“If it’s a hurricane, [at the Defense Department], they’ve got the mission assignments. They know, ‘OK, we’ve got to send people to fill sandbags,'” DHS’s Jeanette Manfra explained. For cyber responses, she said, “that part is not mature enough.”

It’s one small test for a robot, one tactical leap for robot-kind.

“Kill webs,” not kill chains. Instead of exquisite platforms like the F-35 fighter, exquisite functional technology nodes (such as an advanced infrared sensor) that can be mixed and matched via AI-enhanced networks.

“In our defeat-ISIS activities, we’ve had a struggle and presently continue to struggle with the challenge of open source and publicly available information, and how we leverage that to make it truly useful for the warfighter,” Jospeh Votel, former head of both Special Operations Command and Central Command.

“The average time it takes to discover a data breach is about six months,” said Hickey, a deputy assistant attorney general at the Justice Department specializing in cybersecurity and China. By the time you realize you’ve been hacked, it’s too late to “hack back” and shut down your attacker.

NATIONAL HARBOUR: A key capability the Defense Department has relied on since the late Andy Marshall invented it — Net Assessment — is coming to the Intelligence Community. But wait, you say. Doesn’t the National Intelligence Council do long range strategic analysis? Well, not nearly as far out as Net Assessment does, which is 20… Keep reading →

“How do I even know what’s normal and what’s abnormal so I can detect anomalies? We simply don’t know,” says Dean Souleles, chief technology advisor for the Director of National Intelligence.

Enabling multi-domain command and control (MDC2) is “how the Air Force becomes the quarterback, the play-caller of the joint warfighting force,” says Acting Air Force Secretary Matt Donovan.

Textron is not just betting it will win the Next Generation Squad Weapons contract: It’s betting the Army will want to start buying in bulk ASAP. That’s not a bad bet.

Air Force Maj. Gen. Stephen Whiting is the new head of SPACECOM’s Combined Force Space Component Command; Gen. Tom James leads the new Joint Task Force Space Defense.