Army Gen. Keith Alexander, US Cyber Command chief, said Tuesday he favors seeing the organization elevated to a unified command. “I think the question is when; when do you do it? When do you take that step?” said Alexander during a cyber summit in Washington, D.C. CYBERCOM is currently a sub-unified command subordinate to US Strategic Command. While Alexander praised the relationship between the two organizations, he said in his Oct. 8 talk he would push for establishing unified-command status within “the next couple of years” to avoid future issues with accountability. “What you can’t afford is to have Cyber Command responding to the [Defense] Secretary, the President, and a . . . commander who is not directly in the loop,” he said. “You don’t want to hold [that commander] accountable for what the guy over there is doing,” he said.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Sept. 5 to rename the Department of Defense as the Department of War, a move that has heightened the ongoing debate over the White House’s legal authorities and the role of the military in the world and at home.
