Before a Cyber Force, fix cyber governance

Let’s not start picking out uniforms just yet. The chorus calling for a Cyber Force continues to grow by the day, but the debate has its priorities backward. In June, an amendment from Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) calling for the creation of a cyber service within the Department of the Army failed in the Senate Armed Services Committee by a single vote. Support is popular on both sides of the aisle, with Rep. Pat Fallon (R-TX) quoted as saying that a “Cyber Force is inevitable.” The highly anticipated June 2026 Center for Strategic and International Studies report skips the question of whether the Department needs a Cyber Force and goes straight to planning how to do so, treating the new service as just a matter of when. The report builds on an earlier Foundation for Defense of Democracies cyber force study and provides strong recommendations for how to man, train and equip. Neither fully addresses the dysfunction of cyber governance. 

Two years ago, I was a career submariner being detailed to U.S. Cyber Command to pay my joint penance, unsure how a non-cyber officer could support. Seeing the successes but also cyber’s unrealized potential, I left the command equal parts Cyber Force acolyte and skeptic. I won’t relitigate whether the force-generation model is broken because smarter and more experienced professionals have documented that failure, and on the man-train-equip problems, they are certainly right. But before the Cyber community starts to debate what to call these new Cyber Force warriors, the Department should answer the question the Senate was one vote away from skipping. The debate should answer the question of who will govern cyberspace. 

Start with what the advocates have gotten right, and they have absolutely gotten a great deal right. In every other warfare domain, the division of labor is clean: the Services man, train and equip forces, and the combatant commands employ them. Cyber is the exception. Cyber Command depends on the Services to generate its forces, the same Services for which cyberspace will never be the priority. As a line officer working in the cyber world, I kept asking the same question: What makes this so special? The prevailing answer from those inside the community has been constant: force generation. The argument goes that the technical complexity of manning, training, and equipping cyber requires that it be treated as special. That never sat well with a submarine officer whose entire community is underwritten by complex technology. 

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