Data is the currency of war, says US Cyber Command’s top enlisted leader

Air Force Chief Master Sgt. Kenneth Bruce urged Defense Logistics Agency personnel to treat cybersecurity as a shared, front-line responsibility, underscoring the growing stakes of data protection across the military and its supply chains during a July 7 talk.

“The weakest point, pretty much in any network, is you, the human,” Bruce said, jokingly citing everyday lapses such as using public Wi-Fi or failing to change default router passwords. “Thanks a lot, threat factor.”

Bruce, the senior enlisted leader for U.S. Cyber Command and the senior enlisted advisor for the National Security Agency and Central Security Service, described Cyber Command’s core tasks as defending the United States from malicious cyber activity, safeguarding military networks, and integrating cyber effects into joint operations. He said those missions depend on tight coordination with the services and combat support agencies that operate and secure the networks used for planning, logistics and warfighting.

The scale and pace of hostile probing remain relentless, Bruce noted, describing roughly 750,000 pieces of traffic each minute that invite “hundreds of thousands” of attacks. He said defenders continually monitor and mitigate these attempts to keep systems resilient.

In a digital battlespace defined by the speed and precision of information, Bruce framed data itself as both target and weapon. “Cyber is a warfighting domain. Data is a currency of warfare,” he said. “If I can corrupt your data, if I can change your data, if I can remove your data, I can win.”

Bruce emphasized that government-industry collaboration is essential to counter evolving threats, highlighting the NSA’s Cybersecurity Collaboration Center, which partners with defense industrial base companies, including small firms, to strengthen protections. He also pointed to DLA’s outsized role in operational security, saying that adversaries can glean intent from logistics patterns such as movements of fuel, medical supplies and food.

“If DLA is not secure, then the rest of us are not secure,” Bruce said.

Responding to audience questions, Bruce described how competitors like China have expanded beyond network intrusions to wage cognitive warfare, leveraging entertainment, media and social platforms to shape perceptions as part of a broader, whole-of-society approach. He also acknowledged enduring workforce pressures, from fierce private-sector competition for cyber talent to the challenge of retaining highly skilled operators. One solution, he suggested, is to expand pathways through the National Guard and Reserve so professionals can serve while maintaining civilian careers, citing an Air National Guard member who is also a senior vice president at a software company.

Looking ahead, Bruce said artificial intelligence will increasingly augment human analysts and accelerate defensive and offensive cyber operations. “I think the future of artificial intelligence is also changing how we approach cybersecurity and the humans that will actually do it,” Bruce said. “It’s going to be one cybersecurity analyst and about 1,000 AI agents doing the work.”

His message to DLA’s workforce was that hardening individual practices—updating devices, using secure networks and embracing cyber hygiene—has strategic implications when adversaries treat logistics data as early warning. The larger imperative, he suggested, is to fuse human judgment with industrial-scale machine support, connect government and industry defenders, and protect the data that underpins U.S. military power.