A U.S. Cyber Command official said that when they examine whether any given operation or even when a strategy has been successful, they’re not looking at metrics, but rather outcomes.
“It’s really about: have we enabled the collective defense of the nation,” Maj. Gen. John Morrison, Cyber Command’s outgoing chief of staff, told C4ISRNET in a July interview.
Roughly two years ago, Cyber Command and the Department of Defense started a paradigm shift for cyber policy and operations. The 2018 DoD cyber strategy tasked Cyber Command to “defend forward,” which is best described as operators working on foreign networks to prevent attacks before they happen. The way Cyber Command meets those goals is through persistent engagement, which means challenging adversary activities wherever they operate.