Batten the Hatches: Cybersecurity with Military Mariners
Interviews with 20 U.S. Navy and Coast Guard mariners reveal informal, safety-oriented shipboard cyber risk models that may delay attribution and containment.
The study conducts semi-structured interviews with 20 military mariners from U.S. Navy and Coast Guard vessels to understand how service members recognize and respond to cyber risk aboard ships. Unique consequences of compromising military systems identified include weapon takeover and purposeful geopolitical escalation. Cybersecurity is organizationally abstract on ships, so mariners build cyber risk models from informal experience rather than formal instruction. A safety-oriented incident-response model creates resilience but may delay cyber attribution and containment.
- Twenty U.S. Navy and Coast Guard mariners interviewed on shipboard cyber risk.
- Mariners build cyber risk models from informal experience, not formal instruction.
- Safety-oriented incident response creates resilience but delays attribution and containment.
- Compromise consequences include weapon takeover and geopolitical escalation.
Full article225 words · extracted from arxiv.org · click to collapse
Cyberwarfare has become a key component of contemporary geopolitical conflict. However, there has been extremely limited systematic investigation into how cybersecurity is handled by military organizations and personnel. The military context is unique compared to other operational ones, with immense resource availability (U.S. military spending approached 1 trillion dollars in 2024), a rigid chain of command, and extraordinary consequences for its actions. Thus, military cybersecurity is a distinct yet understudied topic. In this paper, we take an early step at understanding military cybersecurity by investigating how service members understand, recognize, and respond to cyber risk. We focus on maritime services and carefully consider organizational barriers to design an unclassified study and conduct semi-structured interviews with 20 military mariners from U.S. Navy and Coast Guard vessels. Through our investigation, we identify unique consequences of compromising military systems, including weapon takeover and purposeful geopolitical escalation. We find that cybersecurity is organizationally abstract on ships, so mariners build cyber risk models from informal experience rather than formal instruction. They nonetheless make cybersecurity actionable by recognizing operational impacts and responding with a safety-oriented incident-response model that creates resilience but may delay cyber attribution and containment. These findings inform actionable recommendations to help military operators frame cyber threats, merge longstanding nautical doctrine with modern systems, and apply military insights to the civilian sector, all to secure the broader maritime environment.
Text extracted automatically; images, tables and formatting may be missing. Original: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.12810