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A cyber operator can spend a shift tracking an adversary halfway around the world, walk to the parking lot, and be home in time for dinner. There is no flight home, no demobilization, and no transition from an operational mission back to ordinary life. The war zone is a commute away. That arrangement looks like one of the advantages of cyber warfare. It is also becoming one of its human costs.
Bloomberg reported in August that as many as five people working at or alongside U.S. Cyber Command took their own lives in a five-week period in June and July this year, enough for defense officials to label it a suicide cluster. Officials have not established that the deaths are connected, and suicide rarely has a single cause, but Congress has taken notice. Legislative proposals include more counselors and shorter waits for care.
These proposals treat the harm, but do not prevent it. The underlying condition is neither mysterious nor new. The 2024 National Defense Authorization Act directed the Pentagon to study the occupational resiliency of the Cyber Mission Force, the command’s operational arm. The study found the resources and programs available to these operators were inadequate and a risk to long-term personnel readiness. It called for a framework to develop, manage, and assess prevention and treatment programs. The implementation plan Congress required was never delivered.
No prevention and treatment program would be enough on its own. The problem is structural.
I deployed overseas in 2009, then served at Cyber Command from 2014 to 2022 as a judge advocate, reviewing operations and keeping roughly the same hours as the teams running them. I did not have the same operational experience, but much of the day was the same: short-notice recalls, inverted shifts, and the rule that nothing about work goes home.
People assume deployment was harder. Sure, deployment was hard, but it was also simple. Everyone was there for the same reason and could focus on the mission, giving the days a singular purpose. Ordinary responsibilities largely disappeared or at least moved into the distant background: There was no caring for an aging loved one, managing family medical needs, making household decisions, or being available to all the people in your “normal life.” The deployed environment was built to support you to do your job. In some ways, that was liberating, although that might seem counterintuitive to most.
Deployment meant creating boundaries in life. Everyone knew you were away. Everyone around you was away as well.
Cyber operators do not have this separation. They work long and odd hours against adversaries, all while Cyber operators do not have this separation. At Cyber Command, they work long and odd hours against adversaries across the globe while living their ordinary lives and returning home between missions. The movement between these worlds happens every day, sometimes more than once, with no physical distance marking the transition between the mission and a rush-hour commute back to ordinary life. A recall can pull an operator back into the mission hours later, while classification rules foreclose the ordinary form of decompression: describing the day to the people they love.
The effects are not limited to the operators. A child cannot understand why a parent missed the game for a war fought from a building minutes away. A parent who is home but often unavailable, in one form or another, does a quieter kind of damage.
Gen. Joshua Rudd, who leads Cyber Command and the National Security Agency, told the House Armed Services Committee in April that the command ran roughly 8,000 missions in 2025, a 25 percent increase over 2024. That surge came as the command supported sustained operations against Iran and in Venezuela, both high-visibility missions that make any request to pause and rest the force during them more fraught. Andrew Schoka, a former Army officer who served at the command, told the Record that its teams are essentially “deployed-in-place” continuously without defined reset cycles. The context cuts both ways: it explains the tempo, and it is exactly the moment a reset requirement is hardest to grant.
This phenomenon is not unprecedented. Researchers studying drone crews for the Air Force described them as being deployed-in-garrison, and Air Force medical researchers found exhaustion and clinical distress driven not only by what crews saw but by round-the-clock operations conducted near home. The fixes came slowly, only after years of treating the problem clinically. The Air Force approved a combat-to-dwell policy for drone units in 2017, then spent years without adequate personnel to carry it out. Cyber operators inherited this condition without the fixes.
The parallel is not exact, and the differences are worth highlighting. Cyber operators are largely spared from the graphic imagery that marks drone operations, so the comparison cannot rest on that specific source of trauma. What does apply to both fields is the mechanism the research actually identified: distress produced not only by effects observed but by relentless tempo and the whiplash that comes with living in two very different worlds in the same day.
When a unit returns from deployment, a set of protections is triggered: restrictions on return to operations, reintegration programs, health screenings. All of this keys off the orders that deployed the unit and brought it home. A cyber operator runs the same kind of surge, sometimes for months, then walks to the car. No official demobilization triggers those protections.
The command has not been idle. Gen. Rudd directed the service cyber chiefs to check in with him weekly on suicide prevention, and the units most affected were placed under a mandatory counseling period. The command has also embedded cleared providers in its own spaces through a partnership with Fort Meade’s Kimbrough clinic, giving operators back the hours that seeking care used to cost them. Two providers are in place, and the arrangement tops out at five, for a mission force of roughly 6,000 and a civilian and contractor workforce larger still. The program covers the military side. These responses are humane and necessary. They are also, by design, treatments for harm that has already occurred.
Two structural changes would address the load, and a third step can help families while they are pending. First, the 2027 defense authorization should require reset conditions for the Cyber Mission Force: defined rest periods carrying the force of post-deployment dwell. That is the drone crew combat-to-dwell equivalent, with the manning it never received. The obligation should bind even when a commander is short-handed. This is not a new demand. The 2024 study established the need; the department never delivered the plan, and the 2027 bill is the vehicle to convert that finding into a requirement.
Second, the clinical response needs access to the information it currently lacks. Adding more counselors will not solve the problem if those counselors lack the information to understand what the job involves. Cleared providers are scarce. Representative Sarah Elfreth, whose district borders Fort Meade, said the command faces a dearth of providers and access and pressed for National Defense Authorization Act language expanding access to cleared mental health providers. The 2026 authorization, now law, directs the department to assign cleared behavioral health specialists to Cyber Command and the Cyber Mission Force and to run an initiative addressing the behavioral health challenges and work-related stresses the force faces. What has not followed is the funding and staffing needed to expand it. The embedded model already works. Scaling it beyond five requires funded billets and enough providers to keep those positions filled by people who hold the credential and the clearance.
These changes run into the same constraint. Schoka observed that there are never enough qualified personnel to support every requirement. Commanders are forced to rely on available personnel whether or not they need rest. It is why the Air Force’s drone policy sat unexecuted for years, and it is why a reset mandate laid on a commander beset by manning shortfalls can yield paper compliance rather than actual recovery. Gen. Rudd separately told Congress the force is insufficiently scaled for the threat it faces. A reset requirement without the people to honor it will be overcome by the first crisis. At Cyber Command, there is always a crisis. A reset requirement should arrive with the manning to honor it, as well as the depth to absorb a surge.
A commander will answer that the adversary does not observe dwell. Neither does the enemy of a deployed battalion, yet battalions still rotate because exhausted operators perform less effectively, and readiness is measured in years, not weeks. Rest sustains the mission and helps prepare the force for missions that may come years from now.
A rest requirement protects service member health and preserves an operational effectiveness that outlasts any commander’s tenure. It should also reach beyond the uniformed force, and here the command’s problem is genuinely distinctive. The Cyber Mission Force is built from active duty, civilian, and contract personnel, and deployment-based protections were written around military orders that civilians and contractors never receive. A dwell construct modeled only on the uniformed rotation would exclude much of the very workforce carrying the load. Vehicles such as work-hour and premium-pay rules and Cyber Excepted Service authorities cover civilians, and the terms of the task orders that put contractors on the floor can reach them. The requirement should support the entire community that actually does this work, or it will only protect a fraction of those who need it.
While structural fixes are pending, operators should also build household contingency plans with their families, as service members do before deployment. The plan should acknowledge no-notice recalls, inverted shifts, and a command point of contact a spouse can reach when their loved one is unreachable, giving the family a chance to work through these challenges before they face them for the first time at 2 a.m. This preparation will not prevent every crisis or solve the underlying structural problem, but it can reduce what a household has to improvise while the larger fix takes years.
The community carrying this burden will grow. U.S. operations are increasingly waged at a distance by service members who go home at shift’s end. Cyber operations, space missions, and remote aircraft look like progress: no deployment, no separation. Each still asks service members to experience operational missions and ordinary lives in the same day. A separate cyber service, which I supported as a member of the Cyber Force Commission, would be better positioned to own force generation and the welfare of the people who do this work. Suicide is the most extreme outcome, but many more live with the effects of a double life, including burnout and attrition, which the command’s own leader has told senators remains high. The Pentagon can treat this as a distinct operational environment and build the protections that go with it, or it can keep asking service members and their families to carry the dual burdens alone.
Kurt Sanger is a cybersecurity and data privacy attorney with Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney PC. He is a retired Marine Corps lieutenant colonel who served as a judge advocate for 23 years, the last eight with U.S. Cyber Command.
Image: Bridget Lynch via DVIDS
