Army cyber/EW troops with laptop and guns at the National Training Center on Fort Irwin, Cali.
WASHINGTON: Two elite Army cyber/electronic warfare units — critical components of its plans for high-tech war — have struggled to fill their ranks, the Government Accountability Office reported Thursday. As of March, only 18 percent of the required personnel were in place at the 915th Cyber Warfare Support Battalion (CWSB) in Fort Gordon, Ga. On the opposite coast, at Fort Lewis, Wa., the Intelligence, Information, Cyber/Electronic Warfare, & Space (I2CEWS) battalion had managed to reach 55 percent manning, up from 32 percent at its creation in October last year.
Of course, the GAO data is out of date. Have things improved? So far, I haven’t gotten updated figures from the Army, nor any official statement on the report. But the informal, off-record reaction I’ve heard from people in the Pentagon boils down to: Really?
It’s no surprise that creating a new capability from nothing is a tricky process. And highly technical cyber talent is in short supply, not just in the Army, but across the government and indeed the global economy. The Army is ramping up its training pipeline, but it didn’t want to hold off on creating new units to test out new high-tech ways of war.
Two new elite Army cyber/electronic warfare units struggled to fill their ranks, GAO reported.
In fact, across its Big Six modernization program, ..
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