Michael Sulmeyer, the inaugural assistant secretary of defense for cyber policy, aims to advance Department of Defense cyber programs and focus on internal cyber scaling, Federal News Network reported Wednesday.
The U.S. Senate appointed Sulmeyer to the role in August after the office was established in March as authorized by the fiscal 2023 National Defense Authorization Act. After over a month in the role, Sulmeyer said that the DOD should focus more on its rate of return rather than just the Pentagon’s cyber capabilities.
“It’s one thing to count the number of operations or to count the number of hunt-forwards,” Sulmeyer said.
Hunt-forward operations are cyber missions conducted by U.S. Cyber Command’s Cyber National Mission Force officers worldwide.
“There is power in quantity, but increasingly, how we talk about our return on the nation’s investment, not just DoD, but the cyber community, more broadly, private and public sector, I think, is an area I’m looking to try to work on,” Sulmeyer added.
Sulmeyer also works alongside the department’s chief information officer to sanction U.S. Cyber Command’s operations budget.
“They’re going to work on operating the network and the cyber security type of work,” Sulmeyer stated. “I’m supposed to focus on understanding the cyber operations part of Cyber Command’s budget and then DoD-wide.”
Prior to this position, Sulmeyer served as the principal cyber adviser for the U.S. Army, where he advised military leaders on all matters of cyber, such as readiness and capabilities.