Army Cyber’s new unit focused on information threats to commanders, troops across the globe
Army Cyber Command’s newly established Theater Information Advantage Detachment will be primarily focused on global threats that U.S. forces are facing in the information space.
The unit is one of three such organizations in the service. Officials recently approved growth for the TIADs, which are 65-person teams focused on synchronizing information capabilities at the theater level. While the U.S. Army Pacific and the U.S. Army Europe and Africa TIADs will be focused on their respective regions, Army Cyber’s will be trans-regional.
“While the two geographic TIADs are going to be focused as they should down and in within their respective theaters, the trans-regional focus of the ARCYBER TIAD is going to be threat focused. Specifically, we’re going to be focused on those priority adversary threats as they’re articulated in the national defense strategy,” Aaron Pearce, director of the TIAD at Army Cyber, said at the annual AUSA conference. “We’re going to look at those trans-regionally — so not just how is a threat impacting the Pacific, but how is that same actor acting halfway across the world or multiple places in the globe at the same time to have the effects that they want to achieve their military objectives?”
Pearce explained that Army Cyber is well-prepared for this mission given the unique authorities it possess for cyber and information, along with its over 10-year history conducting operations as part of U.S. Cyber Command for the joint force.
Through those ops and support, Army Cyber has had to coordinate and deconflict with service component commanders, geographic combatant commanders, multiple interagency partners and multinational partners.
“Not only do you have to do all of that coordination, but the authority structure in cyberspace operations is very fractured. No one commander has all of the authorities needed to do cyberspace operations, plus an influence operation, plus a physical maneuver, combined with all of those things to achieve an effect on the battlefield,” he said. “We have to work together and use a complicated, fused authority structure to do those cyberspace operations and we’re going to have to do the same thing in information. We think we’re incredibly well-postured as ARCYBER to work through this as part of the campaign of learning to figure out how much of this can we actually do.”
These organizations will be present in the day-to-day competition with adversaries, providing commanders opportunities to create information effects while protecting against opponents’ information warfare effects. Then, if scenarios escalate, they can serve as a springboard to help plan and conduct operations or effects for commanders with their own resident capabilities, or attach specialized units such as Army Cyber’s expeditionary cyber teams, which are scalable formations that are designed to augment units upon request with the ability to maneuver with forces and provide offensive cyber capabilities, EW and information advantage functions.
All of those capabilities provides a toolset that a commander can use to understand what they’re facing in the information sphere and develop effects to blunt them or enable information objectives as part of a larger scheme of maneuver.
Last year, the Army enshrined information advantage as official doctrine, meaning all commanders must take its tenets — enable, protect, inform, influence and attack — into consideration. The next step, officials believe, is making information a part of maneuver, much like the Marine Corps has done.
“The pace of information effects and technologies is increasing, and we need to stop thinking in terms of using information as we fight, using it for targeting, using it for planning,” Pearce said. “Information has to be a component of the commander’s scheme of maneuver and scheme of fires. And that’s what the Army’s information advantage transformation construct and doctrine really tells them.”
The TIADs can help commanders in this area by identifying malign influence threats targeting Army forces and then potentially using offensive operations to blunt them. Or, in a purely offensive manner, Pearce said the TIAD could help a commander implement a reveal-and-conceal plan for their capabilities, with the intent of throwing the adversary off balance in terms of decision-making and possibly delay a decision by an adversary to use military force.
As the TIADs are still coming online — with Army Pacific’s being the first to activate in October 2025 followed by Army Cyber — the service is continuing to experiment and learn how they’ll be employed. One example is how to work with the other service cyber components within Cybercom to leverage their authorities to conduct offensive cyber operations, considering certain services are responsible for planning and conducting cyber ops on behalf of certain assigned combatant commands (for example, Army Cyber Command conducts cyber operations on behalf of Central Command and Africa Command).
“I think this is one of the areas where the TIAD will become an advantage. What my observation has been … it is very difficult to then work your way into the battle rhythm with the CoCom, especially where some of those authorities lie. If you’re thinking about information authorities, unless they’re delegated down to the Army element, you’re asking for permission and you’re pushing that CONOP there. If you’re looking for cyber authorities, it’s going up to Cyber Command, but the timing in tempo is at the choice of a geographic commander,” Lt. Gen. Maria Barrett, commander of Army Cyber, said. “What I think the TIAD is going to enable us to do, though, is really help with integrating those type of effects and work that communication. And this still is from an experimentation standpoint.”
The after-action reports from experimentation indicated each commander of their geographic region wanted to employ TIADs and their capabilities slightly differently, such as through a theaters fires element or another staff section. This was also apparent when the Army established the Multi-Domain Task Forces in the Pacific and Europe, where each commander chose how to wield them specifically.
“I think we’re just going to have to let some of this play out,” Barrett said. “It’s not only going to be there from the joint standpoint. I think there’s also a great opportunity here to really understand and work with partners in this space. Because I’m going to tell you, partners know more about their information environment than we do. It may be that we’re bringing in some capabilities that maybe they don’t have and we can tell things and then come up with something that is effective for them.”
