How the Army is helping combatant commands with cyber planning

When it comes to providing combatant commanders the planners they needs for theater-wide cyber cyber operations, Army leaders believe they have a head start.

Cyber teams from across the services work through organizations, formally known as Joint Force Headquarters-Cyber, which in turn provide planning, targeting, intelligence and cyber capabilities to the combatant commands. These organizations oversee combat mission teams and combat support teams.

“We have the more mature JFHQ-C, we just have more reps at this point. We’ve got more capabilities current in the JFHQ-C, the other services are building those rapidly,” Lt. Gen. Stephen Fogarty, the head of Army Cyber Command, told Fifth Domain Aug. 20.

Army Cyber Command was the first to create a standalone JFHQ-C, while other services have decided to dual hat personnel and are still working to create their organizations.

This difference has also allowed Army Cyber to stay on track in building new planning organizations at each combatant command as mandated by U.S. Cyber Command in 2017.

These new organizations, called cyber operations-integrated planning elements (CO-IPE), will serve as satellite offices of the service-specific cyber components, which control cyber forces.

Fogarty said the three cells the Army is responsible for – Africa Command, Central Command and Northern Command – are on pace.

“For us, the focus over the last year has been on the CO-IPEs because we had already built out the JFHQ-C,” he said. This allowed the Army to focus on building these cells, which are expected to be fully operational by 2022.

Because of the maturity of JFHQ-C Army, Fogarty said the service can surge personnel if need be until the planning cells are fully staffed.

The new cells have already improved operations, he said.

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