Army ponders proper shape, size of cyber workforce

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.federalnewsradio.com/398/3492533/Army-ponders-proper-shape-size-of-cyber-workforce-

By Jared Serbu
Federal News Radio
10/28/2013

As the Army builds up a force to operate in its newest warfighting domain 
-- cyber -- it's wrestling through a lot of tough questions. How big 
should the cyber force be? What's the right mix of soldiers, civilians and 
contractors? And how does DoD need to change its legacy personnel systems 
to bring the best possible talent on board?

The military as a whole is in the process of building 133 cyber mission 
teams with responsibilities for offensive cyber operations, defensive 
cyber operations and operating DoD's own networks. The Army will 
contribute 41 teams to that joint effort out of a cadre of soldiers it's 
building under the auspices of Army Cyber Command, which formally stood up 
just three years ago.

But Lt. Gen. Edward Cardon, Army Cyber Command's commander, said for now, 
it's impossible to tell whether that force is too big or too small.

"Let's get demonstrated capability out there, and then we're going to find 
out things we know and don't know and we can adapt our organizational 
structure," he said. "I'm arguing within the Army that the entire cyber 
force should be re-looked at about once every two years. I think we're on 
the inflection point of some pretty amazing technologies coming into the 
operational sphere. Just with cloud computing and the explosion of mobile 
devices, the rapid development on supervisory control and data acquisition 
systems. The impact of Mr. [Edward] Snowden and what's that done to our 
community in terms of the insider threat. When you start putting all these 
things together and you try and predict out a couple years from now what 
size force we need, I'm not sure you can do that. What I do know is we 
gotta get the best people possible."

Cardon said it's taken a few years to get the Army's initial set of cyber 
operators trained and ready, and he's comfortable with the service's 
current plans to build up its cyber force, which cover the time period up 
to 2017. But he said the Army needs to be willing to adapt those plans.

[...]



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