FORT GORDON, Ga. – The Savannah River Site’s (SRS) chief information officer recently spoke with students in a U.S. Army Cyber School course on advanced cyber warfare about operations at the DOE site.

   Lewann Belton, director of the Cyber and Information Technology Division at DOE’s Savannah River Operations Office, talked with nearly 50 members of all military branches and civilians from the departments of Defense and Homeland Security and other federal agencies in the school’s Joint Advanced Cyber Warfare Course – Georgia (JACWC-G). The members of the military in attendance work in the Defense Department’s Cyber Mission Forces or related cyberspace operations, mainly at Fort Gordon.

   “Collaboration with other government agencies and industry is an important part of this course,” said Maj. Charlie Lewis, chief of the school’s Cyber Leader College and manager of the JACWC-G course. “Lewann brought a different perspective on government cyber operations to a group that usually focuses on Department of Defense priorities. We have a lot in common, but there are differences, too. It’s good to look at those, and also to learn a little about the mission at SRS.”

   Belton provided an overview of the SRS mission and history before narrowing in on cybersecurity’s role at the site. 

   SRS is a DOE industrial complex dedicated to environmental stewardship, national security, and clean energy. The site and EM’s Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) develop and deploy technologies to support radiological and chemical cleanup activities at SRS and other DOE sites. More than half the resources at SRS are dedicated to EM operations, while the rest support the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) missions managed by the Savannah River Field Office.

   Belton’s IT and cybersecurity responsibilities involve EM, NNSA, and SRNL, and SRS employs federal employees and contractor staff from several different companies. As with any IT operation, Belton said, many factors compete for priority: major missions need connections and computing power, while dangers inside and outside the network threaten security. He emphasized the importance of protecting not only the national security, but also the personal information of workers and the intellectual property of the government and the contractors.

   The two-week JACWC-G course provides a detailed overview of the U.S. Cyber Command, intelligence community, and other U.S. government cyber partners. Cyberspace threats, planning, operations, and analysis considerations are among the key topics. 

   The school, part of Fort Gordon’s U.S. Army Cyber Center of Excellence, conducts JACWC-G in partnership with the Army Cyber Command’s Joint Forces Headquarters-Cyber at Fort Gordon, with oversight from U.S. Cyber Command. The program is modeled after U.S. Cyber Command’s JACWC course.