FRIDAY FOTO (September 13, 2019)

Wet Silk Training

(U.S. Army photo by Specialist Christopher Stevenson)

A soldier emerges through a parachute canopy during wet silk training at Fort Carson, Colorado on September 6, 2019.

Wet silk training? It sounds so … unmilitary. Here at 4GWAR Blog, we have to admit, we had never heard the term before. The Defense Department caption that came with this photo noted wet silk training is designed to prepare Army Special Operations personnel (Green Berets and Rangers) for airborne water jumps.

Here’s the thing, parachuting out of an airplane or high-flying helicopter is daunting enough, but landing in water can be scary — especially when you swim to the surface and come up under your soggy parachute. “When you are swimming under a wet parachute, it sticks to your face and your body, and it is a very uncomfortable feeling,” Sergeant 1st Class Michael Donahue, told the author of an Army Special Operations Command public affairs article in 2014. “It’s very uncomfortable if you have never done it before,” added Donahue, who, at the time, was coaching water survival training at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

Training is conducted in swimming pools with lots of safety personnel and equipment around, including flotation devices to keep the sodden training parachute afloat, which accounts for the weird swirling colors in today’s FRIFO.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT: The National Security Threat in the Digital Revolution

NSA official says technology could upend U.S. national security infrastructure

 

An opinion piece on the New York Times website this week (September 10, 2019) sounds an alarm over the cyber threats posed by the digital revolution sweeping through all aspects of U.S. society.

Glenn S. Gerstell, general counsel of the National Security Agency (NSA), says it is “almost impossible to overstate the challenges” and “profound implications for our federal security agencies” that the general onrush of technology presents. The NSA leads the U.S. Government in cryptology, the study of codes — both creating and breaking them — which encompasses both signals intelligence (SIGINT) and information assurance (or cybersecurity) products and services. The agency also enables computer network operations for the United States and its allies.

Unlike previous transformational technologies like railroads, electricity, radio and airplanes — which took decades to reach widespread use — cell phones, the Internet and social media have spread and shaped society in a time frame without precedent, Gerstell writes in his lengthy article.

(U.S. Navy photo by Ensign Crysta Gonzalez)

One example of the many challenges he cites is understanding how adversaries might use artificial intelligence (AI) in the future, including data poisoning — feeding misinformation to AI systems to corrupt or defeat them, such as causing a driverless vehicle to ignore a stop sign.  What are the implications for future autonomous weapons such as drones or armed robots? What are the protocols by which they will be controlled?

The sheer amount of data generated by individual and commercial activities will require enormous investments by the United States and its allies to upgrade national security and surveillance systems — perhaps much more than the roughly $60 billion the United States already spends annually on the intelligence community, which includes the FBI, CIA and a dozen other civilian and military agencies.

But it will take more than money to cope with unprecedented technological change, adapt to a world of continuous cyber conflict, navigate concepts of privacy and power that comes with access to big data, and to counter the effects of malign use of the Internet, according to Gerstell.

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Top photo: Mass Communications Specialist 2nd Class Sarah Villegas, U.S. Navy.