Air Force Will Fight Online Without Cyber Command

The Air Force is going ahead with plans to put together a force that will wage wars online. But it won't be a full-fledged Cyber Command.

In August, the Air Force put its controversial effort to put together a "Cyber Command" on hold, after the air service's leadership was sacked -- and after it became painfully obvious that no one was really sure what the new command would really do.

During the Air Force's senior-level "Corona" meeting in Colorado Springs last week, the generals decided to drop the Cyber Command idea, Air Force Times' Michael Hoffman reports. Instead, the service's cadre of information warriors will become a "numbered air force," under Air Force Space Command.

The bureaucratic change, seemingly inconsequential to outsiders, will have an enormous impact within the military. The new network warfare group will be "nowhere near" as big or as important as previously planned, notes reader EM, a former Air Force intelligence officer. "The Air Force is continuing cyber work, but the service won't be the end-all-be-all of cyber."

For years, the Air Force's leader argued that computer networks were a warfighting "domain" -- on par with air or space as a place for combat. The service even changed its mission statement to read, "As Airmen, it is our calling to dominate Air, Space, and Cyberspace." By putting the online force under Space Command, that argument has been effectively nullified.

The Air Force did decide to put together a new command, however. It'll be for nuclear weapons, and not network ones. The new Air Force Strategic Command will "provide a clear chain of command for all Air Force nuclear forces; and will allow for one-to-one alignment between operations and sustainment with the Nuclear Weapons Center," according to an e-mail obtained by Inside Defense.

Until 1992, the Air Force's Strategic Air Command controlled nearly every aspect of the country's nuclear bomber and missile operations. Then, it was disbanded -- and nuclear standards have been slipping ever since, critics say.

[Image: USAF]

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