The Army wants more coders alongside operators

The Navy has cyber warfare engineers that perform coding as part of their mission for the cyber mission force, however, that group is a self-selecting organization that pulls from outside the military as sort of a direct commissioning type program.

Army Cyber Command oversees cyber operations in Central Command, Africa Command and Northern Command on behalf of U.S. Cyber Command overseeing teams across the joint force in those regions. Similarly, Army teams also perform operations across the globe under the command of the Navy and Air Force.

Fogarty said that the service still needs members of industry to provide coding support, but the “flash to bang” wasn’t as tight as they needed from an operational perspective. Forces may need a certain exploit or adjust to a change the enemy made to its network immediately and can’t wait to send it out for development.

As a result, embedding these developers with the operators allows the Army, in particular, to expedite the development cycle.