Here is what a separate cyber force could look like

Anastasia Obis

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The Pentagon has long pushed against the idea of a stand-alone cyber service to fix its cyber problems. But the Trump administration is more open to establishing a separate cyber force — and a new think tank report provides a roadmap for how to build it.

The report, co-authored by Mark Montgomery, senior director of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation at The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and Erica Lonergan, adjunct fellow at FDD’s Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation, outlines practical steps for establishing the new service and provides a framework for navigating the challenges of creating a cyber force.

“There’s a chance that President Trump makes the decision in six to 12 weeks. And if that’s the case, someone needs to have done a blueprint,” Montgomery told reporters Tuesday.

If this administration makes the decision to create a separate cyber branch, “we don’t want to be scrambling to sort of build the aircraft as we’re flying it,” Lonergan said.

“What we are trying to do in this monograph is really articulate a set of core principles and philosophies and vision that should guide the building of this service. There are a lot of additional decisions that will need to be made if a service is created. But our hope is that this product can provide the blueprint to help guide whatever team is responsible for ultimately making those tough decisions,” she added.

Last year, Montgomery and Lonergan made the case for a separate cyber service, arguing that the Pentagon’s continued push to apply a Special Operations Command-like model to U.S. Cyber Command has not solved its longstanding readiness challenges. “America’s cyber force generation system is clearly broken. Fixing it demands nothing less than the establishment of an independent cyber service,” they said in the report.

The new report, released today, builds on that work by answering the “how” and detailing what a separate cyber service would look like, its core mission and what is outside of the scope of the cyber force’s mission set.