Cybersecurity Revolution: Stanton Urges Defense in a Digital Age

Summary

• Lt. Gen. Paul Stanton, director of the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), called for a more capable cyber workforce at the DoD CIO Cyber Workforce Summit.
• His call to action centered on technical competence, lifelong learning and a “warrior ethos.”
• He warned that defenders who wait for tools to raise an alert are already too late.
• Stanton urged earlier recruiting, starting in K-12 schools.

Stanton’s call to action

Lt. Gen. Paul Stanton, director of the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), opened the 2025 DoD CIO Cyber Workforce Summit at Fort McNair in Washington, D.C., on March 20, 2025 with a blunt message about the people who defend military networks. “Our talent is our asymmetric advantage,” he said.

Don’t wait for the alert

Stanton told the audience that waiting for a tool to flag an attack is a losing approach. “If you’re a cybersecurity expert and you’re waiting for your tool to blink an alert, you’re too slow, you’re too late because that alert is blinking off of yesterday’s attack vector, not tomorrow’s.” Defenders, in his view, have to think ahead of the attacker.

Technical skill comes first

Stanton put technical competence at the center. His advice for anyone who wants to be effective in cyber operations has not changed in a decade: understand operating systems, know how to write code and understand networks. Learning never stops. The field moves too fast, he said, for anyone to stay current without a voracious appetite for it.

Leaders have to understand data

He argued that cyber is now a core warfighting domain. Commanders cannot treat it as someone else’s job, because everything on the battlefield produces and consumes data.

In his words

“Shame on every commander and leader that doesn’t understand how data flows on the battlefield. The days of ignoring cyber as a warfighting domain are gone,” Stanton said.

Start recruiting earlier

Stanton also said the military waits too long to find cyber talent. Recruiting someone as a technical expert at 18 or 22 is too late, he said, and the pipeline has to start in K-12 schools. He pointed to his time at Fort Eisenhower in Georgia, where his team coached local high school CyberPatriot teams and helped turn Columbia County into a powerhouse in the competition.

What the speech asks of the Pentagon

Stanton’s speech was a call to rethink how the Defense Department builds its cyber force, with skill, constant learning and a warrior ethos as the three pillars and the people in the room cast as the ones who have to drive the change.

His message applies outside the military too. Security teams that rely on yesterday’s alerts will miss tomorrow’s attacks. Building people who can think ahead is the harder, slower work, and the more important one.

John King, CISSP, PMP, CISM

John King currently works in the greater Los Angeles area as a ISSO (Information Systems Security Officer). John has a passion for learning and developing his cyber security skills through education, hands on work, and studying for IT certifications.