U.S. Cyber Command's Requirements Demand Warrant Officers

Yesterday there was a hearing in front of the House Armed Services Committee, "Outside Perspectives on the Department of Defense Cyber Strategy".

Some of the points brought up were about the personnel management of military cyber warriors. This is a challenge, because "cyber" (BTW, I HATE the term) is both an infrastructure (i.e, IT Infrastructure), and a domain (Information Warfare). It is an area where both warriors and janitors walk, more akin to urban warfare than other historic domains.

Since the late 1980s, the military has treated IT as an area where COTS technologies should rule, to both increase the productivity of the military, and to reduce operating costs. At the same time, the PC and client-server boom of the 1990s drew skilled IT technicians from the military to the higher paying civilian sector.

Through the 1980s, the military, had its own data, uniformed, processing specialists. The father of a high-school friend was a Technical Sergeant in the Air Force and a Burroughs mainframe programmer.  In the 1990s, most of the programming positions were either converted civil service, or outsourced to contractors.

The second wave occurred in the 1990s with the decentralization of IT acquisition, management, and support from central service commands (i.e., Air Force Communications Command) to the local military bases.  This was followed with A-76 studies converting many base level IT jobs to a combination of civil service management and contractor work forces.

The result of all of this is the military lost its uniformed expertise in information technology.

Fast forward to today, and information infrastructure is as much a domain in warfighting as the seas and the air, yet the military is left without the skills in uniform which correlate not only to captains of ships and pilots of airplanes, but also to the technicians, operators, and maintainers. As a result, the military has once again centralized IT acquisition, management, and support, and is once again filling positions with uniformed personnel.

However, IT skills is unique in several ways. They are perishable. Old skill requirements (i.e., Novell NetWare, UNIX) become obsolete and unneeded, and are replaced with new skill requirements (i.e., Windows Server, Linux). To ensure quality, they require validation (i.e., IT Certifcations). Because they are COTS based, they are inexpensive compared to unique military skills. They are fungible and readily transferable to the civilian sector.

Another unique aspect of the military is ab initio training. The military will take someone from high school with the appropriate aptitude, enlist them, and train them up to a level of reasonable, beginners level, productivity. It then will use on the job training and continuing education to build expertise. In the case of an in demand skill set, this creates issues with retention. This is a bigger deal than a military turbine engine mechanic--there are only a handful of airlines needing them. But almost every organization needs a Windows administrator.

Then there are the challenges. The military needs, smart, highly skilled, problem solvers for day to day operation of the IT infrastructure. The military information infrastructure is more likely to be attacked both in peace and in wartime, but rapid recovery is critical in wartime. Poor retention hurts this need. The military needs deeply skilled, highly experienced IT technicians. But the need for operational managers is not that great, so the college educated, commissioned officer corps is not the appropriate career path for an IT technician. Something else is needed.

The military position of Warrant Officer is that of an technical specialist. Historically, the technical expertise came from experience serving in the enlisted corps.  In modern times, the Army uses Warrant Officers as helicopter pilots and trains them to the appropriate level or technical expertise.

Warrant Officers can serve as highly skilled individual contributors or as first level managers. It would seem a perfect career path for an enlisted military IT specialist. Tie it to certifications, and perhaps an Associate Degree, along with a service commitment and a retention bonus.

On the commissioned officer side, the career plan should be more on IT architecture, Information Warfare and advanced academic education. College educated officers would start focusing on both supervisory roles, and architectural roles. Then the focus should be on an advanced degree in the appropriate field of study. From there, moving to an Information Warfighting planning role, followed by the appropriate mid-career professional military education. Cross flow between related fields such as military intelligence would also be appropriate, however, this should be treated with care, as military intelligence often recruits from liberal arts studies such as history, foreign language, and political science. A cross flow program should not disrupt either the military intelligence corps, or the information warfare corps. Finally, the Joint Forces Staff College should create a dedicated Command and Staff school for information warfighters, with the goal of creating cadre of information warfighting leaders for all of the services.

Ultimately, the combination of a cadre of commissioned information warfighting leaders, combined with a corps of highly skilled warrant officer information warfighting specialists, would go a long way towards developing the cyber warrior force our nation requires.