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Cyber career fields in the military are extremely tough. They only take the highest ASVAB scores for these jobs among the enlisted corps, which is something that most people can’t cheat at. Officers are a bit different; comm used to be a dumping ground for just whoever as long as that person had like 16 engineering credits, but it’s a bit more selective now. Still, you tend to get highly intelligent people in this field.
There are two types of comm jobs these days; direct network operations, and everything else. Network ops pipelines are being developed that see people in tech school for years.
Women and minorities tend to be very underrepresented in cyber career fields. Drastically. I’m trying to think of who I even knew in cyber who was black. Maybe two people in ten years. It’s not common, whatever you think that picture is saying. Most guys in the field are either dyed-in-the-wool nerds, or otherwise intelligent people who got smacked out of their preferred field, like intel.
See, the military brass spouts all the right lines, and probably believes it, but when the rubber hits the road, the ASVAB and the ass pain of cyber tech school tends to weed out idiots.
they have pics of who's working there: https://www.cybercom.mil/
And you don’t think that these photos are 100% staged and approved for release?
Of course there are women and minorities in these fields. There’s probably some kind of drive to make sure they get a good mix up at HQ. But women and blacks are still below 20% of the force in their respective categories.
they're obviously real people who work there. they're not however the top dogs working on secret projects obviously. but they are the underlying bulk and support system, and cyberwarfare is something where that bulk actually needs to be capable and paying attention, unlike other areas.
I take it the ASVAB has changed a bit over the years. The one I took in the late 80s wasn't a predictor of anything other than you could pass a standardized test. The one I took to get an interview at a papermill was 10x harder.
It takes a lot to qualify to be in network operations. There are some shitbirds in comm, but they tend to shake out into the less technical jobs.
I don’t worry about dumb people in those jobs. I worry about the over-educated who either abandoned their common sense in college, or are too spergy to properly analyze a situation.
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