The Sad and Sorry Tale of Cyber Command’s Seven-Year Failure
Aden Magee
September 4, 2025
What if I told you a major U.S. Department of Defense component assumed responsibility for building a critical warfighting capability negligently disregarded this duty, and ultimately allowed this capability to reach a point of failure? Well, that’s exactly what happened with U.S. Cyber Command.
Leading into 2017, there was an ongoing debate regarding whether the U.S. Department of Defense should establish a cyber service to generate cyber forces or if cyber force generation responsibilities should be formally given to U.S. Cyber Command. Ultimately, that year, Cyber Command was given force generation responsibilities, which are to organize, equip, train, and provide forces for employment in Cyber Command or other combatant command joint force operations. Since being given these responsibilities, which include sustained unit readiness, Cyber Command’s stewardship of the cyber force generation mission has been counterproductive, resulting in a force generation “model” that has devolved to a point where it cannot be fixed.
The Department of Defense cyber force generation effort has failed. The acting Cyber Command commander recently asserted that this could be corrected going forward by emulating the U.S. Special Operations Command force generation model. This contention tacitly acknowledges that the Cyber Command “model” has failed. In addition, the implication that there is a Special Operations Command “model” that Cyber Command can readily ease into is misleading.
https://warontherocks.com/2025/09/the-sad-and-sorry-tale-of-cyber-commands-seven-year-failure/
