Sep 8, 2026 · 7 min · 9 segments
In this week's episode of The Break Out, networks reporter Mark Pomerleau explains a new US Air Force effort to develop a…
Lee FerranHost
Aaron MehtaHost
Mark PomerleauGuest
As a matter of fact, the Air Force is looking to create measures to better defend against the emergence of AI threats to cyber networks.
Obviously, the Pentagon is going all in on using AI, not just as a chat bot like this new chat GPT model or whatever, but also to be agentic and do work for the military services.
There are questions about how it's going to hack stuff from time to time beyond doing back office stuff.
So now they've designed a defensive cyber operations campaign plan in light of a lot of these new and emerging threats like agentic AI that is really difficult to defend against.
They wanted a plan to be able to set priorities and determine where they're at, if they're falling behind, how can they get back on track to defend against these models.
I mean, I'm sure they're in a hurry because these AI models seem to be evolving day by day almost and getting more difficult.
So the first one is really just to kind of harden their networks, blunt the attack.
This is using their cyber SWAT teams, if you will, to hunt the network for various adversary malicious activity.
Next, they really want to look at deliberate defense, which is prioritizing which networks they want to defend over others.
How can they make it difficult for adversaries to achieve their objective against attacking these networks? And certainly, last but not least, is developing different architectures.
Think of things like ICAM, Zero Trust, where even if the adversary does get in, they want to make it difficult for them to get to their objective.
This is stuff that the Pentagon has been trying to do for a very long time just to defend against cybersecurity threats in general.
As a matter of fact, the Air Force is looking to create measures to better defend against the emergence of AI threats to cyber networks.
Obviously, the Pentagon is going all in on using AI, not just as a chat bot like this new chat GPT model or whatever, but also to be agentic and do work for the military services.
There are questions about how it's going to hack stuff from time to time beyond doing back office stuff.
So now they've designed a defensive cyber operations campaign plan in light of a lot of these new and emerging threats like agentic AI that is really difficult to defend against.
They wanted a plan to be able to set priorities and determine where they're at, if they're falling behind, how can they get back on track to defend against these models.
I mean, I'm sure they're in a hurry because these AI models seem to be evolving day by day almost and getting more difficult.
So the first one is really just to kind of harden their networks, blunt the attack.
This is using their cyber SWAT teams, if you will, to hunt the network for various adversary malicious activity.
Next, they really want to look at deliberate defense, which is prioritizing which networks they want to defend over others.
How can they make it difficult for adversaries to achieve their objective against attacking these networks? And certainly, last but not least, is developing different architectures.
Think of things like ICAM, Zero Trust, where even if the adversary does get in, they want to make it difficult for them to get to their objective.
This is stuff that the Pentagon has been trying to do for a very long time just to defend against cybersecurity threats in general.
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