Never Underestimate Rate of Change

Senior leaders need to make sure they don’t underestimate how much change can occur in a decade, especially in the cyber domain, said Maj. Gen. Edward Bolton, Air Staff director of cyber and space operations, Friday at AFA’s CyberFutures Conference. The biggest shift, he predicted, likely will be in the “exponential use” of smaller and more capable mobile devices. “Things that used to require you to be in working on the main frame . . . can now be done on the metro,” said Bolton. However, more reliance on such communications also means more vulnerabilities that others could exploit. The coming years also will bring a “dramatic increase” in the number of Internet users. Today, one-third of the world’s one billion Internet users live in Asia. China, he said, is developing its cyber specialists “the way Russia used to develop athletes.” Training begins at a very young age and becomes increasingly more competitive, he said.