In February, when the military released its budget for the upcoming fiscal year, the Air Force said it planned to spend $4.6 billion on cyber security. Which was a little bit odd, since the Pentagon said it only planned to spend $2.3 billion for the entire Defense Department — the Air Force, the Navy, the Army, everyone.
And so begins a look by Nextgov into the migraine-inducing, Borges-esque world of dot-mil defense spending. The Air Force asking for twice the money as the armed forces overall? Just one of the many head-scratchers uncovered in the Pentagon’s network defense ledgers. At this point, the services can’t even agree on what’s “cyber security,” what’s plain ol’ IT infrastructure, and what’s… something else. (Thus the giant discrepancy between the Air Force’s figures and the Pentagon’s.)
“When people can’t even agree about the most basic terminology, you know there is going to be a lot of confusion,” quips one Brookings Institution non-resident fellow. “The chances there aren’t billions of dollars in redundancies are slim to none, and slim is out of town.”
Speaking of bureaucracy and confusion: How are we all feeling about this org chart for U.S. Cyber Command, above?
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