New cyber force would cost up to $11 billion to start, commission says

A U.S. military branch dedicated to cyber warfare, on par with the Army or Navy, would cost up to $11 billion to establish and should consist of around 30,000 personnel in order to bolster the nation's digital defenses and better address growing threats, a report by a panel of policy experts and former top military leaders asserts.

The envisioned Cyber Force, which would be the latest since the Space Force was created in 2019, could align with the Department of the Army or stand as its own department within the Pentagon, a report published Wednesday by the Commission on Cyber Force Generation states. 

The military branch would take 12 to 18 months to get up and running and also include roughly 5,000 members of the National Guard and up to 6,000 civilians, according to the commission. 

“There are five domains and we have built services to cover four out of those five. I don’t see how this domain is any less deserving of a service when it is where we literally have troops in contact with the adversary on a daily basis,” Josh Stiefel, a former professional staff member on the House Armed Services Committee who co-chaired the commission, told reporters during a press call.

The board is a partnership by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). Composed of private sector and policy experts and former senior DOD officials, including several who helmed the digital warfighting arm of their respective service, the panel launched last year with the core assumption that the president had ordered the establishment of the Cyber Force, focusing its attention on designing how the branch should be built — rather than rehashing past debates over if one is needed.

The findings arrive as House and Senate lawmakers prepare to craft their annual defense authorization bill. An increasing number of them see a cyber-specific military service as an inevitability, especially as Russia and China continue to grow and mature their own digital corps and race to gain the edge on new technologies like artificial intelligence.

“Our problem is … Cyber Command’s doing okay,” said retired Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, senior director of FDD’s Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation.

“The problem is there’s not a path to growth and it's declining in a more aggressive adversary environment. So we are trying to be ready for the future. We can either have a calamity cause this, or we can intentionally cause it through thoughtful, deliberate programming.”

Bipartisan frustration has grown on Capitol Hill over the chronic failure by the existing military branches to provide U.S. Cyber Command with personnel who are ready to fight foreign adversaries online.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee who has led efforts in recent years for independent assessments on the feasibility of of creating a new service, has already indicated she will offer an amendment that is expected to mirror the board’s conclusions when policymakers meet next week behind closed doors.

The House Armed Services Committee takes up its draft on Thursday. It’s possible a panelist will propose similar legislation during the marathon meeting.

“It'll be interesting to see what comes in the markup if this raises to the level of attention that it’s debated,” Siefel, now vice president for government affairs at defense technology firm Second Front, said of the report.

“I think we’re facing an inevitability,” he added. “I’d just rather we pull this trigger and do it sooner rather than later. It’s typically better to prepare for war in advance of conflict rather than after the fact.”

Besides the commission, the fiscal 2025 defense policy bill tasked the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine with studying the feasibility of creating a Cyber Force. That work is expected to conclude in the coming months.

The Trump administration’s fiscal year 2027 budget request allocates $7.7 billion for the Pentagon’s cyberspace operations, including about $4.5 billion for Cyber Command.

Montgomery, who pitched a Cyber Force to President Trump last year, said that “at some point there’s going to be a ‘go’ order. There’s a lot of things that can drive that ‘go’ order, a national crisis, a president getting motivated about it, Congress getting motivated about it, any series of things can do it.”