What happened at the military’s biggest cyber training exercise to date

When soldiers are preparing to deploy, they head to the Army’s National Training Center at Fort Irwin in California. There, they can replicate an entire campaign during a two-week rotation against a world class force.

But in the cyber world, no such training environment exists. That means cyber forces train in ad hoc cyber ranges and are limited by the number of teams that can dial in. Moreover, there is no space to rehearse for an upcoming mission.

The Persistent Cyber Training Environment (PCTE), managed by the Army, seeks to change all of that. PCTE is an online client in which members of U.S. Cyber Command’s cyber mission force can log on from anywhere in the world for training, either of individuals or of groups, and to rehearse missions.