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TOWARDS MATURE ADF INFORMATION WARFARE –
FOUR YEARS OF GROWTH
MAJOR GENERAL MARCUS THOMPSON, AM
HEAD INFORMATION WARFARE, AUSTRALIAN
DEPARTMENT OF DEFENCE
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Welcome back!
It has been an eventful year this year, and when I
spoke to you at the end of 2019 I don’t think anyone in
the room could have predicted where we would be
today.
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Indeed, “where” we all are is multiply located, you are
watching me give a pre-recorded address, and our
digital world has come of age – if in a somewhat forced
way – through the Corona crisis.
At the end of last year, we would have gathered
together physically, spoken and shaken hands, and
some of us might have discussed the early emergence
of some bushfires in rural NSW.
Now, we have lived through one of the worst fire
seasons in this nation’s history, and the world is still
subject to a pandemic that has destroyed lives,
livelihoods, and greatly damaged the economy. Every
facet of our lives has been affected by it. The only
reassuring constant we have is our digital environment
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which has sustained, enabled and in some cases saved
us during this unprecedented global crisis.
*SLIDES START*
In many ways, our roaring dependence on the digital
world has come at us with the same speed that fires
engulfed us over Christmas. We knew fires were there,
they were dangerous and they had the potential to
overtake us.
Then, they did overtake us, or they nearly did.
As a nation, we are learning to adapt to this new
environment of cyber and information warfare in much
the same way as our communities have become more
sharply aware of the risk we suffer from bushfires and
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pandemics. These risks seep through the seams of our
existing governance and security systems and threaten
to overtake us. Cyber and information events can come
without warning and engulf how we do our business
and conduct our lives. Our communities across
government, business and industry have started to
adapt themselves meaningfully to how we manage this
now very real risk to our national capability and even
our individual lives. In the ADF, the complexity and
sophistication of cyber threats has changed how we
think about our security, our governance, and how we
conduct warfighting.
So I’d like today to share with you first an overview of
my last four years as Head Information Warfare. Even
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this last and very unpredictable year shares themes
with the ADF’s growth as an organisation becoming
resilient in the cyber age.
Four years of growth
The story of the summer bushfires isn’t unlike my entry
into this job four years ago when I addressed you for
the first time.
There, I spoke about how elements of the Department
of Defence had been reticent about forming an
“Information Warfare Division.” I walked Defence’s
halls as the Division’s new head and whispered the
word “cyber” in the hope I wouldn’t be immediately
removed for doing so.
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Then, cyber’s importance came like fire in its intensity
and our awareness of the threats. Their public profile
changed decisively – earlier this year even, the Prime
Minister announced that the nation was subject to
ongoing cyber-attacks at all levels of Government. This
sort of publicity would have been unthinkable a decade
earlier. Now, the nation knows that cyber is a way of
life and core to the business of national security,
business strategy and management, individual and
community safety.
Cyber has become part and parcel of what we do in the
ADF. In my time as the inaugural Head of Information
Warfare, we have come a long way. To name just a few
things, we have:
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Accelerated the development of our cyber
workforce, achieving the White Paper’s directed
workforce 7 years ahead of when the White Paper
said we would achieve it
Built our own cyber ranges
Established:
o A Joint Cyber Unit and cyber units in the Navy
and Army to complement significant effort
within the Air Force
o A common training pipeline for training cyber
practitioners across the ADF. Cyber is now the
only truly Joint ADF workforce, and the only
ADF trade with a common pipeline across all
three Services of Army, Navy and Air Force
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o A common ADF cyberworthiness framework
o Agreed cyber doctrine and concepts
o A Cyber Gap Program to allow short ADF work
placements to prepare cyber students to
apply their skills in an online operational
environment
Additionally, we have established:
o Partnerships with local, national and
international institutions to support the ADF’s
cyber and information warfare capability
development
o Classified cyber infrastructure and databases
o ADF satellite capabilities
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o Advanced and integrated ADF electronic
warfare systems.
In addition, we have brought forward the ADF’s
Defensive Cyberspace Operations Project, JP 9131,
over 12 months faster than the original schedule, so
Defence can defend its deployed networks and combat
platforms against rapidly evolving cyber threats. The
Minister for Defence announced on 12 August an initial
investment of $575 million for this program to support
the growth of the ADF cyber workforce. Government is
also constructing a Joint Information Warfare Facility
here in the ACT.1
1 https://www.minister.defence.gov.au/minister/lreynolds/media-releases/stronger-cyber-defences-deployed-adf-networks
https://www.minister.defence.gov.au/minister/lreynolds/media-releases/stronger-cyber-defences-deployed-adf-networkshttps://www.minister.defence.gov.au/minister/lreynolds/media-releases/stronger-cyber-defences-deployed-adf-networks
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These are only a few of the things we have done. The
momentum in my shop has been fast and strong. It
continues this way unabated.
But at the end of four years, do I think Defence has
“got it” about information warfare and cyber? Have we
advanced to a point where, as I have asked many
times, ADF commanders will think kinetic and non-
kinetic effects in the same breath?
I think the answer is yes, but we still have a long way to
go.
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Where we have gotten to
Some of you may recall that despite even my own
scepticism about “information” and “cyber” operations
in warfare when I began in 2017, a quick reading of
Russian warfare theorist and Chief of the General Staff
Valery Gerasimov convinced me that we needed to act,
and to act faster.
The issue clear to me was that warfare was changing in
its character, and what our Defence Strategic Update
recently named as “grey-zone operations” were
becoming part and parcel of how military manoeuvres
were being conducted across the world.
Grey-zone operations, as the Strategic Update
reminded us, are coercion and influence operations
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that do not exceed the thresholds for normal military
conflict, but achieve strategic goals by means other
than conventional state-on-state conflict.2
The world has seen that such operations are very
effective. The ADF, with its allies, has begun to address
how to confront operations in the grey zone of conflict
between peace and war.
Cyber is a part of this. That is, cyber capabilities and
the use of digital information more broadly – any form
of activity in the digital world which has aggressive
strategic intent against a nation, its interests, or its
critical national infrastructure. Because cyber and
information play such a key role in these new dynamics
2 Australian Government, Defence Strategic Update 2020, p. 5: “[Grey-zone activities] involve military and non-military forms of assertiveness and coercion aimed at achieving strategic goals without provoking conflict.”
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of conflict, it is essential for us, as an ADF, to treat
cyber as a domain of warfare and not just an enabling
capability, as many of us have done to date.
So, we are starting to do this. This will involve new
thinking about how warfighting is conducted in every
domain – where “joint” capabilities in the future mean
air, land, sea, space, and cyber, each contributing
strategic effects in their own right.
These are big conceptual shifts. They change how we
think about warfare just as Government is thinking
about how we generate national capability in the cyber
domain outside of Defence also.
Government’s 2020 Cyber Security Strategy, for
example, shows we are starting to join together the
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seams of cyber as a national effort.3 Alongside
Government’s lead cyber agencies, the ADF is learning
to think about how to act in cyberspace as a domain of
warfare and not just a set of new technologies which
improve our existing warfighting capabilities.
I have had three key questions throughout my tenure,
which I have posed to you and to others I have spoken
with:
1. How do we have a sensible public conversation
about information warfare threats?
2. How do we build national resilience against malign
activities in cyberspace?
3 Australian Government, Australia’s Cyber Security Strategy 2020, https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/cyber-
security-subsite/files/cyber-security-strategy-2020.pdf
https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/cyber-security-subsite/files/cyber-security-strategy-2020.pdfhttps://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/cyber-security-subsite/files/cyber-security-strategy-2020.pdf
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3. What is the role of the ADF in a whole-of-
Government response to these threats?
I am in a better place to answer each of them today.
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1. How do we have a sensible public conversation
about information warfare threats?
We are in a better place to do this because the
Government is already speaking about it. As noted,
grey-zone warfare is now part of our strategic lexicon
and commanders and thought-leaders are beginning to
analyse and identify how the ADF will respond to
activities using cyber and information alongside other
tools of national power.
But there remain ambiguities. Principally, about what
“information warfare” actually is. Is it political warfare
waged through digital means? Or is it cyber capabilities
directed dangerously at civilian populations?
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In reality, it is both. But it is also much more than that.
It is the reality that, today, the passage of information
in the digital sphere defines and directs our lives in
ways we couldn’t imagine just a few years ago. That
means, for the general public, we have to accept that
digital information is a tool of national capability – both
for us, and for our potential adversaries. It means that
the public are in the “line of fire” in a way that they
weren’t before, because information is the
ammunition of the cyber domain. Information – ones
and zeroes and facts and figures resident in the
information environment – can be purposed to
strategic ends by state and non-state actors alike.
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Put differently, the smartphone is the “AK-47” of the
modern information battlefield. We are only just
getting used to what that means for all of us.
If you’re listening to this outside the military and are
worried, you probably should be. But there are
grounds to feel safe, too. The ADF’s adaptability and
agility in this domain has been impressive. We have
learned fast in a short time how to make use of this
new battlefield of cyber and information on deployed
operations. At home, we work closely with our team-
mates in the Australian Signals Directorate to ensure
the Australian military can fight in and through the
information and cyber domain. ASD’s capability is
among the very best in the world, and we are learning
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through them and our whole-of-Government peers
how to use this domain to the strongest effect for our
ADF objectives.
In the ADF, our forces are learning to integrate in the
information domain with our allies, to make us more
formidable through our strategic partnerships with
industry and with our traditional allies. If the strategic
battlefield has changed through cyber and
information’s prevalence, the ADF is changing with it
and sometimes evolving faster than the battlefield
itself.
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2. How do we build national resilience against
malign activities in cyberspace?
The answer to this question starts with awareness and
acceptance of the cyber threat. The threat is real, it is
dynamic, and it wishes us harm. For that reason, we
need to be able to talk clearly about the cyber threat
and inform ourselves how to counter it across all
sections of our community. Then, we need build
national resilience against it.
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National resilience is a core question for Australia. We
saw through the summer bushfires, and are now
seeing through the COVID-19 pandemic, that our
ability to withstand sudden, unpredictable and
destructive change is central to our national capacity.
For that reason, Australia must become as nationally
resilient in the cyber domain as we are in every other
component of our national capability. Perhaps more so
in the digital environment, because of the extent to
which digital information now drives us. And, of
course, because of our increasing dependence on
digital information.
Recent analysis from Australia’s own AustCyber
showed that a sustained cyber-attack against
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Australia’s economy lasting four weeks would cost the
Australian economy $30 billion – approximately 1.5%
of GDP.4
* SLIDES FINISH *
Such amounts can pale when seen against global
figures for economic loss and recovery during the
COVID-19 pandemic. But the reality is that digital and
cyber weakness can be crippling to our way of life.
So, how do we defend against such possibilities, and
become resilient to withstand them?
First, we need to cooperate well and integrate strongly.
4 AustCyber, Australia’s Digital Trust Report, 2020,
https://www.austcyber.com/resource/digitaltrustreport2020 . See also Australian Government, Australia’s
Cyber Security Strategy 2020, https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/cyber-security-subsite/files/cyber-security-
strategy-2020.pdf
https://www.austcyber.com/resource/digitaltrustreport2020https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/cyber-security-subsite/files/cyber-security-strategy-2020.pdfhttps://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/cyber-security-subsite/files/cyber-security-strategy-2020.pdf
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Already, government departments recognise that cyber
is part of their core business, and they are working
together to ensure their core cyber business can
function effectively with the cyber defences of other
national agencies.
This is part of what I call a “mesh” effect in the cyber
world – we cannot generate resilience in siloes, and we
must ensure we are across each other’s defences. We
are all very much confronting this set of problems
together.
Government’s 2020 Australian Cyber Security Strategy
and recent announcements on cyber security for
national infrastructure are very much part of working
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in our cyber environment as a collective national
effort.
Secondly, we need to be able to share critical
information at the right time with the right people.
That means generating a community of capability
where people know who to talk to, and when, about
risks they are seeing, and how they might affect the
whole of government’s systems, those of critical
industries, and those of critical infrastructure.
No-one can wage cyber warfare alone, and no-one can
defend against it alone.
Developing communities of interest are part of
generating the mesh of knowledge that will make our
defences strong and our communities deep in their
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understandings of cyber risks and how to tackle them.
That means communities of interest across
Government, industry, and the Australian community.
Finally, we need to be imaginative as we anticipate the
speed of change in the cyber domain. We may be living
in the last days of human-cyber, for example, with
artificial intelligence beating down the door to drive
cyber decision-making in less than a generation from
today.
How can we adapt to such shifts if we can’t re-imagine
the world after artificial intelligence?
We will need changes to our decision-making
structures that accommodate and make the most of
these rapid advances in technology. None of them are
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a panacea, and none of them are the “answer” to any
of our existing problems. Each of them represent the
opportunity for us to innovate organisationally and to
grow our strategic capability for modern warfare in
their light.
So, I think that alongside our generation of strong
cyber defences we need serious strategic imagination
to identify how we, in the ADF, will manoeuvre in and
through the information and cyber domain in the light
of quickly advancing technology.
We can no more stand still with our decision-making in
a rapidly changing world than we can expect warfare to
return to its ancient antecedents of sticks and stones
tomorrow. The pace of change is faster than we
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expected, and will need to run harder as a country, and
as an ADF, to keep up with it.
Resilience, in this setting, means being prepared to
change quickly and often to preserve Australia’s
strategic enterprise in the light of some of the most
dramatic technological shifts we have witnessed in
generations.
It also means being able to map that change so we in
the ADF can be deliberate about our strategic choices
for cyber, and purposeful in how we approach the
shifts that advancing cyber and information
technologies bring for warfare.
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3. What is the role of the ADF in a whole-of-
Government response to cyber and information
threats?
This is the topic I have wanted to talk to the most
across my four years. We saw over summer this year,
and in the COVID crisis that followed, that the ADF has
become an option of “first resort” when dealing with
urgent, complex, national-level threats. This is
especially the case for risks like the summer bushfires
and the pandemic which emerged quickly and found
their way through most of our traditional crisis
response mechanisms and boundaries.
Cyber is a risk just as dangerous as either the pandemic
or the summer bushfires, and it is permanent.
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The ADF has come a long way, in a short time, in its
capability development to deal with cyber and
information threats. We are still learning, but we are
like ducks or swans calm on the surface and paddling
furiously at every level of our internal systems to stay
abreast of cyber’s growth, and maximise its potential.
We have learned in the ADF that we will need to work
more closely with our whole-of-Government
colleagues to master this capability, because unlike
traditional military theatres of operation there isn’t an
exclusive cyber “terrain” for the ADF which belongs
solely to uniformed members.
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Mostly all of the ADF’s cyber activities are carefully
threaded through our relationships and dependencies
with other agencies, industry and our allies.
This is more of a strength than a risk, and the ADF is
learning daily to make it a greater asset.
What will distinguish the ADF’s approach to cyber,
however, is our ability to understand the nature of
conflict in the cyber environment, and to respond in
kinetic conflicts by integrating cyber with our
traditional capabilities for strategic military effects.
This is where cyber effects will be at their most
effective.
That means being open to strongly threading the ADF’s
external relationships so we move beyond a
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traditional, or “narrow” vision of strategic
preparedness to one that maximises the ADF’s multiple
partnerships in the cyber and information environment
to do its work.
So, while other agencies such as ASD and Home Affairs
will remain lead for Australia’s cyber responses, the
ADF is growing our partnerships with them in a strong
posture of cooperation to meet national threats in the
cyber domain.
This is a moment of growth for the ADF, just as it is for
whole-of-Government partners who are coming to
learn what we can bring, and what they can bring us, in
this new battlespace of information and cyber
capability.
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So what do I think the ADF’s role is in a whole-of-
Government response to cyber and information
threats?
Quite simply, it is as the lead military partner – as
experts skilled in the profession of arms who can apply
that experience to a new domain of warfare, whose
evolution is as rapid as cyber and information’s
technological growth.
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Conclusion
Approaching the end of four years, I can say my time in
this role has been one of unreserved learning for me.
While I started with some sense of apprehension as to
whether I could even say the word “cyber” in Defence
headquarters, I can’t say it now without people
wanting to know more, and wanting more from us.
This, in its own right, is a singular advance on a
capability for the ADF which had only just begun four
years ago. It is alongside the ADF’s significant growth in
cyber capability, investment and focus across these
four years.
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Cyber and information are now core to what the ADF
does. They are part and parcel to how we prepare to
fight as a joint force and how we think about facing any
challenge from the strategic through to the tactical
level of war.
As I leave this role in a few short weeks, I will hand
over the reins to my successor, Major General Susan
Coyle, with a sense of great expectation for all that
Susan will bring. I can say confidently that the ADF
could not be in better hands than hers for cyber and
information capabilities. Susan is an experienced
operator in cyber and information conflict globally and
a true expert in ADF capability development. These are
the prerequisites of success in a role like this.
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I know you will look forward to welcoming her here to
MILCIS next year.
For me, I look back on these four years as those of
growth toward a still developing goal – preparing the
ADF for the conflicts of the 21st century, wherever the
battlespace presents itself.
Thank you.
LENGTH AND TIMING
3, 398 words @140 wpm = 24m 30s