The ever slow death of American Warfighting Capability and an Open Door Policy for China...

Net-Centric Warfare;  The key to current Army and future transformation of its units into connected, all seeing, all knowing warriors with a god eye view of the battlefield has taken a a few hard knocks.  It is not the budget gouging, nor ugly sequestrianism one may think, but rather a pervasive yet inherent and slowly parasitic problem that has been silently creeping deeper into the entire connected battle-space since its birth...

 A massive shift in cold-war legacy doctrine, leading to our modern connected battlefield driven by broad insertions of net centric thought where strategic command and control systems, tactical small units, and wholesale integration of  networked forces resulting in the   Brigade Combat Team has been completed.  Net-Centricity;  The much championed Warfighting and Combat Multiplier, with 360 degree's of vision and destructive power, highly efficient sensor-to-shooter reductions in times from sense to kill removed much of the fog of war.  User friendly, American innovation and game boy style controls embedded  in the arts of modern combat is becoming what I feared;  The very thing it was designed to be...an easy to follow template for the rising dragon, albeit without the expensive economic development costs, expensive and time consuming test and evaluations, budget hungry gluttons for new systems and more bandwidth lofted into space, antenna's and hardware installations on everything from Humvee's to rifles, to new encryption schemes, lack of, and new waveforms.  More networks, servers, clients, connectivity and more avenues of attack for the enemy.  With a lack of Information Assurance built into DoD networks during their initial birthing of this new era in warfare, an equal gods eye of view of both all that we see of the enemy, and all that we know of ourselves classified and supposed to be hidden is given freely to our adversaries.  The entire paradigm was designed to combat and kill, with greater efficiency--us or them? 


During approximately half of FY11 assessments, assessment eams ... observed serious adverse mission impact including degradation to the timeliness, accuracy, and efficiency of the networks crucial to command and control;  adverse impacts to the confidentiality,  availability, and integrity of operational data.  Delays in critical battlefield situational awareness, leading to reductions in allocating effective placement of forces for operational tasking due to deceptive enemy activity within blue--force networks. 
Large-scale exfiltration of operationally significant data by opposition force
actors.

Some of these problems were discovered in early testing of systems fielded, yet economic
punishment by delays in operational fielding and  focus on schedules and time-tables, not on
actual developmental testing.  These problems were and are still being seen in numerous
systems as they begin to become operational, yet are more serious as they are fatal system
flaws as operational uses mean combat use.  People get killed, networked systems get
breached, operational effectiveness, suitability, and survivability is countervailed.  These
situations are entirely avoidable.

Most Red Teams reported increased difficulty in penetrating
network defences, but as Red Teams gained experience and had no time constraints
in developing attacks, the opposite given to network defensive teams the
 penetration of networks and systems become more and more successful and undetected.
Network intrusion detections and the movement within these networks remained
undetected, and the ability of network defenders to detect subsequent exploitations
of network data was minimal; most assessments witnessed large
exfiltrations of operationally significant data. The extracted data
often allowed for Red Teams or Opposing Force tactical and strategic exploitation.

Simple Solutions--Time and time again.
The assessments showed a decrease in the use of backup files for proper system wiping and
complete removal of infected disks, with rapid network re-establishment simply because
backups.....

Proper audit logging and reviews, logical access controls, incident planning, and vulnerability management rules were not followed. There was an overall increase in high-risk vulnerabilities
as patch management and updating of system vulnerabilities were not considered to be
effective measures of information assurance or network security.  Thus CVE and attack vectors
increased.  The recent development and wide scale integration of the Host Based Security
System (HBSS) has resulted in many local improvements in network protection from intrusion as well as intrusion detection, but  the majority of HBSS suites observed were found to be incorrectly or
ineffectively configured.  Experience and formal training levels for network defenders
NEEDS to be completely re-prioritised, and incompetence punished lest we lose our future
wars, global military pre-emminence, if we have not done so already.