Direct officer commissions at high ranks are now being considered in Congress for all the services to build up their cyber capabilities, Army officials say. That and hefty cash incentives are part of the Army’s strategy to bring in and keep people with high-demand cyber skills at a time when the civilian unemployment rate for them is essentially zero, the officials say.

The Army is looking at more money for much of its cyber force, and working through authorization for direct officer commissioning for talented civilians at ranks through colonel, said Lt. Gen. Stephen Fogarty, the new commander of Army Cyber Command. He spoke Thursday at an Army Cyber + Networks event at the Association of the United States Army in Arlington, Virginia.

Accession bonuses of $40,000 for direct commissioned officers are being considered and may be in place in the next calendar year, Army officials confirmed to Army Times on Friday.

“High-end operators” can earn as much as $72,000 in selective retention bonuses, and senior NCOs get up to $100,000 for agreeing to a four-year commitment.

But if you’re competing for talent with Google or Facebook, it can’t be about just the money.

“How can you match the industry with pay? The fact of the matter is you can’t,” said Brig. Gen. Joseph McGee, director of the Talent Management Task Force, Thursday at the AUSA cyber event.

“We need to stop even having that discussion,” McGee said. “It’s not matter of matching civilian pay, it’s closing the gap between military pay and civilian pay, and in that gap providing all the things that keep all of us in service. … It’s the uniqueness of contributing to your nation’s defense that motivates all of us to serve. I think that resonates with people sometimes much more than we give it credit.”

The Army has already begun officer direct commissions to the rank of first lieutenant, and at that level, the pay gap can be huge.

McGee cites the example of “one highly talented individual” the Army wanted to direct commission as a lieutenant, and then that person realized he’d make about the same as a first lieutenant as he would in a part-time job at Dell.

“You can’t have it be that large of a gap,” McGee said.

The Army is working on these incentives for cyber warriors to sign up and stay in the service:

• An accession bonus of $40,000 for direct commissioned officers is under consideration and could be in place sometime next calendar year.  
• Assignment incentive pay up to $500 per month is authorized for all cyber service members but is not yet implemented across the force because qualification criteria are still being developed. 
• Special duty assignment pay up to $300 per month is authorized for enlisted soldiers, but is likewise not yet implemented across the force. 
• The career field of 17C cyber operations specialist has a selective retention bonus ranging from $15,300 to $57,600.  
• 17C offers $19,200 to $72,000 in a location selection retention bonus for high-end operators. 
• Senior NCOS can receive a written bonus agreement of $60,000 or $100,000 for three- or four-year commitments, respectively. 

These incentives are already in place:

• Direct commission of officers at first lieutenant. 
• Directly commissioned officers in the Student Loan Repayment Program (SLRP) can receive up to $65,000 in student loan repayments.

The Army recently commissioned its first two officers as first lieutenants through its new pilot program to direct commission cyber officers. The program, approved by Congress, is set up to help fill certain capabilities the Army needs, such as computer scientists, data specialists, reverse engineers and development operations engineers.

Direct commissions to higher ranks until now have been given to medical officers, Army officials said. Medical officers can enter as captains, majors and lieutenant colonels, and prior-service officers can re-enter service as full colonels.

Pending approval from Congress, cyber officers may soon enter any of the military services in the same range of ranks.

That will be a cultural shift for the Army, McGee said.

“These superstars play an outsize role, make an outsize contribution to our operations,” he said. “Some of the things we are talking about are so fundamentally different, a challenge to the way we have done things.”

The leader of the directorate handles cyber policy for the Army’s G-3/5/7 office at the Pentagon.

Buckner is deputy commander of Joint Task Force-ARES, which engages in the cyber fight against ISIS, at U.S. Cyber Command at Fort Meade, Maryland.

She was named to her current role last June, after serving as deputy commander of operations for the Cyber National Mission Force at U.S. Cyber Command. In 2014, she was named commandant for the newly formed Army Cyber School and tasked with growing the school and developing cyber training.

Buckner is a career intelligence officer whose training includes electronic warfare and signals intelligence courses, airborne and jumpmaster schools, Joint and Combined Warfighting School and Harvard’s Executive Education Program in cybersecurity. She is a 1990 graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point.

The Army has not announced when she will transition into her new role. An Army spokeswoman told Army Times that no additional information is available yet.

The current director of Army cyber is Maj. Gen. Patricia Frost, who has led the directorate since it opened in summer 2016.

The directorate has focused on integrating the Army’s cyber, information and electronic warfare operations as the Army builds its cyber organizations and career field.

The Army has made a “very significant” investment in cyber as it rapidly formed Army Cyber Command and built its cyber mission force, Frost told Army Times in October.

“I feel very strongly that the Army is truly leading the way in this space,” Frost said in the interview. “I think we’re really seeing that come together now in how we’re equipping the cyber mission force, the operational capabilities we’re putting in our support to our geographic combatant commands we’re aligned to.”

Nakasone, who took command of Army Cyber Command in October 2016, has been leading an organization that has grown rapidly to stand up 41 cyber protection teams and the service’s new cyber career branch.

He has been cited as a frontrunner for the job in a report by Fifth Domain, a sister publication of Army Times.

President Trump is expected to name Nakasone to the job heading one of the nation’s top security agencies, according to a report Tuesday in Politico.

Rogers will soon be at the end of his four-year term in the dual role.

A spokesman for Army Cyber Command on Wednesday told Army Times the command could not comment at this time on whether Nakasone is being considered for the top job at NSA and Cyber Command.

Before commanding Army Cyber Command, Nakasone was the leader of the Cyber National Mission Force at U.S. Cyber Command. He has also been director of intelligence for the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan.

At the helm of the Army’s newest command, Nakasone has been vocal about the way forward for the Army’s role in multidomain warfighting, and the progress Army cyber has seen.

A common narrative a year ago was that ISIS could operate in virtual space uncontested, and “there wasn’t much we could do about it,” Nakasone said recently at the International Conference on Cyber Conflict in Washington, D.C.

But in the past year “we have taken that on, and that narrative is no longer true,” he said.

An “incredible amount of work” has gone into creating Army cyber forces, doctrine and strategy in the last few years, Nakasone said, and the pace is faster than expected.

“We are running faster than our headlights,” he said at the cyber conference. “We are learning so much we are well forward of where we thought we’d be.”

The 29 series EW force will transition to the 17 series MOS, the career field that is the baseline of Army cyber, said Maj. Gen. Patricia Frost, who leads the Army Cyber Directorate at the Pentagon.

The 29 series soldiers will begin training to give them a foundation in cyber. Effective Oct. 1, 2018, they will transition to the 17 series.

The Army also will be expanding cyber training in the new year. The service will introduce troops to the new Persistent Cyber Training Environment, which was due to be rolled out at the end of 2017, said Lt. Gen. Paul Nakasone, the commander of Army Cyber Command.

The new virtual environment is designed to be a joint training capability across the Defense Department to fill gaps in cyber training platforms available now.

It will essentially be military cyber’s own firing range, supporting multiple training events across the services.

The Army took the lead on developing the Persistent Cyber Training Environment.

The Army is also planning a new combined exercise for February at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, Frost said.

At the exercise, soldiers will interact with Marines to share information in a tactical environment so they all can understand what is happening in that space, Frost told Army Times.

Army Forces Command will designate which unit will participate in the exercise, she said.

Candidates who are accepted for the Army’s new Cyber Direct Commissioning Program will enter active duty as first lieutenants after taking two courses that total 16 weeks of instruction.

A major incentive for civilians with four-year degrees and high-demand technical skills to enter the Army as junior officers is the scale of the mission they will do, said two generals who lead Army cyber and spoke to reporters about the program on Tuesday.

“The most critical incentive that I think will be most attractive to this group of people is every single day you’ll go toe to toe with the best hackers in the world, and you’re defending our nation,” said Lt. Gen. Paul Nakasone, commander of Army Cyber Command. “Whether it’s a nation state or whether it’s a non-nation state actor or it’s a terrorist, if you want that opportunity, come join us in the Army. We have that opportunity every single day.“

The talent the Army wants to attract may come from academia or industry, has experience operating in cyberspace, and has the “drive, dedication and inclination that they want to serve the nation,” said Maj. Gen. Patricia Frost, director of cyber for the Army’s G-3/5/7.

How it works

The five-year pilot program will commission up to five cyber operations officers per year into the active component, Nakasone said. After the first year, the program will expand to the Army National Guard and Army Reserve, he said.

The first board to consider applicants will take place in about a week, and the first class is anticipated to begin in February, Nakasone said. The Army has more than 50 applicants and “we anticipate we will continue to have great interest,” he said.

Once the candidates are accepted into program, they are sworn into the Army Reserve as second lieutenants. Upon training, they enter active duty as first lieutenants, which has been the case with direct commissions into other branches in the past, Nakasone said.

The Army already offers direct commissions to bring officers into medical, legal and chaplain career fields.

“This is a new way of doing business,” Nakasone said about the cyber program. “Like building a school and a career field together, this is another initiative that we think holds great promise.”

Filling the gaps

Direct commissions for Army cyber are intended to fill a number of capability gaps and make sure Army cyber teams can accomplish their missions, Nakasone and Frost said.

The officers will do a range of tasks such as building tools and devices, writing algorithms, ciphers and programs, and doing research to support Cyber Mission Force teams.

Their skills are needed now, but it takes time, even several years, to build cyber operators, Frost said. So the Army is looking to bring in experienced people laterally to add to the service’s technical skills.

Both Congress and the Defense Department see the program as an opportunity to bridge the capability gaps, she said.

Applicants can expect to hear from the Army and be invited for an in-person interview at the U.S. Army Cyber School at Fort Gordon, Georgia. Army cyber leaders see the interview as critical to determining if the applicant is someone who will meet the security needs of the force. The applicants also will be asked to articulate the skills they will bring to the Army. This is a different approach than with typical, conventional accessions, Frost said.

If the interview goes well, the applicant will be sworn in as a second lieutenant and go to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, for a four-week direct commissioning course, then on to Fort Gordon for an abbreviated 12-week Cyber Officer Basic Leadership Course. Then comes their first assignment as first lieutenants, most likely at Fort Gordon or at Fort Meade, Maryland.

The expedited schedule will allow them to bypass the Army’s Basic Combat Training Course, give them fast promotion to first lieutenant as 17A cyber operations officers, and priority for getting the necessary security clearance.

It will take an estimated five months to go from the first look at an application packet to getting the applicant through courses and putting the new officer to work, Nakasone said.

How to qualify

Requirements for becoming an officer through the program include having at least a four-year college degree, ability to complete an Army physical, meet basic fitness standards and hold U.S. citizenship. They will serve a total of eight years in the service, at least three of those on active duty. Applicants must be less than 41 years old and be able to get and maintain a top-secret security clearance.

The direct commission into cyber differs in several ways from getting a commission through Officer Candidate School. Candidates at OCS will have completed Basic Combat Training before attending 12 weeks of tactical and leadership training at Fort Benning, Georgia, and they must not be older than 32. They are not guaranteed to be commissioned as cyber officers even if they request it, but those selected through the direct commission program are guaranteed to become 17A cyber operations officers.

In addition, OCS candidates are commissioned as second lieutenants and typically serve 18 months of service before making first lieutenant.

Bringing in cyber professionals as lieutenants, rather than a higher rank, was determined in the National Defense Authorization Act as the level for each service, Nakasone said.

After the first year of the program, Army cyber will review to see if the program was able to attract the talent hoped for, Nakasone said. The Army also will see if any changes need to be made, including whether to offer monetary incentives such as special pay or bonuses to sign up or stay in.

Learning curve

Once in uniform, the new officers will be paired with mentors, Nakasone said.

“We find that an effective way of developing talent … any time you have that buddy program, we’ve found great success with it,” he said.

Because direct commission officers are a small population, it will be easier to make sure they are taken care of, Frost said. They will be going through the initial course with other directly commissioned officers in other career fields, so they can talk with those officers as well.

“We’ll be able to prioritize what their needs might be,” Frost said. “Having that mentorship program will be key. “

The Army’s program is a pilot for all the services, Frost said.

“We will share lessons learned across the services. How we recruit in the Army may not necessarily be how we recruit in the Marine Corps,” she said, although the types of skills needed may be similar from service to service. “Of any of our joint warfighting functions, I don’t think it gets any more joint than what you’re executing day to day,“ she said.

To find out more about the program and to apply, go to the Army’s cyber direct commission website.

“For those of you in the military who are 25 years old or younger, captains or below, this is going to be a fundamental, significant change that you are going to have to come to grips with, and you are going to have to lead the way,” Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley said Tuesday at the International Conference on Cyber Conflict in Washington, D.C.

Milley spoke directly to the many young soldiers in the audience, including West Point cadets, at the conference presented by the Army Cyber Institute at the United States Military Academy and the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence. The audience also included military leaders, government civilians and innovators from the cyber industry.

“People my age do not have the answer,” Milley said. “We have enough brains, I suppose, to recognize the fact that we are in the midst of change. But we are not savvy enough, we are not smart enough, we are not sophisticated enough, and, frankly, we may not be around long enough to implement the actual changes that are going to take place.”

“That rock is going to go in your rucksack, and we are counting on you for the future,” he said.

The talent and technical ability in Army units is going to reside at the lower level for the next generation as they cycle through, Lt. Gen. Paul Nakasone, the commander of Army Cyber Command, said at the conference.

“I don’t know too many Army units where you go in and you say ‘hey, I know that the E-6 knows more about what they’re going to do than the O-6,’ “ Nakasone said.

Those at the O-6 level and above do still have a job, and they have a responsibility in terms of leadership, synchronization and vision, he said. But he keeps thinking of the talent on the way up.

“It’s very interesting to command an organization where the true talent and brain power is certainly not at the top, but at the beginning stages,” Nakasone said. “It’s the lieutenants, it’s the sergeants, the young captains that have this remarkable talent.”

Best and brightest

To recruit cyber talent into the military, Milley pointed to a pilot program that taps the country’s vast pool of brilliant cyber minds to bring them into the officer ranks through direct commissions, which usually have been reserved for doctors and lawyers.

“What we need to do, we the Army, we need to track those best minds,” Milley said.

They may want an opportunity to serve, but the military has not reached out to them effectively, he said.

Rather than bring in a cyber expert as a private, in the old “linear industrial model of promotions,” he said, why not bring them in laterally, and have them serve for 24 or 36 months.

“Let them serve this country, let them do some good for us, and they’ll feel good, we’ll feel good,” Milley said.

The power of the “super empowered individual” is one of the things Nakasone said he has learned about the people component of cyber in the last 12 to 18 months.

Among those doing critical jobs on the teams, “our best ones are 50 or 100 times better than their peers,” Nakasone said. “Is there a sniper or is there a pilot or is there a submarine driver or anyone else in the military 50 times their peer? I would tell you, some coders we have are 50 times their peers.”

For example, a common narrative a year ago was that ISIS could operate in virtual space uncontested. They could push their message and share their propaganda rapidly, Nakasone said, and “there wasn’t much we could do about it.”

But in the past nine to 12 months “we have taken that on, and that narrative is no longer true,” he said.

Army Cyber is contesting their message every day, and behind an Army cyber team is an individual, the one Nakasone calls “that 50-x coder.”

“He’s the one who has come up with the ideas about social media and how to get after ISIS in that space,” he said. “That’s the power of the super empowered individual.”

The Army has moved quickly to stand up its cyber career branch, with nearly 20,000 soldiers so far, and 41 cyber protection teams.

An “incredible amount of work” has gone into creating Army cyber forces, doctrine and strategy in the last few years, and the pace is faster than expected, Nakasone said.

“We are running faster than our headlights,” he said. “We are learning so much we are well forward of where we thought we’d be.”

Machine speed

Warfighters in the cyber domain are operating at a time when the battle space is becoming more lethal, more complex and with machines on the rise.

The military is seeing a convergence of a variety of technologies, such as artificial intelligence and autonomous vehicles, and, “in combination, I guarantee that they are changing and will change the fundamental character of warfare,” Milley said.

Machine learning opens up potential applications not just for defense but offense, Nakasone said.

“It’s easy to get on a network and look for vulnerability,” he said.

But he can envision a machine that can find a vulnerability, rapidly identify it, work with persistence and do all that at machine speed.

The potential for cyber warfighting may involve a self-healing network, working at machine speed to lock out adversarial persistent threats with a fraction of the workforce used now, Nakasone said.

“Think of the implications for the Army and the nation,” he said.

For the military, it’s not just about the technologies, “but how you use them,” Milley said. It’s a matter of the doctrine, the organizations and the talent, and how you bring them all together, he said.

“We’re not going to get it right,” he said. “What is important is that we get it less wrong than the enemy.”

The key, Milley said, is to have innate ability to innovate faster than the opponent can in the moment, to rapidly adapt and innovate when in contact with the enemy.

The potential adversaries of the U.S. are moving “very, very rapidly,” he said.

“If we, the United States military, are going to preserve this experiment in freedom for the next generation and the generation after, then we too will have to move up smartly, and you can’t move up alone,” Milley said.

The U.S. military is one component of the effort, which will depend on academia, industry and allied and joint partners working together, Milley said.

“This is going to take teamwork and the best minds that America can bring to bear,” he said.

The Army is working on how it will train and equip soldiers to deal with an adversary they can’t see, said Maj. Gen. Patricia Frost, who leads the Army Cyber Directorate at the Pentagon. The directorate, which opened last summer, is integrating the Army’s cyber, electronic warfare and information operations.

As the Army builds its organizations and capability in the cyber domain, “where I think we need to go next is the understanding by every soldier,” Frost told Army Times in an Oct. 5 interview at the Pentagon. “Every soldier knows ‘I have to fire my weapon.’ Does every soldier realize that they’re the first line of defense in cyberspace? Between what you have at your work station or your warfighting platform, your iPhone or your Blackberry or all these end-point devices, the adversary only has to have one vector in.”

The Army needs a strong and capable cyber mission force, but responsibility for cyber defense belongs to all soldiers, she said.

“They need to understand what their responsibilities are when they log on,” Frost said. “That can’t just be Army Cyber’s problem. Everyone is a defender in this space.”

Soldiers also need to know how to react when the electromagnetic environment in which they work is compromised, just as they need to know how to fire their weapon when wearing protective gear during a chemical, biological or nuclear event, she said.

“We’re talking about this integration with electronic warfare,” Frost said. “You also need to know how to operate, depending on what your MOS is, in a degraded or denied environment, due to what could happen in an electromagnetic environment.”

The answer is not putting an electronic warfare soldier in every squad.

“You can’t scale that across the Army. That’s not realistic,” she said. “You need to know as a soldier, how do I operate, and you need to understand what vulnerabilities you may open up for your squad, company, battalion, brigade, division or corps, by your cyber hygiene on the network.”

A new type of training

Soldiers may see a change in their training at combat training centers across the Army.

Cyber education and training needs to take place not just at the Cyber Center of Excellence “but at all the centers of excellence to understand how this electromagnetic environment is affecting us and also how the cyber domain impacts us,” Frost said.

“We’re looking at how do we change the training environment within our combat training centers to show the environment we’d like to project,” she said. “We’re working very closely with the Combined Arms Center, with FORSCOM [Army Forces Command], on how do we create the right environment that brings in these different aspects,” Frost said.

A new exercise

In recent weeks the Army has been teaming up with the Marine Corps to look at training in signals, cyber and EW, and now a combined exercise is planned for February at Fort Huachuca, Arizona.

“Because we are all very invested in a land component view, there’s a lot of synergy between us and the Marine Corps and how we want to emulate this type of environment,” Frost said.

FORSCOM will designate which unit will participate in the exercise, Frost said. The soldiers and Marines would interact to share information in a tactical environment so they can understand what’s happening in that space.

The Army in September conducted an exercise called Cyber Blitz at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, New Jersey. Marines came to observe and industry partners took part to see what’s needed for EW and cyberspace capabilities.

Soldiers from the 25th Infantry Division were there to try out prototypes of tools and also capabilities now available, then gave the industry partners their feedback.

Growing the force

The Army has made a “very significant” investment in its cyber force, and in its manpower, organizational constructs, resourcing and acquisition, Frost said. The Army has achieved more than other services have so far, she said.

“I feel very strongly that the Army is truly leading the way in this space,” Frost said. “I think we’re really seeing that come together now in how we’re equipping the cyber mission force, the operational capabilities we’re putting in our support to our geographic combatant commands we’re aligned to.”

As of Sept. 30, the Army was the first service to deliver all of its 41 active component teams at full operational capability, ahead of the other services and a year ahead of schedule, Frost said. The cyber teams were supposed to be at FOC by the end of 2018, so they were ready a year ahead of schedule, she said.

The Army’s reserve component teams are building up and expected to reach FOC by 2024, she said. Reserve component teams are already supporting critical missions in support of U.S. Cyber Command, under the operational control of Lt. Gen. Paul Nakasone, the commander of Army Cyber Command.

Frost says she sees the progress as “a huge win.”

The Army has opened the Cyber Center of Excellence at Fort Gordon, Georgia, and is growing that center and its manning. The Army also has a cyber brigade at Fort Meade, Maryland.

“Generating an operational force at Fort Gordon is just tremendous, and we hope we are setting the foundation to maybe be that joint service school … not just cyber but electronic warfare as well,” Frost said.

Priorities ahead

One of the priorities for Army cyber now is to assess how secure and resilient its weapons platforms are, Frost said, and the same goes for installations and systems.

“We’re doing a lot of mission analysis of what does the Army need,” she said, including what type of cyber expertise is required at echelon as staff and as operators.

Another priority for the year ahead is supporting Army Cyber Command, the Army’s only operational command in the cyber space, Frost said.

“I want to ensure that Gen. Nakasone is successful in what he is trying to achieve for ’18 and beyond, and we’re helping him achieve that,” she said.

One of his missions is defending the Department of Defense Information Network. The cyber directorate works to ensure his command is resourced and has the capabilities for that mission, which extends across every command to strengthen and secure the DODIN, Frost said.

Warfighting in cyberspace

As soldiers develop and mature in the Army, they should understand “at the base level of their tradecraft” how the different domains — land, air, sea, space and cyber — affect their warfighting function, Frost said, “and how we integrate across all the centers of excellence and how we integrate operationally across the Army,” she said.

Soldiers and commanders need to understand the battle spaces and visualize the invisible ones.

“One of the things we’re working on not just in the cyber domain but in the electromagnetic environment is how do you visualize this space that is not tangible,” Frost said. “We have right now a capability requirement for cyber situational understanding which would provide a visualization tool for commanders all the way down to the brigade combat team.”

Commanders would also have a planning management tool to allow them to see the electromagnetic environment and their own unit’s energy signatures as well as the enemy’s.

The goal is to give the commander tools to achieve mission success, and as the threat evolves, the capabilities evolve as well.

“Everyone says it’s about the technology and the hardware, but the Army is a people-focused service, we’re about our people,” Frost said. “The 8th Infantry Division was my first unit when I came into the Army and ‘Soldiers are our credentials’ was our motto. That truly is how were going to advance in this space.”

The Army’s cyber operators want unit commanders to know they’re ready to bring solutions that can be tailored to the unit, the network and the commanders’ missions — and they’re bringing their servers and sensors with them.

“We’re coming into our own as a brand new brigade, a brand new unit and a brand new domain,” said Maj. Josh Rykowski, a mission team leader with Cyber Protection Brigade.

“We’re trying to develop and get our capabilities out to the customers, network owners to understand what the capabilities are that we can provide,” Rykowski said.

He and other cyber operators met with reporters this week at the Association of the U.S. Army annual meeting in Washington, D.C., to talk about how cyber protection teams do their jobs, what they need to succeed, and how they can support commanders.

As the Army’s newest war-fighting domain grows, it will soon open its own training range, just as more traditional combat arms units have their firing ranges, said Lt. Gen. Paul Nakasone, the commander of Army Cyber Command, who joined the cyber operators at the AUSA event.

The training environment will hone the skills of cyber warriors and the Army’s cyber protection teams, which go out to units to do assessments and use intelligence to find gaps in units’ networks and look for other issues.

The teams then work with the local defender to leave the network more defensible than it was before, Rykowski said.

“My team has had a very high operational tempo,” Rykowski said in response to a question from Army Times. “The adversary is out there, and there is definitely a wide range of missions to conduct.”

The tools

When the cyber protection teams bring their defensive capability to a unit, they arrive equipped with a deployable cyber kit: hardware, servers, software, and sensors to sense a network.

The equipment can be a powerful advantage for commanders, the operators said.

The cyber kit includes a combination of network assessment equipment and forensics equipment, said Capt. Sean Eyre.

“We have server stacks that give rudimentary defense and a substantial amount of storage capacity and a substantial amount of computational power that allows me to flexibly create tools on the fly from my repository of tools,” Eyre said.

And the kits can be protected from what they find, he said.

“We always go on a mission with the mindset that a network has been exploited in some fashion, so it’s not safe to operate on there,” he said. “So, when we connect our kit to the network, we have defenses within the kit, so we ensure we ourselves do not get exploited if the adversary is still in the network.”

New training range

The new Persistent Cyber Training Environment is due to be rolled out at the end of the year, Nakasone said.

The Army has taken the lead in developing the new platform, which is intended to be a joint training capability across the Defense Department.

The virtual environment is intended to fill gaps between the virtual cyber training environments available now, support multiple training events, and boost cyber readiness across the services, Army officials have said.

It will be scalable to train individuals, teams and units, and for large-scale exercises as well as preparing for missions.

Commanders: Plan ahead

As the teams prepare for missions, they have a message for commanders.

Commanders should plan ahead for a cyber team to pay a visit — months ahead, said 1st Lt. Alvaro Luna, a former armor officer who works with cyber support to corps and below to help deliver cyber effects for commanders.

At 180 days before a rotation to the National Training Center, a cyber planner begins integrating with a commander, said Luna, who works on the offense side of the Army’s cyber operations.

His number one challenge, he said, is educating the unit he’s attached to about how cyber support works.

“One thing we found that is critically essential is early integration,” Luna said. “At the first sit-down, they understand what you can do. The second time we go out, we do another exercise with them that’s actually on their territory at their local [field training] event, [and] they can actually see those effects that we planned in the past.”

By the time the unit gets to NTC, “they’re caught up on what we can do. They’re already planning and they understand how we think. It’s really building that early relationship with commanders so that they know how you process information. Showing up at NTC with everything is too late so we integrate extremely early,” he said.

The teams

What characterizes a cyber protection team is that the operators are hunting for adversaries, looking for someone who doesn’t want to be found in a network.

“That is a core skill that we train in our cyber protection teams,” Nakasone said.

Rykowski’s team is one of the Army’s 20 cyber protection teams, the defensive elements, in the Army’s active force, Nakasone said. Another 21 teams are being built in reserve component — 11 in the Army National Guard and 10 in the Army Reserve. Of a team’s 39 personnel, 80 percent are military and 20 percent are civilians.

Each team’s civilians can share their expertise from diverse backgrounds, Nakasone said.

Vincent Walker is one of those. He is former enlisted and a former signals intelligence analyst who has been working with Army cyber for three years.

“We work closely with each other daily,” Walker said. “I can bring partners in from other places and agencies.”

With his background comes a wealth of contacts he can call on, he said.

“The experience of those people coming in and having conversations with them [the team members] helps them a great deal,” he said.

There are four different kinds of teams: national CPTs, Defense Department Information Network CPTs, teams that work directly with combatant commands, and Army service CPTs.

“Being an Army CPT, we receive a broad range of missions, and as we’ve gone out and assisted the network owner, a lot of what we do is educate them in our capabilities and also trying to work toward leaving the network in a much more defensible position,” Rykowski said.

“Nerds want to be nerds, not leaders,” said Chris Lynch, leader of Defense Digital Service.

The military has to let go of the individual contributor model, because for many tech people, “that doesn’t work,” he said.

The Defense Digital Service is a Defense Department agency that hires private-sector employees with cyber skills.

Lynch and leaders of Army cyber and the cyber industry spoke about attracting, keeping and, in some cases, letting cyber talent go during the panel discussion “A New Kind of Force for a New Fighting Domain: Cyber Talent Management” at the AUSA annual meeting in Washington, D.C.

“We’re now competing with a world unlike anything else,” Lynch said, referring to intense competition with tech companies for cyber talent. “We need to be building a place where this kind of work has a home.”

Click here for full coverage from the AUSA annual meeting.

The Army’s cyber force also may want to adapt to letting people go for its own good, panelists said.

“The private sector has advantages you’re not going to have, to hire and fire,” said Guy Filippelli, vice president of Solutions Data and Insider Threat Solutions for Forcepoint and a former military officer who ran software programs on deployments.

Good engineering teams in private industry “might start with 30 people and end up with 20 we really like,” he said. “An interesting learning lesson for the military might be how quickly can you get rid of people.”

The Army should be willing to let cyber personnel leave the military, learn new skills and come back in, said Brig. Gen. Stephen Hager, deputy commander of operations for the Cyber National Mission Force, U.S. Cyber Command. He is a former active-duty officer who went reserve and has run tech companies.

In Silicon Valley, he said, companies may get rid of 50 percent of their tech people a year to get new blood.

“I think competition is good,” Hager said. “We should be willing to let our workforce permeate, go out … and come back. The U.S. military is the greatest one on earth, but that is not the most important thing to the nation. The most important thing is our economic might.”

In the cyber profession, it should be all right for some people to fail the training, said Maj. Gen. John Morrison Jr., commander of the Army Cyber Center of Excellence at Fort Gordon, Georgia.

The mindset that “we have to get everyone through the course” should change, Morrison said. Soldiers aren’t yet a 17 series MOS until the conclusion of the course.

“It’s a different paradigm” in cyber, he said.

• High-end technical expertise and/or significant cyber-related accomplishments outside of mandatory military education.

• Significant operational leadership or experience, preferably with some technical linkage.

• Unique experience from diverse backgrounds or educational paths that indicate creativity, intellectual curiosity, problem solving, and/or academic excellence.

AGR applicants should also have a “deep interest in and passion for” the cyberspace domain, propensity for self development and improvement, and proven ability to work as a contributing member of a team, either as a team leader or team member, according to the MILPER messages.

Army cyber is a total Army force, with Army Reserve and Army National Guard cyber warriors fully integrated into cyberspace operations, said Lt. Gen. Paul Nakasone, who took command of Army Cyber Command and Second Army in October.

Who’s eligible:

Those who want to apply must meet these requirements to be eligible:

• Be an AGR warrant officer 1 through chief warrant officer 4, or an AGR officer in ranks of senior captain through colonel.

• Be able to obtain and maintain a top-secret security clearance and sensitive compartmentalized information (SCI) eligibility. A TS/SCI security clearance is required for warrant officers prior to attending the 170A Warrant Officer Basic Course or Warrant Officer Advanced Course and for officers attending the 17A Cyber Basic Officer Leader Course (CBOLC), Cyber Operations Officer Course or Cyber Captains Career Course. Those not required to attend a 17A course must get the clearance to be awarded the area of concentration.

• Pass a counterintelligence scope polygraph (CSP) before being awarded the MOS 170A or AOC 17A, and pass subsequent polygraphs to hold the MOS or AOC.

Those who have Cyber Mission Force training and experience should be able to document it as part of the cyber branch questionnaire, including certification records. CMF experience is helpful but not required.

Other preferred experience includes programming and software development.

For officers, preferred degrees include, at minimum, a bachelor’s of science or higher degree in electrical engineering, computer science, computer engineering, information technology, information systems, information assurance/cyber security, or mathematics.

For details on criteria for transfer to cyber, warrant officers should read the draft 170A section and officers should see the draft 17A section of DA PAM 600-3, according to the MILPER messages.

Officers may request branch transfer if they are within six months of completing their initial three-year AGR tour.

Who’s not eligible:

There are some who are not eligible for transfer. They include officers or warrant officers who serve as active-duty, Army National Guard or Reserve non-AGR warrant officers, or AGR officers controlled by the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, Chaplain Corps, Army Medical Department or Medical Service.

Also not eligible are officers who have undergone or are pending an unfavorable action including Uniform Code Military Justice (UCMJ) action or received a general-officer letter or memorandum of reprimand (GOLOR/GOMOR); were selected by a separation board; received a referred Officer Evaluation Report or Academic Evaluation Report; or do not meet Army physical fitness or Army body composition standards under AR 600-9.

If you are selected:

• You have at least 12 months time on station before transfer. Warrant officers and officers on three-year continental U.S. tours must finish the tour or get approval to cut it short.

• You will transfer to the new branch effective on the date on the transfer notice. If you do not yet have a TS/SCI, the branch transfer will take place when the clearance is received.

• Warrant officers and officers will have the option to accept or decline the transfer, and if they decline they will stay in their current branch and wait one year before they request transfer again.

• Warrant officers will receive training as directed by the 170A assignment officer or career manager at Human Resources Command.

• Selected officers will be required to attend the Cyber Basic Officer Leader Course, Cyber Operations Officer Course or Cyber Captains Career Course at Fort Gordon, Georgia. Major through colonel will not need to attend any additional training before transition to 17A.

The MILPER messages have details on how to apply, and how soldiers will be selected. For information, see the Human Resources Command website at

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