TOWARDS MATURE ADF INFORMATION WARFARE FOUR YEARS … Mature-ADF... · 2020. 11. 20. · HIW -...

HIW - MILCIS 2020 – KEYNOTE ADDRESS

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TOWARDS MATURE ADF INFORMATION WARFARE –

FOUR YEARS OF GROWTH

MAJOR GENERAL MARCUS THOMPSON, AM

HEAD INFORMATION WARFARE, AUSTRALIAN

DEPARTMENT OF DEFENCE

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Welcome back!

It has been an eventful year this year, and when I

spoke to you at the end of 2019 I don’t think anyone in

the room could have predicted where we would be

today.


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Indeed, “where” we all are is multiply located, you are

watching me give a pre-recorded address, and our

digital world has come of age – if in a somewhat forced

way – through the Corona crisis.

At the end of last year, we would have gathered

together physically, spoken and shaken hands, and

some of us might have discussed the early emergence

of some bushfires in rural NSW.

Now, we have lived through one of the worst fire

seasons in this nation’s history, and the world is still

subject to a pandemic that has destroyed lives,

livelihoods, and greatly damaged the economy. Every

facet of our lives has been affected by it. The only

reassuring constant we have is our digital environment


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which has sustained, enabled and in some cases saved

us during this unprecedented global crisis.

*SLIDES START*

In many ways, our roaring dependence on the digital

world has come at us with the same speed that fires

engulfed us over Christmas. We knew fires were there,

they were dangerous and they had the potential to

overtake us.

Then, they did overtake us, or they nearly did.

As a nation, we are learning to adapt to this new

environment of cyber and information warfare in much

the same way as our communities have become more

sharply aware of the risk we suffer from bushfires and


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pandemics. These risks seep through the seams of our

existing governance and security systems and threaten

to overtake us. Cyber and information events can come

without warning and engulf how we do our business

and conduct our lives. Our communities across

government, business and industry have started to

adapt themselves meaningfully to how we manage this

now very real risk to our national capability and even

our individual lives. In the ADF, the complexity and

sophistication of cyber threats has changed how we

think about our security, our governance, and how we

conduct warfighting.

So I’d like today to share with you first an overview of

my last four years as Head Information Warfare. Even


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this last and very unpredictable year shares themes

with the ADF’s growth as an organisation becoming

resilient in the cyber age.

Four years of growth

The story of the summer bushfires isn’t unlike my entry

into this job four years ago when I addressed you for

the first time.

There, I spoke about how elements of the Department

of Defence had been reticent about forming an

“Information Warfare Division.” I walked Defence’s

halls as the Division’s new head and whispered the

word “cyber” in the hope I wouldn’t be immediately

removed for doing so.


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Then, cyber’s importance came like fire in its intensity

and our awareness of the threats. Their public profile

changed decisively – earlier this year even, the Prime

Minister announced that the nation was subject to

ongoing cyber-attacks at all levels of Government. This

sort of publicity would have been unthinkable a decade

earlier. Now, the nation knows that cyber is a way of

life and core to the business of national security,

business strategy and management, individual and

community safety.

Cyber has become part and parcel of what we do in the

ADF. In my time as the inaugural Head of Information

Warfare, we have come a long way. To name just a few

things, we have:


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Accelerated the development of our cyber

workforce, achieving the White Paper’s directed

workforce 7 years ahead of when the White Paper

said we would achieve it

Built our own cyber ranges

Established:

o A Joint Cyber Unit and cyber units in the Navy

and Army to complement significant effort

within the Air Force

o A common training pipeline for training cyber

practitioners across the ADF. Cyber is now the

only truly Joint ADF workforce, and the only

ADF trade with a common pipeline across all

three Services of Army, Navy and Air Force


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o A common ADF cyberworthiness framework

o Agreed cyber doctrine and concepts

o A Cyber Gap Program to allow short ADF work

placements to prepare cyber students to

apply their skills in an online operational

environment

Additionally, we have established:

o Partnerships with local, national and

international institutions to support the ADF’s

cyber and information warfare capability

development

o Classified cyber infrastructure and databases

o ADF satellite capabilities


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o Advanced and integrated ADF electronic

warfare systems.

In addition, we have brought forward the ADF’s

Defensive Cyberspace Operations Project, JP 9131,

over 12 months faster than the original schedule, so

Defence can defend its deployed networks and combat

platforms against rapidly evolving cyber threats. The

Minister for Defence announced on 12 August an initial

investment of $575 million for this program to support

the growth of the ADF cyber workforce. Government is

also constructing a Joint Information Warfare Facility

here in the ACT.1

1 https://www.minister.defence.gov.au/minister/lreynolds/media-releases/stronger-cyber-defences-deployed-adf-networks

https://www.minister.defence.gov.au/minister/lreynolds/media-releases/stronger-cyber-defences-deployed-adf-networkshttps://www.minister.defence.gov.au/minister/lreynolds/media-releases/stronger-cyber-defences-deployed-adf-networks


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These are only a few of the things we have done. The

momentum in my shop has been fast and strong. It

continues this way unabated.

But at the end of four years, do I think Defence has

“got it” about information warfare and cyber? Have we

advanced to a point where, as I have asked many

times, ADF commanders will think kinetic and non-

kinetic effects in the same breath?

I think the answer is yes, but we still have a long way to

go.


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Where we have gotten to

Some of you may recall that despite even my own

scepticism about “information” and “cyber” operations

in warfare when I began in 2017, a quick reading of

Russian warfare theorist and Chief of the General Staff

Valery Gerasimov convinced me that we needed to act,

and to act faster.

The issue clear to me was that warfare was changing in

its character, and what our Defence Strategic Update

recently named as “grey-zone operations” were

becoming part and parcel of how military manoeuvres

were being conducted across the world.

Grey-zone operations, as the Strategic Update

reminded us, are coercion and influence operations


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that do not exceed the thresholds for normal military

conflict, but achieve strategic goals by means other

than conventional state-on-state conflict.2

The world has seen that such operations are very

effective. The ADF, with its allies, has begun to address

how to confront operations in the grey zone of conflict

between peace and war.

Cyber is a part of this. That is, cyber capabilities and

the use of digital information more broadly – any form

of activity in the digital world which has aggressive

strategic intent against a nation, its interests, or its

critical national infrastructure. Because cyber and

information play such a key role in these new dynamics

2 Australian Government, Defence Strategic Update 2020, p. 5: “[Grey-zone activities] involve military and non-military forms of assertiveness and coercion aimed at achieving strategic goals without provoking conflict.”


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of conflict, it is essential for us, as an ADF, to treat

cyber as a domain of warfare and not just an enabling

capability, as many of us have done to date.

So, we are starting to do this. This will involve new

thinking about how warfighting is conducted in every

domain – where “joint” capabilities in the future mean

air, land, sea, space, and cyber, each contributing

strategic effects in their own right.

These are big conceptual shifts. They change how we

think about warfare just as Government is thinking

about how we generate national capability in the cyber

domain outside of Defence also.

Government’s 2020 Cyber Security Strategy, for

example, shows we are starting to join together the


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seams of cyber as a national effort.3 Alongside

Government’s lead cyber agencies, the ADF is learning

to think about how to act in cyberspace as a domain of

warfare and not just a set of new technologies which

improve our existing warfighting capabilities.

I have had three key questions throughout my tenure,

which I have posed to you and to others I have spoken

with:

1. How do we have a sensible public conversation

about information warfare threats?

2. How do we build national resilience against malign

activities in cyberspace?

3 Australian Government, Australia’s Cyber Security Strategy 2020, https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/cyber-

security-subsite/files/cyber-security-strategy-2020.pdf

https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/cyber-security-subsite/files/cyber-security-strategy-2020.pdfhttps://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/cyber-security-subsite/files/cyber-security-strategy-2020.pdf


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3. What is the role of the ADF in a whole-of-

Government response to these threats?

I am in a better place to answer each of them today.


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1. How do we have a sensible public conversation

about information warfare threats?

We are in a better place to do this because the

Government is already speaking about it. As noted,

grey-zone warfare is now part of our strategic lexicon

and commanders and thought-leaders are beginning to

analyse and identify how the ADF will respond to

activities using cyber and information alongside other

tools of national power.

But there remain ambiguities. Principally, about what

“information warfare” actually is. Is it political warfare

waged through digital means? Or is it cyber capabilities

directed dangerously at civilian populations?


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In reality, it is both. But it is also much more than that.

It is the reality that, today, the passage of information

in the digital sphere defines and directs our lives in

ways we couldn’t imagine just a few years ago. That

means, for the general public, we have to accept that

digital information is a tool of national capability – both

for us, and for our potential adversaries. It means that

the public are in the “line of fire” in a way that they

weren’t before, because information is the

ammunition of the cyber domain. Information – ones

and zeroes and facts and figures resident in the

information environment – can be purposed to

strategic ends by state and non-state actors alike.


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Put differently, the smartphone is the “AK-47” of the

modern information battlefield. We are only just

getting used to what that means for all of us.

If you’re listening to this outside the military and are

worried, you probably should be. But there are

grounds to feel safe, too. The ADF’s adaptability and

agility in this domain has been impressive. We have

learned fast in a short time how to make use of this

new battlefield of cyber and information on deployed

operations. At home, we work closely with our team-

mates in the Australian Signals Directorate to ensure

the Australian military can fight in and through the

information and cyber domain. ASD’s capability is

among the very best in the world, and we are learning


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through them and our whole-of-Government peers

how to use this domain to the strongest effect for our

ADF objectives.

In the ADF, our forces are learning to integrate in the

information domain with our allies, to make us more

formidable through our strategic partnerships with

industry and with our traditional allies. If the strategic

battlefield has changed through cyber and

information’s prevalence, the ADF is changing with it

and sometimes evolving faster than the battlefield

itself.


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2. How do we build national resilience against

malign activities in cyberspace?

The answer to this question starts with awareness and

acceptance of the cyber threat. The threat is real, it is

dynamic, and it wishes us harm. For that reason, we

need to be able to talk clearly about the cyber threat

and inform ourselves how to counter it across all

sections of our community. Then, we need build

national resilience against it.


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National resilience is a core question for Australia. We

saw through the summer bushfires, and are now

seeing through the COVID-19 pandemic, that our

ability to withstand sudden, unpredictable and

destructive change is central to our national capacity.

For that reason, Australia must become as nationally

resilient in the cyber domain as we are in every other

component of our national capability. Perhaps more so

in the digital environment, because of the extent to

which digital information now drives us. And, of

course, because of our increasing dependence on

digital information.

Recent analysis from Australia’s own AustCyber

showed that a sustained cyber-attack against


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Australia’s economy lasting four weeks would cost the

Australian economy $30 billion – approximately 1.5%

of GDP.4

* SLIDES FINISH *

Such amounts can pale when seen against global

figures for economic loss and recovery during the

COVID-19 pandemic. But the reality is that digital and

cyber weakness can be crippling to our way of life.

So, how do we defend against such possibilities, and

become resilient to withstand them?

First, we need to cooperate well and integrate strongly.

4 AustCyber, Australia’s Digital Trust Report, 2020,

https://www.austcyber.com/resource/digitaltrustreport2020 . See also Australian Government, Australia’s

Cyber Security Strategy 2020, https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/cyber-security-subsite/files/cyber-security-

strategy-2020.pdf

https://www.austcyber.com/resource/digitaltrustreport2020https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/cyber-security-subsite/files/cyber-security-strategy-2020.pdfhttps://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/cyber-security-subsite/files/cyber-security-strategy-2020.pdf


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Already, government departments recognise that cyber

is part of their core business, and they are working

together to ensure their core cyber business can

function effectively with the cyber defences of other

national agencies.

This is part of what I call a “mesh” effect in the cyber

world – we cannot generate resilience in siloes, and we

must ensure we are across each other’s defences. We

are all very much confronting this set of problems

together.

Government’s 2020 Australian Cyber Security Strategy

and recent announcements on cyber security for

national infrastructure are very much part of working


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in our cyber environment as a collective national

effort.

Secondly, we need to be able to share critical

information at the right time with the right people.

That means generating a community of capability

where people know who to talk to, and when, about

risks they are seeing, and how they might affect the

whole of government’s systems, those of critical

industries, and those of critical infrastructure.

No-one can wage cyber warfare alone, and no-one can

defend against it alone.

Developing communities of interest are part of

generating the mesh of knowledge that will make our

defences strong and our communities deep in their


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understandings of cyber risks and how to tackle them.

That means communities of interest across

Government, industry, and the Australian community.

Finally, we need to be imaginative as we anticipate the

speed of change in the cyber domain. We may be living

in the last days of human-cyber, for example, with

artificial intelligence beating down the door to drive

cyber decision-making in less than a generation from

today.

How can we adapt to such shifts if we can’t re-imagine

the world after artificial intelligence?

We will need changes to our decision-making

structures that accommodate and make the most of

these rapid advances in technology. None of them are


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a panacea, and none of them are the “answer” to any

of our existing problems. Each of them represent the

opportunity for us to innovate organisationally and to

grow our strategic capability for modern warfare in

their light.

So, I think that alongside our generation of strong

cyber defences we need serious strategic imagination

to identify how we, in the ADF, will manoeuvre in and

through the information and cyber domain in the light

of quickly advancing technology.

We can no more stand still with our decision-making in

a rapidly changing world than we can expect warfare to

return to its ancient antecedents of sticks and stones

tomorrow. The pace of change is faster than we


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expected, and will need to run harder as a country, and

as an ADF, to keep up with it.

Resilience, in this setting, means being prepared to

change quickly and often to preserve Australia’s

strategic enterprise in the light of some of the most

dramatic technological shifts we have witnessed in

generations.

It also means being able to map that change so we in

the ADF can be deliberate about our strategic choices

for cyber, and purposeful in how we approach the

shifts that advancing cyber and information

technologies bring for warfare.


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3. What is the role of the ADF in a whole-of-

Government response to cyber and information

threats?

This is the topic I have wanted to talk to the most

across my four years. We saw over summer this year,

and in the COVID crisis that followed, that the ADF has

become an option of “first resort” when dealing with

urgent, complex, national-level threats. This is

especially the case for risks like the summer bushfires

and the pandemic which emerged quickly and found

their way through most of our traditional crisis

response mechanisms and boundaries.

Cyber is a risk just as dangerous as either the pandemic

or the summer bushfires, and it is permanent.


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The ADF has come a long way, in a short time, in its

capability development to deal with cyber and

information threats. We are still learning, but we are

like ducks or swans calm on the surface and paddling

furiously at every level of our internal systems to stay

abreast of cyber’s growth, and maximise its potential.

We have learned in the ADF that we will need to work

more closely with our whole-of-Government

colleagues to master this capability, because unlike

traditional military theatres of operation there isn’t an

exclusive cyber “terrain” for the ADF which belongs

solely to uniformed members.


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Mostly all of the ADF’s cyber activities are carefully

threaded through our relationships and dependencies

with other agencies, industry and our allies.

This is more of a strength than a risk, and the ADF is

learning daily to make it a greater asset.

What will distinguish the ADF’s approach to cyber,

however, is our ability to understand the nature of

conflict in the cyber environment, and to respond in

kinetic conflicts by integrating cyber with our

traditional capabilities for strategic military effects.

This is where cyber effects will be at their most

effective.

That means being open to strongly threading the ADF’s

external relationships so we move beyond a


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traditional, or “narrow” vision of strategic

preparedness to one that maximises the ADF’s multiple

partnerships in the cyber and information environment

to do its work.

So, while other agencies such as ASD and Home Affairs

will remain lead for Australia’s cyber responses, the

ADF is growing our partnerships with them in a strong

posture of cooperation to meet national threats in the

cyber domain.

This is a moment of growth for the ADF, just as it is for

whole-of-Government partners who are coming to

learn what we can bring, and what they can bring us, in

this new battlespace of information and cyber

capability.


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So what do I think the ADF’s role is in a whole-of-

Government response to cyber and information

threats?

Quite simply, it is as the lead military partner – as

experts skilled in the profession of arms who can apply

that experience to a new domain of warfare, whose

evolution is as rapid as cyber and information’s

technological growth.


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Conclusion

Approaching the end of four years, I can say my time in

this role has been one of unreserved learning for me.

While I started with some sense of apprehension as to

whether I could even say the word “cyber” in Defence

headquarters, I can’t say it now without people

wanting to know more, and wanting more from us.

This, in its own right, is a singular advance on a

capability for the ADF which had only just begun four

years ago. It is alongside the ADF’s significant growth in

cyber capability, investment and focus across these

four years.


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Cyber and information are now core to what the ADF

does. They are part and parcel to how we prepare to

fight as a joint force and how we think about facing any

challenge from the strategic through to the tactical

level of war.

As I leave this role in a few short weeks, I will hand

over the reins to my successor, Major General Susan

Coyle, with a sense of great expectation for all that

Susan will bring. I can say confidently that the ADF

could not be in better hands than hers for cyber and

information capabilities. Susan is an experienced

operator in cyber and information conflict globally and

a true expert in ADF capability development. These are

the prerequisites of success in a role like this.


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I know you will look forward to welcoming her here to

MILCIS next year.

For me, I look back on these four years as those of

growth toward a still developing goal – preparing the

ADF for the conflicts of the 21st century, wherever the

battlespace presents itself.

Thank you.

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