Mad Sci Army Cyber 2050 Final Report

Attached is the final report from our Cyber 2050 Mad Scientist conference co-hosted with the Army Cyber Institute at West Point.

Sincere thanks to the Team at ACI for their efforts to execute this exceptional event.

 

Key points from the EXSUM starting at page 3:

 

1. Cyber challenges generate an “alternative domain” experience that alters our normal expectations with respect to every component of the DOTMLPF-P model.

2. To practice effective mission command, sustain its forces, provide critical intelligence, and communicate over the horizon, a nation must – of necessity – be a cyber power. The “barriers to entry” for cyber power status, however, are relatively low. Moreover, cyber power demonstrates a destabilizing capability / vulnerability paradox: the greater the reliance on advanced cyber capabilities, the greater vulnerability to disruption, diversion, and destruction.

3. Future Commanders must be as adept at deploying cyber effects as they are at delivering physical effects. Their leadership and education must address desirable attributes and skills, and be broad enough to enable their ability to conceptualize rapidly and develop creative, feasible solutions to complex challenges.

4. Attributes that describe cyber' s elusive future.

a. Ubiquity. Cyber will be “everywhere” and so pervasive that in the future “cyber is no longer cyber.”

b. Volatility. The pervasiveness and leverage of cyberspace structure will likely have a destabilizing impact on global – and local – stability.

c. Uncertainty. The explicit mechanism of connectivity and “cause-and-effect” in cyberspace infrastructure will be buried in the sheer mass of users, nodes, connections and data within it.

d. Complexity. With “cause-and-effect” relationships not readily apparent, the quantity of those relationships will shift a “complicated” system into the “complex” category.

e. Convergence. As data and digitization continue to move beyond information and technology communication to all aspects of our physical, cognitive and social experiences, a dominant attribute of the cyber future will be convergence.

5. Cyber’s potential identity extinction may not be as important as cyber’s impact on human evolution, as we increasingly recognize the impact of extended information technology exposure: cognitive off-loading, reduced memory capacity, and altered aptitude for deep learning.