Management

DoDIIS 2024: Defense and Intelligence Communities Focus on Cyber Talent Pipelines

The military is rethinking how it assigns cyber talent and using AI to augment personnel.

Dave Nyczepir is a Senior Editor for Manifest.

The defense and intelligence communities want to create more pathways for their former data scientists and other in-demand personnel to return to government and address the cybersecurity workforce shortage.

Adjusting laws and making policy changes will be critical to allowing cyber personnel to easily step away from intelligence work and later return, though government-trained cyber professionals in the private sector remain in the “asymmetric fight,” said Patrick Johnson, director of the Department of Defense CIO’s Workforce Innovation Directorate, during a workforce panel at the 2024 DoDIIS Worldwide Conference on Wednesday.

While the CIA’s talent pipeline is full, thanks in part to Hollywood’s tendency to romanticize its work with characters such as Jason Bourne and Jack Ryan, the agency still has trouble re-engaging employees who leave, said Deputy CIO for IT Enterprise Ryon Klotz.

“The culture of the federal workforce, and certainly the CIA, is challenged by this idea of regular turnover and change,” Klotz said. “Generationally, what we’re starting to see is the ability to retain the best and brightest is harder and harder.”

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Retaining Cyber Talent with Stable, Targeted Assignments

Interviews with both departing and retained service members revealed that the military’s traditional duty station transfer model isn’t always conducive to gaining the desired technical acumen, said Marine Master Gunnery Sgt. Clayton Hill, senior enlisted leader with the National Security Agency’s Central Security Service.

As a result, the military is exploring longer orders assignments and revived a group of warrant offers that are allowed to remain on their preferred missions. Such assignments allow for greater depth of technical expertise, and those warrant officers wind up “go-to, primary assets” in cyber operations with higher salaries, Hill said.

Meanwhile, the Workforce Innovation Directorate has begun piloting ways to assess cyber talent based on a worker’s potential to benefit a particular mission. The effort was prompted in part by a Government Accountability Office report on shortcomings in DOD recruitment and retention, Johnson says.

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Augmenting the Existing Cyber Workforce and Competing with China

The Workforce Innovation Directorate is also exploring how emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence might augment DOD’s existing cyber workforce. AI is already being used to pore over large volumes of data on the educational offerings available to DOD cyber personnel to identify discrepancies, halving the time it typically takes a human to do the same work, Johnson says.

DOD is still reckoning with the computing and storage requirements of AI. A single mission can generate enough data on one platform to exceed existing storage capacity, and AI is being used to curate that data so that valuable information isn’t tossed, Hill said.

Applying AI to workforce challenges is critical to keep pace with foreign adversary China, which faces many of the same issues. The country’s cyber workforce shortage is estimated at 2 million unfilled positions and can make considerably less than their private sector counterparts, Klotz said.

For that reason, the People’s Liberation Army revised its conscription law in 2023 to draft more university and college graduates with science and engineering degrees into intelligence roles, with limits set on age and time served. China’s top cyber institutes graduate about 30,000 students annually, though their education is “questionable,” Klotz said.

PLA cyber personnel are augmented with militias, reserves, civil servants, and university faculty and research institute staff.

“The state seems to be able to pluck talent from the private sector on at least a temporary basis,” Klotz said.

In the U.S., civilian cyber personnel simply can’t be reallocated to address issues like service members can, which is why the defense and intelligence communities are working to upskill more data scientists with AI expertise.

DOD partnered with a community college that has a campus dedicated to IT solutions, sending service members there on orders to participate in a curriculum mimicking a typical workday for its cyber personnel. Meanwhile, the NSA is starting its first cryptologic data science internship program, and the Marines are collaborating with the Army Futures Command by placing a software factory near its headquarters in Austin, Texas, Hill said.

To learn more about DoDIIS Worldwide, visit our conference page. You can also follow us on the social platform X at @FedTechMagazine to see behind-the-scenes moments.