Pentagon cyber chief: The demand far exceeds supply

At DefenseTalks on Tuesday, Katie Sutton said the Pentagon now receives far more requests to use cyber operations than its forces can fulfill, eight years after gaining that authority.

The Pentagon’s top civilian cyber policy official said Tuesday her single priority is expanding the cyber options available to the president and the defense secretary, describing a gap between what commanders are asking for and what the force can deliver.

“I’m focused on one single priority, and that is building a more robust set of capabilities for the secretary and the president,” said Katie Sutton, assistant secretary of defense for cyber policy, at DefenseTalks, hosted by DefenseScoop. “The demand far exceeds the supply we have.”

Sutton traced the department’s posture to 2018, when the military gained authorities to run cyber operations as a traditional military activity. “In those last eight years, we’ve learned a lot, but I feel like the last year has really been the year that cyber has sort of entered the limelight,” she said. “We’ve built up the capabilities, we’ve built up our force, we have the operational experience.”

One particular instance of that limelight are previous reports from an operation in Venezuela to apprehend the country’s former president Nicolás Maduro. Various public statements, including those made by President Donald Trump, stated that power outages during the operation were the result of a cyberattack. Experts told CyberScoop in the aftermath that cyber ops may have been involved, but the visible physical attacks that were also part of the operation alone could plausibly explain the outages.

Sutton further described the shift as rooted in how cyber is used, “not just to counter other malicious cyber actors as a cyber-on-cyber tool, but actually as an integrated tool of cyber warfare.” 

Sutton put data at the center of that argument. “Data is fundamental to every battle that we fight going forward,” she said. “Being able to use our cyber tools to deny that to our adversaries as we go into a kinetic fight will ensure our mission success and provide greater safety for our troops.” 

She also described cyber as a tool leaders can use “below the level of armed conflict to provide options before having to move forward to our kinetic options.”

How AI fits in

Sutton also spoke about how she sees artificial intelligence being integrated into the military’s cyber operations, casting it as a natural fit. “Cyber is a digital domain; it’s all based on zeros and ones,” she said, further arguing the department needs to be “an AI-first organization.” 

However, she highlights AI-specific risks—like data poisoning and weakened guardrails—that demand the Pentagon adopt a fundamentally different approach to cyber operations.”

At the conference, Reed suggested AI itself may be the solution, helping Transcom become less predictable and illustrating how military officials are leveraging the technology across multiple operational domains.

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