The National Reconnaissance Office has been building a cyber workforce large enough to rival its satellite engineering bench. At CyberSat in Reston, Virginia, Lt. Col. Luke Shibilski put the agency’s Cyber Protection Office at 600-plus people and $250M a year, roughly twelve months after its stand-up was first disclosed.
Shibilski, who also leads Space Force Delta 26, described a deliberate fusion of two functions the NRO had kept apart. Adversaries hunt for seams, he said, for the gap between a written rule and the person executing it. The agency answered by folding cyber operations and defensive security under a single chain, drawing on military personnel, civil servants and contractors from the Air Force, Army and Navy alongside engineers, acquirers and intelligence officers.
A sprawling portfolio of defensive work
Roughly three dozen distinct capability lines sit under the office, from hunt-and-respond work and secure engineering through to risk management and direct support to missions in flight. That footprint grew through the past year as operational demand climbed in the Middle East and beyond, reaching combatant commands on several continents. Those commands will hand over their most sensitive networks and hardware to central protection in stages.
The scope also reaches legacy operational technology, the industrial control gear that predates modern network defence and rarely accepts a software patch.
The warning that set the tone
William Loucks, intelligence lead at the Office of the National Cyber Director, used a separate keynote to argue that watching for attacks and writing signatures no longer keeps pace. Adversaries armed with AI compress the interval between intrusion and damage, he said, and a purely reactive posture cannot close that interval.
That argument lands squarely on the space sector, where spacecraft cannot be patched quickly and ground segments are shared with commercial partners.
