The Air Force Institute of Technology’s Graduate School of Engineering and Management faculty members divide their time between teaching and research at the Center for Cyberspace Research. Here are the basic facts about the graduate school:

Full-time faculty: 132
Cyberwarfare faculty: 12
New students 2006: 304 (80 percent Air Force)
Residential tuition: $291 per credit
Distance learning tuition: $249 per credit
Degrees offered: 22 master’s and 12 doctoral
Degrees conferred 2005-2006: 584

– Sami Lais

Cyberwarriors of the near future will be fighting in a terrain more alien than any in history. Familiar conventions such as up or down, dark or light, warm or cold, have little or entirely different meanings once you move from conventional to cyberwarfare. The enemy will be invisible except by inference. Physical distance will be inconsequential. And victory won’t be marked by a satisfying puff of smoke.

Weapons on this new battlefield will perforce be different from conventional ones. Maintaining situational awareness in the cyberdomain will present a huge challenge. Blue Force Tracking (BFT) systems, which combine a computer, satellite antenna and Global Positioning System receiver, let commanders see troops — both theirs and those of the enemy.

“We need a Blue Force Tracker for cyberspace,” said Air Force Capt. Brian Hobbs, speaking at the Network-Centric Warfare Conference in January.

“I need a lot more tools than just the plain-Jane network management tools that are available,” said Hobbs, deputy chief of the Directors Action Group at Air Combat Command headquarters’ communications directorate at Langley Air Force Base, Va.

“One of the first priorities of this command will be to address the fundamental command-and-control necessity of situational awareness: the omnipresent Common Operating Picture [COP] re-imagined for the cyberdomain,” said former Navy submarine officer Jim Stogdill.

Cyber and physical COPs must match up geospatially, he said. Because it often will be necessary to interact with a cyberasset, knowing its exact location will be critical.

“Despite the audible industry lip-smacking, I think this is going to be a relatively difficult nut to crack, at least to do it well,” Stogdill said.

Use of 2-D or 3-D electronic or paper maps with overlays and icons for topography, minefields or red and blue forces — “crap on maps” — is virtually second nature to anyone in the military, he said.

“In an Air Force Air Operations Center AOC or inside an Army Tactical Operations Center nearly every display will be fundamentally geospatial, the map metaphor made electronic and embedded in nearly every system,” said Stogdill, chief technology officer of interoperability specialist Gestalt. Gestalt, a member of the Lockheed Martin team modernizing 20 Air and Space Operations Centers, is building a net-centric infrastructure to connect the centers’ 48 disparate systems.

“But what does a map of the cyberdomain look like?” he asked. A cybermap can denote a server under a denial-of-service attack. “But making the leap from that to what the impacts of the attack or a counterattack — in conventional terms, will I lose my Web site or my financial systems? In warfare, what will the outcome be in cyberspace? — will be where the challenge is.”

The absence of such analysis is a deficiency in current network tools, Hobbs said at the January conference. But further, the analysis must be built into the tools, automated and have a small appetite for bandwidth to prevent disruption of warfighters’ communications on the physical battlefield, where bandwidth sometimes is limited.

– Sami Lais