The Paradoxical Challenge of Weapons & Tech Modernization

by Kris Osborn

Finding the proper balance between leveraging new technologies enabling increased data interoperability and needing to adjust to changing technical paradigms to sustain threat-focused cyber resiliency –  is emerging as a complex, if even paradoxical, challenge.

While a variety of IT and cyber initiatives, such as accelerated work on AI, cloud migration and data consolidation throughout DOD and the services, appear to be on a successful path toward configuring what many observers regard as auspicious tech developments, such progress naturally operates within the context of a fast-evolving threat landscape. In particular, many DOD and military service leaders are specifically looking to expedite technical movement toward the commercial sector as a strategy to address this.

Upon initial examination, several ongoing efforts appear to be successfully oriented toward reconciling what might strike some as a uniquely modern predicament given the current pace of technological progress – namely when new common standards could collide with unexpected threat areas or entirely new technical structures. It is conceivable that new technical structures would, in some respects, challenge or complicate the current modernization push for common standards.

Such things, it seems, could manifest within several different spheres, including yet-to-be-implemented IP protocols, applications of AI, unanticipated methods for data analytics or more nuanced attack schemes.  Engineering new systems entirely impervious to cyber intrusion may be a bridge too far, current thinking seeks to identify, however modern US military strategies are hoping to mitigate some of these risks by emphasizing the need to identify vulnerabilities as quickly as they emerge.

Overall, these phenomena seem to fall within several distinct, yet also interwoven trajectories. One of these, expectedly, includes the ubiquitous and often-discussed “open architecture” approach aimed at engineering common sets of IP protocol both within and between networks, databases and cyber-dependent weapons systems. 

This, as many current developers emphasize, is designed to allow for rapid integration of emerging tech such as software patches designed to address new threats, new algorithms enabling increased automation, machine-learning and commercial innovations favoring rapid modernization.

At the same time, some have raised the question of what happens if, within the strategic sphere occupied by open architecture, new unexpected technological progress changes the entire equation. In one sense, common standards and rapid upgradability are designed to address this, yet it also seems conceivable that new potentially unforeseen technical innovations could, at very least, bring a particular set of new challenges.