The Army Study Center, Center of Thought of reference of the military terrestrial component1, launches the first civil and military studies project in the field of cyber defense: "The development of the cyber capability of the army". The aim of the project is to implement the existing capabilities in the field of cyber defense and cyber security of the Italian Army.
The interdisciplinary pool, made up of military and civilian professionals in the sector, at the end of a calendar year, will produce a blue paper which will be delivered during a formal event in the presence of senior military, political and legislative leaders.
The objective of the ambitious project is to promote cyber knowledge, organizing meetings and seminars aimed at the various actors involved, also to promote the cyber education of future generations.
The team consists of telecommunications engineers, cyber experts, technicians, military personnel, academics and industry experts from Oracle, Leonardo, CISCO and Engineering. Researchers and analysts have been at work for some months now in order to identify future scenarios of international crisis or any disruptive events that could lead to future cyber-wars.
The offensive and defensive capabilities of potential competitors are bound to increase as fast as we develop new technologies. Hence the need to provide for a system of strong collaboration between the military and civilian world.
The aim of the Army Study Center, in promoting the Cyber project, is to promote knowledge and awareness in the sector, identifying the cyber capabilities (defensive and offensive) necessary for the army of the future (internal and / or external), shortly and medium term, indicating the main elements to be considered for long-term development.
The object of the study is also to understand how to proceed in developing the necessary capabilities, in collaboration with all national actors (national, international institutions, universities and industry), identifying capabilities related to disruption technologies to be strengthened as they are fundamental for the cyber domain. In fact, it is essential to prepare a reference model and an effective plan of action to operate in the military and civilian fields, in order to shorten response times as much as possible and probe defensive and offensive capabilities, necessary for the army of the future. Cyberspace has no borders, and so neither are the threats that populate it, so it is necessary to prepare: “si vis pacem, para bellum”.
In Warsaw, in 2016, NATO recognized the cyber space as the fifth operational domain. Hybrid warfare is in all respects a complex war that presupposes the combined use of hidden tactics, cyber crime, cyber espionage, cyber terrorism and cyber warfare.
Cyber aggression represents a low-cost attack, with excellent results in terms of cost-benefit opportunities (for the attacker, of course), making it even difficult to establish the attacker with certainty. Critical infrastructures, banks, schools, hospitals, networks are today real strategic objectives of national interest.
Future technological developments are of course difficult to predict, but it is from the limits that we intend to take the first steps in order to propose the most suitable solution for the use and consumption of the legislator and the administration, so that it can measure itself against current and future criticalities.
And if it still does not seem clear to us how the next technologies will insist on our life and our safety, the head of the team, Alessandro Rugolo, invites us to imagine one of the future operational scenarios considered: Try to think for a moment that your every action, starting from when you check your email online, shake your social networks or enter your CV on a platform, is carefully profiled (this is the correct term) by a powerful algorithm, capable of making you the subject of worse, targeted promotion campaigns influence your thinking, perhaps during the election campaign, by sending you news, posts and partial testimonies. Try to imagine that major emerging and non-emerging international powers have long invested funds and energy with the sole intent of guaranteeing cyber dominance. Consider the applications of 5G, the high use of the electromagnetic spectrum, the growth of the IoT, the different applications of artificial intelligence. Think of quantum computers, synthetic DNA and, again, the consequences of high connectivity, the interdependence of weapon systems and computer networks, the difficulty of clearly identifying your opponent and the consequent difficulty of predicting his moves?
Does it scare you? And what would you say if I told you that the future has already arrived?
