The Defense Department’s National Cyber Range earlier this month concluded a one-year beta-operation phase, announced DARPA. During this time, various Pentagon organizations conducted seven large-scale cyber experiments, according to the agency’s release. Beta operations involve ironing out the bugs of a system before the final configuration. The range is a secure, self-contained facility at which defense officials can validate cyber technologies by emulating complex defense and commercial networks. It is rapidly reconfigurable and can represent diverse types of networks and accommodate multiple activities simultaneously at different classification levels, states the release. Such flexibility is vital given the dynamic nature of real-world cyber threats, according to DARPA. The range transitioned in October from the agency’s management to the oversight of the Pentagon’s developmental test and evaluation shop, states the Nov. 13 release.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth this week released strategies meant to focus the Pentagon’s “alphabet soup” of innovation organizations and proliferate artificial intelligence—moves that experts say could provide the structure needed to make the military’s efforts to integrate and field new technology more effective.
