Bytes, With, and Through: Establishment of Cyber Engagement Teams to Enable Collective Security

Abstract

Multiple documents from the White House, Congress, and from within the Department of Defense describe the imperative to work with allies and partners toward long-term advancement of the U.S. and partners’ interests. These same documents also often stress the importance of the cyberspace as a warfighting domain and a U.S. and international interest. However, there is no clear strategy or methodology today that explicitly links the building of partner capacity within the cyber domain. This paper serves as a primer for discussion on how to bridge cyber operations and partner capacity by proposing a concept of Cyber Engagement Teams (CETs). CETs would seeks to expand on current Foreign Internal Defense (FID), Security Force Assistance (SFA) or other cooperation and engagement apparatuses. Taking advantage of similar successes and lessons learned over the many decades by those units engaging in FID, SFA, and other security cooperation mechanisms, the U.S. has an opportunity establish a cadre of functional cyber experts to complement the traditional and existing engagement models. These forward deployed CETs would work with and train U.S. allies in areas of network operations, cyber security, and even offensive cyber operations while at the same time providing a viable mechanism to hold the adversary’s target networks and systems at risk. By working with indigenous forces, CETs would situate U.S. and friendly forces and capabilities in a better position to counter Anti-Access Area Denial (A2AD) threats, to hold adversary command and control (C2) networks at risk by working “by, with, and through” friendly nations, and would develop lasting relationships. CETs are a logical tool to contend with cyber adversaries through friendly engagement, collective security, and partnering.