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.
Anduril and General Atomics will develop their Collaborative Combat Aircraft for the Air Force, beating out Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman, the service announced on April 24. But any of the non-selected companies can compete to actually manufacture the eventual design, the Air Force said.