Summer 2017 | 91
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Data You Can Trust
Blockchain Technology
Col Vincent Alcazar, USAF, Retired
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the official sanction of the Department of Defense, Air Force, Air Education and Training Command, Air University, or other agencies or
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and Space Power Journal requests a courtesy line.
They say that coming events cast their shadows before. May they not some-
times cast their lights before?
—Augusta Ada King–Noel, Countess of Lovelace
e Case for Change
America’s military continues its wait for network-centric warfare (NCW) break-
throughs to deliver technological leadership and war-fighting advances that revolu-
tionize the American way of battle. Instead, in the past decade the US military got
artifacts: Internet access, laptop computing, the introduction of smartphones, and
so forth. The artifacts of technological advancement are often misidentified as the
anticipated NCW breakthroughs. At their core, those artifacts are iterative device
and machine productivity improvements. If NCW has an insidious weakness, it is
its hardware orientation. The focus on artifacts begs a question: what about the data
that is transported within the hardware, devices, networks, and associated infra-
structure? Despite advancements in technologies and processes, today’s software
and hardware shells—the things that surround and distribute data—remain chronically
vulnerable. Among history’s recurring insights is that a military’s vulnerabilities—
hidden or acknowledged—can become linchpins in an opponent’s campaign of sur-
prise. However, surprise need not be strategic to impede the American way of battle.
What is to be done?
Against the backdrop of US data vulnerabilities and potential susceptibility to cyber-
space surprise, warriors and warrior leaders need a different approach, a big idea—
a viable technology that can mitigate the weakness in the DOD’s paradigm of central-
ized data protection. The better (big) idea should not be a continued near-exclusive
focus on iterative military computing machine improvements. Instead, this better
idea ought to outline a design for the enhanced security of what military informa-
tion technology (IT) equipment processes, stores, and distributes: data. The better
idea exists; it is blockchain technology. Concisely stated, blockchain is a technology
that stores data in a way that makes it incorruptible, doing so via its integrated data
ledgers. The reasons to adopt blockchain’s leap-ahead technology are twofold:
