America's Military Lacks the Proper Structure to Effectively Wage Cyber Warfare

Summary

The United States military continues to treat cyberspace as a secondary function rather than a primary warfighting domain, despite facing daily adversarial engagements online from nations like China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. While Congress and the Pentagon have made incremental reforms to U.S. Cyber Command over the past decade, no single military branch exists with the core mission of recruiting, training, and retaining specialized cyber talent, leaving the force fragmented across multiple services with competing priorities. The current system fails to attract and keep technically skilled personnel because career advancement models favor management over deep technical expertise, which is precisely the opposite of what effective cyber warfare requires. A new report from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Center for Strategic and International Studies proposes the creation of a dedicated Cyber Force, similar to how the Air Force and Space Force were established when their respective domains became critical to national security. The authors argue that just as those services were created to give emerging warfighting domains proper institutional focus, cyberspace has reached the same threshold and demands its own dedicated military branch before adversaries gain an irreversible advantage.