The US military’s Cyber Command logo sticker on a silver laptop in Kyiv, Ukraine, on June 26, 2024. Integrating cyber operations into the US military has proved challenging, according to Mark Montgomery and Matthew Ferren. (Shutterstock/Mehaniq)

The US Military’s Cyberwarfare Challenge

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Since its inception, US Cyber Command has struggled to find its place within the US military.

Days after the United States launched Operation Epic Fury, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine described how US Cyber Command had been “layering” cyber effects with space and other non-kinetic capabilities to disrupt Iranian communications and sensors. The remarks came weeks after President Donald Trump implied that US forces used cyber effects to “turn out the lights” in support of the raid to capture Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Once a highly classified tool of espionage, cyber operations have emerged as a normal part of how the US military fights.

Despite the administration’s positive narrative, offensive cyber operations remain difficult to fit into the joint warfight. For a decade, US cyber forces have postured to disrupt malicious cyber threats below the level of armed conflict. The doctrine of persistent engagement, the delegation of authorities under NSPM-13, and the concentration of elite operators within the Cyber National Mission Force were all optimized to wield cyber as a standalone instrument. This posture enabled US Cyber Command to dismantle terrorist propaganda networks and disrupt ransomware gangs, but it is less well-suited to cyber’s emerging role as a combat enabler.

The US military needs to adapt how it plans, resources, and employs cyber effects to support joint operations across all domains. Cyber operations should become so tightly integrated that commanders can employ cyber effects as readily as they can call for kinetic fires or resupply. Iran and Venezuela are best understood as qualified successes, where cyber succeeded against less capable adversaries and with time to plan and rehearse. Against a peer competitor like China, deficiencies in how the US military currently develops joint plans, generates cyber forces, and employs them in joint operations will be exposed.

Challenge 1: Joint Planning with Cyber

Today, cyber effects remain inconsistently integrated into joint operational and contingency plans, particularly at the operational and tactical levels. Cyber is often confined to a domain-specific annex and poorly synchronized with activities in other domains. The US military’s planning process must overcome three barriers to integrating cyber effects. 

The first is reliability. Producing a cyber effect at the time and place a commander chooses requires gaining and holding access to a contested adversary system and fielding a payload that produces predictable effects on demand. Every weapon carries uncertainty—a missile can be intercepted, its guidance system jammed, or its warhead rendered a dud—but planners can measure the missile’s probability of success. Adversary defenses, the complexity of the target network, and the challenge of reliably generating real-world effects from a digital payload all introduce uncertainty into the planning cycle. While commanders are accustomed to planning for uncertainty, cyber’s uncertain probability makes it difficult to trust as a load-bearing element of a joint plan.

The second barrier is the lack of shared visibility. US Cyber Command and the NSA manage the most sensitive capabilities. There are inherent trade-offs between employing those capabilities and preserving them for intelligence collection or to support a different operational requirement. But centralization prevents theater commanders from seeing every cyber capability available to them. 

US Cyber Command embeds Cyber Operations-Integrated Planning Elements (CO-IPEs) in combatant command planning staffs to close this gap.........

© The National Interest