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

Scheduled for July 2 at AUSA headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, the daylong Hot Topic will feature a keynote by James Rubin, special envoy and coordinator for the U.S. State Department’s Global Engagement Center.

Young Bang, principal deputy assistant Army secretary for acquisition, logistics and technology; Maj. Gen. Paul Stanton, commander of the Army Cyber Center of Excellence; Peter Singer, strategist with New America and founder and managing partner of Useful Fiction; and many other leaders in the field also are expected to speak.

For more information or to register, click here. On-site registration is available beginning at 7 a.m. July 2.

There is no cost for members of the military, government civilian personnel and the media.

During the Hot Topic, a series of presentations and panel discussions will focus on the Army’s approach to gain and maintain information advantage and man, train and equip its information forces.

Key topics include signature management to enable survivability, social media’s role in influencing global affairs, maturing a datacentric Army and transforming information forces in contact.

Panelists also will discuss the rise in information access and surveillance that has led to unprecedented battlefield transparency, causing combatants, including the U.S. Army, to rethink their signatures, survivability and operational security.

In an online press briefing earlier this year, Rubin warned of the dangers of information manipulation.

“Information manipulation—foreign information disinformation—is a national security threat, and understanding that it is a national security threat is the first step toward doing something successful about it,” Rubin said during the briefing hosted by the State Department in Brussels.

The mission of the Global Engagement Center, which Rubin leads, is to direct, integrate and coordinate the U.S. government’s efforts to recognize, understand, expose and counter foreign state and nonstate propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining or influencing the policies, security or stability of the United States, its allies and partner nations, according to its website.

Two countries the center is paying close attention to are China and Russia, and leaders in the U.S., Europe and Asia are “increasingly” recognizing the threat posed by the “information warfare” conducted by those two countries, Rubin said.

One way to counter that information warfare is by working together, Rubin said. “Governments alone cannot solve this problem,” he said. “We can galvanize, we can organize, … but without support and recognition from society at large, meaning academia, meaning journalists themselves, meaning NGOs and people, that Russian disinformation is an element of information warfare, that China’s desire to gain information dominance is a threat to our democracies, we’re never going to be able to do anything about that.”