The 19 January 2022 OODA Salon featured Dr. Jennifer Buss, CEO of the Potomac Institute.

Dr. Buss is a long term friend and OODA network member who has contributed insight to the greater national security community for years. As leader of the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, she guides an organization with a stellar reputation for S&T policy research. The institute identifies and leads discussions on S&T and national security issues facing our society, providing an academic forum to enable evidence based recommendations.

In response to the SolarWinds Orion and Hafnium Microsoft Exchange breaches, the  U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services, Subcommittee on Cyber, held a hearing on April 14th.  Entitled “Future Cybersecurity Architectures”.  The specific breaches were actually only the context for a larger conversation about (and a general update on) DoD implementation of the recently approved DoD Zero Trust Architecture Framework.  We take a look at this use case through the prism of “extreme sampling” and our neverending search for bleeding-edge cybersecurity architectures.

Dr. Kathleen H. Hicks, Deputy Secretary of Defense, released a memorandum yesterday establishing the new Chief Digital and AI Officer (CDAO): “…effective February 1, 2022, there will be within the Office of the Secretary of Defense a new position of Chief Digital and AI Officer (CDAO), reporting directly to me and through me to the Secretary of Defense.”

Two recent developments speak to both a market-driven and governmental response to the vital operational role technology, innovation, standardization, and collaboration will play in a transition to 1) a resilient supply chain that mitigates risk in the global IT supply chain; and 2) cybersecurity processes to protect the defense industrial base. We provide a brief analysis of both developments:  The Athinia Platform and the DoD Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) 2.0 Program.

In 2018, when Google employees found out about their company’s involvement in Project Maven, a controversial US military effort to develop AI to analyze surveillance video, they weren’t happy. Thousands protested. “We believe that Google should not be in the business of war,” they wrote in a letter to the

NATO’s release in October of its first-ever strategy for artificial intelligence is primarily concerned with the impact AI will have on the NATO core commitments of collective defense, crisis management, and cooperative security.

Worth a deeper dive is a framework within the overall NATO AI Strategy, which mirrors that of the DoD Joint Artificial Intelligence Center’s (JAIC) efforts to establish norms around AI:   “NATO establishes standards of responsible use of AI technologies, in accordance with international law and NATO’s values.” At the center of the NATO AI strategy are the following six principles: Lawfulness, Responsibility and Accountability, Explainability and Traceability, Reliability, Governability, and Bias Mitigation.”

More than 3,300 US military service members, dependents, and civilians employed by the Department of Defense were reportedly compromised due to a transitional cybercrime ring that was created to defraud them out of millions in military benefits coming from the Department of Veterans Affairs and the DoD. A former civilian

The U.S. DoD has embarked on a strategic transformation. Central to this transformation are supply chains. Specifically, an understanding and reduction of the reliance by U.S. military systems on foreign components, subcomponents, materials, and software.  “Made in America” is an objective, rectifying supply chain security concerns with American-made components, subcomponents, materials, and software. As it turns out, supply chain transformation is a central military operational activity of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) – and they want their supply chain to be “Made in America” too.

Two historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) have been selected to receive a collective $15 million in Defense Department funding to form centers of excellence in biotechnology and materials science. The Pentagon currently views the two topics as near-term priotirites. The two institutions selected are Morgan State University in Baltimore,

This post provides insights into what the C-Suite needs to know about the rise of great power competition, based largely on a recently released report by the policy and legal research agency of the United States Congress, the Congressional Research Service (CRS), titled Renewed Great Power Competition: Implications for Defense—Issues for Congress.
Great Power Competition:  U.S. DoD and Strategic Transformation. The report sees a “new or renewed emphasis on the following, all of which relate to China and/or Russia”:

-Defense issues need to focus on a “grand strategy and the geopolitics of great power competition,” including DoD changes in organizational structure.
-Nuclear weapons, nuclear deterrence, and nuclear arms control need to once again be center stage.
-Military force deployments and their global allocation new to be looked at anew, especially U.S. and allied military capabilities in the Indo-Pacific region.
-The continued commitment to Europe in the form of U.S. and NATO military capabilities; and
-The maintenance of superiority by the U.S. in conventional weapon technologies.