The Pentagon Still Cannot Manage Cyber Talent at Scale. Here’s the Fix.

The Department of Defense does not primarily have a cyber recruiting problem — it has a cyber talent management problem. The military already possesses serious qualification frameworks, scholarship programs, credentialing systems, and selection tools. What it still lacks is a system tying assessment, training, assignment, performance, and retention together across an entire cyber career.

In March 2026, the department announced at its Cyber Workforce Summit 2.0 an effort to reinvent the cyber workforce. Called Cyber Command 2.0, this effort’s principal goal is improvement in talent management by focusing on identifying, recruiting, hiring, and retaining the right people. The effort also emphasizes the need to manage career-long expertise through flexible and responsive training pipelines and flexible career paths. Such flexibility is needed to accommodate multiple pathways to qualification — through a combination of education, coursework, experience, and assessment. Navy as an aerospace experimental psychologist, designing workforce development, competency assessment, and personnel selection systems. I also served as the chief of staff for the Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative , which fielded systems modeling defense learner, job, and competency requirements at scale. The Department of Defense has been trying to solve these problems for as long as I have been working on them. What makes Cyber Command 2.0’s ambitions so difficult is not an absence of good ideas, but an issue of structural barriers in connecting these ideas into a single functioning system. I now work in the private sector at IntelliGenesis , so I have a commercial interest in how the department answers these questions. I want to be transparent about that. But these are problems I have worked on and cared about for my entire career. What follows reflects that full span of commitment, not just my current role.

Key points

• In March 2026, the department announced at its Cyber Workforce Summit 2.0 an effort to reinvent the cyber workforce.
• Called Cyber Command 2.0, this effort’s principal goal is improvement in talent management by focusing on identifying, recruiting, hiring, and retaining the right people.
• The effort also emphasizes the need to manage career-long expertise through flexible and responsive training pipelines and flexible career paths.
• Such flexibility is needed to accommodate multiple pathways to qualification — through a combination of education, coursework, experience, and assessment.
• Navy as an aerospace experimental psychologist, designing workforce development, competency assessment, and personnel selection systems.