The Defense Department is aiming toward developing the capacity for around-the-clock virtual training for its Cyber Mission Forces and is working to put funding into the FY ’17 budget request for this purpose, the deputy chief of United States Cyber Command said on Friday.
Ranges for training the cyber forces exist but “what we’re resourcing now is the ability to do that 7-by-24,” Air Force Lt. Gen. James “Kevin” McLaughlin, deputy commander of U.S. Cyber Command, said in a speech at the Center for Strategic & International Studies. The current training capabilities don’t allow for “as many teams and as often as we need,” he said.
And Cyber Command wants this training to be able to happen anytime, anywhere.
“We want people to be able to log into this environment anyplace where they live in the world and do realistic training,” McLaughlin said. “As you can imagine, the need to have the sophisticated technical skills along with what’s growing as the operational art about how this works have to be tested and trained, and our people have to prove and demonstrate that they can do their job in a realistic scenario.”
There is “strong agreement” for this capability but the question is how much funding will be available for this training capacity, McLaughlin said.
McLaughlin said “deep” discussions are underway to fund the Persistent Training Environment beginning in FY ’17, although it’s “still too early to determine how much funding we’ll get.” He added that if the request is agreed to and ultimately funded, “we’re still a few years away” from the around-the-clock capability.
The range environments are being created for cyber teams with defensive and offensive missions to test in realistic scenarios.
Later in the morning as part of a CSIS panel on the role of the U.S. military in cyberspace, Maj. Gen. Paul Nakasone, commander of the Cyber National Mission Force for Cyber Command, said a training environment has to be able to replicate networks that are being defended or attacked, have a “thinking opposing force that can offer your team challenges,” realistic scenarios, and most importantly an assessor to say ‘this is what you did well, this is where you fell short, and this is the standard that you have to achieve.’”
Realistic training environments are “the most impactful way that we’ve learned” to create effects generation for offensive and defensive teams, Nakasone said.
The Persistent Training Environment will allow that training to be repeated over and over, McLaughlin said.
Beginning with the FY ’13 budget, the Defense Department began setting up 133 separate cyber teams across three mission sets. Just more than half the teams have been stood up and the schedule for initial operating capability by the end of 2016 remains on track, McLaughlin said. By the end of 2018 is when DoD expects to achieve full operating capability with the teams.