Military looking for more cyber warriors

Stars and Stripes:

To meet manning requirements for cyber warfare that will skyrocket in the coming years, the Pentagon will focus on recruiting and training people already in uniform, even those without any cyber background or knowledge, defense officials said Friday.

“Our nation’s reliance on cyberspace outpaces our cybersecurity,” Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel said Friday at Fort Meade, Md., during the retirement ceremony for Gen. Keith Alexander, the outgoing commander of U.S. Cyber Command.

The Defense Department currently has about 1,800 people in its Cyber Mission Force. That number is scheduled to jump to 6,000 by the end of 2016, according to DOD. There are currently 17 teams engaged in cyber operations, and the Pentagon wants to field 133 of those teams by the end of fiscal 2016, Alexander said in written testimony to a House Armed Services subcommittee earlier this month.

To meet these ambitious goals, DOD wants to recruit people who are already in the military to fill these new positions.

“We spent a lot of time in the last two years in particular figuring out what that [recruiting] model would be. Initially sometimes people will think about recruiting highly skilled people from the outside, and that is one option … But quite honestly, the way we’re going to be most successful is using people within the force [including those with no cyber background] and giving them the training,” a senior defense official told reporters Friday.
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The outside experts are already making too much money to be tempted by a government job.  They are going to have to train people already in the military for this role and they should have plenty of takers, because the training could lead to lucrative jobs later.

We need people to develop cyber war offensive capabilities as well as defensive.  We need the ability to automatically respond to cyber attack with counter offensive measures that will find and destroy the computer system used in the attacks.