The U.S. Air Force plans to establish an operational technology (OT) sister office to its Cyber Resiliency Office of Weapons Systems (CROWS), the principal cyber advisor for the Air Force said on Tuesday.
At the Oct. 29 SAIC OutFront 2024 conference produced by MeriTalk, Wanda Jones-Heath, the Air Force’s principal cyber advisor, said that the Air Force has received funding to establish a new OT office. It will be a sister office to CROWS, established in 2017, which aims to enhance the cyber resiliency of Air Force weapon systems to protect against cyber threats throughout their lifecycle.
Jones-Heath said that funding for the office is provided in the fiscal year (FY) 2024 and 2025 budgets. The Air Force’s FY2025 budget request was $188.1 billion, a $3 billion increase from the FY2024 budget.
“[It] will be the office that will bring the entire picture back together and look at our mission thread analysis and say, this weapon system, this base structure, this business system, is critical to the mission thread,” said Jones-Heath. “We are starting to have those conversations more and more.”
The office will assist in evaluating the Air Force’s enterprise cyber perspective including its weapons, network, and operational technology capabilities. Jones-Heath said that while they’ve done a “great job in understanding a subset of our weapons systems” the “left behind community [is] our operational technology.”
Once established, the office will focus on “funding operation technology, putting sensors” and “understanding how the adversary is using operational technology to attack.”
OT encompasses a wide variety of systems, including industrial control systems, supervisory control and data acquisition systems, the Internet of Things, wired and wireless telematics, and the IT tech that cyber operations rely on.
“How do we have the visibility into the things that we need to see, whether it’s a weapon system, whether we’re talking about individual program office systems and things like that – we’re not there yet,” said Jones-Heath. “That’s where we need to go, we need to have more integration, more visibility, to be able to say … here’s how we need to protect ourselves.”
