You. I joined for a few different reasons. Like many people, it’s to travel and for education. But there’s also two other reasons that may be kind of weird. So I heard about this job that I’m currently in from a friend that was currently in doing the job, and I really liked it, and I thought it was really cool and badass, so I wanted to do it also.
And I also like structure, which is weird. I don’t know. I like being told what to do. Yeah, that sounds weird. Yeah, I like structure, so that’s why I joined.
I’ve been in for a little over five and a half years. My current rank is staff sergeant e five. I soaked that on at my four year mark.
My job is called cyber warfare operations and the control AFSC for it is one before x one. I’m currently a one before 71. Been in this job for over a year and a half.
So this is weird. This job right now is still retrain only, which means you would have to have a job in the air force or another branch that is suitable to this job. So I’ve met some people that have got out of the marines and came into this job. There is an application and a test involved with getting into this job, and that is the electronic data processing test, the EDPT. It is considered one of the hardest tests to take in the military.
It is difficult. It’s designed that way to test how well and how adept you are to learning cyber things or just learning quick in general. The first job I had, I signed this job at depth. I just said I wanted to be in the career field. So they gave me ground radar systems, which was three d one x five.
Now it’s one charlie eight x three. They merged with another Afse. Yes. I just said, hey, I want to be in a job. I know it looks good on the interview.
If I held an electronic, like, previous job, so that’s what I wanted. That’s what my recruiter was able to give me, and now I’m in the shop. One before x one.
This job was definitely something that I wanted to do. It was something I wanted to do before I even wanted to be in the air force. Like I said, I had a friend that was in the shop, and he enjoyed it. He loved it. He made it sound really cool, and it is really cool, and I really like doing it.
So, yeah, it is something that I wanted to do. It’s something that I want to do, and it’s something that I’m probably going to do for a really long time. Even after I get out of the. Yeah.
So the other job that I thought about doing was explosive ordinance disposal, EOD tech, just because they had to have a high ASVAP score, they had to be pretty smart, but they also had to be fit. And that’s something that I like doing. I like working out, I like doing physical stuff. So it’s kind of like a cross between doing something analytical and something with my body. So that was completely different, but also something really interesting to me.
So when I first joined, I signed a six year contract and I don’t regret it at all. At my five year mark, which was just like seven, eight months ago, I signed up for another five on top of my six. So I’m going to be in the air force for at least eleven years.
So both of my tech schools, my first one was about eight months. That was at Keesler, Mississippi, Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi. The second was also there. So I was there for eight months. My first tech school, about six months.
My second tech school, the first time I went through, I was considered a non prior. So I had to stay in the dorm. I had to do all the other stuff that a normal person, right out of basic training, had to go through. All the. All the stuff and following orders and all that other stuff.
The second time was I was considered a prior, so I got to live off base, stay in a hotel, have some freedom outside of the class. So I really enjoyed it. Both times were really fun for me. Second time was a little bit more fun. It was a little bit more stressful.
The course load was a lot more intense, and just getting through the course for this job that I currently have was a little bit more intense. We normally have a really high fill out rate just because the tests are pretty difficult. So I think out of the. We started off with about ten or eleven people, we ended up graduating with five people.
So the unfortunate thing is this job, you can’t really get stationed at a whole lot of places. San Antonio is a huge hub for our job. There’s also a huge hub in Hawaii and Scott Air Force base, which is in Ohio or Illinois, I think it’s Illinois and then also in the DC area. So those are like the four major hubs for our job. You can tdy out to many bases and there’s a few other bases like Georgia and Nevada.
Nellis Air Force Base you can get stationed at. There’s not a whole lot of people out in those two areas, but you can get stationed there. But you can tdy, depending on what shop or section that you get put into or specialty, you can tdy out to a lot of different bases depending on that.
So our job can go either two ways. So if you do really well in tech school and you don’t get any failures, and you have a really high GPA, which is usually only one or two students, if that out of each class, you go the offensive, which is your typical hacking things. So people that hack into other people, that’s what an offensive person does. So since they’re in the military and they work for the DoD, we follow certain things like the uniform code of military justice, and we follow low act. We have laws that we have to abide by.
Obviously, we only do title 50 and title ten, which means we only do foreign asset collection, intel collection, and then we do attacks on foreign assets. We don’t do anything with the US citizens. It’s only strictly foreign, foreign stuff. So whatever you think hacking is, I don’t know. Cyber attacks.
We do cyber attacks. There’s also a defensive thing. Defensive. Normally a lot of one befores. The majority of us are defensive in nature.
So that means we protect the air Force network from any kind of foreign attacks. Some of the defensive posture goes out, and TD wise, like I said, we may have an asset that we need to learn how to protect better. So they’ll go out there and try to figure out a defensive posture that we can take in order to deny enemy attacks, cyberattacks from coming into our network. And then we also do, if they were able to get in, we do reverse engineering on malware, we do computer forensics and implement measures to make sure they don’t get in again.
So, like I said, most of us that are in this job are staff surgeons because it’s a retrain only. So a lot of us have already made staff. I’ve met a few seniormen, but like I said, most of us are staff or above. There have been two non prior students that have been able to make it through the course. I’m not sure how they were selected.
They had to go through some other tests and other tech schools before they ended up becoming an RS. I’m assuming it was a rigorous process. I’ve never heard of it before until like, last month, I think they graduated from our tech school as nonpriars. So a lot of people that do what we do are staffs. A lot of people I work with and some advice that I have given them or that we’ve kind of just, like, I don’t know have come to their realization is nothing is permanent if you want it that way.
So a lot of us get started off at a lower position, like maybe doing log analysis or looking at traffic over the network and try to figure out which is malicious, which could be considered an introductory job, which is rightfully so. We just graduated tech school, so we’re going to do something like on the lower end of the spectrum, and then we gradually move up. So right now, I do computer forensics, and I also do cyber threat emulation, where I pretend to be a bad guy and try to break into our own network. If you want it, show that you’re motivated. Show that you’re willing to learn.
Show that you’re willing to be good at the job that you’re put in, and don’t complain about it. That’s a huge thing. People in this job, unfortunately, they expect that they’re going to be like this crazy great hacker. They’re going to be doing these crazy operations. It’s going to be awesome.
But we all start somewhere, and most of us start at the bottom and work our way up to that. So don’t expect everything to just be exactly the way that was told to you. You got to work for it, you got to want it. You got to show that you’re motivated and you’re willing to learn and be good at whatever position they want you to be in.
So most of my FSC is kind of. Not that we’re paranoid, but we just like to keep our social media presence low or private. I’m sure if you comment on the bottom of this YouTube video, I’ll follow it and try to stay on top of it. If you have any other questions about this job, I just want to say I won’t be able to talk about a whole lot of stuff with this job. It is considered at a high classification level, but I will try to do my best to answer any questions that you have in a non classified way that makes sense.