cyberwar

Few countries have a military mix comparable to that of the United States: ground, naval, air and space forces, industrial capacity and the means to operate far from their borders. However, recent conflicts have made it clear that the superiority no longer depends solely of airplanes, ships or battle tanks. In Ukraine, drones have acquired a prominence that forces us to review tactics and defenses. Meanwhile, Cyberattacks have established themselves as another tool of confrontation. And that’s where some experts believe the American structure is starting to show problems. A commission assembled by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in collaboration with the Cyberspace Solarium Commission 2.0s project, has tried to answer this question and its diagnosis is not very reassuring. In a recently published reportits authors maintain that the current design of US cyber forces is insufficient to deter, compete and combat in this domain. They do not claim that the Pentagon lacks specialists, units or operational capacity. The problem, according to the study, is deeper: no organization concentrates the responsibility of consistently recruiting, training and equipping the personnel needed by the United States Cyber ​​Command. It is no secret that measuring military power requires more than counting soldiers, ships or planes. The most visible data comes from SIPRI: in 2025, the United States remained by far the biggest military spender in the worldwith 954 billion dollars and 33% of the global total, compared to the 336 billion estimated for China. This data does not measure military power on its own, but it fits with other analyses, like those of GAO and Brookingswhich continue to describe the US as a dominant force due to its combination of capabilities, deployment, logistics and alliances. The domain for which no branch of the United States Armed Forces was designed There appears the anomaly that focuses the report. The United States has created military services with central responsibilities associated with the large traditional domains of combat, including the space branch since 2019. Cyberspace, on the other hand, continues without its own branch. The commission maintains that, for this reason, there is also no single authority responsible for creating the necessary forces to operate in that area. Responsibilities are distributed among different services, all involved in the mission, but none obliged to place it ahead of their traditional tasks. This dispersion translates, according to the report, into different approaches among the Department’s five military services to recruit, train and develop those who make up the cyber forces. Each one applies their own criteria access, career plans, educational systems and compensation models, which, according to the commission, produce unequal and inefficient results. Katherine Sutton, civilian cyber policy officer and senior cyber advisor at the Pentagon, acknowledged before the Senate Armed Services Committee on April 28, 2026 the “significant difficulties” in recruiting profiles with the appropriate skills, retaining the most experienced operators in the face of better-paid opportunities in the private sector and offering specialized training with sufficient agility. Now, the Pentagon has not stood still. The report acknowledges that it has attempted to correct part of the problem with CYBERCOM 2.0an initiative announced in 2025 to reinforce the role of Cyber ​​Command in talent, training and capacity development. But the commission considers that this type of reform does not resolve the underlying issue: the absence of a military branch dedicated to generating forces for cyberspace. In other words, it is not just discussing who commands the operations, but who stably builds the personnel, preparation and tools that those operations need. The United States Cyber ​​Command, known as USCYBERCOMhas the official mission of directing, synchronizing and coordinating operations in cyberspace to defend and promote national interests, according to its own institutional description. According to the commission, the problem is that in practice it also ends up carrying part of the “service-type” functions that it should provide. personnel, preparation and capabilities. The authors see there a design problem that is reminiscent of the model corrected by the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986which reorganized the Pentagon and better delineated the difference between building the force and employing it in operations. And what do they suggest? Well, the study works on the hypothesis of creating a military branch dedicated to cyberspace and develops how it should be organized if Washington were to make that decision. This Cyber ​​Force would have a defined mission: organize, train and equip the personnel in charge of offensive and defensive operations, while USCYBERCOM would retain the responsibility of employing them. The proposal does not seek to absorb all of the Pentagon’s technology or take charge of each of its computer networks. The other branches would continue to manage the systems linked to their own missions, but they would stop separately generating a capability that requires common criteria, careers and priorities. The paradox is difficult to ignore. The United States retains the most powerful military force in the world, but the report warns that has not yet developed a structure specifically designed to generate its capabilities in cyberspace. Erica Lonergan, lead author of the study and professor at Columbia University, and Mark Montgomery, commissioner of the report, retired rear admiral and head of cyber and technology at the FDD, They later transferred that conclusion to a forum in Defense News: If the digital environment has already become a war domain, it should have a branch ready to fight in it. Images | US Army Cyber ​​Command | Wyoming National Guard In Xataka | For years Russia accustomed its citizens to a distant war. Thousands of gas stations have just broken that illusion