Piret Pernik, ICDS Research Fellow, moderated a panel at the Forth Annual Cyber Security Conference „Integrating Cyber Defence into Professional Military Education“ that was held on 26-27 October 2016 in Riga.
The conference was organised by the Baltic Defence College. Speakers and participants included Baltic, Nordic and US national defence academies, universities and research institutions, civilian and military personnel from the Ministries of Defence and Defence Forces, NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence, NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence, NATO HQ Emerging Security Challenges Division, and European Defence Agency. More information is available at the conference website http://www.baltdefcol.org/cyber/.
I her remarks Piret emphasized that in addition to teaching soldiers and officers of all ranks cyber hygiene and fundamental awareness on cyber security issues and on the use of cyber power in international relations national defence academies should adopt a comprehensive, multi-disciplinary approach. Since cyber security pertains to every military and social domain technological and operational views must be complemented with an understanding of the broader political, economic, social, informational context. Cyber issues in other social sciences such as policy and strategy, law, economics, strategic communications, and so forth should be covered in cyber defence educational programmes. In addition, cyber issues must be made relevant to a the training audience by analysing the repercussions of cyber incidents and attack to their systems and tasks, as well as to the larger objectives of the mission. The use of methods and tools that enable the target audience to experience realistic and real-time effects – such as visualisation, table-top and hands-on exercises, workshops, demos of hacking, – should be encouraged.