[Infowarrior] - Fwd: USAF cyber hiring binge

[Richard Forno]

c/o DOD (no, not that one.  ---rick)

Begin forwarded message:

> http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?List=7c996
> cd7%2Dcbb4%2D4018%2Dbaf8%2D8825eada7aa2&ID=1026
> 
> 
> 1/17/2013
> Air Force Cyber-Operations Wing to Go on Hiring Binge
> By Stew Magnuson
> 
> In a time of hiring freezes and great budget uncertainty, the Air Force
> plans to hire more than 1,000 personnel at its wing devoted to
> cyber-operations.
> 
> The 24th Air Force, located at Lackland Air Force Base, in San Antonio,
> Texas, will “hopefully” add “well over” 1,000 mostly civilian new hires over
> the span of two years beginning in 2014, Gen. William Shelton, Air Force
> Space Command commander told reporters in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 17.
> 
> The mostly civilian new hires will be added to the approximately 6,000
> already serving there, Shelton said. The “hopefully” part of the equation
> has to do with current civilian hiring freezes that the military services
> are currently imposing because of the possibility of sequestration and the
> continuing budget resolution for fiscal year 2013. Shelton, however, is
> optimistic that these will all be in the past by next fiscal year.
> 
> He expects the office of the secretary of defense to order Space Command to
> add the new hires in its 2014 directions, Shelton said. The request to boost
> the number of personnel assigned there, however, originates at U.S. Cyber
> Command. The 24th Air Force is the service’s component that answers to the
> Cyber Command located at Fort Meade, Md.
> 
> “If it turns out the way we think it’s going to turn out, we think it will
> be on the order of 70 to 80 percent civilian,” hires, he said. They will be
> involved in all aspects of the 24th Air Force’s cybermission: defend,
> operate, exploit and attack, he said.
> 
> Cyberspace is a double-edge sword, he said. The U.S. military endures
> millions of probes against its networks every day. Most — close to 100
> percent, he asserted — are not successful. But the Air Force is also using
> the Internet to do its own intelligence gathering.
> 
> “It is not a whole substitute — but certainly darn near a substitute  — for
> human intelligence activity. There are things you can get to from a computer
> network … that in the past would have been very hard to collect,” he said.
> This is done through the authorities of the National Security Agency, but
> with the services participating, he said.
> 
> “Attack is [a capability] that we have developed, and certainly at the
> direction of the national command authority, we have the capabilities there
> and ready,” he said. As for the type of cyberweapons used, he only said,
> “Let your mind wander.”
> 
> On the space side, the command is struggling to determine how to maintain
> its critical functions in a time of “tremendous” uncertainties, Shelton
> said. The main uncertainty is the budget. The continuing resolution means
> there are no new program starts this calendar year, and it makes planning
> for 2014 all the more difficult. It is also unclear how many troops the
> command will need to serve in Afghanistan beyond next year.
> 
> “This is the worst I have seen in it in 36 and half years,” he said of the
> budget battles. “It is irritating.”
> 
> The capabilities Space Command provides are critical, he said. They underpin
> the forces and enable them to fight the way they fight today, he said.
> Communications, GPS and remote sensing satellite fleets need to be protected
> from the budget ax, or they can’t carry out their missions effectively, he
> said. The command can’t just cut one spacecraft out of the budget and expect
> to have global coverage.
> 
> “The challenge is to protect that level of service, if you will, with a
> budget that is coming down,” he said.
> 
> The Joint Space Operations Center at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif.,
> which provides command and control for all the space missions, is “way
> overdue” for modernization, he said. There is a space surveillance mainframe
> computer there that hasn’t had a software upgrade since 1994, he added.
> 
> Space Command is conducting a series of studies to determine how it can
> achieve its mission under the new budget paradigms. There are plans to put
> some of its payloads aboard commercial or civilian spacecraft. Known as
> hosted payloads, the command plans to release a contract that will help make
> this procedure easier by the end of the calendar year.
> 
> Satellites may also be smaller. GPS satellites, for example, now currently
> carry nuclear detonation sensor payloads. The command wants to launch a
> stripped down, navigation-only spacecraft that will boost the system’s
> capabilities, particularly in so-called urban canyons where signals aren’t
> as robust.
> 
> How Space Command achieves its missions will be  “fundamentally different,”
> in the future, he said.

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Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it.