1st Information Operations Command was created in 2002. It provided red teams and opposing force capabilities against units that were training, and also offered the ability to synchronize information tools and prepare forces to resist adversary information warfare. It was slated for deactivation in the Army Force Structure Transformation (ARSTRUC) plan released in February 2024.

The decision to deactivate the organization was related to the decision to build three so-called Theater Information Advantage Detachments that will be 65-person teams focused on synchronizing information capabilities at the theater level: one in the Pacific, one in Europe and another that Army Cyber is orienting toward transregional threats.

Those organizations will be doing the day-to-day business of setting the conditions and informing commanders of the information environment.

That consolidation of capabilities meant the Army didn’t necessarily need 1st IO Command anymore.

“The inactivation of the command means the Army is turning a page. It doesn’t mean what the command has done is not still relevant, it just means we are going to do it a different way. 1st IO and IO writ large were created because the Army didn’t know how to integrate non-kinetics into the fight,” Col. Willie Rodney, who commanded the organization, said at the inactivation ceremony, according to the Army. “The rise of [multi-domain operations] demands the Army integrate the capabilities that are executed in domains other than air, land, and sea are in incorporated in the scheme of maneuver and the overall operations process. The need for IO is not going away with the command; rather, the Army is forcing it to be integrated throughout the service and its forces. Overall, it’s a step toward where we’ve always wanted/needed to go.”

Lt. Gen. Maria Barrett, commander of Army Cyber Command, said in an interview last year that the Army needs information operations. The service must understand the information environment and commanders need to integrate information advantage as part of their scheme of maneuver, both in campaigning and in conflict.

Those capabilities must be ready to go and not just be resident in small teams similar to what 1st IO Command was doing. Rather, they have to be bigger and more all-encompassing by complementing information with cyber and electronic warfare, among others.

“As we transition into the next era of Multi-Domain Operations, we carry forward the lessons learned and the expertise honed by 1st IO, ensuring that our cyber forces remain agile, resilient, and ready for the challenges ahead,” Barrett said at the inactivation ceremony.

The move also comes amid a broader cut in information operations forces, as some Defense Department leaders and members of Congress have warned of a void in the information space.

The Army was slated to slash upwards of 3,000 personnel from the special operations community, namely in psychological operations and civil affairs. Officials have previously noted that those cuts will hurt the joint force’s ability to be successful in conducting information ops.

Members of Congress have derided those cuts and have called on the Army to reevaluate its decision.

The Army’s decision “to cut 3,000 billets from Army Special Operations Forces [was] a decision that both the [Special Operations Command] and the [Indo-Pacific Command] commanders advised against. Last year’s National Defense Authorization Act prohibits the special operations forces cuts until the Army secretary completes an additional assessment. Would you agree to taking a closer look at reversing these cuts?” Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., asked Michael Obadal, the Trump administration’s nominee to be undersecretary of the Army, at his confirmation hearing on Thursday.

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In late February, the Army Force Structure Transformation (ARSTRUC) plan directed the activation of two more so-called expeditionary cyber and electromagnetic activities teams (ECTs) in the 11^th Cyber Battalion — a total of 90 authorizations — rounding out that battalion and an additional 390 authorizations for ECTs to begin building the 12^th Cyber Battalion, Lt. Gen. Maria Barrett, commander of Army Cyber Command, said in an interview with DefenseScoop.  

“We’re doubling down on what the expeditionary [Cyberspace and Electromagnetic Activities] teams have been doing to date. I think that is a good sign,” Barrett said.

The battalion provides tactical, on-the-ground cyber operations (mostly through radio-frequency effects), electronic warfare and information operations. The unit consists of four companies with over 300 personnel total and five ECTs — scalable formations designed to augment units upon request.

They’re expected to maneuver with units, plan tactical operations for commanders and conduct operations on the ground.

The decision to expand the teams — and the overall concept — comes after what initially began as a pilot effort over six years ago to test how the Army could integrate tactical cyber and electronic warfare effects for brigades on the ground without having to rely upon the remote, strategic resources of U.S. Cyber Command, which are not only in high demand but, at the time of the pilot, limited in authorities to conduct operations.

According to Army Cyber, based on lessons learned over the last five years, the command has refined the operational concept of the ECTs to account for Army doctrinal and organizational changes, now accounting for employment in competition as well as crisis and contingency scenarios. That feedback has included real-world operations — such as when, in the run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, an ECT was sent forward to Europe to support the Army’s regional theater headquarters to provide subject matter expertise in electronic warfare, information operations, and defensive cyber and offensive cyber planning — lessons learned from Ukraine and other regions, over two dozen combat training center rotations, multiple Warfighter and theater-level exercises, and the Project Convergence experimentation series. As the ECTs continue to mature, ARCYBER will refine their concepts of operations to provide better support and consequential effects to commanders, according to a spokesperson.

Integration with Special Operations Forces and space forces is one of several operational use cases for the ECTs. Going forward, most use cases — particularly in conflict — for the ECTs will involve their placement with conventional combined arms formations to provide specialized EW and cyberspace effects against operational and tactical targets at corps and below, the spokesperson added. Other use cases could involve integration with space and special operations forces under what the Army dubs the modern triad, a play on the nuclear triad consisting of the combination of space, special operations and cyber to create a deterrent effect greater than the sum of its parts.

The Army continues to experiment with the concept and how those forces can augment or support the operations of a division, including Summit Strike, a first-of-its-kind home station training event for 10^th Mountain Division to test and train multidomain operations and capabilities that took place Nov. 19-21.

11^th Cyber Battalion participated in the event to better understand how it fits into a division fight and what targets it can assist to create effects against and provide tactics they can bring back for their own training objectives in the future.  

“11^th Cyber is a tactical cyber unit and that is a first-of-its-kind ability or effect that the Army has to call on. There’s a lot of question on how that unit would actually come and like support a division,” said Capt. Sean Thorpe, 10^th Mountain Division CEMA officer in charge for 10^th Mountain Division. “11^th Cyber is able to gain access to certain unique enemy capabilities that are always on the high payoff target list for a division. Things that we want to destroy, so that way the enemy isn’t able to use those so they can support their maneuver units. 11th Cyber gives us the unique capability of providing access to those things so that we can provide cyber effects.”

The Army is examining appropriate command relationships to ensure that Army Cyber can employ trained ECTs with appropriate intelligence and authorities in support of theater Army missions for joint force commanders throughout the competition continuum, according to a spokesperson.

When the new battalion comes online, Barrett noted it will likely be a carbon copy of what the 11^th currently does. The Army is examining holistically how it does electronic warfare, what that looks like at the edge and what kind of capabilities it needs. Similarly, it is taking a look at whether it needs to make any adjustments in the new battalion, but those are all pre-decisional.  

Building information forces

Barrett said that from Army Cyber’s perspective, the ARSTRUC’s directions came in two buckets: to finish building the first cyber battalion and building the Theater Information Advantage Detachment. The latter is one of three organizations being developed by the Army to synchronize information capabilities at the theater level: one in the Pacific, one in Europe and another that Army Cyber is focusing on transregional threats.

As part of all these builds, the ARSTRUC is sunsetting 1^st Information Operations Command, which provides information operations support and training.

“Taking the success of realizing that we do need information operations. We need to understand this environment. Commanders need to integrate information advantage as part of their scheme of maneuver, both in campaigning and in conflict, and have those forces ready to go and not small teams being deployed out as 1st IO was doing,” Barrett said. “Instead of [that capability] just being focused on the information operations disciplines, we’re now complementing them with, it’s cyber, it’s IO, it’s EW, it’s fires. Bringing all of those competencies together to create this just really composite effects in the theaters or, as we take a look at global from an Army Cyber TIAD standpoint, transregional challenges in the information environment.”

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Since the creation of the cyber mission force — the teams each military service is responsible for providing a set number to Cybercom to employ for operations — over 10 years ago, personnel often wouldn’t get all the training they would need at their schoolhouse prior to arriving at their operational units. Rather, digital warriors would get additional on-the-job training upon arriving at their unit. This was a contributing factor to readiness issues that have plagued the cyber mission force across all the services.

Recently, however, Cybercom’s commander, Gen. Timothy Haugh, has noted marked improvements in readiness levels.

Army Cyber Command is trying to move that training to the left as part of its efforts to improve the preparedness of the forces it provides to Cybercom.

“Some of the other things that Gen. Haugh has been talking about, like training to the left, so that more of the soldiers in the CMF when they come out of the schoolhouse don’t require as much or any additional training in order to perform their work role,” Lt. Gen. Maria Barrett, commander of ARCYBER, said in an interview. “The Army, a while ago, aligned its coursework to do … all of the 1000-level tasks and as many of the 2000-level tasks as it could in order to do that. It just didn’t make any sense where we have the majority of the cyber forces in the CMF, why would we insert unique service requirements into the schoolhouse training? First take care of the joint requirements. There is a very strong alignment between the curriculum in the [Cyber Center of Excellence] and the requirements that Cyber Command has put out.”

Operational commanders who receive personnel from the services have to balance their operations with managing the workload directed at training, which is a difficult task, Barrett noted. They don’t want to focus so much on individual training, but rather, the collective training of their respective teams as a unit. She said going forward, they want to spend as little time as possible focusing on the individual training at the operational command and focus more on collective training or developing proficiency beyond basic.

Barrett explained that there are many factors that go into readiness and remedies for deficiencies, noting there is no “silver bullet.”

“There’s the schoolhouse to be considered, there’s the advanced training, there’s the number of ops that we do, there’s the number of trainers to sign off on the training. A whole bunch of things go into the readiness picture,” she said.

Army Cyber is continuing other efforts to improve the preparedness of its forces, some of which were initiated under Paul Nakasone, the previous Cybercom commander, according to Barrett.

Those include special pay for military personnel and civilians, something Haugh has lauded previously, and retention bonuses. Barrett explained that direct hiring authorities with Cyber Excepted Service have also improved readiness.

The Army will be doing five-year tours for cyber mission force members and enablers that perform intelligence, fires, or any other support for those teams.

“If your training pipeline, or some of the unique aspects of doing that discipline in cyber is a one to two years of training and certification, now we get three to four years on the backside of developing proficiency in those disciplines. I think that would be a huge win,” Barrett said.

This leads to deep proficiency in the work roles, something Haugh has talked about realizing for the force.

“It isn’t just about having a particular fill rate, or having people trained at a basic level. We need people at a senior and master level in order to really face the challenges that we think we’d be faced with in the future,” Barrett said.

Army Cyber is looking to instill these readiness fixes, all while continuing to build more teams. In the fiscal 2022 budget, Cybercom proposed and was eventually approved for a phased approach to add 14 additional teams beyond the original 133, adding teams for the first time since the cyber mission force was created. The Army is building four teams over a five-year period and has already seen two such teams achieve initial operating capability. Those teams are now supporting the cyber mission force, marking a significant milestone in enhancing the command’s cyber capabilities, according to an ARCYBER spokesperson.

“That’s a little bit of the challenge of increasing readiness across the rest of the CMF while you’re also growing teams, is we’ve been able to balance that, because that’s very difficult to increase your readiness while you’re growing at the same time. But the teams are on schedule in terms of where we expected them to be from an IOC and [full operating capability] standpoint,” Barrett said.

Regarding the employment of her cyber teams, Barrett declined to offer any specifics regarding operations in the Middle East, but she said they’ve been busy since Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas’ attack on Israel ramped up tensions and conflicts in the region.

Forces under Cybercom are employed for operations through what’s known as Joint Force Headquarters-Cyber. Each service cyber component commander is also the commander of a Joint Force Headquarters-Cyber and is responsible for operations for assigned combatant commands. For example, JFHQ-C Army is responsible for operations in U.S. Northern Command, Africa Command and Central Command, which covers the Middle East.

Hamas’ attack last year set off a new round of turmoil in the volatile region, which has included an all-out Israeli assault against the militant group and its backers such as Iran and its proxies to include Hezbollah in Lebanon. Additionally, the Houthis — a group backed by Tehran that has controlled portions of Yemen, including the capital, since 2014 — have been attacking U.S. military and commercial ships transiting the Red Sea.

“I do think the volatility of the region is something that we continue to keep our eye on. It is incumbent upon us to deliver both Gen. Haugh and [Central Command commander] Gen. [Michael] Kurilla as many options as possible to kind of try to reset that region. That’s first and foremost, I think. That’s what we’re trying to do is give them options where we can perhaps deescalate, make it more safe to transit the Red Sea,” Barrett said. “That’s what we’ve been really focused on doing.”

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The tool, dubbed Panoptic Junction or PJ, is part of the Defense Department’s solution to fulfill a key directive in President Joe Biden’s watershed artificial intelligence executive order that, among many tasks, directed the secretary of defense to develop plans for, conduct and complete an operational pilot to “identify, develop, test, evaluate and deploy AI capabilities, such as large-language models, to aid in the discovery and remediation of vulnerabilities in critical United States Government software, systems, and networks.”

Cybercom is leading that effort on behalf of the DOD and, in working with Army Cyber Command, designated its Panoptic Junction tool to fulfill that directive.

Following a months-long prototyping effort, it was determined that the tool effectively detected malicious traffic, according to Lt. Gen. Maria Barrett, commander of Army Cyber Command.

“We determined that any missed detections were either unsuccessful attacks or behaviors that could be categorized as benign,” she said in an interview.

Following those favorable prototype results, PJ will enter into a 12-month pilot for Cybercom taking observations from the prototype and focusing on improved integration, usability, system performance, enhanced analytics and false positive reduction, she added.

PJ’s primary goal is to enhance the detection of anomalous and malicious cyber activity — including living off the land — through scalable and continuous monitoring. It is seen as a significant step towards more effective digital security.

Living-off-the-land techniques have come into sharp focus with the May 2023 disclosure of a Chinese actor called Volt Typhoon. That threat has been found to have penetrated U.S. critical infrastructure systems at an unprecedented scale — over a year later, the government is still finding remnants — signaling a paradigm shift in China’s cyber actions.

PJ uses AI-driven, programmatic access to Enterprise Mission Assurance Support Service (EMASS), the platform for authorizing IT systems, and threat intelligence to identify what risks most apply to a specific enclave’s architecture. It delivers those priorities to a second set of AI-driven functions to conduct event log analysis and identify anomalies or malicious activity. PJ is novel in that it uses artificial intelligence to link EMASS with continuous cybersecurity monitoring tools.

Cybercom officials have lauded PJ in the past, describing it as effective, fast and agile.

“ARCYBER is piloting an AI, machine learning platform that will enable scalable, continuous security monitoring of networks and platforms. It analyzes system compliance, threat intelligence and streaming cyber event data, which will enable advanced detection of adversary activity, malware and anomalies at speeds that human analysts would not come close to,” Morgan Adamski, executive director of Cybercom, said at the CyberTalks conference in October. “But not only is it fast, it’s agile. It is rapidly taking the pulse of networks and assimilating threat information simultaneously, protecting networks in real time … It’s increased efficiencies in operations and maintenance. It’s improved our ability to identify risk and detect adversary activity. It’s … provided real -time hardening recommendations and improved the technical ability of our force.”

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With new forces and organizations beginning to take shape, the service is determining how it can apply military power across the spectrum of hostilities.

“The information dimension is a place [where] we are in a persistent conflict right now … It is going to be crucially important to us — how do we think through how to apply military power across the spectrum of conflict?” Lt. Gen. Maria Barrett, commander of Army Cyber Command, said during a presentation at an Association of the United States Army event on Tuesday. “We might reserve this discussion to, oh it’s just to conflict or just to crisis. But in fact, the competition space, this is where it’s happening now. If you think you’re going to deliver options to a commander, insights to a commander about the information dimension and you are not looking at it in the competition phase, whatever you are delivering in crisis and conflict probably will fall short. You need to be prepared to be operating across that spectrum.”

One reason it’s important to stay engaged is that the barrier to entry is very low in the information space, Barrett noted. Technologies and mediums such as social media make it easy for unsophisticated actors or tactics to have an impact. However, those tactics can be enhanced by ever-advancing capabilities that are becoming more prevalent.

“What happens when you have a very capable adversary that can make the investment in artificial intelligence, and what does that then do to the information dimension?” she said. “I think these are serious considerations for all of us and the fact that this particular dimension, again, activities will happen across the spectrum of conflict, below the threshold of war, it’s important for us to consider what is our role.”

Officials across the U.S. military, not just the Army, have been talking about the need to be present in this competition phase, short of armed conflict, for a few years. While the Pentagon has historically taken a binary approach of war or peace, adversaries have seen conflict as a fluid continuum. In recent years, they have sought to exploit the information space to achieve their objectives without using traditional military capabilities.

Officials said some of this isn’t all that unfamiliar and it boils down to being able to map the environment with commercially available information ahead of time while keeping in place protections for U.S. persons.

“Commercially available information, publicly available information — those are areas where you can start to get a sense of what the information environment looks like, how the adversary uses it, what kind of tools they use. It’s actually something that you can start to map,” Barrett told reporters following the event. “Something that is actually in our wheelhouse to do is mapping networks. I do think this is something that will come easier to us in terms of mapping data.”

This includes being able to understand target audiences, what languages they speak, how they communicate, what social media platforms they use, and whether they’re pro or anti-U.S. or they support or oppose certain actors or other nations.

Officials also explained that if forces want to put a concept or an operation forward for approval, the work needs to be done on the front end to be able to determine how it will be carried out based on the intelligence and what’s known.

“If you go to a geographic combatant commander and say, ‘I want to conduct information operations,’ you’ll walk right back out of the headquarters having achieved nothing,” Maj. Gen. Paul Stanton, commander of the Cyber Center of Excellence, said at the AUSA event. “In contrast, if you’ve done your planning, you’ve done your homework and you walk in and say, ‘Here is the very specific objective that I am attempting to achieve, this is how it nests into my campaign plan that supports your campaign plan as the geographic combatant commander,’ that’s a fundamentally different conversation.”

New forces

The planning and expertise to be able to enable these operations comes from the Army’s Theater Information Advantage Detachments, 65-person teams focused on synchronizing information capabilities at the theater level.

The Army recently approved the force structure for three such organizations: one in the Pacific, one in Europe and a transregional one with Army Cyber Command.

Officials explained they will be doing the day-to-day business of setting the conditions and informing commanders of the information environment.

“This is all for the purpose of enabling commanders to visualize and decide and again synchronize these effects that they could have in this dimension much better than they can today,” Barrett said.

Those TIADs will be taking what might be abstract to something concrete.

“The TIAD has to do all detailed planning, they have to do the data collection, they have to get the approvals in order to execute mission, and then they have to do the appropriate assessment of effectiveness after the fact,” Stanton told reporters.

He noted that while not there yet, the detachments are likely headed towards collaborating more with international partners in their regions to share information on potential threats.

One of the main reasons this type of formation must exist at the theater Army level, is because that’s where many of the authorities exist and coordination between other nations’ militaries and diplomatic officials occurs at the theater level.

“We need to develop the right very detailed plan and walk that forward through the interagency and other governmental organizations for the right approval to say, ‘OK, in this particular case, based off of the specifics that you described, we should establish an information-sharing agreement with the host nation because of dependencies on the execution of our mission on their operating environment.’ I absolutely believe that there’s space for that conversation [but] we’re not doing it currently,” Stanton said.

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Unveiled last year, the Army has begun exercising and demonstrating this concept in which its components pair their unique capabilities that span across the globe to provide integrated packages for commanders.

“The reason we coalesced around the term ‘triad’ because it means so many things. Again, anyone who’s our age or older can remember the … ’60s, ’70s, ’80s — all that of where ‘triad’ just meant so many different things. It meant deterrence theory, it meant the three different legs of the [nuclear] triad, it meant tactics, techniques and procedures, it meant developing actual weapons systems, it meant contributing towards deterrence theory,” Lt. Gen. Jon Braga commander of Army Special Operations Command, said during a presentation at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium on Tuesday.

He continued: “My proposal is that the same thing is needed today in competition … from the modern day triad, because our adversaries are actually using against us to impose doubt and cost and coerce — in some cases, [to] assure their own friendly network, but certainly to deter us from actions.”

Unlike the United States, which has long viewed conflict under the binary states of war and peace, adversaries have viewed it as a continuum seeking to achieve their objectives without firing a shot. As such, America’s competitors have begun to be more active in this gray zone sphere, leveraging non-kinetic capabilities such as cyber, electronic warfare, intelligence, information and influence operations in order to subvert the U.S. and its allies, officials say.

The new modern triad is one way the military has sought to address this paradigm shift and provide commanders additional capabilities to combat adversary activity.

In February, the Joint Staff published a concept for competing in this gray zone or competition space, formally recognizing the Department of Defense is engaged in a competition on a daily basis below the threshold of all-out war or conflict.

Braga noted that from observations in Ukraine, there has been an ongoing game of escalation as new capabilities and offensives are presented.

The capabilities of the triad can help manage escalation and possibly deter actions — either below the threshold of conflict or during conflict — or prevent situations from getting worse, he suggested.

“When you bring on a new piece of equipment, a new weapon system, a new technique, it’s a question every time for policymakers: ‘Are you contributing towards escalation or towards deterrence?’” he said. “We have to be better at developing those capabilities for the policymakers and being able to deliver on those effects in order to make informed decisions that we look at a larger contribution to actually strategic deterrence there.”

Braga is concerned about not only winning potential high-end conflicts, but also preventing them from breaking out in the first place.

“That’s what’s before us,” he said. “I really think the weight of that burden, while not 100% on the legs of the triad, we certainly have a major role to play in that, an outsized ability to influence and prevent and contribute towards deterrence in this modern day triad.”

For a real-world example of how these capabilities have demonstrated tangible results, Braga pointed to Ukraine.

“Jump forward to Ukraine and look at everything from one-way attack drones to the use of satellite communications to help assist with deep sensing, the use of cyber effects, … information ops,” he said. “Sixteen-thousand Russian soldiers have deserted, 16,000 have been taken off the battlefield without having to expend kinetic rounds. That’s by a combination of effects, delivery effects, I would suggest, that have been assisted by space capability, cyber capability, human capability and just old-school information operations there. That’s a dramatic effect. That has few comparisons even dating back to some old information ops in our World War II chapters when we worked very closely with our Brit partners there.”

Others have noted that the capabilities the triad can provide to commanders and policymakers will present new and more complex problems to adversaries.

“When confronted with a constantly changing situation, then our leaders can employ the triad to create new combinations of capabilities, methods and effects to pose new dilemmas for the adversaries,” Lt. Gen. Daniel Karbler, commander of Army Space and Missile Defense Command, said. “The triad is valuable in competition as commanders have to consider the possibility that overt military action may escalate towards armed conflict … The combined use of space, cyber and SOF capabilities provides other options to commanders that are less likely to cause escalation. Triad capabilities can provide commanders with options to defeat, destroy, disrupt, or manipulate energy networks, information and decision-making.”

Karbler noted that the triad has advanced beyond concept and the Army’s components have been exercising it and developing tactics.

“When you look at what the triad demonstrates and its ability to integrate, synchronize space, cyber, SOF capabilities at the most effective tactical echelon, and then it expands options for creating advantages to exploit — that’s what commanders are looking for. That’s what our ground commanders [are] looking for. That’s what the joint force is looking for,” he said.

At the four-star, joint combatant command level, U.S. Special Operations Command has begun to take note of what the Army components have done and is examining it to see if it applies to its mission.

The other services haven’t exactly created a formalized “triad” to date, though officials pointed to the fact that Marine Corps Forces Cyberspace Command also serves as the service’s space component. It also conducts cyber operations for Socom through its responsibilities to U.S. Cyber Command under what’s known as Joint Force Headquarters-Cyber Marines.

For its part, the Navy’s 10^th Fleet/Fleet Cyber Command is also the service component for space as well, taking an integrated approach to cyber and space capabilities.

Non-kinetic capabilities can help provide commanders a greater understanding of the battlespace to make more informed decisions.

“One of the biggest things that I think from my perspective, when I’m thinking about the competition sphere, is what can I produce for Gen. Braga and Gen. Karbler in terms of situational understanding of what the environment might look like,” Lt. Gen. Maria Barrett, commander of Army Cyber Command, said. “It could be the cyberspace environment, it could be the electronic warfare environment, it could be the information operations environment.”

Conversely, those leaders could bring their insights to Army Cyber, which through its big data platform can make sense of the information from sensors and data sources.

“If you’ve got a big data platform that can do things at a classified and unclassified level and I can take things off of sensors that … produce something that is then layered and makes sense, now you have an understanding of what is happening in the competition space at a level that maybe previously you did not have,” Barrett said. “That sets the conditions for delivering effects in crisis and conflict.”

While there aren’t any overt examples from the U.S. side of the triad’s uses or successes, likely given the classified nature of these operations and capabilities, Barrett noted that she’s seen practical examples within Central Command.

Officials noted that each component of the triad won’t always be featured equally. Depending on the situation or problem, it could be one or two that play a bigger role.

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“Secretary [Christine] Wormuth said the No. 1 thing, the No. 1 thing the Army of 2030 needs to do is to see more, faster, farther and more consistently at every echelon than our adversaries,” Lt. Gen. Jonathan Braga, commander of Army Special Operations Command, said at the annual AUSA convention earlier this week. “The cyber, space, [Special Operations Forces] triad does exactly this by providing the joint force with the enhanced capability to rapidly see, sense, stimulate, strike, assess and effect across the spectrum from integrated deterrence during competition to high-end conflict.”

The U.S. nuclear triad — which consists of bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles and ballistic missile submarines — that emerged during the Cold War era was geared toward strategic deterrence. The Army’s new modern triad is aimed more at contesting malign adversary activity occurring on a daily basis by integrating and converging the unique capabilities of each component.

Braga said the modern triad isn’t meant to replace the nuclear one, but rather, enhance integrated deterrence — a key pillar of the Biden administration’s national defense strategy — by providing more options for policymakers.

“It is our professional responsibility to provide our best military advice to policymakers that would contribute to deterrence perhaps in a different way,” he said. “Cyber, space and SOF all possess … unique but independent capabilities. Each component can rapidly gain intelligence, attack critical vulnerabilities. And we must leverage all of these components in order to impose doubt, cost … upon our adversaries.”

What is less clear is, however, is how these capabilities will be integrated and provided to joint commanders when needed.

“I would say that’s part of the experimentation,” Braga told reporters when asked what this triad looks like in practice and how it integrates its capabilities on the battlefield for commanders. “Right now we have SOF, space and cyber working side by side. We’ve done this recently, physically co-located in Fort Bragg. We’re physically working together in support [of] Project Convergence as well and have been doing that the last year. And then there’s other exercises that we’ve been doing … I’d say it’s been both episodic and then we’ve been growing in physical co-location of different entities.”

Others explained that it depends on the mission.

“If you’re doing Project Convergence, you’re going to be out at their ops center. If we’re supporting one of [Braga’s] operations, we’re going to be co-located at Fort Bragg,” Lt. Gen. Maria Barrett, commander of Army Cyber Command, told reporters.

Project Convergence is the Army’s campaign of learning that is intended to facilitate Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2).

The Army’s new multi-domain operations doctrine, which was officially unveiled this week, directs the service to combine and integrate land, air, maritime, space and cyber in all facets of operations.

Officials also explained that given each entity of the triad is essentially global and works for global combatant commands, they are joint by nature and must work across services and interagency, which is especially important in the cyber realm.

While Army Cyber Command provides high-end cyber operators to conduct operations on behalf of U.S. Cyber Command, it only is responsible for conducting those ops for a select number of combatant commands — Central Command, Africa Command and Northern Command.

Offensive cyber capabilities are conducted on behalf of Cybercom through what’s known as Joint Force Headquarters-Cyber. These entities provide planning, targeting, intelligence and other cyber capabilities to the combatant commands to which they’re assigned. The heads of the four service cyber components also lead their respective JFHQ-C. These organizations oversee combat mission teams and combat support teams.

Army Cyber does, however, provide tactically focused cyber and electronic warfare personnel globally through the 915^th Cyber Warfare Battalion that conducts more proximal radio-frequency types of operations, and has global control and oversight of the Army’s portion of the Department of Defense Information Network.

When it comes to the unique capabilities each component of the triad provides, leaders described how SOF provides irregular warfare, Army Cyber provides increased awareness and intelligence to the network along with integrated cyber, electronic warfare and influence packages, while Space and Missile Defense Command provides space capabilities and intelligence at the theater level.

Army Special Operations Command is creating a two-star headquarters at 1^st Special Forces Command on irregular warfare, transforming headquarters elements to converge on adversaries. Additionally, 1^st Special Forces Command is experimenting with a deployable two-star special operations joint task force headquarters to better interoperate with the joint force during high-end conflict. Exercises are slated for next summer in the Indo-Pacific, Braga said.

Meanwhile, Army Cyber Command provides insight to commanders on what their battlespace looks like from a digital perspective.

“How well are your networks responding, what does the attack surface look like, what does the influence sphere look like, what are the trends that the adversary is doing in that information sphere, and so on and so forth,” Barrett said. “What I really think Army Cyber delivers are some comparative advantages of a few key areas … There is a track record of integrating cyber, EW and influence operations. We’ve done it before. Now we can deliver this to my partners over here having the reps and sets of doing that.”

Space and Missile Defense Command assists with space-based intelligence.

“When integrated with SOF and cyber, whether that’s the accesses that each of those commanders can provide us, whether it’s space capabilities that I’m going to provide them, it’s going to have a deterrent effect on the adversary and it will provide non-lethal effects to our adversaries,” Lt. Gen. Daniel Karbler, commander of Space and Missile Defense Command, said. “When we talk about active campaigning, we look at what we’re also able to provide intel support to space, provide that information, whether it’s to SOF or whether it’s to cyber or whether it’s to supported commander.”

Moreover, by integrating capabilities, units that deploy forward can help provide additional intelligence and access needed for another unit, creating a more holistic and even symbiotic relationship with increased capability for commanders, officials say.

“There are some places that they go that maybe I can’t get to. This is where I would say, ‘Hey, can you get me close to something so that I can do X, Y and Z?’” Barrett said. “They offer me a positional advantage and then can I let then see the environment in a way then perhaps they were not able to do — or if they’re downrange and a special operator perhaps doesn’t have the time to take a look at all the data that we’re seeing, can I offer him something very fast and very informative to his team’s decision-making that might inform their operations?”

When pressed to provide specific examples of how the triad has performed, officials declined to offer a recent example — likely for classification reasons — but referenced the counter-ISIS fight during the mid-2010s.

Joint Task Force Ares was part of the campaign in which Cybercom sought to not only attack ISIS through cyberspace, but also to integrate cyber effects into battlefield operations.

“We combined lethal and non-lethal effects for much, much more of a holistic effect that provided the gains on the ground in the physical domain, but it also provided gains in the information domain that both Cyber Command was able to do with non-lethal means. And then there were some kinetic means that were put into effect for exponentially more impact and actually had an even larger impact than any of us actually expected and predicted before we went down that journey together,” Braga said.

“That’s really informed a lot of my thinking going forward,” he added. “Combining [cyber capabilities] with actions to the maneuver force on the ground, I think this really was groundbreaking for leading a lot of different thoughts for how the maneuver force could actually employ this in combined arms maneuver and in a very kinetic fight. But combining those two together I think has shaped a lot of thought moving forward.”

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Last week, the Army announced this new triad between Army Cyber Command, Army Space and Missile Defense Command and Army Special Operations Command, which aims to to deliver more options to commanders in an integrated fashion.

“Probably the biggest contribution was one being able to take a fusion of traditional intelligence and what we were seeing publicly available information, in order to inform the commander forward of what we were seeing,” Lt. Gen. Maria Barrett, commander of Army Cyber Command, said during a presentation at the TechNet Augusta conference Wednesday.

Adversaries are globally focused, and so is the Army.

“Three operational units with unique authorities and capabilities — and we see the globe,” she said. “We were seeing some things in the electromagnetic spectrum, we were seeing things in the information environment and we were able to provide that back very quickly because of the Big Data Platform and the [Cyber Military Intelligence Group], that intelligence group, being able to turn that pretty quickly.”

The Cyber Military Intelligence Group (CMIG) directs, synchronizes and coordinates intelligence support for cyber, information and electronic warfare operations while also providing support to U.S. Cyber Command and other combatant commands. It was created to perform functions not found anywhere else within the Army or intel community, and blend open source information with military intelligence.

Big data platforms exist across U.S. Cyber Command, the Defense Information Systems Agency, Army Cyber Command and the Marine Corps. They are essentially hybrid cloud environments that allow for storage, computation and analytics across networked sensors. When forces conduct cyber missions, they collect data and use high-powered analytics to make sense of it. Big data platforms do just that, but also share that analysis in an easy-to-access repository for other forces. The Army’s version is called Gabriel Nimbus.

The CMIG is already having tangible effects despite being so new.

“I have been absolutely impressed with how quickly they can take an RFI from myself or from Cyber Command on a particular subject and pull that information together into a report,” Barrett said. “You might think that serialized reporting takes a long time. These guys are turning this pretty quick. [It’s] pretty valuable.”

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Lt. Gen. Maria Barrett, commander of Army Cyber Command, told an audience at the TechNet Augusta conference Wednesday that the service is dedicated to beefing up the force in support of geographic combatant commands’ missions and the priorities of the National Defense Strategy.

Barrett also noted that these two teams will be followed by two additional teams that will be stood up this year for Cybercom.

Cyber Command has been approved to grow its cyber mission force in recent years from the initial 133 teams that conduct defensive, offensive and support missions.

“Between FY22-FY24, we expect the CMF presence to continue to evolve. In FY22 — 4 teams [will be added] and in FY23 — 5 teams, for a total of 142 teams,” a Cybercom spokesperson told FedScoop.

The majority of new cyber mission force teams will come from the Army and Air Force and consist of a variety of mission sets, though it is too early to tell where exactly they’ll be assigned, according to the spokesperson.

The Army has approved significant growth for its cyber and electronic warfare force. In 2018, the Army folded electronic warfare personnel into the cyber branch converging around an emerging concept the service called cyber and electromagnetic activities, or CEMA. For the high-end personnel, the schoolhouse would send them to the cyber mission force at Cyber Command. However, others will learn foundational concepts of cyberspace and the electromagnetic spectrum and could serve in new tactical electronic warfare units or in integrated cyber, electronic warfare and information operations units, as well as staff sections.

Offensive cyber forces conduct operations under what’s known as Joint Force Headquarters-Cyber, which provide planning, targeting, intelligence and cyber capabilities to the combatant commands to which they’re assigned. The heads of the four service cyber components also lead their respective JFHQ-C and oversee the cyber teams that conduct operations for the combatant commands.

Army Cyber Command is responsible for U.S. Africa Command, Central Command and Northern Command.

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