The American Federation of Government Employees, which represents 300,000 Department of Defense employees, is arguing in a letter to lawmakers that DoD has long skirted the caps by enlarging its contractor workforce. It’s the latest in a years-long tug of war over the military’s so-called “fourth estate,” made up of agencies outside of the service branches.

“These personnel caps mask true overhead costs by creating incentives for shell games involving creating field operating agencies that are really part of the headquarters or shifting ‘closely associated with inherently governmental’ functions and ‘critical functions’ to contractors,” AFGE Legislative Director Julie Tippens said in a Feb. 8 letter to the leaders of the House and Senate armed services panels.

The letter outlines the union’s priorities for the fiscal 2023 National Defense Authorization Act, which the panels aren’t expected to begin drafting until after President Joe Biden releases his FY23 defense budget request some weeks from now.

AFGE says it wants to repeal statutory caps of 4,300 personnel at the Office of the Secretary of Defense, as well as caps on headquarters personnel for the Army (1,350), the Navy and Marine Corps (1,350 total for both) and Air Force (1,100). Personnel for the Pentagon’s management headquarters activities and management headquarters support activities are frozen by law at 1989 levels, and AFGE wants that repealed too.

AFGE argues contractors cost more than government employees, which is in line with the findings of a Project On Government Oversight review of DoD budget and spending data. POGO in 2012 found that contractor employees cost nearly three times more than an average DoD civilian employee performing the same job.

AFGE’s proposal is already seeing some pushback on Capitol Hill, where there’s a long history of efforts to pare back the Pentagon’s civilian bureaucracy. The top Republican on the House defense appropriations subcommittee, Rep. Ken Calvert of California, last year proposed a 15% cut to DoD’s civilian workforce and decried AFGE’s proposal this month in a statement.

“Today, we have fewer troops, fewer Navy warships, and fewer combat aircraft than we did under President [Ronald] Reagan. We are also at a historical high when it comes to the number of civilian workers at the Defense Department,” Calvert said. “We should focus on performance and ensure that the Department is more efficient and effective through eliminating unnecessary middle management and modernizing business practices. Eliminating the caps on civilians does the exact opposite.”

Though Pentagon officials with the Obama and Trump administrations have sought savings through headquarters civilian reductions, it’s unclear how the Pentagon will respond to AFGE’s current push. A Pentagon spokesperson declined to comment on AFGE’s letter, but Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks, before her current role as DoD’s top manager, expressed some skepticism over past efforts to control costs by cutting personnel.

“Predictably, for example, even though Congress directed the Defense Department to cut $10 billion through administrative efficiencies between 2015 and 2019, the Pentagon failed to substantiate that it had achieved those savings,” Hicks said in a 2020 essay for Foreign Affairs magazine. “The reason those efforts rarely succeed is that they merely shift the work being done by civilians to others, such as military personnel or defense contractors.”

Likewise, Todd Harrison, director of defense budget analysis at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said he’s wary of using workforce adjustments as a means to rein in spending. He said cost comparisons between contractors and civilians are tricky because long-term civilian pension costs are hard to predict and eliminating unnecessary tasks at DoD is a more effective way to find efficiencies.

“When you start cutting back on unnecessary or low-priority tasks and missions, then you can start reducing headcount,” Harrison said. “Whether it’s a civilian or a contractor, in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that you stop spending money paying people to do things that don’t need to be done.”

The move offers a weeks-long reprieve, until Sept. 30, for firms doing business with the Department of Defense. The firms are among those still reeling from the economic effects of the coronavirus pandemic and who lobbied for more time to comply with new far-reaching regulations.

The original provision was to take effect Aug. 13. The administration had been finalizing regulations that would prohibit government contracting with companies whose supply chains contain products from five Chinese companies including Huawei, as mandated under of Section 889 of the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act.

The administration, confronting China on trade and a host of issues, has deemed Huawei an espionage threat.

Citing U.S. national security interests, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe granted the Pentagon a temporary waiver to further assess a broader waiver request from DoD. The action came in a memo to Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment Ellen Lord.

The temporary waiver Lord sought was so DoD could continue to execute procurement actions that would, in part, equip and feed troops.

“You stated that DoD’s statutory requirement to provide for the military forces needed to deter war and protect the security of out country is critically important to national security,” Ratcliffe said. “Therefore, the procurement of goods and services in support of DoD’s statutory mission is also in the national security interests of the United States.”

While considering the broader waiver, Ratcliffe asked Lord share more information about potential increased risks, mitigation measures and a plan to contract with alternatives to the banned Chinese companies.

Contractors had been confused over an interim acquisition rule, agencies cannot award new contracts, task orders or modify existing contracts to any vendor who doesn’t self-certify that they are not using products from Chinese companies like ZTE and Huawei, the Federal News Network reported this week.

Ratcliffe’s memo is a win, albeit a temporary one, for defense contractors and trade associations representing them. They had hoped for a legislative fix in a new pandemic relief package ― but larger bipartisan talks had broken down.

The leaders of the National Defense Industrial Association and the Professional Services Council had called for the deadline for 889 implementation to move. They argued the focus should be on recovering from the fallout caused by the COVID-19 crisis. And citing the far-reaching implications of the government’s rules, NDIA said companies should get a yearlong extension.

In May, Lord told lawmakers that contractors needed more time to comply with the government-wide ban or risk throwing the defense industrial base into disarray.

“The thought that somebody in six or seven levels down in the supply chain could have one camera in a parking lot and that would invalidate one of our major primes being able to do business with us gives us a bit of pause,” Lord testified at a House Armed Services Committee hearing.

The lawmakers, led by California Rep. Katie Porter, are pushing back on the Pentagon’s argument the changes would make the restrictions more consistent with criminal law and other agencies. DoD requested the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act contain a partial roll back of the rules, which apply to former general officers and senior Pentagon civilians by amending the 2018 NDAA’s Section 1045.

“We do not believe that weak ethics rules for some agencies is a reason to roll back the relatively strong ethics rules at the Pentagon,” the lawmakers wrote in a letter Thursday to DoD General Counsel Paul Ney. “It is unfortunate that Congress has not enacted stronger ethics rules governmentwide, and we agree this should be a priority.”

DoD’s proposal would change a one-year lobbying ban for all senior officials, regardless of rank, to a two-year ban in place for some officials; narrow the definition of “lobbying” to apply only to direct “lobbying contacts” ― which would allow former personnel to work in less visible roles ― and eliminate the departmentwide lobbying ban so that former senior officials will be able to immediately lobby some components of the Pentagon.

House Armed Services Military Personnel Subcommittee Chair Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., signed the June 11 letter to Ney with Reps. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, and Dean Phillips, D-Minn.―as part of an ongoing back and forth.

Speier and Porter, on Wednesday, published a column calling the proposal “misguided” and asking, “Why is the Pentagon trying to grease the revolving door between the military and the defense industry?”

In an April 30 letter to Defense Secretary Mark Esper, the group said the move was out of step with his efforts to cut costs at the Pentagon. Esper was Raytheon’s chief lobbyist before he entered the Pentagon as Army secretary.

“It is unclear how developing and delivering this relaxed lobbying proposal to Congress fits within these priorities or is in the best interests of the taxpayers who fund the DoD,” they wrote. “If anything, looser lobbying rules could bloat military spending that is unnecessary to protect our country.”

Ney’s May 20 response argued in part that the 2018 NDAA, “created a patchwork of restrictions” and that DoD’s proposed changes would conform better to longtime Office of Government Ethics guidance.

“These time-tested standards protect against undue influence without unreasonably interfering with the right of veterans and public servants to future employment,” Ney said.

The June 11 reply from the four lawmakers posed a series of hypothetical situations, asking if they would be allowed under DoD’s proposal:

“Could a former Air Force General who was involved in the F-35 program lobby high-ranking civilian officials in the F-35 Joint Program Office immediately after retirement, with no cooling-off period? Could they lobby civilian or uniformed officials in the Navy F-35 program?” the letter reads.

“If the answer to any of these questions is ‘yes’ or ‘possibly,’ do you believe that these are ethically acceptable outcomes, and why?”

The lawmakers also reiterated an unfulfilled request to DoD for all documents associated with the creation of the proposal and all correspondence with the DoD ethics office ― all by June 25.

The news has sparked a backlash from multiple high profile Senate Democrats. It comes after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Wednesday confirmed that he knew his department’s inspector general, Steve Linick, who the president fired this month, was investigating a massive arms sale to Saudi Arabia made last year.

In a CNN op-ed Wednesday, Senate Foreign Relations Committee ranking member Bob Menendez said he discovered that the administration is pursuing a previously undisclosed arms sale to Saudi Arabia, which includes “thousands more precision-guided bombs to the President’s ‘friend,’ Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.”

“Before we went into pandemic lockdown, I received draft State Department documentation that it is now pursuing this previously undisclosed sale ― details of which have not yet been made public ― even though the Saudis seemingly want out of their failed and brutal war in Yemen, and despite the fact that a bipartisan majority in Congress rejected previous sales of these weapons,” Menendez, D-N.J., wrote.

“The administration has refused to answer our fundamental questions to justify this new sale and articulate how it would be consistent with US values and national security objectives,” he added.

Last year, Menendez blocked a sale of U.S. arms to Saudi Arabia, leading to the Trump administration declared an emergency in May 2019 that helped the president bypass Congress and to make those sales, with an estimated price tag of over $8 billion, go through. The House and Senate passed 22 resolutions aimed at disapproving the sales, but Congress couldn’t muster the votes to overturn the president’s veto.

The Daily Beast broke the news that the administration was considering a new arms sale to Riyadh.

Trump fired Linick late Friday, in what lawmakers have suggested was a move to preempt investigations into Pompeo’s personal conduct or possible impropriety in the Saudi arms sale.

“I have learned that there may be another reason for Mr. Linick’s firing. His office was investigating ― at my request ― Trump’s phony declaration of an emergency so he could send weapons to Saudi Arabia,” House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Eliot Engel said in a statement this month. “We don’t have the full picture yet, but it’s troubling that Secretary Pompeo wanted Mr. Linick pushed out before this work could be completed.”

Engel and Menendez have opened an investigation into Linick’s removal, which Menendez called an apparent, “politically motivated act of retaliation designed to protect Pompeo.”

“The question remains: why is the President and his top diplomat working so hard to prop up one of the world’s worst despots? Until we have an answer, Congress must reject this new multi-million dollar sale of weapons to Saudi Arabia,” he said.

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.”