  The last decade consolidated the cyberspace as fifth domain of operations,
which extends its preliminarily intelligence and information exchange purposes
towards enabling complex offensive and defensive operations
supported/supportively of parallel kinetic domain actuations. Although there is
a plethora of well documented cases on strategic and operational interventions
of cyber commands, the cyber tactical military edge is still a challenge, where
cyber fires barely integrate to the traditional joint targeting cycle due among
others to long planning/development times, asymmetric effects, strict target
reachability requirements, or the fast propagation of collateral damage; the
latter rapidly deriving on hybrid impacts (political, economic, social, etc.)
and evidencing significant socio-technical gaps. In this context, it is
expected that tactical clouds disruptively facilitate cyber operations at the
edge while exposing the rest of the digital assets of the operation to them. On
these grounds, the main purpose of the conducted research is to review and in
depth analyze the risks and opportunities of jeopardizing the sustainability of
the military tactical clouds at the edge by cyber operations. Along with a 1)
comprehensively formulation of the researched problematic, the study 2)
formalizes the Tactical Denial of Sustainability (TDoS) concept; 3) introduces
the phasing, potential attack surfaces, terrains and impact of TDoS attacks; 4)
emphasizes the related human and socio-technical aspects; 5) analyzes the
threats/opportunities inherent to their impact on the cloud energy efficiency;
6) reviews their implications at the military cyber thinking for tactical
operations; 7) illustrates five extensive CONOPS that facilitate the
understanding of the TDoS concept; and given the high novelty of the discussed
topics, it 8) paves the way for further research and development actions.
