The Persistent Cyber Training Environment (PCTE), a system developed and fielded by the U.S. Army’s Program Executive Office for Simulation, Training and Instrumentation (PEO STRI), was utilized during Cyber Flag 22, a multinational service training event held at the U.S. Cyber Command’s DreamPort facility in Columbia, Maryland, and remotely in five countries across nine different time zones from July 20 to August 12.
PCTE is an Army-led agile acquisition program delivering a distributed capability to “train as they fight” in a relevant, configurable, and real-time virtual environment for the Department of Defense cyber mission forces at the individual, group/team, and force-level. It provides the means for Cyber Mission Force (CMF) operators and trainers to create training environments that emulate the operational network environments that include realistic scope (type of nodes), scalability (number of nodes), and fidelity (level of representation of nodes) driven by training objectives and mission requirements.
Cyber Flag 22 included 17 Cyber Ops teams from U.S. Cyber Command as well as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the U.S. Postal Service. It is designed to enable a multinational collaborative environment where the U.S. and international partners can share tools, tactics, techniques, and procedures strengthening partnerships while achieving collective cyber training readiness objectives.
According to Lt. Col. Dan Rodriguez, PEO STRI product manager for Cyber Resiliency and Training (CRT), members of the CRT staff led the operations support mission, providing U.S. Cyber Command with the ability to create a virtual cyber range that DoD cyber operators could attack and defend without threatening real-world network infrastructure.
“In addition, we monitored system performance to ensure that the PCTE system was stable and responsive,” Rodriguez said. “PCTE decreases the time required to produce training scenarios, improves quality of training, increases reuse of training scenarios and emulated environments, and increases training throughput.”
Rodriguez said Cyber Flag pits event participants against live opponents with significant offensive cyber experience. By participating in the event, DoD cyber operators get hands-on experience in combating advanced threats like what they would see in real-world scenarios.
“Partner country teams are graded on the same scale as the teams from our DoD teams,” Rodriguez said. “This baseline provides the teams with a common understanding of the threats so that they can collaborate and compare their techniques."
Rodriquez said improving readiness is important to the Army and the Joint Force, and in the future, the teams’ familiarity with each other’s operating procedures will benefit their ability to work together to combat advanced threats.
“This experience results in an increase in the operators’ ability to find, eliminate, and prevent threats to important U.S. networks and systems,” Rodriguez said.
Now in its fifth production iteration, PCTE leverages agile acquisition and rapid prototyping, allowing CMF to actively test and provide feedback during development.
PCTE provides continuous support to the DoD cyber operator and has registered over 10,000 user accounts. The CRT staff is on track to deliver PCTE to the Australian Defence Force in October 2022 and expects additional international interest from allied partners around the globe.
| Date Taken: | 08.12.2022 |
| Date Posted: | 08.22.2022 09:23 |
| Story ID: | 427741 |
| Location: | ORLANDO, FLORIDA, US |
| Web Views: | 677 |
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