As special assistant to the Air Force Chief of Staff and leader of the Cyberspace Task Force, Lani Kass has been asked, on occasion, to estimate how many people in the Air Force are participating in “cyberspace efforts” right now. The answer, she said Wednesday at AFA’s Air & Space Conference, is that about 40,000 Air Force personnel are currently involved in some kind of cyberspace mission, from sensing and connecting to command and control of critical processes. “People who talk about cyberspace as if it only dealt with computers are missing the point,” she said. People have been fighting in the cyberspace domain even longer than they have been in air and space, she postulated, pointing out the telegraph as the “Victorian Internet.” Now, she said, the challenge is to integrate all of these processes to deliver strategic and tactical effects.
The Air Force is on track to reach its annual goal of graduating 1,500 new pilots that had proved elusive to this point, one year after the service launched a sweeping overhaul of its undergraduate pilot training program, Air Education and Training Command said Sept. 14.
