Military Communications and Information Technology: A Trusted ...

Chapter 4: Information Assurance & Cyber Defence
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• recording of any information about incidents, both positive (i.e.: Best and
Good Practices) and negative (Lessons Learned),
• ordering recorded items according to some predefined criteria (e.g. ranking).
The results which should be delivered at the end of the process after collecting
an appropriate amount of complete data about incidents, on one hand lead directly
to an increase in analysis quality and on the other (indirectly) to:
• increase in the training effectiveness (for e.g. through updated syllabuses
of training programs, discussing more comprehensive cases in the area
of cyber security, etc.);
• wider use of observations and experiences from mission (e.g. through visualization
of cyber risk on the map, predicting the threat levels for a given
region and period of time, ...);
• cross-validation and improvement of the methodological documents
fundamental for military service (recommending changes that aim at
improving soldiers’ performance) on a tactical level (in warfare rules),
operational-tactical level (mission plans), to a strategic level (improvement
of doctrines).
A successful execution of a process of gathering factual data (information
about incidents) is a necessary condition to be able to apply advanced methods
of analysis of data in subsequent steps e.g. to identify relevant:
• correlations (mutual qualitative and quantitative relations);
• coincidences (simultaneous occurrence of incidents, which are not related
to each other by the root cause);
• associations (association, combining facts pairwise and identifying relations
between them);
• cause-effect relations (direct and indirect).
An interesting case study on the analysis of communication networks reliability
in crisis management and military missions is presented by authors in [3].
The way to identify and analyse the critical resources, search for the optimum
communications network layout (relative to the adopted criterion) and identifying
cause-effect relationships of objects and processes in the area of communications
is presented there with use of game theory approach.
IV. Factographic data collection process
The proposed method of collecting factual material in cyberspace is specific
and as such can be characterized by:
• underlying goal of inferring information from data and further turning
it into explicit knowledge;
• multi-staged approach (gaining experience e.g. from daily missions, collecting,
analysing and then applying it in a given context);