http://www.army.mil/article/145106/_Red_Team__exposing_Army_technology_vulnerabilities/
By David Vergun
Army.mil
March 24, 2015
SPRINGFIELD, Va. (March 24, 2015) -- Operations, a few years ago in
Afghanistan, were a wake-up call to the Army's force-protection
vulnerabilities, said Mary J. Miller, deputy assistant secretary of the
Army for research and technology.
Two small outposts, Camps Keating and Wanat, were nearly overrun, she
said, speaking at a National Defense Industrial Association-sponsored Army
Science and Technology seminar here, March 24.
Although the Army placed a lot of capabilities in those outposts, there
were "collections of pieces that didn't integrate well together and the
enemy watching," she said. "They found and exploited those seams" in
methods and technologies.
That wake-up call was heard by the Army's nearly 12,000 scientists and
engineers, some of whom were tasked to ensure something like that would
never happen again, she said.
Therein was born the Deployable Force Protection Adapter Red Team, or just
Red Team for short.
"Red Team must be a really fun place to work because they get to break all
the rules," she said. "They take on the persona of the adaptive enemy. We
give them a lot of latitude - as much as the lawyers would allow."
They are instructed to think and act like the enemy and, they can even go
outside the rules of engagement in gaming vulnerabilities, she said.
Red Team took the mission and ran with it, devising "non-conventional ways
of coming at our technology and exploiting 'black hat' capabilities," she
said. It was no-holds barred.
They exposed weaknesses in the armor, illustrating that "we as scientists
and engineers think we have a great solution and ha-ha moments, thinking
Soldiers will love this" new piece of gear. Then the Red Team would show
up and show all the weaknesses, she said, so "we started solving those
problems."
From that point on, anything deployed to small forward operating
outposts
of 300 people or less gets a Red Team going over from "the construct of
the operational perspective, technology perspective, and how we could
integrate it in such a way not to create inherent vulnerabilities. It's
been very effective."
The Red Team approach was so successful, she said, that they began gaming
vulnerabilities in systems very early in the materiel development
lifecycle, she said.
ARMY OF 2040
As the Red Team was doing its work, personnel, under the leadership of
Heidi Shyu, assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and
technology, started looking beyond the five-year program objective
memorandum, or planning cycle, she said.
Shyu used her industry experience as an engineer to develop long-range
investment requirements, or LIRA, which look 30 years out into the future,
Miller said.
Using LIRA as a blueprint, the Army looked at total lifecycle costs of all
its programs, from research and development to production and sustainment.
The picture illuminated funding problems in distant years, meaning after
the five-year cycle, where the Army had exceeded its investment
capabilities.
This in turn, she said, forced planners, budgeters and others to take a
realistic look at costs and programs and this led to some interesting and
sometimes heated exchanges, as everyone was in favor of eliminating
programs, as long as it was not their own.
In the end, the planners had to get real and ask themselves what they
needed to give up and what the tradeoffs and cost-benefits were, she said.
The data showed the stark reality, especially as modernization is funded
at 40 percent less this year than what was planned three years ago.
SCI FI PLANNING
But Shyu was not yet completely satisfied, Miller said. So she gathered a
group of science fiction writers, not the ones who just want to
sensationalize, but those who weave a story grounded in science and
physics.
They were asked to help the Army identify the future environment. Their
predictions were then collected and a trend analysis was conducted to see
converging and diverging viewpoints. Then, that information was
crowd-sourced with industry and academia and then war-gamed. Miller said
that in turn caught the interest of Army Training and Doctrine Command,
which tries to forecast the battlefield of the future.
COLLABORATIONS
The Army science and research community does not exist in a vacuum, Miller
said. They collaborate with sister services and the Defense Department to
come up with joint solutions and to avoid repeating each others work.
Miller gave a shout-out to Dick Urban, an analyst from the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, who spoke in a seminar just
before hers. She said the Army leverages and exploits their work as they
do the Army's.
Urban said when a person does a Google search, the sum of all the results
that come up are only 5 percent of the Internet. The other 95 percent is
"dark" or "black." He said DARPA is looking to see that 95 percent, which
would be of use to Army cyber efforts.
As well, DARPA is trying to come up with a programming language for
scientists who are not programmers so they can speed up their research
work without having to find someone versed in C++ or some other language.
That would help scientists at the Army Research Lab and other Army
research facilities.
To protect Soldiers on the ground, DARPA will test the feasibility of
launching tiny 100-pound satellites from jet aircraft, saving weeks or
months of time waiting for a launch window at one of the few space launch
sites.
On the topic of space, Miller said her Army researchers are exploring ways
to create "pseudo-satellites" operated from the ground or aircraft, that
can be deployed should the GPS system crash or fail in a worst-case
scenario.
(For more ARNEWS stories, visit www.army.mil/ARNEWS, or Facebook at
www.facebook.com/ArmyNewsService, or Twitter @ArmyNewsService)
--
Evident.io - Continuous Cloud Security for AWS.
Identify and mitigate risks in 5 minutes or less.
Sign up for a free trial @ https://evident.io/
