Senate eyes Guard for info security

[William Knowles <wk () C4I ORG>]

http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2000/0529/web-army-05-31-00.asp

BY Dan Verton
05/31/2000

The Senate this month urged the Pentagon to study how it might use the
Army National Guard to make up for the shortage of computer
programmers and information security specialists.

"The reserve component, especially the National Guard, is
well-positioned" to carry out the mission of securing the nations
critical computer systems, the Senate Appropriations Committee said in
its report on the fiscal 2001 Defense Appropriations bill.

The committee urged the Defense Department "to examine the role of the
reserves in the carrying out [of] information operations, information
assurance and information systems security missions."

The bill, approved by the committee May 18, still must pass the full
House and Senate and work its way through a joint House/Senate
conference.

The language in the Senate report comes almost one year after a major
Defense Department study recommended an unprecedented expansion in the
role the reserves play in national defense, including the formation of
a virtual cyberdefense unit to protect the nations critical
infrastructure.

That study, known as the Reserve Component Employment Study 2005,
concluded that the reserves are "particularly well-suited to homeland
defense missions" and called for the formation of a "joint [reserve
component] virtual information operations organization."

The committee approved more than $3 billion in overall operations and
maintenance funding for the Army National Guard, including $65.7
million for expansion of the Guards Distributed Learning project and
electronic courseware development to bolster the Guards Homeland
Defense mission aimed at federal, state and local responses to
terrorist attacks involving weapons of mass destruction.

The committee also added $16 million to the Armys research and
development budget for an information operations warfare vulnerability
assessment and $2.1 million for a threat information operations
simulator.


*-------------------------------------------------*
"Communications without intelligence is noise;
Intelligence without communications is irrelevant."
Gen. Alfred. M. Gray, USMC
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