As special assistant to the Air Force Chief of Staff and leader of the Cyberspace Task Force, Lani Kass has been asked, on occasion, to estimate how many people in the Air Force are participating in “cyberspace efforts” right now. The answer, she said Wednesday at AFA’s Air & Space Conference, is that about 40,000 Air Force personnel are currently involved in some kind of cyberspace mission, from sensing and connecting to command and control of critical processes. “People who talk about cyberspace as if it only dealt with computers are missing the point,” she said. People have been fighting in the cyberspace domain even longer than they have been in air and space, she postulated, pointing out the telegraph as the “Victorian Internet.” Now, she said, the challenge is to integrate all of these processes to deliver strategic and tactical effects.
The use of a military counter-drone laser on the southwest border this week—which prompted the Federal Aviation Administration to abruptly close the airspace over El Paso, Texas—will be a “case study” on the complex web of authorities needed to employ such weapons near civilian areas and the consequences of agencies…
