By Secretary of the Air Force Public Affairs, / Published
March 31, 2015
WASHINGTON, (AFNS) -- Chief of Staff of the Air Force
General Mark A. Welsh III signed a memorandum on March 20, establishing Task
Force Cyber Secure, to address challenges of the cyberspace domain in
synchronization, operations and governance within the Air Force and with those
organizations it supports.
"This task force is fundamental to understanding the
inherent risks within the cyberspace domain and instituting a culture change,
in which our Airmen realize the impact cybersecurity has on all the Air Force
core missions,” Welsh said.
Lt. Gen. Bill Bender, the Secretary of the Air Force chief
of information dominance and chief information officer, outlined three main
focus areas the task force will be responsible for.
“The task force will diagnose the extent of the cyber threat
and the vulnerabilities that currently impact our core missions and will plan
to develop a risk management plan that will allow the Air Force to fly, fight
and win in a cyber-contested environment,” Bender said. “Finally, the task
force will recommend investment priorities to the SECAF and CSAF for how best
to address the cybersecurity challenges.
“The Air Force
focuses the majority of the cybersecurity effort on protecting the information
technology we’ve always protected the last 20 years, but that’s only 20 percent
of the problem,” Bender continued. He envisions a "comprehensive,
enterprise-level look at the cyber threat as it relates to everything outside
of that 20 percent."
The concepts of
mission assurance and cybersecurity were addressed and studied across the
Department of Defense and the Air Force across multiple functional lines and
major commands. A top priority of Task Force Cyber Secure is to be inclusive of
all stakeholders who are working this cyber challenge already and to begin
synchronizing and coordinating efforts for securing and mitigating operational
risk to the most critical nodes and “centers of gravity.”
Pete Kim, the Cyberspace Operations and Warfighting
Integration acting director, will lead the daily task force operations and
direct an organization that will include cyberspace stakeholders throughout the
Air Force.
“Many efforts for securing the core missions in cyberspace
are currently distributed across multiple organizations and commands throughout
the Air Force,” Kim said. “We have great leaders moving out on fixing ‘the
problem’ within their functional areas, but the time is right to look into
opportunities to synchronize and maximize resources at the corporate level in
order to establish a foundational, consistent enterprise-wide approach in the
future.”
The task force
efforts will inform Air Force strategic planning and programming for fiscal
year 2017 and beyond. It will provide a governance plan for Air Force corporate
board management and synchronization of cybersecurity investments of the future
in the planning, programming, budgeting and execution (PPBE) process. The task
force will also integrate multiple efforts and studies, attempting to address
cybersecurity across the Air Force, focusing on Air Force core missions and
provide a prioritized cybersecurity investment strategy for SECAF and CSAF.
“We’re already seeing
benefits of a focused task force standing up to address the cybersecurity
challenge,” Bender said. “At a practical level, sharing information across the
Air Force, education on the seriousness of the threat and the vulnerabilities,
and connecting the dots are the benefits I’m beginning to see. We are also
connecting with academia and commercial industry because we recognize their
contributions as significant force multipliers in this domain.”
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