ARMY PLANS ELECTRONIC THREAT TESTS FOR DIGITIAL FORCE.(Army Task Force XXI exercise)

The Army is planning several electronic vulnerability threat assessments of its digital force before it is fielded in 2000, according to Brig. Gen. William Bond, director of the Army Digitization Office.

"During the Task Force XXI exercise we really did look at some of the (electronic threats) but the plan has always been to do a crawl, walk, run," Bond told Defense Daily during a recent interview.

Critics of Army digitization plans have cited electronic vulnerability as a reason the Army may want to move more cautiously in creating a fully digital force. The same critics, including some in Congress, said the Army's Task Force XXI Exercise--the service's brigade-size test of its digital force held last spring--did not adequately test the systems against electronic threats.

Bond, however, said that was by design. He said the service achieved its goal of establishing a functioning digital architecture at Task Force XXI and did limited testing of Global Positioning System (GPS), signal and operational security vulnerabilities.

For example, Bond said, the Army divisional advanced warfighting experiment (DAWE), a command post exercise held last fall, included hacker attacks and electronic jamming. In both cases, the digital systems proved robust.

"After two and half weeks [the hackers at the DAWE] were unable to get in, at that point we let them into systems to see if the detection tools would find them and to see how far they would get, The detection tools picked them up and and we were able to cut them off before they were able to level any of their markers," Bond said.

Bond said the most crucial electronic test for the digital force will come in FY '99 at the Initial Operational and Technical Evaluation of the digital intranet and its associated software. At that exercise, Bond said, all type of electronic threats will be permitted to play.

Bond conceded no system can deny all electronic threats, but, he said, the Army wants a digital system that will allow it to "manage" those threats. He said keys to managing threats will be building in fire walls and developing software that can detect and track electronic attacks so safeguards can be put in place to prevent future vulnerabilities.

Bond said the Army's digital intranet is in a "better environment" than open systems at military installations and the Pentagon. Both have been entered by hackers. He said the Army's closed intranet ultimately makes the system less vulnerable to hackers than systems on the commercial Internet.

On the battlefield, Bond said, safeguards would make it challenging for an enemy to capture an Army tank and use that vehicle's digital gear to access the intranet. He said safeguards include: the ability to remotely turn off digital functions if a tank is captured; password-access only systems; and the ability to "spoof" the information being sent to a particular vehicle. Also, Bond noted, a tank's digital system would have only limited local access to the battlefield intranet.