The U.S. Navy’s Fleet Cyber Command/Tenth Fleet will be getting a new deputy commander with a Defense Department (DoD) announcement detailing Rear Adm. Michael Bernacchi Jr. to the post.
Bernacchi currently serves at the director for plans and policy at U.S. Space Command, but will take over as deputy commander for the Navy’s cyber and space component.
Prior to being the director for plans and policy, Bernacchi served as the commander of Submarine Group 10 from 2019-2020, and commander of the Naval Service Training Command from 2017-2019.
Recently, the service branch began taking aim at building a more agile and innovative force leveraging information anytime and anywhere through the modernization of IT systems, and at better defending those systems.
Navy CIO Aaron Weis explained earlier this month how the Navy was maintaining several legacy IT systems in a complex architecture, and how that created isolated data silos which increased the departments cyberattack surface. This created unnecessary risks for the service branch.
“Cybersecurity is not a compliance issue, it is a readiness issue,” Weis said. “To protect and defend our systems we need to move away from patchworks to comply with cyber standards, and focus on training to be prepared for possible breaches.”
