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- [00:03]
Dina Temple Raston
From Recorded Future News and prx, this is Click Here. I have to tell you that when I heard that your call sign was Tuna, Charlie Tuna Moore, I was expecting you to look a little more like Charlie the Tuna.
- [00:23]
Lt. Gen. Charlie Tuna Moore
You have beret glasses in the cool glasses.
- [00:27]
Dina Temple Raston
Exactly. And you don't look like him at all. So where did this come from? Foreign Future News, this is Click Here's Mic Drop. A longer listen to one of our favorite interviews. I'm Dina Temple Raston, and today a conversation with Lt. Gen. Charlie Tuna Moore. He's the former deputy commander of U.S. cyber Command, and we talk to him at a moment when the future of American cyber defense feels unusually shaky. We sat down in Nashville at Vanderbilt University's Summit on Modern Conflict and Emerging Threats, not too long after NSA Director General Tim Hawk was unexpectedly fired. Were you surprised?
- [01:13]
Lt. Gen. Charlie Tuna Moore
I was surprised.
- [01:14]
Dina Temple Raston
And the surprises didn't stop there. Offensive cyber operations against Russia were reportedly paused. Massive reorganizations are underway at the Pentagon, and it feels like the ground is shifting and no one, not even the generals, are sure where it's going to land. Stay with us.
- [01:40]
Unknown
Looking for more of the cybersecurity and intelligence coverage you get on Click Here, then check out our sister publication, the Record. From Recorded Future News, you'll get breaking cyber news from reporters in New York, Washington, London, and Kyiv, among others. And you'll see for yourself why it attracts hundreds of thousands of page views every month. Just go to TheRecord Media.
- [02:07]
Dina Temple Raston
I'm Dina Temple Roast, and this is Click Here's Mic Drop. It'd be easy to assume that a call sign like Tuna came from a moment of embarrassment. But in the world of fighter pilots, sometimes nicknames are less about humiliation and. And more about just belonging.
- [02:28]
Lt. Gen. Charlie Tuna Moore
I spent the first two thirds of my career flying fighters, aircraft. And so when you go to your first operational squadron and you become mission ready, they give you a call sign. It's almost like welcoming you into the brotherhood and sisterhood and the family. And so therefore, they're going to call you what they want to call you. Most of the time, those call signs involve things that you have messed up during your training. And I was no different. They had plenty of material to work with, and I'm a big water sports fan. And so Charlie the Tuna is what they settled on. And I guess I should be thankful for that.
- [03:00]
Dina Temple Raston
It could have been worse.
- [03:01]
Lt. Gen. Charlie Tuna Moore
Could have been much worse.
- [03:04]
Dina Temple Raston
General Moore logged more than 600 hours flying combat missions. But by 2015, the battlefield was changing, and so was his role. He left the skies behind for a New fight, an invisible war waged across networks and servers. He and Gen. Timothy Hawke were part of the same constellation at U.S. cyber Command. Moore as deputy commander and Hawk first director of intelligence, then later as the head of the Cyber National Mission Force. Their timelines overlapped. Their responsibilities did too, at least at times. And while they may not have shared the same office or even the same briefings, they were both part of cybercom's leadership in a formative moment when digital threats were growing and the US Was still figuring out what cyber war really meant. So when the news broke that Hawk was fired, we do have this breaking news out of Washington where the top two leaders at the National Security Agency have been ousted. A US official, it hit hard. Where were you when General Hawk was fired?
- [04:12]
Lt. Gen. Charlie Tuna Moore
I was at home and I clicked on a newsfeed and saw it come up, and the first thing I said was, okay, well, is this accurate? I want to look at a couple different sources. And so I did, and, and then, so it appeared to be accurate information.
- [04:33]
Dina Temple Raston
The firing of General Timothy Hawk wasn't just unexpected. It reopened a debate that never really went away. Since 2010, US Cyber Command and the NSA have shared a single leader, a dual hatted role designed to unify intelligence and operations in the digital realm. But it was never without controversy. One agency spies, the other strikes. And some believed putting both under one hat on one head blurred too many lines. So when Hawke was dismissed, the question resurfaced. Is it finally time to split the two? General Charlie Tuna Moore knows the debate well.
- [05:13]
Lt. Gen. Charlie Tuna Moore
I'll give you a little bit of background on that. When I was working on the Joint Staff, I was actually asked to conduct a study. Should we split these two organizations? And I can tell you, at that time, I didn't have a dog in the fight. I'm just trying to get to what I think is ground truth. And the outcome of that was pretty clear to me. There was no compelling reason to split the two organizations, but there were plenty of reasons why not to split the two organizations. We need this close alignment between our digital information gathering enterprise, the National Security Agency, and then the organization that's responsible for achieving effects in that domain. And we want the unity of command, we want the unity of effort, because we need to be able to operate at speed. If you don't have one person in charge, then everything tends to become overcome by events and you don't necessarily make the right decisions and the timelines that matter.
- [06:14]
Dina Temple Raston
General Moore contends that cyber attacks move so quickly, you don't have time For a committee, you need one person, one decision, one chain of command. The concern is that clarity and that unity may be starting to unravel. And that's next in our conversation. We'll be right back.
- [06:48]
Unknown
Looking for more of the cybersecurity and intelligence coverage you get on Click here, then check out our sister publication, the Record. From Recorded Future News, you'll get breaking cyber news from reporters in New York, Washington, London, and Kyiv, among others. And you'll see for yourself why it attracts hundreds of thousands of page views every month. Just go to therecord media.
- [07:21]
Dina Temple Raston
Across the U.S. government strains are becoming hard to ignore. There have been deep staff cuts at the digital service office, mass layoffs at cisa, an entire cybersecurity review board dismissed, and most recently, a reported pause in offensive cyber operations against Russia. So General Nakasone and I sat down a few weeks ago and we talked about a pause in offensive cyber allegedly ordered by the Secretary of Defense. And General Nakasone at the time said, look, we've done pauses before. This is not as unusual as everybody's making it sound. And he said, but, you know, CISA is continuing apace. NSA is continuing apace. Now, we've had an accumulation of events that makes this seem a little more problematic. Given the firing of Hawk, given cutbacks at cisa, are you worried in what specific way that we're making ourselves more cyber vulnerable?
- [08:19]
Lt. Gen. Charlie Tuna Moore
Now, obviously, when you let somebody go from an organization as big as the national security agency and U.S. cyber command, you know that's disruptive. I don't think anybody can argue that on the other side of the coin, the way our system's set up, the president is allowed to have anybody in senior positions that he feels is the right folks for him or her. And, you know, that's the way things work in our system.
- [08:44]
Dina Temple Raston
The system is supposed to allow for sudden exits, mid mission shakeups, and sometimes even strategic silence. Still, Moore says there are reasons to be optimistic.
- [08:56]
Lt. Gen. Charlie Tuna Moore
We don't know a lot about what the next budget, for instance, is going to look like, but I am really optimistic that the development of advanced capabilities within the cyber or the digital space AI does seem to be a priority.
- [09:10]
Dina Temple Raston
For the administration, but priorities don't always translate to practice. Budgets are cut, posts are vacant, missions stall. And even more concedes the threats haven't gone anywhere.
- [09:22]
Lt. Gen. Charlie Tuna Moore
And to your question, more specifically to the threat during this time period, the threat's significant in this space. It has been for years. It's only getting more so, I think, for our country and from A national security perspective. And so we have to be vigilant and we have to make it a priority.
- [09:44]
Dina Temple Raston
Some have proposed an even more radical step. Make cyber its own branch, like Space Force, but with keyboards. General Moore says that would be a big mistake.
- [09:54]
Lt. Gen. Charlie Tuna Moore
What we need is a DoD wide culture as it relates to cyber, not a standalone specific service 1.
- [10:02]
Dina Temple Raston
Tell me what you mean.
- [10:03]
Lt. Gen. Charlie Tuna Moore
What I mean is we no longer have tanks, airplanes, ships and things that move through space. We have computers that move to the battlefield, that fly through the air, that fly through space and that float in the oceans. So whether you're talking about the computer or you're talking about the networking of those, all those computers and the sensors in the battle space, that's important to every other service's mission accomplishment. If you create another service, it is so easy to look and say, well, that's their responsibility as opposed to understanding, no, it is part of your responsibility if we're going to succeed.
- [10:44]
Dina Temple Raston
A cultural shift, he says, not a structural one. Which brings us to what he thinks is next. So the panel you're on here at the summit, one of them is predictions for 2025. What are your predictions?
- [10:59]
Lt. Gen. Charlie Tuna Moore
For me, I don't know what the next year is going to hold or what might be surprising for anybody. That's one of the other aspects of the digital environment is this is extremely hard to predict from a threat perspective. Unlike, you know, the domain. I spent most of my career in the air domain, and it applies to land, sea, space. We tend to have pretty good intelligence capabilities and we tend to be able to look out and determine what we believe our adversaries are doing, and then we're able to prepare for that over the course of many years. In this domain, things literally come out of nowhere, whether it's a zero day or some type of malware or some type of capability like a large language model.
- [11:45]
Dina Temple Raston
Do you think it's inevitable that we're going to have a big critical infrastructure cyber attack in the near future?
- [11:52]
Lt. Gen. Charlie Tuna Moore
I don't.
- [11:53]
Dina Temple Raston
Oh, really?
- [11:54]
Lt. Gen. Charlie Tuna Moore
No. I think. Well, let me qualify. If we end up in a position where we're going to end up in conflict, then yes, I do think you'll see some of that if I set aside crisis that leads to conflict. I don't. I think in general, other nation states are starting to understand what's considered an act of war and what is not.
- [12:18]
Dina Temple Raston
Can you give me an example of that?
- [12:20]
Lt. Gen. Charlie Tuna Moore
Sure. So obviously, with all the Typhoon series things that we've seen, whether it's telecommunications or critical infrastructure, the Chinese were in those locations gathering information.
- [12:31]
Dina Temple Raston
Foreign Salt Typhoon. They sound like disturbing weather patterns, and in a way, they are. Volt Typhoon is a Chinese hacking operation targeting US Critical infrastructure, water, power, communications. We talked about their efforts in our episode on Tuesday. Salt Typhoon is focused more on surveillance, targeting telecom systems to monitor and collect data and global communications. Both operations were designed not to blow anything up, but to be ready to if conflict ever broke out.
- [13:09]
Lt. Gen. Charlie Tuna Moore
That's called intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, or espionage in the cyber domain, however you want to label it. And obviously, lots of countries around the world, including the United States, do similar types of activities. But if you're in critical infrastructure, like a power company or part of the power grid, you're only there to figure out how it works and to position yourself so that you can take action should this crisis or conflict start to occur. There's no reason for you to be there unless you plan to take that effect and potentially do that. And actually taking those actions and causing that effect would, without a doubt in my mind, cross the threshold into what most countries around the world would consider an act of war. And what I think we really need to do is, from a policy perspective and working with our friends and allies around the world, we need just to be very clear and very vocal that that shouldn't be allowed because essentially what you are doing, you've basically planted an explosive, you know, under that bridge or on that railroad crossing. And, oh, you haven't caused an effect yet, but if, if, if you wanted to, you could at any moment. And we would never put up with that in the physical space. So why are we putting up with it in the cyberspace?
- [14:25]
Dina Temple Raston
Got it. So do you think that things have fundamentally changed now that we have found that Volt and Typhoon are in critical infrastructure and consumer critical infrastructure?
- [14:35]
Lt. Gen. Charlie Tuna Moore
Well, I think it gives us an opportunity to do exactly what I just talked about. I just read this morning that during a recent engagement before the end of the Biden administration, that the Chinese didn't actually admit to it, but they came as close as they can, saying, well, this is what you get because of your positions on Taiwan.
- [14:59]
Dina Temple Raston
China stopped short of confessing. But according to multiple reports, including leaks from recent backchannel talks, Chinese officials didn't deny their hand in Volt or Salt Typhoon. Instead, they issued a kind of shrug. They told US counterparts, if this happened, well, maybe you should reconsider your stance on Taiwan. Not quite an admission, not quite a denial. What they were saying was, these weren't rogue operations. These were strategic pressure points held in reserve. And Moore says That's intriguing.
- [15:34]
Lt. Gen. Charlie Tuna Moore
This is a very interesting development and I think it leaves the door open for the current administration to take this very strong policy approach that I just talked about and build a coalition of our friends and allies to make it very clear this is unacceptable. These are civilian type targets. There's no reason for you to be there unless you intend harm.
- [15:56]
Dina Temple Raston
So could you imagine a scenario in which they say this is what you get when you raise tariffs 125%?
- [16:03]
Lt. Gen. Charlie Tuna Moore
It's going to be interesting to see their response. I mean, we could see them respond in the cyber or physical space to their displeasure. And I'll be watching it very carefully like everybody else, because I think they're in a significant disadvantaged position economically and they know it. And I don't know how it's going to resolve or when it's going to resolve, but I do not think you want to be China in this position right now.
- [16:29]
Dina Temple Raston
Meaning they need us more than we need them.
- [16:30]
Lt. Gen. Charlie Tuna Moore
100%.
- [16:33]
Dina Temple Raston
We like to think that China needs us more than we need them, that their economy is more tethered to ours than ours to theirs. But in cyber, the power dynamic isn't measured in exports or imports. It's measured in patience and presence. And what you might not have seen coming from recorded Future News, this has been Click Here's Mic Drop. It was written and produced by Megan Dietrich, Sean Powers, Erica Gaeda, Zach Hirsch, Lucas Riley and me, Dina Templrest. It was edited by Karen Duffin. We'll be back on Tuesday with an all new episode of Click Here. Have a great weekend.
- [17:22]
Unknown
Looking for more of the cybersecurity and intelligence coverage you get on Click Here, Then check out our sister publication, the Record. From Recorded Future News. You'll get breaking cyber news from reporters in New York, Washington, London and Kiev, among others. And you'll see for yourself why it attracts hundreds of thousands of page views every month. Just go to the Record Media.