President Obama may be urged to split the joint leadership of the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command in favor of two distinct forces for cyberespionage and cyberwarfare as NSA officials announce that artificial intelligence will be a future part of U.S. cyber strategy.
The potential move will be urged by the Pentagon and intelligence community and is driven by a sense that the two missions are fundamentally different as military hackers and cyberspies shouldn't compete to use the same networks and the job of leading both missions is too big for one person, according to the Washington Post.
Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper are both reportedly pressing for the split, with Carter seeking to build Cyber Command into a full-fledged fighting force that has its own network accesses to conduct attacks, the post said while Clapper supports the idea in hopes that it will reduce tension over which force gets to use the networks .
Last week, NSA leader Admiral Michael Rogers told an audience at the Intelligence & National Security Summit that ‘‘he believes the two organizations should remain aligned but separate.
In other news, earlier this week, Rogers told Congress that artificial intelligence will play a large role in the U.S. cyberspace strategy.
He told the Senate Armed Services Committee Tuesday that his agency is interested in using machine learning to do cyber at the scale and speed necessary to keep up with adversaries, according to Inside Sources.
“Because if we're just going to take this largely human capital approach to doing business, that is a losing strategy,” he said.
