The move follows a yearlong review by the Office of Personnel Management on federal workforce pay issues. In a statement, officials said the move was “the right thing to do” for the public servants and to keep wages competitive with the private sector.

“Raising pay rates across the federal government to a minimum of $15 per hour reflects our appreciation for the federal workforce and our values as a nation,” said Kiran Ahuja, director of the Office of Personnel Management. “We know that paying a living wage provides a myriad of benefits, from recruitment to retention to increased productivity, and more.”

About 67,000 individuals in the 2.2 million person federal workforce will be affected by the change.

Of that total, OPM officials said about 56,000 currently work as Defense Department employees, with most performing “non-appropriated fund activities at military bases around the country [that] provide essential services to our military, including many who are military spouses.”

In a statement, Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness Gil Cisneros called the move “an important step for the civilian men and women who support the military community and their families” and a “well-deserved” pay raise.

Another 9,700 of the federal workers who will benefit from the change are VA employees. Department officials said they include custodians, housekeeping aides and food service workers.

VA Secretary Denis McDonough called the workers “critical front-line employees, central to patient safety and improved outcomes for veterans” and noted that many have acted as front-line service providers workers through the coronavirus pandemic.

The pay raises will go into effect by Jan. 30. The $15-an-hour pay rate is roughly equivalent to $31,000 a year, without overtime or bonuses.

Under changes in federal policy in 2021, all government contractors already are required to pay employees at least $15 an hour for their work.

However, a proposal in Congress in summer 2021 to guarantee service members base pay of no less than $15 an hour was rejected because of cost and implementation concerns. Enlisted troops with less than two years of military service can earn around $22,000 a year in base pay, but that does not factor in other compensation, like free health care and housing stipends.

In a statement, American Federation of Government Employees National President Everett Kelley praised the action as “one of [the president’s] most significant actions to date.”

“For the tens of thousands of workers who will start seeing more money in their paychecks each week, this is a transformative policy choice that will improve their everyday lives,” he said. “Setting a new, $15 per hour wage floor for federal government work will encourage employers across the country who are currently paying poverty wages to compete for labor and start paying fairer rates, lifting the wages of American workers across the country.”

The review, expected to last 12 weeks, is not expected to delay the deployment of the new system to the Columbus, Ohio, VA medical center this summer. But department officials acknowledged that “the order of subsequent deployments may be revised as a result of this strategic review.”

Last month, officials from the Government Accountability Office recommended postponing further expansion of the project until lingering issues with the system are resolved. They said as of last fall, “VA was at risk of deploying a system that did not perform as intended and could negatively impact the likelihood of its successful adoption.”

Department officials framed the new review as an assessment by the new administration to ensure that project timelines and requirements are realistic.

“A successful electronic health records deployment is essential in the delivery of lifetime, world-class health care for our Veterans,” VA Secretary Denis McDonough said in a statement.

“After a rigorous review of our most-recent deployment at Mann-Grandstaff VA Medical Center [in Washington], it is apparent that a strategic review is necessary. VA remains committed to the Cerner Millennium solution, and we must get this right for veterans.”

VA officials separately emphasized that the review is not aimed at looking whether the entire project should be reconsidered, but instead only at the pace of deployment and advance requirement needs for that work.

The 10-year health records project — heavily touted by former President Donald Trump’s administration as a transformation effort for VA — is designed to bring veterans and military medical software into alignment, allowing lifelong medical records to follow service members from through Defense Department clinics, VA medical appointments and even health visits outside the federal systems.

But deployment of Cerner’s Millennium software, already in use at the Defense Department, has had a difficult start. Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill have promised close scrutiny on the new records system in the coming year, both because of the scope of the project and the reports of uneven progress in the initial stages.

Earlier this week, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., set a letter to McDonough complaining of “new stress on the Mann-Grandstaff VA Medical Center” — the first site to use the new system — because of shortcomings with the new records implementation.

“I am hearing from some [employees] who are deeply frustrated with the system and are not getting the support they need,” she wrote. “Nurses who go to work every day to serve our veterans should not be driven to tears because software, which was intended to be an improvement, makes their jobs more difficult.”

She also raised concerns about patient safety, citing multiple reports of prescription delays linked to the new system. Officials from Cerner have disputed whether that is a widespread problem.

They have also said that many of the initial challenges with deploying the new system were expected, and technical experts from their company and VA built space into their deployment timelines to account for improvements needed as those problems have arisen.

“Cerner supports the decision by VA to conduct a strategic program review,” said Brian Sandager, general manager of Cerner Government Services, in a statement.

“We are proud of the significant milestones we have achieved, including one of the largest health data migrations in history and the deployment of a new joint Health Information Exchange between DOD, VA and their community partners. As committed partners we welcome and value the opportunity to review the program and share lessons learned.”

VA officials have already moved more than 24 million veteran health records into the new system. All VA facilities are expected to be using the system by the end of 2028.

Twenty-seven states got their feet wet during the 2018 mid-terms, the bureau’s chief told reporters at the Pentagon on Tuesday, and he expects more will be engaged next year.

“The election network security is a very state-centric thing,” said Air Force Gen. Joseph Lengyel. “It’s not military responsibility, or National Guard responsibility, to secure it. We’re an additive measure.”

The Illinois guard played a key role in 2018, teaming with their state board of elections, Illinois’s adjutant general said.

“We also had the command-and-control cell at our state intelligence center, with our state police,” Air Force Brig. Gen. Richard Neely said. “That way, when we saw an incident come in, we identified it there and we triaged it.”

Guard members can scan networks for suspicious activity, then determine whether something is a glitch or an attack. From there, they can try some preliminary fixes to get things back online, or send more serious hacks to the state’s IT experts ― and get state or federal law enforcement involved, where necessary.

They didn’t see any true attacks during that election, he said.

“If we’re doing our business correctly, we’re hopefully seeing that beforehand, before an attack actually occurs,” he added.

Washington state is doing some homework heading in the election, its adjutant general said, putting together a 10-person team to develop a plan, look for vulnerabilities in their network and then monitor for anything strange.

Then, come election night, Army Maj. Gen. Bret Daugherty said, troops will be “on hand to respond if all of our efforts have failed and the bad guys find their way in.”

Whether each state and territory’s guard personnel are activated for the election is up to their governors, but in the mean time, units are getting prepared for bigger things.

Currently, the guard is piloting a Cyber Mission Assurance Team concept, 10-person groups of soldiers and airmen. They will focus on Defense Department and other federal installations, to assess their vulnerabilities and come up contingencies to get everything back online after a breach.

It’s expected to run in Ohio, Washington and Hawaii through next year, Lengyel said.

Multiple state guard bureaus have been on the front lines of other attacks in the past year, according to Lengyel.

Earlier this year, 54 Louisiana public schools experienced a ransomware attack, where hackers ― often through a link in an email ― take online systems hostage and demand payment to return them.

It happened twice in Texas, as well, to 23 county government systems.

“Now, it’s turned into what we would call a battle drill,” Air Force Mag. Gen. Tracy Norris, Texas’s adjutant general said, part of their standard training.

And in Colorado, according to U.S. Cyber Command’s National Guard adviser, the state had to respond to an attack on its department of transportation network.

“States are going to experience a number of attacks and they might increase, they might not,” Col. Sam Kinch said. “What we have seen is a greater effort from Cyber Command to do a higher number of persistent engagement activities, So when we have information that leads us to going after a threat, we have seen our operational tempo increase significantly over the past year.”

In any case, Lengyel said, there are agreements in place to make sure every state can call on cyber troops to help with an attack, including memoranda of understanding with neighboring states.

“I would tell you that every state has some cyber capability,” he said. “If they don’t, then they have an agreement with somewhere else to borrow it.”

While much of the new gear and experimental fighting concepts are rapidly coming to fruition for what the top Marine has dubbed the “Force 2025” initiative, the Corps is struggling to place Marines in high-end positions to man the force.

According to data obtained by Marine Corps Times, serious manpower gaps appear to be impacting fields like cyber, intelligence, drone operators, ground combat leadership and F-35B pilots — occupations Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. Robert B. Neller often has highlighted as key to building the future fighting force.

High-tech stealth F-35B pilots are only manned at 33 percent, according to 2019 data. Some cyber fields are as low as 17 percent. Drone officers are manned at only 53 percent. Counterintelligence operators are at 67 ­percent, and some signals intelligence fields are manned at 69 percent.

The Corps is also in a race to plus up its low altitude air defense, or LAAD, Marines as it faces increasing air threats. In 2005, the Marine Corps eliminated 4th LAAD Battalion, and in 2007 it eliminated 1st Stinger Battery. Now the Corps is seeking an increase of 214 LAAD counter-drone Marines through fiscal year 2021 and 2022, according to documents obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request.

Other fields appear grossly overmanned: Ground ­intelligence officers and signals intelligence officers are manned at more than 140 percent. And enlisted drone operators are hitting 138 percent manning.

The data obtained by Marine Corps Times via a Freedom of Information Act request is current as of February.

The manpower crunch and overpaced demand for ­high-end fields may create new opportunities for Marines in the form of retention bonuses and a slew of new occupations for Marines to progress into, as the Corps ratchets up efforts to meet the demands of a world amid great power competition.

But the Corps’ push to build the future force may also ­result in shrinking it to reinvest in what incoming ­Commandant Gen. David Berger wrote in prepared remarks to senators during his April 30 confirmation hearing as “constrained resources.” It’s an issue Berger noted as one of his “most significant challenges” as he modernizes the Marine Corps.

The Corps says these manning numbers only provided a limited snapshot of a more complex manning ­calculus, which involves juggling school seat requirements, ­building new occupations and getting Marines through career progression courses.

For schools that don’t belong to the Marine Corps, like the 7315 unmanned aircraft system or UAS officer field, seat requirements have to be registered at times two years in advance, according to Brian ­Gahagan, deputy branch head for Manpower Management Integration Branch.

Gahagan says the surface numbers are “not an accurate depiction” and that some numbers will look “skewed.” It is a multiyear build, he said.

“As new modernizing or divesting [occupational fields] mature through the process many will reflect numerically low staffing levels that, to someone outside the manpower profession, paint an ­unrealistic perspective of some primary MOSs,” Manpower and Reserve Affairs told Marine Corps Times in an emailed statement.

“It may take several years to meet the accession and training levels to fully meet the requirements and build of Marine Corps Force 2025,” Manpower and Reserve Affairs said.

Still, the challenges for the Corps to meet the demands of a dynamic world and rapidly rising ­adversaries may come with considerable sacrifices.

“We will need to conduct a deliberate redesign of the force to meet the needs of the future operating environment,” Berger said in remarks to senators.

Neller’s decision to cut the rifle squads to 12 Marines may be a glimpse of manpower changes the Corps will have to make to plus-up billets in high demand fields and to cut costs to the force.

In many cases, fields that look poorly manned actually have an adequate number of people in the occupation, but those Marines simply need to attend various career progression schools within their tracks to officially obtain some leadership billets.

Still, those Marines have yet to attend ­specific ­follow-on training for leadership positions the Corps has deemed as necessary for obtaining the occupational field, despite already sitting in the billet.

Some of those fields are simply feeder MOSs, where Marines need to attend various schoolhouses to ­obtain the occupation.

As is the case with the 0202 field or Marine ­air-ground task force intelligence officers, which is only manned at 57 percent, according to data obtained by Marine Corps Times.

Capt. Will Dunst, an unrestricted officer ­promotion planner with Manpower and Reserve Affairs, says the “assignable inventory is healthy.”

The 0202 is a feeder occupation within the 02XX field that includes other intel occupations. Dunst says the 02XX occupational field is actually manned at 87 percent, but some Marines need to attend an underutilized school known as the MAGTF [Marine air-ground task force] Intelligence Officer Course, or MIOC.

It is an issue that the Corps is addressing and has slated for action, Dunst said.

High barrier for entry

A lot of the Corps’ manning issues are solved by simply pushing Marines through their feeder MOSs and getting them to schoolhouses.

But for some fields, high barriers to entry are ­preventing Marines from obtaining the occupation; and in other cases, demand for the field is simply creating pipeline logjams, real manpower concerns that can’t simply be addressed by stamping billet assignments for Marines who have not actually ­obtained the primary field.

The 0211-counterintelligence field has ­historically had manning problems associated with a ­multitude of barriers that hinder Marines entering the field.

The field is a lateral move primary occupation that requires a top secret sensitive compartmented information clearance and a high ASVAB test general technical score of 110, which Maj. Lucas Crider, end strength planner and enlisted plans for Manpower and Reserve Affairs, described as a “historically very high” barrier.

To complicate the matter, Marines wishing to enter the field were often put through overly subjective evaluations, like essay writing and interviews.

Crider says the Corps has since removed some of the more subjective requirements and standardized the screening process.

Data obtained by Marine Corps Times says the field is manned at 67 percent, but Crider says the overall inventory of counterintelligence Marines is at 82 percent and that the field has been trending ­upward for the past couple of years.

Within the aviation community, new job fields like the 7315 unmanned aerial system officer field and the 7518 F-35B occupation are outpacing the demand and available school seats.

For the drone field, the Air Force runs the ­schoolhouse, and the Corps only has a finite number of seats.

According to Dunst, the Corps is working with the Air Force to increase seats. But increasing seats also comes with opportunity costs in manpower from the fleet, as often pilots have to staff cadre schoolhouse ­positions.

For the officer drone field, the Corps is also ­looking at leveraging redesignations for pilots, who for ­whatever reason may not have completed ­pilot ­training. This could allow the Corps to recapitalize on skills the Marine may already have learned.

Dunst called it a “good use of taxpayer money.”

From the enlisted side of the house, the 7314 UAS field is overmanned at 138 percent. But Dunst says that growing requirements will eventually balance it.

The F-35 pilot training is running into similar problems where the demand is simply “outpacing training capacity,” Dunst said.

The Corps is pushing a number of initiatives like pilot bonuses and a program called “2P captain ­continuation” to help shore up the F-35B field.

The captain continuation program, for those Marines selected and recommended by a board, allows captains passed over twice for promotion to be offered a chance to continue.

The newly minted 1700 cyber field, ­according to data obtained by Marine Corps Times, is critically short.

The 1705 cyberspace warfare development officer is manned at only 17 percent, the 1721 cyberspace ­defensive operator is staffed at 63 percent, and the 1799 cyber operations chief field is manned at 55 percent, data show.

While the numbers look bad, the cyber field is barely a half year old and many of the fields are only in their first year of MOS production.

The requirements to get these Marines through the pipeline training have been registered, Dunst said.

For the cyber defensive operator field, the Corps just kicked off the first accession school in the second quarter of fiscal year 2019 and simply hasn’t graduated the Marines from that course, according to Dunst.

In some cases, manpower numbers are crunched because the Corps has created new schools.

In 2019, the Corps created the new 0521 psychological operations field, or psyops, which according to data is only manned at 63 percent. Officials at Manpower and Reserve Affairs say the inventory of psyops Marines is actually at 67 percent.

The field used to be an additional MOS and only recently became a primary field, but after completing a tour in psyop, those Marines would leave the field. That has caused the numbers to appear low.

While bleeding talent, Crider says the field has a “difficult school to get through.”

To make the field healthy, the Corps is trying to ­entice psyops Marines who left the field to come back. And now, once Marines laterally move to the field they can stay in the community, Crider said.

Crider said that the field is on track and should hit its authorized billet number of 49 Marines by the end of this fiscal year. There are currently 33 psyop Marines.

The Corps also has created new signals intelligence fields such as 2611 cryptologic cyberspace analyst, manned at 3 percent, and 2629 signals intelligence electronic warfare tech field, manned at 76 percent.

For the 2611 field, the schoolhouse is new and has yet to graduate anyone. And the 2629 field is a feeder occupation within the 26XX signals intel field, where Marines just need to attend follow on leadership and career progression schools.

While a lot of manning issues for the Force 2025 initiative can be solved by pushing Marines through the career progression schoolhouses, there are some serious concerns for fields like cyber, drone operators and F-35 pilots.

The Corps says it is addressing the issues, registering ­schoolhouse requirements and working with sister ­services to increase class seats, while also offering bonuses and job redesignations to help plus up the fields.

At the end of the day, the future force has several years to hit its goals.

New gear, tech, weapons, vehicles and aircraft are already hitting the fleet. And the Corps has signed off on its new expeditionary advanced base operations concept to confront a rising China in the Pacific.

The manpower to staff the new fields to put all the new toys and fighting concepts is slowly catching up.

“The NDS [national defense strategy] forces us to establish strategic priorities and make difficult choices — which will mean doing less in certain areas so we can do more in others,” Berger wrote to senators.

A panel of four experts from military, finance, cyber and strategy laid out frightening scenarios at the New America Future of War conference Monday that are not far-off possibilities but things that are happening now.

Peter W. Singer, author of the novel “Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War,” and New America senior fellow, told the audience in Washington, D.C., that data breaches, cyber probes and power shutdowns in other countries haven’t been given the attention they truly need. And the enemy is watching that lack of response.

“We will see kinetic attacks on the Internet of Things that will break things and kill people,” Singer said.

Robert M. Lee, a former National Security Agency cyber expert and current CEO of Dragos Inc., pointed to a new development that is a first in cyber attacks.

A piece of malware called Trisis was used to sabotage an industrial control system of an electric company. But it was more than just an attack on electric power.

“It was the first piece of malware specifically designed to kill people,” Lee said.

The malware would allow hackers to access controls that could cause leaks or explosions, rather than simply switching off power to parts of the grid.

But both in that incident and ones preceding it in recent years the actual events garnered little public acknowledgement by government leaders nor responses that would help deter such attacks.

That’s causing a major problem.

“We’re setting a precedence that these attacks are a great investment because they don’t come with the baggage that other attacks do,” Lee said.

At the same time, non-kinetic attacks could have real consequences for troops on the battlefield. Software being used both in research labs and the pornography industry can alter the face of a person on a different body or even use recordings and physical data from online videos to create a speech that never happened.

Such videos and images could be used and have been used in crude ways to alter battlefield footage that distorts what actually happened on the ground.

Singer called it the melding of the fake and real.

“Weapon will be used against U.S. democracy and U.S. military,” Singer said. “We need to do research and development on how to rapidly ID and debunk.”

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.

A computer nerd in North London, looking for military evidence of UFOs, shut down the Army’s Military District of Washington network of 2,000 computers for 24 hours.

And the hack — believed to be by Russian intelligence — of the Democratic Party’s emails roiled the 2016 election.

The Air Force doesn’t want to be next on that infamous list. And that spells opportunities for airmen who are interested in scoring bonuses and retention pay, retraining, and perhaps even a better shot at getting a promotion.

“There is a fight raging [in the cyber domain], make no doubt about it,” Maj. Gen. Patrick Higby, the Air Force’s director of cyberspace strategy and policy, told Air Force Times.

The Air Force has work to do. On Aug. 10, the service announced the results of the Hack the Air Force bug bounty program conducted earlier this year, in which it invited “white hat hackers” to ascertain where its weaknesses are, similar to the way a bank might hire a master thief to find soft spots in its vault.

The most successful hacker was a 17-year-old who submitted 30 valid reports of vulnerabilities. In all, more than 270 information security specialists from around the world discovered 207 cracks in the Air Force’s security and earned more than $130,000 in bounties.

The Air Force has roughly 22,000 active-duty cyber airmen, as well as another 10,500 National Guardsmen, 2,800 Air Force Reserve airmen and 9,700 civilians. Most are in the 24th Air Force, the service’s dedicated command responsible for operating, defending and sustaining the service’s cyberspace domain, but others are scattered through other organizations.

The Air Force isn’t looking for dramatic growth in the size of its cyber workforce, Higby said, but is rebalancing as it focuses its efforts on offensive and defensive cyber operations.

The majority of the 45,000 cyber airmen and civilians — about 36,000 of them — are assigned to run the Air Force’s network as part of the Department of Defense Information Network, or DODIN, operations. A smaller group of 837 are focused on defensive cyber operations, and another 286 conduct offensive cyber operations.

But now, the service is moving operations such as email, chat and voice to the cloud under the Collaboration Pathfinder project — freeing up DODIN ops airmen to move to offensive or defensive cyber operations.

When airmen make that move, Higby said, the biggest change will be adopting a different, “adversarial” mindset. They need to think like a hacker to figure out how someone might try to crack the Air Force’s systems, and sleuth out where the weaknesses might be.

“That causes you to say, ‘Oh, wait a minute, I need to pay attention to this setting,’ or ‘I need to make sure that these ports are actually closed,’ because that’s the way the adversary is going to come in to try to attack us,” Higby said.

Airmen moving to the offensive or defensive mission will also need to go through additional skills and mission qualification training, he said.

Those kinds of jobs, which carry a “coolness factor,” give cyber whizzes the chance to help defend their country — or to take on America’s enemies.

You can’t legally get that kind of offensive work in the private sector, he said.

“If you’re working for a bank or working on Wall Street or working for a large IT company, you can certainly defend yourself against cyberspace attacks, but you cannot, as we would say in the air domain, take the fight to the enemy,” Higby said.

Higby wouldn’t divulge what such hacking operations might entail, but said, “If you use your imagination, you can probably figure out what kind of things those airmen are doing at the behest of the United States Cyber Command commander.”

‘Troubling lack of focus’

The retention of cyber airmen is a serious problem, however.

During a May hearing, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, sounded the alarm, noting that none of the 127 Air Force officers who recently finished their first tour in a cyber-related job stayed within the cyber field.

“That is unacceptable and suggests a troubling lack of focus,” McCain said. “It should be obvious that the development of a steady pipeline of talent, and retention of the ones we’ve trained already, is essential of the success of the cyber mission force.”

Higby said that when he’s asked if the Air Force has a cyber retention problem, he replies, “Yes and no.”

When it comes to 17D cyber officers, Higby said, the Air Force typically sees 70 percent to 75 percent come back for a second four-year stint after finishing their first four years. That’s more or less on par with other career fields across the Air Force, he said — but it’s not enough.

The Air Force also has historically under-assessed its cyber officers and has too many in higher, field grade officer positions — such as major, lieutenant colonel and colonel — and not enough company grade officers, such as lieutenants and captains. The problem was worsened by the force shaping cuts in 2007 and 2008, which led to a shortfall of company grade officers today, he said.

As a result, the Air Force now needs to hold on to about 90 percent of its officers — and it’s nowhere close to hitting that.

“We have to be a lot better,” Higby said. “We are not. We actually have more [field grade officer] authorizations than [company grade officer] authorizations. That means, if 100 percent of our captains stay in and get promoted to major, I’m still going to be short. Our pyramid is almost upside down.”

Bonuses and promotions

To try to fix its problems on both the officer and enlisted sides, the Air Force is upping its efforts to move airmen to the cyber world — and hold on to those already there.

For example, the Air Force in April began an officer retention bonus program for 17D cyber officers, allowing those with four to 12 years of service to extend their service in exchange for a $60,000 bonus.

In fiscal 2016, the Air Force added 1B4X1 cyber warfare operations to the list of career fields eligible for special duty pay, and then one year later upped their bonuses considerably, to $300 or $375 a month, depending on their skill level.

Earlier this year, the Air Force upped the selective re-enlistment bonus for cyber warfare operations airmen with between 17 months and six years of service, and expanded the bonus for those with 18 to 20 years of service. The bonus amounts for airmen with six to 14 years remained unchanged.

Retraining opportunities for NCOs to move into the 1B411 cyber warfare operations career field will increase in fiscal 2018. In 2017, there were 30 slots for staff sergeants and 35 slots for technical sergeants, but in 2018, that will rise to 44 for E-5s and 45 for E-6s. There are also slots for 80 first-term airmen to retrain into that career field in 2018 — the third-most of any AFSC, although that is down slightly from the 92 slots the previous year.

Although the Air Force in July slightly trimmed the list of career fields eligible for high year of tenure extensions — which give airmen more time to make rank before they are separated — it expanded eligibility for airmen in the cyber warfare operations career field.

Tech and master sergeants were already eligible, and now so are senior airmen and staff sergeants.

Some cyber career fields are also getting a considerable boost — particularly for E-5 through E-7 — when promotion time comes around. In most cases, career fields are promoted at the same rate across the service. But the Air Force has the power to up the selection rates of career fields that are undermanned in certain ranks.

For example, airmen in those ranks promoted in the 1B4X1 cyber warfare operations Air Force specialty code over the past year saw a selection rate that was anywhere from 8.75 to 10.5 percentage points higher than the Air Force average.

The Air Force is also increasing the number of 1B431 cyber warfare operations airmen it trains. In fiscal 2014, only 86 airmen in that field were trained, but by fiscal 2016, it had more than doubled to 200. And in the first 10 months of fiscal 2017, 192 had already been trained for that field.

The number of 17D1 network operations officers trained also increased from 264 in 2014 to 300 the next year. It dropped to 267 in 2016, but by the end of July, 288 had been trained in that field — almost matching the 2015 record.

And the Air Force Academy is guiding more new officers into the cyber world. Three years ago, only three academy graduates went on to join cyber career fields. By the time the class of 2017 graduated, that number increased to 27.

But trying to convince young cyber experts to put on Air Force blues for the first time isn’t easy.

In a May interview, then-Brig. Gen. Brian Kelly, the former director of military force management policy, said the improved job market — not to mention the growing demand for people with cybersecurity skills in the private sector and the rest of the military — has made it harder for the Air Force to recruit people with the same skill levels as it used to get.

“In the cyber area, … we’re getting the numbers we need and the basic quality we need,” said Kelly, who is now a major general and commander of the Air Force Personnel Center. “But as the competition has increased, we used to get even higher quality cyber folks, folks with what I would call additional credentials, exceeding our requirements. They came with previous cyber training and previous cyber certifications. … We continue to get some, but not as many as we would like. It’s getting to be a more challenging environment in the cyber world.”

Higby agreed and said one of the biggest recruitment and retention challenges facing the Air Force is that the United States isn’t producing enough cybersecurity experts.

“It’s a scarce resource,” Higby said. “So the challenge for the Air Force is, how can we entice a young man or young woman to join the cyber team, and be able to do some of these cool things to defend the nation?”

Air Force advantages

One big selling point for the Air Force, Higby said, is that it invests in training a lot more than many major commercial firms, which often expect new employees to already have certifications when they come on board. After the traditional seven weeks of basic training, apprentice cyber warfare operations airmen undergo 105 days of technical training, for example. New 17D cyberspace operations officers receive 115 days of training.

“You join the Air Force, we’re going to give you all the training you need,” Higby said. “They’re not going to be masters by the time they graduate [from technical training], but they’re going to have enough skills to be successful in learning new things at that first base we send them to. There are not a lot of other companies that invest that much time. … They’re going to expect you to already know, and already have all your certifications. They’re not going to help you do that.”

The Air Force also offers young airmen leadership opportunities within a few years. That — combined with the training and career experiences they’ll get — positions them to enter the private sector with an impressive portfolio when they decide to leave the service.

On the flip side, someone who has already studied cybersecurity and has commercial certifications such as A+, SEC+ or CISSP (certified information security systems professional) could come into the Air Force with an extra stripe, Higby said.

The fiscal 2017 National Defense Authorization Act authorizes the military to give newly commissioned reserve officers who have cyberspace-related experience or advanced education up to three years of constructive service credit. The Air Force, however, is still ironing out the finer points of how it will offer that credit, Higby said.

Down the road, the Air Force is looking at rolling out a new aptitude test to try to figure out which young people might have a knack for the cyber field.

It would be similar to the Defense Language Aptitude Battery test, Higby said, which doesn’t test whether someone knows a foreign language, but instead tests their potential for learning a new language.

The Air Force also could look in some unexpected places to find new airmen who could fill that role, he noted.

A young person who figured out how to get around security features and break into cars, for example, might not seem to be someone the Air Force wants on its cyber team, Higby said. But when he or she takes the cyber aptitude test, that expertise could demonstrate the “adversarial mindset” necessary for cyber operations.

“Then the question is, ‘OK, is this someone we can bring on the team, and then, through our Air Force training regimen, be able to instill the core values — excellence, integrity and service — into that young man or young woman?’ ” Higby said. “And then we bring those adversarial-minded skills onto the team to help us do our missions better.”

The federal lawsuit, filed in the U.S. Western District of New York Court on Tuesday morning, demands an overhaul of the site and additional protections for personal information of individuals in the department databases.

“By making this private information freely accessible, the defendants are putting veterans at risk of impostor scams, identity theft, and other frauds,” the lawsuit stated. “Defendants are also depriving veterans their ability to control who learns sensitive details about their military service.”

In recent days, defense officials have announced planned changes to the site, including “updates to the website’s code base” to “better protect servicemember active duty information.”

But the lawsuit alleges the problems are fundamental to the set-up of the site.

“The Defense Department is fueling the problem by leaving veterans’ private information easily accessible on the internet,” said VVA President John Rowan in a statement. “(Defense officials) have refused to properly secure veterans’ information; we are asking a court to order them to do so.”

For now, the SCRA website allows any visitor to search through an individual’s service records by providing their last name and either their birthdate or social security number. No restrictions are put on who can read the results, which VVA officials say makes the resource attractive to scammers and identity thieves.

Retired Air Force Master Sgt. Thomas Barden, who is a party in the lawsuit, said online scammers used details from the site to win his trust, convince him to buy fraudulent computer security software and steal other financial records.

“We expect the military to protect our private information, not to leave it unsecured,” Barden said in a statement. “The government should not be giving con artists easy access to information they can use to scam veterans like me.”

The lawsuit accuses defense officials of violating both the federal Privacy Act and the Federal Information Security Modernization Act, along with a host of industry best practices for personal information.

VVA officials are represented in the lawsuit by the Civil Liberties and Transparency Clinic of the University at Buffalo School of Law. The suit seeks at least $1,000 in damages for Barden along with fixes in the site.

Leo Shane III covers Congress, Veterans Affairs and the White House for Military Times. He can be reached at lshane@militarytimes.com.