Cyber Innovation Warfare center will pair industry side-by-side with operators

BALTIMORE — US Cyber Command’s new Cyber Warfare Innovation Center will pair operators and members of industry side by side in order to drive faster capabilities and tactics, and bridge the so-called valley of death.

“For too long, prototypes developed by industry have withered in the so-called valley of death, failing to transition to operational use. We do not have the luxury of time anymore to let good technology sit on the shelf,” Katie Sutton, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Cyber Policy, said here at the TechNet Cyber conference today. “The Cyber Innovation Warfare Center, or the CWIC, will be our proving ground, a collaborative environment where operators and industry will sit side by side to test new concepts against realistic threats and operational scenarios.”

CWIC is one of three enabling organizations under the so-called CYBERCOM 2.0 plan, the department’s push to improve how cyber forces are generated from the services to the command. The other two are a Cyber Talent Management Organization and an Advanced Cyber Training and Education Center.

Sutton said the organization won’t be a traditional brick and mortar facility, but is more a concept for fostering better innovation.

“The CWIC will bring our warfighters and industry developers into the same room to build and iterate together based on the real-world operator feedback,” she said. “By forging this direct link between those who build the tools and those who wield them, we ensure that our best innovations actually make it to the fight and onto the cyber battlefield.”

Speaking to Breaking Defense following her remarks, Sutton declined to offer exact specifics on CWIC’s stand up, noting it is not starting from scratch. Rather, the concept was already happening to a degree and now the department is trying to refocus, scale and grow it, with elements of the concept already operational.

Sutton said the goal is for the center to feed tactics and requirements to the acquisition pipeline, known as the CYBERCOM J9, who will work to build and field them.

“It brings in not just the ability to quickly interface with industry and do those prototypes and pilots to what’s going to be most operationally relevant, but also, what are we going to have to do to really operationalize that tool,” she told Breaking Defense. “I talk a lot about the non-materiel aspects with these tools … A tool is not just going to make us do a task better, it may change how we fight, it may change what our TTPs are, what our doctrine is. We’ll have to identify what training we would need to support that tool. What kind of data? Are we going to need policy changes?”

The CWIC won’t necessarily have the wherewithal to develop the capabilities, given it’s not a program office, Brig. Gen. Reid Novotny, Cyber Force Generation Lead at CYBERCOM, told Breaking Defense at the conference this week. It will feed those to the J9, instead.

Officals said they want to a faster feedback loop to impact operations.

“The Cyber Innovation Worker Center under CYBERCOM 2.0 is intended to … increase that partnership or bring those critical aspects much closer together, as close as possible, so that the innovation from the private sector directly impacts our war fighting capability as soon as possible,” CMSgt Bryan Neumann, who most recently was the Senior Enlisted Advisor to the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Cyber Policy, at the conference today.