WASHINGTON — Fears over how adversary nations use artificial intelligence is one of the aspects driving a Defense Department overhaul of how it provides and trains its cyber warriors, a top Pentagon official told Breaking Defense.
“The other thing that we’re seeing over the last few years is the importance of how technology is shaping this domain and how artificial intelligence is fundamentally changing how our adversaries are behaving in the space and how the domain is operated,” Katherine Sutton, assistant secretary of defense for cyber policy said in one of her first interviews since taking office Feb. 3.
“Making sure that we can have the right training at the speed of the domain is becoming something that we need to address, so that we can move at the speed of the domain and not the speed of traditional training and force generation models.”
Sutton was referencing the recently released Cyber Command 2.0 plan, which aims to better attract and train the department’s cyber warriors.
Since the cyber mission force was created, it has been plagued by readiness concerns and suffered from members cycling in and out of cyber operations roles back to their respective services, resulting in wasted funds for training these high end operators.
Now is the right time for the CYBERCOM 2.0 plan, one of the largest changes in the command’s 15-year history, Sutton said, given the last five to seven years have really been where the department has gained the operational experience to build and mature the force with basic trained levels at the operational tempo necessary with the domain.
During that period, there have been many lessons learned regarding building that talent and where to improve the process, Sutton said, because as adversary behavior has shifted, so too must DoD.
“The other area that I think is going to be really critical to the success is the growing understanding of the threats posed by our adversaries, the growing importance of cyber in any future warfighting conflict, and the need to have this deep technical skill set to be successful,” Sutton said.
The plan seeks to remedy these pain points, proposing a “comprehensive” approach to force generation.
“One of the things that is foundational about CYBERCOM 2.0 is the fact that it is comprehensive; it’s not just solving one piece, but actually re-imagining the entire talent management model, and that is fundamental to building the cyber talent that we need,” Sutton said. “It’s what we need to build the talent and I think there’s strong support across the department for us to implement and execute that vision.”
Sutton rejected the notion that the plan put forward is essentially “status quo-plus,” arguing it looks comprehensively with 97 lines of effort across the entire talent management process to examine how to holistically and fundamentally change the development of cyber warriors, she said.
There has been a “unified campaign” from the beginning of the process with the command and services, Sutton said. That’s important, because ultimately there needs to be buy-in from the services who are still responsible for providing the right number of people at initial training to the command.
“Our implementation plan is something that we’ve worked together; the services have been engaged from the beginning. They’ve been part of building it. They are going to be part of all of the working groups that we do to move forward to implementation, to ensure that we build the lethality into this force that we need and that we build the deep specialization of talent,” she said.
The department is taking a two-pronged approach to the implementation plan to ensure results are realized in a rapid manner, while some of the more institutional changes will likely take five or more years to come to fruition.
“We’re starting with drafting the foundational policy guidance that we need to be able to move out quickly at adopting these changes, to set the new rules of the road for our force,” Sutton said. “Simultaneously, we’ve identified a set of pilot programs where we can test innovative approaches to some of the career path aspects, training and incentives that will allow us to learn and adopt quickly to be able to scale that approach more broadly across the force. Really looking at how we can move at speed through a deliberate process.”