The devastatingly destructive potential of cyber attacks has become the security challenge of our age, said Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel. “Cyber is one of those quiet, deadly, insidious unknowns you can’t see,” said Hagel while speaking to about 200 service members at JB Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii on May 30 on the opening leg of his official trip to Singapore. “It’s in the ether—it’s not one big navy sailing into a port, or one big army crossing a border, or squadrons of fighter planes. . . . This is a very difficult, but real and dangerous, threat. There is no higher priority for our country than this issue,” he added. Hagel noted that cyber is “one of the very few items” pegged to receive a boost in funding in the Pentagon’s Fiscal 2014 budget request. (AFPS report by Karen Parrish)
A new report from the Government Accountability Office calls for the Pentagon’s Chief Technology Officer to have budget certification authority over the military services’ research and development accounts—a move the services say would add a burdensome and unnecessary layer of bureaucracy.
