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Computerworld - Mark Sachs, a U.S. Army major with battlefield network engineering experience, explains his newest mission this way: "We understand that one of the commodities we have to move is information - not just fuel, equipment and soldiers. That information movement requires an infrastructure. And security of the information inside that infrastructure is a big concern."

The Info Warrior's Job The U.S. military first experimented with information warfare in Operation Desert Shield, when it disrupted Iraqi military communications. But the job of an information warrior didn't become official until October 1999, when, at the behest of a presidential directive, the Computer Network Defense and Computer Network Attack missions were formed under the U.S. Space Command at Peterson Air Force Base, Colo. With titles like operations analyst, electronic engineer and chief of communications and computer systems, information warriors develop and operate computer-based offenses and defenses.

At the end of 1999, Sachs became an operations analyst at the newly organized Joint Task Force for Computer Network Defense in Arlington, Va., an assignment given to him just after he finished government-sponsored graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin.
Washington is the nerve center for those U.S. military networks put into the task force's care: the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force and a dozen other agencies, such as the National Security Agency, Defense Finance and Accounting Service, Defense Logistics Agency and Defense Information Systems Agency (the Department of Defense's backbone support network). In essence, the Computer Network Defense task force has been charged with protecting more than 3.5 million DOD computers.
Sachs works the analytical side of the task force. The other side is the watch team. The watch team monitors DOD computers for problems, abnormalities and intrusions both within and outside DOD networks - such as the distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks that took down the Web sites of Yahoo Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and eBay Inc. early last year. "We observed the DDOS activity hour by hour, because if a problem arises somewhere else on the Internet, it may eventually affect us," Sachs says.
While the watch group gathers data from its network traffic, outside commercial emergency advisories and news reports, the analysis team to which Sachs belongs is tasked with figuring out what to do with that information.
"If the watch reports something wrong - an intrusion or whatever - we then make an assessment of whether there is or isn't an operational impact on the Department of Defense," Sachs explains.
Sachs hasn't been on the job long enough to chase down any