SecDef Should Crack Whip On Cyber, Drones, & Training Foreigners

[unhappycamper]

http://breakingdefense.com/2014/01/secdef-should-crack-whip-on-cyber-drones-training-foreigners/

SecDef Should Crack Whip On Cyber, Drones, & Training Foreigners
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
on January 24, 2014 at 4:39 PM

~snip~

Yesterday, four mid-grade military officers — one from each armed service – made a remarkable public recommendation to their boss, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel: It’s time to force the four services back into clearly demarcated “lanes” and reduce overlap between them as budgets shrink and competition escalates. They focused on three high-priority areas:

* Cybersecurity, the one area of the budget that’s actually growing. As a result, all four services are training “cyber warriors” and creating “cyber” units — but with no clear guidance from the Defense Department on which service should specialize in what, so everyone is doing a bit of everything. “The services risk building similar capabilities in different ways to conduct the same mission,” the co-authors write, “(with) significant duplication and overlap.” Their (tentative) solution: take away some of the services’ authority to “train, equip, and organize” cybersecurity personnel and give it to the interservice Cyber Command. That step would raise CYBERCOM to a status currently enjoyed only by Special Operations Command (SOCOM), halfway to being a full-scale independent service.

* Drones, aka “unmanned aircraft systems” (UAS). “Currently,” they write, “the four services are developing 15 separate UAS platforms of varying weights, speeds and altitudes” (see exhibits 1, 2, 3, and 4), as well as “42 separate UAS payload development programs… (and) 13 ground control stations.” While they stop short of a specific recommendation here, the co-authors do note regretfully that the current UAS Task Force lacks “authority over the services for programmatic consolidation or termination.” (Hint, hint?) They also speak approvingly of the much-derided 1947 Key West agreement, which among other things defined what kind of (manned) aircraft each service could fly.

* So-called Phase Zero Operations, in which US troops train foreign forces, conduct exercises with them, and even quietly help them secure their countries. Historically, Special Operations Forces did the small-scale, low-profile, long-term work in the shadows, while the four services occasionally showed up for big high-profile exercises. But after 9/11, the “Big Army” and Marine Corps both had to build up Afghan and Iraqi forces, expertise they don’t want to lose. Now now they are to some extent competing (my word, not the authors’) with each other and with SOCOM for Phase 0 business around the world, especially in the high-profile Pacific. “The Department of Defense needs to provide the services guidance on their primary mission responsibilities in Phase 0 operations,” the four officer write, “instead of letting the services make their own decision about the force size and mix required.”