What you said is probably true for the *average* cadet or midshipman. However, I'm assuming this was a volunteer competition, thus the competitors likely skewed toward the technical majors. It appears that at least Annapolis has a CS curriculum.
I'd recommend DARPA expand the scope of this competition to ROTC cadets and middies. There are plenty of top-tier CS schools that either host an ROTC unit (e.g. Berkeley) or have a cross-campus agreement with one (e.g. Stanford).
Some obvious problems with any approach. First being that people join the military for many reasons, and joining a "cyber warfare" unit isn't typically one of them. Even as a CS graduate, I'd be hard pressed to trade my few years as a line officer for being in one of these cyber units. Second, a decent CS graduate doesn't necessarily make a computer and network security expert. Shit, look at the security issues we encounter in the software world on a daily basis (I do not exclude myself from fault here). I think it takes years of experience too, and like others have mentioned, probably helps a ton to have been a black hat.
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What you said is probably true for the *average* cadet or midshipman. However, I'm assuming this was a volunteer competition, thus the competitors likely skewed toward the technical majors. It appears that at least Annapolis has a CS curriculum.
I'd recommend DARPA expand the scope of this competition to ROTC cadets and middies. There are plenty of top-tier CS schools that either host an ROTC unit (e.g. Berkeley) or have a cross-campus agreement with one (e.g. Stanford).
Some obvious problems with any approach. First being that people join the military for many reasons, and joining a "cyber warfare" unit isn't typically one of them. Even as a CS graduate, I'd be hard pressed to trade my few years as a line officer for being in one of these cyber units. Second, a decent CS graduate doesn't necessarily make a computer and network security expert. Shit, look at the security issues we encounter in the software world on a daily basis (I do not exclude myself from fault here). I think it takes years of experience too, and like others have mentioned, probably helps a ton to have been a black hat.