Defense Secretary Robert Gates Announces Nation's First Cyber-Commander

Robert Gates (left), U.S. Defense Secretary; Army Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander (far right), first U.S. cyber-commander

May 25, 2010 By News Report

Photo: U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates announces the formal activation of Cyber Command. Army Gen. Keith Alexander, seated far right, was appointed the nation's first cyber-commander. Photo by Cherie Cullen, Department of Defense

Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced on Friday, May 21, the appointment of four-star Army Gen. Keith Alexander as the country's first commander of the newly created U.S. Cyber Command. Cyber Command is a subdivision of the U.S. Strategic Command, the agency responsible for military space operations, missile defense and strategic deterrence. Alexander has served as director of the National Security Agency and chief of Central Security Service since 2005.

Cyber Command was conceived during President George W. Bush's administration to combat the growing threat to national security from cyber-attacks. The development of Cyber Command was continued under President Barack Obama and was formally activated on Friday. During the activation ceremony, Gates announced Alexander would helm the agency.

"Given our increasing dependency on cyber-space, this new command will bring together the resources of the [Department of Defense] to address vulnerabilities and meet the ever-growing array of cyber-threats to our military systems," Gates said.

Cyber Command is to be headquartered in Fort Meade, Md., and according to an Air Force News Service release, will be "charged with pulling together existing cyber-space resources, creating synergy that does not currently exist and synchronizing war-fighting effects to defend the information security environment."

You may use or reference this story with attribution and a link to
http://www.govtech.com/security/Defense-Secretary-Robert-Gates-Announces-Nations.html

| More

Comments

Add Your Comment

Name *

Comment *

You are solely responsible for the content of your comments. We reserve the right to remove comments that are considered profane, vulgar, obscene, factually inaccurate, off-topic, or considered a personal attack.

Latest From Security

GovTech Papers and Case Studies View Library

Follow @govtechnews

Government Best Practices

Accelerate and Protect Your eLearning Initiatives With Akamai’s Cloud Based Intelligent Platform

IDC: Delivering Customer Value with Enterprise Flash Deployments

The Legacy Play

Five Myths of Cloud Computing

Secure Access to Your Data in a Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) World

Disaster Recovery

Big Data, Big Promise

Protecting Government and Citizen Data

Virtualizing the Government Desktop

Service Virtualization: Streamlining Development of Complex Applications

Mobile Government: Getting your employees the right tools for the job

Secure Mobile Productivity

Collaborative Video Solutions in Healthcare

Collaborative Justice: Transforming Criminal Justice Services Through Unified Collaboration

State Agency Bolsters Security & Operational Efficiencies

Most Viewed

This Section | Whole Site

Most Commented

Site Reveals Salaries of New York State Employees, Other State Financial Data

"Under the current mayor all NYC agencies increased the number of overpaid managers and their salarie"
California Launches Cybersecurity Task Force

"Apologies for the error. It has been corrected."

Collaboration for the Public Sector

Collaborative Justice: Transforming Criminal Justice Services Through Unified Collaboration
This issue brief examines video collaboration in every stage of the human justice process, demonstrating how this technology can not only make services more efficient, affordable, and accessible.