Staff Sgt. Wendell Myler, a cyber warfare operations journeyman assigned to the 175th Cyberspace Operations Group of the Maryland Air National Guard monitors live cyber attacks on the operations floor of the 27th Cyberspace Squadron. (U.S. Air Force photo by J.M. Eddins Jr.)
WASHINGTON — In the face of emerging cyber threats posed by artificial intelligence, the Air Force’s cyber organization has developed what it calls a defensive cyber operations “campaign plan” to ensure networks are hardened, its commander said this week.
“At the end of the day, autonomous, agentic AI orchestrated attacks are possible today. So we’ve got to harden our networks. When people say, ‘Hey, we’re at an inflection point,’ we are absolutely at an inflection point,” Lt. Gen. Thomas Hensley, commander of 16th Air Force/Air Forces Cyber, said during a presentation at the annual Department of the Air Force Information Technology and Cyberpower conference in Montgomery, Ala., on Wednesday. “Frontier AI models, they are a concern. We are doing things to secure ourselves against those.”
Hensley said the framework follows the development of an offensive cyber operations campaign plan last year, though he did not describe that plan. For the defensive plan, there are four lines of effort, according to Hensley’s presentation:
