Army Gen. Keith Alexander, US Cyber Command chief, said Tuesday he favors seeing the organization elevated to a unified command. “I think the question is when; when do you do it? When do you take that step?” said Alexander during a cyber summit in Washington, D.C. CYBERCOM is currently a sub-unified command subordinate to US Strategic Command. While Alexander praised the relationship between the two organizations, he said in his Oct. 8 talk he would push for establishing unified-command status within “the next couple of years” to avoid future issues with accountability. “What you can’t afford is to have Cyber Command responding to the [Defense] Secretary, the President, and a . . . commander who is not directly in the loop,” he said. “You don’t want to hold [that commander] accountable for what the guy over there is doing,” he said.
The Air Force will finish restructuring the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile program by the end of this year, achieve its first test launch of the ICBM by 2027, and reach initial operational capability by the early 2030s.
