For years, the Navy was the only service that didn’t have its own work role for cyber warriors conducting operations as part of its contribution to the cyber mission force, the teams each service provides to U.S. Cyber Command. Its cyber personnel were primarily resourced from its cryptologic warfare community — which is also responsible for signals intelligence, electronic warfare and information operations, among several mission sets — leading to a neglect in cyber and having a lack of institutional expertise both in the operations community and at top echelons of leadership, according to critics.

The fiscal 2023 annual defense policy bill directed the service to create a “designator” — the service’s parlance for officer work roles who are now maritime cyber warfare officers or MCWO — and a “rating” — the service’s terminology for enlisted work roles who are now cyber warfare technicians — solely for cyberspace matters.

With those work roles in place, and readiness of those forces beginning to improve, the Navy is now focusing on building out those roles and establishing a culture for which someone in the cyber field can rise all the way up to flag officer.

“The plan is to … start creating the baseline and the foundation for these officers to achieve a flag rank at some point, have the right schooling, have the right career paths to be able to command,” Vice Adm. Michael Vernazza, commander of Naval Information Forces, told reporters at the annual WEST conference.

Vernazza, as the “I-Boss,” is responsible for what the military calls the man, train and equip role for information warfare sailors, a category which cyber falls into.

He and other officials said as part of this career build out, the Navy created a new organization in Hawaii for its cyber operators, a task force that is still in the works and will have two task groups beneath it.

The task force will take the majority of cyber missions that are currently carried out under Navy Information Operations Command (NIOC) Pacific and move them to a dedicated cyber task force, according to a Fleet Cyber Command spokesperson.

Under the construct for how the Defense Department conducts cyber operations, each service cyber component commander also commands a Joint Force Headquarters-Cyber that is subordinate to Cybercom and is responsible for conducting and coordinating cyber operations for assigned combatant commands. The Navy, for example, is responsible for Indo-Pacific Command, Southern Command and U.S. Forces Korea.

The creation of the new task force will allow greater focus on both cyber operations and getting NIOC Pacific back to its traditional missions, the spokesperson said, which include a wide range of information warfare support to the Navy and the National Security Agency, such as signals intelligence.

The reason for the change, they added, is to allow greater focus and expertise to be applied to each mission.

“MCWO now aren’t going to do what cryptologists used to do. Cryptologists did EW, they did SIGINT, they did all kinds of RF analysis, and then, oh, by the way, you guys also go command the cyber teams. Can you imagine being a lieutenant or lieutenant commander and every single one of your tours is in a completely different domain and we expect you to be an expert? Not particularly helpful,” Vice Adm. Craig Clapperton, commander of 10th Fleet and Fleet Cyber Command, said during a presentation at the WEST conference. “Great job by the Navy and working with Congress, and now we have MCWOs. Well, MCWOs are going to do cyber and then they’re going to do cyber, and then right after that they’re going to do cyber.”

When Cybercom was first created it was closely nestled with NSA to rely on its infrastructure and expertise, locating many of the service operations centers along with the spy agency’s cryptologic centers spread throughout the country.

As the military cyber enterprise has matured, DOD has sought to let it stand more apart from its NSA and signals intelligence origins, albeit remaining closely linked for intelligence support.

The new task force, an organization change that won’t affect team operations and structures and will only impact cyber mission force teams and operations that previously reported to NIOC Pacific, will help build the career of MCWOs.

Clapperton said he is working with Vernazza on beginning to screen leaders for the offensive and defensive cyber teams.

The two task groups beneath the task force will have O-5s – or commanders in the Navy – with O-4s – or lieutenant commanders – screened working for them. Then there will be an O-6 – or captain – major command screened MCWO, Clapperton said, noting those personnel have already been identified and will be there by the summer.

“We’re building a career path for MCWO that they’ll do cyber and then cyber and then cyber, and they’ll be experts by the time they’re an O-5 or O-6 doing nothing but cyber with command and increasing responsibilities up the path. They’re going to be steely eyed killers,” he said. “Then we pick from that group of very talented post major command O-6s to be one-star MCWOs.”

Vernazza noted that there will be good movement on the cyber career field in 2025 with the creation of the task force and greater progression of the MCWO and cyber warfare overall.

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While readiness issues have plagued all the services’ contributions, the Navy faced the brunt of ire from former officials, outside experts, and namely, Congress.

The cyber mission force includes 133 offensive, defensive and support teams that conduct cyber operations for Cybercom. Each of the military services is responsible for providing personnel for a set number of teams to the organization, which then employs those forces in operations for the other geographic combatant commands.

Congress had grown concerned that the Navy’s forces were woefully inadequate.

“The readiness of the Cyber Mission Forces assigned to U.S. Cyber Command is substantially below acceptable levels. This shortfall is due primarily to the lack of sufficient numbers of personnel in each of the services in three critical work roles that are especially demanding: tool developers, exploitation analysts, and interactive on-net operators,” senators wrote in multiple questionnaries to prospective service chiefs last year.

At her confirmation hearing in September, the Navy’s top officer vowed to make cyber mission force readiness a top priority.

“The Navy remains fully committed to meeting DOD and USCYBERCOM Cyber Mission Force (CMF) requirements both in readiness and directed growth. We have prioritized fixing readiness while still aggressively working to grow the force,” Adm. Lisa Franchetti wrote in response to senators’ advance policy questions. “Our aggressive action to correct has turned the tide, and Navy readiness for Cyber is rapidly improving in order to meet the demands of U.S. Cyber Command.”

Following several initiatives, top Navy officials have asserted the service is on the right track.

“We’ve been able to make some really important advancements in how we’re approaching readiness and how we’re approaching talent management,” Vice Adm. Craig Clapperton, commander of Fleet Cyber Command, 10th Fleet, Navy Space Command, said at the annual WEST conference last week.

Battle rostering and training

Through efforts primarily from Naval Information Forces — responsible for providing trained sailors and equipment to forces in the information warfare arena — and its commander Vice. Adm. Kelly Aeschbach over the last couple of years, the Navy improved training and developed a dedicated cyber workforce.

“We really need for our cyber mission forces, we needed to develop a force generation engine. We were looking across man, train and equip areas,” Elizabeth Nashold, deputy commander of Naval Information Forces, said at the WEST conference.

Officials sought to get the manning levels of the teams to at least 90 percent, as mandated by Cybercom.

However, upon doing a deep dive, the Navy’s cyber community realized it was having an issue getting enough personnel fully trained onto the teams — a problem Clapperton referred to as a “battle roster” issue.

“We really started doing some analysis. Okay, where are all these people? Because big Navy was saying, ‘Well, I’m giving you most of what you want.’ And you never get all, but [from] big Navy perspective, ‘You’re getting the people, where are they?’” Clapperton told DefenseScoop in an interview. “We had a lot of people that were actually getting assigned to the teams that we could not, as we say battle roster, because they hadn’t had all the classes ahead of time.”

Each team under the CMF has to have a set number of total personnel to be considered fully manned. While a person may show up to their team, they require certain training and certifications in order to conduct real-world operations and be “battle rostered” on that team to count toward the manning numbers. If they don’t have the proper qualifications, despite actually being on the team, they can’t be counted.

The Navy began trying to improve its pipeline. Over the last two years, it performed a self-assessment of its cyber mission force contributions, which included lifting and shifting all training to the left in order for sailors to arrive fully trained, according to the service.

Cybercom in recent years has sought to move training to the left for all the services. When the cyber mission force was created in 2013 and up to now, there was a heavy reliance on on-the-job training, meaning personnel would get basic and intermediate training at their respective service schools based upon loose, joint standards Cybercom set forth. Once they arrived at their specific unit, they would need additional training because they weren’t ready for operations after schooling. That led to readiness concerns.

“Two years ago, the situation with training is that we were sending our sailors to the cyber mission force teams and they weren’t trained,” Nashold said. “They would go to the teams and then they would go get training. And so the readiness of the team suffered because they weren’t qualified.”

To address that problem, Clapperton said the Navy worked with Cybercom to federate that training across various installations or centers of excellence so sailors would have better access to it.

“That enabled us to start pulling training to the left so that when sailors got to the teams, they could in fact be battle rostered,” Clapperton said. “That really helped to improve our personnel numbers. As our personnel numbers went up and then as those guys were able to be battle rostered and get to the teams and then start moving through the quals once they got on the teams, then we started seeing their actual training numbers go up as well.”

Additionally, the Navy’s cyber community has had to work with big Navy, given the requirements set forth by Cybercom for manning teams. Clapperton said the Navy is largely platform based and a rotational force, and its teams normally aren’t manned to 90 percent.

But because the cyber force is engaged all the time, Cyber Command wants its teams constantly ready.

“That was a little bit of a sea change as well to say, ‘Hey, look, these teams need to be manned at 90-plus percent,’” Clapperton said. “We were targeting manning them traditionally within the Navy at 80 percent. And then you always fall, candidly, a little short of the targets. So we’re always in the high 70s. For our rotational force, that might seem like that’s okay, but for a force that has to be ready all the time, it wasn’t.”

He said there are commitments now from within the Navy to get those number up.

“Pulling the training to the left, manning the teams to 90 percent or above all the time, creating some training centers of excellence, and really focusing on that training so that as soon as they get to the teams, they can start moving forward — that’s had really marked improvements,” he said.

The Navy had established Cyber Qualification Training Teams along with its improvements to force generation for Cybercom, which will also better posture it to go from 40 cyber mission force teams to 44.

It was reported last year that the Navy was forced to adjust and scale back four additional teams it was slated to provide to the cyber mission force as part of authorized growth to the overall force. The military had not added any teams to the initial 133 envisioned when the CMF was created in 2013. The Department of Defense has authorized an additional 14 teams over five years, for which the Navy was to provide four.

Clapperton said with the adjustments to manning and training, the Navy is on track to add those additional teams again in coming years.

“I don’t have enough people battle rostered on the teams. It doesn’t make sense for me to spread that peanut butter even further and start failing to meet the battle roster numbers on more teams. I said, ‘Let me get to where I’ve adjusted my training and I’m battle rostering at that 80 to 90 percent on the teams I’m supposed to have, and then I’ll start filling those other teams,’” Clapperton said regarding discussions with Cybercom and the move to scale the build back. “We’re at that point now. It took us about a year, year-and-a-half to make that adjustment and catch up, but going forward, we’re going to start filling those other teams.”

Developing cyber-specific work roles

The other issue that impacted the readiness of the Navy’s cyber teams was the fact it was the only service that didm’t have a dedicated military role for cyber. Its cyber personnel are primarily resourced from its cryptologic warfare community — which is also responsible for signals intelligence, electronic warfare and information operations, among several mission sets — with additional roles resourced from information specialists and cyber warfare engineers. Cyber warfare engineers are not operators, but specialize in highly technical skills and development of tools.

Critics said this risked neglecting cyber and having a lack of institutional expertise both in the operations community and at top echelons of leadership. However, others in the community believe a cyber-specific work role is too limiting, which could lead to a lack of expertise across the entirety of the information warfare discipline.

In last year’s annual defense policy bill, Congress required the Navy to create specific cyber roles for its enlisted and officer ranks — a rating and designator, respectively, in Navy parlance.

In June 2023, the Navy announced the cyber warfare technician rating for sailors and the maritime cyber warfare officer designator for officers.

Clapperton said those have “dramatically increased our readiness over the last 12 months, and then even more so when you look at that over the last 24 months,” but it’s also too early to quantify exactly how much.

He did laud the decision’s importance for creating cyber experts within the Navy.

“This is going to enable both our enlisted and officer force to stay focused in cyber, instead of going across the entire breadth of” information warfare, he said at the conference. “It’s going to drive and force both those officer [and] enlisted personnel to stay primarily in cyber and to stay on target and to create the expertise that we need to defend ourselves and if necessary, be able to attack our adversaries in space and cyber.”

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The term “non-kinetic effects,” in Pentagon parlance, generally refers to capabilities that don’t blow up or explode such as cyber, electromagnetic spectrum, or space-based tools. They have come into sharper focus in recent years and the U.S. military has sought ways to expand their use and integration as a complement to more traditional weapon systems.

The Navy’s first cyber strategy, released in November, placed significant importance on non-kinetic capabilities for future warfighting, stating that they will be a deciding factor and those who effectively synchronize non-kinetic effects will have a decisive advantage on the battlefield.

“We have now matured that integration of our non-kinetic effects so significantly with the joint force maneuver that there isn’t a difference between what we do and what the traditional joint force and kinetic forces do. In fact, one can’t succeed without the other,” Vice Adm. Craig Clapperton, commander of Fleet Cyber Command, 10th Fleet and Navy Space Command, said last week at the annual WEST conference.

“We have worked very closely with [Indo-Pacific Command], [Pacific Fleet], U.S. Forces Korea and others across the Indo-Pacom theater to integrate these non-kinetic effects, synchronize them in a way that we have never been able to before, and then properly synchronize them into the joint force maneuver so that we’re providing greater battlespace awareness, we’re providing greater survivability and significantly improved targeting and lethality for the integrated force,” he added.

Clapperton, in an interview with DefenseScoop, stressed that what these teams can provide, and what the Navy is looking for, is more than just cyber tools.

“I think initially, everyone got too focused on that a non-kinetic team meant that we were going to do cyber specifically from a ship,” he said. “I’m not saying we’re not going to do that. When we talk about non-kinetic effects teams right now, cyber specifically from a ship, okay, that’s one thing, but there’s a dozen things.”

Those teams could include a mix of space, electronic warfare, and offensive and defensive cyber capabilities that can be deployed from a ship, airborne assets, fixed locations or expeditionary.

“The effects teams, I think you’re going to start seeing them be present in both deployable and expeditionary sites as well as traditional sites. You’re going to start to see more synchronization of the space, cyber and EW capabilities coming together,” Clapperton said.

This could take a variety of different directions. For example, it could be small watch teams of two to five sailors at a headquarters element operating under the authorities of Fleet Cyber Command, or a detachment of 30 to 50 sailors at an expeditionary location.

The Navy has been on a path in recent years to develop its own organic cyber forces and integrate them with additional non-kinetic capabilities.

In 2019, upon becoming the top officer in the Navy, now retired Adm. Micheal Gilday released a fragmentary operations order to the force directing, among many things, the creation of small tactical cyber teams for fleet commanders by 2020.

Last year, officials announced the intent to create fleet non-kinetic effects teams to augment afloat forces with information warfare capabilities.

U.S. Cyber Command owns the offensive cyber capabilities within the Department of Defense, and the services conduct offensive cyber ops through Cybercom and the cyber mission forces that each service provides to the command. Each of the services, in one way or another, has been developing forces and capabilities to deliver tactically focused, on-the-ground cyber and electronic warfare effects, known as radio frequency-enabled cyber.

Clapperton said some of the capabilities on the higher end could be similar to the combat mission teams (CMT) that the services provide to Cybercom — teams that conduct cyber operations on behalf of combatant commands, mostly in the offensive realm.

“Some of them might be more EW focused. Some of them might be more space focused. Then some of them might be EW focused that are not CMT trained, but might work very closely with a CMT mission element,” he said. “Maybe the CMT mission element is deployable with them, maybe they’re back at a traditional site. There’s 100 different ways to mix that combination together.”

As the Navy builds out these forces, Clapperton said it needs an enabling infrastructure between them and his headquarters, given he owns the authorities within the service.

“I don’t want a three-star headquarters trying to command and control, say, an O4 [detachment] across the globe. I need an O5, O6 command structure that enables and guides in between,” he said, referring to lieutenant commander, commander and captain levels in the Navy. “We’ll be following that as we work with [Naval Information Forces] and the Navy of exactly how we want to do the command structure that’s going to go in between it.”

That command-and-control and authority must flow back through Clapperton’s command, given the sensitive nature of many of these digital operations.

While there are some local or proximal effects and operations that cyber can perform, most of them occur beyond traditional geographic boundaries and must be carefully synchronized.

“The majority of those things tend to have effect in a much broader construct, across a significant piece of the [area of responsibility] or a joint operation area,” he said. “If given that that’s the case, you have to be very careful about letting a very small, hyper-focused tactical unit drive that kind of stuff. Because while it might seem like a great idea for them, well in the broader scape, hey, that wasn’t the right time to do it and had you synchronized that with other things and done it a little bit later, a little bit sooner, in a different way, it would have been more impactful. That’s why we get a little worried about trying to drive that down too far.”

Integration of space

While 10^th Fleet had been the Navy’s space entity for years, this past January it officially also became Navy Space, the service’s component for U.S. Space Command. Increasingly, space-based capabilities are falling into the fold of information warfare within the Defense Department. The Marine Corps has also made its cyber component its space component as well.

This approach from the Department of the Navy allows unique insights and integration of all these non-kinetic capabilities.

“From our perspective, bringing that space piece in with cyber — and I think MARFOR sees it in the same way, so in the naval perspective — that yes, it has forced us to think in a very integrated way. Hey, I don’t want to just look at a cyber aspect, I don’t want to just look at an EW or a space or in an information ops aspect. We have authorities across all of them,” Clapperton said. “Putting them all together has really forced us to do that and it sort of empowered us to do it in different ways.”

As Fleet Cyber is building out its space portion and bringing on space personnel — for which the office of the chief of naval operations approved missions, functions and tasks that are driving the manpower — it is seeking to build integrated firing elements to help operational organizations understand and integrate non-kinetic capabilities.

“These integrated firing elements would then be pushed forward to Echelon II and III headquarters and work with that staff,” Clapperton said, which could include a numbered fleet or even a combatant command staff. “The integrated firing element, that’s more of the operational planning and joint fires integration element. They should be in the planning of the O-Plan, they should be in the [concept of operations] development, the CON employment development and then no kidding, actual operationalization of it, but that’s at the staff level.”

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Non-kinetic effects, or capabilities that essentially don’t blow up or explode — such as cyber, electromagnetic spectrum or space-based tools — are often less understood than their kinetic counterparts. Commanders know what traditional types of weapons are capable of, as an exploding target can be easier to visualize than electronic warfare.

However, commanders may not always have these non-kinetic capabilities resident within their organization due to either authorities constraints or the fact they are more specialized and require unique units that might have to be assigned.

“If you don’t have the capability resident within your formation, then you have to call for fires. That’s part of the rehearsal is calling for fires. But what’s become clear to me in the world of … non-kinetic, cyber and space effects, [is] I don’t always know what those fires are or where to go to call for them or have any understanding,” Vice Adm. Michael Boyle, commander of 3rd Fleet, which has responsibility in the Pacific, said during the annual WEST conference. “We need to build the expertise within our headquarters to know what fires exist within the joint force. That’s in kinetic, non-kinetic, across joint capability and partner capability and beyond, and at any classification level.”

Boyle later noted that commanders and organizations don’t know what they don’t know, and they have to build expertise and liaisons to help educate people about the tools that are at their disposal.

“Whether it’s a carrier strike group, or a three-star headquarters or a four-star headquarters, within the planning element, they have to know what’s available, what’s the full capability,” Boyle told DefenseScoop, noting that calling for fires is nothing new within the military.

“If you’re a JTAC on the ground, a joint [terminal] air controller, who is supporting troops on the ground, you call for close air support from the sister service of the Air Force. I’m just talking about calling for close air support that may be a cyber effect, a space effect, an exquisite capability of a sister service. But I have to know that it exists,” he said.

Several years ago, the Navy created O-6 level information warfare commanders as permanent fixtures within carrier strike groups, with other pilots elsewhere in the force. The Marine Corps also created the Marine Corps Information Command at the beginning of 2023 to help integrate and explain non-kinetic capabilities and authorities across the globe.

However, Boyle said they’re stovepiped right now within the Navy, and in a future fight against a sophisticated adversary like China, the carrier strike group — the main fighting unit for the Navy in the past — might not be suitable on its own.

“I’m not saying that the carrier [strike group] doesn’t have applicability or capability. We just have to evolve in this maneuver fight. We’re no longer an island that’s being protected by our strike group. We are a maneuvering element of the fight and I want to be able to give the carrier strike commander battlespace to own,” he told DefenseScoop. “In some cases, it may be very limited because I am not authorized to push target engagement authority down to him. In other cases, I am, then he’s got to be able to plan and call for joint fires.”

Fleet Cyber Command/10^th Fleet, which is the Navy’s cyber organization and cyber component to U.S. Cyber Command, is working to build some of that expertise to send around to organizations within the cyber, information and space communities.

“Our goal really there is to create expertise … I need experts, not generalists when we’re going against the kinds of adversaries that we are with the capabilities that they have. We need people that can bring that expertise to bear,” Vice Adm. Craig Clapperton, commander of Fleet Cyber Command, 10th Fleet and Navy Space Command, said during the conference.

While 10^th Fleet had been the Navy’s space entity for years, this past January it officially also became Navy Space, the service’s component for U.S. Space Command. Increasingly, space and space-based capabilities are falling into the fold of information warfare within the Department of Defense, such as in the Navy and Marine Corps, including space in their cyber and information warfare commands.

As the command brings on its space personnel, for which the office of the chief of naval operations approved missions, functions and tasks that’s driving the manpower, they are seeking to build integrated firing elements to help organizations integrate non-kinetic capabilities.

“Pushing forward what I call integrated firing elements that are going to go around to the Echelon 2 and Echelon 3 staffs and then work to do exactly that. These are going to be specially trained people … There will be [warfare tactics instructors] within them, but they will also be a broader group,” Clapperton said. “Then they will rotate through these Echelon 2 and Echelon 3 staff to talk about exactly how we use space as a force multiplier for you and how we can work together to synchronize and integrate those capabilities.”

Clapperton noted that the final manpower assessment for space is not complete yet, but officials believe it could drive an increase within their staff by up to 250 people.

While the addition of Navy Space brings more responsibility to the command, Clapperton said it provides a boost when added to the other capabilities resident within the command.

“When you step back and look at it, the blending of those authorities and those capabilities, and then creating those experts in space, in cyber and information technology, and then bringing all of their skills together — it’s actually been really powerful and a force multiplier for us,” he said.

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