The U.S Navy’s top cyber advisor has released the service branch’s new Cyberspace Superiority Vision (CSV) to guide and improve the Navy’s cyber posture.
The vision features three core principles: secure, survive, and strike.
“The principles of secure, survive, and strike build an enduring advantage for the Department of the Navy and enable our force to prevail in competition, crisis, and conflict,” said Chris Cleary, the Navy’s Principal Cyber Advisor, who made the strategy document public on Oct. 28.
The three core principles of the strategy are fundamental in maintaining maritime dominance and enabling sustained operations in cyber-contested environments.
The CSV focuses on the Navy’s responsibility to ensure: 1) that systems are secure; 2) that infrastructure and weapon systems are survivable; and 3) that cyber operators can strike in and through cyberspace at a time and place of the commander’s choosing.
The new guidelines focus heavily on the resilience necessary to survive adversary cyberattacks – including training “Sailors, Marines, civilians, and contractors on sustaining operations in denied or degraded environments, [and] improving their ability to rapidly respond and recover from attacks.”
Resiliency also means effectively managing and securing data. During a Federal News Network webinar on Oct. 26, Cleary teased the release of the CSV, saying that because warfighting is shifting to the cyber realm, data needs to be secure, but it also needs to be able to survive. It is the “fuel oil” that allows military operations to transpire, he said.
“When we talk about ‘survive’ – survival of weapons systems, resiliency, survivability of things like defense critical infrastructure – and when we see it through the lens of defense critical infrastructure and weapons systems, it makes sense. But what are all the things that enable those,” Cleary asked, referring to data.
“I now – even in defense critical infrastructure – can’t get away from the data argument,” he said.
The new CSV, Cleary said, will help ensure the availability and delivering of data – among other key cybersecurity tools – is as critical as physical warfighting operations within the Navy.
