Introducing a Cyber Warfare Communications Effect Model to Synthetic Environments

Network-Centric Warfare (NCW) is characterized by geographically dispersed forces maintaining a high level of situational awareness, allowing increased combat effectiveness. Computer network operations (CNO) are becoming an effective weapon to undermine the capability of net-centric systems. Hence, there exists an urgent need to evaluate and train for vulnerabilities and resilience of net-centric military systems to computer network attacks from multiple, diverse, and (possibly) coordinated threats on communication networks. Published research and initial investigations have demonstrated efficacy of countermeasures to security threats. However, such countermeasures to security threats are evaluated in isolation, that is, their side-effect on other operational systems have not been considered nor has their impact on other metrics such as force effectiveness been analyzed.