Pentagon’s Roughly 500 Cyber Operators Draw Watchdog Scrutiny

The Pentagon’s sprawling cyber operations involve about 500 organizations and more than 70,000 personnel, numbers that signal significant potential for costly overlap and inefficiency, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office released on Wednesday.

The report describes a vast, decentralized and at times duplicative system in which each military branch develops service and support units that sometimes overlap.

For example, the GAO points to each branch developing its own cyber operations training despite previous congressional direction to develop a joint training model to reduce costs. For almost a decade, no one in the Pentagon assessed what was actually ...