JCS vice chairman: break service barriers Published June 20, 2008 By Chuck Paone 66th Air Base Wing Public Affairs MARLBOROUGH, Mass. (AFPN) -- Nattily attired in his khaki-and-olive uniform, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. James E. Cartwright squinted through the stage light glare before beginning to speak at the second annual Air Force Cyberspace Symposium here June 19. Looking out at a sea of blue uniforms and business suits, the general joked briefly about the seeming incongruity of a Marine addressing an Air Force conference, and then spoke passionately about the need to break down service barriers. Much of what tends to hamper joint warfighters' ability to share and fully exploit critical information stems from individual services' inherent desire to control their systems and processes, he said. "The technology is not what paces us, it's the culture," General Cartwright said. "And that needs to change." He said that culture is based on a sense of ownership, a belief that, "I've got to own it. If I don't own it, I can't defend it. If I don't own it, I can't operate it." When the only ownership construct is a service ownership construct, "that's not serving us well," the vice chairman said. Speaking of his recent tenure as commander of U.S. Strategic Command at Offutt Air Force Base, Neb., he said he had no cyber identity, "other than pretending I was an Air Force person and then getting an e-mail account. That just doesn't work." It's not the way U.S. combat forces fight, he said. "We fight joint, we fight as a coalition, we fight as a government, not as services," the general said. He also noted that dot-mil addresses are organized around bases and stations, but, he added, "The last time I looked, we don't fight as bases and stations. We fight as operational forces." Plenty of technical solutions for achieving more jointness exist, he said, mentioning one, a trusted workspace construct, which primarily serves the intelligence community. The general said this tool allows him, simply by plugging his ID card into his computer, to access the military's open and secure networks, as well as those of other U.S. agencies and coalition-nation partners. "Wherever it is that I want to pipe into, I've got it," he said. "Wherever my card goes, those networks go with me." He said that while this particular system isn't large enough to be available for all to use, it provides the right model. "We've got to start to create these systems for what our job is, which is being warfighters." This, he said, is not about taking on service culture. "Service culture is still -- at the end of the day, at the high stress (point), whether it's in a foxhole or in a cockpit -- what convinces you that you must continue on," he said. "It is what convinces you that your buddy next to you is going to get you out of whatever you've gotten yourself into. Only service culture will do that for you." However, "we don't fight as services," but rather as joint, interagency task forces, he said. Therefore, "if we provide weapons and capabilities for services, they are misaligned with our mission." As for the specific ways in which the Air Force is handling cyber challenges, General Cartwright said he thought highly of the approach being taken. He commended the service, and each of the others, for taking steps to organize, train and equip their cyber forces "in such a way that they can present those forces to combatant commanders," who will use them to fight. At the Defense Department level, while all of this "may seem pretty straight forward," it's not settled yet, General Cartwright said. He said there's still much discussion about centralization versus decentralization, for instance. "That's not a bad thing," he said. "Rather than trying to argue over the shape of the table before you know whether the table's valuable, we need to get out there and experiment. We need to get out there and try some of this activity. "Culturally we like to pour the cement first and then figure out where the value is," he said. Yet the Defense Department needs to do it the opposite way. "We need to figure out exactly where the value is, and then worry about the organizational construct." "We're on that path, but we're not there yet," he said. The symposium was sponsored by the Air Force Electronic Systems Center, headquartered at nearby Hanscom AFB, as well as by Air Force Cyber Command (Provisional) at Barksdale AFB, La., and the Paul Revere Chapter of the Air Force Association. Comment on this story (comments may be published on Air Force Link) View the comments/letters page