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Why Warriors, Not Geeks, Run US Cyber Command Posts
koterica writes "The Washington Post explains why the military prefers to have combat veterans rather than geeks running network security. '"It was supposed to be a war fighter unit, not a geek unit," said task force veteran Jason Healey, who had served as an Air Force signals intelligence officer.
A fighter would understand, for instance, if an enemy had penetrated the networks and changed coordinates or target times, said Dusty Rhoads, a retired Air Force colonel and former F-117 pilot who recruited the original task force members. "A techie wouldn't have a clue," he said.'"
In a number of nations, the geeks and warriors are the same people. Take China for instance. There is a reason why one of the first things that they do after getting a free education at a US school is go into HUMINT/SIGINT plans.
Over there, a hacker who blows up a SCADA system is considered just as cool as someone who manages to nail an enemy sniper at over a mile's distance over here.
Different standard of machismo. Only in the US do we separate the warriors from the hackers. A lot of countries, they are the same people.
I was in the USAF and had to deal with pilots fairly often. It's true they are good with their planes, but most of them are rather stupid and would fail most logic tests. (But they tend to have egos the size of Texas, and the dumber they are, the bigger the ego.)
There are exceptions, about 20%, but for the most part, don't let them near anything that's not a plane they've trained on.
Army calls their people 'soldiers', Marines usually refer to theirs as 'warriors'. It is generally a bad idea to call a Marine soldier. I know when I was in I would have taken serious offense to it. I can't tell you how Army feels about being called warriors, never interacted much with anyone but Navy and Marines.
Does this mean I am generally unable to understand the reasons behind those requirements? Of course not. I just did not care. Not my job.
On another non-military project I got the task to help to develop some traffic simulation models. There I did quite a few consistency checks for the incoming data. Guess my customer was stupid to give me the job. According to the article (no, I did not the original) some old war veteran should have been much better suited for this task and might have been cheaper.
Utter nonsense. If those changes can be determined by statistical or other algorithms then this most likely belongs to the tasks where a computer outperforms a human being considerably. To develop such a system is geek work. If not, it does not matter who does the guesswork. Rolling dices would probably as good.
But, they probably aren't. I'm sure if you ask around, there's a surprising number of people who at 18 already had years of experience dealing with technical systems. You're not going to do a crash course and catch somebody up in even several years. It's just not going to happen. Hell, by the time I was of enlistment age, I already had the better part of a decade under my belt dealing with computers. And that was back when AOL was huge, OSX didn't exist and a person could wear a turtle neck without worrying about endorsing Apple products.
Also ad hominem arguments really don't make me want to respect you. They mostly make me think that perhaps the problem is even worse than it appears on the surface and that perhaps you've got something to be insecure about.
Or a reflection of the fact that the DoD has had a series of exploits which even a moderately qualified sysadmin would've been able to prevent. The attacks may have, and probably would've, happened anyways, but it would've taken at least some technical competence. I mean, honestly, a network definitely isn't secure if it hasn't got a password at all.
It's really, really hard not to feel superior to that sort of incompetence.
In a war, the best person to stick in position as a sniper is the guy who's spend the last ten years or more practicing to handle a sniper rifle, and getting experience.
The best guy to lead the troops into battle as a general is one who's come through times as an officer, and knows what the troops can, and will likely do in a given situation.
There are military who never see the front line because they spend their time working on tuning the efficiency of logistics to ensure the front line troops get their supplies in the most efficient manner.
What this reeks of is taking a front line trooper, who is excellent at combat most likely, and saying that they're best placed to direct the logistics teams, without understanding the math, or having the years of experience in that field, just because they've been in a fight.
If you want to really trust your cyber warfare team, then have them led by the best hackers you know of. They understand the insidiousness of the attacks, and to them, fending off an attack (or leading one) is instinct, far more than it ever will be to a front liner.
There are commanders of air, sea and land for very good reasons.. The style of combat is different.. New rules apply to digital warfare..
European fighters found to their cost a few hundred years ago that not adopting new methods of war was costly.. The British Empire insisted on keeping its rules as they always were, and putting their veteran commanders into the new situations, expecting them to 'just make it happen'.. However, they were ill suited to the new methods and ways, and consistently outmanoeuvered..
Maybe geeks are just too good at seeing through the real reason for war: business
I hear business is booming in Iraq...