Batten the Hatches: Cybersecurity with Military Mariners

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.

• Security and privacy → Usability in security and privacy.