Air Force demotes Cyberspace Command

The Air Force announced last week that it has backed off even further from its grand plan to establish a cyberspace command as the military entity primarily responsible for securing and conducting offensive operations in cyberspace.

The Air Force launched a provisional Cyberspace Command more than a year ago and scheduled a formal command launch for Oct. 1. However, officials delayed that effort after the departures of Air Force Chief of Staff T. Michael "Buzz" Moseley and Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne, who were fired for incidents involving the mishandling of nuclear detonators and weapons.

After a series of meetings in Colorado Springs, Colo., last week, the Air Force dropped the idea of establishing the command as an equal of the nine other major Air Force commands, which include Air Combat, Space and Air Mobility commands.

Instead, the cyberspace initiative will become an element of the numbered Air Force, one step down the organizational ladder from the top-level major commands and above wings and other independent groups. It will be part of Space Command, effectively combining the mission to secure cyberspace with that of securing the exploitation of space. The move eliminates cyberspace as a separate battleground on which to concentrate.

Combining cyberspace and real space initiatives make sense, if only because both focus on the control and communication of information, whether that means data communications or surveillance from satellites and other means, said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org.

“Cyberspace Command was one of those Air Force things where, the more you studied it, the less you understood it," he said. "Its functions either made no sense at all or replicated those that are the responsibility of long-standing institutions. They were talking about offensive information operations when the [National Security Agency] got that job 15 or 20 years ago. They talked a lot about protection of the critical infrastructure in the commercial sector, which has been dominated by the [National Institute of Standards and Technology] and FBI. It was never clear whether they had any statutory authority to do any of these things."

U.S. law defining the role of the four armed services does not include a section defining which, if any, have responsibility for maintaining the security of cyberspace or for handling electronic warfare, said Maj. Gen. John Maluda, director of cyberspace transformation and strategy in the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force for Warfighting Integration and Chief Information Officer.

Maluda talked about the likely fate of the existing Cyberspace Command during a speech in August at the Air Force Information Technology Conference in Montgomery, Ala.

The command was an ambitious plan whose execution was stymied by budget and personnel cuts and high-profile mistakes, including the August 2007 incident in which nuclear-tipped missiles were flown from Minot Air Force Base, N.D., to Barksdale Air Force Base, La., by crew members who believed they were carrying nonnuclear devices.

"We took some warheads down to Barksdale, and that kind of queered the deal," Maluda said. "That did kind of hold things up a bit."

Details on how the command will be reorganized will have to wait until after completion of the Air Force Nuclear Roadmap — a more detailed plan for revamping control of the country’s nuclear arsenal — and specific plans for the command responsible for maintaining it.

Concrete results on the plan for a nuclear or cyberspace command will probably happen only after the presidential election in November, Pike said.

"They're putting the gear into neutral in the sense that they recognized [the command] was poorly thought out," he said. "What they'll probably do is make a preliminary set of recommendations on the way it ought to go and wait on results of the election."