Shaun Waterman
Assistant Secretary of War for Cyber Policy Katherine Sutton this week pledged to follow new hiring practices for cybersecurity jobs under the CyberCom 2.0 initiative. (Image: Shutterstock)
For the private sector, the cyber talent gap is an HR issue - at most a security problem. But for the U.S. military, it's a looming strategic crisis, the Pentagon's top cyber official said this week.
"We cannot rely on our legacy model for building [cyber] talent," Assistant Secretary of War for Cyber Policy Katherine Sutton told the AFCEA Cyber Workforce Summit. "It's too slow, too fragmented, and hinders our ability to adapt at speed and scale."
"We cannot afford to continue this way," she concluded.
The Pentagon currently treats cyberspace much like a geographical area. Just as U.S. Central Command marshals forces from all of the military services to wage U.S. wars in the Middle East, U.S. Cyber Command, or CyberCom, has trained and equipped personnel, organized into military units, by the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps, to conduct cyber operations.
But, as Sutton acknowledged, there's been growing dissatisfaction at the Pentagon with that way of recruiting, training and equipping cyber troops - what the military calls "force generation."
"Our current force generation approach, while effective for conventional forces, has been inadequate for the unique requirements of building the deep, specialized technical skills we need in cyberspace," she said.
The absence of dedicated cyber career paths "has led to the bleeding of talent, where we lose our most skilled people right when they become most valuable," Sutton said.
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