Effective Talent Management is crucial to the Army's stated goal of cyberspace dominance. Attracting, training, motivating, and retaining talented personnel for the Army's many occupational specialties has historically been an area of distinctive under performance for the Army.
The bureaucratic and tradition heavy service relies on a recruiting and career progression process that presupposes the majority of recruits will separate from the service before qualifying for retirement benefits. The incentives to remain in service revolve around benefits and institutionalization that skew towards acceptance and compliance with the status quo. Everything has revolved around the strategic structuring of the force around the boots-on-the-ground warfighter augmented by combat support and enabled by combat service support.
The current mentality is soldier first, everything else second. This has served the Army well because the occupational specialties have been broken down to simplified caricatures of the complex responsibilities their many distinctive job titles might suggest. The end result is the mission is ponderously progressed with total conformity and mission success is nearly inevitable. For conventional war this is a highly desirable state, but in cyberspace these paradigms are neither efficient or desirable.
During World War II the limits of conventional warfare became very apparent. The answer grew out of the Office of Strategic Services. Special Operations lead to the formation of unconventional warfare units that relied on exceptional, highly skilled people. Today the Special Operations Command (SOCOM) recognizes the importance of people as a statement of five truths:
-----------------------
http://www.socom.mil/Pages/SOFTruths.aspx
Truth 1: Humans are more important than hardware.
People – not equipment – make the critical difference. The right people, highly trained and working as a team, will accomplish the mission with the equipment available. On the other hand, the best equipment in the world cannot compensate for a lack of the right people.
Truth 2: Quality is better than quantity.
A small number of people, carefully selected, well trained, and well led, are preferable to larger numbers of troops, some of whom may not be up to the task.
Truth 3: Special Operations Forces cannot be mass produced.
It takes years to train operational units to the level of proficiency needed to accomplish difficult and specialized SOF missions. Intense training – both in SOF schools and units – is required to integrate competent individuals into fully capable units. This process cannot be hastened without degrading ultimate capability.
Truth 4: Competent Special Operations Forces cannot be created after emergencies occur.
Creation of competent, fully mission capable units takes time. Employment of fully capable special operations capability on short notice requires highly trained and constantly available SOF units in peacetime.
Truth 5: Most special operations require non-SOF assistance.
The operational effectiveness of our deployed forces cannot be, and never has been, achieved without being enabled by our joint service partners. The support Air Force, Army, Marine and Navy engineers, technicians, intelligence analysts, and the numerous other professions that contribute to SOF, have substantially increased our capabilities and effectiveness throughout the world.
---------------------
I believe the way forward for the Army to become truly dominant in cyberspace is to invest in people. The Army must divorce itself from the counterproductive current system of personnel management within the realm of cyberspace. Cyber needs its own management branch, highly focused longevity incentives, effective talent identification within the force and in initial entry recruiting, world class training, and the backbone to fail/non-select the bottom 75% of applicants.
A SOF model of recruiting, selection, and training is a proven and optimal route for building what will ultimately be an unconventional force of out-of-the-box thinkers, planners, and operators. The specifics will and should change but the model should guide the vision of the cyberspace force moving forward.
The Army focuses too much on excelling in fitness performance and leadership positions that are unimportant and pedestrian concerns for force projection within the cyberspace domain. There is a reason the civilian sector (with proven innovative performance) separates IT management from the engineers. Forcing your senior technical personnel to become leaders and managers in order to progress their careers removes their technical capabilities and experience from the operational talent pool and over time results in those managers becoming divorced from current technologies and skill sets.
Recent additions of the 35Q and 25D occupational specialties have served to prove the stranglehold traditional doctrine maintains on the cyberspace domain. 25D is intended to specialize in Computer Network Defense (CND) for the Army but somehow also became heavily saddled with COMSEC responsibilities. This defies logic as the paperwork, logistic, and policy heavy arena of COMSEC management assignments will result in two to three year long career gaps in our future cyber defenders where their highly valuable and volatile technical skills
will degrade and become severely outdated. In the 35Q realm of Computer Network Attack (CNA) and Computer Network Exploitation (CNE) the skill sets have focused on correlating conventional warfare tactics and methods as if they have any actual purpose other than allowing aging officers and enlisted managers to understand the concepts. The idea of "weaponizing" cyberspace is counterproductive to actually understanding and exploiting the military and intelligence potential of the domain.
The dynamics of cyberspace are very unfavorable for the application of traditional military doctrine (http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/why-your-intuition-about-cyber-warfare-is-probably-wrong). In conventional warfare the defender has the advantage, in cyberspace the attacker does with research indicating defenders must field 1000x the resources an attacker must. In conventional warfare the US asserts dominance in every domain of combat, without exception. In cyberspace we are out-manned, out-funded, and falling woefully in the technical expertise of our personnel. In conventional warfare we can point to a distinctive entity as the enemy, but in cyberspace the enemy can be anyone or anonymous.
To succeed we must disrupt, in the Silicon Valley sense of the word, our entire way of operating in order to have any chance of catching up and dominating our opponents.
Some thoughts on how to proceed:
Identify talent: Like SOF, allow anyone (MOS immaterial) with basic qualifications to challenge "Cyber Selection." Use IQ, psychological, and technical skills testing to weed out the less capable. Avoid the use of the ASVAB except as a very base level of capability. Often experience is far more valuable than a GT, ST, or ET line score. Do not require any kind of originator command approval of the applicants' packets for accession. The traditional military and much of its leadership are not conducive for selecting who would or would not be a good fit for a highly technical cyber role.
Train the talent: Initial training should be intense and demanding with little room for failure. Course failure should be embraced as an effective talent management process ensuring only the most capable and dedicated succeed. Follow on training at the unit should be continual, relevant, and well funded. The kind of person best suited for cyber duties will consider technical training a job perk thus incentivizing their longevity.
Differentiate the Talent: The cyber domain should be relatively rank agnostic, instead the focus should be on skill level and capabilities. Specializations in networking, programming, reverse engineering, microprocessors, etc.. should be identified and strong preference given to further develop and assign based off of individual strengths. Recognition of prowess and skills along with commensurate expectations of responsibility will further incentivize personnel by allowing a way to benchmark in a sort of meritocracy.
Retain the Talent: In addition to ensuring the cyber personnel feel valued, it is necessary to counteract the pull of the private sector. This does not necessarily mean more money. Most soldiers are not in the Army for the money. Identification of the motivating factors attracting a soldier to the military and reducing the demotivating factors are more likely to succeed. On the monetary front it is necessary to ensure there is a feeling that career progression is always possible if enough effort is exerted. Thus within the cyber domain their should be no hard rank caps. If a person chooses to put forth the effort they should be able to attain the highest ranks at the operational level possible. Rather than slot and promote based on the number of allotted E-6,7,8, etc... all slots should be open to ranks allowing for personnel to maintain steady career progression into reasonably well compensated ranks for their skills.
Read the below for a very thought provoking analysis of the SOF model applied to cyberspace:
APPLICATION OF US SPECIAL OPERATIONS COMMAND MODEL TO DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE CYBERSPACE FORCE
http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a510497.pdf
Any thoughts? Just my personal opinion/rant/essay of the moment. Constructive criticism is much appreciated.
The bureaucratic and tradition heavy service relies on a recruiting and career progression process that presupposes the majority of recruits will separate from the service before qualifying for retirement benefits. The incentives to remain in service revolve around benefits and institutionalization that skew towards acceptance and compliance with the status quo. Everything has revolved around the strategic structuring of the force around the boots-on-the-ground warfighter augmented by combat support and enabled by combat service support.
The current mentality is soldier first, everything else second. This has served the Army well because the occupational specialties have been broken down to simplified caricatures of the complex responsibilities their many distinctive job titles might suggest. The end result is the mission is ponderously progressed with total conformity and mission success is nearly inevitable. For conventional war this is a highly desirable state, but in cyberspace these paradigms are neither efficient or desirable.
During World War II the limits of conventional warfare became very apparent. The answer grew out of the Office of Strategic Services. Special Operations lead to the formation of unconventional warfare units that relied on exceptional, highly skilled people. Today the Special Operations Command (SOCOM) recognizes the importance of people as a statement of five truths:
-----------------------
http://www.socom.mil/Pages/SOFTruths.aspx
Truth 1: Humans are more important than hardware.
People – not equipment – make the critical difference. The right people, highly trained and working as a team, will accomplish the mission with the equipment available. On the other hand, the best equipment in the world cannot compensate for a lack of the right people.
Truth 2: Quality is better than quantity.
A small number of people, carefully selected, well trained, and well led, are preferable to larger numbers of troops, some of whom may not be up to the task.
Truth 3: Special Operations Forces cannot be mass produced.
It takes years to train operational units to the level of proficiency needed to accomplish difficult and specialized SOF missions. Intense training – both in SOF schools and units – is required to integrate competent individuals into fully capable units. This process cannot be hastened without degrading ultimate capability.
Truth 4: Competent Special Operations Forces cannot be created after emergencies occur.
Creation of competent, fully mission capable units takes time. Employment of fully capable special operations capability on short notice requires highly trained and constantly available SOF units in peacetime.
Truth 5: Most special operations require non-SOF assistance.
The operational effectiveness of our deployed forces cannot be, and never has been, achieved without being enabled by our joint service partners. The support Air Force, Army, Marine and Navy engineers, technicians, intelligence analysts, and the numerous other professions that contribute to SOF, have substantially increased our capabilities and effectiveness throughout the world.
---------------------
I believe the way forward for the Army to become truly dominant in cyberspace is to invest in people. The Army must divorce itself from the counterproductive current system of personnel management within the realm of cyberspace. Cyber needs its own management branch, highly focused longevity incentives, effective talent identification within the force and in initial entry recruiting, world class training, and the backbone to fail/non-select the bottom 75% of applicants.
A SOF model of recruiting, selection, and training is a proven and optimal route for building what will ultimately be an unconventional force of out-of-the-box thinkers, planners, and operators. The specifics will and should change but the model should guide the vision of the cyberspace force moving forward.
The Army focuses too much on excelling in fitness performance and leadership positions that are unimportant and pedestrian concerns for force projection within the cyberspace domain. There is a reason the civilian sector (with proven innovative performance) separates IT management from the engineers. Forcing your senior technical personnel to become leaders and managers in order to progress their careers removes their technical capabilities and experience from the operational talent pool and over time results in those managers becoming divorced from current technologies and skill sets.
Recent additions of the 35Q and 25D occupational specialties have served to prove the stranglehold traditional doctrine maintains on the cyberspace domain. 25D is intended to specialize in Computer Network Defense (CND) for the Army but somehow also became heavily saddled with COMSEC responsibilities. This defies logic as the paperwork, logistic, and policy heavy arena of COMSEC management assignments will result in two to three year long career gaps in our future cyber defenders where their highly valuable and volatile technical skills
will degrade and become severely outdated. In the 35Q realm of Computer Network Attack (CNA) and Computer Network Exploitation (CNE) the skill sets have focused on correlating conventional warfare tactics and methods as if they have any actual purpose other than allowing aging officers and enlisted managers to understand the concepts. The idea of "weaponizing" cyberspace is counterproductive to actually understanding and exploiting the military and intelligence potential of the domain.
The dynamics of cyberspace are very unfavorable for the application of traditional military doctrine (http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/why-your-intuition-about-cyber-warfare-is-probably-wrong). In conventional warfare the defender has the advantage, in cyberspace the attacker does with research indicating defenders must field 1000x the resources an attacker must. In conventional warfare the US asserts dominance in every domain of combat, without exception. In cyberspace we are out-manned, out-funded, and falling woefully in the technical expertise of our personnel. In conventional warfare we can point to a distinctive entity as the enemy, but in cyberspace the enemy can be anyone or anonymous.
To succeed we must disrupt, in the Silicon Valley sense of the word, our entire way of operating in order to have any chance of catching up and dominating our opponents.
Some thoughts on how to proceed:
Identify talent: Like SOF, allow anyone (MOS immaterial) with basic qualifications to challenge "Cyber Selection." Use IQ, psychological, and technical skills testing to weed out the less capable. Avoid the use of the ASVAB except as a very base level of capability. Often experience is far more valuable than a GT, ST, or ET line score. Do not require any kind of originator command approval of the applicants' packets for accession. The traditional military and much of its leadership are not conducive for selecting who would or would not be a good fit for a highly technical cyber role.
Train the talent: Initial training should be intense and demanding with little room for failure. Course failure should be embraced as an effective talent management process ensuring only the most capable and dedicated succeed. Follow on training at the unit should be continual, relevant, and well funded. The kind of person best suited for cyber duties will consider technical training a job perk thus incentivizing their longevity.
Differentiate the Talent: The cyber domain should be relatively rank agnostic, instead the focus should be on skill level and capabilities. Specializations in networking, programming, reverse engineering, microprocessors, etc.. should be identified and strong preference given to further develop and assign based off of individual strengths. Recognition of prowess and skills along with commensurate expectations of responsibility will further incentivize personnel by allowing a way to benchmark in a sort of meritocracy.
Retain the Talent: In addition to ensuring the cyber personnel feel valued, it is necessary to counteract the pull of the private sector. This does not necessarily mean more money. Most soldiers are not in the Army for the money. Identification of the motivating factors attracting a soldier to the military and reducing the demotivating factors are more likely to succeed. On the monetary front it is necessary to ensure there is a feeling that career progression is always possible if enough effort is exerted. Thus within the cyber domain their should be no hard rank caps. If a person chooses to put forth the effort they should be able to attain the highest ranks at the operational level possible. Rather than slot and promote based on the number of allotted E-6,7,8, etc... all slots should be open to ranks allowing for personnel to maintain steady career progression into reasonably well compensated ranks for their skills.
Read the below for a very thought provoking analysis of the SOF model applied to cyberspace:
APPLICATION OF US SPECIAL OPERATIONS COMMAND MODEL TO DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE CYBERSPACE FORCE
http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a510497.pdf
Any thoughts? Just my personal opinion/rant/essay of the moment. Constructive criticism is much appreciated.
Cyber
Talent Management
Edited >1 y ago
Posted >1 y ago
This is a duplicate discussion. Click below to see more on this topic.
Effective Talent Management is crucial to the Army's stated goal of cyberspace dominance. Attracting, training, motivating, and retaining talented personnel for the Army's many occupational specialties has historically been an area of distinctive under performance for the Army.
The bureaucratic and tradition heavy service relies on a recruiting and career progression process that presupposes the majority of recruits will separate from the service before qualifying for retirement benefits. The incentives to remain in service revolve around benefits and institutionalization that skew towards acceptance and compliance with the status quo. Everything has revolved around the strategic structuring of the force around the boots-on-the-ground warfighter augmented by combat support and enabled by combat service support.
The current mentality is soldier first, everything else second. This has served the Army well because the occupational specialties have been broken down to simplified caricatures of the complex responsibilities their many distinctive job titles might suggest. The end result is the mission is ponderously progressed with total conformity and mission success is nearly inevitable. For conventional war this is a highly desirable state, but in cyberspace these paradigms are neither efficient or desirable.
During World War II the limits of conventional warfare became very apparent. The answer grew out of the Office of Strategic Services. Special Operations lead to the formation of unconventional warfare units that relied on exceptional, highly skilled people. Today the Special Operations Command (SOCOM) recognizes the importance of people as a statement of five truths:
-----------------------
http://www.socom.mil/Pages/SOFTruths.aspx
Truth 1: Humans are more important than hardware.
People – not equipment – make the critical difference. The right people, highly trained and working as a team, will accomplish the mission with the equipment available. On the other hand, the best equipment in the world cannot compensate for a lack of the right people.
Truth 2: Quality is better than quantity.
A small number of people, carefully selected, well trained, and well led, are preferable to larger numbers of troops, some of whom may not be up to the task.
Truth 3: Special Operations Forces cannot be mass produced.
It takes years to train operational units to the level of proficiency needed to accomplish difficult and specialized SOF missions. Intense training – both in SOF schools and units – is required to integrate competent individuals into fully capable units. This process cannot be hastened without degrading ultimate capability.
Truth 4: Competent Special Operations Forces cannot be created after emergencies occur.
Creation of competent, fully mission capable units takes time. Employment of fully capable special operations capability on short notice requires highly trained and constantly available SOF units in peacetime.
Truth 5: Most special operations require non-SOF assistance.
The operational effectiveness of our deployed forces cannot be, and never has been, achieved without being enabled by our joint service partners. The support Air Force, Army, Marine and Navy engineers, technicians, intelligence analysts, and the numerous other professions that contribute to SOF, have substantially increased our capabilities and effectiveness throughout the world.
---------------------
I believe the way forward for the Army to become truly dominant in cyberspace is to invest in people. The Army must divorce itself from the counterproductive current system of personnel management within the realm of cyberspace. Cyber needs its own management branch, highly focused longevity incentives, effective talent identification within the force and in initial entry recruiting, world class training, and the backbone to fail/non-select the bottom 75% of applicants.
A SOF model of recruiting, selection, and training is a proven and optimal route for building what will ultimately be an unconventional force of out-of-the-box thinkers, planners, and operators. The specifics will and should change but the model should guide the vision of the cyberspace force moving forward.
The Army focuses too much on excelling in fitness performance and leadership positions that are unimportant and pedestrian concerns for force projection within the cyberspace domain. There is a reason the civilian sector (with proven innovative performance) separates IT management from the engineers. Forcing your senior technical personnel to become leaders and managers in order to progress their careers removes their technical capabilities and experience from the operational talent pool and over time results in those managers becoming divorced from current technologies and skill sets.
Recent additions of the 35Q and 25D occupational specialties have served to prove the stranglehold traditional doctrine maintains on the cyberspace domain. 25D is intended to specialize in Computer Network Defense (CND) for the Army but somehow also became heavily saddled with COMSEC responsibilities. This defies logic as the paperwork, logistic, and policy heavy arena of COMSEC management assignments will result in two to three year long career gaps in our future cyber defenders where their highly valuable and volatile technical skills
will degrade and become severely outdated. In the 35Q realm of Computer Network Attack (CNA) and Computer Network Exploitation (CNE) the skill sets have focused on correlating conventional warfare tactics and methods as if they have any actual purpose other than allowing aging officers and enlisted managers to understand the concepts. The idea of "weaponizing" cyberspace is counterproductive to actually understanding and exploiting the military and intelligence potential of the domain.
The dynamics of cyberspace are very unfavorable for the application of traditional military doctrine (http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/why-your-intuition-about-cyber-warfare-is-probably-wrong). In conventional warfare the defender has the advantage, in cyberspace the attacker does with research indicating defenders must field 1000x the resources an attacker must. In conventional warfare the US asserts dominance in every domain of combat, without exception. In cyberspace we are out-manned, out-funded, and falling woefully in the technical expertise of our personnel. In conventional warfare we can point to a distinctive entity as the enemy, but in cyberspace the enemy can be anyone or anonymous.
To succeed we must disrupt, in the Silicon Valley sense of the word, our entire way of operating in order to have any chance of catching up and dominating our opponents.
Some thoughts on how to proceed:
Identify talent: Like SOF, allow anyone (MOS immaterial) with basic qualifications to challenge "Cyber Selection." Use IQ, psychological, and technical skills testing to weed out the less capable. Avoid the use of the ASVAB except as a very base level of capability. Often experience is far more valuable than a GT, ST, or ET line score. Do not require any kind of originator command approval of the applicants' packets for accession. The traditional military and much of its leadership are not conducive for selecting who would or would not be a good fit for a highly technical cyber role.
Train the talent: Initial training should be intense and demanding with little room for failure. Course failure should be embraced as an effective talent management process ensuring only the most capable and dedicated succeed. Follow on training at the unit should be continual, relevant, and well funded. The kind of person best suited for cyber duties will consider technical training a job perk thus incentivizing their longevity.
Differentiate the Talent: The cyber domain should be relatively rank agnostic, instead the focus should be on skill level and capabilities. Specializations in networking, programming, reverse engineering, microprocessors, etc.. should be identified and strong preference given to further develop and assign based off of individual strengths. Recognition of prowess and skills along with commensurate expectations of responsibility will further incentivize personnel by allowing a way to benchmark in a sort of meritocracy.
Retain the Talent: In addition to ensuring the cyber personnel feel valued, it is necessary to counteract the pull of the private sector. This does not necessarily mean more money. Most soldiers are not in the Army for the money. Identification of the motivating factors attracting a soldier to the military and reducing the demotivating factors are more likely to succeed. On the monetary front it is necessary to ensure there is a feeling that career progression is always possible if enough effort is exerted. Thus within the cyber domain their should be no hard rank caps. If a person chooses to put forth the effort they should be able to attain the highest ranks at the operational level possible. Rather than slot and promote based on the number of allotted E-6,7,8, etc... all slots should be open to ranks allowing for personnel to maintain steady career progression into reasonably well compensated ranks for their skills.
Read the below for a very thought provoking analysis of the SOF model applied to cyberspace:
APPLICATION OF US SPECIAL OPERATIONS COMMAND MODEL TO DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE CYBERSPACE FORCE
http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a510497.pdf
Any thoughts? Just my personal opinion/rant/essay of the moment. Constructive criticism is much appreciated.
The bureaucratic and tradition heavy service relies on a recruiting and career progression process that presupposes the majority of recruits will separate from the service before qualifying for retirement benefits. The incentives to remain in service revolve around benefits and institutionalization that skew towards acceptance and compliance with the status quo. Everything has revolved around the strategic structuring of the force around the boots-on-the-ground warfighter augmented by combat support and enabled by combat service support.
The current mentality is soldier first, everything else second. This has served the Army well because the occupational specialties have been broken down to simplified caricatures of the complex responsibilities their many distinctive job titles might suggest. The end result is the mission is ponderously progressed with total conformity and mission success is nearly inevitable. For conventional war this is a highly desirable state, but in cyberspace these paradigms are neither efficient or desirable.
During World War II the limits of conventional warfare became very apparent. The answer grew out of the Office of Strategic Services. Special Operations lead to the formation of unconventional warfare units that relied on exceptional, highly skilled people. Today the Special Operations Command (SOCOM) recognizes the importance of people as a statement of five truths:
-----------------------
http://www.socom.mil/Pages/SOFTruths.aspx
Truth 1: Humans are more important than hardware.
People – not equipment – make the critical difference. The right people, highly trained and working as a team, will accomplish the mission with the equipment available. On the other hand, the best equipment in the world cannot compensate for a lack of the right people.
Truth 2: Quality is better than quantity.
A small number of people, carefully selected, well trained, and well led, are preferable to larger numbers of troops, some of whom may not be up to the task.
Truth 3: Special Operations Forces cannot be mass produced.
It takes years to train operational units to the level of proficiency needed to accomplish difficult and specialized SOF missions. Intense training – both in SOF schools and units – is required to integrate competent individuals into fully capable units. This process cannot be hastened without degrading ultimate capability.
Truth 4: Competent Special Operations Forces cannot be created after emergencies occur.
Creation of competent, fully mission capable units takes time. Employment of fully capable special operations capability on short notice requires highly trained and constantly available SOF units in peacetime.
Truth 5: Most special operations require non-SOF assistance.
The operational effectiveness of our deployed forces cannot be, and never has been, achieved without being enabled by our joint service partners. The support Air Force, Army, Marine and Navy engineers, technicians, intelligence analysts, and the numerous other professions that contribute to SOF, have substantially increased our capabilities and effectiveness throughout the world.
---------------------
I believe the way forward for the Army to become truly dominant in cyberspace is to invest in people. The Army must divorce itself from the counterproductive current system of personnel management within the realm of cyberspace. Cyber needs its own management branch, highly focused longevity incentives, effective talent identification within the force and in initial entry recruiting, world class training, and the backbone to fail/non-select the bottom 75% of applicants.
A SOF model of recruiting, selection, and training is a proven and optimal route for building what will ultimately be an unconventional force of out-of-the-box thinkers, planners, and operators. The specifics will and should change but the model should guide the vision of the cyberspace force moving forward.
The Army focuses too much on excelling in fitness performance and leadership positions that are unimportant and pedestrian concerns for force projection within the cyberspace domain. There is a reason the civilian sector (with proven innovative performance) separates IT management from the engineers. Forcing your senior technical personnel to become leaders and managers in order to progress their careers removes their technical capabilities and experience from the operational talent pool and over time results in those managers becoming divorced from current technologies and skill sets.
Recent additions of the 35Q and 25D occupational specialties have served to prove the stranglehold traditional doctrine maintains on the cyberspace domain. 25D is intended to specialize in Computer Network Defense (CND) for the Army but somehow also became heavily saddled with COMSEC responsibilities. This defies logic as the paperwork, logistic, and policy heavy arena of COMSEC management assignments will result in two to three year long career gaps in our future cyber defenders where their highly valuable and volatile technical skills
will degrade and become severely outdated. In the 35Q realm of Computer Network Attack (CNA) and Computer Network Exploitation (CNE) the skill sets have focused on correlating conventional warfare tactics and methods as if they have any actual purpose other than allowing aging officers and enlisted managers to understand the concepts. The idea of "weaponizing" cyberspace is counterproductive to actually understanding and exploiting the military and intelligence potential of the domain.
The dynamics of cyberspace are very unfavorable for the application of traditional military doctrine (http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/why-your-intuition-about-cyber-warfare-is-probably-wrong). In conventional warfare the defender has the advantage, in cyberspace the attacker does with research indicating defenders must field 1000x the resources an attacker must. In conventional warfare the US asserts dominance in every domain of combat, without exception. In cyberspace we are out-manned, out-funded, and falling woefully in the technical expertise of our personnel. In conventional warfare we can point to a distinctive entity as the enemy, but in cyberspace the enemy can be anyone or anonymous.
To succeed we must disrupt, in the Silicon Valley sense of the word, our entire way of operating in order to have any chance of catching up and dominating our opponents.
Some thoughts on how to proceed:
Identify talent: Like SOF, allow anyone (MOS immaterial) with basic qualifications to challenge "Cyber Selection." Use IQ, psychological, and technical skills testing to weed out the less capable. Avoid the use of the ASVAB except as a very base level of capability. Often experience is far more valuable than a GT, ST, or ET line score. Do not require any kind of originator command approval of the applicants' packets for accession. The traditional military and much of its leadership are not conducive for selecting who would or would not be a good fit for a highly technical cyber role.
Train the talent: Initial training should be intense and demanding with little room for failure. Course failure should be embraced as an effective talent management process ensuring only the most capable and dedicated succeed. Follow on training at the unit should be continual, relevant, and well funded. The kind of person best suited for cyber duties will consider technical training a job perk thus incentivizing their longevity.
Differentiate the Talent: The cyber domain should be relatively rank agnostic, instead the focus should be on skill level and capabilities. Specializations in networking, programming, reverse engineering, microprocessors, etc.. should be identified and strong preference given to further develop and assign based off of individual strengths. Recognition of prowess and skills along with commensurate expectations of responsibility will further incentivize personnel by allowing a way to benchmark in a sort of meritocracy.
Retain the Talent: In addition to ensuring the cyber personnel feel valued, it is necessary to counteract the pull of the private sector. This does not necessarily mean more money. Most soldiers are not in the Army for the money. Identification of the motivating factors attracting a soldier to the military and reducing the demotivating factors are more likely to succeed. On the monetary front it is necessary to ensure there is a feeling that career progression is always possible if enough effort is exerted. Thus within the cyber domain their should be no hard rank caps. If a person chooses to put forth the effort they should be able to attain the highest ranks at the operational level possible. Rather than slot and promote based on the number of allotted E-6,7,8, etc... all slots should be open to ranks allowing for personnel to maintain steady career progression into reasonably well compensated ranks for their skills.
Read the below for a very thought provoking analysis of the SOF model applied to cyberspace:
APPLICATION OF US SPECIAL OPERATIONS COMMAND MODEL TO DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE CYBERSPACE FORCE
http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a510497.pdf
Any thoughts? Just my personal opinion/rant/essay of the moment. Constructive criticism is much appreciated.
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