It’s hard to miss the enormous billboard across the street from Fort Meade’s main gate. A billowing, preposterously large American flag fills most of its real estate. Above the stars and stripes read the words “Freedom Isn’t Free” and “Be Part of Something Big.” Patriotic billboards are nothing new in the world of military recruiting, and the anodyne slogans of this one are hardly worth a second glance.
Except that this billboard is not, in fact, about military recruiting. It’s an advertisement for ManTech International, a defense contracting company that employs Computer Network Operations (CNO) developers, penetration testers, reverse engineers.
What’s up with ManTech channeling its inner Uncle Sam?
Unlike the floors full of O-6s in CYBERCOM, ManTech (and every other defense contractor) knows why the military’s junior officers are fleeing CYBERCOM and the service cyber components like the buildings are on fire. From my vantage with the Marine Corps:
- Officers with technical backgrounds prevented from doing technical work
- Unqualified and incompetent GS civilians occupying key leadership positions, like technical directors and primary staff members
- Continued service pressure to rotate back to the Fleet and command
- Annual billet rotations within the command
The ad campaign is working
In the last year, I’ve seen dozens of our brightest officers (and enlisted folks, but the reasons are different here) head for the exits. These officers are overwhelmingly not leaving because of the money; they’re well-compensated as captains and majors. They’re leaving because the Marine Corps is actively preventing them from doing the work that they want to do, that they in most cases trained and studied to do. The few that somehow manage to land in a job with work they don’t despise can’t expect to get good at it, because there’s a quarterly manning review or task ord lurking just around the corner waiting to send them to work nights on the watch floor.
A new kind of service
What defense contractors like ManTech understand, and what the military seems not to, is that working for one of these companies provides a more meaningful sense of service than the military does for these officers. Infinite cubicles overflowing with staff planners cannot solve the actual technical challenges facing our nation. For all the plans, PowerPoints, and emails we generate, at the end of the day, someone with deep technical skills has to build the cyberspace capabilities needed to actually perform the tasks we need done.
The military no longer has a monopoly on service in cyberspace. Because the Marine Corps disallows its officers from performing meaningful work in cyberspace, they are forced to seek opportunities to do it outside of the Corps. And, because the Marine Corps relies heavily on contracted support (because it’s refused to allow its own members to do actual cyber work), contractors end up doing the bulk of meaningful cyberspace work for the Marine Corps, with actual Marines and government civilians frequently reduced to impotent contractor-managers.
Our best young officers want to use their brains in the service of our nation, doing hard, technical work. Either we give it to them, or defense contractors like ManTech will be happy to give them the opportunity to serve in cyberspace that the Marine Corps didn’t.