Cyberspace Activities Funding in the U.S. Army’s FY 2020 Budget Request

Following a fiscal year (2019) when Army asked for a large portion of the funding for its cybersecurity operations as part of its Research, Development, Test, and Enhancement (RDT&E) request, the Service has shifted its request for most of this funding to its Operations and Maintenance (O&M) account.

There are two major categories of cybersecurity funding listed as part of Army’s O&M request for FY 2020. These are Cyberspace Activities - Cyberspace Operations and Cyberspace Activities – Cybersecurity. Funding under the former category, totaling $612M in FY 2020, includes activities like training Army personnel and Cyber Mission Forces, as well as cyber-related operations at global commands (European Command, Southern Command, and U.S. Forces Korea), and U.S. Army Cyber Command (ARCYBER). Readers will please note that the Army doesn’t list every dollar in its program descriptions, so the numbers in the tables below will not add up to the $1.2B mentioned above.

Funding for Cyberspace Activities, meanwhile, totals $557M and covers oversight and management of the Army’s Cybersecurity Program, the Army’s Insider Threat Program, Cyber IT Services Management, and the “development of cybersecurity plans, assessments, and strategies to combat cyber threats and vulnerabilities.”

There is of course some overlap between these two funding categories, but the main point is that there are new funding lines totaling nearly $1.2B in Army’s O&M request, which is typically considered money for established programs and not new money like that listed under Procurement and RDT&E. These new funding lines account for most of the increase in Army’s O&M request, which grew from $73B enacted in FY 2019 to $74.7B requested in FY 2020.