WASHINGTON — The top member on the House Armed Services subcommittee focused on cyber had a stark warning about the how America’s greatest geopolitical rival is positioning itself to overwhelm the US military in cyberspace.
“China has 10:1 people doing offensive cyber to us. I think we should be expanding our capabilities,” Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., told Breaking Defense on the sidelines of the 4th Annual National Cyber Innovation Forum Thursday.
US Cyber Command does a “great job with what they have,” he said, “but I think we’re underfunded and undermanned.”
Recently a Pentagon official described how part of the command’s new CYBERCOM 2.0 force generation strategy is specifically designed to emphasize “domain mastery” over brute numbers.
“The Department of War will not match adversary cyber forces in sheer number, rather, we will maintain our advantage in the cyber domain through true domain mastery, essentially creating a ‘quality over quantity’ approach,” Assistant Secretary of Defense for cyber policy Katie Sutton said in a statement to Breaking Defense earlier this month, using the Department of Defense’s secondary name.
