By Emelie Rutherford
The Air Force will need a much more flexible acquisition process to ensure its burgeoning Cyberspace Command is properly equipped to counter adversaries using complex technologies to try to disrupt warfighters’ computing environments, the command’s leader said yesterday.
Maj. Gen. William Lord, commander of Air Force Cyberspace Command, said he faces the challenge not only of recruiting tech-savvy personnel, but also of maintaining the latest technology for them at the command slated to standup in October.
His address to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York yesterday was broadcast over a conference call.
While the technology used by adversaries attacking U.S. military computing environments is getting more complicated, the U.S. defenses also are improving, Lord said. He described the matchup between the two as “one-to-one, probably, right now.”
“In the Air Force we can’t take our eye off that ball, though,” he said. “And so what it requires for us is an acquisition cycle, a requirements cycle, that’s much, much more flexible than we have had in the past.
“It takes 15 or 20 years to develop an F-22 or an F-15…to get a very technologically advanced platform,” he said. “In this [cyberspace] business, it only requires months, maybe days. How do you acquire the counter to that ability in the same amount of time as people are producing the potential weapon? So there’s a lot of focus there.”
The Air Force has not yet decided where to set up the permanent headquarters for its new Cyberspace Command, and recently pushed back the deadline for a decision from the end of this year until next year. The service issued a March 28 statement announcing a “short list of possible final locations should be announced by the end of the year with the final location announced by September 2009.” Communities in 18 states have expressed interest in hosting the command, which will stand up Oct. 1 in an interim basis at Barksdale AFB, La.
Lord said the command will initially have a “virtual” headquarters, and the initial 500 headquarters employees will be spread out at 13 to 14 bases across the United States.
Roughly half of that headquarters staff–250 people–will be assigned when initial capability is reached in October, he said. The command will eventually grow to more than 8,000 employees in five combat wings across the country.
Lord said his job is to organize, train and equip the forces that will be presented to combatant commanders for deployment, for both defensive and offensive cyberwarfare.
The command’s initial focus will be on defense. Lord pointed to the need to prevent radios and computers from going down because of an attack, and to ensure command-and-control information being used to make combat decisions isn’t manipulated.
The offensive front, he said, could include shutting down computer systems in other nations, as opposed to dropping 2,000-pound bombs on them.
“Potentially, it’s not about the destruction of buildings, it’s about the changing of behavior of an enemy,” he said.
The Air Force is setting up the command because it is “is a very technologically dependent force,” Lord said. “Today we’re flying Predators [unmanned aerial vehicles], where the controls are in Nevada and 12,000 miles away over Afghanistan we are having a combat effect,” he said. “So we are very dependent on the electromagnetic spectrum. And that’s the way we define cyberspace. We define it as a domain that contains the entire electromagnetic spectrum.”
Other nations have cyberspace commands, and Lord said the Chinese are believed to have “several thousand people in this arena.” But, he said, “the cyber criminals, activity and…organized crime from Russia is just as problematic.”
The new Air Force command’s budget is being built now, he said.
In December 2005, the Air Force amended its mission statement to reflect that cyberspace is now considered as an operational domain, along with air and space (Defense Daily, Sept. 28, 2006).