From the Crows' Nest

Ken Miller [00:00:09]:
Welcome to from the Crow's Nest, a podcast on Electromagnetic Spectrum Operations, or EMSO. I'm your host, Ken Miller, Director of Advocacy and Outreach for the Association of Old Crows. You can follow me on LinkedIn or email me directly at hostecrowsnest.org. Thanks for listening. All right, in this episode I bring you a conversation I had last month at AOC 2025. I had the opportunity to moderate a panel discussion featuring experts across government and industry. I was joined by retired Navy Commander Scott Sherm Oliver, the former Chief of Staff of the MSO CFT or Cross Functional Team, who's now with Booz Allen Hamilton. Next to him was Paul Archangeli, the former staff Director of the House Armed Services Committee, and he is now a respected National Security expert with the Invariant Group. And finally, I was joined by author and journalist, SMEE and frequent contributor to the show Jeff Fischer.

Ken Miller [00:01:11]:
Before I get to this conversation, just a few quick notes. First, don't miss our first season of our new from the Crow's Nest CTO series. This first season is designed to be a deep dive into next generation technology in EW and EMSO. The first season is powered by L3Harris and it takes us onto a deep dive into next generation EW capabilities for air superiority. You can go to crows.org podcast to learn more or you can download season one anywhere you get your podcast on Apple, Spotify and other places. If you or your company are interested in powering a future season of the CTO series, just please reach out to me via email at host from the crowsnest.org Also, it's obviously been a busy week here in the United States with the inauguration of President Donald Trump as the 47th president of the United States. If you are an AOC member or subscriber, don't miss our episode. Last week I had a great conversation with Jeff Fisher once again to get his take on what Donald Trump's second term means for NATO, the war in Ukraine, DoD reform, among other issues.

Ken Miller [00:02:28]:
If you are not an AOC member or subscriber, please consider subscribing today for the low cost of $2.99 a month. You get two additional episodes ad free a month and those episodes are typically geared to more towards current events, discussion Q and A audience Q and A from the audience and members. Uh, and subscribers also get a chance to join our the recording of each of those bonus episodes from our live virtual studio audience where you can engage real time with us and our conversation and ask questions and so forth. So it's a great opportunity. Please consider doing that today. And then, of course, also this past week following the inauguration, we have a new Secretary of Defense confirmed and Pete Heth and a new Secretary of Homeland Security and Christy Noam. Both those new secretaries especially, of course, the SEC def are going to play a major role in where we go in MSO moving forward here. So we're there's a lot to unpack to better understand what to expect in terms of defense spending, national strategy and so forth, and how we work with coalition partners.

Ken Miller [00:03:39]:
And we're going to start to peel all that back in the next few episodes over the next over the coming weeks and months. So please stay tuned to that. But today's episode and my panel discussion with Sherm, Pollock, Angeli and Fish really opens the door to begin this conversation. So without further delay, let's listen in.

Ken Miller [00:03:58]:
All right. Well, welcome to from the Crow's Nest, our podcast on electromagnetic spectrum operations. As hopefully many of you know, I am Ken Miller. I am the host of our podcast. It's great to be here with you on this live recording of our episode. This episode will air on our regular feedback. And so what we're going to do today is just have an open conversation. I have three special guests here today with me today, and I'll introduce them shortly.

Ken Miller [00:04:23]:
We'll start off with a few questions, but I do this is this is for you, the audience. So feel free to ask your question. You can raise your hand, come to the microphone. We'll do our best to answer. When we do release the episode on our feed, we will not include it will be audio only and we will not include names. So if you're concerned about any sort of name recognition, feel free to don't worry about that. Just ask your question and and we'll edit any any names out. Also, grab a drink.

Ken Miller [00:04:54]:
If you have not grabbed a drink, you're welcome to join us. Have the drink and helps the conversation flow a little bit more easily. As you can see, I'm already joining that process. So to get started here, I want to welcome my three distinguished guests and I'll start here on my left. This is a Scott Oliver, call sign Sherm. Many of you know him. He's the former chief of staff of the AMSO Cross Functional Team. He is now with Booz Allen Hamilton.

Ken Miller [00:05:20]:
Next to him is Paul Archangeli. He's a senior advisor at the Invariant Public Relations firm, former professional staff and staff director of the House Armed Services Committee in the US Congress. And at the end is Jeffrey Fisher, author, journalist SME. Any other titles? Oh, new. New. New board member to the aoc. And he will be joining, he will be joining the symposium tomorrow afternoon for a pre. For his presentation.

Ken Miller [00:05:46]:
We'll get to that in a little bit. So I'm going to join the, the guests here. We're going to ask a few questions, but please grab a drink, come to the microphone, or just raise your hand if I can speak. See you. We'll, we'll acknowledge you, and we'll get started right now. Thank you. All right, well, gentlemen, thank you for joining me here on from the Crows Nest. It's great to have you with me.

Ken Miller [00:06:04]:
It's, it's, it's nice because usually when we do the podcast, we can only do one at a time, and so I get the privilege of having all three of you on stage at one time. That's one of the nice benefits of this effort. So thank you for joining me. All right, so just to get us started on the conversation, Sherm, you're closest to me. So guess what? You get, you get the, you get the first question throughout the week. You know, obviously the convention is, the theme of the week is MSO in the context of great power competition. You have had an especially a privileged focus on what this means because you helped develop, or you develop, under your leadership, develop the DoD EMS superiority strategy and the implementation plan that came out after it. So I wanted to just pose a question to you first.

Ken Miller [00:06:53]:
From an AOC perspective or just from a general public perspective, it's really hard to understand the impact that the strategy has been having on DoD operations and getting the capabilities and the strategy and everything out to the field and into the fight. Sometimes it feels like the strategy's dead, and we know it's not. But could you give us some perspective on is the strategy really moving the ball forward down the court on emso? And are, is it succeeding in providing enduring change for DoD in the way that we fight in the electromagnetic spectrum?

Scott "Sherm" Oliver [00:07:34]:
Yeah. Thanks, Ken, and thanks for having me back on your show. It's always fun to talk, and I appreciate that question because we've, we've talked about this before, about whether or not the strategy is dead, and, and we had talk about, we talked about, you know, we're approaching year five, and so it's like, you know, are we going to. Usually DoD strategies are about 5 years old, 5 years long, and then we revisit the topic and we update it. I think that this strategy is still relevant 100%. And, and we are seeing positive changes. You know, When I was listening to General Anthony's talk, it was confirming, you know, yep, yep, yep, we're doing, we're doing all the things we said we were going to do. Maybe some people would say we're not going as fast as we should, so there's, maybe there's room to accelerate.

Scott "Sherm" Oliver [00:08:27]:
But I'm seeing that the changes that we were talking about with the creation of the strategy are being implemented. And so it's neat to see the maturity of those ideas being, you know, come into, into fruition.

Ken Miller [00:08:41]:
Is there any element that needs to be revisited from the strategy or the implementation plan? Maybe what is meant to be done is not being done properly. Or is there anything that, like, after five years, okay, well, we were right. But maybe we need to revise something.

Scott "Sherm" Oliver [00:08:56]:
Well, you know, I don't think so. But I would also say that the strategic context has changed a little bit. Perhaps maybe even it has gotten a little bit worse, the global situation. And so I still think it's very relative, but that would be the only thing that I would just kind of check in on and make sure we need to look at this any differently, given the geopolitics today.

Ken Miller [00:09:22]:
Right. So, Paul, I want to turn to you. You've been, you were on the hill for 15 years was it?

Paul Archangeli [00:09:30]:
18.

Ken Miller [00:09:31]:
18 years.

Paul Archangeli [00:09:33]:
I'm going to count all.

Ken Miller [00:09:34]:
That's a, that's a long time. And I believe you. I think your turn. I don't know. What year did you start?

Paul Archangeli [00:09:39]:
2004.

Ken Miller [00:09:40]:
2004. So we overlapped by one year when I was on the Hill and for, for one year. But give us some perspective because as many of you might know, what we have, it's a pretty tumultuous time right now. A little bit. So talk to us a little bit about the climate right now as we head into the new year. Obviously we have a new administration coming in. The Congress is kind of up in the air a little bit. We know roughly what those numbers would look like.

Ken Miller [00:10:05]:
But just from the political climate, what is the prospect of actually getting something done in the defense space? Because the Armed Services Committee has some unique bipartisanship, but it's also an, it's, it's a function of Congress, it's a committee in Congress. And so it deals with those, some of those broader issues.

Paul Archangeli [00:10:26]:
So, yeah, so if you were paying attention, we had a big election and we have a, what we will see is a lot of disruption. So even though one party controls all levers of the government, they do so with just a slim margin in the House. And it's funny, the President comes in, this is version 2, but has made clear some very big plans for the government. The DOGE is not a government agency, but has this opportunity to make all kinds of recommendations. And they're already leaning in on what those recommendations might be. And they will probably be disruptive for the good, for the bad. No one can tell yet. But you can be certain that they will be disruptive.

Paul Archangeli [00:11:22]:
The Congress gets a vote in those things. The President will have the authority to do things. The Congress will have, will have to approve some of the things that need to be done. But all of this will move the needle. The thing that I get asked a lot is how's this going to affect defense? What is it going to do to defense spending? Well, I'm going to tell you that whatever the President sends over in the budget this year is what is going to be approved. And most likely because of the fiscal pressure that the President's up against, it's probably going to be pretty flat with a bump for inflation. What we might be able to see is perhaps there'll be an additional amount of money that gets done in budget reconciliation. So something outside of the budget that goes to defense.

Paul Archangeli [00:12:08]:
But the Congress won't add more money and embarrass the President and they won't undercut the President. So whatever the President sends over, the best opportunity for a higher defense budget was split government. We didn't get that. So we're just going to probably be flat. The thing to watch, as everybody knows, is that the House of Representatives right now as a 2:20 to 2:15. But actually, once you take out the three members who are going to the, to the President's Cabinet, you're going to end up with 217 to 215, which means they can lose one on any vote. And if you were paying attention this last year, they lost one or two or three or four all the time. So it's going to be a difficult time for them to move legislation.

Paul Archangeli [00:12:51]:
It's going to be a difficult time for them to approve some of these potentially disruptive things that are coming. So it's going to be exciting to watch, but there will be a lot of momentum to do things within the department.

Ken Miller [00:13:03]:
So. So in, in some previous episodes, for those of you who listen to the show regularly, we just released an episode talking about reform of the PPBE process and it's pro planning, programming, budget and execution process. I think I got that right. Yep. Okay. And so the general sense was change of administration. Some of these Reform efforts might not see the day of light from a legislative standpoint. What is the prospect? But yet, when you talk to anyone in the defense sector, whether it's military, DoD, civilian industry, we need to make major change in acquisition process in the way that we budget for defense, in the way that the speed that we get the capability into the field, so forth.

Ken Miller [00:13:47]:
What is the prospect for any sort of reform of these processes in the new Congress?

Paul Archangeli [00:13:52]:
So, so 18 years on Capitol Hill and I am a pessim, honest, right. And I'm rarely disappointed. I spent all those years and I watched budget reform, excuse me, acquisition reform more than a few times. And I, I want to say maybe seven or eight times I saw major attempts to do acquisition reform inside the department. And at every turn, there is certainly a lot of enthusiasm, there's a lot of desire. But as soon as you get down to trying to make those individual changes, that's where the fighting begins and then actually an execution, the bureaucracy fights you and doesn't want to do those things. So I would say there will be an attempt to try and reform acquisition. There will be an attempt to try and move forward.

Paul Archangeli [00:14:36]:
Certainly if you look at some of the statements of the, of the folks that are working, potentially will be working in the department or working in the administration, they want to, they want to bring AI in, they want to bring in automation. They want to try and streamline things whether they're successful. I think the culture is going to be hard. I think the Congress is going to be hard to, to approve those things.

Ken Miller [00:15:01]:
And Fisch, last but certainly not least, and I have to apologize, I did not introduce our special guest to your left, Zoe.

Jeffrey Fisher [00:15:10]:
This is Zoe.

Ken Miller [00:15:11]:
I'm glad that she could join us. And I, I and if you have any questions for Zoe, she's fair game. Anyone on the stage is fair game.

Jeffrey Fisher [00:15:18]:
So she's a little scared.

Ken Miller [00:15:19]:
She's a little scared. She might not, she might, might not answer clearly, you might not get the answer you're looking for. Be happy to participate. So you are going to be briefing tomorrow. Great presentation on what's going on in Ukraine. And you've seen just almost revolutionary change and the capabilities that are brought to the field by both Ukraine and Russia, changing the way that we fight on a daily basis. You've been here this entire week as well, listening in as the AOC board.

Ken Miller [00:15:51]:
What message would you have based on your presentation tomorrow? I don't want to give anything away, but obviously what are your thoughts in terms of what will be, what should be your message? Or what do you want attendees to walk away with?

Jeffrey Fisher [00:16:06]:
It's a great question. And by the way, thanks for having me back. Me and Zoe, of course. Look, I, it's, I live in Austria, right. So I have a different perspective on the Ukraine where I have, I have different access to information. What's going on over there is, right?

Jeffrey Fisher [00:16:21]:
So the pace of technological innovation is not constant. It's always fluid and it changes. And I would say in the Ukraine war, because they're concerned about their existential existence, the pace is ridiculously fast. And not only is it fast, but you have a situation where both sides have chosen to fight a conventional war in what I would call a low end warfare. Right. A for. And I don't mean this pejoratively, but a ghetto war, if you will. Everything's commercial.

Jeffrey Fisher [00:16:53]:
Not everything, but the vast majority is commercial. Off the shelf. I'm going to build it in a garage. I'm going to, you know, so we're seeing a lot of, of that kind of stuff. And unfortunately, when you look at how fast technological innovation can happen in true wartime, juxtapose how not fast it happens over here on this side of the Atlantic Ocean, it grows to even more infuriating or disappointing. Look, I agree with Sherm. I think that the strategy that he crafted and helped build has some wonderful things. And if the world was at peace, the whole world, I think he'd go, oh, we're on track.

Jeffrey Fisher [00:17:40]:
We're, we're, we're moving. But, but we're not at peace, right?

Jeffrey Fisher [00:17:43]:
I mean, we had the four star earlier today tell us that he's never lived in a more complex and threatening time his entire life. So where I would push back with Sherm is like, okay, well, we're, we're not at be sure. So we, we need that thing to move a little faster.

Ken Miller [00:17:58]:
Yeah, yeah. Did you want to.

Scott "Sherm" Oliver [00:18:00]:
Yeah, I wanted to say something. You know, your comments about speed, it's all like, speed matters, right?

Jeffrey Fisher [00:18:07]:
Yeah.

Scott "Sherm" Oliver [00:18:08]:
And so I was wondering, they don't. The Ukrainians, both sides, Ukraine and Russia don't have the time to create new doctrine for all these new capabilities. They don't have time to do the proper training that they deem to do. So I don't know, like, do we put too much emphasis on dot, mill, pfp, or can we do better without so much emphasis?

Jeffrey Fisher [00:18:36]:
Are you asking me?

Paul Archangeli [00:18:37]:
Yeah.

Ken Miller [00:18:38]:
Okay.

Misc [00:18:38]:
I thought this was 1v3, not 2v2. I couldn't do I get to keep. Him on my investment conversation.

Ken Miller [00:18:43]:
But I mean, I think it's it's a good point because, you know, with each of your answers, you highlight both opportunities, but also problems or concerns or challenges. And we see what's happening over there in Ukraine. And then you look back here and like, we don't. You, you say, they don't have time to do that, do we? When you look at the global security threat environment, do we have time to make the changes that we need to?

Scott "Sherm" Oliver [00:19:12]:
That's the thing is time is depending on your position in, in the world, right? And so there are people at this conference that don't have as much time as other people at this conference. So I think it's a very good thing to consider.

Jeffrey Fisher [00:19:28]:
And so I, I, it's a, it's a valid question. But I would tell you that I think that as much as they duct tape things together in the material world, they will also duct tape things together in that organizational doctrine orange. And I'll give you an example, right? Both sides now are using fiber optic controlled drones. Okay? So the fiber optic cable's about a thousand bucks, the drones about a thousand bucks. And the bomb that they're delivering, the warhead that they're planting on is about a thousand bucks. So 3,000 bucks for this thing, right? And you're like, okay, that's kind of. And they're building them in garages and they're building them rapidly. And, and so there, there's production for $3,000.

Jeffrey Fisher [00:20:04]:
They can build these things. Okay, where would I need to get doctrine, organization and training stuff for that? Well, guess what? The United States army has a very similar thing called a TOW missile, right. That does the exact same thing. It's on a fiber optic cable. It flies out and it blows something up. Ironically, that one costs $50,000, right? So you've got a, now a quadcopter that can fly around, go forward and back versus at only 3,000, versus a TOW missile that only goes forward. It goes very, very fast and it very, very lethal. Don't get me wrong.

Jeffrey Fisher [00:20:35]:
But you know, the, the organization, the, the, the R D, the development, the material, the cost, all that goes into this conga line of thing that our government has, has mandated on the mill doctrine complex. Takes a long time. It's very expensive. So I would, if I was them, I would just duct tape the doctrine and the organization for the toad that the, that the army would use for TOW missiles into what I'm doing.

Ken Miller [00:21:02]:
So thank you. And I want to. One of the, the main reason for, you know, doing the show live here is to obviously hear from the audience as well. So I do want to open it up for questions. And a very important element to this question is we are, we have podcast T shirts that are going to go on sale tomorrow, but if you ask a question, we have them free here today. So do we have any questions? If you have a question, please line up behind the mic and we'll, we'll get to as many questions as we can. And if you want a T shirt, come up with a question. And it doesn't have to be technical.

Ken Miller [00:21:38]:
It can be in any realm because we are. Everybody on stage here has a broad background covering not just dw, but just generally Congress, industry, academia, so forth. So feel free to open up and, and we'll start. And I'll start over here with John Knowles here from.

John Knowles [00:21:56]:
You're not supposed to know the name.

John Knowles [00:21:57]:
I couldn't edit it out. I know, but sorry. So, thanks for having me today. John Knowles from Red. Thanks for the introduction, Ken, but my question is, is broad. It's sort of a king for a day question, so. Or king for a year, whatever you want. But if you could pull three threads or whatever anywhere to accelerate the pace of MSO development and, or just, just fix things faster that we need, what would those three be?

Paul Archangeli [00:22:28]:
That's.

Ken Miller [00:22:28]:
That's a question for each of you. Well, I, I'm the host. I'm going to start here with Sheryl.

Scott "Sherm" Oliver [00:22:35]:
I already got a sneak peek into the question. So I've been thinking about this and, and actually our conversation is very relative to the answer because there's a lot of elements that need to be considered. And so do we have the time to, to, you know, is my answer relative to our position or whose position? You know, that's what I'm kind of wrestling with. So from the US Perspective, I think that the three things I think that we need to focus on are training and education, leadership and organization. And I say training and education, which is kind of unpopular for some, you know, the J7s and the N7s of the world, they don't get enough attention. It's often an afterthought. But if you don't have understanding, how can you fix anything? So I think that training and education is really important. But then I also think to myself about what we saw with the United States Marine Corps when they got rid of the EA6B prowler and did not replace it with any airborne, airborne electromagnetic attack platform.

Scott "Sherm" Oliver [00:23:46]:
They lost the material capability to, to, to deliver that capability. And so along with it went a host of People that were trained and educated and had understanding, and we. And along with that, then we lost the leadership and the organizations. And that's just one example. So it's really complex. And I think that the. So my answer is that understanding is paramount because if you don't understand, then you can't fix any of this.

Ken Miller [00:24:18]:
Do either of you have any additional threads you want to share or.

Paul Archangeli [00:24:26]:
From the congressional perspective, the answer is throw more money at it.

Ken Miller [00:24:30]:
Yeah. Okay, so let me pose a question to you, kind of following up on that thread. We can throw more money at it, but how do we know the money's going to ew?

Paul Archangeli [00:24:41]:
Well, that's, you know, that's it. Right? The Congress doesn't like to put money against things in a slush fund. Like, that's a dirty word. So they'll want to. They'll have some, some plan. But how do you make certain it goes to where you really want it to go? And that, and that's the biggest problem. Directing the money and directing it in a way that arrives at a capability that you're trying to reach. One of the biggest problems that I think we have is that technology is moving so fast that we cannot imagine what we cannot imagine.

Paul Archangeli [00:25:14]:
So inside the warfighters and inside the dotML PF, we're not really thinking about what is. We're trying to articulate our requirements, but we're not really saying, what do we really need? What capability are we trying to reach? We're. We see what we see, and we try and fit it into the, the hole that we, we. Rather than going to industry and saying, here's a problem I need to solve, solve this problem. And then Congress gets behind that with money to get.

Ken Miller [00:25:42]:
And, and, and, you know, we, we work closely in with the congressional EW Working Group on Capitol Hill. It's led by Rick Larson and, and Congressman Don Bacon. And one of the things that I know Rick Larson, Congressman Rick Larson has said numerous times over the years is we need almost a Rosetta Stone to kind of figure out where that money is, an ew. Because when we talk about, hey, we need to invest in this capability, then you get the budget and you're like, where is it?

Paul Archangeli [00:26:10]:
Where it's buried? It's lost. I mean, it's lost and it's spread across a bunch of lines, and it's hard to find, it's hard to, to track down. The problem is if you push it all in one place, it's easier to steal.

Scott "Sherm" Oliver [00:26:19]:
So, so there's a, there's an important aspect of this. And, and this is the industry, industry side. You know, my boss reminds me that, you know, there's three elements we're trying to control. Time, quality and performance. You can't have all three. And so we can throw money at the problem. And so you're going to get something very quickly and you can get high quality, but it might or it might not be the performance that you're looking for. And so it's a trade off.

Scott "Sherm" Oliver [00:26:52]:
And so it's a very complex problem.

Paul Archangeli [00:26:55]:
Yeah.

Jeffrey Fisher [00:26:57]:
Can I jump in real fast? So look, I, I won't even give you three. I'll give you one. It needs to be the EMS is domain and needs to be recognized as a domain.

Ken Miller [00:27:09]:
Right.

Jeffrey Fisher [00:27:09]:
We heard a four star say for the first one of the first few times this morning, and the reason I say that is, yes, money gets lost. But, but how many times do you see a service chief, air Army, Air Force or Navy going in front of Congress to testify and they go, where's the EMS money? I mean, they can answer where the ships are, they can answer where the airplanes are, they can answer where the, you know, the land forces are, but they, they're never going to be asked. So, so who's the four star that has to sit in front of Congress and answer for where's the ems? The EMS domain money for mso, it doesn't, it doesn't exist. So it does get buried. Right. And, and you know, I grow more pessimistic as I get older, just like everybody else and I got my gray hair. But I honestly believe every time I see, see one of the services say we're going to do something more for ew. The only reason they're saying they're doing more and yes, I'm dogging out the services right now.

Jeffrey Fisher [00:28:05]:
I get that is because they want to save their goose that laid the golden egg. They want to say save air, they want to save land. They want to say, and they know they got to give something because they need the spectrum. Right. They need it for their operations. But no one's got the gravitas to say it needs, it needs to be a domain and someone needs to answer for what's going on in the spectrum and needs to answer for the money that's going there.

Ken Miller [00:28:32]:
Over here.

Ken Miller [00:28:33]:
All right.

Paul Archangeli [00:28:34]:
Hello.

Zoe [00:28:34]:
How is everybody doing today? Good, good. So the big question is, do you have an extra large?

Ken Miller [00:28:38]:
We do.

Jeffrey Fisher [00:28:39]:
That's a joke. Yes, yes.

Ken Miller [00:28:41]:
We also have small. And don't ask about the media small.

Audience questioner [00:28:45]:
So my question, my question for you Guys, is, you know, being the Doge. The Doge is, is, is believes in decentralization, you know, and for a very long time centralized armies have been the way for the military, for the traditional state. But seeing the Ukraine conflict and everything, how, you know, with the drones and everything, how people can just put it together in a garage and such. Do you think the Way Forward is more a decentralized military perhaps? I mean, for, for, for my self, you know, I run a decentralized space force. So we actually have a group of crypto guys, it's a dao, which is a decentralized autonomous organization. And we're trying to bring in people with bright minds to build our own satellite technologies, our own comms, our own everything. Do you think that's more the Way forward being that like Elon Musk is leading the way in commercial, private commercialization of space, whereas instead of traditionally relying on big government fat to bring it more to the commercial space individuals.

Ken Miller [00:29:53]:
Jeff, I'll hand that over.

Jeffrey Fisher [00:29:55]:
Extremely relevant question.

Ken Miller [00:29:57]:
Right.

Jeffrey Fisher [00:29:57]:
And thanks for it and hopefully you get your shirt. But you're right, right. And I would tell you it's a little bit, it's even more complex than that. Right. It's harder than that because the west and the east in great power competition have both planned, should they ever go to war, that this is going to be a high end conventional war. So we've dedicated massive amounts of our defense budgets to low observables, to all this high tech, high strength, high power, expensive war fighting capability. But then you look at Ukraine and you're right, everything's this low end, built in a garage, decentralized. This guy knows a little bit about drones, this guy knows a little bit about ems.

Jeffrey Fisher [00:30:48]:
This guy knows a little bit about bombs. We're going to put them together in garage on, you know, 7th street and we're going to come up with something pretty cool and we're going to mass produce it. The cat's out of the bag and I hope, I hope people realize that. Right. One of the, one of the conclusions I'll give you a little like lead into my briefing tomorrow is that the last two decades, this shock and awe concept of how high end war happened is done. Ukraine and Russia have changed that. And I'm not saying that the next war is going to be Russia, Ukraine, but what it is going to be is it's going to be both high end and low end. And, and where you're going to the, the next, the next war, the winner of the next war is going to be able to fight effectively a combined arms asymmetric war.

Jeffrey Fisher [00:31:36]:
So instead of going after an S400 with an F35 or whatever, I'm going to get a 300 quadcopter with a bomb and slowly fly it at 20 knots all the way in and drop it and destroy a hundred million dollar air defense system. And you have to be prepared for that. Right. So you're going to have to fight both a high end and low end war at the same time. And people like you and what you're doing are going to be relevant. So thanks for the question over here.

Jeffrey Fisher [00:32:03]:
Yeah, so thought I'd just.

Scott "Sherm" Oliver [00:32:05]:
Sorry.

Jeffrey Fisher [00:32:06]:
Change it up a little bit. So one of the things that leads into the conflicts Fish that you're talking about, so there's rules of engagement, there's indications and warnings, there's like direct attack. So if we're talking about the future and the influence of Spectrum in those conflicts, I expect a lot of that to happen in the spectrum beforehand. So what are we doing to actually identify those precursors so we can engage earlier? Because right now we're generally taking a, we're taking a hit in the gut before we actually do anything. It'd be nice to figure out how to actually get ahead of that, identify when those actions are happening and be able to respond quickly and effectively.

Ken Miller [00:32:47]:
Who wants to Sherm, do you want to take a stab at that as a former operator?

Scott "Sherm" Oliver [00:32:55]:
Well, are you saying that we need to be able to better predict what's going to happen before it happens so that we can operate better? Is that what you're.

Jeffrey Fisher [00:33:06]:
I think full life cycle. So predict, assess, you know, predict, observe, assess and respond. So the predicting is a piece of it.

Ken Miller [00:33:15]:
But yeah.

Scott "Sherm" Oliver [00:33:16]:
So these two questions are kind of related because I fully believe in centralized planning, decentralized execution and you have to give, communicate the commander's intent to the entire force and empower them to be innovative. I think that's another thing that Fish is kind of talking about. So we can't predict everything that's going to happen. But if the warfighter at the tactical edge understands what the commander's intent is, they can be creative and think outside the box because they know they can achieve their commander's objectives in a novel way that was never thought of before. So I, I don't believe that we can predict everything that will ever happen, but we can empower people to make decisions.

Ken Miller [00:34:03]:
Does anyone else have anything they want to contribute to that?

Jeffrey Fisher [00:34:06]:
To be fair, I, I don't know the answer and I, I'll I'm not trying to scare people here, but imagine if 90% of the drones that are being flown in asymmetrical war, commercial off the shelf. That means that commercial off the shelf for the US Government, allowing those companies to sell them here, say that they have to operate on given FCC approved frequencies to operate on. Right. So now if you want to take away the asymmetrical fight, no one to fly drones in the United States because you're fearful that these drones are going to go do things against your strategic assets that cost you hundreds of millions of dollars. How do you take that away from the adversary but still allow it for the American public to use because it's an open frequency that's been promised by the government to use it.

Ken Miller [00:34:58]:
Paul, did you say having some.

Paul Archangeli [00:35:00]:
The only thing I was going to say is, you know, I deal with a whole lot of high tech companies and a lot of autonomy and a lot of AI and the convergence of this is we're going to see, we're going to see not just distributed decision making, we're going to see distributed decision making by the, by the machine. And that is where the future is going to take us, where it's going to be low cost and it's going to be making decisions at the edge and there's going to be a lot of them.

Ken Miller [00:35:32]:
Please feel free to come to the mic if you have a question. We have a few more minutes left so we do have time if you have another, if you have a follow up question or anything. But just so one other piece that we really haven't touched on and we kind of danced around it when we talk about Ukraine, but is of course AOC is an international organization, a lot of global partners. So I want to talk a little bit about NATO and because that's going to be a topic that is frequently arises next year, I'm sure. But we have, we, we hear from NATO tomorrow morning with Major General Elizabeth Michelson coming here. Obviously our, our, our participation and, and the growth of NATO and the, and the activities of NATO very important to global security. So I wanted to get your thoughts on how from an international perspective and also you know, with within Congress, I mean they have parliamentary assemblies and everything. Talk a little bit about the importance of coalition partners, alliances and, and specifically NATO to, when we, when we focus on making sure that we can have superiority in the spectrum during, during the fight.

Ken Miller [00:36:42]:
And I'll start with, let's see, I'll start with Sherm, you're close. I'm sorry but do you Want to pass the buck?

Jeffrey Fisher [00:36:49]:
Yeah, I wanted to picked a bad seat, buddy.

Ken Miller [00:36:52]:
I'll let you, I didn't tell you where to sit. I just, you know, so feel free to jump in.

Jeffrey Fisher [00:36:57]:
I, sure I'll give, I'll give Sherm some time to, to chew on that and figure, figure out how he wants to answer. So live in Austria. A lot of people know that I, I, I, you know that Europe is my home, right? For even though I'm American. And I'll tell you that I, I think I, on X Spaces I do a podcast every Wednesday called the Dish with Fish. Just yesterday I did one and it was with Mike Ryan, who's a huge advocate for the U.S. nATO relation, that, that the transatlantic relationship is perhaps one of the most strategic relationships that exists in the world. That, that the United States and Europe account for half of all the GDP in the world. Like this is really, you know, we, we would be foolish to, to kind of walk away from this.

Jeffrey Fisher [00:37:44]:
And, and I, you know, I see, I see bits and pieces that may be optic make me optimistic that, that things move forward in the EW world. Right? In FMS case was just approved for Italy to buy Compass Call. Right up until this point, the only airborne communications electronic attack platform of that caliber was stationed in Tucson, Arizona. I used to fly it, right. So if there was ever a war and we needed airborne electronic attack, it was either coming on a US Q113 out of Whidbey island or it was going to come out of, out of Davis Monthan. So when Americans, perhaps rightly so, would say things like why is it always America? Why is it always America? Why are they the ones always in the fight? Well, you know what? You can't have your cake and eat it too. If you want other nations to step up, you have to give them items and assets to be able to use. And now we've got, or we will have Italy, who can be that entity that goes forward and says, hey, we're going to take this mission for, for this contingency or this war where they're going to stand up and do things and think that's, that's a very interesting aspect of burden sharing.

Ken Miller [00:39:00]:
Paul, I'm going to turn to you. I'll take the political middle class here.

Paul Archangeli [00:39:04]:
So it's no secret that the incoming President Trump has said that he wants to pull out of NATO. It's not something that he said it more than once and he said it recently. I will say that the Congress has other thoughts. I was just at the Reagan National Defense forum on Friday, Senator McConnell stood up and, and talked about how we need to continue to support Ukraine, how we need to continue to support NATO, all the members that were there, 30 members of Congress that were absolutely full throated in their support of NATO and Ukraine. So I think this is where you might see a divergence between the legislature and the executive branch. But it is clear, looking backwards, that NATO serves a very important purpose. And the war in Ukraine has driven our NATO partners to make greater investment, significant investment into their militaries. And we were part of that.

Paul Archangeli [00:40:04]:
We urged them along, and I think we need to continue to urge them along. And I think that it will be very difficult to extract ourselves should we decide to do that.

Ken Miller [00:40:12]:
Sherm?

Scott "Sherm" Oliver [00:40:13]:
Yeah, so we've been talking a lot about Europe and NATO and I just have to say that from the Indo Pacific perspective, this topic of partnerships and alliances is very different because in Europe we have the European Union, we have NATO, all this. And so I think it's extremely complicated in the Indo Pacific trying to forge these relationships for these nations to work together for a common cause. And so that's something that I would suggest that we should focus on, is working closer together with those Asian nations. And that's an area we could really make a big difference.

Ken Miller [00:40:55]:
Yeah, well, I, I promise, I promise I would keep us on time. And so since I don't see any more questions that will conclude this episode. Oh, one more question. We will always make room for one more.

Scott "Sherm" Oliver [00:41:06]:
Yeah, no problem.

Paul Archangeli [00:41:08]:
All right, so in, in light of.

Ken Miller [00:41:09]:
Recent events where we have hundreds of drones flying around cities, not only in.

Jeffrey Fisher [00:41:14]:
The United States, in multiple different cities.

Scott "Sherm" Oliver [00:41:17]:
Around the globe, do you guys see that as not only a national security threat or a global security threat? And how do you combat that? Well, it's 100% a threat. It's concerning, I would say. Right. And what do we do about it? I don't know. Maybe I guess I should go back to the education and training part because actually my mom texted me and asked me if we were going to be talking about counter UAs at this conference. And I think it's, we're kind of talking at a bigger scale at a, you know, it's, we're not talking about tactical problems too much. It's more strategic, operational. But if there, we need to understand that, you know, it's not, there's not always a kinetic solution to every problem.

Scott "Sherm" Oliver [00:42:06]:
And so if more people understood how we could have non kinetic options, that one of my favorite phrases is, you know, it's easier to control the escalation ladder with non kinetic once you fire a bullet you can't do take it back. And so I think there should be a heavy concentration on non kinetic effects to safeguard the homeland and protect our operations worldwide.

Ken Miller [00:42:30]:
And does anyone have anything else? We have one. We talked about one more question.

Jeffrey Fisher [00:42:34]:
It was a good answer.

Ken Miller [00:42:34]:
It's got answer one more question. Here we go.

Audience questioner #2 [00:42:36]:
Yeah, just so maybe this will be a good closing. I don't know. I'm hoping so. We'll make it a good closing. It's no surprise. I mean the admirals and generals over the last few years have been quoting, you know, in the near future we have to worry about Taiwan, right?

Audience questioner #2 [00:42:50]:
China, Taiwan on and they've actually put dates on that sometime within the next five to 10 years depending on how you look at it. So knowing the speed of our ability to improve things in our military upgrades for each of the panel. If you had one thing to invest in to try and get better within this next time frame of five to 10 years, what would that one thing be? To maximize our ability to have influence in that region.

Jeffrey Fisher [00:43:20]:
I'll go to your.

Paul Archangeli [00:43:21]:
The answer is not the one for this conference but it is biotechnology that we are in the age of biotechnology. AI is changing everything with regard to biology and it is going to be the next hundred years going to be aged biotechnology and the Chinese have spent 20 years investing $100 billion into this and we are not keeping up.

Jeffrey Fisher [00:43:44]:
If it's up to me, I'm going to invest in how we reduce governmental oversight on bringing weapons to the war fighter faster. So I we put enough money towards the weapons. Where we need to get is get rid of the get, get rid of the architectures and the structures that actually mandate and oh and oversee it. And I'll tell you another one that's going to be crazy is it is a luxury to think about the ethics of artificial intelligence in war. When you are in peacetime that is a luxury. If you are not in peacetime and you are at war, your ethical concerns on how AI is employed in war kind of go out the window. So that's another one.

Scott "Sherm" Oliver [00:44:29]:
My answer is data. We're living in a ever more increasingly data world. Data drives everything. Data is driving breakthroughs in biotechnology. And data is to me is the secret to, to the success and in the electric there's, there's no larger data set than the electromagnetic spectrum. It is world, it's global, it's universal. You can't turn it off. It's a, you know an enormous data set.

Scott "Sherm" Oliver [00:45:00]:
And I believe it's the, it's the, it's the next frontier underscore. We're, we're making breakthroughs in biotechnology where we haven't made the breakthroughs in the electromagnetic spectrum yet. We're. So that's that it's all about the data.

Ken Miller [00:45:15]:
Well, that is all the time that we do have for today's episode of from the Crow's Nest. If you did not get to ask a question, I do apologize. But we do have a limited time. However, I think we have enough T shirts for everybody here. So if you do want a T shirt and you didn't get to ask a question or whatever, feel free to see Heather right down here. We will be handing them out for you to anybody here. But I do appreciate everyone taking a chance, taking some time to come join us and if you have any follow up just we'll be, all of us will, well except for Paul. But we'll all be here this week kind of milling around.

Ken Miller [00:45:47]:
So feel free to come up to talk with us. But I do appreciate you taking time to join us here and I want to thank my guests also for taking time out to join it here.

Paul Archangeli [00:45:55]:
Thank you, Ken.

Ken Miller [00:45:56]:
Thanks a lot with that. That concludes this episode of from the Crow's Nest and when the episode is released, please review, share and subscribe to the podcast. If you are an AOC member, please take the opportunity to participate in our virtual studio audience on every other Tuesday begin. It'll continue in January. You'll get notices as an AOC member. If you're not an AOC member, it's you can subscribe through the podcast at for 2.99amonth and you can will have a similar forum. You can come and ask your question during the recording of the episode and participate in the conversation. So with that, thanks for listening.

Ken Miller [00:46:35]:
That will conclude this episode of from the Crow's Nest. Don't forget to review, share and subscribe to this podcast. We always enjoy hearing from our listeners. You can also email me@hostromthecrow's nest.org that's it for today. Thanks for listening.