The first CyberPatriot “games” took place in 2009, at AFA’s 25th Annual Air Warfare Symposium where seven Air Force Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (AFJROTC) teams and one Civil Air Patrol (CAP) team from the greater Orlando area competed. As a prototype event, no one quite knew how well it would be received. But the enthusiastic responses from the competitors and the positive feedback from the surrounding industry professionals and senior military leaders demonstrated that it was an unqualified success.

For the 2009-10 school year, the competition, though still restricted to Air Force JROTC units and CAP squadrons, went nationwide, conducting three online qualification rounds for nearly 200 teams in 44 states, South Korea, and Japan.

The support from the competition’s industry-leading sponsors helps reaffirm the importance and relevance of cyber security. A generous grant from the program’s presenting sponsor, Northrop Grumman, made full national deployment possible. SAIC supplies their patent-pending software as the platform for the competition. The CIAS at the University of Texas in San Antonio (creator of the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition) provides rich instructional materials for the competition. All of these sponsors ensured that CyberPatriot became a reality for high school students nationwCyberPatriot and Its History