The military’s Cyberwarfare Group has been renamed the Cyberwarfare Wing after an expansion and reorganization to meet rising Chinese cyberthreats, a defense official said on Sunday.
A unit of the Information and Electronic Warfare Command, the wing saw an increase in personnel from less than 600 to between 800 and 1,200, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The wing is the only military formation outside of the air force that is organized as a wing, a basic deployable unit of maneuver roughly equivalent to an army or marine brigade or a naval fleet, the official said.
Wing Commander Colonel Chen Yung-shun (陳永順) has been combing the nation’s higher education institutions to find recruits with the appropriate skill sets for the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, the official said.
The unit’s efforts have yielded encouraging results in recruiting active-service volunteers and reserve officers, the official said.
The Ministry of National Defense ordered the cyberunit’s organizational upgrade following the Electronic and Information Warfare Command’s establishment on June 29, the official said.
The ministry’s willingness to reorganize the unit suggests that the nation’s cyberwarfare-qualified troops have multiplied since the initiative began, the official said.
The wing’s reorganization reflects the unit’s dedication to the missions that President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) highlighted at the Electronic and Information Warfare Command’s founding, the official said.
The command is tasked with “Internet-based defensive and offensive operations, protecting the integrity of communications and pursuing electromagnetic capabilities,” Tsai said at her dedication speech, without clarifying what that meant.
However, the military’s decision to organize hack-tool users and developers into separate “first echelon” and “second echelon” units has resulted in poor communication between the units, which has plagued the improvement of hacking tools, an expert on cyberwarfare said on condition of anonymity.
The most significant shortfall is that developers have little to no feedback on the tools’ frequency of utilization or cyberattack success rates, the source said.
The military should consider employing properly vetted civilian contractors for cyberdefense and offense to strengthen its capabilities, another expert said.
In response, the ministry on Sunday said that the military imposes the same qualification standards for all cyberwarfare troops, without making any distinctions between the so-called “first or second echelon units.”
Cyberoperations have unique requirements and any proposed utilization of contractors must meet security and legal requirements, the ministry said.
The military is studying the US military’s cyberwarfare organization’s model and the only cyberwarfare activities carried out by non-governmental groups are the educational training provided by higher-education institutions, the ministry said.
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