Building the Best Offensive and Defensive Cyber Workforce: Volume II, Attracting and Retaining Enlisted and Civilian Personnel (Research Summary)

Cyberwarfare is considered a core element of the U.S. Air Force (USAF) mission. People with cybersecurity skillsets are in great demand, not only in the military but also in the private sector. As a result, USAF is concerned that recruiting and retaining talented cyber personnel might be increasingly difficult. Thus, USAF expressed an interest in better understanding the perspectives of members of its cyber workforce and the insights that could be gained from their views. USAF turned to RAND Project AIR FORCE for assistance in gathering these insights. Prior RAND work explored these issues among officers; this report focuses on enlisted and civilian members of the cyber workforce. We conducted 30 focus groups and interviews to collect the viewpoints of cyber enlisted and civilian personnel in offensive and defensive cyber operationsspecifically the cyber warfare operations (1B4) specialty, digital network analyst (1N4A) specialty, and civilians operating as part of the cyber mission force (CMF). We also reviewed USAFs archival personnel data files to examine retention profiles for the civilian and enlisted cyberwork force.