An Interview with Admiral Michael Rogers

Q: You served concurrently as Director of the National Security Agency and Commander of US Cyber Command. For those readers who are unfamiliar with these organizations, would you describe them and their functions?

A: USCYBERCOMMAND (CYBERCOM) is a Combatant Command (COCOM), one of the 11 senior warfighting organizations in the Department of Defense (DoD) tasked with using its assigned forces to execute a particular set of missions defined by geography or function. I was its second commander, so it was a very new organization and still building itself up in many ways. COCOMs are often referred as either geographic or functional, and CYBERCOM is an example of the latter— like STRATCOM, TRANSCOM, SOCOM, etc. These execute on a specific set of missions on a global basis rather than one defined by a specific geography. And those missions were: 1) defense of the DoD’s networks, data concentrations and warfighting platforms from unauthorized cyber access; 2) creation and employment of offensive cyber capabilities; and 3) defense of the nation’s critical infrastructure in the event of a significant cyber event directed against them. The National Security Agency (NSA) is the largest intelligence organization in the US intelligence community (almost double the size of the next largest) and is the largest intelligence organization in the free world. It is primarily a collection and reporting organization (vice a multiple discipline analysis organization like the Central Intelligence Agency or Defense Intelligence Agency).