The US military is not organized for cyber war

Excerpt

The United States is preparing for cyber conflict with a military structure that still treats cyberspace as a secondary supporting function.

We have soldiers for land, sailors for sea, airmen for air, and guardians for space. But in cyberspace, a borderless domain where American forces are engaged with adversaries every day, we still do not have a military service whose central purpose is to build a quality, expert force, equipped with the most cutting-edge capabilities, for war-fighting in the cyber domain.

For more than a decade, Washington has tried to patch this problem instead of fixing it. Congress has granted U.S. Cyber Command new authorities. The Pentagon has adjusted organizations, budgets and training pipelines. Senior leaders have made the current structure work better than it should. But those reforms have not changed the basic fact that there is no military service that sees organizing, training and equipping forces for the cyber domain as its first and primary priority.

Cyber Command’s job is to employ cyber capabilities in military operations. But it still depends on the existing services to recruit, train, retain, and develop the people who carry out those missions and equip them with the capabilities to do so. In the rest of the military, that division of labor is clear: services build forces, and combatant commands employ them.

Dr. Erica Lonergan is an assistant professor in the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University and previously held several positions at the United States Military Academy at West Point. RADM (Ret.) Mark Montgomery served for 32 years in the U.S. Navy and is now the senior director of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.