U.S. Cyber Command’s Hunt Forward Operations (2018–2025): A Seven-Year Analysis of Historical Evolution and Operational Practice

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of publicly available information on an operational concept known as “Hunt Forward Operations” (HFO), which has been deployed by the United States Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM) in collaboration with allied and partner nations since 2018. In particular, this paper analyzes various issues surrounding HFO over the past 7 years from three perspectives: publicly available data on its characteristics, historical contexts of its continuous evolution, and operational practice on the ground, referring to similar operational practices in the private cybersecurity industry. This analysis aims to retrace the development of USCYBERCOM’s initiatives over the past 7 years, understand the internal logic of these initiatives, and identify various theoretical and policy implications they hold.

Section 1 defines two meanings of HFO, as referred to by USCYBERCOM: one in a narrow sense and the other in a broad sense. Section 2 explores qualitative and quantitative data on narrower-sense HFO’s evolution over the past 7 years. In tandem with section 1, this section illustrates what HFO really looks like, going deeper into a couple of publicly available data sources that received less attention, such as the USCYBERCOM’s declassified materials and the Defense Innovation Unit’s solicitation of the next-generation threat-hunting kits.

Section 3 considers the historical context that led to the continuous evolution of HFO from its origin, in an attempt to understand the factors that have led to the consistent and bipartisan growth of this operational concept in the 7 years from 2018 to the present day, as well as the internal logic of the USCYBERCOM and Department of Defense at the root of this concept.

Section 4 considers “threat-hunting” (TH), a cybersecurity practice that exists at the root of the HFO operational concept, and analyzes the practical operational considerations and challenges of HFO as “international collaborative approaches to TH” while elucidating previous studies and practitioners’ findings. This section then focuses on the increasingly institutionalized intra-regional cooperation on TH, particularly in the Euro-Atlantic region, including Canada- and Latvia-led initiatives, and analyzes the context of this phenomenon of threat-hunting cooperation beyond HFO. The analysis sheds light on the issues of capacity and willingness on the part of host countries, particularly NATO’s eastern flank and Ukraine, and on the role of the existing institutional basis for multilateral defense cooperation led by NATO in the region.

Section 5, as the concluding section, summarizes a comprehensive interpretation of the publicly available data about HFO for the past 7 years, outlined in Section 2, reflecting the key takeaways from the following sections. Furthermore, building on the analysis provided in Sections 3 and 4, Section 5 presents five implications based on the overall analysis: (1) Globalization of HFO’s operational areas and improvement of readiness of deployed units; (2) Gaps in the number of countries and times deployed; (3) Existence of an operational strategy optimized for multiple deployments to the same country, as suggested by the trend in (2); (4) Convergence of domestic and bureaucratic political factors and foreign policy environments in supporting the continuous growth of HFO; (5) Importance of the institutional basis for multilateral defense cooperation in the Euro-Atlantic region as a factor related to the foreign policy environment. The paper concludes with a discussion of the policy and theoretical implications of this study, as well as future research issues, based on comparative perspectives on the Euro-Atlantic region and the Indo-Pacific region.

Full report (Japanese)