We Took West Point Cadets to (Cyber) War

CPT Aaron Kletzing - Borderline irrelevant. "By having a quadcopter fall from the sky midflight from a height of 20 feet and crash into the grass at the push of a trigger attached to a Raspberry Pi, we have shown the power of open source cyber tool development. " Any modern pre-teen child can disrupt comms . . . and any modern teen child can take over comms . . . of a COTS drone in flight. More interesting intel might be derived from watching what the watchers are watching. But, the risk is the drone carries an explosive or other potentially lethal / disabling warhead. Better to gently blow it out of the sky conventionally before and without setting off the warhead. This reminds me of the FBI Cyber Security expert who insisted the only option was to get a court order for Apple to break their own technology . . . claiming neither NSA or any other government agency could procure the data . . . ignoring the readily available COTS tools and the contractors who subsequently extracted contents of the phone. Warmest Regards, Sandy

p.s. It might be more interesting to hand USMA students a decent mobile rack of computers equipped with a broad range of software tools for communications intercept, demodulation, decryption, analysis, display, re-encoding, encryption, and injection . . . together with a pair of extremely wide frequency range multi-modal RF decks for receiving and transmitting anywhere within the COTS spectra ( say 30 MHz - 3 GHz ) . . . then turn them loose with more complex realistic traffic analysis, interception, and spoofing missions . . . or let them freelance ( do whatever they want ) for some period of time . . . observe their interests, creative approaches, and implementation skills . . . then assign the good ones to an "Old Crow" for further study.

Maybe get them a decent satellite dish . . . some wideband equipment . . . see what they can pull off the many civilian, competing government, and our own government communication and intelligence birds. This might be a lot more interesting and relevant for the modern officer candidate than child's play with trivial targets in their own backyard. Send them on a field trip to meet and greet EW officers at Wright Patterson, NSA, DIA, or even Cheyenne Mountain.

Better yet . . . get them a couple of fully operational EW trucks . . . and a few EW backpack systems . . . why waste their field studies on a zero capability toy targeting a COTS drone?

http://www.crows.org

https://peoiews.army.mil/electronic-warfare-cyber

CPT Aaron Kletzing great read and share!

Thanks for sharing this!