In secret cyberwar game, reservist techies pummel miltary cyberwarriors

Do the military "cyberwarriors" even have local admin rights on their machines? Do they have the education necessary to think about systems and vulnerabilities and the requisite leeway to use that knowledge, or are they (as I would guess) "highly trained," where "trained" means "good at following a set of procedures"?

I'm not knocking that as part of military culture. I want the people in control of weapons and aircraft, etc. to be great at following orders and the procedures they were trained to follow, and do little else. The ICMB fleet is not a place for improvisation.

But computer security is. It's a creativity-driven field that moves quickly, evolves hourly, and requires intellectual agility. I would imagine that from a locked-down, out-of-date OS with a years-long procurement cycle to buy third-rate software from huge, blundering contractors and no leeway to try new things on a whim, it would be impossible to beat a team of educated, unencumbered civilians in a field like this.

Of course, that's just a caricature of military culture that I'm imagining, but can anyone speak to this?

Can you imagine the difference in reaction if we sent door-kickers on the ground to Natanz and smashed the Iranian centrifuges, rather than using Stuxnet?

The problem here is that there is a fundamental tension between hacking (or "advanced penetration testing" or "ethical hacking" or whatever) and the structure of the military.

The military relies upon rules and procedures to accomplish repeatable tasks at massive scale. Hacking is an individual or small collective endeavor that involves non-linear thinking and creative leaps.

Right now, they're trying to figure out how to work around that tension, and all we're seeing now are the early tests.

That does describe what is expected of military members in combat operations, so it isn't like the military shouldn't be able to apply that philosophy to this area.

I would think the issue is that the "cyberwarfare" group is new and so is being run like an ordinary technical unit, which means procedures and process out the ears and limited flexibility. The military could easily free them of that and let the unit run itself like a special operations unit.