Blog

Cybersecurity Defense Academy.

Washington, D.C., July 11, 2019

I’m working on a little creative problem solving right now. This should help some of our veterans and the military.

As you might imagine, cybersecurity is a large and growing endeavor for our military. And the Defense Department has many important contracts with American firms that specialize in cybersecurity.

Many employees who work for these companies are required to have a security clearance. (For obvious reasons.) Unfortunately, there’s a backlog for these security clearances, which take a long time to process. This makes it difficult to maintain proper staffing levels in these important cybersecurity roles. This backlog may only get worse as our needs grow in this area.

Meanwhile, many thousands of servicemen and women retire from the military each year to pursue a career in the private sector. And a fair number of those individuals received security clearances as part of various roles they held while in the military.

So my proposal would create an educational program called the Cybersecurity Defense Academy. It would be a public-private partnership that would provide cybersecurity job training for veterans who held a security clearance in the military. Upon completion of their training, they could quickly begin working for an American company under a Department of Defense contract, without getting caught up in a long wait for a new security clearance.

If someone can be trusted with secret information while IN our military, then he/she should certainly be entitled to that trust while working FOR our military. This proposal will help our veterans with good paying jobs, and help our nation’s effort to defend itself from cyber threats around the world.