The provisional commander of the U.S. Air Force’s nascent cyber command suggests the U.S. military may need to rethink — and essentially loosen — its definition of uniformed personnel, as well as streamline and quicken its acquisition processes to meet growing cyberwarfare needs.

“Perhaps we need a different kind of warrior in this domain,” Maj. Gen. William Lord told a Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) audience. “Today, all of our armed forces have a physical fitness test that requires us to ... meet some physical fitness standards.

“How do you attract the brains of some of this crowd that you might not want to wire up to a polygraph, but yet use their ... wonderful innovative ability? But they’re not the same kind of folks that perhaps you want to march to breakfast in the morning,” Lord said March 31.

In a free-flowing discussion with audience participants, Lord further said that the military may have to open up about cyberwar attacks that are already occurring so that more commercial and public attention can be brought to the subject, and help meet what are expected to be daunting challenges (Aerospace DAILY, Dec. 6, 2007).

“Part of it has to be a willingness to talk about it in a little broader circles than we have been willing to talk about it in the past,” Lord said.

Pentagon officials have named cyber attacks from China as a growing concern. But cybersecurity worries have blossomed throughout the Bush administration to the point that the White House has launched a new initiative and submitted a significant fiscal 2009 budget request for such efforts.

The attacks do not just target DOD or other government agencies. Last August, 28 defense contractor sites in the United States were targeted, mostly from China, with primarily e-mail attacks using false attachments that had malicious code embedded, according to Air Force Col. Jeffrey Kendall, the CFR military fellow who hosted Lord’s breakfast.

Meanwhile, Gen. C. Robert “Bob” Kehler, head of Air Force Space Command, told reporters April 1 that the Air Force is increasingly adopting a strong cybersecurity element to its classic air and space missions. A recent paper from the Air Force’s chief of staff asserted that to lose control of one realm was to lose dominance of them all, Kehler said.

Kehler said ground-link nodes of space-related assets needed particular attention under further security efforts. With GPS-jamming and laser-dazzling equipment commercially available worldwide, even a terrorist group in the western Pacific has targeted communications satellites, according to Kehler. “The proliferation of jamming technology is pretty wide,” he said.

Photo: AW&ST