Summarized by the Alliance for Fort Eisenhower
Published May 9, 2025
Despite the Department of Defense spending $14 billion a year on cyber forces and technology, U.S. military cyber forces have never met the department’s readiness standards. This decade-long failure has motivated Congress, the military cyber community, and a variety of national security thinkers to debate major structural changes to Cyber Command and its Cyber Mission Force (a joint force with teams provided by each service).
In late 2022, Cyber Command responded to these concerns by creating a readiness campaign to attack the structural problems keeping Department of Defense military cyber forces from meeting training and readiness standards, and I was selected to lead the first phase of the effort. That experience revealed that the problems with cyber readiness are deeper, more severe, and more structural than most of the leaders and thinkers discussing cyber readiness realize.