CAREER OUTLOOK » Industry Overview


Digital World War is


Cybersecurity is no theoretical exercise about potential future confl icts. In cyberspace, the balloon went up years ago. The First Digital World War is now in full swing. And America is under constant strategic bombardment.


service attacks against the private sector. No, the real threats are the well-financed, sustained hacking and espionage campaigns focused on disrupting America’s military might, intelligence abilities, and even political processes. Unable to match America’s


W


conventional military strength on the battlefield, many foreign powers have turned to brand new cyber weapons to level the playing field. The so-called era of “cyber restraint,” the days of testing vulnerabilities and hoarding cyber weapons, ended in early 2016 and moved swiftly into open cyber warfare worldwide. Or as Deputy


e’re not talking about just the endless stream of ransomware and denial of


Defense Secretary Robert Work mentioned in 2016 about responding to digital attacks from Russia, China, North Korea, and terrorist organizations like the Islamic State: “[NSA and U.S. Cyber


Command] aren’t just passively logging and reporting; we are fighting back. We’re dropping cyber bombs of our own. We have never done that before.”


U.S. MILITARY’S PREMIER CYBERSECURITY FORCE IS LEADING THE FIGHT


While every DoD agency maintains their own cybersecurity teams, usually civilian employees or contractors, leading this war is the military’s premier cybersecurity force: the unified U.S. Cyber Command. Only established in


2009, CyberCom has already grown to field 6,200 active-duty and Reserve troops from every branch of service and wields a $545 million budget—and is still expanding. Full operational capacity won’t even be reached until October 2018, when the Pentagon plans to staff twice as many cybersecurity personnel. And that’s in addition to the 16,000– 20,000 other civilian cybersecurity positions needing staffing across other DoD agencies every year. Originally formed as a defensive


force to safeguard U.S. government and private sector IT infrastructure from hacking and disruption attacks, CyberCom is increasingly tasked with offensive operations, particularly counterattacking threats, often from unknown


88 USBE&IT | WINTER 2017


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