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Air Force scales back cyberwar plans

Staff shifted to 'more pressing' need in new nuclear unit

By Shaun Waterman UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL | Thursday, November 13, 2008

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The general in charge of the U.S. Air Force's cyberwarfare effort says plans for his unit have been scaled back because staff who would have been used to set up a cybercommand will be allocated to the service's new nuclear command instead.

Air Force Cyber Command was to be established as a major command alongside the service's space, air-combat and other commands -- last month. However, those plans were suspended over the summer after Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates fired the Air Force's civilian and military leaders because of lapses in the security of the nation's nuclear arsenal.

Last month, plans for a full-fledged major command for cyberwarfare were scrapped.

The Pentagon's Armed Forces News Service reported on Oct. 8 that a gathering of the service's leadership in Colorado was told that cyberoperations would be a numbered Air Force component -- one step down from a major command in organizational terms.

Maj. Gen. William T. Lord, commander of Air Force Cyber Command, told United Press International that the change helped solve the organizational challenge of creating a new nuclear command "with the manpower that was going to be allocated to make cybercommand a major air command allocated instead to fix the more pressing problem... [of] making sure that people are comfortable that we in fact have our eye on the ball of our nuclear enterprise."

Gen. Lord said the headquarters billets that were going to be allocated to cybercommand were used to create the Air Force's Global Strike Command.

The new command brings together all the Air Force's nuclear weaponry under one leadership and is one of a series of measures taken to restore confidence in the service's stewardship of the nation's atomic arsenal after some high-profile missteps.

An internal report released in early June was sharply critical of the Air Force, focusing on a mistaken shipment to Taiwan of four Air Force electrical fuses for ballistic missile warheads. In August 2007, a B-52 bomber was mistakenly armed with six nuclear warheads and flown across the nation without anyone realizing it.

As a numbered Air Force component, the cybercommand will be a force provider to the U.S. military, organized within Air Force Space Command - much as a bomber wing forms part of Air Combat Command, which provides air power to the joint combatant commands.

Gen. Lord said the new arrangement is "a good marriage between the expertise capabilities inside Air Force Space Command and the capabilities we're tying to bring on in the cyberbusiness."