At the end of the Cold War, the service divested much of its electronic warfare inventory. During counterinsurgency fights in the post-9/11 wars, the Army used blunt jamming tools to thwart improvised explosive devices, which, in turn, inadvertently jammed friendly systems.

But Russia’s first incursion into Ukraine in 2014 served as a wakeup call, and the Army has been on a years-long journey to modernize its EW prowess.

“I think this year will be the beginning of the combination of force structure, training circulars, range guides and field manuals now combined with manpackable gear that allows both the sensing and the activity in the space that heretofore … was different systems or different methods from different units. We’re going to make this a solution across our whole Army,” Maj. Gen. Ryan Janovic, commander of the Cyber Center of Excellence, said in an interview.

In 2017, the Army merged electronic warfare within its cyber branch, meaning soldiers that go to the cyber school at Fort Eisenhower in Georgia also learn to be electromagnetic spectrum professionals.

The Army, up until the last year or so, had no fielded program-of-record jammers — relying for years on quick-reaction capabilities developed to address capability gaps in Europe.

That system, the Terrestrial Layer System Manpack, is a manpackable system, which provides direction finding with limited jamming on-the-move as well, had a history of use by special operations units, allowing it to be awarded and fielded to the conventional force on a much faster timeline.

Through the Army’s transforming-in-contact initiative — which seeks to speed up how the service buys technologies and designs its forces by injecting emerging capabilities into units and letting them experiment with them during exercises and deployments — the service will begin providing units a variety of EW systems for sensing, understanding their footprint to manage it, and jamming.

“We’re excited that this is the year where we’re going to start to see in earnest the combination of equipment arriving into divisions and the formations of trained young men and women ready to take that equipment and demonstrate what it can do on behalf of those division commanders. That’s going to continue as we roll this out to all the divisions, as we continue to equip the force and train the force,” Janovic said. “That’s an area that will remain a priority and it’s one of our chief’s priorities, because we’re all looking at what we’re learning from the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and operations in the electromagnetic spectrum define the future of combat as we see it.”

The Army has been on a path to provide more electromagnetic spectrum forces to units in the way of EW platoons and companies. Janovic noted that just a few years ago, where the Army may only have trained 60 EW personnel, that number is up to 600 over three years.

“It’s just a magnification change as we start to man the formations that we built from platoons and companies all throughout the divisions and then the corps and the [Multi-Domain Task Forces]. We will end up training significantly more EW professionals,” he said.  

In fact, Fort Eisenhower, the home of the Cyber Center of Excellence, has sought to invest in training ranges for EW professionals to get out in the dirt with gear and test their classroom courseware given they are increasing the force structure.

“We’re putting them under gear and out in the wood line and really trying to create as tough and realistic training that we can to simulate the environment,” Janovic said. “We’ve got room to grow both in what we’re doing in the classrooms and what we’re doing in the field, but I think that’s the important balance that we have to find. How do you do it in tough, realistic conditions, but also teaching the fundamentals of the EMS and understanding it, the science of it? It’s a complete overhaul.”

The Cyber Center is also working to proliferate EW expertise across the entire Army and the other centers of excellence in an expansion of a partnership that began a couple of years ago.

Janovic noted that all units and formations must be aware of how the electromagnetic spectrum affects their operations and how they maneuver on the battlefield.

“We’re contributing to the body of knowledge and other centers of excellence. How do they put EW into their programs of instruction? How do we help all formations understand what they need to know at the basic level for survivability, if you will, in emissions control, if you’re being jammed, how not to be detected?” he said. “We’re going to have to do this in a very, very collaborative way, because all centers have some aspect of the EMS at work in the foundation of what they do. All formations will be operating in the EMS. When you think about it from a protection standpoint or from an intelligence standpoint, all of us at the centers of excellence agree that we’re going to have to do this somewhat differently.”

As part of that effort, the Cyber Center is improving doctrine and manuals, having recently collaborated with the Intelligence Center of Excellence to develop the Multidomain Operations Range Guide.

The aim is to improve home station training for units. The Army is also working on other training circulars, Janovic said, especially as more lessons are learned from Ukraine where a team led by an Army general officer was sent to loot at electronic warfare.

Those observations will be factored into training, courseware and even combat training centers where forces execute operations against a live opposing force.  

“We’ll continue to learn lessons as we fight at home station and fight at the CTCs, and learn lessons about what works and what doesn’t right,” Janovic said. “We’re excited about seeing where that takes us in the next year.”

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A series of events will help officials determine what the concept of employment for EW will be at the division level and what programs of record will look like.

Those events included a tabletop exercise at Fort Eisenhower, Georgia, focused on how electronic warfare will be done at division and higher; an October Fires Symposium at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, examining how network, intelligence, cyber and EW will integrate into fires; a capabilities-based assessment for electromagnetic warfare conducted by the Cyber Capability Integration Directorate at the Cyber Center of Excellence in Augusta, Georgia, that will be completed over the next year; and a sensor-to-shooter event focused on challenges in the Indo-Pacific region and long-range precision fires at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

“We’re doing a deep dive on that now,” Col. Leslie Gorman, Army capability manager for electronic warfare, said in a recent interview regarding how the service is thinking about fighting electronic warfare at echelon and with what platforms. “I had a sit-down with some folks at the Pentagon yesterday. One of the things that came back was truly, what does that concept of employment look like at the division?”

She explained that the Cyber CDID event helped determine what exactly the forthcoming Terrestrial Layer System-Echelons Above Brigade (TLS-EAB) system will be.

TLS-EAB was initially designed as an integrated EW and signals intelligence system primarily for divisions, corps and Multi-Domain Task Forces to sense across greater ranges. Like its smaller, brigade counterpart, TLS-Brigade Combat Team, following experimentation and lessons from Europe, the Army has decided to split up the SIGINT and electronic warfare functions.

Given the EAB effort was less mature than the BCT variant at the time the decision to split the functions was made, officials have stated EAB will be the main component for defining and demonstrating an initial EW architecture and publishing the requests for information concerning the architecture, that will eventually deliver it back to the BCT version for integration.

“There’s been some interesting information that came out of that [tabletop event]. We also have another CONEMP we’re taking a look at from [the] C5ISR [Center] to help shape some discussions with the maneuvers at an upcoming tabletop exercise with them because I think that’s going to be very important,” Gorman said, using an acronym to refer to command, control, communications, computers, cyber, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. “As we’re flushing out the requirements at echelon that we’re not only talking to fires, we’re also talking maneuvers. Because it’s ensuring that we’re incorporating our capabilities in a light infantry fight. Since we are an enabler, what does it look like to implement an EW sensor on a” robotic combat vehicle?

Officials are also looking at other capabilities that have been prototyped and used primarily at the brigade level to see if there’s applicability at division, namely, the Tactical Electronic Warfare System-Infantry Brigade Combat Team, or TEWS-I, which was initially a quick-reaction capability built by General Dynamics, providing a smaller system designed for infantry vehicles. It was a prototype activity to serve as a risk reduction and requirements pathfinder for the Army’s program of record, the Terrestrial Layer System-Brigade Combat Team (TLS-BCT) and has been used by units within the XVIII Airborne Corps.

Gorman noted that the service is looking at experimentation efforts next year to not only gain improvements for TEWS-I, but how that capability could potentially be a division asset.

The Army is still essentially in the requirements phase when it comes to the electronic warfare portion of TLS-BCT again, trying to figure out what makes the most sense going forward.

Gorman noted it could evolve to include more robust communications systems, deception capabilities or situational awareness tools. Moreover, while the Army is currently fielding the TLS Manpack — the first official program in decades for a dismounted electronic attack capability that soldiers can use to conduct direction finding with limited jamming on-the-move as well — for mobility, the service is looking at possibly bringing that into a vehicle mount with an amplifier for extended range, something that was conceived of initially within the original TLS family.

Constant feedback from units is also helping to inform future generations of the Manpack capability, Gorman said.

As the Army is continuing to work on the platform and capability side of the issue, fleshing out how they’ll be employed, the other critical parallel effort is moving out on EW-enabling capabilities to be able to plan and manage within the spectrum.

“It’s also ensuring that we address it as a system-of-systems approach … It’s going to be important to be able to ensure that these capabilities that we’re fielding, we’re able to communicate and C2 those systems, be able to also incorporate where the systems are on the battlefield and incorporate that into not only our EW plan of action via [the Electronic Warfare Planning and Management Tool], but then also think leveraging [the Spectrum Situational Awareness System] for the spectrum management, the [electromagnetic emission control], the [electronic protection] capabilities, to be able to also bring that information into fires for a more comprehensive, holistic, synchronized, non-lethal effect support to fires planning capability,” Gorman said.

EWPMT serves as a command-and-control planning capability that allows service members to visualize potential effects within the invisible spectrum and chart courses of action to prevent their forces and systems from being jammed during operations. The Army is embarking on the EWPMT “Next” effort, which involves shifting to the Tactical Assault Kit framework, where applications for situational awareness data and geospatial visualizations can be created for better joint and coalition integration.

The Spectrum Situational Awareness System (S2AS) is a new start in fiscal 2025 and is envisioned to be a commercial off-the-shelf solution that will provide sensing and visualization of what units look like in the spectrum and allow commanders to be able to sense and report in real-time their command post signatures, sources of electromagnetic interference — either from coalition partners or the enemy — and threat emissions.

Officials have described EWPMT as the glue that holds the electronic warfare architecture together, because if forces can’t see, understand and plan within the spectrum, jamming and sensing capabilities won’t be effective.

“We’re talking about this too, is like we have a lot of Manpacks coming out. We’re going to have to be able to ensure that those systems can be effectively C2’d and that missions can be planned at the optimal level at echelon, so that way everyone understands what’s going on their battlespace. I think that helps reduce potential adjacent unit RF interference or jamming,” Gorman said. “It’s also ensuring that our signatures that we’re emitting, that is also a part of our planning efforts and you have to do that with each and every EW emitter or an effector.”

The Army will begin embedding its requirements personnel with experimental units to create a direct feedback loop to inform the software developers for EWPMT in the program office. This will help the program office prioritize as the service is planning likely tranches of 12 improvements per quarter going forward in line with a holistic software modernization strategy for EWPMT Next.

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Janovic recently served as the director of operations at U.S. Cyber Command.

In his new position, he’ll be responsible for furthering the modernization of cyber, electronic warfare and communications from a doctrine and training perspective.

The Cyber Center of Excellence has played a pivotal role in shaping the future of the Army by developing doctrine and concepts for electromagnetic warfare, data and information advantage — all of which are expected to be key elements in future conflicts and play a bigger role than they did in the global war on terror.

Janovic takes over for Maj. Gen. Paul Stanton, who was nominated for his third star in June and tapped to be the next director of the Defense Information Systems Agency and commander of Joint Force Headquarters-Department of Defense Information Network (JFHQ-DODIN), a subordinate headquarters under Cybercom responsible for protecting and defending the Pentagon’s network globally.

Stanton has been at the Cyber Center of Excellence since June 2021 and was charged with helping the Army with its data problems as well as focusing on the future of cyber and electronic warfare.

Stanton is expected to take over for Air Force Lt. Gen. Robert Skinner, who has led DISA since February 2021. Skinner was JFHQ-DODIN’s first deputy commander when it was first established.

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“We need decoy systems such that if … the enemy is looking at us through the electromagnetic spectrum, they can’t pinpoint us. They might be able to see us, but they can’t understand us … We need to be able to raise the noise floor of the signal to noise ratio, such that again, they might be able to see that we are in a generalized location, but the enemy won’t be able to pinpoint or target our capabilities,” Maj. Gen. Paul Stanton, commander of the Cyber Center of Excellence, said Friday during a virtual event hosted by Defense One. “In FY ’25, we believe that we’re seeing the very rapid maturation of these obfuscation and decoy capabilities. We will look at rapidly advancing that technology.”

One of the biggest lessons from Russia’s incursions into Ukraine — stemming from 2014 to its current invasion — is how units can be located and targeted with kinetic munitions solely based on their emissions within the electromagnetic spectrum.

In addition to efforts for units to reduce their overall signature, the Army is pursing technologies that will allow them to deceive the enemy and even hide in plain sight.

Top Army leadership has been harping on the notion that in the future, forces will be under constant observation with nowhere to hide — unlike past conflicts. This is due to the technologies possessed by sophisticated actors to track forces through airborne or satellite systems or digital means of detecting forces based on emissions.

In order for troops to be able to employ decoys, obfuscation techniques or even jamming, they must first understand what they look like within the spectrum.

One program the Army is making investments toward is called the Spectrum Situational Awareness System, or S2AS. It is envisioned to be a commercial off-the-shelf solution that will provide sensing and visualization of what units look like in the spectrum and allow commanders to be able to sense and report in real-time their command post signature, sources of electromagnetic interference — either from coalition partners or the enemy — and what threat emissions look like.

Officials noted it will be critical to allowing units to understand their own electronic footprint.  

A new start in fiscal 2025, the Army requested $9.3 million in research-and-development funds for integration, testing, and technical and program management support of the program. The documents project an anticipated contract award in the third quarter of 2025, with first unit integrated and fielding to the Army beginning in the second quarter of 2026.

Stanton noted there are promising technologies the Army is experimenting with at Project Convergence, which took place from early February to mid-March, in the way of decoys and obfuscation.

He did not mention any specific systems by name.

One system that was tested at Project Convergence was called MAGPIE, which can replicate Army assets — such as company to division level radio frequency signatures — to confuse and deceive enemy signal collection.

At Camp Pendelton, California, during the first phase of Project Convergence, the system was explained to DefenseScoop as being able to collect the signals and signature profile of a command post — or anything that emits — and copy it to rebroadcast as a decoy. A couple of the systems can be deployed to mimic a command post so the enemy doesn’t know exactly where the command post is or which one is the real command post.

The Army has also articulated its intention for a prototyping initiative dubbed the Modular Electromagnetic Spectrum System (MEMSS). This capability stemmed out of a prior science-and-technology effort called Modular Electromagnetic Spectrum Deception Suite (MEDS) and will be a new start in fiscal 2026, Army officials have said.

The effort is related to command post survivability and could employ techniques to confuse and deceive adversaries.

“It goes back to understanding how you look and are there ways to lower or raise noise levels to better hide in plain sight,” Brig. Gen. Wayne “Ed” Barker, program executive officer for intelligence, electronic warfare and sensors, told DefenseScoop in a December interview.

Officials explained that R&D for the effort is ongoing and there could be a range of options for what such a system could look like — from low-dollar disposable to an emulator to make it look like certain radio signals are emitting from a location to digitally replicate a command post. It could also be as small as a handheld device.

The program office is still making small investments to “hit the ground running in ’26,” Barker said. The funding lines are still a bit amorphous and officials believe these concepts could be achievable in the near term.

“It goes back to getting that kind of seed corn and being able to incubate ahead of that ’26 time frame for MEMSS,” Barker said.

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“Every soldier in the Army has to understand the impacts of EW,” Maj. Gen. Paul Stanton, commander of the Cyber Center of Excellence, told reporters during a media roundtable at the TechNet Augusta conference Thursday.

One of the Army’s guiding principles for its digital transformation is ensuring units maintain a low or reduced signature in the electromagnetic spectrum, which program offices are accomplishing by delivering technologies to help units lessen, manage and obfuscate their signatures.

But more broadly, soldiers must understand the risks. Stanton said the Cyber School is conducting a partnership with the Maneuver Center of Excellence along with the infantry and armor school to expose students to the effects of jamming and geolocation in the electromagnetic spectrum.

The plan is to start with the Maneuver Center and then expand the initiative to the Army’s other centers of excellence.

Additionally, units are being exposed more and more to jamming at their home station training locations as well as when they go to combat training centers for their validation rotations.

Getting soldiers exposed earlier at home stations will allow them to be more prepared when they go to a combat training center. Those rotations are high-stress environments in which entire campaigns are shrunk to two weeks for the purpose of meeting numerous training requirements and validating units. Failing due to a jamming capability would be detrimental to the entire unit’s trajectory in the Army, affecting which units meet certain readiness thresholds.

“We are exposing our forces to the EMS at the training center. That’s not good enough,” Stanton said. “We own large portions of the electromagnetic spectrum for training purposes at Fort Irwin [in California]. Now what we need to do is take those same lessons and bring them back to home station so that the first time that a soldier is exposed to being jammed is not when they’re being graded in their final exercise, or worse yet, in a real-world situation.”

This ends up being more complicated in practice because each Army installation has different regulations regarding what can be done in the spectrum. Turning on jammers requires coordination with other federal agencies so as to not interfere with commercial systems such as airplanes, which limits training and testing.

“We want to standardize the capability of turning on a jammer. However, each individual installation has responsibilities to build the electronic warfare range within their individual footprint,” Stanton said. “The Cyber School … is building out, hey, what do you need in the backwoods of Fort Campbell or at Fort Cavazos or at Fort Moore in order to train not cyber soldiers, but every soldier in the Army. There are a lot of specific regulations that we have to work our way through. The authorities to operate in the EMS at each home station is a little bit different, because many of those are localized. We’re working our way through that process right now.”

Forces at combat training centers, specifically the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, are met with a formidable electronic warfare capability from the opposing force that will jam units and geolocate them based on their signatures. In some cases, more advanced units going through Fort Irwin will use their own EW capabilities against the opposing force, Stanton said.

Another change the Army is making when it comes to home station exposure and training within the spectrum, is putting more focus on counter-electronic warfare.

“The big pivot right now is in emissions control. How do you get left in that kill chain so that they cannot identify you? If they’re identifying you, we’re using other obfuscation means by which they may have identified you, but there are decoys … and then they’re unable to target you,” Todd Boudreau deputy commandant of the Cyber School, told reporters. “A lot of the effort right now is pivoting from reacting to electromagnetic interference or electromagnetic attack to conducting counter-EW measures, which is emissions control.”

For EW-specific forces, Fort Gordon has received approval from the Army to build its own electronic warfare range where soldiers will be able to maneuver with their gear and employ it.

“We move forward with a cyber and EW multipurpose training range on Fort Gordon. It’s about 600 acres right in the middle of Fort Gordon. It has undulating terrain, it has vegetation, the humidity — all that we want. That was approved by the Army and is already in the [program objective memorandum] right now and is being influenced,” Boudreau said. “That will allow us to go from crawling with our students to then engaging the environment, movement and maneuver, light discipline, noise discipline in a combat environment, to be able to set up their height sights, to be able to do their mission to find, fix, finish the adversary and then to be able to move tactically as well.”

Stanton said this is critically important as EW soldiers will be on the front lines and must have that practical maneuver experience to be successful.

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A revised version of Joint Publication 3-12 Cyberspace Operations — published in December 2022 and while unclassified, is only available to those with DoD common access cards, according to a Joint Staff spokesperson — officially provides a definition for “expeditionary cyberspace operations,” which are “[c]yberspace operations that require the deployment of cyberspace forces within the physical domains.”

DefenseScoop has seen a copy of the updated publication.

The last version was published in 2018 and was publicly available. The Joint Staff spokesman noted that five years has been the norm for updates.

The definition, recognition and discussion of such operations are indicative of not only the maturity of cyberspace and associated operations, but the need for more tactical capabilities to get at targets that the current cyber force might not be able to access.

U.S. Cyber Command owns the offensive cyber capabilities within DOD, and the services conduct offensive cyber ops through Cybercom and the cyber mission forces that each service provides to the command. Authorities to launch cyber effects have traditionally been held at the highest levels of government. In recent years, those authorities have been streamlined and delegated. However, most cyber operations are still conducted from remote locations by the cyber mission force (CMF) and primarily focused on IP-based networks.

Many of the services have begun investing in capabilities and forces for their own offensive cyber, however, that is mostly in the blended electronic warfare or radio frequency-enabled sphere at the tactical level.

The updated doctrine recognizes that these capabilities, which will still have to be coordinated centrally, could provide access to targets that remote operators might not be able to get for a variety of reasons.

“Developing access to targets in or through cyberspace follows a process that can often take significant time. In some cases, remote access is not possible or preferable, and close proximity may be required, using expeditionary [cyber operations],” the joint publication states. “Such operations are key to addressing the challenge of closed networks and other systems that are virtually isolated. Expeditionary CO are often more regionally and tactically focused and can include units of the CMF or special operations forces … If direct access to the target is unavailable or undesired, sometimes a similar or partial effect can be created by indirect access using a related target that has higher-order effects on the desired target.”

It also notes that these effects and operations should be coordinated with the intelligence community to deconflict intelligence gain/loss.

Moreover, the updated doctrine recognizes the complexity of cyberspace and how in-demand cyber capabilities might be. Thus, global cyber support might need to “reach-forward” to support multiple combatant commands simultaneously.

“Allowing them to support [combatant commands] in this way permits faster adaptation to rapidly changing needs and allows threats that initially manifest only in one [area of responsibility] to be mitigated globally in near real time. Likewise, while synchronizing CO missions related to achieving [combatant commander] objectives, some cyberspace capabilities that support this activity may need to be forward-deployed; used in multiple AORs simultaneously; or, for speed in time-critical situations, made available via reachback,” it states. “This might involve augmentation or deployment of cyberspace capabilities to forces already forward or require expeditionary CO by deployment of a fully equipped team of personnel and capabilities.”

When it comes to internalizing the new doctrine, the Air Force sees this as additional access points for operations.

“How do we leverage folks that are and forces that are at the tactical edge for access? That’s primarily how I think about the expeditionary capabilities we have … is empowering or enabling the effect they’re trying to create or using their access or position physically, to help enable some of our effects,” Lt. Gen. Kevin Kennedy, commander of 16^th Air Force/Air Forces Cyber, told DefenseScoop at the AFCEA TechNet Cyber conference.

He noted that these access-enabling capabilities could be across the services, but primarily from an Air Force perspective, “I’m looking at looking within the Air Force, from aerial platforms down to ground-based airmen, as well about how we would do that,” he said.

Officials have described how the services are seeking to build their own forces separate from Cybercom.

“There was a lot of language that came out the [National Defense Authorization Act] that talked about force design in general. All the services to one degree or another are really — I’m not going to say rethinking — but evaluating what their contribution to the joint force is, as well as what their own … service-retained cyber teams are,” Chris Cleary, principal cyber advisor for the Department of Navy, told DefenseScoop at the AFCEA conference.

Last year’s NDAA directed the Pentagon to develop a strategy for converged cyber and electronic warfare conducted by deployed military and intelligence assets, specifically for service-retained assets.

As electronic warfare and cyber capabilities are expected to be a big part of the battlefield in 2030 — a key waypoint the Army has been building toward — it recognizes those capabilities can’t be held from remote sanctuary, Maj. Gen. Paul Stanton, commander of the Army Cyber Center of Excellence, told DefenseScoop in an interview on the sidelines of the AFCEA conference.

In fact, the Army’s principal cyber adviser has tasked the Cyber Center of Excellence with clarifying certain authorities and capabilities.

“How do you execute electronic attack to achieve effects? How do you differentiate a cyber-delivered capability that benefits from proximity based on owning the land, owning the ground?Because that’s what the Army does. The principal cyber advisor, Dr. [Michael] Sulmeyer is tasking me with conducting a study to clearly define and delineate where those lines are,” Stanton said. “This study is going to help us be able to clearly define that. I expect to be tasked to kick that off here in the very near future with about 90 days to complete.”

When it comes to service-retained forces and capabilities, the Army has built the 11^th Cyber Battalion, formerly the 915^th Cyber Warfare Battalion, which provides tactical, on-the-ground cyber operations — mostly through radio-frequency effects — electronic warfare and information ops. The unit will help plan tactical operations for commanders and conduct missions in coordination with deployed forces. It consists of several expeditionary cyber and electromagnetic activities (CEMA) teams that are scalable and will maneuver with units and conduct operations on the ground for commanders.

The Navy, meanwhile, is building what it’s calling non-kinetic effects teams, which will augment afloat forces with critical information warfare capabilities. Cleary has previously noted that the service is still working through what cyber ops at sea will look like.

“As we continue to professionalize this, [information warfare commanders within carrier strike groups] will become more and more important as it fully combines all aspects of the information warfare space, the electromagnetic spectrum, command and control of networks, eventually potentially offensive cyber being delivered from sea, information operations campaigns,” Cleary said.

“That job will mature over time, and then the trick is to get the Navy and the Marine Corps to work together because we are back to our roots of being an expeditionary force. Even the Marines through [Commandant] Gen. [David] Berger’s new force design is really about getting the Marines back to being what the Marines were designed to be, which is an expeditionary fighting force that goes to sea with the Navy. We work together to achieve our objectives as a team, and we’re getting back to our blocking [and] tackling them.”

For the Marine Corps’ part, officials have been building Marine Expeditionary Force Information Groups (MIGs), which were created in 2017 and support each MEF within the Corps, integrate electronic warfare with intelligence, communications, military information support operations, space, cyber and communication strategy — all to provide MEF commanders with an information advantage.

The service has also recently established Marine Corps Information Command (MCIC), which was designed to more tightly link the service’s information forces — including cyber, intelligence and space — in theater with the broader joint force across the globe.

Mission elements the Marines have created and sent forward with Marine expeditionary units are “right in line with [Joint Publication] 3-12,” Maj. Gen. Joseph Matos, deputy commander of Marine Corps Forces Cyberspace Command, told DefenseScoop at the AFCEA conference.

“How do we take what we do at the fort, or back at Fort Meade [where Cybercom is headquartered], and be able to extend that out to the services? That’s what we’re in the process of doing right now … We started about two years ago doing that. That capability is starting to mature pretty well,” he said. “It’s to extend Cyber Command out to those forward units.”

Matos said the recently created MCIC will act as the integrator for a lot of these capabilities throughout the force, acting as a bridge of sorts.

The organization will help tactical forces understand the authorities and capabilities that cyber can provide to help them conduct their missions.

“You kind of hit a glass ceiling of the capability [of] the lower elements being able to reach out and do cyberspace operations,” Matos said of the process prior to establishing that entity. “We’re able to say, OK, here’s a team, trained, capable,’ understand the capabilities that we can bring, give them to the deployed forces to say, ‘OK, you want to do cyber operations, here’s how we can help you do that.’ We know who to talk to, the authorities and so on so forth, and we can do that. I think it’s right in line with what the [Joint Publication] 3-12 is trying to do.”

That command essentially acts as the glue between the high-end cyber forces and the tactical elements, bridging the gap between Cybercom forces and the deployed forces.

“The genesis of the Marine Corps Information Command to tie all these elements together is to address that concern, is to be that integration point between the forces below the tactical edge who have these requirements to operate in a rapidly changing environment. But also tie that to the Marine Corps Information Command knows who to talk to at Cyber Command, or at NSA, or at Space Command. To be able to be that touchpoint between the two organizations so you don’t have to have an infantry battalion going all the way to” a combatant command, Matos said during a presentation at the AFCEA conference.

“I think as we operate in this rapidly changing cyberspace world, that Marine Corps Information Command’s going to be a tremendous benefit to the [Marine Air Ground Task Force], but also to the joint world and the intelligence and cyber world,” he added.

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The Army last month kicked off an eight-month pilot to train the cyber mission force — the cadre of personnel that each of the services provides to U.S. Cyber Command to conduct cyber operations — to go on the attack.

“Our critical shortfall and the most significant readiness factor is tied to our offensive operators,” Maj. Gen. Paul Stanton told DefenseScoop this week in an interview at the AFCEA TechNet Cyber conference.

It takes a really long time to train these personnel and that’s why Cybercom, through the Army as executive agent for advanced cyber work-role curriculum development, decided to focus on a new pilot to improve the training.

This training for what’s called Interactive On-Net Operator (ION) is highly advanced and requires a significant time investment of between one to three years to complete. It can cost between $220,000 to $500,000 per service member, according to the Government Accountability Office.

Stanton, who previously talked about the pilot last summer, noted that some of the defensive training didn’t have to be fully conducted behind closed doors in a classified setting, given many of the tactics and fundamentals are commercially known.

“We’ve been able to teach our defensive courses more broadly, early on in the formation of the cyber mission forces,” he said.

On the flip side, the offensive training, some of which stems from efforts to train high-quality National Security Agency operators, was lengthy and had to occur in highly classified environments — which led to higher costs.

“One of the most expensive aspects of our former training model was it all needed to be in highly classified environments, which means that the instructors have to have those clearances, they have to maintain that classified environment. And that’s just really, really expensive,” Stanton said.

The pilot course will help Cybercom personnel understand fundamentals that can be broken out in a way that forces can be trained in an unclassified setting — with more practical elements taught in the next phase in a classified environment.

“There’s the potential for very significant cost savings in the revised model,” he said.

Moreover, while the course is taking place at Fort Gordon at the Army’s cyber school, the intent is that the course will eventually be distributed, which will mean additional cost savings in not paying for personnel to move around to a central location to do the training.

With authorized growth for the cyber mission force in the next five years — and as Cybercom teams face readiness issues — getting this training right will be critical.

“It’s absolutely key and essential that the graduates of a new course have the same skill sets and the same technical abilities that they had previously. We just need to be able to do it at a broader scale because of the growth,” Stanton said. “This is a highly collaborative effort. All of the services, the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command are all tied in together to help us assess if this pilot is going to do what we need it to.”

Given the highly dynamic nature of cyberspace, the military must have an adaptable and flexible model to prepare operators as tactics evolve.

“If we create one educational and training model and expect it to last for several years, that’s naive given, again, the rate of change of technology and the rate of change of our enemies,” Stanton said. “Frankly, as we expand the trained and educated workforce, it will align with the execution of missions. We’ll realize that when a service member sat down to execute a mission, they were lacking some technical competency that they really needed in order to do whatever that mission required. Well, if I see that in a repeated sense and it wasn’t just a one-off, unique requirement for that particular mission, well we should look at that and does it make sense to incorporate it into the actual training and education.”

Officials are currently taking a phased assessment process where they will assess the course at different points in time throughout the training. Stanton said the military is probably a year or so away from being able to assess fully if this pilot is suitable.

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Offensive cyber personnel across all the services were not ready to perform their job on day one, so the Army, serving as the executive agent for advanced cyber work-role curriculum development, is piloting a new course and curriculum for all the U.S. military branches.

This new initiative, which will entail a distributed model where courses will be taught at locations in Texas, Fort Gordon, Georgia, Fort Meade, Maryland, and Washington, is about six months to a year from being operational, Maj. Gen. Paul Stanton, commander of the Army Cyber Center of Excellence, told reporters at the TechNet Augusta conference on Tuesday.

“This is a joint endeavor, in coordination with U.S. Cyber Command with the other services to produce service members that are ready to be part of their cyber mission force teams,” he said, noting the pilot is being executed with Cybercom’s training directorate, the J7. Cyber Command is responsible for setting the cyber training standards across the entire Department of Defense.

Defensive cyber ops were historically more difficult to train for because there was no template for how to do it. Offensive operations, on the other hand, benefitted from a legacy of NSA operations allowing cyber curriculum developers to rely on a playbook of sorts when developing the military’s cyber force.

However, what the DOD is discovering is that not every offensive cyber warrior needs to be trained to those high-end NSA-type standards right away to be effective in their missions.

“Not every offensively oriented soldier needs to be trained to a comparable standard to execute a foreign intelligence mission on behalf of the National Security Agency,” said Stanton, who oversees the Army Cyber School.

Instead, the new curriculum and approach deals with evaluating the risk profile for operators on certain missions. The skills needed to carry out the high-end type of foreign intelligence ops that the NSA conducts are extremely complex given the types of targets and the need to go undetected.

The military, however, whose main mission is warfighting and not foreign intelligence, isn’t always as concerned with being caught.

“We want to be able to train service members to be able to execute missions that fall into that different risk profile and be able to execute those missions earlier in their training and development than matriculating all the way through a very long, lengthy and quite difficult training model to become foreign intelligence certified on behalf of the NSA,” Stanton said. “Working in coordination with the NSA, just looking at where’s the right breakpoint, if you will, that allows a service member to then execute operations that fall under a different risk model and then subsequently continue their education to become certified at the NSA standard.”

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