U.S. Air Force to train hundreds yearly in cyber warfare skills
As the U.S. Air Force becomes more dependent on information and networks, it needs more officers trained in cyber warfare — both to protect U.S. cuber systems, and do damage to the adversary’s systems
The U.S. Air Force has launched a cyber warfare training program. Air Education and Training Command officials expect “Undergraduate Cyber Warfare Training” will be about 100 days long. They also estimate “Cyber 100,” a professional continuing education course, will be about 10 days. The two courses are linked. “They will be placed at the same location because once they graduate from the UCWT, they will stay for the 10-day course,” Col. Lee Pittman, chief of the technical training division for AETC, said.
The Standard-Times’s Trish Choate writes that the Air Force will also bring in other students for Cyber 100, the 10-day course, bringing them all together, Pittman said.
Three air force bases — Goodfellow Air Force Base in San Angelo, Texas, Sheppard Air Force Base in Wichita Falls, Kansas, and Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi —are in the running to be the host facility for the course.
Choate writes that Pittman and other AETC officials are waiting for a decision about where the Air Force will locate the new mission to train approximately 600 to 800 students annually. So are San Angelo’s local leaders, who reconvened the Goodfellow Air Force Base Coordinating Group to advocate for the program, saying it’s a good fit for an intelligence-training base that already has the capability to handle and store classified information.
About 600 students will go to school at the winning base for about 100 days in the Undergraduate Cyber Warfare Training, Pittman said. About 200 will train at the base for about 10 days in Cyber 100, he said. Around 60 cyber instructors will be permanently stationed at the base. Their students will mostly be enlisted service members, although some will be officers, including intelligence officers and cyber warfare officers, Pittman said.
The training mission is part of an Air Force effort to revamp, centralize and focus more on cyber operations, he said. The Air Force already trains about 5,600 people annually in cyber duties such as building, maintaining, updating, operating, and defending networks and cyber operations, Pittman said. About 5,000 are enlisted personnel, he said. About 600 are officers. Spread out across various career fields and operations, cyber specialists work in the cyber domain to achieve military objectives, Pittman said.
These goals might be confined to the cyber arena, or they could be operations to enable the military to do other things. “In other words, even the traditional air-to-air campaign or air-to-ground campaign has an element of cyber to it,” Pittman said. “Those platforms use those cyber domains to gather the information they need to drop that bomb. So all of that is related.”
The Air Force is retooling cyber fields and training, he said. “This is an effort to bring it all together so we can get the most synergy,” Pittman said. The training that the bases are in the running for has a stand-up budget of $11.6 million, said Maj. Jeffrey Stockwell, AETC chief of combat operations training.
A good chunk of the budget will go to build a virtual network within a sensitive compartmented information facility, Stockwell said. In the SCIF, students will learn how to build, maintain, defend, and attack a virtual network instead of doing that on the World Wide Web — which would cause havoc, Stockwell said.
