Author: alaysia.mckenzie

By Josh Keating of The Messenger

The U.S. government is concerned about foreign actors, including China, using new artificial intelligence tools to spread lies and disinformation in the U.S. during the 2024 presidential election, as well as launching cyberattacks aimed at “sowing chaos” in U.S. society, a top Pentagon cyber official said on Friday. 

“Certainly [the People’s Republic of China] is one of the actors that we are quite concerned about when it comes to elections defense and foreign malign influence,” Mieke Eoyang, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for cyber policy, said at a reporter’s roundtable hosted by George Washington University. “And I think our concern is that they will see the value in that kind of misinformation/disinformation, and use these tools to get better.”

Eoyang said that generative artificial intelligence capabilities–programs such as ChatGPT which study huge data sets in order to generate plausibly realistic text or images–can be useful as a “means to help people who may have not a particularly wide range of language skill affect a nation where they don’t speak the same language.”

That means that future misinformation campaigns targeting U.S. elections could be cheaper and easier to carry out than Russia’s well-publicized efforts in 2016. They could also be more effective. 

Earlier this week, the New York Times reported on a Chinese misinformation campaign which used AI-generated text and images to suggest that the recent wildfires in Maui were caused by a “weather weapon” being tested by the U.S. government. It’s believed to be one of the first large-scale efforts to use artificial intelligence to spread misinformation, and officials worry it could be a preview of what’s in store for the 2024 election.

Traditionally, state-backed online influence campaigns like these have been carried out by large groups like the St. Petersburg-based troll army employed by the late Yevgeny Prigozhin, or the so-called “50-cent army” of online nationalists who push messages on behalf of the Chinese government.  

AI could allow governments to generate the same amount of content with far less manpower, and potentially higher believability. A report released by the RAND Corporation this month suggested a scenario in which social networks like Twitter and Facebook would be populated by massive numbers of AI-generated fake accounts that “do not just sound like native U.S. English speakers but use regional variations, such as “Pittsburghese” or Southern American English. They get jokes and U.S. cultural references, and they post pictures of their life: camping with the kids, their dog lying on the living room rug, a birthday party…they also share their political opinions from time to time.”

According to the Times report, U.S. intelligence officials believe Chinese influence campaigns will likely try to undermine support for President Joe Biden and boost the campaign of Donald Trump, but Eoyang wouldn’t comment on Beijing’s intentions.

“I wish I could read Xi’s mind,” she said. 

Eoyang also noted that efforts to bolster election cybersecurity have “broad bipartisan support.”

Elections are not the only area of concern for U.S. cybersecurity officials when it comes to China. Earlier this week, the Pentagon released a new cybersecurity strategy, the unclassified version of which warned that both China and Russia “have embraced malicious cyber activity as a means to counter U.S. conventional military power.”

Last May, Microsoft released a report on a state-backed Chinese hacking group nicknamed “Volt Typoon,” which it said has targeted a wide range of  government and private organizations and is part of a campaign aimed at disrupting “critical communications infrastructure between the United States and Asia region during future crises.”

On Friday, Eoyang said the Volt Typhoon report and other recent revelations of Chinese activity suggested “a theory of disrupting military mobilization, but also sowing chaos in the United States.”

Others:

‘Be careful what you wish for:’ DoD official warns separate cyber force could pose new challenges | USSA News | The Tea Party's Front Page.

Senior DOD official on creating an independent cyber service: 'Be careful what you wish for' | DefenseScoop

BY JEFF SCHOGOL of Task and Purpose

The U.S. military is making plans to evacuate its drone bases in Niger, but no such order is imminent, said Air Force Gen. James Hecker, commander of US Air Forces Europe/Africa.

“We are doing a lot of prudent planning, but right now we’re not going anywhere, and we don’t plan to go anywhere until we’re told to go anywhere,” Hecker told reporters on Friday. “And right now, there’s not a need to go anywhere, so our civilian leadership is just saying, ‘Hey, hang tight, and continue planning in case something happens.’ And we’ll be ready if something happens, but hopefully this thing gets done politically, diplomatically with no bloodshed.”

Hecker spoke during a Defense Writers Group event, which is based at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

The U.S. military has two drone bases in Niger: One in the country’s capital of Niamey and the other, Agadez, that cost $110 million to build. After taking power last month in a coup, the military junta now ruling Niger closed the country’s airspace, preventing the U.S. from flying drone missions for now.

Roughly 1,100 U.S. troops are deployed to Niger, which has become an increasingly important partner for counter-terrorism operations in Africa. Several other countries in the region including Mali and Burkina Faso have experienced coups in recent years and become more closely aligned with Russia.

So far, the U.S. government is not calling the overthrow of Niger’s democratically elected president a coup, which would trigger the end of American economic and military assistance to the country.

Meanwhile, the 15-member Economic Community of West African States has threatened to invade Niger if ousted President Mohamed Bazoum is not restored to power, and Mali and Burkina Faso have both said they would consider such an intervention as an act of war against them.

Hecker said on Friday that U.S. Air Forces Europe/Africa has been ordered to conduct planning to evacuate the two drone bases in Niger under both permissive and nonpermissive circumstances.

“We are planning it because it’s prudent planning to be ready for all situations,” Hecker said. “There’s a lot of hypotheticals that we could come up with why and if we should evacuate. We are hoping that we don’t have to evacuate.”

The U.S. government is trying to reach a diplomatic solution to Niger’s current crises so that it does not turn violent, Hecker said.

If U.S. Air Forces Europe/Africa is ordered to conduct a gradual evacuation of the two bases that takes place under peaceful conditions, service members would take all U.S. military equipment with them, Hecker said.

Should the U.S. military be ordered to leave the bases under more dangerous conditions, it would just take sensitive equipment and leave behind housing units and other items deemed non-sensitive, he said.

It’s hard to say whether the U.S. military would make the two bases’ runways unusable before leaving, said Hecker, who noted that the base in Niamey is co-located with a civilian airport.

U.S. military planners are also looking at where else in Africa it could base surveillance aircraft, but that issue would ultimately be handled by the State Department, Hecker said.

Hecker stressed that U.S. Air Forces Europe and Africa would only execute these plans if asked by the U.S. government to evacuate its forces from Niger.

“That decision is not anywhere close to being made here,” Hecker said. “And I think we have weeks if not much longer before civilian leadership is going to give an order to evacuate or not evacuate. There’s no talk right now from our civilian senior leadership that tells us to leave. We are doing prudent planning for anything that they may ask us to do.”

OTHERS:

Niger coup: US military preparing for possible withdrawal from bases | Washington Examiner

Top US Air Force general was surprised that Russia 'gave up' trying to destroy Ukraine's Russian-designed air defenses so quickly (yahoo.com)

Top Ukraine War Lessons From USAF's Commander In Europe (yahoo.com)

US military in Niger drawing up evacuation plans amid coup, air force general says | Stars and Stripes

USAFE Boss: Ukraine Won’t Get the F-16 Until 2024—And Proficiency Will Take Years (airandspaceforces.com)

Bryant Harris of Defense News

WASHINGTON ― A congressionally mandated commission on Tuesday took its first shot at convincing the Pentagon and Congress to reform its budget planning process.

The Commission on Planning, Programming, Budgeting and Execution Reform released an interim report detailing 13 improvements that could be implemented now and another 10 suggestions that require additional stakeholder feedback before the final report is due in March.

The Planning, Programming, Budgeting and Execution, or PPBE, process is the Pentagon’s multiyear system for aligning strategy with funding, which culminates in the president’s annual defense budget request to Congress. In the fiscal 2022 defense policy bill, Congress created a bipartisan commission to review the PPBE process.

“We’re looking at a number of improvements,” Commission Chairman Bob Hale, a former Pentagon comptroller, told reporters at a Defense Writers Group roundtable on Tuesday. “Can we make PPBE better able to foster innovation — because we know how important that is to national security — and to adapt more quickly to changing requirements?”

The recommendations for immediate implementation include:

• Improved Pentagon information sharing with Congress
• Consolidating budget line items
• Bolstering the Pentagon’s budget management workforce
• Modernizing information systems
• Streamlining disparate budget data sets within Pentagon budget offices

The commission is still seeking feedback from the Defense Department and Capitol Hill on its pending recommendations, which include:

• Making congressional appropriations available for two years, instead of one
• More flexibility for the Pentagon to reprogram certain funds
• Allowing new initiatives to begin even when Congress only passes short-term funding bills instead of a full budget

As part of its research, the commission has conducted 560 interviews so far with Pentagon and congressional staffers and compared the Pentagon’s PPBE system with the budget process in other federal agencies. It has also compared the U.S. defense budget process with equivalent systems in China and Russia as well as other allied countries with parliamentary systems.

“We want to make sure that we have stakeholder engagement so that when that final report comes out, it’s not a surprise to anyone and it is actionable,” said commission vice chairwoman Ellen Lord, who previously served as the Pentagon’s Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment. “There are some things in our interim report that can be acted on now. And we think there are many potential recommendations that will begin a dialogue.”

Immediate recommendations

To improve information sharing with Congress, the interim report recommends the Pentagon comptroller provide an annual midyear briefing to lawmakers to coincide with the yearly reprogramming request the Defense Department typically submits on June 30.

It also recommends moving from paper to electronic documents via classified and unclassified “enclaves” that would “include the electronic transmission of budget justification books that makes them searchable, sortable and able to be updated electronically.”

Hale noted Congress receives “an avalanche of information” when the president submits the defense budget request, but that the Pentagon is slower to provide updates later in the year “and sometimes it’s not consistent with information[lawmakers have] gotten before.”

Another recommendation calls on the Pentagon and Congress to collaborate to consolidate budget line items and accounts “where appropriate,” noting the current structure sometimes makes it “difficult for [the Defense Department] to manage defense programs and for Congress to clearly track and understand them.”

Additionally, it recommends standardizing the department’s detailed budget justification books in a common format while creating training courses for the staff who produce them.

The report also recommends improving recruiting and retention in the comptroller’s office while familiarizing them with private sector practices and improving analytic capabilities to reduce personnel workload. This pairs with another possible recommendation, pending feedback, that would call for increased staff levels in the comptroller’s office and the Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation Office, or CAPE.

Another immediate recommendation would modernize and streamline Defense Department information, allowing for better budget analysis. That includes accelerating consolidation of the data sets used by the comptroller’s office and CAPE, which “have historically used separate databases and separate tracking systems,” resulting in duplicative entries in different formats.

Notably, the fiscal 2024 defense policy bill the House narrowly passed 219-210 in July includes a provision that would abolish CAPE and direct the defense secretary to move its functions elsewhere — without specifying exactly where.

“If they just abolished CAPE and didn’t provide those functions, it would be a disaster,” Hale told Defense News. “The commission report says both CAPE and the program budget organization within the comptroller provided strong support to the PPBE. I think the commission agrees with that.”

Possible recommendations

The commission is also considering some more significant changes to the PBBE process. These possible recommendations are contingent on stakeholder feedback.

Notably, the interim report says the commission “feels strongly that changes should be made” to provide congressional funds beyond a one-year basis.

One potential recommendation suggests a “two-year minimum availabilityfor all appropriations accounts, which would reduce use-it-or-lose it pressure and allow for reprogramming of expiring funds, particularly [operation and maintenance], reducing lost buying power due to expiration and cancellation.”

The report notes other agencies like NASA and the Department of Homeland Security run on two-year appropriations for some accounts and activities.

Other possiblerecommendations would have the Pentagon streamline its procedures to reprogram funds while allowing reprogramming under certain dollar thresholds for some accounts without advance congressional approval.

Finally, the commission is looking at how to help the Pentagon cope with Congress constantly forcing it to operate on short-term funding bills past the end of the fiscal year, which inhibit the Defense Department’s ability to launch new initiatives.

Hale said one potential recommendation “would be to allow new starts under a [continuing resolution] but with the provisio that all four defense committees had acted on the budget, passed a bill and none of them had prohibited that new start.”

OTHERS:

US DoD needs better budget communication with Congress, commission says (janes.com)

https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2023/08/pentagon-may-be-too-busy-fix-its-half-century-old-budget-process-reform-group-says/389439/

New report calls for a reconsideration of the way the Department of Defense presents the budget to Congress - LatestFinance.News

'Wake up call': Panel identifies 5 'key' ways Pentagon can reform budget process now - Breaking Defense

Capitol Hill commission urges overhaul of Pentagon budget planning (yahoo.com)

Aug. 1, 2023

Chris Gordon, Air & Space Forces Magazine

Though a parade of senior American officials have visited China as of late to try to encourage a working relationship with Beijing, the Pentagon has yet to make significant progress in establishing substantive communications between the American and Chinese militaries—a tool for avoiding miscommunication and escalation during a potential crisis.

“Escalation management in the Indo-Pacific is so incredibly important, and we would be delighted to have increasing communication channels and connectivity with the [People’s Republic of China],” Mara Karlin Mara Karlin, a senior policy official at the Pentagon, told reporters Aug. 1 at a Defense Writers Group event.

But so far, that has yet to happen. Beijing has repeatedly rebuffed attempts by Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III to establish a channel for talking with his Chinese counterpart. 

“Secretary Austin has requested multiple times to have communication channels, particularly crisis communication,” said Karlin, who is performing the duties of deputy under secretary of defense for policy. “It’s really important that the most senior folks can talk to each other as quickly as possible when something happens. So Secretary Austin keeps asking for that.”

Chinese President Xi Jinping has called for “reunifying” Taiwan with China, perhaps by force if need be, and objected to U.S. efforts to improve Taiwan’s defenses with military aid. The Chinese have ramped up military drills near the island in recent years, including sending warplanes into Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone.

Tensions between the U.S. and China in the region have also grown. A Chinese jet came within a few yards of U.S. Air Force RC-135 over the South China Sea in December. In February, an F-22 Raptor shot down a Chinese surveillance balloon that transited the continental U.S. And in May, the Pentagon released video of another “unnecessarily aggressive” maneuver by a Chinese fighter intercepting a U.S. RC-135.

Heightening the potential for miscalculation is the often opaque nature of China’s decision-making. That tendency was highlighted by dramatic moves in late July when Xi sacked the head of the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force, which is in charge of China’s land-based nuclear missiles, and his foreign minister in short order.

The reason for the moves are not clear. But it comes as China is engaged in a substantial nuclear buildup that could leave it with a stockpile of 1,500 nuclear warheads by 2035, according to a Pentagon report released last year on China’s military power. 

In recent weeks the U.S. has attempted to stabilize the U.S.-China relationship. On July 12, Chinese ambassador to the U.S. Xie Feng met with Ely Ratner, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs. 

So far, however, the establishment of a military-to-military channel remains stalled despite recent visits to China by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, and climate envoy John Kerry.

“We have been trying really hard to set up communication channels and they have not been enthusiastic about those,” Karlin said. “That’s really problematic. When we look at history, it is usually quite helpful for us to be able to sit down and speak with those whom we disagree, not least so we can get an understanding of what they’re doing, what we’re doing, what we all think is escalatory, and how we might understand it in different ways.”

Austin shook hands with his Chinese counterpart Li Shangfu in June at a Singapore security meeting but did not have a substantial exchange, Pentagon Press Secretary Brig. Gen. Patrick S. Ryder said in a statement at the time. Li is under U.S. sanctions, though the Pentagon says those would not prevent talks between the two defense chiefs.

Austin met with the Chinese minister’s predecessor, Wei Fenghe, in November 2022. 

Karlin pointed to how the U.S. has tried to manage the risk of escalation with Russia despite Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

She highlighted the example of the U.S. postponing a routine test of a Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile that had been scheduled for March.  

“Now, this was just a regular old ICBM test,” Karlin said. “But understanding in that context was critical because the context was, of course, Russia’s military had just attempted this massive invasion. It wasn’t doing terribly well. Ukraine’s military was fighting a lot harder than perhaps some folks had expected. And so what would appear to be just a traditional old here’s what we do, not interesting, actually might be meaningful for escalation management.”

Others:

Pentagon’s strategy planner wants China crisis channels (yahoo.com)

Nuclear Submarines and Lessons From the Front | AFCEA International

Ukraine is ‘extraordinary laboratory' for military AI, senior DOD official says | DefenseScoop