Trump nominates former congressional staffer for top Pentagon cyber policy job
Katie Sutton has been nominated to serve as assistant secretary of defense for cyber policy, according to a notice posted on Congress.gov
Sutton — who is currently chief technology advisor to the commander and director of Pentagon operations at U.S. Cyber Command and had been a professional staff member on the Senate Armed Services Committee focused on cyber — will be the second official to hold this position, which was created by Congress in the fiscal 2023 annual defense policy bill.
That position was established due to the growing role of cyber in society and the U.S. military. Many in Congress wanted to elevate the role of cyber policy within the Defense Department to the ASD level.
As the Trump administration looks to fill out its cyber policy personnel at the Pentagon, multiple press outlets last week reported Laurie Buckhout was selected to serve as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Cyber Policy, which was the top cyber policy position in the department until the ASD position was created.
A retired Army colonel, Buckhout was an electronic warfare officer and has been outspoken about the degradation of the Army’s and U.S. military’s EW capabilities relative to adversaries. She recently ran for Congress in North Carolina as a Republican, but was defeated by Democrat Don Davis.
These top cyber policy roles will be integral in helping the department navigate critical cyber issues, namely, the evolution of U.S. Cyber Command via an initiative dubbed Cybercom 2.0. That effort was initially meant to not only provide a holistic examination of the command and its forces to better posture it for the future — given its structure remained largely untouched since its inception over a decade ago in a less dynamic environment — but also bunch together multiple congressional reports that lawmakers required of the DOD in several annual defense policy bills.
“What we see now as Cyber Command 2.0 is the command’s efforts to build domain mastery to achieve a competitive advantage in the cyber domain. Through these efforts, we will be enhancing total force readiness and our innovation,” Gen. Timothy Haugh, Cybercom commander, said last week at the Cyber Workforce Summit in Washington.
The effort has four main buckets: a new force generation model for how each service provides cyber forces to Cybercom; a talent management model; an advanced training and education center to ensure forces are more ready when arriving to their units and have specialized training if needed; and a cyber innovation warfare center that could focus on rapid innovation and capability development.
It has been reported that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has directed those efforts be expedited by several months, something some in Congress support.
Haugh told senators at a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing Tuesday that for the 2.0 effort he was asked to produce recommendations for the SecDef on how to manage, develop and equip cyber talent. That plan was brought to Hegseth, who told the command to go faster. Based on Hegseth’s guidance, Cybercom is moving forward with the rest of the department, according to Haugh.
