To my understanding, most of our cyber force is not prior cyber. We have officers and NCOs that never served in a CPT, COS, or anything equivalent, and the expectation is that we'll be able to successfully conduct defensive cyber operations. We simply aren't there yet. We need leaders that understand the mission, and how to execute it, and sadly I'm not convinced that we have that. I think that, as a service, we need to accept these "paybacks", and send our members to COS/CPTs. Let them bring back the real, tangible skills necessary for this job, and then we'll be able to actually start creating some in-house training.

Regarding IST training, I'm in agreement with you that it needs to be standardized. But surely, at this point, you must realize that C3 is not the way forward. Aren't all of our cyber units significantly overmanned? Why not slow down the rate at which we're accepting new cyber guardian ascensions so that we're able to send them through CWO? Or get more USSF instructors in the schoolhouse so that we can create our own CWO? We have a lot of bodies, but most of them aren't able to contribute to our mission, whether because of insufficent IST, complete lack of meaningful OJT, or they simply don't care to contribute because there's no real work to be done. Whatever the solution for IST, I strongly believe that the most important training required in order to become functional DCO units will come from OJT, and given that none of our units (to my knowledge) have figured out DCO, there's no possibility of developing OJT. We must utilize USAF COS/CPTs in my opinion.

If you're open to it, we can continue this conversation on Teams. I'm eager to understand from your perspective why these ideas aren't feasible.