What is cyber resilience in C2 and how is it achieved?

• A. The ability to withstand and recover from cyber disruptions; achieved through redundancy, backup, incident response, and continuous monitoring.
• B. The ability to prevent any cyber disruption entirely.
• C. Achieved solely by encrypting data end-to-end.
• D. Achieved by isolating all systems from networks.

Answer: (B)

Cyber resilience in C2 means the system can continue operating and quickly recover when cyber disruptions occur. It isn’t about preventing every disruption, but about being prepared to withstand incidents, detect them early, respond effectively, and restore normal operations fast. Achieving this involves multiple overlapping measures: building redundancy and diversity into critical components so a single failure doesn’t take the system down; maintaining backups and having clear recovery procedures to restore data and services; implementing formal incident response plans with trained teams and playbooks; keeping continuous monitoring and rapid detection to spot breaches as they happen; using automated failover, segmentation, and alternative communication paths to keep essential C2 channels alive even if some parts are compromised; and regularly exercising these capabilities to validate readiness. That's why describing resilience as the ability to withstand and recover from disruptions—through redundancy, backups, incident response, and continuous monitoring—best captures how cyber resilience is achieved in practice.

Relying on the notion of preventing every disruption isn’t realistic, encryption alone doesn’t guarantee resilience, and isolating all systems would cripple the operational capability needed for effective command and control.