President Obama nominated Maj. Gen. William Bender for promotion to the rank of lieutenant general for assignment as the Air Force’s chief of information dominance and chief information officer, announced the Pentagon on June 10. Bender has been deputy chief of the Office of Security Cooperation-Iraq in Baghdad since July 2013. If the Senate approves Bender’s nomination, he would replace Lt. Gen. Michael Basla, who has held these positions on the Air Force Secretariat since June 2012.
Creating a new military service to wage war in the cyber domain would take too long, risk creating a top-heavy bureaucracy, and create confusion about the defense of other services’ IT networks, two former leaders of U.S. Cyber Command told a congressionally chartered research committee looking into the question.
