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4 June 2024

Preparing the U.S. Cyber Force for Extended Conflict

Jason Vogt, Kendrick Kuo, and Dan Grobarcik

Cyber operations are inevitable in future warfare. What roles they will play, however, and to what effect, are hotly contested. Over the past decade, U.S. cyber forces have engaged in numerous operations, but they have yet to be tested in high-end conflict against a technically sophisticated adversary, leaving defense planners with limited information from which to design a force structure to confront the varied character cyber conflict may take.

The Russia-Ukraine war suggests that force structure decisions related to cyber operators face temporal tradeoffs. Combat quickly begins to outpace the speed with which offensive cyber operations can be accomplished. This, in turn, reduces the capacity of highly trained cyber operators to achieve effects. As a result, sustaining these types of cyber operations likely will require more resources than were anticipated at the start of the conflict. Attrition and mass—terms now associated with Ukrainian battlefields—may then bleed into the cyber domain.

In the early phase of the conflict, Russia used elite cyber operators to conduct complex cyber operations in support of its military objectives. The pace of these operations waned, however, as Russia expended its exquisite network accesses, leaving it with limited capabilities as the war moved into its protracted state. In contrast, Ukraine’s cyber capabilities were less sophisticated at the outset, but over time a large primarily volunteer force coalesced in support of Ukraine. Preliminary insights from the Russia-Ukraine war highlight that getting force balance right may determine whether cyber forces maintain significance past the initial salvo or are relegated to the sidelines.

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