A Cyber Force without enlisted? New report poses model for standalone military cyber organization

If the military established a separate Cyber Force, what would it look like? According to a new report from two Washington, D.C. think tanks, it would initially cost upwards of $11 billion dollars through reallocations of existing funds, focus on offensive and defense cyber operations, and — crucially — employ roughly 30,000 uniformed and civilian personnel, excluding enlisted troops.

On Wednesday, the Commission on U.S. Cyber Force Generation, a joint effort between the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Foundation for Defense of Democracies, published the study, exploring a blueprint for an independent uniformed service singularly dedicated to cyberspace.

The report didn’t litigate one of the most hotly contested debates in cyber: whether the military should establish an independent service solely focused on the digital domain. Instead, it provided a model for a Cyber Force under the premise that the order to create one was already given.

Reaching initial operating capacity could take 18 months, the study said, and scaling the personnel process could be accomplished within three to four years.

This Cyber Force, the authors argued, would be staffed by commissioned officers, warrant officers, civilians and contractors only — no enlisted service members. As justifications, they cited a current pay scale that didn’t adequately compensate the work enlisted cyber operators do, lengthy training pipelines, competing responsibilities for enlisted troops, and the need for managerial and technical tracks that the commission said officers and warrants are best suited to assume.

“It’s not that we don’t value the enlisted cadre; in fact, the opposite,” Joshua Stiefel, a former House Armed Services Committee staffer who co-chaired the study, told reporters Monday. “We value the enlisted cadre so much that we believe that if they can make it through the cyber pipeline, [they] more than have earned the credibility, the merit to wear a warrant officer’s collar device.”

In a later interview with DefenseScoop, Stiefel said the Cyber Force model could borrow from existing enlisted-to-warrant officer tracks to feed talent from enlisted ranks into the warrant officer corps, who would then help staff the new organization. This, he said, would help give enlisted troops a path to better pay and a higher rank for duties they largely already do.

Multiple former military cyber officials, some of whom have prior-enlisted backgrounds, told DefenseScoop an all-officer and civilian Cyber Force would miss out on the critical value an enlisted cadre would provide, and could limit internal talent development and culture that might help sustain the organization organically.

And while they agreed with the authors that compensation isn’t the only incentive for cyber service, some of the veterans also said the study did not adequately address the pay issue, a thorny topic for a government force that is constantly competing with a lucrative private sector.

“The enlisted force has a really long heritage and has brought much to the country and to the military, both in valor and in training and culture across the services,” said retired Maj. Jeremy Thompson, a cybersecurity expert who served in enlisted and officer ranks in the Air Force for 21 years. “I’m surprised we would be talking about spinning up another military force that would eschew itself of that tradition because of what is realistically just a money issue.”

Roles, culture, talent

The commission recommended an active-duty staff of 20,000 officers and warrant officers, emphasizing technical capability and its application as foundational factors for a possible Cyber Force. It examined a few different models and borrowed from existing entities such as the United States Public Health Service and Army aviation units as examples of organizations with sufficiently technical tasks that justify an officer-warrant staff.

To delineate their responsibilities and career mobility, it argued for establishing a managerial track for officers and a technical expertise track for warrants, which the authors said resembled industry practice and would provide stable career progression to support a very specialized capability. 

It recognized that enlisted personnel perform “hands-on work” in current service structures, but said those junior troops are currently expected to perform cyber operations, lead at the tactical level and dole out technical expertise — all traits the authors believe are commensurate with higher rank and pay for a Cyber Force.

“Given their incredible intellect, skill, and attributes, combined with leadership by competence at the moment of need, these operators and analysts are more like commissioned officers,” the study said.

Taking one of the study’s models: Even though officers and warrant officers fly the Army’s helicopters, there is still a host of enlisted personnel who help make those machines run.

“There are tasks that you have to put your hands on and do the dirty work that usually officers don’t do, and warrant officers do when they have to,” said retired Col. Alfredo Corbett, whose last assignment was Air Force Special Operations Command’s director of cybersecurity, communications, computers and C2. Warrants are typically seen as advisors, who are informing, helping and directing. “They’ll get their hands dirty [and] roll up their sleeves, but that’s not their daily routine.”

Enlisted cyber operators still screw in the servers, pull cable and perform important administrative functions that the former cyber personnel DefenseScoop spoke to were skeptical officers and warrant officers would take on. Thompson also pointed to a somewhat intangible but unique “get-it-done” culture within the enlisted force where parts or solutions seem to materialize out of thin air at moments of crisis and officers are better off not knowing how.

Stiefel, the co-chair for the study, said some of those administrative responsibilities would likely fall on the lower ranks of the warrant officer corps, but added that the Cyber Force needed to be small, and if composed of officers and warrants, could provide more predictable career advancement and higher pay. 

An enlisted-inclusive structure couldn’t offer that pay in the first place. And given the model for a lean force that already needed a floor of officers to run, there wouldn’t be enough “space” for a long progression from private to sergeant major. He cited the Space Force’s nearly 1:1 ratio of enlisted to officer as a reason to essentially level compensation for work the enlisted force is already doing via a warrant track. 

“If you are dealing with those numbers, I’d rather be paying them some more, then just saying, ‘look, we should have enlisted, because that’s what the armed services have,” Stiefel said.

As such, the proposed Cyber Force would rely on lateral entry, where promotion and high turnover rate common to conventional forces are less valuable to a highly specialized organization that requires stability and doesn’t expect “large amounts of combat losses” that need constant back-filling, the study said.

Thompson said the type of attrition common to the enlisted force — where leaders can pick and choose talent from a large pool of people — was actually a boon for organic talent identification and flexibility in the units he served in.

“In a much smaller force that is made of warrant and commission officers, I don’t think you’re going to have that ability to attrit personnel that are non-performers once they arrive like you do with enlisted,” Thompson said. “We just had more bodies that were enlisted with a larger talent pool that we could test and pick out our top performers from and award them leadership positions and technical training that some of their peers didn’t get because they couldn’t hack it.”

Pay

All of the people DefenseScoop spoke to said that compensation wasn’t the sole factor driving people to military cyber operations. There is the opportunity to conduct operations that the civilian side just doesn’t have the authority to do and the familiar characteristics of being part of a large organization of like-minded people focused on something important.

“As long as you’re reasonably well compensated, the compensation is not going to be the driver,” retired Lt. Gen. Edward Cardon, who was part of the commission and formerly served as head of Army Cyber Command, told reporters earlier this week. “It’s going to be, ‘What am I working on?’ Because that’s the culture of this area. It is more about, ‘What am I known for? What’s my reputation? What have I done?’ That is what drives this.”

That said, pay was justification for the warrant-officer-only structure the study referenced several times. Given its proposed size of 20,000 active-duty personnel, the commission recommended approximately $2.7 billion for personnel requirements such as salary, bonuses and healthcare.

Even with the proposed model where cyber operators can get paid more at higher ranks, government compensation will still have problems competing with industry.

“Ultimately, we will never be able to truly effectively compete against some of the higher-paid cyber workforce that is out in industry,” Vice Adm. Heidi Berg, head of Fleet Cyber Command, said earlier this year.

But a fairer compensation for enlisted cyber troops could be possible if the leadership appetite for one was willing and focused, some of the former cyber officials said, and the justification to omit the enlisted force in the study, in part for pay reasons, sidestepped that, they said.

“We can do it,” Corbett said of compensation. Leaders may have competing competitions, “but then don’t turn around and say, ‘Hey, it’s not that we can’t pay them, it’s that we won’t pay them to do that because we don’t have to pay them to do that.’”

The study assessed that “the enlisted pay scale cannot adequately compensate this community, even with pay incentives and special duty bonuses.” Some of the former cyber officials said that a Cyber Force could build stability for that kind of compensation with bonuses or a better pay scale as a matter of organizational self-discipline.

Bonuses and special pay, however, are also at the whims of competing priorities or legislative inefficiency. While both sets of experts said the pay scale was too low, it is also much harder to change on a whim.

On Monday, Stiefel acknowledged special incentives could be part of the model, and that a separate Cyber Force, solely dedicated to a cyber mission, freer from competing priorities unrelated to that mission, and an ability to manage its own pay could make that possible.

“Once you have a service that plans and programs and budgets for these things, then they start to build in the rule sets and the institutional designs around compensation,” he said. “When you have a cyber force and your service is the one actually designing your budget, programming for incentive pays and assignment cycles and all that kind of stuff, that’s what a service can institutionalize in a way that the existing services who don’t have this as a first, second, third, tenth priority, are able or willing to do.”