Initial Disclosure Date: Jul 9, 2012

On July 1, Defense News reported that the United States has a deficiency of offensive cyber experts. “A small percentage of the [U.S. Cyber Command’s] workforce attends to [its] offensive missions and responsibilities,” the newspaper quoted a report of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which accompanies the bill to authorize defense budget for the 2013 fiscal year. Although the Committee demanded the Pentagon to consolidate its network activities and reallocate its personnel to the offensive missions of the Command, personnel on offensive missions need not only cybersecurity skill sets and training but also specific mindset.

Rep. Jim Langevin (D-R.I.), a Ranking Member of the Emerging Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee under the House Armed Serviced Committee, argued, “We only have about a thousand people that can operate at world-class levels in cyberspace. What we need is more like 20,000 or 30,000 people.” He is the co-founder and co-chairman of the bipartisan House Cybersecurity Caucus, which aims to boost the Congress’ awareness of cybersecurity.

Army Gen. Keith Alexander, head of the Cyber Command, has never publicly admitted the understaffing issue. Yet, Alexander testified that Cyber Command manpower is excessively allocated to network management and defense, according to the aforementioned report. The Pentagon has 15,000 networks to protect.

There are two issues to increase the number of offensive cyber experts. First, it “take[s] time to get [people] operationally ready” because “[s]ome of the training programs run for 18 months,” as a Cyber Command spokesman acknowledges. Second, “[o]ffensive operations require not only a different skill set but also a different mindset. Defensive specialists are required to focus on anomalies, hunting for any footprints left behind by an intruder. Offensive specialists are a creative group, focusing on imaginative techniques to take advantage of underlying system vulnerabilities,” Defense News explains. Thus, it is hard to reallocate network defense experts to an offensive mission.

Sources:
“U.S. Congressman Jim Langevin: Biography,”
http://langevin.house.gov/about/biography.shtml
Kate Brannen and Zachary Fryer-Biggs, “U.S. Short on Offensive Cyber Experts,” DefenseNews, July 1, 2012,
http://www.defensenews.com/article/20120701/DEFREG02/307010002/U-S-Short-Offensive-Cyber-Experts?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE
Stars and Stripes, “US Cyber Command needs more offensive specialists,” July 2, 2012,
http://www.stripes.com/news/us/us-cyber-command-needs-more-offensive-specialists-1.181855

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