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If the Army needs to turn on a light bulb, and it’s a wartime mission-critical light bulb, then renowned experts in light bulbs will strategize and plan every minute detail of the event, and there will be spares and backups poised for action. But if the Army wants the sun to rise, and it’s a peacetime non-mission-critical sunrise, then it will likely be delegated to some random private living in a deep cave in the wrong time zone.
The officer didn’t knock when he entered Hirsch’s office. He couldn’t. Cubicles have no doors. “Specialist Hirsch, you’re good with computers. Could you figure out where to put this guy under house arrest? He’s some kind of autistic genius computer hacker. Find some military base where they have the skills to keep his hacking in check. But it needs to be reasonably comfortable. Not Adak Island. Comfortable imprisonment, not exile.”
“Yes, sir. No problem, sir.” Hirsch smiled but silently grumbled because the officer had interrupted his Minecraft game. He typed “military computer jobs” into a Google search. Then clicked on the first result, a list of army careers at go-army-dot-com. He scrolled down one page until he saw something interesting called “Cyber Network Defender”. He clicked on that and saw that people were trained for that job at Fort Gordon, Georgia. He started a new Google search for Fort Gordon. Clicking on the first result he found that that was the home of US Army Cyber Command. That sounds about right, he thought. He wrote up a brief email to his boss recommending that the autistic genius be sent there, and the Cyber Network Defenders could practice on him. From start to finish he had taken less than three minutes. He stored the draft email and set an alarm to himself to send it to his boss in two hours. After all, he had to make it look like he had worked hard to get the answer. Then he went back to Minecraft.