A Roadmap for a US Cyber Force is Being Drawn. It is Paved with Questions.

A New Panel Evaluates Creating a US Cyber Force

On May 29, 2020, a new Netflix series premiered to mixed reviews. Starring Steve Carrell and John Malcovich, Space Force followed Carrell’s General Naird as he stood up the US Space Force and sought to put “boots on the moon” on the order of an unnamed president. This series, cancelled after two seasons, was a response to the February 2019 publication of Space Policy Directive-4, which established the US Space Force. It was a cultural moment when ideas and policies coming out of the first Trump Administration were seen as laughable and the idea of a Space Force was no exception. The same year, the John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) was passed with funding for the Space Force and it is an active branch today.

I was a space policy maker when the Netflix version of Space Force aired, and I didn’t think it was such a laughable idea. The idea of a Space Force was never to put “boots on the moon.” It was about specializing in a clear warfighting domain where critical military assets reside and are now, and will be in the future, under attack. The non-military nature of the space domain was long ago abandoned as space was filled with surveillance and command and control for militaries around the world. It was naïve far before Steve Carrell portrayed a hapless Space Force general to assume that space would be used for peaceful purposes only.

Three years after the cancellation of the Space Force series, an August 2025 press release detailed the formation of a panel of former civilian and military cybersecurity experts are working together to roadmap how the US might now create a yet another new branch of the armed forces. Calls for a Cyber Force are not new, but this news pushes the issue into more serious territory even though it does not constitute true government action. Many in cybersecurity circles cheered this development.

Having lived through the Space Force experience (both as a watcher of the show and someone involved) the idea of a Cyber Force is not simple nor analogous to the establishment of the Space Force. The success of bringing the Space Force into the US military does not equal success with a Cyber Force and in truth the operational, talent, and bureaucratic challenges for creating a Cyber Force are likely to be considerably more complex. Cyber is a domain unlike our physical domains so while the idea of a domain-specialized military branch tracks with our entire martial history, cyber may not be the same.