President Obama moves to split cyberwarfare command from the NSA

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With weeks to go in his tenure, President Barack Obama on Dec 23 moved to end the controversial “dual-hat” arrangement under which the National Security Agency and the nation’s cyberwarfare command are headed by the same military officer. It is unclear whether President-elect Donald Trump will support such a move. A transition official said only that “cybersecurity has been and will be a central focus of the transition effort.”

Pressure had grown on President Obama to make such a move on the grounds that the two jobs are too large for one person to handle, that the two organizations have fundamentally different missions and that US Cyber Command, or Cybercom, needed its own leader to become a full-fledged fighting force. “While the dual-hat arrangement was once appropriate in order to enable a fledgling Cybercom to leverage NSA’s advanced capabilities and expertise, Cybercom has since matured” to the point where it needs its own leader, President Obama said in a statement accompanying his signing of the 2017 defense authorization bill.


President Obama moves to split cyberwarfare command from the NSA