Maj. Gen. David Senty, US Cyber Command’s chief of staff, said finding a “logical career track” for a “special operations-like career field” for the cyber domain is a top priority. These cyber commandos would be a “skilled, selected, distinctive cadre that can operate in cyberspace with the same hubris as our combat arms and operators do today,” said Senty at AFA’s CyberFutures Conference last week. Building such a cadre would require bringing together the various cyber career fields in each of the services and capitalizing on common threads that already exist today in how the Army uses its signals or communication personnel and how the Air Force utilizes IT skills. The next-generation cyber operators would have a background in intelligence, space operations, engineering, electronic warfare, combat arms, and, most importantly, planning. “Planners are our most fundamental function . . . because of the intricacies of cyber and the need to have that integrated at all phases of an operational plan,” he said during his April 1 presentation.
The Air Force is leaning toward a less-sophisticated autonomous aircraft in the second increment of the Collaborative Combat Aircraft, the services chief futurist said. He also suggested that the next increment of CCA may be air-launched, a la the "Rapid Dragon" experiments conducted by the service in recent years.