CDTA Status

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Interesting.  I wonder if that is related to the sudden firing of all TXWG CP staff, CDTA started in TX.

The TXWG CP staff purge is entirely unrelated.

Whoa! Wait. What?

Texas Wing just couldn't follow the newish Encampment rules. So after a couple of warnings they got wacked.
Didn't help that they posted videos on the internet showing them violating the rules.

Nothing says "thanks for your business" like "...punishable to the fullest extent of the law...".

Hopefully the replacement curriculum will be from open sources and / or leverage the extensive
in-house IT resources CAP has and be developed internally so that it can and will be released publicly.

Their policy on restricting their training materials always bothered me.

In that respect I won't miss them, and I look forward to a more open courseplan like the cyberpatriot slides.

It'd be nice if the CAP cyber curriculum and the CyberPatriot competition were in line to at least some degree. CDTA made it very clear they were not training the cadets for the competition.  If we're going to push CyberPatriot let's train our cadet to at least be competitive.  Like I said before, right now you're only as good as the guy (or gal) teaching you at your local squadron meetings.

Here's how our CyberPatriot has worked for the past few years that I've been involved...

We start the year with about 3/4 of the cadets from last year and replace those we lost with 1/4 new cadets.  The 3/4 that remain then sit through the same power point slides from last year to teach the new cadets.  In that 2-3 month process we loose about 1/2 of the cadets from the previous year because they get bored to death from watching the same power point from last year while sitting there thinking they could be at home doing their homework.  The cadets never really move forward with their training and therefore never really move forward in the competition.   

In years past the cadets were told to go the CDTA over the summer so they'd get advanced training they could bring back to the squadron to help with the competition only to find out that CDTA has nothing to do with the competition. 

Interesting.  I wonder if that is related to the sudden firing of all TXWG CP staff, CDTA started in TX.

The TXWG CP staff purge is entirely unrelated.

Whoa! Wait. What?

Texas Wing just couldn't follow the newish Encampment rules. So after a couple of warnings they got wacked.
Didn't help that they posted videos on the internet showing them violating the rules.

Goes right back to some of the other recent topics on Encampment. That's why you follow the regulations, and when you have a 'chance to improve,' make the improvement; don't waste the opportunity.

It'd be nice if the CAP cyber curriculum and the CyberPatriot competition were in line to at least some degree. CDTA made it very clear they were not training the cadets for the competition.  If we're going to push CyberPatriot let's train our cadet to at least be competitive.  Like I said before, right now you're only as good as the guy (or gal) teaching you at your local squadron meetings.

Here's how our CyberPatriot has worked for the past few years that I've been involved...

We start the year with about 3/4 of the cadets from last year and replace those we lost with 1/4 new cadets.  The 3/4 that remain then sit through the same power point slides from last year to teach the new cadets.  In that 2-3 month process we loose about 1/2 of the cadets from the previous year because they get bored to death from watching the same power point from last year while sitting there thinking they could be at home doing their homework.  The cadets never really move forward with their training and therefore never really move forward in the competition.   

In years past the cadets were told to go the CDTA over the summer so they'd get advanced training they could bring back to the squadron to help with the competition only to find out that CDTA has nothing to do with the competition.

We've faced some of the same issues. You ask a room of 20 people, "Who wants to get involved in CyberPatriot?" 3/4 of the hands go up. You start to organize it, and then the numbers dwindle fast. We used to have a team that met at a cadet's house each week, but even the numbers there stopped showing up (it was really the parent that was interested). We've done some presentations on it, and some practical exercises, but nobody has really shown an interest in long-term activity participation. Now, some cadets in CAP absolutely love it. I think it's a great program. There are units that are very heavily involved. It just hasn't been received as much at the home squadron.

It's the same story with "Cyber" as with flying - it sounds cooler then it is once
you get to the reality of the activity, and it takes considerable effort and time investment
to get to a comfort level.  Something our beloved kids these days don't have much of.

There also probably some conflict between the more outgoing "adventure" type of kids who
would join and be successful in CAP (traditionally), and the type who are excited sitting
in a dim room scanning network ports and parsing text files, however at least in a CAP context,
you can't do the latter without also doing the former.

This is what the media portrays as "cyber defense":



Get ready to "Hack the Gibson!"

While this is the reality of the job day-to-day (assuming you leave the house):


Don't get me wrong, these are important jobs in a field that is growing (in the short term), but it
takes a special breed of cat to sit in a cube all day and comb through this sort of screen for hours...



...looking to find some 12-year old running a script from his Aunt's basement trying to hack V-Bucks.
(Maybe if "Mitnick" up there wasn't running Spotify and Outlook on a server console he'd have less issues...)

One of the other issues is that Cyber Defense is a pretty narrow field and focus, one which is increasingly being
assumed by AI.  There will always be people minding the store, but in 10 years?  It'll all be AI doing the security.

Moving away from the "Cyber Defense" focus and into general software development would at least offer
more directly relevent career skills, but of course the USAF doesn't build cloud-based collaborative systems
or games.

I've been in IT for some 30 years (gee-zus I'm old as dirt), and have watched it evolve from dumb terminals to local systems
back to what are essentially "smart dumb terminals" on a vector which has made hardware almost "free" and user
support increasingly "rip and replace".  It's not there yet, but I'm glad I'm nearing the twilight of my career vs the mid-point.

It'll all be back-room soon, with again, AI doing the bulk of the heavy lifting.

Meanwhile, I'm looking on eBay and similar sites for a classic VT-series dumb terminal. 

Texas Wing just couldn't follow the newish Encampment rules. So after a couple of warnings they got wacked.
Didn't help that they posted videos on the internet showing them violating the rules.

What rules did they violate?

I've been in IT for some 30 years (gee-zus I'm old as dirt), and have watched it evolve from dumb terminals to local systems
back to what are essentially "smart dumb terminals" on a vector which has made hardware almost "free" and user
support increasingly "rip and replace".  It's not there yet, but I'm glad I'm nearing the twilight of my career vs the mid-point.

It'll all be back-room soon, with again, AI doing the bulk of the heavy lifting.

Right there with you. Looking for my "end of tour assignment" that will get me to retirement with most of my brain cells and all of my hair intact.

Not having much luck.

But I too have witnessed the move from VT-100/3270 terms to PCs w/emulators on Big Iron, then PC "client server" apps, where the PC was doing your lifting, which morphed into server-based terminal apps on "big servers," then back to Big-ish Iron with virtualization,  then cloud... "it goes big, it goes small, it goes big.."  I'm getting ... tired.

I've been in IT for some 30 years (gee-zus I'm old as dirt), and have watched it evolve from dumb terminals to local systems
back to what are essentially "smart dumb terminals" on a vector which has made hardware almost "free" and user
support increasingly "rip and replace".  It's not there yet, but I'm glad I'm nearing the twilight of my career vs the mid-point.

It'll all be back-room soon, with again, AI doing the bulk of the heavy lifting.

Right there with you. Looking for my "end of tour assignment" that will get me to retirement with most of my brain cells and all of my hair intact.

Not having much luck.

But I too have witnessed the move from VT-100/3270 terms to PCs w/emulators on Big Iron, then PC "client server" apps, where the PC was doing your lifting, which morphed into server-based terminal apps on "big servers," then back to Big-ish Iron with virtualization,  then cloud... "it goes big, it goes small, it goes big.."  I'm getting ... tired.

Relevant to thread: so, my middle son (who enjoyed the Maryland cyber NCSA last year) instead spent the summer as a research intern at GA Tech working on aircraft data links. I wondered if he'd want to go to the advanced cyber NCSA, but instead he took the shot at breaking into a different area (Ahem, it also was paid, ahem!).


BTW, Eclipse, I've been in command centers and SILs that do look like your fancy picture. Sadly, most of them are CONUS and near the money (for visibility... notice the three "money" guys on your catwalk in the pic!). Few of them are used by operators. The CAOCs that I've been in are some of the nastiest coffee-and-spoiled-fast food compartments I've ever worked in. They look less like "Enders Game", and more like a cross between "1980s Crystal Peak" (Terminator) and a battered Conax container. Still better than working in a server farm.


V/r
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Hey, the server farm at least has working air conditioning!