Cyberwarfare and bureaucracy - like oil and water?

I was amused to read about a presentation by Ms. Lynn Dugle, President of Raytheon Intelligence and Information Systems. Ares reports:

"We have done an admirable job of identifying the problem, and then standing in a circle and admiring it." So says Lynn Dugle ...

. . .

In a fast-paced brief to the Air Force Association's CyberFutures conference yesterday, Dugle says that cyberdefenders "have done an outstanding job except for three things. We are over-reliant on historical learning, we're looking for talent in all the wrong places, and the organizations that most need that talent are the least likely to attract it."

"Other than that, we're doing great."

Cyber, Dugle says, is "not like physics, where the half-life of what you learn is measured in decades", so the traditional concepts of learning and development don't apply.

Also, cyberexperts don't fit the mold of big-company recruitment -- "from prestigious universities with high GPAs". Out of Raytheon's last three "premier cyberrecruits", Dugle says, one had never graduated from high school and was working on the filler line at a pharmaceutical plant (Raytheon found him on a hacker site), and another was a high-schooler that the company found at a hacker competition, singlehandedly pwning teams of more experienced people.

. . .

Finally, Dugle adds, "we make efforts in big companies to be inclusive toward everybody -- but we have an embedded bias towards people who want to work 9-to-5, charge their time in six-minute intervals and conform to a dress code. Is that solid thinking or flawed logic? What if you work when you want to, and every time you find a vulnerability, I write you a check?"

"I throw that out to the human resources people," Dugle concludes, "and they start vibrating in place."

There's more at the link.

It's refreshing to hear such honesty from an industry leader. Ms. Dugle's comments certainly match my memories of military service during the early days of electronic warfare, when those of us who knew what we were doing were largely ignored, shouted down or otherwise harassed by those who'd spent their lives "in the system" and were profoundly opposed to doing things differently to the way they'd "always" been done. Only when the proverbial brown substance hit the rotary air impeller, and we were able to demonstrate that we were the only ones who could deal with it, did things improve.

Looks like not much has changed . . .

Peter