Ask the Air Force Cyber Command General About War in Cyberspace

We ran an article about the new Air Force Cyber Command and its recruiting efforts on February 13, 2008. Now Major General William Lord, who is in charge of this effort, has agreed to answer Slashdot users' questions. If you're thinking about joining up -- or just curious -- this is a golden opportunity to learn how our military is changing its command structure and recruiting efforts to deal with "cyberspace as a warfighting domain." Usual Slashdot interview rules apply.

Comments

Re:Difference In Culture

[Anonymous Coward]

Major

A Major General is more properly addressed as General.

Ok, nit picking done, it's a good question.

Name Change

[spacerog]

General,
Perhaps the reason you are having difficulty in attracting top talent is partly due to the name of your unit. Cyber Command? Sorry, but that just sounds soooo 1980's. How about Electronic Defense Command or something, anything without the word 'cyber' in it. Seriously, have there been any thoughts about a name change?
- Space Rogue

Already done

[daveschroeder]

The classified networks (such as SIPRnet and JWICS) are already not connected to the commodity internet. Only unclassified networks (which can still contain troves of sensitive and other information, and whose interruption can cause havoc in all manner of other ways) are connected to the commodity internet.

The answer is the same for anything else that is connected to the internet: that the benefits -- real or perceived -- of being connected to the internet on the unclassified side, with proper security controls, etc., outweighs the risks.

Re:Already done

[bleh-of-the-huns]

Actually, the SIPR net runs on top of the nipr net, the nipr net is the internet that is connected to the general internet, so technically, the SIPR net is connected to the general internet, but well secured... think of it as a giant closed VPN....

Re:National Labs?

[jlaprise1]

Neither the national labs nor the NSA have the authority or mandate to conduct military operations. The national labs are put in the service of research questions from other organizations within the government and the NSA is primarily a SIGINT collection organization with some analysis responsibilities centered the interpretation network of networks and their characteristics. They were doing network analysis long before MySpace.

Re:Physical Fitness

[bkr1_2k]

According to this web site PT standards haven't gone up at all in recent history since those are about the same (roughly) as when I was in the military in the early 90s. I was in the Air Force, but trained with all services during tech school so I was quite familiar with Army standards of the time. http://usmilitary.about.com/od/army/a/afpt.htm

For soldiers 22-26 it's 40 push ups (in 2 minutes), 50 sit ups (in 2 minutes) and 16:36 time for the 2 mile run. Those values only get easier for older soldiers. If you think "most slashdotters" wouldn't make it in the door, I think you're sadly mistaken. Those are particularly easy values for anyone remotely fit to attain, and not particularly difficult for many people who aren't that fit. Obviously there is a contingent of folks who are sadly out of shape, for whatever reason, that it would be difficult for but it's far from "most" even in the slashdot community, I'd guess.