The Washington National Guard broke ground on a new facility in a Dec. 11 ceremony at McChord. The new building will be home to the Washington Air National Guard's 262nd Network Warfare Squadron.

Construction of the new $5.6 million, 23,500 square foot facility is scheduled to finish in October 2010.

"The 262nd NWS is a cutting-edge unit that will fully utilize this state-of-the-art facility for the benefit of our state and nation," Maj. Gen. Timothy Lowenberg, the adjutant general and commander of the Washington National Guard, said in a release.

The mission of the 262nd NWS is to train citizen airmen to provide network warfare capabilities to secure defense information networks and provide full-spectrum cyberspace options to the state of Washington, Air Force Space Command and 24th Air Force.

The squadron is the first unit of this type in the Air National Guard and only the second in the Air Force, and is tasked with the mission of finding potential vulnerabilities of Air Force computer systems and Operations Security (OPSEC) measures.

Since its official inception in 2002, the squadron has maintained a very high operational tempo, as a result of the on-going war on terrorism, focusing on cyber-attack and physical security.  The National Guard Bureau gave the Military Department of the State of Washington formal approval to establish the first ever Information Warfare Team (IWT) in August of l999. In June 2002, after several years of extensive coordination and training, Washington Air National Guard officials participated in a re-missioning ceremony, marking the beginning of the 262nd Information Warfare Aggressor Squadron.

The newly established information warfare squadron's mission is to conduct adversarial information warfare operations and vulnerability assessments by employing realistic threats and tactics, thus enhancing the Air Force's defensive counter-information posture.  The focus is on two types of vulnerability assessments.  The first deals with Computer Network Assessments, which looks at computer network systems and cyber security, while the second deals with multi-disciplinary vulnerability assessments, which include the operations security measures of a military installation.

(Information from a WANG article contributed to this article.)