Does the US military need a Cyber Force?

Experts say the U.S. military is at risk of being outgunned and outmanned in cyber warfare.

David Roza

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The U.S. military is hemorrhaging talent in cyber warfare, which national security experts warn could lead to America being outgunned and outsmarted by adversaries such as China, Russia, or Iran, who could use cyber weapons to wreak havoc on American military and civilian infrastructure.

The only way to fix it may be to start a seventh branch of the military: a Cyber Force.

There are currently about 225,000 service members, civilians, and contractors who work in cyber fields across the Defense Department. Most of them build, operate, patch, maintain, and do routine security for the 4 million computers and 34 billion IP addresses that make up the larger Department of Defense Information Network.

Each of the military services manages its own information networks and defends them against run-of–the-mill cybersecurity threats. They also recruit and train cyber troops and present them to U.S. Cyber Command, a combatant command that provides cyber support to troops conducting real-world operations.

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There is some overlap here between what Cyber Command, or CYBERCOM, does and what the services do, but generally, if it’s offensive operations, or if the threat being defended against is really heavy-duty, that is usually CYBERCOM’s business.

But the services have not coordinated how they train cyber troops. That means service members come to CYBERCOM with different training for the same job, using different terms to refer to the same thing, and bringing their service-specific approaches to cyberspace.

That’s bad because CYBERCOM’s Cyber Mission Force — the 6,000 or so people who actually perform cyberspace operations — is designed to be modular, where teams from different services can swap in and do the same job. That’s according to Aden Magee, a retired Army cyber officer who wrote about this for War on the Rocks in September.

CYBERCOM is often compared with U.S. Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, which oversees real-world special operations and is the only other combatant command also charged with guiding how the services train units for it.