The Pentagon still cannot manage cyber talent at scale. Here’s the fix

Name: The Pentagon still cannot manage cyber talent at scale. Here’s the fix
Uploaded: 2026-05-22T09:20:09-04:00
Channel: Kylie Bielby
Description: The Department of Defense does not primarily have a cyber recruiting problem — it has a cyber talent management problem. The military already possesses serious qualification frameworks, scholarship programs, credentialing systems, and selection tools. What it still lacks is a system tying assessment, training, assignment, performance, and retention together across an entire cyber career. In

U.S. Air Force airmen with the 67th Cyberspace Wing's 367th Cyberspace Operations Squadron prepare for daily mission tasks at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland, March 31, 2025. (U.S. Air Force photo by Jantzen Floate)

By Henry Phillips • May 22, 2026

The Department of Defense does not primarily have a cyber recruiting problem — it has a cyber talent management problem. The military already possesses serious qualification frameworks, scholarship programs, credentialing systems, and selection tools. What it still lacks is a system tying assessment, training, assignment, performance, and retention together across an entire cyber career.

In March 2026, the department announced at its Cyber Workforce Summit 2.0 an effort to reinvent the cyber workforce. Called Cyber Command 2.0, this effort’s principal goal is improvement in talent management by focusing on identifying, recruiting, hiring, and retaining the right people. The effort also emphasizes the need to manage career-long expertise through flexible and responsive training pipelines and flexible career paths. Such flexibility is needed to accommodate multiple pathways to qualification — through a combination of education, coursework, experience, and assessment.

I spent 20 years in the U.S. Navy as an aerospace experimental psychologist, designing workforce development, competency assessment, and personnel selection systems. I also served as the chief of staff for the Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative, which fielded systems modeling defense learner, job, and competency requirements at scale. The Department of Defense has been trying to solve these problems for as long as I have been working on them. What makes Cyber Command 2.0’s ambitions so difficult is not an absence of good ideas, but an issue of structural barriers in connecting these ideas into a single functioning system.