An agreement signed this month with the Department of Homeland Security and an earlier initiative to protect companies in the defense industrial base make it likely that the military will be a key part of any response to a cyber attack. While the Department of Homeland Security officially remains the lead government agency on cyber defense, the new agreement "sets up an opportunity for DHS to take advantage of the expertise" in the Pentagon, and particularly the secretive electronic spying agency, the National Security Agency, said Butler, who is a deputy assistant defense secretary. The two agencies - Defense and Homeland Security - "will help each other in more tangible ways then they have in the past," Butler told a group of defense reporters. Among other things, a senior DHS cyber official and other DHS employees will move to the NSA to be closer to the heart of the military's cyber defense capability. Closer collaboration provides "an opportunity to look at new ways that we can do national cyber incident response, he said. http://www.defensenews.com/story.php?i=4939254&c=AME&s=TOP