AFCEA and Cyber Ranges partner on defence cyber exercise platform
AFCEA International, the US-based nonprofit that connects military, government, industry and academia on technology and security matters, has entered a formal partnership with Cyber Ranges to deliver cyber exercises across its global membership network. Under the agreement, Cyber Ranges becomes AFCEA's official cyber range partner, and the two organisations will collaborate on exercises hosted at AFCEA conferences and forums.
At the centre of the arrangement is AFCEA RANGE, an AFCEA-branded deployment of the Cyber Ranges platform. The environment is designed to support tabletop exercises, Capture the Flag competitions, cyber drills, and team-based cyber defence exercises, providing what the companies describe as realistic, attack emulation-based scenarios in which participants can practise and assess their capabilities.
The partnership
Lt. Gen. Bruce T. Crawford (Ret.), president and chief executive of AFCEA, framed the partnership around organisational resilience rather than pure defence. "The question is not whether organisations will face disruption. The question is whether they have prepared their people to adapt, respond and continue the mission when they do," he said. Crawford argued that workforce readiness requires repeated, realistic exercises over time, not one-off training events.
Cyber Ranges chief executive Al Graziano said the partnership would bring "scalable, hands-on cyber exercises" to AFCEA's defence communities. The agreement also provides for Cyber Ranges to deliver dedicated remote support services and the potential development of an annual cyber exercise, though no confirmed schedule or pricing has been disclosed.
Cyber Ranges carries a relevant reference point: in April 2022, MITRE Corporation selected it as the cyber range of choice for the MITRE ATT&CK Defender programme, lending third-party credibility to its attack emulation approach ahead of this partnership.
Market context
The cyber range and workforce development market has grown considerably as governments and defence agencies grapple with persistent skills shortages and increasingly sophisticated adversary tradecraft. Vendors including SimSpace, Raytheon Cyber (via its Cyber Academy offering) and a number of government-contracted range providers compete in the same space, alongside cloud-native simulation platforms that emerged during the shift to remote working.
AFCEA's membership spans more than 30,000 individuals across military, government and industry globally, giving Cyber Ranges distribution into defence communities that are difficult to reach through conventional commercial sales channels. The partnership structure, in which Cyber Ranges powers a white-labelled AFCEA-branded environment rather than selling direct, is a model several training-platform vendors have used to penetrate defence and intelligence markets where brand trust and institutional affiliation matter as much as technical capability.
Regulatory and standards read-across
Governments on both sides of the Atlantic have sharpened expectations around cyber workforce readiness in recent years. The UK's National Cyber Strategy and the US Cyberspace Solarium Commission's recommendations both emphasise continuous workforce exercise as a pillar of national cyber resilience. The EU's NIS2 Directive, which took full effect from October 2024, imposes incident-response preparedness requirements on operators of essential services, creating demand for documented exercise programmes that platforms like AFCEA RANGE are positioned to support.
Neither organisation disclosed commercial terms, revenue-sharing arrangements, or membership-access pricing for AFCEA RANGE. The absence of those details limits external assessment of the deal's financial significance for either party. Observers will look for named exercise events on the 2027 AFCEA conference calendar as an early indicator of the partnership's operational pace.