The Pentagon announced Feb. 19 that Army Brig. Gen. Paul Fredenburgh III will be the next deputy commander for Joint Force Headquarters-Department of Defense Information Networks.
JFHQ-DoDIN, a subordinate headquarters of U.S. Cyber Command, is responsible for the daily defense of DoD’s networks, which face billions of daily probes by adversaries.
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Fredenburgh currently serves as the director of Command, Control, Communications and Cyber, J-6 for Indo-Pacific Command. He previously served as chief of the network integration division within the Army’s chief information office.
He takes over for Rear Adm. Kathleen Creighton, who has held the position since August 2017.
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JFHQ-DoDIN, a relatively new organization established in 2016, has made recent strides. It reached what is known as full operational capability in January 2018.
The new designation is “a recognition that we’re able to perform the basic tasks that we’re laid out to perform as the Joint Force Headquarters,” Creighton, said at the time. “We’ve been able to show through exercises and other world events that we’ve been able to perform our mission of secure, operate and defend.”
JFHQ-DoDIN has also worked to fuse intelligence with operations, optimizing network sensors to provide greater intelligence to commanders of threats to the network.
“We are capturing what the enemy is doing, how they’re doing it, their behaviors, so that we can prevent the next attack. That is much different than just stopping the attack from a whack-a-mole perspective,” Col. Paul Craft, director of operations, J3 at JFHQ-DoDIN, said. “Actually gaining information on what the enemy just did, why they did it, where they came from, home many nodes did they light up at that particular time and then using that to our advantage.”
Mark Pomerleau is a reporter for C4ISRNET, covering information warfare and cyberspace.
