The Virginia Army National Guard’s 91stCyber Brigade hosted Cyber Fortress 26, a joint, interagency, intergovernmental multinational exercise, July 25- Aug. 8, 2026, at the State Military Reservation in Virginia Beach.
“This was the best iteration of Cyber Fortress yet,”said Col. Gerald Mazur, commander of the Fort Belvoir-based 91st Cyber Brigade.
Cyber Fortress consists of two lines of effort, he explained. The first is the recertification of two cyber protection teams and the validation of one battalion headquarters.
This year, South Carolina National Guard’s 125th Cyber Protection Battalion was validated. Meanwhile California National Guard’s Cyber Protection Team 171 and the Ohio National Guard’s Cyber Protection Team 172 were recertified.
“The 91st Cyber Brigade is the only deployable, cyber space operations capability in the United States Army,” Mazur explained.
The brigade footprint touches 31 states, including battalion headquarters in Virginia, South Carolina, Massachusetts and Indiana.
The second line of effort was the domestic operations exercise. The exercise brought together Active, Reserve, and National Guard components of the U.S. military and NATO partners, as well as local, state, and federal government agencies and civilian partners from private industry to respond to a simulated real-world cyber incident. This year’s scenario focused on hydroelectricity.
“This year we conducted the range using the Persistent Cyber Training Environment, which proved to be a very reliable platform,” said Col. David Garner, commander of the 91st Cyber Brigade’s Fairfax-based Information Operations Support Center and the exercise director. “Moreover, the support from the PCTE team from concept design to range execution was nothing less than outstanding.”
Participants in this year’s exercise included the Virginia Department of Emergency Management, Virginia State Police, Virginia Defense Force, Virginia Fusion Center, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Air National Guard, U.S. Army Reserve, and U.S. Marine Corps, as well as military cyber personnel from Finland and Estonia.
This was the fifth iteration of Cyber Fortress and this year the 91st leadership made it a point to work closely with their partners at CISA, Garner explained.
“CISA developed and facilitated a cyber incident response table top exercise that involved multiple state and federal partners, provided members to the red team and white cell, and worked closely with the 91st Cyber Brigade intelligence section and the Virginia Fusion Center to develop injects that added value and realism to the exercise,” he explained.
Week 1 of the exercise focused on training in the areas of cyber defense of operational technology, the technology used to interact with physical devices such as an Industrial Control Systems andSupervisory Control and Data Acquisition systems. The Soldiers and civilian partners also received training in cyber threat intelligence, malware analysis, and electrical systems.
Another key event from the first week was a Distinguished Visitors Day, which included capabilities briefs, a tabletop exercise, and an air movement of cyber operators by helicopters from the Virginia National Guard’s 2nd Battalion, 224th Aviation Regiment.
Week 2 of the exercise featured a force-on-force cyber exercise designed to simulate and test cyber incident responses to a cyber attack. Working collaboratively, participants conducted incident response, threat analysis, and defensive cyber operations as integrated "Blue" teams, countering a dedicated "Red" team that emulated multiple threat actors within a realistic critical-infrastructure enterprise network environment.
“Overall, I am very pleased with how the entire staff and our partners worked together to present a fantastic training environment for the participants,” Garner said.
Cyber Fortress is one of the nation's premier military exercises focused on a whole-of-government response to significant cyber threats impacting critical infrastructure and key resources, and the only Army National Guard cyberspace operations exercise that includes capability certification or re-certification.
| Date Taken: |
08.20.2026 |
| Date Posted: |
08.20.2026 10:19 |
| Story ID: |
572813 |
| Location: |
VIRGINIA BEACH, VIRGINIA, US |
| Web Views: |
37 |
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0 |
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This work, Cyber Fortress 26 tests military, civilian experts on domestic cyber-attack scenarios, by A.J. Coyne, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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