the importance of teams in the Army today. The Army is no different than other organizations, in this regard. Teams are vital to success in many types of organizations and across many different cultures (Lucas, 2010). However the emphasis of this principle of Mission Command contributes to the implication that leaders who fail to build teams will fail in operating under the Mission Command philosophy. 

The move toward Mission Command or a Mission Command philosophical construct is very important and applicable to many organizations. In his article on team development, Daniel Holden writes, 

”The command and control mindset, a mainstay of traditional organizations, doesn't yield the kind of nimble, responsive results a complex, fast-changing world requires. It (the command and control mindset) depends on hierarchy and a chain of command rather than relationship, dialogue, and trust” (Holden, 2007, p. 20). 

Talent Management, Personal Choice, & Officer Assignments or, How would we get anyone to go to Minot Air Force Base?

https://medium.com/the-bridge/personal-choice-in-officer-assignments-ededecc3c521

The opinions belong to the author alone and do not imply or reflect endorsement by the U.S. Air Force or the U.S. government. 

The military blogosphere is alive with discussion of talent management and retention. Tim Kane’s Bleeding Talent appears to have sparked a wildfire of calls for personnel management reform which to date have gone unanswered. Discussions abound recommending a market-based military assignment system where Air Force officers (or their sister service counterparts) apply for jobs and commanders hire them instead of the current system that pathologically rejects the officers’ desires and commanders’ inputs. In my personal experience, discussion about this possible market-based system immediately and inevitably devolves into the exact same fundamentally flawed question (at least for Air Force personnel):

How are we going to get people to go to Minot?

For those unfamiliar with Minot Air Force Base, it is in North Dakota and, at least according to those who ask that question, is closer to hell than Afghanistan. This article seeks to examine nine common assumptions and claims of those who ask this question and attempts to offer possible implementation methods. 

Assessment: Flawed assumption.

Air National Guard bases throughout the country have people who happily choose (even compete) to live there long-term, even in North Dakota. I’ve heard it’s a nice place from those who have been. Also, although I don’t have data on active duty military members’ location desires regarding Minot, civilians seem very keen on the place. Minot has experienced a 10% population growth per year since 2010. In 2010, the population was 40,000. By 2017, they expect it to be over 60,000. Clearly, there are insane amounts of people who want to go to Minot. 

Claim #2: You might get people to go, but the most talented will congregate at “good” locations.

What is a “good” location? DC? Not for the person who hate the city. Montgomery, AL? Not for the person who loves DC. Destin, FL? OK, that’s probably a “good” location. But, maybe a “good” base is one in which the mission is attractive or the commanders are respected or the quality of life is posh or the base services are solid. Maybe a “good” base is one at which a person can stay for more than two years so their spouse can have a career or their kid can be the high school football star. Maybe “good” means the childcare center is really great or the schools are fantastic or they have free sno-cones in the summer. The definition of a “good” base is different for everyone and is not solely based on location.

Bargaining with the defence services

ByLt Gen Harwant Singh

Date : 01 Jan , 2015

http://www.indiandefencereview.com/news/bargaining-with-the-defence-services/

First it was the then officiating defence minister shri Jaitley, who, during his meeting with a delegation of veterans, told them to lower their demand for One Rank One Pension, (OROP) Now the present defence minister, speaking the same language mentioned that OROP could be considered once this figure is lowered to 80% of what is being demanded. Further he is of the view that pension cannot be hiked with every Pay Commission rise of pay.

…the question haunts us as to why we continues to be so ambivalent about national security on the one hand and on the other continue with our efforts at weakening and demoralizing the military!

Why this bargaining with the soldiers! Little does the defence minister seem to know how badly the soldier in India has, over time, been disadvantaged and soldiering as a profession made so, grievously unattractive. He seems unaware of the fact that veterans are dieing early and to the extent they are financially disadvantaged.

In its very elementary terms and at the cutting edge, national security boils down to two factors, the gun and the man behind the gun. That is, military’s weapons, equipment, defence infrastructure and the quality and morale of the men who wield these instruments of war. On both counts all governments after independence have failed to deliver this most basic of its duties.

Had Pakistan not started the Kashmir war in 1947, Nehru and his government would have, in all probability, done away with the military and relied only on police, as he once famously articulated that India did not need an army and that police could attend to security needs of the country. Eventually, as noted by Jaswant Singh in his book,’ Defending India,’ Nehruvian foreign policy did not leave a legacy of a stable security environment, or even secure frontiers. What it did as a legacy was ambivalence, ambiguity and an uncertain and apprehensive filled future.’

Chinese gave Nehru a lesson or two in 1962, and left him to rue over his slogan of ‘Hindi Chini Bhai Bhai,’ and notions of a new world order. The shocks delivered by the Chinese reduced him to a derelict. Yet subsequent governments did not learn enough. Yes we did scrape through in 1965, and in 1971, were able to exploit Pakistan’s great disadvantage in its Eastern Wing.

Historically India has, over the centuries, neglected national security and suffered an unbroken chain of military defeats, at the hands of invading armies, spread over a period of two thousand years. The last time India won against a foreign army of consequence was in 303 BC when Chandergupta Maurya defeated Seleucus Nicator, Alexander’s general. An over simplification of this complex military situation can have its own pitfalls and lead to inappropriate and invalid conclusions. Yet the question haunts us as to why we continues to be so ambivalent about national security on the one hand and on the other continue with our efforts at weakening and demoralizing the military!

How to Avoid Making the Front Page of the Military Times

By: Joe Byerly

Source Link

This post is part of a series of weekly professional discussions that occur on Twitter among military leaders in the United States and students and professors at Kings College in London. If you’re interested in participating, tweet your response with hashtag #CCLKOW. A new conversation starts every Monday!

We’ve all done it. While standing in line at the AAFES checkout counter, we glance over at the latest edition of the Military Times, and on the front page we see a picture of another fallen leader. We shake our heads in disgust and quickly attribute his or her ethical failure to a lack of values, saying to ourselves, “That will never happen to me!” And while those words may give us assurance that we will never make those mistakes, it’s important to understand that the complexities of a situation may play a much greater role in our decision-making than our personalities.

For example, two military leaders of the opposite sex who work together may never plan on cheating on their spouses. But add alcohol, a conference on the road, and a couple of minor issues in their marriages to the scenario, and these factors may combine to create a night of ethical indiscretion.

Research has shown that situational forces impact our behavior, and that even the smallest of tweaks to the environment can affect our judgment. Put simply, depending on the situation, we may throw our Army Values card out the window. This doesn’t excuse unethical behavior or mean we are victims of circumstance, it just means that we need to be aware that we are all capable of ethical failings and that we can take steps to influence the situation so that the situation doesn’t influence us.

In their book Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, authors Chip and Dan Heath found that it is possible to design an environment in which those behaviors that may lead us to Military Times infamy can not only be altered, but can be avoided all together. In other words, we can set the conditions ahead of time to avoid ethical lapses.

Changing the Situation

‘The Tragedy of the American Military’ is the latest attempt to define the Pentagon’s troubles

By Dan Lamothe 

December 30 

Source Link

A U.S. soldier is shown in this April 2014 file photo walking next to the razor wire-topped fence at the abandoned “Camp X-Ray” detention facility at the U.S. Naval Station in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. AFP PHOTO/MLADEN ANTONOVMLADEN ANTONOV/AFP/Getty Images 

The Atlantic magazine has unveiled a new cover story bluntly titled “The Tragedy of the American Military.” Written by James Fallows, it explores the problems and culture of the U.S. military after more than 13 years of war, and what it might take to fix them. 

In particular, Fallows targets the “chickenhawk nation” that has sent its troops into combat without clear strategies, weapons acquisition programs that are expensive and politically connected, and an American public that is largely disconnected from the wars. Fallows also reports on the findings of a commission that President Obama requested in 2011 to examine how the Pentagon could best be reformed. 

The commission, headed by former Sen. Gary Hart (D.-Colo.), made a series of recommendations that will be familiar to those following defense policy in Washington. It sought the creation of another panel to assess the lessons learned in Iraq and Afghanistan, a separate effort to determine how the decision-making process for the use of military force should work in the future, and for the president himself to help bridge the gap between those who have served and the rest of American society. 

“Barack Obama, busy on other fronts, had no time for this,” wrote Fallows, who served in the Carter administration. “The rest of us should make time, if we hope to choose our wars more wisely, and win them.” 

The piece has created buzz on social media, in part because of the senior officials and famous academics quoted in it. But it’s the latest in a long line of journalism this year that grapples with how the military should reassess and reinvent itself following wars that have cost billions of dollars and thousands of American lives, without many clear victories. 

In one recent example, the Military Times newspapers published a series of stories relying heavily on a poll of 2,300 active-duty troops. The articles described a military in turmoil as it adjusts to changes like the end of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that banned gay men and women from serving openly in the military and the integration of women in more ground combat units. 

The Military Times stories also highlighted plummeting optimism among those surveyed in the future of Afghanistan and significant drops in morale and satisfaction with serving. Contributing factors: There are now fewer opportunities to prove oneself while deployed and a variety of cuts to special-duty pay and other financial incentives to which troops had grown accustomed. 

Ending A War Is Difficult, But Harder Still Is Building Peace

BY CHRISTOPHER HOLSHEK

DECEMBER 30, 2014 

Ending a war is difficult, but harder still is the work of building peace. And soldiers shouldn't be doing it. 

Christopher Holshek, a retired U.S. Army civil affairs colonel, is a senior fellow at the Alliance for Peacebuilding and a member of the leadership council of the Veterans for Smart Power. 

For more than two years, the African Union Mission to Somalia (AMISOM) has tried to carve out modicums of peace and stability that might lead the country out of the violence that has shredded it for more than two decades. AMISOM has sought to protect civilians from IEDs laid by al-Shabab, the militant Islamist group, and its sympathizers, and to improve essential public services such as water, education, roads, bridges, and other infrastructure. AMISOM hopes to “provide an enabling environment” for the United Nations, civilian organizations, and commercial enterprises to come in and finish the work of building peace.

The idea behind the mission has been to address why the enemy exists rather than who it is, Lt. Col. Paddy Ankunda, a Ugandan officer who commanded forces in Somalia, told me after his presentation in late November at the Swedish Armed Forces International Academy on AMISOM’s civil-military programs. But while AMISOM has made major gains, there’s only so much its military forces can do.

The question that Ankunda, along with many others, is asking now is: What next? It’s a question that has perplexed armies, governments, and international organizations around the world in many post-conflict situations and security crises. (The collapse of Iraq and the unsteady future looming in Afghanistan are testaments to the unsatisfactory answers the United States found to it.) It is the essential question in determining whether the blood and treasure spent to bring about peace were worth it. In its “Decade of War” study, the Department of Defense (DOD) identified the American experience in this predicament as a “failure to adequately plan and resource strategic and operational transitions,” characterized by expectations inconsistent with the reality of civilian partners or with host nation capabilities; poor training; a lack of unity of effort; and, of course, the failure to understand the operational environment.

That transitions have been so persistently problematic speaks to a systemic failure in Washington and elsewhere to take peace as seriously as war — in programs, budgets, and authorities as much as in policy statements. Diplomacy and development agencies continue, for instance, to be dumping grounds for political hirelings.

In Somalia, there is the typical problem of not having nearly enough civilians to take over development and conflict transformation from AMISOM. The U.N. Assistance Mission in Somalia (UNSOM), the parallel political effort to AMISOM’s peacekeeping mission, has a staff of less than 100 civilians, barely the size of one of AMISOM’s scores of infantry companies. Despite the U.N. organization’s ambitious mandate to help the country’s first national government in 20 years with “peace, security, and nation-building,” culminating in elections in 2016, the civilian capacity of the U.N. to grab the baton from AMISOM is woefully insufficient. The danger, as in most post-conflict situations, is that “if the international community doesn’t get there in a big way soon and relieve AMISOM of work it cannot sustain indefinitely, the situation in Somalia could all slide back into what we had just a short time ago,” says Ankunda.

Taking on good, bad, all Talibans

Suhasini Haidar

January 2, 2015 

Despite a change in mood in Pakistan after the Peshawar massacre, India cannot afford to be complacent given that the network of the various ‘Talibans’ is more united and synchronised than ever, and benefits from the differences between South Asian neighbours

In its multi-point National Action Plan against terror, Pakistan’s government and military has envisaged a plan more comprehensive than any other in the past 20 years. It was in 1994 that the Taliban first emerged to take power in Kandahar, funded and trained by Pakistani officials, and will be full circle for the country if its leaders go ahead with the ambitious course laid out in the plan. The steps include the establishment of fast-track anti-terror courts, a crackdown on banned organisations and terrorists and choking their finances, disarming all militia, and the regulation of madrassas that indoctrinate them.

Pakistan has made such declarations before. The first was when it became a “partner” in the war on terror in 2001 and agreed to look for Osama bin Laden, and again in 2002, when President Pervez Musharraf announced a crackdown on anti-India groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM). Neither of those pronouncements came to much, but there is still reason to hope that the new announcement recognises that the people of Pakistan want a decisive turn after the massacre of over 130 schoolchildren in Peshawar. It is now a battle for Pakistan’s soul, one made even more complicated by the fact that the perpetrators of this diabolical operation once trained alongside the Afghan Taliban in a war in which Pakistan was once a prime mover.

The many Talibans

Much has changed since those days, in the 1990s, when the Taliban claimed Kabul, and welcomed every kind of jihadigroup into the country, and some of those fighters were given access to Pakistan’s borders with India, so as to fight in Kashmir. A distinction between “good Taliban” and “bad Taliban” has come up between the Afghan Taliban groups and the Pakistani Taliban who target the Pakistani military and civilians. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s statement that there will now be no good or bad Taliban is welcome for most Pakistanis, but the euphemisms of good and bad are only a more visible part of the threat they face from the Taliban. It is important that Pakistan’s leaders recognise the other Taliban threats today, in a self-destructive war they have already squandered too much time on, and after Mr. Sharif has committed to fighting “All the Talibans”.

To begin with, the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistani Taliban, as the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) that carried out the Peshawar massacre now represents, weren’t always separate entities. In 2008, when the TTP first came up under Baitullah Mehsud, its chief patron was Mullah Omar, the chief of the Taliban. Mehsud himself had been very close to the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, and declared a governor by Mullah Omar in 2004 before five major Taliban commanders, including men responsible for the death of Benazir Bhutto and assassination attempts on Mr. Hamid Karzai and Gen. Musharraf. Therefore, it is baffling how the narrative today has become one of Pakistan protecting the Afghan Taliban, while Pakistan accuses Afghanistan of sheltering TTP leaders and other members of the Pakistan Taliban.