Ask Lt. Col. John Bircher About Cyber Warfare Concepts 236
The Air Force is not the only U.S. military branch trying to come to grips with the electronic side of warfare, both current and future. The U.S. Army Computer Network Operations (CNO)-Electronic Warfare (EW) Proponent (USACEWP), located at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas — home to the U.S. Army's Combined Arms Center — serves as the Army's hub for cyber-electronic concepts and capabilities. This is the organization responsible for developing doctrine, materiel and training to prepare the Army for cyber-electronic engagements. For example, USACEWP has developed training teams to ensure that U.S. commanders and soldiers around the world are fully informed of cyber-electronic capabilities at their disposal. Leading the Proponent's Futures branch is Lt. Col John "Chip" Bircher; Bircher entered the Army in 1989 as an Infantry officer, then served in various command and staff positions, most recently Information Operations (IO). He was the IO Chief for the 25th Infantry Division (Light), Hawaii, and Director of IO for Combined Joint Task Force -76, Bagram, Afghanistan. If you want to know more about the realities and challenges that face an armed, global IT department in a time when electronic warfare is ever more important and dangerous, now's your chance to ask Lt. Col. Bircher some questions. We'll pass on the highest-moderated questions for Lt. Col. Bircher to answer. Usual Slashdot interview rules apply.
Re:Technique? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Interview Question (Score:5, Insightful)
You made a typo there. Here's a correction:
With the political tilt as it is, a large part of the software development community is likely inclined against helping politicians use the Army as a tool to fight wars which harm our country.
Re:For us geeks who'd be sitting behind a computer (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Interview Question (Score:3, Insightful)
If you mean to say lots of us don't support invading foreign countries without causus belli, or we start complaining at the suspension of habeas corpus and being jailed indefinitely without charges, then you're confusing "helping our country" with supporting the government.
Defending Liberty and Supporting our President are not necessarily the same thing.
Re:Recruitment (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Go to the recruiter and say "I want to do XYZ". If you are lucky you will get a recruiter that isn't a slimeball and will actually help you do specifically what you want. Hit or miss here, some are really amazing folks that know how to work things, others are asshats that know how to sleaze kids in. Do your research first. Non military and recruiters are about the last people you want to talk to for "how it really is" information, one is clueless and comes up with nonsense stories, the other has a clue and comes up with nonsense stories. Currently active or recently retired people will have the best information, though it will frequently be a bit dated. It is best to refine your questions with them and then ask specific pointed questions of the recruiters.
2. Go to the MEPS (Military Entrance Processing Station I believe) and do the tests. ASVAB being the big one here, all branches use these scores in one way or another to determine what jobs you are qualified to do. This isn't exactly a hard test by any stretch, more than anything it gives the military a guess as to how complex of a school they can send you to without wasting money on you failing out. You will also go through the whole physical thing, eye tests, piss tests, blah blah blah.
3. Go to the career manager folks. Each branch has a different name for them and this part will typically happen at the MEPS. Again, much like recruiters they are hit or miss. However, they have a bit better of an excuse. They aren't there to convince you to join so much as for you to tell them what specific job you want to do. These are the people that look up your scores and compare that to job requirements and then check for openings in that job. They process tons of people per day, many of which have no idea what they want to do other than "work on computers" or "fix planes" or whatever. The key to coming out of this is to do your research well before you go. Narrow down what you want to do to a few jobs and know their code for whichever branch you are talking to. These people are experts at human resources stuff, not the details of whatever career you want. They probably won't be able to answer much unless they came from that career or know someone in that career. The best bet is to get your recruiter to arrange some time to meet people in the career field you are interested in and get the answers that way.
4. Go to basic training. Everyone goes, no way past that.
5. Go to your school. Each branch does this a bit differently, but after basic training you will go to the school for your chosen job. This could be 2 weeks long, it could be 2 years long, all depends on the job.
6. Pray for your assignment. Now you are in, you have the career you want, and now it is a roll of the dice. You go where they need your career, period. There are a number of programs to finagle your way around to places you want, but don't expect any of them to help you much in your early days. Your best bet here is to do a damned good job, don't be a fuckup, and let your supervisors know what your goals are. Good supervisors will help you get where you want to go. Above all else, don't expect it to happen quickly.
National Guard units basically follow the same steps, except for the assignment process. With the Guard you will be joining a specific unit when you enlist. So you will already know exactly what your assignment will be. The Guard units are able to do much more targeted recruiting because of this. The Active Duty world you kind of go into a big pot and stay there unless you managed to get into special assignments (usually by being really good at what you do and leaning forward for opportunities).
Peace is a valid concept (Score:5, Insightful)
If you think it is possible to have a world where there are no armed forces, you are not adovcating for a peaceful world when you say that. You are in fact unknowingly advocating for a more brutal, injust and violent world. This is so simply because you have not yet made yourself acquainted with, or made peace with (no irony intended), certain ugly but unremovable aspects of fundamental human nature.
Or, you could try to remove those aspects of human nature in the name of peace. This sets you down the road to autocracy, and makes you an enemy of free will and free expression. If you wish to continue to respect the notion of free will and free expression, you must understand why a force of arms is always necessary to be at the ready, in the name of peace.
Re:Legal Ramifications (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Recruitment (Score:2, Insightful)
If you look at past interviews with the Air Force and Army, you will find that they work with a significant number of contractors. So you do not need to be "in the armed forces" to work on anti-cyber terrorism.
Obviously you need to be able to get a security clearance.
What value does doign it in the Army add? (Score:5, Insightful)
Would you agree that a special, single cyber-defense branch should be created to assist all branches of the military as well as non-military?
Generally the armed forces are never known for technical prowess. (They are more consumers than creators) The role of creation comes from contractors. Why shouldn't we rely on contractors to perform these functions when contractors already obtain top-secret clearances? Contractors compete for projects which ensures a level of cost limitation (lets face it, Cost+ rips off the tax payer), continual advancement (beyond what the enemy throws at us).
Why should the armed forces be doing this in-house?
Re:Interview Question (Score:3, Insightful)
Probably he'd rather recruit people who will obey orders to the best of their abilities as long as those orders are legal. I don't think the military is interested in people who want an option to leave if they don't agree with their orders.
There are people who don't make good soldiers. I'm one of them. That doesn't mean that out of a population of ~300 million he won't find the people he's looking for.
Making defenses availible to the tax payers (Score:5, Insightful)
What limitations or rules would you use for release of such information?
Re:Legal Ramifications (Score:3, Insightful)
I can answer this. (Score:1, Insightful)
Eventually, the bids have to go out to the government in an unclassified area, and occasionally businesses have to collaborate with each other through unclassified channels.
While it would be possible to keep ALL classified stuff and ALL unclassified stuff on totally separate networks, some business people work in both areas enough that this becomes inconvenient. So they put them together out of pure laziness. Time is money, after all.
Now, if a classified system that is purely for a functional use (i.e. weapons systems, intelligence gathering, satellite guidance, etc.) ended up on the open internet, that would be retarded.
Re:Recruitment (Score:5, Insightful)
"But the recruiter promised me" means absolutely nothing.
If it isn't in writing, don't expect it to happen.
The corollary to this is: if it is in writing and you have to sue, at best expect a Pyrrhic victory.
your model of human nature is invalid (Score:3, Insightful)
without understanding this simple concept, your opinions, that you hold in great regard, are simply dysfunctional, and yet you cling to them anyway
how very egotistical of you
Re:What value does doign it in the Army add? (Score:2, Insightful)
Traditionally, the armed forces are separated by attack mediums or "turfs". Air force is obviously in the air, Navy is in the water, Army takes the land. The Marines seemed to bridge the water-land gap early on, though now they seem like some weird hybrid that is most defined by their crazy proud human-shield machismo. They all have devolved into overlapping hybrids by now, to varying degrees, but they are still defined by their central turf.
It makes sense that a new turf requires a new branch -- for now let's call them Infosec (I know, it's taken, but cyber-blah just makes me think of a bunch of half-skinned Arnie Terminators wandering around using IE). It makes sense to overlap efforts a bit (beneficial competition), but Infosec should definitely be the first stop at the Pentagon for any big network hacking jobs.
Reminds me of Barack Obama's proposition for a Federal CTO. I wonder if he's thinking of adding a similar position to the Pentagon as well?
Egads! Where to start? (Score:4, Insightful)
Ever watch a mountain lion kill a deer, eat it's fill, then wander off to let the bulk of the deer rot? I have. How about dogs that are not fenced in killing cats for fun, or wildlife? Yep, seen that too...many times. How about the cats killing stuff and bringing it home as a trophy? Yep, all the time again.
You have no clue here on this subject.
"Oh, and btw. I don't really care what anyone thinks about it." and (in the same paragraph) "But I'd really love to see more people discussing peace rather than war."
So, you don't care what anyone else thinks about it, just what you think is important. Right.
The rest of your clueless diatribe is not even worth discussing, so crawl back into your mom's basement and use some of that internet time to get at least a LITTLE education instead of trolling forums, you will benefit from it tremendously.
Re:Why so many directly connected networks at all? (Score:1, Insightful)
Do you think the department of Energy is going to wire their own dedicated fiber to connect all their sites? Department of transportation? Boeing? General Electric? If they decide to share secure networks it just increases the risk, because one breach could compromise every network.
They may have a leased line, which isn't logically connected to the internet. But it's still going through switches that are also carrying other networks traffic. That switch may not even carry internet traffic (but one of it's other customers is on internet). The site thinks it's secure but if that switch gets broken into, it's all over. There were recent slashdot articles about counterfeit cisco equipment, who knows what kind of vulnerabilities they may have.
Lots of sites also need to be able to move information from their secure side down to their internet network, or vice versa. Even if you have them burn a CD, get scanned, etc it's still a vulnerability. The problem with completely airgapped networks is you need a lot of people whose only job is to move data between networks.
Also networks may not be tracking their equipment well enough. Someone moves desks and tries to setup their computer, plugging a phone line into a modem on their secure machine. That box could be sitting there for years before someone notices. That one gateway compromises their network.
The job of security is to find that hole, that mislaid cable, bad gateway, flawed encryption. It's hard work, networks are always changing. The job of intruder is to search for that same flaw.