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Eighteen states are vying to become the home of the headquarters for the coveted Air Force Cyber Command. So, on May 15, William Anderson, assistant secretary of the Air Force for installations, environment and logistics, sent a letter to the governors, asking them to provide details that will help the service make its decision.

The letter, which a source was kind enough to send me, notes that the unique nature of the cyber domain dictates that the candidates have a complete understanding of the supporting capabilities of headquarters bases and their surrounding communities. Anderson included in the letter a checklist of requirements.

These included the ability of the new HQ to work easily with other Air Force commands near the Cyber Command that are engaged in activities such as intelligence and space operations. The new Cyber Command HQ also will require an extensive high-speed network, including state-of-art secure fiber networks and connections to unclassified and classified Defense networks.

The Air Force wants to locate the HQ in a low-threat environment that's close to new technology corridors and IT centers of excellence.

Anderson asked the governors to reply by July 1. The Air Force intends to tour cyber HQ sites this summer and to draw up a short list of locations by November. The process then will slow down (probably to hear from aggrieved members of Congress whose states did not make the short list), with a final selection made in September 2009.

States competing for the Cyber Command HQ are: Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Iowa, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah and Virginia.

It's About Cyber Attack, Not Cyber Defend

The attachments to Anderson's letter make it clear that the key mission of the Cyber Command will be to cyber attack, not cyber defend -- a position the Air Force has emphasized during the past year. A paper, titled "Proposed Purpose and Need for Air Force Cyber Command," which Anderson sent to the governors, said the command will work to "influence, disrupt, corrupt or usurp adversarial human and automated decision-making while protecting our own."

You can't set up a new command without doing the vision thing, and the vision for the Cyber Command is to "help secure our nation by employing world-class cyber capabilities to dominate the cyberspace domain, [and] create effects worldwide," the paper noted.

And, if you're doing the vision thing, make sure it's "through a holistic, agile and evolutionary approach to science and technology, research and development, systems acquisition, operations, force structure" etc. etc. I could really score high on buzzword bingo with these two paragraphs.

Does a Flight to Cuidad Chihuahua Help?

One of the requirements for the Cyber Command HQ is proximity to an international airport. New Mexico, where I live, will have a tough time satisfying that requirement, although our newly bearded Gov. Bill Richardson, announced last week that Aeromexico will lay on a flight to Cuidad Chihuahua, Mexico, later this year from the Albuquerque International Sunport.

This is an improvement for the Albuquerque airport, which always has touted itself as an international airport during the five years I have lived here, although you cannot fly anywhere internationally right now. A couple of years back, the airport PR guy explained to me that the word "international" in the airport's name was not a misnomer, "because you can fly from here to another airport and catch an international flight."

Navy Network Strategy Reappears

Since writing about the quick disappearance of the Navy Naval Networking Environment Strategy-2016 paper from the Web site of the department's chief information officer a day after it appeared on May 8, it reappeared on Thursday. A quick comparison between the new and old versions shows few substantive changes. The biggest difference was the deletion of a clickable section in the PDF file that allowed mere mortals to track comments on changes in various versions of the strategy draft.

This confirms my suspicions that the Navy abruptly took down the strategy document to edit it, not re-scan it, as I was told.

Don't Hang VA for Single E-Mail

The Veterans Affairs Department managed to get more bad news coverage last week. A leaked internal e-mail from a doctor at the VA hospital in Temple, Texas, said to her staff: "Given that we are having more and more compensation-seeking veterans, I'd like to suggest you refrain from giving diagnosis of PTSD straight out."

VA, which often tries to duck bad news, responded to this quickly and put out a statement which in part said, "A single staff member, out of VA's 230,000 employees, in a single medical facility sent a single e-mail with suggestions that are inappropriate and have been repudiated at the highest level of our health care organization. The employee has been counseled and is extremely apologetic."

The doctor who sent the e-mail, I'm told, was transferred from Temple to a VA facility in Austin, a move that outraged a VA insider at the department's Vermont Avenue headquarters in Washington. "She should not have been transferred," the insider told me. "She should have been fired."

COMMENTS

• I didn't know you were in NM. Before I got to the "int'l airport" part of your post, I was thinking that ABQ would be the perfect spot for this command -- due to Kirtland AFB, Sandia Labs, Intel fab, etc. Just how many "international" visitors will the USAF be expecting? Or do they simply want access to an airport that can field international-capable USAF aircraft? Because ABQ/Kirtland certainly meets that criterion. Johnny S. Posted May 19, 2008 1:31 PM
• Not a week goes by without another horror story regarding the VA, its a stain on our Veterans who deserve better. The fact that the person was transferred tells it all, the VA is here to protect its CS work force and to hell with the veteran. NSPS is drastically needed in the VA, if they got rid of 50% of them it wouldn't be enough Dan ketter Posted May 19, 2008 11:26 AM
• The federal government already has a huge infrastructure aimed at cyber warfare. Why invest a tremendous amount of money to build another facility? It just means more opportunities to waste federal tax dollars and invade our privacy. Remember how the federal government was once pumping money into a supercomputer that could monitor huge numbers of phone calls at one time? Did it really help defend our country or did it make everyone feel like Big Brother took away some more of our privacy. What the feds need to be working on is getting the Internet upgraded and available to everyone. A new network is needed that provides more privacy and security for everyone, not just the government. Robert M. Posted May 19, 2008 6:27 AM