Your Navy: Focused on the fight in the cyber domain

In the spirit of National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, I would like to bring the Navy’s efforts in the cyber domain to the forefront. When it comes to the cyber mission, the Navy must be a hard target, a good ally, and a bad enemy to meet the challenges presented by our competitors.

While the Navy has made significant progress within the cyber domain, much more work needs to be done and I welcome the constructive public debate surrounding the Navy’s cyber posture. In truth, our cyber workforce must constantly innovate to maintain the competitive edge.

The challenges our Navy faces today in cyberspace requires honest self-assessment and self-correction when we are off course. It’s what I expect from Navy leaders at all levels, and I assure you, we are actively doing both.

My mission as the Principal Cyber Advisor is to drive excellence across all aspects of the Department of the Navy’s cyber security, cyber resiliency, and cyber warfighting efforts. How we organize, resource, and coordinate our cyberspace activities impacts nearly every aspect of the Navy’s operations, so there is no room for failure.

Cyber readiness is mission readiness and the Chief of Naval Operations, Adm. Michael Gilday, identified readiness as the Navy’s top priority in the 2022. Accordingly, we are working swiftly to improve the readiness of the cyber forces we provide to the Joint Force.

Over the past two years, Navy senior leaders completed a comprehensive review of Navy cyber mission forces and are transforming how we man, train, and equip these forces. In short, our new process will vastly reduce the time to present fully trained and qualified cyberspace operations forces.

Thankfully, the well-known foundations of readiness generation, learned over decades of producing ships, submarines, and aircraft, are equally foundational to delivering next generation cyber forces. By tailoring traditional force generation methods to account for the complexities of the cyber domain, Navy leadership have charted a course to efficient cyber force generation.

Naval Information Forces (NAVIFOR) is reemphasizing the importance of cyber training and qualification. Key actions include increased efforts to screen for and identify cyber aptitude, as well as reorganizing the core cyber workforce to enable sailors to remain focused on the cyber mission throughout their careers. Most importantly, we are reducing the time associated with initial cyber training and adding distributed learning capabilities to greatly increase the number of sailors provided to the fleet.

Additional training improvements are underway in the Navy’s cyber community. Our operators actively leverage the Persistent Cyber Training Environment (PCTE), which houses training, qualification, and virtualized mission rehearsals. The PCTE also provides these capabilities to joint cyberspace operators and analysts around the globe. Our Navy Cyber Warrant Officers are leading the development of PCTE content at the tactical level and developing training capabilities for defensive cyberspace operators and analysts yielding thousands of hours of training and assessment.

There are no overnight solutions to our challenges. We are increasing our cyber proficiency across the entirety of the domain every day, including traditional cybersecurity as well as cyber resiliency and warfighting. All the initiatives I’ve mentioned, including many others underway, are the direct result of Navy leaders recognizing our shortfalls as well as the growing need to provide many more fully-trained and capable cyber professionals to join the fight in cyberspace. We need to continue to recognize shortfalls, and we need to have candid conversations about how the Navy can continue to improve.

Improving cyber readiness is a top priority for the Navy, and we have assembled a fantastic team to coordinate our efforts in cyberspace. Failure in this domain is not an option. I am confident that our sailors, civilians, and contractors will enable us to produce success at scale. We greatly appreciate the support of our many partners as we continue to increase our competitiveness in cyberspace.

Chris Cleary is the Principal Cyber Advisor at the Department of the Navy