The United States is preparing for cyber conflict with a military structure that treats cyberspace as a secondary function. That is not a criticism. It is a structural fact, documented in a new report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
The US has soldiers for land, sailors for sea, airmen for air, and guardians for space. It has no service whose primary mission is cyber warfighting. Cyber Command exists and can employ cyber capabilities, but it depends on the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, and Space Force to recruit, train, and equip its personnel.
Each of those services has its own core mission. A Navy builds fleets. An Army builds land power. Cyber is never the first priority.
“Too much of this debate treats a new service as a judgment on Cyber Command’s performance. It is not,” write Dr. Erica Lonergan of Columbia University and Rear Admiral (Ret.) Mark Montgomery of the FDD, both of whom served on the commission that produced the report. “Cyber Command houses some of our nation’s most talented cyber warriors. What they need is a better force-generation system behind them.”
The talent pipeline is broken
The report identifies a fundamental problem: the US military has no deliberate, continuous pipeline for recruiting, training, and retaining cyber operators.
The current system produces inconsistent results. Career paths force technical experts into management roles to advance, taking skilled operators away from the work they do best. There is no reward structure that values technical mastery over command experience.
“Cyber talent does not grow by accident,” Lonergan and Montgomery write. “It must be recruited deliberately, trained continuously and retained through a career model that rewards technical mastery, instead of forcing top operators to move into command or management roles just to advance.”
The consequences are not theoretical. American forces are in daily contact with adversaries in cyberspace. China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and criminal networks are actively targeting US networks, critical infrastructure, and military systems. Artificial intelligence will increase the speed and scale of those operations.
History repeating
The US military has faced this problem before. When airpower became too important to leave as a secondary function of the Army and Navy, the Air Force was created as an independent service. When space needed its own culture and focus, the Space Force followed.
Cyberspace has reached the same point, the report argues.
“In cyberspace, a borderless domain where American forces are engaged with adversaries every day, we still do not have a military service whose central purpose is to build a quality, expert force, equipped with the most cutting-edge capabilities, for war-fighting in the cyber domain.”
What a Cyber Force would look like
The commission’s proposal is not for a sprawling bureaucracy. The proposed Cyber Force would not take over all military IT networks or absorb every technology function across the Defense Department. Existing services would retain responsibility for securing their own mission-critical networks.
Instead, the Cyber Force would organize, train, and equip forces specifically for offensive and defensive cyberspace operations. It would strengthen Cyber Command, not replace it.
The report draws a distinction that is often lost in public debate. Creating a dedicated service is not a criticism of the cyber personnel currently serving. It is a recognition that the current generation model, asking services built for other domains to produce cyber warriors as a side mission, cannot meet the threat.
“If cyberspace is truly a domain of warfare, it deserves its own service built to fight in it,” the authors write.
The threat is not waiting
The Pentagon has made incremental improvements to cyber force generation over the years. The commission’s report is the latest and most comprehensive assessment that those fixes are not enough.
“The threat is evolving too quickly to justify continuing marginal fixes to the current system,” the authors write. “For too long, cyber has been treated as everyone’s responsibility, and therefore no one’s first priority. Our adversaries are not waiting for us to get organized.”
The report comes at a time when cyber operations are increasingly central to conflicts around the world. Iran has used cyber attacks alongside missiles in its confrontation with the US. Russia’s war on Ukraine is fought online as much as on the ground. China’s military modernization includes a major cyber component.
The US has the technical talent and the budget to build a world-class cyber force. What it lacks is the organizational structure to put them together. That is a choice, and it can be changed. The question is whether the Pentagon and Congress will act before the next conflict proves the point with American casualties.