Airmen were sent running half a mile across base with sticky notes to alert the operations team of the details for the C-130 takeoff. When the aircraft arrived to airdrop of water and ammunition to troops in combat, ground crews sent up smoke signals to alert pilots that they were engaged with the enemy. Back at home base, it was “controlled chaos,” a pilot said.
It’s what happens when all forms of electronic communication are wiped out.
It was all part of a simulated cyber attack that the Missouri National Guard’s 139th Operations Group practiced as part of an exercise dubbed “Operations Goes Dark.” Over the course of four days, a simulated U.S. adversary conducted intermittent attacks on the base, jamming internet communications, leaving teams to resort to pen and paper, white boards and dry erase markers. For the first two days, the internet was out for hours at a time and by the third and fourth day, it was down altogether.
The exercise was done to prove that the airwing could operate without access to computers or personal cell phones, all while sending up and landing aircraft and resupplying troops.
“We have the potential for being involved with real-world adversaries that have the ability to do this,” said Capt. Kyle Hutchison, a 180th Airlift Squadron pilot who planned the exercise.
The focus of the operation was on a cyber attack’s impact to flight operations, which begins long before the planes even leave the ground. Without access to everyday digital systems for updates to things like aircraft maintenance, crew readiness or inclement weather, they resorted to passing information, person-to-person, using the same techniques as aviators and ground crews in the 20th century.
“The big picture: if other people aren’t helping us get to where we need to be, we’re not gonna fly the airplanes and execute the mission,” said Chief Master Sgt. Jason Lehman, chief of safety for the 139th Airlift Wing. “We tried to change the mindset of going back to the old school mentality of we don’t necessarily need that to effectively execute a mission. We went back to whiteboards and dry erase markers and drew out the mission by hand.”
The chance for human error
The challenges began early on. Planning briefs usually include PowerPoints up on a screen, but for this exercise they had to throw that out. They also had to change the way they communicated the stakes of the cyber attack from the top down.
“You can’t just pick up the phone and say, ‘hey, this is so and so,’” Hutchison said. “Being able to do that is a real real kick in the pants when you’re not used to operating that way.”
In normal circumstances, air traffic personnel would use radios to communicate with pilots, but instead they had runners outside watching the aircraft launch and bringing back information to the operations group.
Hutchison said it’s usually a “constant process” of figuring out if the aircraft are in good standing maintenance-wise, when they’re ready for pre-flight inspections, how much fuel is on board and the location of the plane. In order to communicate all of the details, and ask questions, they used the runners, but this slowed things down.
“There are a lot of very simple things that we use phones to communicate things to each other about. If you didn’t have that, think about how much extra time that would inflict on you,” he said.
It also added a human challenge of playing the game of telephone — where information could change ever so slightly after it was passed between people. Something as simple as takeoff times could be miscommunicated and then that error might throw other operational plans off.
“There’s always a way where there could potentially be the human dimensions aspect of this where somebody messes up something or misspeaks,” Hutchison said. “We’re human. It happens. But that’s one of those situations where you pray that it doesn’t happen in a conversation that was super important.”
In addition to runners, mission support personnel tested the use of satellite phones to call flight service stations “that would be outside of the affected region of jamming” to get up-to-date information on factors that would be crucial to the aircrews like weather.
For pilots, Hutchison said the exercise emphasized the need to train “clock to chart to ground techniques.” This meant pilots using flight time, paper maps and visual aids on the ground to navigate without GPS. On the ground, personnel used smoke signals to alert pilots that the drop zone wasn’t safe and it had been overtaken or disrupted by enemy forces.
“I think that was an eye opening and kind of a shocking revelation because everybody had done this at some point in their career going through pilot training or nav school but it’s been a long time since they had done that,” Hutchison said. “It identified areas that are challenging with it, but I think it also opened the door for us to be able to do this more routinely.”
The broader lesson, according to Hutchison, was the need for an established analog process that’s routinely updated and can be used to vet air crews and generate flight authorizations. All of those factors are part of the planning process, but are key to aircraft being able to take off and land successfully, he said.
“So many people have their hand in something in order to get this to get a crew out the door, and, I don’t think that it’s talked about,” he said. “That is the part of the puzzle that it takes a lot more bites of the pie in order to complete the circle.”
Limitations and future exercises
While the Air Wing communicated their plans for the exercise, Lehman and Hutchison said one of their biggest challenges was getting other offices on base to play ball.
“We were kind of in an exercise bubble here where it was the operations group doing this, but the rest of the base was not under the exercise,” Lehman said. “Next time, lessons learned for a bigger exercise for us is getting everyone involved.”
They were also limited by the fact that air traffic controllers still had to be alert for nearby civilian aircraft that were flying near the base. It was “non-negotiable” for safety reasons, Hutchison said.
In future exercises, Lehman said they would benefit from the challenges of operating in a more mountainous environment from a risk management and environmental analysis perspective, since Missouri and eastern Kansas have relatively flat terrain.
Given how likely it is that the different services will have to work together in a conventional fight like the one the U.S. military is preparing for, they’ll eventually have to practice analog flight operations with the other branches, as well, Lehman said.
“As we know, different services communicate differently,” he said. “Sometimes just the lingo barrier can cause issues.”
And that’s before you have people shouting messages to runners who have to run across the airbase to relay that information.
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