WEST 2026 — Cyber Command 2.0 will provide “exciting initiatives” that can be replicated for Navy service personnel in cybersecurity or IT roles, according to a top official.
“One thing that I’m really going to focus on over the next year is Cyber Command 2.0 or the revised cyber force generation model implementation plan … I’m really interested in taking what we learn as we start to implement that and looking at how that translates not just to the force generation that I’m providing to Cyber Command, but for force generation writ large,” Anne Marie Schumann, principal cyber adviser of the Navy, said in an interview here at the WEST conference.
That plan, first unveiled in November, aims to improve how the cyber mission force personnel that each service provides to CYBERCOM are developed and trained with the goal of achieving “mastery.”
CYBERCOM 2.0 provides a chance to question everything and think creatively about how to shape CYBERCOM’s missions as well as Navy retained missions, Schumann noted.
“We’re going to learn things about best practices in recruiting or identifying talent. We’re going to look at things like how we incentivize,” she said. “This is a whole talent management model to include the training piece. I think there’s going to be a lot of applicability there for the services as well as service-retained forces.”
More broadly, other Navy officials have said they are still waiting for more details on what the plans and structures laid out in the CYBERCOM 2.0 implementation plan — unveiled at the end of January — will look like.
“I think that’s still kind of being worked out, to be honest with you, I don’t think the ink’s dry on any of that … or how these centers are going to impact what we have to do at our level,” Vice Adm. Michael Vernazza, commander of Naval Information Forces, said.
As laid out in the implementation plan, the services will still be responsible for providing the initial basic training before personnel get to their teams at CYBERCOM. But the plan identifies an Advanced Training and Education Center, a concept that might not necessarily be a brick and mortar, but a vision for how the command can provide advanced training to forces once on the teams.
Vernazza, who’s responsible for providing the trained sailors to CYBERCOM, said it’s not totally clear yet what CYBERCOM 2.0 is going to look like, but noted there are working groups that have just started his organization is a part of.
Schumann noted that over the next year, the military will get into the details and “put meat on the bones of the implementation plan” to drive policies and processes that will need to change.
Katherine Sutton, assistant secretary of defense for cyber policy, said there was “a unified campaign” between the services, CYBERCOM and the Pentagon to build out the implementation plan in an interview with Breaking Defense Feb. 3.
For the services, roles in implementing the CYBERCOM 2.0 plan include altering career management and incentive pay, Schumann said.
“I do think we have some very unique levers in the service that CYBERCOM can’t necessarily turn, but they can tell us what they need and then we can figure out how to leverage those things that we do have,” she said.
“Recruiting and assessing is another area where I think there’s a lot of partnership we can have with CYBERCOM to say, as CYBERCOM stands up these three centers for 2.0, what are their studies, what is their research telling them are the qualities that make the best cyber operators? And then, how do we come together with CYBERCOM to make an assessment that spots that talent?”