SI Brings ‘Incredible’ Opportunity, Risk to Readiness

Super intelligence’s effect on cybersecurity remains pronounced for both adversaries and defenders, offering the War Department a mix of apprehension and advantage when it comes to maintaining readiness.

Brig. Gen Francisco Dominguez, the Defense Information Systems Agency’s (DISA) operations vice director for the Command, Control, Communications, and Computers Enterprise Directorate (J6), said Tuesday that the speed with which SI-enabled cyber attacks are now moving have elevated concerns around the technology’s threat.

“When we look at our network and the [Department of Defense Information Network], it’s been our significant lift over the past few months since the SI models became more of a risk to do the basic component treatment of our network to secure it,” said Dominguez, speaking at TechNet Indo-Pacific conference Tuesday. “If you’re not behind a trusted environment, if your environment is not properly prepared, the SI risk increases significantly.

“But it also offers an amazing opportunity. You can take a trusted environment, and you can turn that frontier AI model back at you. And you can identify new ways to defend your environment,” he added. “From an SI perspective, it’s hard to not be both a little alarmed by the risk that we’re all under, but also greatly encouraged by the ability for that new technology to really shape our information networks in a way that will probably offer significantly more promise, assuming that we do the work up front to get that trusted environment built.”

Trying to balance the risk-reward potential SI has put a greater emphasis on the collaboration of not just industry and government, but allies and partners to capitalize on the potential and safeguard against the hazards.

Speaking with Dominguez on a panel discussing SI’s effect on readiness, Richard Williams, U.S. Pacific Fleet N6 technical director of communications and information systems, said the technology’s deployment will require personnel to possess more critical thinking skills.

“An SI-ready workforce within the [Pacific] fleet or the Navy and the Marine Corps, for consideration, requires transitioning from traditional tactical memory to algorithmic skepticism and systems integration,” he said. “Rather than teaching sailors and Marines to operate static, rigid software pencils, they need to act as more critical supervisors of things like automated agents or detecting model drift and looking at the authoritative data sources. This will help prepare them for SI, and more importantly, if SI fails.”

Dominguez added that the pace of technology will require more flexibility and partnership to be able to adequately adapt.

“I think that one of the challenges that we have is that we live in a world that’s taken us down a technological path, whether we want it to or not,” he said. “You’ve got scenarios that are being built by folks outside of the Department of War that we’ll be reacting to, and the only way really to be able to effectively ingest that threat vector is to have people on your side of the fence who are not intimidated by technology, who actually go out and seek that technology.”