Lynn Brezosky
San Antonio Express-News
October 16, 2014
NSA chief: 1,000 new jobs coming to S.A.
Photo By William Luther/San Antonio Express-News
The National Security Agency building in San Antonio is seen in this Thursday June 14, 2013 aerial photo. The NSA may have invested as much as $300 million to overhaul the former Sony fabrication plant, which was closed in 2003, to turn it into a hub of classified activity, However, the agency appears to have departed from its normal process of identifying major construction projects in the Defense Department budget with the San Antonio facility.
SAN ANTONIO — The director of the National Security Agency said Thursday that San Antonio could expect as many as 1,000 additional personnel working on the Defense Department’s ongoing cybersecurity mission over the next three years.
“San Antonio is very important to the future of cyber within the Department of Defense,” Adm. Michael Rogers, who’s also commander of the U.S. Cyber Command, said during a Cybersecurity Summit hosted by the San Antonio Chamber of Commerce. “You are going to see a larger footprint coming to San Antonio.”
The military has quietly grown its cybersecurity mission in San Antonio.
The 24th Air Force at Port San Antonio, which is responsible for safeguarding key components of the Defense Department’s information networks, now employs more than 1,300 people here.
Electronic warfare and other operations now are the charge of the 25th Air Force at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland.
The NSA has stealthily transformed a former Sony chip fabrication plant on the Northwest Side into an intelligence hub with a 94,000-square-foot data center.
It’s not clear where the new employees will be working.
Rogers said the military was growing a “dedicated cyber mission force” of about 6,200 people, and that San Antonio would get a good segment.
“We have made the decision that San Antonio — both the Air Force side … (and) the investments we’ve made at NSA Texas — these are foundational to the future and we’re going to keep working.”
Rogers said the military recognized that staying ahead of global threats would involve partnerships with private-sector contractors, which San Antonio officials are hoping to grow.
“As I always remind the workforce, the driving edge of technology, the driving impetus for innovation isn’t coming from within the Department of Defense,” Rogers said. “It is coming from the private sector, and we need to harness that technical insight, we need to harness that innovation. We need to work collaboratively to generate better outcomes for our nation.”
In January President Barack Obama named Rogers, then the Navy’s top cybersecurity officer, to assume command of the NSA, an agency embattled by former contractor Edward Snowden’s leaks about surveillance. Rogers replaced retiring Gen. Keith Alexander.
“Now I find myself as a leader of an intelligence organization that quite frankly is taking some heat very publicly,” Rogers said. “We just need to have an honest conversation with ourselves about what are we comfortable with as a nation when it comes to risk.”
The list of speakers at Thursday’s event made two things made clear: the need for cybersecurity was not going away, and startup companies have been raking in significant amounts of investment capital. Large companies have lots of cash to invest in staying ahead of the threat, said Maria Lewis Kussmaul of AGC Partners.
“What (startups) don’t do well is grow organically,” she said.
The San Antonio Chamber of Commerce commissioned a $100,000 study to evaluate the cybersecurity industry here and compare its potential with other cities.
“We really didn’t have a catalog of our assets,” said John Dickson, principal of Denim Group, Ltd., a sponsor of the event.
Phil Schneider, whose firm is working on the study, said San Antonio was starting “from a position of enviable strength that only a handful of places in the U.S. — and really the world — actually have.”
The public only started to understand what cybersecurity was a few years ago when big, commercial computer breaches — such as Target’s and Home Depot’s recent troubles — started making headlines, Schneider said. And few other cities are truly evaluating cybersecurity as a jobs engine.
“Like a lot of technology, particularly constantly evolving technology, there aren’t always a lot of big job generators, but maybe thousands of small job generators — so it really doesn’t get on the radar,” he said. “That’s precisely why there isn’t a lot of competition out there.”
He said the network security industry’s “800-pound gorilla” is the Washington metro area, led by Montgomery County, Maryland, and Fairfax County, Virginia.
Participants said San Antonio is set to position itself as the leader in cybersecurity outside the National Capital Region.
The military is a big part of that.
“It’s an ongoing juggernaut, not only for contractors that work with them, but it’s also a constant source of talent coming out, which is a rarity anywhere in the world,” Schneider said.
But that’s only half of it.
San Antonio turned out to have a much larger commercial presence than expected — that is, contractors working predominately for private-sector companies instead the military. The commercial side of the business is seeing strong job growth.
“Most, if not all, of the companies on the commercial side of cybersecurity that are here are home grown,” Schneider said. “They started here as local entrepreneurs, they came out of other parts of the industry, they came out of the military…. That should inform us on what kind of economic development strategy we have.”
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