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Cyber Command Will Miss Friday's Operational Deadline
techinsider writes "The U.S. Cyber Command won't be fully operational by Friday's October 1st deadline. A major challenge appears to be staffing the command with qualified personnel, of which it will need over 1,000 skilled employees. General Alexander told Congress his leadership staff was in place but acknowledged there were challenges in bringing in people to the rest of the organization."
Must've been delayed by cyberstorm iii
Can't get qualified IT staff? Why should someone who has studied for several years and has worked to gain specialist knowledge, want to work in an environment where people who know less than them and don't have to break their backs to meet arbitrary deadlines are more highly rewarded? When those with the greatest expertise and who have to work hardest to actually create the product get the smallest portion of the credit and the pay, no wonder there are problems encouraging people to work in the field.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
The title is misleading.
I didn't find any pictures of Miss Friday in TFA.
$120 million / 1000 employees = $120,000/employee. That doesn't seem much for a skilled IT person, when the $120,000 includes all the overheads, and the actual pay received will be much lower (1/2 to 1/3?)
Could it be that anyone skilled enough to participate is also skilled enough to see a complete operational failure that will smear the resume of anyone desperate enough to work there?
And with the additional toxic working environment supplied by mass-employed "upper-tiers" of politically motivated and utterly incompetent management not even the draw of decent pay in the coming second half of the recession is likely to reverse that.
kartune85 : Incapable of reason, observation or learning. A kind of dim, drab, flightless parrot.
now we look for somebody to do the work
Or shocking anyway. It's easy to shoot criticism at a bureaucracy; but to miss a somewhat artificial deadline in an area which the leadership really doesn't understand is just not a surprise. Throw a financially compelling argument not to work for them on top of it - hats off to Gen Alexander and company for getting it this far.
Why would any self-respecting geek want to work in a place where there is no possibility of being management, and all the management is, self-admittedly, not 'qualified' to do their job?
I'm sorry, but I've never been able to respect a manager who could not have done my job, and has done in previous years. Now that doesn't mean everyone up to the CEO needs to be a programmer, very quickly managers stop being programmers and their day focuses on other things (read: meetings and bureaucracy).
So by my example, a dev manager should be a former programmer, his/her manager should have experience leading a team of tech people, his/her manager should have been a manager for other tech managers before, etc. In other words, each level should have experience doing the day-to-day job of the level below.
And what about career advancement - it sounds pretty lame when all the management positions are pre-filled, so the only way to move up the chain is for someone higher up to retire, or get dishonorably discharged (I assume the guys in management are career military, not doing a tour).
indicative of the state of the world: china sets a new train speed record, and the US in the midst of high unemployment cannot staff a military command....
"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. --Washington Post
With their attitude towards cyber security experts (who are probably also geeks!), I am not particularly surprised they have had trouble with staffing.
Having seriously considered the positions in question from their open job postings, qualified applicants stand to make somewhere in the mid-$100k range in the private sector anywhere in the country, and closer to the $200k mark in the DC Metropolitan area (the 2nd highest cost of living allowance area in the country, right behind Denver, CO). Salary ranges offered are in the $60-83k starting mark. Offer a competitive wage, and you may just get qualified applicants.
and they've contracted out to their friends and relatives, but as it turns out, none of us have the first fucking clue how to hire anyone who actually knows what they're doing. Oopsie!
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Maybe the skilled people are smart enough to see that the cyber army is a fascistic control structure and want nothing to do with it? Lieberman wants to "educate" kids in kindergarten and schools in cyber warfare to control the population when they get to be older. Beware of the Youth Core.
I hate to reply to my own comment, but apparently Slashdot actually ran this story while I wasn't looking. So yeah no need for another 400 comments on it.
If SAIC is running the show it's no wonder that it is difficult for them to staff the positions. No self respecting IT professional would accept a job under a company that treats their employees like crap.
Additionally, choosing "Combat Veterans" over IT professionals will eventually cause this entire project to fail. Field IT is not a qualification for running a full blow offensive security command. Most of these people are using pre-configured equipment in shock cases and only need to know that cable A goes to port B, then press power. If the government is concerned that civilian personnel will not know what the data they are protecting should look like, then they should train them to know what they are looking at.
+ must be army fitness + take a DI in your faces do a lot of PT just for A DESK JOB!
I saw this when Slashdot posted it the other day, but a story I was reading today about Britain's defence review seems to shed light on why it's such a bad idea to be hiring military folk over geeks.
As part of our spending review, we're thinking about increasing the number of territorial army folk who are the part time volunteer soldiers that are drafted in from their real jobs when the army needs the numbers. The reason they've thinking about increasing this contingency is that they have found people who are normally bank clerks or similar to simply be more adaptable and more useful in situations like Afghanistan and Iraq- their skills from civvie street as it were are simply invaluable, perhaps the most interesting part of it all is that these comments came from a former SAS commander- someone who surely knows as well as anyone what works in a real war.
But the point was bolstered by another fact I was previously unaware of- most of the US' special operations in Afghanistan are apparently carried out by National Guard reservists because the US has also found them to simply be better at adapting to the unique situations in Afghanistan and being able to best make use of new equipment and such.
So whilst they weren't arguing that trained professionals are what you need against trained professionals - if the US was going toe to toe against Russia, their trained army would still matter for example - it seems that in some situations including those involved the frontline, civvies with a bit of military training are simply far better at doing the job than military trained soldiers with training in some particular technology.
With this in mind, it seems an absolute mistake to think that military elitism is the key to building a good cyber warrior defence. I would be willing to bet that digital warfare is something much carried out by a team of skilled civilian security experts with training in military terms and concepts, than a team of skilled military experts trained in security.
most good IT people are to old for the army to get in and do you want to start over at amry private pay as well?
Young students fighting governments of foreign countries and organized crime families that could (as US government keeps saying) crush the infrastructure of the US? No, this is about shaping the ethics of police state workers from a young age to keep dissenters in check. KINDERGARTEN??? Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of 2010: http://hsgac.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Files.View&FileStore_id=52895dd6-1931-4770-b089-3c6a23a41de0 An analysis available at: http://cryptome.org/isp-spy/s3480.htm Section 405: "(B) the use and impact of special hiring authorities and flexibilities to recruit the most qualified applicants, including the use of student internship and scholarship programs for permanent hires;" Section 406: "(2) K THROUGH 12.—The Secretary of Education, in coordination with the Director of the National Center for Cybersecurity and Communications and State and local governments, shall develop curriculum standards, guidelines, and recommended courses to address cyber safety, cybersecurity, and cyber ethics for students in kindergarten through grade 12." "(3) UNDERGRADUATE, GRADUATE, VOCATIONAL, AND TECHNICAL INSTITUTIONS.— (A) SECRETARY OF EDUCATION.—The Secretary of Education, in coordination with the Director of the National Center for Cybersecurity and Communications, shall— (i) develop curriculum standards and guidelines to address cyber safety, cybersecurity, and cyber ethics for all students enrolled in undergraduate, graduate, vocational, and technical institutions in the United States; and (ii) analyze and develop recommended courses for students interested in pursuing careers in information technology, communications, computer science, engineering, math, and science, as those subjects relate to cybersecurity. (B) OFFICE OF PERSONNEL MANAGEMENT.—The Director of the Office of Personnel Management, in coordination with the Director, shall develop strategies and programs— (i) to recruit students from undergraduate, graduate, vocational, and technical institutions in the United States to serve as Federal employees engaged in cyber missions; and (ii) that provide internship and part time work opportunities with the Federal Government for students at the undergraduate, graduate, vocational, and technical institutions in the United States." Section 407: Monetary awards for doing a good job suppressing the population?
Even Han Solo knew you had to assemble your team first and THEN get the command crew. Sheesh.
What's absurd is that leadership is so easily staffed, but technical prowess is not. These roles are subjective. The people actually doing something require objective skills. The fact that the objective-skilled people are not staffed, but the subjective-skilled people are, leads me to question the quality of leadership.
IT leadership requires IT skills. I had this disagreement with the CIO of Microsoft when I was there. He didn't think you needed IT skill to be an IT leader. But his projects all failed and he got fired.
It seems they want to get the most experienced employees from the private sector.
This is going to be a problem because these types of employees can make more money in the private sector and don't have any incentive to switch to a government job.
Why would someone who works for Google or IBM switch to the Cyber Command for the US Government? The fact that they call it the Cyber Command also shows lack of knowledge of current terminology. How many of us actually use the word "cyberspace" to describe the internet? Only the government still calls it cyberspace.
I don't have a problem with enlisting, the problem is that even to enlist at this time would be competitive. So basically a person has to enlist, hope they can get top secret clearance, and hope again that they can get this job?
It's going to take them years to staff up.
Dude, they use contractors. The problem is getting people who qualify for Top Secret clearance, plus you have to give up smoking weed...FUCK THAT!
"My strike teams ready, but I need a command crew for my shuttle..."
Maybe the leadership staff are such a bunch of asshats that no one is willing to follow them? Did anyone else read "Miss Friday's" as referring to the Heinlein heroine?
The military never, ever has a problem filling billets for "knowledgeable" people to make "important" decisions with "authority" and "zeal."
The problem they do have, however, is that none of the people who actually understand and "live" for the work are ever the same as those "knowledgeable" people who make "important" decisions with "authority" and "zeal."
In other words, they have plenty of chiefs and no fucking indians. (that's not a pun at India, it's a phrase familiar to all sailors and many Marines.)
Smart and innovative people are frequently classed as troublemakers and misfits when they chaff at the idiocy of military stricture. It's hard to live with arbitrary rules that either have no rationale or lost whatever usefulness they had 50 years ago. You can't lure people in with glamour jobs where none exist. And most certainly not for less than a quarter of the pay. Military benefits have steadily eroded since the end of the Viet Nam war, and they sure as heel won't be getting any better.
Good luck with that staffing issue, Al.
No, I'm not trying to be funny. What are they paying, and have they gotten over the idiocy of looking for 1000 security guys amongst the military? They need experts on the effects and targets, but they also need real experts in security. If they only hire the first, they are idiots, and they're not going to find 1000 people in the military who do both. They're not even going to find 1000 people who can do one.
So what are they paying, where are they looking, who's their headhunter?
In the MD/DC/VA area, everyone works for some form of gov't agency. Ft. Meade is also home to another larger and sexier IT-type agency which shall remain nameless, so they are competeing heavily for the IT talent they have. Also, agencies in the suburbs between DC and Baltimore generally pay less than those located in the District and NoVA, so people with the clearances required to work there would be taking a paycut. The short answer.... pay more or lower your expectations.
That's why they are looking for nerds. The need hard problems solved, not easy problems filled with WoW references.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Could you post links to the job postings? I'll likely be meeting CYBERCOM leadership in a couple weeks, so this would be useful to understand better. If you have examples of the comparable ads for private sector to show side-by-side, that's ideal.
This.
I know numerous qualified candidates who live in NoVA or DC, but none of them (us) are going to make the commute to Ft. MEade every day -- or move to Columbia, MD (yuck!) -- for a measly $85k/yr.
Screw that!
Now, if they wisened up and moved operations to NoVA, and then added about $50-75k to the salaries, perhaps they'd get a few more takers...
We need a IT boot camp. No DI / NO PT / No uniforms. Make more like a class room and not a full on PT filled Boot camp. We have lots of GOV IT workers who do office jobs have no big need for a full DI filled PT boot camp. Also make it free with a 2-4 year army like must stay in. Even better make all FBI / CIA / other gov IT. Use this system. Does a bench / office IT guy at the FBI need a full fbi academy to do IT work in a office and not in the field? maybe some training about the laws when there are doing forensics work.
Agreed only people already living in MD maybe DC, would look at working at Cyber Command. From NoVA that's a 2hour commute.
Plus getting a TS/sci w/ a Full scope poly is hella hard. They want people that already have that clearance too, which very few people actually have. getting that clearance take a year min. People with that clearance are older and probly making 75-- 100+ a year where their working @ anyway
Two words: Pay Scale.
With "salary non-negotiable" the only talent they can recruit is talent that has never been paid, aka low-skilled. Back to the Reagan era, the best should be working in the private sector, not the public. You got your wish. Until the government decides they want to pay to hire the best and brightest they'll be stuck with what they have. Challenging jobs exist at every tech company. How would you choose between working at Facebook, Cisco, Google, or lastly NSA? Lets not forget the pay is right off the bat double at the private companies, the work is similar, and the benefits are on par if not better at the three private companies. DoD may have a retirement program, but it doesn't award stock, the 401k programs at these companies blow away what the government offers. and lets not forget DC isn't any cheaper than the Bay Area where these private companies are based.
Bah, maybe I'm wearing a pair of golden handcuffs, but when Obama says $70,000 buys happiness and the DoD isn't paying $70,000 base for these tech jobs it's a joke. Look at the pay-scale a grade 12 step 5 doesn't even make $70,000. Did I mention there's no sign-on bonus? Keep hiring the kids, when you're ready for skilled adults you know where to find us. It's no secret, you have the routing tables.
http://www.opm.gov/oca/10tables/html/gs.asp
AMEN
I live on the West Coast - you can and will find ALL the talent needed out here. Some people like living in DC, but if you want to build some sort of CYBER anything, come out to Colorado, California, or Washington state. (or Monterey - Naval Post Graduate Skewl of R00t? :-) )
Self Defense - A Human Right www.a-human-right.com
Nothing against Columbia Md or the base there, but maybe....just maybe it's because the geeks and nerds they want would rather live someplace better?
So, during this time between October 1st and whenever CyberCom is finally staffed, seated, resolved, and working, there will be no effective "cyber defense" for the country. Though the Department of Homeland Security will have just completed operation "Cyber Storm III" (between Tuesday of this week - currently ongoing - and 3-4 days later) which is a simulated attack on our nation's "information superstructure", apparently we will be without a department that could take advantage of what that simulation teaches us. If history is of any value as a learning tool, we should take note that prior simulations have taxed our national defenses and presented strategic moments for our enemies to attack. If you'll remember, during the terrorist attacks of 9-11, our Air Force and other departments were undergoing an attack simulation which left us vulnerable in key areas for the most terrible thing that happened to all Americans since Key West got overdeveloped, blocking out the gorgeous view. It was also very similar to Pearl Harbor in the way in which the enemies executed their attack, and similar to the Trail of Tears in how many Americans died.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
You have got to be management.
At least hide the fact you need the data for your own personal use and are either job hunting and lazy or being inept at your job on reporting why no one wants the jobs to your higher ups. For crying out loud you even asked him to format it for you.
Try asking a legitimate question. For example : "Could you prove those cost of living allowance numbers? I live in the Denver metro area and that doesn't seem quite right? Also do you have a reference on those salary ranges or are you just making it up off the top of your head?"
Feel free to copy and paste into your own post or, seeing as how lazy you are, just reply with "ditto" :) If your joke was to pretend you were one of the management, it's to dead on for me to catch the sarcasm. Good show, sir. Good show.
I thought most people who had college education/extensive skills were brought on higher than private(for enlisted)/cadet(for officers), at least after they got through boot camp.
Wow Dusty Rhoads is involved. I guess they must need to lay the SMACKDOWN on someone and smash them RAW. Oh Wait, I can see some NITRO in the THUNDERous explosions.
Never mind, is the AM hours here.
I can program myself out of a Hello World Contest!!