From the Crows' Nest

Ken Miller (00:09):
Welcome to From the Crow's Nest, a podcast on Electro Magnetic Spectrum Operations, or MSO. I'm your host, Ken Miller, Director of Advocacy and Outreach for the Association of Old Crows. Thanks for listening. To begin, I'd like to thank our episode sponsor, Pacific Defense. Pacific Defense rapidly delivers military electromagnetic spectrum technology solutions to the Department of Defense, the intelligence community, and their industry partners. Learn more at pacific-defense.com. Today, we're at an event for the local chapter of the Defense Entrepreneurs Forum with a panel discussion on the role of EMS superiority and innovation. Let's listen in.
Dan (00:47):
Welcome to the inaugural Event at the Association of Old Crow's new facility. Thank you so much for hosting the DEF DC Agora this evening. For those of you who are not familiar with DEF, we are the Defense Entrepreneurs Forum, and our mission is to inspire, connect and empower people across the defense community to do great work for our nation. Sometimes that's things from helping to feed us with a startup farm out in Tyson's corner. Sometimes that might be doing great things on a very technical national security front, but we have a diverse group of people here today, and we know that we can't solve all these problems single-handedly. None of us can. It takes a large group of individuals with plethora of ideas.
Dan (01:32):
Sometimes we can agree to disagree, and sometimes we're going to disagree to disagree, but either way, we're going to make it through it. We're going to have a good conversation this evening about the electromagnetic spectrum. It is a very important domain for all of our war fighting activities. I'm really honored that the Association of Old Crows hosted us here in their facilities tonight. This idea was born from Scott Oliver here, AKA Sherm, from the RVG Institute. I want to thank our sponsors Pacific Defense, as well as Cyber Safari for providing the food, beverages, the podcast recording, everything that's going on here this evening.
Dan (02:12):
Vox [Topic 00:02:13] who's in the back giving me the thumbs up saying, yes, if we can get a plug, too, that's awesome, because they do great production work out there and their podcasts get turned around in record time. Really appreciate the work you guys are doing. This evening we have up here on stage Courtney Barno. She's the co-director of our DC Agora. She's very intelligent and asks way harder hitting questions than I do. As well as Scott Oliver, Ken Miller from AOC, and Pat Flood representing national security, policy advice, and many, many other things as well. I'll let them all give introductions of themselves and further details. Without further ado, I'm going to get off the stage.
Courtney Barno (02:49):
Thank you, Dan. I'm not going to do introductions because this is certainly not about me this evening. I'd love to turn it over to Scott Sherm next to me, and have him do a quick introduction. Then we can just go down the line here and do Ken and Pat after you, if that's okay.
Scott Oliver (03:02):
Yeah, sounds good. Well, this is really fun. This was an idea that we had to do this, Dan and I, and there's a lot of good friends that are in the room here today. I know it's going to go coast to coast because we're going to put this on two different websites, and host it on the DEF website and also on the AOC website. I was just actually having a conversation about the importance of awareness. We're going to talk about something that's invisible. You can't see it, you can't touch it, you can't smell it, but it's everywhere we go.
Scott Oliver (03:28):
All of our war fighting operations, all of our technology that we have today, that's wireless, GPS to your cell phones, to your Wi-Fi, to the F-18 that we're flying with the radar and the comm suite, essentially everybody except for rucksacks and bayonets. They don't depend on the electromagnetic spectrum, but almost everything else does. It's really, really challenging because it's invisible, and it's really important that you bring awareness to this issue. A little bit about myself, I just retired from 22 years of active service in the Navy. I flew the EA-18 G Growler.
Scott Oliver (04:03):
I also most recently stood up the Secretary of Defense's electromagnetic spectrum operations cross-functional team. We started that back in April of 2019, and we published a strategy that was tasked by Congress, that we update the strategy. Most recently, the team is in the final stages of an implementation plan for that strategy. That is a really big deal because we've had a lot of good strategies in the past, but it's finally going to be implemented. They just met with the Secretary of Defense, Mr. Austin, and we expect that signature very soon. The thesis for this discussion is that it's going to take a holistic approach to solve this problem.
Scott Oliver (04:43):
It can't be done by industry. It can't be done by the government or the military. It can't be done by academia. It has to be a holistic approach, a united approach between government, academia, and industry, to solve this problem. What is the problem exactly? The problem is that nearly every single one of our capabilities depends on the electromagnetic spectrum and those dependencies are at risk. We have to take steps to make sure that our joint force is prepared to operate in a contested, congested and constrained electromagnetic environment. That's why it's so important to bring them awareness to this.
Scott Oliver (05:22):
In my day job, I work for Expression Networks. It's a full-stack software development firm. They're headquartered here in DC. We do EMS situational awareness type software, among other things, but in my volunteer time, I'm helping start up a not-for-profit 501(c) (3) institute, an academic Institute focused on the electromagnetic spectrum, and operations in the electromagnetic spectrum. The problem we're trying to solve is, today, there's a lot of really wonderful places you can turn if you want to get research and analysis, and they're very commonly sought after. There's fantastic FFRDC's. There's think tanks.
Scott Oliver (06:02):
It's actually quite a big industry here in Washington DC, but there is no place that you can turn for expertise in the electromagnetic spectrum, but yet all of our capabilities depend on it. It's very inefficient, the current state of affairs, because you go to one of these fine institutions and you ask them a very challenging question that's going to take research and analysis, and the first thing they have to do is they have to figure out who the experts are. That usually takes a few months to identify all the right experts to come together. Then the next thing they have to do is they have to find out what the state of the art is. What is the latest research that's been done on this topic? That's just wasting a lot of time.
Scott Oliver (06:42):
Then by the time they start to do analysis and research, and to produce material to inform the decision that material is delivered to the customer, a decision is made, and oftentimes, that report is put into a filing cabinet and it's not part of our institutional knowledge. That's what this Institute is trying to do. It's the Reginald Victor Jones Institute. We're standing up an Institute to be the go-to authority to ask hard questions and to consolidate research, and to have a cadre of experts on hand that can answer tough questions at a moment's notice. I've been talking well now, but a good example I like to use is, there's been some recent directed energy here in Washington DC.
Scott Oliver (07:23):
I'm not sure if anybody's paying attention to that. Probably should be, right? But there's something going on near Pennsylvania Avenue. It's been talked about in the news. We need experts to be able to weigh in on this, and provide expert opinion and analysis to this pretty big happen here in our hometown. Just a couple of weeks ago, just an example, I was speaking to the one of the world renowned experts on directed energy, and he's very excited and he wants to be a part of the Institute. That's where we're headed is we want to have these experts on hand to answer hard questions, and we want to consolidate research in order to advance the art and science of electromagnetic spectrum operations. It's exciting.
Scott Oliver (08:03):
I put a couple of plugs in because we are looking for funding. It's actually being funded out of the generosity of Stephen and Melinda Tourangeau. We have things we want to do, and it's not possible without some sponsorship and a corporate investment. After serving in the military, I know nothing about fundraising, but I'm beginning to learn a lot about it. Please tell your friends, your family members. If anybody is independently wealthy, I'd like to talk to you afterwards. Anyways, that's what I'm up to. I think this is an interesting panel because when I think about Defense Entrepreneurs Forum, we immediately think about industry. What is industry doing?
Scott Oliver (08:39):
The Association of Old Crows is the industry association. Ken Miller is a good friend of mine. We've known each other for years. One of the questions I wanted to ask Ken was, what are those barriers to innovation for young startups? There's one here in the right now. Cyber Safari is a young startup that's trying to get in on this and it's challenging. My heart goes out to young startups who are trying to get started in this realm because it's complicated. I thought that that's something that Ken could bring from the Association of Old Crows, so there's Ken.
Ken Miller (09:10):
Well, thank you. It's great to be here. I want to welcome everyone to the Association of Old Crows new office building here. It is our inaugural event, so it's great to have everyone out here. As Sherm said, I'm the Director of Advocacy and Outreach for the Association Crows, and for those of you who aren't familiar with our association, we're a global association of professionals engaged in advancing electromagnetic spectrum operations. We represent industry, we represent the war fighter, both here in the U.S. and around the world. We have chapters all over the globe. Our events and our activities are all geared to raising that awareness.
Ken Miller (09:44):
My job is to basically, from the staff side, be the primary interface with all of our stakeholders. One of the things that I do, and I just recently started a few months ago, we started two new podcasts, one called From the Crow's Nest, which really deals with hot issues of the day, where we talk to experts and start to deep dive into some of this discussion. Then the other one, if you're interested in electronic warfare, we have A History of Crows, and we are tracing the history going all the way back to the early thinkers of electromagnetic energy, and the next episode is going to be on radar.
Ken Miller (10:15):
We're going to start tracing that history all the way up through to current. We talk with experts in and so forth, and bring them in to interview for that. With those podcasts, over the last few months I've had a great opportunity to engage a lot of leaders and talk about some of the key issues that are facing industry, facing military in terms of barriers for startups. I had the privilege of interviewing Michael Madrid for one of our podcasts episodes a few weeks ago. If you're looking for a good podcast, please download that episode. We touch on a lot of those issues, of some of the challenges facing these startups.
Ken Miller (10:47):
In thinking about what I wanted to share today, I could go on and on with a number of different things, but I had basically four issues, and I'm just going to really quickly highlight them, and then if they're of interest to you ask questions and we can talk more about it. The first one is from a market perspective, there is tremendous structural change happening in the market right now. When you look back 20 years ago, you basically had this vertical and horizontal arrangement of the market, from your prime integrators to your system houses, subsystems, components. Cross horizontally, you had your EW market, you had your SIGINT market, you had your radar market and so forth.
Ken Miller (11:24):
Sometimes it was a little bit hard to always define those markets exactly, but we had an idea. If you looked at the market for the EW market, you'd get estimates around 18 billion globally. Sometimes it went up to 30, just depending on how you move those lines a little. Recently though, as technology is rapidly advancing, as Trump says, touching everything we do, it's changing industry dramatically day in and day out. What we're seeing now is those market stovepipes coming together, and a lot of that's under this idea of multifunction systems. With these multi-functioning systems, no longer do you have an EW box.
Ken Miller (12:02):
That EW box, it's now just a box that does what you need it to do when you need it to do it. A key part of that is going into open systems architecture and standards. You have multi-function blending these markets together, and then from really the bottom up, you're getting a lot more influence and a lot more shaping of the market from component manufacturer subsystems on that upward pressure. You're getting a much more blurred vision of, from our perspective, would be the EW market, which is basically going away. You just have an electromagnetic spectrum operations. I don't know what we call the market.
Ken Miller (12:37):
Maybe it's defense electronics, which is a little bit broader. We're still, as an association, started trying to figure this out. What is our market? Because it's changing so dramatically. How does industry respond to that? We can talk a little bit more specifics. I mentioned the role of open systems architecture. I just recorded a podcast episode yesterday on that topic. That'll be coming out in a few weeks. There's two issues. There's a sensor open systems architecture consortium that's coming out with hardware standards for DOD 1.0 in a few weeks.
Ken Miller (13:08):
There's also software standards across the services. You have service standards, you have DOD standards. How are these standards going to fit together? Then a key thing for industry is how do they conform to those standards? It's great to say, we're going to have one standard, but industry has to build to that standard and they have to get certified to that standard, and they have to hold that certification to that standard as that technology develops. That's going to be a challenge for some companies, particularly when we look at the larger traditional systems houses on down to the small business.
Ken Miller (13:37):
How do they come together, whether it's through a consortium, whether it's through some other mechanism? How do they engage the market? How do they conform to the standards? How do they stay up to speed on what those standards are to the extent that they're evolving? Standards are great, but when you're facing a threat that's constantly changing, I can guarantee you standards are going to be constantly changing. If standards are changing, then are they standard? I think that this is going to be an issue that we're going to have to continue to work on a little bit more going forward.
Ken Miller (14:06):
You mentioned the importance of EMS and I'll pass to Pat in a second here, but I wanted to mention one thing about another topic that we've been covering is JADC2. Great vision from the DOD. For those of you who aren't familiar with Joint All Domain Command and Control vision for our forces, it's essentially a single network of sensors that across service, cross domain, cross mission, that can share information, that can gather, collect, distribute, manage, store, you name it. That 100% depends upon EMS superiority. If you do not have an advantage in the EMS when you need it, for the duration you need it, where you need it, you will fail in that mission. It is the backbone, full stop, and in my view.
Ken Miller (14:49):
It's going to be a real challenge, I think, for DOD. I don't necessarily, at this point, see quite the embrace of EMS superiority from the leadership. When the discussion shifts to JADC2, I'd like to see more of it. I think it's getting there, but I think that from an industry perspective, as well as Congress, we need to be talking about the role that EMS superiority plays in this, because if you look at other organizing constructs from DOD over the last 20, 30 years, they've all relied on the EMS, but they really have stopped short of placing the EMS at the center of why they need it to succeed. I think that that needs to happen here for JADC2. Hopefully that'll be another topic that comes up.
Ken Miller (15:33):
To pass the mic to Pat, what I will say is, on all these issues, Congress has a tremendously important role to play, from the accountability perspective, from the oversight perspective and from the funding perspective, because if you're talking about open systems architecture, if you're talking about entry for small businesses, you need incentives. That comes in the form of structural change through policy and legislation. That's part money that comes from Congress. They have a tremendous role to play. I will pass that to Pat and just say, hey, we need Congress to play an important role in this, because if Congress is silent, then I think a lot of these other things that need to happen will eventually be silenced.
Pat Flood (16:14):
Wow.
Ken Miller (16:15):
It has been [crosstalk 00:16:16]-
Pat Flood (16:16):
I don't know how to continue on and top of that. I think we're a wrap. I think that sounds pretty good. No, I just had seven points I wanted to bring up and put them in detail. No. Hi, everybody. I'm Pat. I want to thank everybody here, especially Ken and Sherm. Sharing the stage with these two gentlemen is quite an honor. We've been engaged in this struggle, I think this insurgency, this virtuous insurgency, I think to use the tagline from DEF, I think, for about, I don't know, three plus years working in our various silos, but trying to pursue a common goal. I started my career in the military, in the air force, served about 30 years.
Pat Flood (16:56):
Then when I retired, I got a phone call from another air force officer I served a long time with, who'd retired as a one-star, who had just recently been elected to Congress. This individual was a career electronic warfare officer, cared very much about where we were headed with respect to our dominance, our ability to dominate the spectrum. Was shortly named to the Armed Services Committee and I've been with him working his portfolio on defense for a long time, but a major emphasis area for us has been the EMS. It was very clear in his mind, and in mine, that work needed to be done on this, but in life, sometimes the most important things in the world are not in your inbox.
Pat Flood (17:35):
Nobody's telling you to do this. We recognized that it needed to be done and we were fortunate enough to seek out partners inside and outside of government cared in much the same way. It's often said that a fish can't see water. Think about that for a second. When you're immersed in the environment, you don't really necessarily take notice of it. You can't really define it. In a way, DOD is reliance on EMS is similar. Okay, so then the question is, what does it take for an organization to adapt itself? What capacity does an organization have to adapt itself when they're in it? A million things in the inbox that have to be dealt with every day.
Pat Flood (18:14):
I think over the last three decades, this particular part of this was not receiving the attention it needed to. Meanwhile, our dependency on it was growing exponentially, and our vulnerabilities were growing even more in a non-linear way. We set to work to help enable this transformation. I think we've had some success so far. There's a lot more to go, and can talk ad nauseum about the process and the politics, and what we can expect here moving forward. I think I'll save some of the details for later, but it's great to be here.
Ken Miller (18:47):
Could you talk a little bit about the EW working? Because I think that that's an important part of [crosstalk 00:18:52]...
Pat Flood (18:51):
Oh, sure. Just to set the stage, and this is something that Ken's been pretty close to for years. In fact, I think he actually started it, but what makes this topic so difficult from a public policy perspective, and certainly from a defense perspective on the committee... sorry... now, legislative branch jurisdictional oversight of the defense enterprise, it touches everything, which means everybody cares about it. Everybody, in a sense, is responsible for it, which is the kiss of death for anything useful coming out of that, because nobody's really in charge, right? On the committees in the Senate's... I work in the House.
Pat Flood (19:27):
The Senate is very structured and very much the same way jurisdictionally. This is slippery. It falls through the cracks a lot, just like it does in DOD in the Pentagon. What was recognized, that in order to keep the fires burning and to keep interest alive, there had to be a coalition of the willing organized, right? A few members and some staffers who actually cared and understood what was at stake here. An organization... you see this a lot. They're called congressional member organizations, also sometimes referred to as caucuses, but they're just collections of people who care about an issue, who want to try and band together to try to make progress.
Pat Flood (19:59):
There's a spectrum of them. Some are highly effective, very large, actually resourced pretty well. Others, they're in name only. A point of pride for the electromagnetic warfare working group is that it's not called a caucus. It's actually got a working group because the members actually take pride in delivering things, teeing language up for enactment into law when required, providing actual oversight. We try to stay within that lane. The four members currently, the four co-chairs, two Republicans, two Democrats, are my boss, Representative Don Bacon, joined on the Republican side by Representative Austin Scott of Georgia.
Pat Flood (20:32):
Then on the Democrat side, you have representative Jim Langevin of Rhode Island, and then Representative Rick Carson of Washington. I think the four have proven that they just care about this stuff, and so they keep coming back for more. The staffs that are part of this are pretty united, and are determined not to let the lights go out on this one, to keep driving it. The unfortunate part is that we learn and we have to keep driving it because just letting... nothing happens on its own. The bureaucratic inertia, not only in the DOD, but also in the House and the Senate will take over, so you've got to care. That's the history, and that EWWG is something that can help start [inaudible 00:21:07].
Courtney Barno (21:09):
I'll jump in and ask a question here. I think to bisect the conversation, if we are to maintain an advance or superiority in the electromagnetic spectrum, there's two elements that I've heard here that we need, right? We need a governance structure... everybody loves that word, right? That is effective and give someone, some entity ownership of this to advance it. We also need innovation. Innovation is critical to advancing any capability that we have.
Courtney Barno (21:34):
I guess to start with the innovation side, what are the appropriate steps to take, to ensure that industry is leading and driving innovation in this area? We have increased research and development budgets that are being proposed coming down the pipe, especially in non-defense agencies. Is there work that can be done there, and how do we engage industry on the defense side? Are you seeing the momentum you'd like to see? I think Pat, this is a great way to engage you from the Hill perspective, but also Sherm and Ken, from your perspective, are we seeing the prioritization we want to see in the defense budget on this going forward?
Pat Flood (22:11):
Well, I'll kick it off, and I'll say it's unclear, okay? Here's a bit of the problem, is the defense budget, that term, ‘the defense budget', that comes across here, is about 4,000 to 6,000 pages, in excruciating detail from each of the military services, the reserve components, as well as the office of the Secretary of Defense and everything in between. It's a lot of stuff, a lot of information. Contained in there might be, in the aggregate, some real wisdom and genius about what the request is.
Pat Flood (22:42):
"Give us this money and we will do amazing things with it," but the problem is, who in the world can tell? We don't have an AI machine reader for this. Maybe we need one. One of the constant criticisms of, is that we need a Rosetta stone to break this out. Tell us how all of this adds up into something virtuous, and powerful and meaningful. We don't know. Now, so there's a lot of bets in that budget. Some of them are undoubtedly going to be amazing and great. Many will not. What's the cost of the ones that don't pay off in terms of time, if not the money itself? It's unclear right now.
Scott Oliver (23:16):
You're keying me up because this is something I'm passionate about, and that is, I agree that you need to understand the budget, but I think that we need to take a different view of this. We need to first understand what are our priorities and what are our capabilities, and where do we have gaps? Then where are we going to prioritize research and development? Where are we going to prioritize sustainment? On and on. Understanding the budget, it's important, but I would offer that now that I'm out of uniform, I can say this, I think Congress should pressure the department to tell them what is important. Then after you know what's important, then you can search through the document and say, why aren't you funding the top three things you told us was important.
Ken Miller (24:01):
I want to build on that a little bit, because I agree with you that we have to prioritize. One of the challenges, and we always talk about raising awareness with the leaders in DOD, is how difficult it is, and it is. In some cases, almost the easiest thing to do, because it's very easy to go, in theory, to someone and say, "Hey, we have a problem," but when you get into the actual system development, oftentimes that system is well past the point where you can insert a solution. Even if you change the priority, you still have a problem with making sure that that gets down at the earliest stages of development. From an EW perspective, we don't own these systems. We don't manage them.
Ken Miller (24:44):
We might find a vulnerability in a particular radar system, or a plane or ship, or something, but we don't own that program. We can talk about those vulnerabilities and we can say, "Hey, you need to have this as a priority," but at the end of the day, we have to get in at the earliest stages. Then that's where, I think, going into the innovation question is, we have to make sure that we're focusing a lot of our efforts on getting innovators to get on the same page about the importance of EMS, not just from the attack standpoint, but particularly, and maybe arguably, most important from the electronic protection side of the equation, because we have to design systems that can survive. That comes down to EP. Too often we understand the vulnerabilities too late, and so that's how I would like to build on not just the priority, but also getting in early.
Pat Flood (25:33):
This is a great conversation because I think it is pretty fundamental. Begin with the end in mind, right? What's the end? What are you trying to do? Why are you trying to do it? Once upon a time, in our acquisition process, we would actually try to inform our investment decisions based on some level of a model, right? In order to achieve our security objectives in a part of the world against a certain adversary, we would basically try to game out how each adversary would act in a certain set of circumstances with a certain set of capabilities and military objectives, and we have capabilities that do that.
Pat Flood (26:04):
Those actually do inform for structure decisions and capability decisions. It's a somewhat linear process in a way, and it's not perfect, but it is useful, and that does help us understand how many brigade combat teams do we need to buy, and how many carrier strike groups? What is interesting about this spectrum is that we really don't have an ability to do that beyond adversary blue versus red box versus, box versus box. Hey, I have an aircraft that's trying to do this mission. I know the adversary has a threat system out there, so I need to have a better box than he does, and I'm going to do that, but yet across a broader arrangement of capabilities, have we built the system that can model this, our moves across all services versus the adversary's capabilities?
Pat Flood (26:49):
What was a little shocking was that we don't have that. In fairness, it's hard. This requires a level of computational power and a structure that is highly complex, but yet what's really mystifying for a lot of us is that we're still asking to buy things when we don't know if this is all going to work together. Remember, these budget requests come up, basically through service channels, Army, Navy, air force, Marine Corps, Space Force. They have to operate in an environment that doesn't really care what uniform you wear.
Pat Flood (27:17):
The spectrum doesn't really care if it's blue or red, or gray or something else. Before we can make good requests and identify those gaps, we got to understand, we've got to model this somehow. That's been one of the things Congress has been pushing on. Now, it's not easy, but until we get that, then do we even know what those priorities are? Because in theory, those gaps would be illuminated at some point in time, and then you could determine and inform your investment requests, and your decisions and your R&D needs from that.
Courtney Barno (27:46):
I love this because I think what we're illuminating here is this exact problem this linear system, right? If the capability that's going to give you the edge of something completely orthogonal to what you think it's going to be, that process isn't going to get you what you need, right? You're going to need to make near-term bets and longer-term bets over different horizons in different areas to see what yields the capability edge. But I wanted to come back to something that Ken mentioned about EP, and this brings me to JCIDS the JROC, everybody's favorite, right? I want to push on this for a minute and say a lot of your opening remarks, for me, sounded a lot like what the department has gone through in the past five years with data.
Courtney Barno (28:26):
We have this cross-cutting enabler. We didn't really see it. We didn't prioritize it, and now we're realizing it is the fuel that's going to give us the advantage, or it's going to lose the next conflict for us. We were beginning to prioritize it. We have a joint war fighting concept that says this is primacy for us. We're going to go after this. The joint staff has put out guidance on this. What can be learned there for EMS? Then moving into maybe the implementation plan, are we seeing things in the implementation plan that mirror some of the goodness that we've seen in the turn towards the data strategy in the past few years?
Ken Miller (28:58):
I'll save the IPLAN for Sherm-
Courtney Barno (29:00):
Sure.
Ken Miller (29:00):
... but going to the EP now, I will say that when we get to lessons learned, I will say this. We learn lessons through failure. It's a bad way to learn lessons, but we've always held such an advantage over our opponents, or over our adversaries, that we've been able to figure it out and put out a solution. We do need to learn lessons from other communities, AI, that have gone about and figured out how to come up with the solution before there's an actual problem, because we will be able to have that time, talking certain [inaudible 00:29:32], you're talking a matter of days, max, to figure out a solution to a vulnerability.
Ken Miller (29:38):
I don't know what changes have to be made to that process, but we do have to learn from other communities who have figured it out, particularly in the data AI areas, because they don't have the history that we have, but we're used to learning from failure, and we have to break that process up.
Scott Oliver (29:52):
An important string I want to pull there is a realistic electromagnetic operating environment that we can simulate in and train in, it doesn't exist. If we had a realistic electromagnetic operating environment that we could simulate, Pat, we could understand what our capabilities are and what our vulnerabilities are, and what opportunities we have, because this is an opportunity space. I really appreciated the fact that you mentioned that, Pat. Connected to a realistic environment, I think AI and data, and ML might actually be suffering almost the same problem because they don't know what it's going to be like when we begin algorithmic warfare.
Scott Oliver (30:31):
They don't understand... we don't understand what it's going to be like when the algorithms that we've built are overly influenced by bad data. It's nothing that we did. It's our adversary is giving us bad inaccurate demonstration that we're sensing, and it's throwing all of our algorithms off. Modeling and simulation is so important.
Courtney Barno (30:54):
The similarities between what's going on with EMS strategy and implementation, AI, ML, data, what does this say about our approach to technology policy from a defense perspective, but I think even from a broader national security perspective? Do we have a technology strategy? We've talked about three different areas of technology here that we've either fallen behind, are in, or they're cross-cutting, and we feel like we don't have ownership for, and we're scrambling to advance them. Where does that leave us?
Scott Oliver (31:24):
My reaction to that, a friend of mine has an example of self-driving cars. When everybody has a self-driving car, it's going to work great. The problem is that intermediary time. That's what I see right now with the Department of Defense. There are some very smart people that understand what we're talking about, and then there are some people that don't really. We're in that intermediary time of understanding. When we push through and we have a new joint force that has this understanding, that's when we're going to be really lethal and really capable. That's the struggle I think we have right now, is that we're just in the intermediary time and we're pushing through.
Ken Miller (32:02):
I would add when you talked about algorithmic warfare, when everyone has a self-driving car, turns out we'll never get to that point, and then you can draw that comparison to DOD. We'll never really actually get there because I think a lot of times, your algorithm is only as good as the next human it comes in contact with, whether it's the person sending the data, interpreting the data, sending it, doing something in that loop. But I will say, with that, I think the biggest thing, and talked with Michael Madrid about this, is this idea of accepting risk.
Ken Miller (32:31):
We have to accept more risk along the development of a system, and for that risk acceptance to become contagious. Right now, bureaucracy does not like risk. It actively fights against risk. It is designed to make sure everything stays in one place, and so when you have pockets of great examples of where risk was taken and it produced something, but bureaucracy will work to contain that so it doesn't spread into other programs, other agents, other sectors of DOD. Figuring out what structural changes we needed to make to accept more risk and allow it to be contagious.
Pat Flood (33:05):
I would say, Courtney, to your question, that is the question, and I think our victory or defeat will largely rest on the answer we come up with that in terms of our technology policy. As I've evaluated this and pondered this for the last several years, I've come to the conclusion, we have plenty of money as a nation. We're not broke. Far from it. We have extraordinary intellectual talent and the capacity to innovate. What we don't have necessarily is time. The change is not linear, and our biggest vulnerability, I believe, as a society is the nation, and specifically within the defense space, although it's not exclusive. This is the process that we put on our pathway to get to something better, speed of innovation, that's victory or defeat.
Pat Flood (33:50):
We have got to adapt faster than anybody else, and we are not going to do that with 5,000 series and JCIDS, okay? What got us here will not get us there. I was a little concerned about this when I started on the Hill. I am terrified about this now. We have to recognize as an open and free society, we have limitations. China does not have an appropriations or an authorization process. They don't have committees of jurisdiction. They don't have JCIDS. There's a lot of things that they can afford not to have, which allows them to move very fast. We have those things, but we also have other self-imposed things that we need to rethink.
Pat Flood (34:27):
I think that has been the head-scratcher, that's what people are digging into, is how can we run this process better to get it? Everybody wants to do it, but we haven't figured out what that recipe looks like. Then what does that combination of changes to regulations versus changes to statute that need to happen? Industry is no different. Now, one thing though, industry has figured this out, in a way. Hedge fund traders go to war every day at a scope and scale, and a speed that the DOD can't even begin to imagine, and they do that because their survival depends on it. That is powered by an industry that knows how to do this. For so long we have worked overtime to evict industry and those cultures, and those ways of doing things from the defense space. Long answer, but that's...
Courtney Barno (35:11):
Couldn't have asked for better closing remarks, so you all are very fortunate. Anytime we end on a good old fashioned critique of the 5,000 series, I'm happy. But let's go ahead and do some audience questions here. We've got about 10 minutes, but I'd love to get some other voices in the room.
Speaker 6 (35:27):
Thank you very much. I love those closing remarks. That was fantastic. Now, as an entrepreneur, how do we actually inspire change here, or get further, right? I think it's great that eventually we'll get to that point, but to your other point, we're not there yet. We still have a lot of challenges to overcome. I highly doubt that the U.S. government is going to start overcoming their risk challenge. Having pitched to investors in my life before, I promise you, very few people will overcome that risk. They want to see more reward first. Congress can be, candidly, really tricky to navigate for a small startup with 11 people. How would you guys say, if, say, we had a solution already for EMS, already for this, that can protect us 100%, how would that company even start going through those channels to get success?
Pat Flood (36:08):
Let me just start. I would say, hey, it's not us, it's the other guy. Everybody's going to say that, right? The money's there, and you will find many members and members of staff who say, "Look, the authorities have been provided. They exist. They're there. They're just not being used." There's a little bit of a circular argument on that one, but I think the belief currently on the Hill is that, look, we have done what you asked us to do. You've got to deliver something out of it, but thinking big is less important than doing big things, and you've got to deliver. You've got to produce, and that's where this valley of death dynamic becomes a challenge, but you can't do it on your own. I'm not looking at you. I'm looking at the uniforms, if you will, in the department pulling stuff across.
Scott Oliver (36:52):
It's not probably reasonable to transform the entire Department of Defense to an agile force. I don't know if that's going to happen and it probably wouldn't be prudent, but I think that we shouldn't be so hard on ourselves because there is some very positive signs, places like AFWERX, Cyberworks, Softworks, those innovation centers that are looking for a game-changing innovation, and they're bringing in those companies to look at what their bright ideas are, and then they're funding them to develop prototypes.
Scott Oliver (37:24):
The Department of Defense, we've started... agile development is really getting embraced, DevSecOps. All these things are all very good, and so we need to give ourselves some grace that it's not as bad as we're making a sound. There are some places of innovation, and maybe that's the counter to Pat, to your thoughts, is I don't know if we're ever going to have a completely agile force. I think it's important that we incentivize and promote those pockets of innovation, where we can take risks and then really find that leap ahead technology. Then we can bring it into production and make sure that the whole force gets that capability.
Ken Miller (38:08):
I agree with you, Sherm. Stepping out, though, from just the DOD standpoint, I think that's one of the reasons why we're here tonight, is by engaging innovators from an academic perspective, association perspective, congressional perspective, we can start to really learn your experience, okay, you're bumping up against something. This company is bumping up against something. We can start then to aggregate that a little bit better and figure out that maybe the streamlined solution, instead of talking these fantastic changes of plans that need to happen at the top.
Ken Miller (38:39):
Because I think it's important that this is not just about getting in there. It's also about staying in there, too, and being able to... You can always pitch your solution. You can get that one product, but that doesn't necessarily spread to all of a sudden, now you are looked to as a solution across other areas. Getting in there, staying in there, but just engaging associations and groups like us, where we can start to aggregate those problems and then we can present it-
Scott Oliver (39:04):
And we can have these conversations.
Ken Miller (39:05):
... yeah.
Trish (39:06):
Hi, my name's Trish. My day job is deputy Director of Collaboration at the National Security Innovation Network. We are part of a three link chain between DIU, the National Capital Innovation program and the National Security Innovation Network, so we are here for you. Connected to the Pentagon, so maybe it doesn't totally hit it, but I would say one thing, 5,000 series, yes, I'm a total dork on that. When we swallowed Enclosure 13 and we swallowed that rapid capability, and solution development, we lost a very critical tool. Bring it back. That's number one, so please just make that happen. Then number two, since I am talking a little bit about DIU, Mike Brown is not going to move into the acquisition top jobs, so who are the names that are at the top of your short lists?
Pat Flood (39:58):
I'm not certain I'm going to touch that one, but I would say, though, that did go off like a bomb last night when the word came out, and right or wrong, a lot of folks were banking a lot. It's a big job. It's an important job. It's the job at the R&E right now, is what we're talking about. There's a sense of loss. Now, having said that though, our bench is [inaudible 00:40:21] very deep in America, so there will be somebody, but it's also a process. I don't have any names to give you, but I would just say that we've got to get one fast, back to my argument about being short on time.
Courtney Barno (40:36):
I'll touch that briefly. I think there is an enormous amount of conversation that goes into the A&S pick, and for good reason, as the top of weapons buyer. I think there is less conversation, without good reason, that goes into the R&E pick. I think if you look back at why Congress actually separated AT&L to begin with, it was to elevate the technology strategy of the Department of Defense, and to have one entity that owned and drove that strategy based on the critical challenges that we need to solve as military, and that hasn't really happened for a variety of reasons, placing it on no one shoulders. Structural reasons as well, but I think where there is opportunity in the coming years is for R&E to really step into that role.
Courtney Barno (41:26):
I think, I will admit I am a former staff member of the National Security Commission on AI, so we've put out a number of recommendations in that area. But I think that's a bright spot, is that over the next few years, hopefully we will see a return to collaboration between these two entities, that, if done correctly, bridges that valley of death and provides more innovative solutions that can get companies to scale faster in the department as well.
Thaddeus (41:51):
Well, thank you. This is an awesome panel, by the way. I appreciate the opportunity to sponsor and actually take this conversation in. For you, I'm actually sitting in R&E right now, in the Electronic Warfare and Counter Measures office, our job to include what Dan's job is, is to find innovative technologies that actually work on the EMS and bring us back to superiority. I'll give you my card so you can-
Courtney Barno (42:19):
[crosstalk 00:42:19]-
Thaddeus (42:19):
... reach out to me tomorrow, because we're doing another R&E innovation working group thing, where we have guys come in and pitch, and those things turn into unfunded requirements that we push forward and get funded, and we test it out. I look forward to talking to you. All right, so my question to the panel, I was really intrigued by the points you guys made about the parallel between things and data things like I'm an old NSA guy as well. There was a big fight between things in data, things like I'm an ONSA guy as well. There was a big fight between what was OSS-7 versus what is now DNI. Then that term "convergence' came into being, and everybody was like, "Oh, a cellphone is everything."
Thaddeus (43:02):
It's computer communications. It's a cellphone. It talks to the geospatial and the cell phone network, so it's everything. Also, I was back at NSA back in the ‘90s when we broke VoIP and started doing data network exploitation. I've been able to see, on the course, OEF, OIF, personal communication devices, and how do we break those encryptions and do cool things in the field. At each of those innovations, I guess, explosions or crossroads, however you want to call it, there were two things that I noticed that happened in those, to push those forward, that isn't happening in the EMS right now.
Thaddeus (43:45):
That's the two dirty words, the G&P, which is governance and policy change. Somebody has to really own it. I bring that up because someone touted AI, for example. I just sat on an AI working group about electronic warfare and cyber today, this morning, and I brought up the point, okay, so who is responsible for this? The topic of bad code, and that actually came up this morning, and I turned to the JAIC rep and says, "Is this a job for the JAIC, the Joint AI Center?" They were like, "I'm not a three-star, so I'm not sure." That can't really happen, but with regards to SIGINT changes, and I guess a tactical communications, or personal communication changes and data changes, we actually looked at policy and someone stepped up to own it. My question to you guys, as far as EMS goes, we have this stovepipe service structure with regards to what's happening.
Thaddeus (44:56):
Dan and I work on a tool that's awesome. We think the framework supports everything from I&W out to EMS enhanced situational awareness, weapons target paring code generation. It's freaking awesome, but when we go pitch this thing, the Navy wants to do something different with it. The army wants to do something different with it. The air force only wants this piece because, really, I just want it to fit into EMBM, or even JACD2, as you guys mentioned, but there is no authority. It depends on where you go, who thinks that they're the authority in EW. What do you guys feel about that governance piece? Who should actually own this thing, so there is actually a centralized place to say innovations in service and fielding out? That just can't happen because, just, theoretically it doesn't exist. Semantically, there's no tie.
Scott Oliver (45:57):
Yeah. Thaddeus, I can't agree with you more. I mean, you put a bow on it, pretty much the success of the strategy... we have a great strategy, the 2020 DOD Electromagnetic Spectrum Superiority Strategy. Now we have an implementation plan that's about to be signed, and I believe that the success of that IPLAN will really hang... It depends on if there's an empowered official that is going to hold people accountable for what's required of them. That's what the IPLAN is. It's a list of tasks that need to be accomplished in order to achieve the strategy.
Scott Oliver (46:37):
If we don't have an empowered official that's willing to go and sit at the table with all the other seniors that's high enough rank and say, "Why aren't you doing this? It's impacting our, our capabilities, our ability to maintain a superiority." But until we have that person that can look eye to eye across the table and ask those questions, I don't know if it will work. We got very lucky, I think, when we had... it was a perfect situation when we had... Congress wrote legislation, telling the department to take this more seriously, and they said, "Name a senior designated official that's going to be responsible for this."
Scott Oliver (47:15):
It was the Vice Chairman and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I personally was in meetings with him and this Deputy Secretary of Defense, and to have the Vice Chairman be able to go toe to toe with whoever didn't understand, or didn't believe, or was resisting, that's the only way we can really be successful, is because there's a senior official that's willing to say something, and that's being held responsible for it. I mean, I want to be a part of your bandwagon. I believe in everything you said, and I think that we just need to bring more awareness to how important this is, so that it's almost like a no brainer. You have to have an empowered official in order to accomplish the strategy.
Ken Miller (47:59):
I would add, an empowered official who, whose job it really is to focus on that versus wearing numerous hats.
Scott Oliver (48:06):
Right, right. They have to be focused-
Ken Miller (48:07):
Really, they have to be focused on that.
Scott Oliver (48:09):
... with no other competing priorities, because the minute you have other things in your portfolio, then you have to make a decision about am I going to do this today, or am I going to do that today? No. This empowered official has to have this as the number one focus and it's the only focus.
Ken Miller (48:24):
We've had great leadership from the Vice Chair and everything, but I think that if it's going to take proper seat in the discussion, it's got to be an exclusive seat on an EMS superiority. I'll just add, governance is absolutely huge. I think that's one of the reasons why we've always, for years, have had this domain discussion. It's not just because we enjoy sitting around in a circle and just talking like, "Oh, how does that compare to air, land, sea?" Domains drive authorities, they drive resources, and the strategy comes out, it's maneuver space.
Ken Miller (48:59):
That's fine, but I don't think it's enough long-term because I think that in my perspective, this is Ken Miller speaking, not AOC, it really starts to drive this governance structure back to the services, when you start talking it into maneuver, and eventually it needs to be elevated. Now, I don't think it's necessarily... you're talking about a fundamental force of the universe, so I don't know if it even fits in a domain. I don't know what the answer is, but we have to come up with a governance structure that has authorities and resources tied to it exclusively, and not shared with competing interests.
Pat Flood (49:30):
If my boss was here, he'd give you a hug right now. I almost gave you a hug. That's how this journey started for us, was really back in the ‘18 legislation. It's almost been three years, and it was focused on that. We can't expect unless somebody is accountable for it. I would say we've made progress, good progress. It's not enough. This governance thing is not perfect. I think there's a lot of unease, but what boss would also say is, "Look, we have got to stop polishing the rock at this point." We've got to move out, and we need to adapt in stride. We're not giving it up now, but we've got other stuff and we'll figure it out as we go, but that accountability and that single focus is fundamental to all of this. Thank you for bringing that up.
Scott Oliver (50:15):
One last thing. The IPLAN is going to fall largely, I think, on Congress, and Congress is going to have a huge job to make sure that the IPLAN stays on track. [crosstalk 00:50:24]-
Pat Flood (50:23):
Yeah, and the way we look at it is, that is our blueprint for oversight. The strategy was nice. All strategies are great. Who doesn't like a strategy. They say good things, but what's more important is the execution of the strategy. What is that going to require? Those details. That's what Congress... that's that Rosetta stone that we're really going to be using to monitor this over time, and then identify where we need to adjust.
Courtney Barno (50:46):
All right. Well, I think we'll wrap it there. Give a huge round of applause to our fantastic panelists. Again, to the association and our sponsors for generously hosting us this evening, it's been fantastic.
Ken Miller (50:59):
That will conclude this episode of From the Crow's Nest. I'd like to thank our episode sponsor, Pacific Defense. Pacific Defense rapidly delivers military electromagnetic spectrum technology solutions to the Department of Defense, the intelligence community, and their industry partners. Learn more at pacific-defense.com. To learn more about the Association of Old Crows and From the Crow's Nest podcast, please visit us on our website at crows.org/podcasts. Thanks for listening.