US Cyber Command, the nascent organization at Fort Meade, Md., for overseeing cyberspace operations across the US military, is getting its arms around the various roles and missions in the rapidly expanding domain, and building a “unified vision,” said Robert Butler, deputy assistant secretary of defense for cyber policy, Wednesday. From the onset, CYBERCOM has worked to bring inside the various arms of the Air Force, Army, Marine Corps, and Navy to do classic command and control activities, Butler told defense reporters in Washington, D.C. It has also made progress in sorting out the services’ plans for organizing, training, and equipping, and “the roles and relationships” of their various responsibilities through a series of meetings with CYBERCOM boss Army Gen. Keith Alexander, he said. “You now have a unifying vision, a unifying direction” so that the commanders of the services’ cyber components and other cyber officials “can see where they need to plug in,” said Butler.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth this week released strategies meant to focus the Pentagon’s “alphabet soup” of innovation organizations and proliferate artificial intelligence—moves that experts say could provide the structure needed to make the military’s efforts to integrate and field new technology more effective.
