Promote or Stay Technical?

A Cyber Force Shouldn’t Force the Choice

By MAJ Francis “Peter” McKee

August 1, 2026 | Gray Space, 2026 E-Edition

Read Time: < 10 mins

In one of the final iterations of the Joint Advanced Cyber Warfare Course at Fort Gordon, a mixed group of cyber students, including lieutenants at the Basic Officer Leader Course and sergeants at the Advanced Leaders Course, awaited a talk from the branch proponent leadership. The proponent sergeant major walked in and made his point with two questions. First, he said, “Raise your hand if you like being technical and hands-on keyboard.” Then, he said, “Raise your hand if you want to get promoted after you hit E-6 or O-3.” When most students’ hands remained up for both, he delivered the punchline: “Then you better go warrant.”

An uneasy laugh circulated the room. Several students were almost certainly calculating their exit from the Army. The sergeant major had given them sound advice to navigate a broken system. It’s a system that assumes all cyber talent will shift into management and presents a hurdle to staying technical. For the lieutenants, it meant accepting a demotion. For the noncommissioned officers (NCOs), it meant time away from the force and an additional service obligation.

That moment captured the central problem in how the Army manages its early-career technical talent. It forces people to choose the technical or managerial track before ever joining the force. A new Cyber Force gives the rare chance to fix that.

If the United States erects a new Cyber Force, it should adopt the model that the tech industry already uses. Everyone enters a single track, spends the first several years building deep technical expertise, and only then opts into management with knowledge of what that means and input from their leadership. Management should be a deliberate choice, not the default path for our cyber professionals.

The Commission Recommendation Is Only a Start

The recent Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Commission on U.S. Cyber Force Generation has drawn significant attention due to its atypical blueprint of a dedicated cyber service. One of its more unique force-structure recommendations is that a Cyber Force should be built from commissioned officers and warrant officers, sans traditional enlisted cadre (Stiefel et al., 2026). The commission’s reasoning is sound: The current enlisted cyber talent is so specialized, so highly trained, and so valuable that the enlisted pay scale is inadequate, and the rank structure is not reflective of what these operators contribute.

This is true, but is not comprehensive in two ways. First, it asks people to choose a lane at the start of their careers. The commission accurately notes that a two-track structure mirrors industry, where professionals advance through either a technical track or a managerial one. In industry, however, those tracks split in the middle, not at the beginning. Second, by routing technical talent into the warrant ranks, the commission’s model still leaves a pay and rank gap between the technical expert and the people manager. If the goal is to make staying technical a genuine peer of going into management, the real answer is to put the technical track on the same pay grades.

What Industry Gets Right About Technical Talent

If you walk into any leading technology company, you will find that a future engineering manager and a future staff engineer begin in the same role, with the same title, doing the same work. There is no “manager-in-training” track for a fresh college graduate who has never shipped anything. The expectation is to meet a minimum technical experience and capability bar before considering management.

The split between the technical track and the management track usually comes after several years and achieving a “senior” level. By then, the engineers have built sufficient technical experience. Both the engineers and their leaders have had the opportunity to assess who has both an aptitude and an appetite for leading people. Only at that point does anyone choose. Critically, choosing the technical track is not a consolation prize. A principal engineer can out-earn and out-rank most managers. Technical leadership is valued on par with people leadership.

Today, Cyber Force generation in the military inverts this. It asks people to choose before they have done the job, and it attaches more pay and rank to the managerial track. It makes moving toward the technical path later feel like a step down.

The Proposal: One Entry Track with a Mid-Career Split

All new entrants to the Cyber Force in a core technical role should enter as commissioned officers, split into at least two separate competitive categories under the Defense Officer Personnel Management Act (DOPMA), which is the same mechanism that already allows for different promotion rates and comparison pools for technical experts like Army Medical Department officers and Navy limited duty officers (LDO). These competitive categories could be called the Cyber Technical Corps and the Cyber Command and Staff Corps. The Technical Corps would consist of officers in the grades of O-1 and above, and the Command and Staff Corps would consist of only those in the grades of O-3 and above.

A separate competitive category means technical officers compete for promotion only against one another, not against command-track peers. This would enable the Cyber Force to prevent the technical path from quietly becoming the less competitive path. It would also let the service tailor promotion timelines and continuation rules for the Cyber Technical Corps using additional authorities granted by the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) so that a superb technical expert is not forced out by an up-or-out timeline built for commanders (RAND Corporation, n.d.).

For the first several years of their careers, all entrants to the Cyber Force are in the Cyber Technical Corps, establishing the technical foundation that the rest of their careers will build upon. Then at roughly five years of experience and the grade of O-3, those who want to move to the managerial track would have the first of several windows to opt in. A board reviews each candidate, and leaders who have actually worked alongside them weigh in on whether the person has shown genuine aptitude for management. Those selected attend something like a Cyber Force Captains Career Course to train in management and the responsibilities of command, and they would transition to the Cyber Command and Staff Corps.

The result is a force in which every leader has cleared a real technical bar, every technical expert can keep advancing in rank and in pay without abandoning the work, and the choice between the two paths is made by people who actually know what each one involves.

Why a Single-Entry Track Fits the Cyber Force

Beyond mirroring proven industry practice, a single-entry track suits the specific realities of cyber formations in at least three ways.

It avoids defaulting our best technical talent onto the managerial path. Many of the nation’s most technically gifted young people attend highly selective universities. A computer science student from an elite program who wants to serve will almost always enter through ROTC and commission as a second lieutenant, automatically on the managerial track. Had the same student entered industry instead, they could just as likely be on the staff or principal engineer track. A different accessions structure for the Cyber Force would allow that talent to go where it has the highest impact in the military as well.

Furthermore, cyber formations are relatively small, and there is less “officer business” to do at the junior level. In an infantry unit, a lieutenant handles the administrative and leadership load for 30 or more Soldiers. The similarly sized cyber formation, a Cyber Mission Force team, may have many officers and be led by a field-grade. There is no need for the junior officers to be anything but technical. In practice, junior officers in cyber are already overwhelmingly technical. A single early-career track would formalize what the mission already requires.

Finally, a single-entry track guarantees that senior leaders have met a real technical standard. This matters more in cyber than almost anywhere else. We do not need every colonel to be the most technically capable person in the room, but we do need our senior leaders to have been there and done the work well enough to vet decisions with heavy technical inputs. Because every officer begins on the technical track and must prove themselves there before a board will let them opt into the managerial category, that credibility is baked into the force. The manager and the technical expert started in the same place and met the same high standard. The manager chose the command path after having a clear understanding of what that meant.

Building a Culture of Mastery

A force generation model that cultivates mastery will not be one that directly copies the accessions model for commissioned officers in the other services. An obvious challenge with that would be a college-degree requirement in a field where incredible talent has been demonstrated by self-taught operators and those who emerged from the services’ existing cyber training pipelines for the enlisted path. Instead, the Cyber Force should retain an accessions pipeline that doesn’t require a college degree, but that has high aptitude standards for entry and even higher competence standards for the initial entry training pipeline. It should be an extended pipeline that does not expect everyone to pass, and one that culminates in meeting the same technical standards expected of ROTC and service academy graduates entering the Cyber Technical Corps at the O-1 pay grade. The policy goal should be for the Cyber Force to increase the pay of the individuals who are the strongest enlisted and warrant operators today, not to exclude them.

Putting the technical track on the officer pay scale resolves the structural pay and grade problem, but it does not eliminate the perception that the command path would be superior. The potential for that perception would require a cultural solution. The warrant officer corps is instructive here: It is a cohesive community with its own identity, its own pride, and its own sense of being the technical conscience of the force. A Cyber Technical Corps would need to build the same thing from the ground up. Advanced technical training that command-track officers do not receive, direct commissions that bring renowned industry experts in at senior grades, and even distinct insignia and titles could all help the technical track cohere into a community with its own prestige, rather than being quietly viewed as just the officers who cannot command.

While the non-monetary aspects will be important, money also sends a signal. Paying everyone in the Cyber Force on the officer pay scale will be more expensive, but it is worth it. These operators will still be able to earn more outside the military than inside it, but the technology industry pays its individual contributors and its managers comparably in recognition of their comparable impact. Diverging from that pay model in the military sends a cultural signal that technical expertise is not as valuable as people-management skills. Officials at U.S. Army Cyber Command estimated that the replacement costs of a cyber soldier trained as an interactive on-net operator are about $400,000 (U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2022). The difference in annual pay between a captain (O-3) and a chief warrant officer 2 (W-2) with six years in service is $25,819 (Defense Finance and Accounting Service, n.d.). At that premium of just 6% of the replacement cost per year relative to keeping technical experts on the warrant scale, even a modest increase in the retention of technical experts will make the investment well worth it.

Conclusion

The CSIS commission deserves credit for recognizing that cyber talent does not fit the traditional enlisted and officer structure. If the nation is to stand up a new service from scratch, it should design its talent model around how technical excellence is built and retained, not around the inherited assumptions of branches with very different missions.

That means one entry track for technical talent, several years of genuine hands-on work, and a deliberate, board-reviewed choice to move toward management for those who want it and show the aptitude for it. It means treating the technical path as a destination, not a holding pattern. And it means never again telling a room full of the most promising people that staying good at their jobs and advancing in their careers are two different doors.

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