This is where I provide some commentary on commentary and originally appeared in Soldier Systems Digest, Vol 5, Issue 26.
The Pentagon knows its cyber force model is broken. Here’s how to fix it
The authors of this article revive the argument for establishing a US Cyber Force. I agree, except that the designation of Cyberspace as the fifth warfighting domain was myopic in the first place and establishing a “Cyber” force only gets part of the job done.
The reality is that Cyber is SIGINT by other means and that SIGINT is one of many elements of electromagnetic warfare. The EM spectrum is the true fifth domain.
To solve our current shortfalls, we must look to the past to face the future.
First, establish the US Security Service as the sixth military service with specialization in offensive Cyber, Electromagnetic Warfare, and SIGINT. This requires a fix to the Title 10 / Title 50 issues which caused this bifurcation of effort in the first place.
Second, reconstitute service level versions of the Security Service which were stood down and merged with other Intel organizations in the 70s and 80s. Like the USSS, these service elements will provide offensive Cyber, EW, and SIGINT capabilities to support their own service branch.
Third, merge the National Security Agency and US Cyber Command once again into a single entity with additional technical control over Electromagnetic Warfare and an understanding that this entity controls offensive actions in addition to collection. Once again, the tweaking of Title 10 / Title 50 issues is critical.
Fourth, leave cyber security to the services as they establish and manage their own networks.
The new US Security Service will provide the National Cyber Force as well as the lead on national level EMS collection efforts and EW policy and execution. It will also provide forces to support joint warfighting at the Strategic, Operational, and Tactical Levels. Finally, it will establish a SOF component to support properly USSOCOM with a full seat at the table.
Unfortunately, cyber has become a generic term used by operations personnel to describe the full gamut of EW activities. While CEMA has been used here in the US as well as in the UK, Cyber ElectroMagnetic Activites seems to have lost favor even though it better describes the capability. As EW elements are embedded in Army formations under the Transformation In Contact initiative, Army combat arms Soldiers and Leaders will begin to use the term EW to generically refer to what is, EW. Unfortunately, they won’t be getting everything. The Army’s concept of EW is a stripped down capability which provides elementary direction finding and jamming, which makes it a hammer when it could be a scalpel. Signals will be geolocated without ample characterization and either jammed or passed to fires for destruction. This will invariably lead to the denial of exploitable nodes or the destruction of deceptive emitters while the real ones escape notice.
The Army is actually exacerbating the issue. The Army is combining USAREUR’s 2nd Multi-Domain Task Force with the 56th Artillery Command referring to “cyber” and traditional fires and defensive and offensive fires. The Army got the CEMA element correct in the 2nd MDTF, combining Cyber, EW, and SI in one organization. The danger is pacing all of that capability under a commander who only understands that targets get destroyed.
–Eric Graves
Founder
SSD
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