Navy wants more offensive, ‘expeditionary’ cyber capabilities

WASHINGTON — The Navy’s cyber advisor is looking for more tools from industry to conduct offensive cyber operations at the tactical edge, demonstrating a significant development and maturation of the application of cyber capabilities.

“What I would offer to industry … if you are interested in talking about expeditionary cyber, cyber at the tactical edge, particularly offensive or capabilities that support offense, please come talk to me. I would love to hear more from industry about expeditionary cyber capabilities,” Anne Marie Schumann, principal cyber advisor for the Department of the Navy, said at the Billington Cybersecurity Summit in Washington earlier this month.

Schumann didn’t say exactly what kinds of capabilities the Navy was seeking, and in a follow-up statement to Breaking Defense, she only said the goal is to “meet the Secretary of War’s intent for robust cyberspace effects options.”

“As we continue to mature our Information Warfare enterprise, we are focused on integrating multi-domain capabilities to support tactical and operational commanders in contested environments,” she said. “These efforts are designed to deliver timely, relevant effects in support of maritime operations, enhancing the agility and self-sufficiency of forward-deployed Sailors and Marines. We are working in close coordination with U.S. Cyber Command.”

The public plea to industry for offensive, expeditionary cyber options reflected both a shift to a more aggressive cyber stance throughout the military, and an acknowledgment that some cyber capabilities are going to have to be employed at tactical edge by the different servicemembers in different combatant commands at different times.

That’s a change from the decades-long paradigm that, generally speaking, US Cyber Command conducted virtually all cyber attacks from more established facilities.

The shift has been years in the making, as a revised version of a Pentagon cyberspace doctrine published in 2022 formally recognized “expeditionary cyberspace operations” as doctrine and provided a definition for it.

Each of the services have begun developing their own versions of these expeditionary or tactical capabilities from the Army’s 11th Cyber Battalion — with approval to establish a second cyber battalion — to Air Force Cyber Enabled Air Superiority, a Guard unit charged with an offensive cyber mission to protect the Air Force’s core functions, to non-kinetic effects teams in the Navy.

Hacking on the tactical edge requires different equipment, as battlefield targets are less likely to be connected to the traditional internet. Often that means hitting targets using the electromagnetic spectrum via radio waves, an authority battlefield commanders have much more leeway over than traditional cyber or hacking.

Conceptually, the Pentagon has always desired these types of tactical effects or teams to play a role in gaining access to hard to reach networks — like hardened networks controlling air defense systems, for instance — that can then be passed off to top tier cyber operators at CYBERCOM.

Navy officials in the past had hinted at the need for offensive cyber capabilities at the fleet level. The Navy’s 2022 cyberspace superiority vision outlined a three-pronged approach of “secure, survive, strike,” with the latter alluding to an offensive need.

For the Navy, the ability to be able to launch these effects from a ship as opposed to having to ask for permission or wait for a high-demand cyber mission force team to perform them provides the commanders greater flexibility against an increasingly sophisticated adversary.

“I’m not at liberty speak on specific operations, but I think we do have some recent examples that other defense officials have spoken about publicly where we have seen the integration of fleet and kinetic and non-kinetic effects in a joint environment. And that is going to be the norm, not the standard deviation,” Schumann said in an interview in February. “As we push on the expeditionary cyber, it’s going to be interesting to see what new constructs emerge from that. But I am seeing a ton of interest.”

With her public offer to industry last week to help, Schumann noted that department members had to take a hard look at themselves and realized they were not best positioned to partner with industry to accept the capability delivered and get them out to the force quickly.

But, amid broader acquisition reforms, Schumann said the Navy is in an “incredibly exciting moment.”

“The ship has turned,” she said.