As we reported yesterday, the Air Force has now announced that it does not expect to name the permanent location of its new Cyber Command until “closer to the end of the year.” The decision was supposed to come this spring, before the official stand up of the command on Oct. 1. Now USAF says it needs more time. “We are currently reviewing how well the locations that have been identified to us match up to the needs of the Air Force,” said Maj. Gen. William Lord, commander of AFCYBER (Provisional) at Barksdale AFB, La. The Air Force is not releasing the specific criteria being used in this process. Lord said one of the next major steps is to whittle down the candidate locations to four finalists so that initial site surveys and environmental impact studies may commence. After completion of the environment studies, which usually takes about six to eight months, USAF will announce the winning location. AFCYBER “will be assigned an interim location until the final location is announced,” the Air Force says. Full operational capability of the command “will take at least another year,” said Lord.
A provision in the fiscal 2025 defense policy bill will require the Defense Department to include the military occupational specialty of service members who die by suicide in its annual report on suicide deaths, though it remains to be seen how much data the department will actually disclose.