Carley Welch
TECHNET AUGUSTA 2025 — The Army’s new principal cyber advisor came into his role ready to align with the service’s overarching transformation initiative, and as part of this he’s set on enabling artificial intelligence for defensive and offensive cyber operations, he told Breaking Defense in an interview Wednesday.
Brandon Pugh, an Army reservist who formerly served as the director and a resident senior fellow for the R Street Institute’s Cybersecurity and Emerging Threats team, started in his role as PCA about eight weeks ago. The top advisor to the Army’s secretary and chief of staff on all things cyber, Pugh is the third person to serve in this congressionally mandated role, following Michael Sulmeyer who left his post in March 2024 to become the assistant secretary of defense for cyber policy in the Pentagon. Pugh is also the first in his role to be appointed by the president. Previously, those who held this role were appointed by officials within the service.
After meeting with various leaders across the service and the joint force, Pugh said what he’s come to realize is that the service needs to better leverage AI for cyber at the operational level instead of just at the enterprise level like the Pentagon and the services have been doing for a few years now.
“I think our CIO [chief information officer] is doing an exceptional job when it comes to AI at the enterprise level. Where I’m passionate about is, how do we leverage AI for cyber defense and offense? And in fairness, that is happening, Cyber Command is doing some of that. ARCYBER [Army Cyber Command] is doing some of that,” Pugh said. “But how do we take what they’re doing now and amplify that and continue to invest in it. I think that’s key, especially as threats continue to evolve.
“I think where the narrative and the conversation needs to go is if there is an operational use of AI, like bringing it to the warfighter, that’s where I think we should be,” he later added. But he emphasized that he doesn’t want this happening at the expense of utilizing AI at the service’s enterprise level.
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