Via Satellite/Freepik illustration

More than four years after the establishment of a sixth military service, U.S. Space Force, in December 2019, a new report advises the creation of a seventh service, the U.S. Cyber Force, which would initially come under the Department of the Army.

“In the U.S. military, an officer who had never fired a rifle would never command an infantry unit, yet officers with no experience behind a keyboard are commanding cyber warfare units,” said the Washington, D.C.-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ United States Cyber Force: A Defense Imperative. “This mismatch stems from the U.S. military’s failure to recruit, train, promote, and retain talented cyber warriors. The Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines each run their own recruitment, training, and promotion systems instead of having a single pipeline for talent. The result is a shortage of qualified personnel at U.S. Cyber Command (CYBERCOM), which has responsibility for both the offensive and defensive aspects of military cyber operations.”

Retired Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, FDD’s director of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation, and Erica Lonergan, an assistant professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and a writer of last year’s DoD Strategy, co-wrote the FDD report. The authors said the latter is based on interviews with more than 75 active duty and recently retired military personnel from the five DoD military branches–most of the interviews from field grade officers and above. The report does not include the U.S. Coast Guard, which is under the Department of Homeland Security.

“The inefficient division of labor between the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps prevents the generation of a cyber force ready to carry out its mission,” the study said. “Recruitment suffers because cyber operations are not a top priority for any of the services, and incentives for new recruits vary wildly. The services do not coordinate to ensure that trainees acquire a consistent set of skills or that their skills correspond to the roles they will ultimately fulfill at CYBERCOM.

“Promotion systems often hold back skilled cyber personnel because the systems were designed to evaluate service members who operate on land, at sea, or in the air, not in cyberspace,” per the report. “Retention rates for qualified personnel are low because of inconsistent policies, institutional cultures that do not value cyber expertise, and insufficient opportunities for advanced training. Resolving these issues requires the creation of a new independent armed service — a U.S. Cyber Force — alongside the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, and Space Force.”

The U.S. Cyber Force would number 10,000 from across the DoD services, the study said. The Space Force, the smallest military service, has about 9,000 military and 5,000 civilian personnel.

Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., who chairs the House Armed Services Committee’s cyber, information technologies and innovation panel and who plans to leave Congress on Apr. 19, moderated a March 25 FDD virtual discussion on the report with its authors.

“It seems to me we have a clear, next step here, which is that Congress needs to have the Department of Defense commission an independent assessment of the force generation challenges to include some recommended ways forward,” he said. “I think we need the department to have an outside assessor replicate the study, but at an even deeper level. They recently had a commitment to create a vision for Cyber Command 2.0, which is kind of a tacit recognition that the status quo in force generation is not working, but I worry that might not be an honest, independent assessment of how we might fix readiness.”

The FDD report’s recommendation to create a U.S. Cyber Force “might not be on the table, if DoD looks at this internally,” Gallagher said. “I’m disappointed we didn’t get the provision for a more fulsome study across the finish line in last year’s NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act), but I hope we can in this NDAA.”

This story was first published by Defense Daily