Registration is open for an Association of the U.S. Army Hot Topic focused on Army cyber.

Scheduled for June 14 at AUSA headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, the daylong Army Cyber Hot Topic will feature speakers such as Lt. Gen. Maria Barrett, commanding general of Army Cyber Command, and Patrick Murphy, a former Army undersecretary and AUSA senior fellow.

The theme for the Hot Topic is “Building the Army of 2030: Maturing the Cyber Domain.” This one-day educational and professional development event will feature keynote speakers and panel discussions. There also will be an Army birthday celebration, marking the service’s 248th birthday.

Online registration is available until 5 p.m. Eastern June 12. On-site registration is available beginning at 7 a.m. Eastern June 14.

For more information or to register, click here.

During the Hot Topic, attendees will learn about the Army’s approach to manning, training, equipping and sustaining the current and future cyber force.

Barrett, who has commanded Army Cyber Command since May 2022, will provide opening remarks. Murphy, who was appointed as the 32nd Army undersecretary in January 2016 and also served as acting Army secretary, is the keynote speaker.

There will be panel discussions on topics such as defending Army operational technology and critical infrastructure, optimizing opportunities in a modern workforce, applying artificial intelligence for information advantage and lessons learned from the crisis in Ukraine.

The Army’s cyber forces must quickly and continually adapt to keep up with evolving threats, Barrett said last fall. “If you lag in this sphere … then you’ve ceded the information terrain,” she said.

More recently, Barrett said the Army must harden its networks and strengthen cooperation with allies and partners to protect against cyberattacks and information warfare. “If you’re going to make a very quick transition to crisis or conflict, that is not the time to be hardening your networks, that is not the time to be wondering if your allies and partners have hardened their networks,” she said during a panel discussion at AUSA’s LANPAC Symposium and Exhibition in Honolulu.

The threats facing the U.S. and its allies and partners are not constrained to one particular geography, Barrett said. “We see the threats of China in the [Africa Command] area of operations, we see it in [Central Command],” she said.

“From a threat standpoint, cyber, information warfare, big data, that’s going to underpin the contested environment our commanders are going to operate in,” Barrett said. “It’s also the threat of weaponized narratives, information disruption machines that really will attempt to disrupt what it is we’re doing and unity of effort. That is what we need to prepare ourselves for.”