SAN ANTONIO — The U.S. Air Force has moved its only software development squadron into the Light Building in downtown San Antonio, with plans to support the armed forces and the private sector while raising its profile in the tech community.
The 90th Cyberspace Operations Squadron said 160 developers will work in a 43,000-square-foot office on the historic building’s third floor, which it calls Shadow’s Edge, to quickly create unclassified cyber tools. The Air Force unit will continue to work on classified operations for U.S. Cyber Command at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland.
Lt. Col. Casey Miller said about 75 percent of the 225 workers under his command are civilians and contracted employees. The remaining 25 percent are enlisted military members. They work at the base, remotely and now in the Light Building on Broadway Street. A grand opening for Shadow’s Edge is planned for Oct. 5.
Miller believes the move downtown will enable the unit to work with local government agencies, tech companies and academia to recruit software developers, DevOps engineers, managers and product owners.
“The talent piece is probably the biggest driver for us to move downtown,” Miller said. “What I have in my mind for the potential for partnership is going to be completely blown out of the water once we actually get the unit down here and start interacting with folks.”
Founded in 2017, the 90th Cyberspace Operations Squadron — under the 318th Cyberspace Operations Group — creates software in-house for offensive and defensive cyber missions.
“If you think of a normal software company like Facebook, they have one primary platform that they build, maintain and update,” said Rebecca Lively, deputy director of the 90th Cyberspace Operations Squadron. “We, at any given time, are building up to 16 different pieces of software to meet 16 different requirements for six different” military organizations.
The 318th COG is under the 67th Cyberspace Wing, which is described as the Air Force’s “execution arm for conducting global cyberspace operations.” The 67th Cyberspace Wing is under the 16th Air Force, also known as Air Forces Cyber, with both based at JBSA-Lackland.
DOD in private sector
Historically, the Defense Department has had a reputation of being slow to adopt new technology. But in recent years, the military has been putting workers in off-base offices in Texas as it seeks to attract highly skilled workers and learn how to produce as quickly and as nimbly as good startups.
The U.S. Army picked Austin in 2018 for its Futures Command, whose mission is to bring cutting-edge technologies to warfare.
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In 2019, the Air Force launched a software development organization called
LevelUP Code Works
in San Antonio. Its employees — a mix of military personnel, civilians and contractors — work in an office on Navarro Street for Air Force and other Defense Department missions.
Lt. Col. Richard Lopez, who headed the organization at the time, said LevelUP had established itself downtown because it’s close to the River Walk and near the city’s small but buzzy tech district. One of the aims, he said, is “to attract and retain the talent we need” to write code for the Air Force.
Over the past few years, the Air Force has stood up several software development factories across the United States, including Kessel Run in Boston, Kobayashi Maru in California, Space Camp in Colorado and BESPIN in Alabama.
The build-out of software factories “is absolutely an indicator that the Air Force is beginning to take software development much more seriously,” Miller said. “But the 90th has largely remained unknown because of the specifics of the mission that we execute.”
While LevelUp builds platforms and develops applications for U.S. Cyber Command to support analysis activities, the 90th Cyberspace Operations Squadron “writes exploits and malware to hold our enemies at risk, in support” of U.S. Cyber Command, Miller said. The unit focuses “on offensive and defensive cyberspace operations.”
The unit has built a team of developers “working on timelines that are often measured in weeks to months, sometimes days to hours,” Miller said. “So we don’t have time for years and decades like we’re used to with big government contracts.”
90th in private markets
Attempting to partner with tech companies, the 90th Cyberspace Operations Squadron has licensed
Whiddler
, a software capable of identifying malicious files, or malware, used to harm computers, networks or servers to steal data, hijack computing functions and monitor activity.
While other software scans a network file and determines whether it’s malicious, the unit’s technology can specifically search for suspicious items.
In 2020 and 2021, the 67th Cyberspace Wing signed patent licensing agreements with two private sector companies “to expand and improve on the software code” to detect software vulnerabilities.
The wing also signed
cooperative research and development agreements
, or CRADAs, with both companies, enabling them to work on the code and sell it to industry.
Ohio-based
Ignyte Assurance Platform
is one of the software development companies that signed the agreements.
“We are on a mission to deliver cyber risk management automation and governance software for organizations looking to innovate away from slower and more cumbersome processes,” Ignyte founder and CEO Max Aulakh said last year.
“Our mission is very much complimentary to 16th Air Force Cyber — to generate cyber insight, compete and escalation of information warfare,” said Aulakh, who
served
in the Air Force. “The joint agreement between Ignyte and U.S. Air Force is designed to further our capabilities, bringing them to commercial markets.”
Eric Rosenberg — former chief of cyber intellectual property law at 67th Cyberspace Wing who is now
an attorney
at U.S. Cyber Command at Fort George G. Meade in Maryland — said at the time that patent licensing agreements and CRADAs “are some of our best tools for public-private convergence and partnership.”
Move downtown
The 90th Cyberspace Operations Squadron, which works largely with classified information, has struggled to attract talent, especially among civilians.
“One of the things we find when we’re recruiting is that people didn’t know this type of work was something you could do and then also get paid to do it and also not get arrested,” Lively said.
The unit has been searching for more ways to talk about its unclassified operations, meet with private industry players and tap into the growing pool of tech workers in San Antonio. And unit leaders believe the recent move downtown might be part of the solution.
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To mingle with the private sector meant changing long-held views about keeping all cyber missions on base.
Ultimately, it took unit leaders working with remote developers during the COVID-19 pandemic to consider the possibility of opening an office elsewhere in the city.
“COVID was one of the many things that ultimately opened the eyes of folks within the squadron — but as well as our leadership — to realize that a move like this was even possible,” Miller said. “Prior to COVID, everything we did was done in a classified facility, and just discussing anything like this made people uneasy.”
Unit leaders questioned what should remain classified as the military continues to run cyberwarfare operations. They decided that while they wanted to keep a large chunk of information out of the public eye, they could declassify other projects, especially when using open-sourced cybersecurity tools already used in academia and the private sector.
“We found that there’s a whole lot of things we can do unclassified. And if we are willing to move in that direction, it opens up the fact that we exist with a whole lot of people that we didn’t before and gives us the chance to move the unit downtown to be in closer proximity to other government entities and civilian entities,” Miller said.
The unit searched for a centrally located space in San Antonio and landed on the Light Building being renovated on Broadway, where the Express-News is also a tenant. It began moving office furniture and computers into the space in July.
“We were excited about the possibility of being able to build the space that we want versus moving into a different building downtown that already decided where walls go,” Lively said. “We were looking for the ability to tailor the building to our needs.”
The unit leaders said the Light Building is secure enough to handle their unclassified operations.
“Our folks were at home doing this during COVID,” Lively said. “If you can do it at home, you can do it here.”
Recruiting
From its downtown post, the Air Force is now expanding its recruiting reach, with plans to hire an additional 21 positions this year to work at the base, remotely or at the Shadow’s Edge office. Miller also envisions having interns from the University of Texas at San Antonio working in the Light Building.
He hopes the downtown space will be an inducement, as developers have been searching for apartments downtown instead of ones closer to the military base.
One foreseeable challenge in recruiting is luring the type of tech workers who are among the city’s highest earners, with an average annual wage of $88,017 in 2020, compared with $55,940 among workers in all other industries across the city, according to data from the Texas Workforce Commission.
Lively said the unit has hired developers who have expressed interest in working on the Air Force’s cyber missions that could have global reach.
“We have found a lot of folks who will take massive pay cuts to come work here,” Lively said. “We’re trying to pay reasonable wages, and we’ve been able to be fairly competitive.”
Source: https://www.expressnews.com/sa-inc/article/Air-Force-cyber-unit-downtown-San-Antonio-17476294.php
