Tag Archive for: reorganization

Xi Jinping calls for China’s biggest military reorganization since 2015 – Firstpost

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Chinese President Xi Jinping. Source: AP

As cyber warfare between China and the United States intensifies, Chinese President Xi Jinping ordered what is being touted as the biggest reorganization of the nation’s military since 2015.

With an intention to expand its military capabilities, China terminated the Strategic Support Force and in turn created a new branch called the Information Support Force. This provides China with the ability to bolster its capabilities in several areas including cyber warfare, Xinhua News reported.

It is important to note that Beijing’s now-terminated Strategic Support Force was created more than eight years ago with the aim of enhancing capabilities in space, cyber, political and electronic warfare.

What’s new? 

China’s defence ministry maintained that the aerospace and cyber units previously under the Strategic Support Force will now be organizationally parallel to the newly created Information Support Force.

The aerospace unit is expected to improve China’s capability to use space and step up the management of space crises.

While announcing the new re-organisation, Xi reiterated the Communist Party’s leadership over the army. The Chinese President insisted that the new force would provide “key support in coordinating the construction and utilization of the cyber information system.”

According to Xinhua, Li Wei, the political commissar from the now-defunct Strategic Support Force, will take over the same role with the Information Support Force.

Following the announcement, Li pledged to “resolutely” listen to Xi’s instructions. Bi Yi on the other hand was appointed the new commander of the new force.

The change amid a tense climate

The restructuring came as China continues to face off with the US in a fight for global influence with cyberwarfare emerging as a key battleground. Last month, the US, the UK and New Zealand accused China of sponsoring malicious cyber activity and targeting democratic institutions.

Interestingly, the disappearance of the previous commander of the Strategic Support Force Ju Qiansheng, has led to a rise in speculations about the growing turmoil within China’s military leadership.

While Ju recently appeared in the…

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Space Force Looks to Boost Cyber Defenses of Satellites with Acquisition Reorganization

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The ongoing restructuring of Space Force acquisition authorities is designed in part to ensure proper cybersecurity testing and monitoring of new programs as they are developed and deployed, a senior Space Force procurement official said May 10.

The stand-up of Space Systems Command, and it’s absorption of the Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC), details of which were unveiled last month, was advertised as an effort to increase the speed and agility of Space Force acquisitions.

But in a lunchtime keynote at the CyberSatDigital event on May 10, Cardell DeLaPena, program executive officer for Space Production at SMC, stressed that it was also intended to improve the resilience of Space Force overhead architecture against new kinetic and cyber threats.

“The reason why we’ve stood up … a separate Space Systems Command for acquisition, and launch, and architecting is to make that shift from today’s peacetime architecture, … an architecture which was never envisioned to conduct offensive or defensive operations,” he said. In its place, Space Force plans a new architecture that could survive kinetic and cyberattacks by near-peer adversaries. “To make that pivot,” DeLaPena added, “We integrate all of those responses to those threats to our satellites into an integrated architecture, which will achieve space superiority.”

The new architecture, DeLaPena said, would rely on digital twinning technology, more properly called model-based systems engineering, in which a detailed virtual model of a satellite or other complex system is built so that it can be attacked and its cyber defenses tested.

DeLaPena said that cyber threats to U.S. satellite systems would be addressed in detail in a classified session later in the week, but outlined a series of “potential threats” in the cyber domain, which he said the newly reorganized acquisition elements in the Space Force would be “testing against” before turning new products over to operational commanders.

“The types of threats we are looking for [are] things like insertion of rogue components—that’s more on the supply side—malicious software, electronic warfare…

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NIST Suspends IT Lab Reorganization – GovInfoSecurity.com

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GovInfoSecurity.com NIST Suspends IT Lab Reorganization GovInfoSecurity.com Under the proposed reorganization, unveiled in August, the director of the lab's Computer Security Division would have been elevated to a position within …

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