A Look Inside The Pentagon's Cyber Boot Camp

From left: Miles Brinkley, 23, and Joshua Fisk, 26. Photographer: William Widmer for Bloomberg Businessweek

Jordan Robertson and Michael Riley, Bloomberg: Inside the Pentagon’s Boot Camp for Cyberwarriors

Drop and give me 20 lines of code.

Inside the U.S. Navy’s Corry Station base in Pensacola, Fla., there’s a school that wouldn’t look out of place on any well-manicured college campus—except for a handful of buildings wreathed in barbed wire, with the windows bricked up. That’s to keep electronic signals from getting in or out. The buildings make up the Center for Information Dominance (CID), the Pentagon’s primary boot camp for personnel training in the art of cyberwar.

U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter has said that cyber may one day become the sixth service branch, but the military doesn’t yet have the staff for it. The Pentagon said in April that U.S. Cyber Command, the organization created in 2010 to coordinate military efforts online, won’t reach its six-year goal of deploying 6,200 military and civilian personnel until 2018, two years late. The new force is to be responsible for defending the Pentagon’s computer systems as well as, at the direction of the president or defense secretary, launching cyber attacks. Admiral Michael Rogers, who heads Cyber Command and the National Security Agency, told Congress the government has been “hard-pressed” to find and train qualified service members.

WNU Editor: The problem for the Pentagon is that they can never compete against private industry for the best cyber-specialists that are out there unless they appeal to their patriotism and sense of duty.