The military needs a globe-spanning network to counter threats that no single theater command can cope with. That takes more than just technology.

This year promises to be a year of big changes in how the Defense Department does Cyber — and leaders are warning staffers that it’s not going to be business as usual.

Until cyber operators can both train realistically and see the their digital battlespace as clearly as traditional commanders see physical battlespace, they’ll be hard-pressed to defend everyone else’s systems.

“We haven’t deployed anyone, just to be clear,” Edwin Wilson said. “We’ll have a traditional prepare-to-deploy order, (and) the members and teams are on recall ready to go within hours.”

CAPITOL HILL: The military’s new cyberspace force is working to overcome recruiting and retention shortfalls, training bottlenecks, and its dependence on the National Security Agency, officials told the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday. These devils in the details are an inevitable part of standing up a new kind of force for a new kind of… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: Under relentless grilling from Democratic senators, the four-star officer who heads both Cyber Command and the NSA said the US government is “not doing enough” to prevent Russia from meddling in the 2018 elections. Could the US keep the Russians from interfering again? asked Sen. Claire McCaskill. “Yes,” Adm. Michael Rogers said at once.… Keep reading →

BALTIMORE: The Pentagon has fallen in love with Silicon Valley — though it’s largely unrequited — but traditional defense firms argue there are some things only they can do. One striking example: this Northrop Grumman factory, where the company makes its own microchips “from sand” with unique security features that are not available from commercial vendors.… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: The Army is recruiting smart young soldiers to wage cyber war. But human talent is not enough. Ultimately, say experts, cyberspace is so vast, so complex, so constantly changing that only artificial intelligence can keep up. America can’t prevail in cyberspace through superior numbers. We could never match China hacker for hacker. So our… Keep reading →

Ever since the day of its creation, critics have slammed the Office of Director of National Intelligence as an expensive and unnecessary bureaucracy, a threat to the longtime primacy of the Director of Central Intelligence and a toothless tiger. Much of that changed during the joint tenures of DNI Mike McConnell and SecDef Bob Gates… Keep reading →

SAN DIEGO: Adm. Mike Rogers, who heads both NSA and Cyber Command, is looking past CYBERCOM’s elevation to an independent Unified Command towards a much wider reorganization of military cyber. Some reorganization is implicit in a Feb. 17 memo in which Defense Secretary Jim Mattis charges Deputy Secretary Bob Work to “develop an initial plan…… Keep reading →