The Department of Defense’s large-scale cyber training platform for U.S. Cyber Command’s cyberwarriors could one day be leveraged for all cyber-related war fighters within the services. The cyber mission force is the current focus of the program. However, one military official believes in a few years it’ll be leveraged by what he termed “forces operating in cyberspace.”
The persistent cyber training environment, or PCTE, which is being developed by the Army, will serve a critical need for cyber mission force personnel, as they currently don’t have a place on par with facilities like the Army’s National Training Center in which they can conduct individual training, collective training or mission rehearsal.
The vision, according to Col. Steve Rehn, the capability manager for cyber at the Army’s Cyber Center of Excellence, is to have personnel within the brigade responsible for operating and maintaining the network during operations be able to train on and replicate the network without having to set it up.
This end state likely won’t happen for at least another three to four years, Rehn said Aug. 22 at TechNet Augusta.
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The PCTE is currently undergoing a prototyping phase and the official final contract for the CMF won’t be put out to bid until 2020.
Mark Pomerleau is a reporter for C4ISRNET, covering information warfare and cyberspace.
