How the Army is strengthening cyber cities

Cybersecurity has become an ecosystem in which the public and private sector must work together to ensure safety. Recognizing this, the Army’s cyber think tank has staged an ongoing series of exercises looking at how domestic cities respond to major cyber incidents (and what testing the seams reveals about how the local infrastructure cybersecurity can affect overseas deployments).

The Jack Voltaic series, put on by the Army Cyber Institute (ACI) at West Point, is now in its third iteration. The next Jack Voltaic is looking not at one city, but at a whole region — Charleston, South Carolina, to Savannah, Georgia — and is also plugging into the Army’s Defender 2020 exercise. Defender 2020 will simulate a deployment to Europe and game how quickly Army units in the United States can get all their equipment there.

“The theory is something happens and you need the forces to go to Europe ... so you’ve got forces that are at Fort Stewart [Georgia] that are going to need to go through Savannah to deploy. You’re involving Savannah and you’re looking at the critical infrastructure that goes from the post to the port [and] the different ways that someone could disrupt the movement,” Col. Andrew Hall, director of ACI, told Fifth Domain during a July visit to West Point.

“You’re looking at what the attack could be on the city’s infrastructure to delay the arrival of the U.S. forces, because by delaying them a couple of days you’d be able to turn the tide on some activity you were trying to do within Europe.”