
Army looks to tap civilian talent for cyber force - pgl
https://fcw.com/articles/2017/12/05/cyber-civilian-army-hire.aspx
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angry_octet
Five officers per year is a total embarassment. NSA has (estimated) 40k staff,
and unknown additional contractors and outsourced solution providers.

NSA officers already deploy with US forces, so the only reason is to have
people in your chain of command. But then they won't have access to the
resources of NSA.

It also seems to be a bad career track, because, being restricted duties, they
could not command anything significant. The corollary is that there will never
be people educated in offensive infosec making informed decisions.

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mtgx
That $70 billion a year increase in budget, while they keep whining they
"don't have money for free college" must've helped quite a bit. The military
industrial complex keeps growing.

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turblety
Does the US Army work with the NSA? Because I wouldn't be surprised if the
reason they can't find staff is because a lot of techies are against the
government spying on all it's citizens. They might not want to be involved in
helping the government surveillance plans.

I guess there's also the financial aspect that the private section will pay
more than the government. But I think the job (if you removed the betraying
your country by spying on them stuff) would be rewarding enough to attract
some people.

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jbob2000
> applicants must be under 41 compared to 32 for OCS, and can skip the
> traditional basic and combat training requirements, but they must be able to
> pass a physical and meet basic fitness standards.

> applicants are sent to Ft. Sill for four weeks of direct commissioned
> officer training and 12 weeks of condensed cyber basic officer leader course

> security clearance backlog of more than 700,000 applications, making it
> possible for cyber officer candidates to report for duty in as little as
> four to five months from initial application

This makes applying to Google and Amazon seem like a breeze. And at least
private companies try to hide their ageism.

And am I missing something? If you're sending techies to the battlefield,
you're doing it wrong.

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tomjen3
My guess is two-fold: one issue is that there is a culture and this was the
best compromise that the institution could do.

The second is that there might be cases where you want to send techies to
bases in, say, Afghanistan, to take a closer look at computers you might not
want to expose over any kind of external connection, or where you need to talk
with local assets.

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dfc
I can't tell if they have waved the requirement to have better vision than
20/100 or whatever it is in your weak eye.

