Pentagon makes pitch to young tech-savvy individuals

The Pentagon must shake up its personnel policies and shed its "dreary" image in order to attract young tech-savvy individuals to work in the cyber field, the new secretary of defence has said.

Speaking at Stanford University on Thursday, Ashton Carter said that the military needed to offer much more flexible career paths if it wanted to be an attractive place to work for people with skills in cyber security or other important new technologies.

Making the first visit by a defence secretary chief to Silicon Valley in two decades, Mr Carter insisted that the Pentagon should do much more to tap the innovative potential of the West Coast in areas such as robotics, data analysis and 3D printing.

"There is a clash of cultures and a clash of generations. We need to attract to military service a generation of people who have grown up in the internet age," said Mr Carter, who has a doctorate in theoretical physics. The Pentagon would have to develop a personnel system that encouraged "flexibility and mobility" and was "permeable enough that people can give it a try".

One part of the Pentagon's new West Coast push will involve setting up a dedicated office in the region as well as a venture capital fund that could invest in technology start-up companies.

Mr Carter's speech reflected a broader concern among public sector employers about how to take advantage of the talents of younger workers who do not envisage spending their careers within a large bureaucracy. "Kids do not want to go into something for their entire lives," he said. "We can't have industrial-age human resources thinking in an age when they want choice and flexibility."

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Richard Bejtlich, a former Air Force officer now chief security strategist at FireEye, a cyber security company, said that the military was having no problems attracting people from within the services to fill new cyber-related positions, in part because it is one of the few growth areas. However, in the long-run, the Pentagon would need build new institutions with a different and more flexible culture if it was to retain soldiers with cyber-skills.

"A strict military model will not eventually be a firm foundation," he said.

In his speech, Mr Carter revealed that Russian hackers had gained access last year to parts of the Pentagon's unclassified network but were quickly repelled. He did not say if the Pentagon believed the hackers were working for the Russian government.

The Pentagon also unveiled a new cyber strategy document which talked more openly about the potential use of cyber weapons to deter potential attacks.

Mr Carter said that the US military's ability to deter attacks was being helped by the fact that it was becoming easier and quicker to identify new hackers. Potential attackers might be put off by the knowledge that it was harder to hide behind a string of proxy servers.

"Adversaries should know that our preference for deterrence and our defensive posture don't diminish our willingness to use cyber options if necessary," Mr Carter said.

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