From the Crows' Nest

Speaker A [00:00:09]:
Welcome to from the Crow's Nest, a podcast on electromagnetic spectrum operations, or mso. I'm your host, Ken Miller, Director of advocacy and outreach for the association of Old Crows. You can follow me on LinkedIn or you can also follow us on social media. We're back up on social media on Instagram and YouTube, so you can follow us there. As always, thanks for listening and I am pleased to be here with my producer, Laura Krebs, soon to be Laura Anderson. Anderson. Yeah. You have to think about that sooner.

Speaker B [00:00:40]:
Well, we have some nine months to get used to it, so it's okay.

Speaker B [00:00:43]:
But congratulations in advance because I will forget about this in nine months. But congratulations.

Speaker A [00:00:47]:
Well, thank you. Thank you.

Speaker B [00:00:49]:
How are you doing?

Speaker A [00:00:51]:
I'm ready for school to start.

Speaker B [00:00:53]:
Yes. Yes.

Speaker A [00:00:53]:
It's been a long summer.

Speaker B [00:00:55]:
It has been. I was on vacation last week, obviously, so, you know, whatever we released last weekend, I'm not even sure what our release schedule was, but whatever we released happened while I was on vacation. So I hope everyone. We had some really good episodes come out, but it's good to be back from vacation. And so we're having this episode here today is going to be a little bit of a Q and A to help everyone get caught up on current events. For those in the studio audience, thank you for joining us. For those listening upon release of this episode, welcome to access to these episodes. Now these used to be what we had as AOC member subscriber only editions or episodes that we put out.

Speaker B [00:01:40]:
And the purpose of these is to give our listeners a chance to participate in the audience, to ask questions, to guide the conversation and then of course, or, and then you could subscribe. And it was. Release was only limited to AOC members and subscribers. We did a massive survey, listener survey earlier this year. And the biggest feedback we got back was that a lot of our listeners who weren't AOC members, they just, they wanted access to these episodes, but because of scheduling, they couldn't always be a part of the studio audience. And so what we're trying to do is, what we done is removed the subscription, open up the subscription. So now all these episodes are available to everyone. But if you're an AOC member, you can then still participate in the studio audience.

Speaker B [00:02:33]:
So the studio audience now is an AOC member benefit only. And so if you're an AOC member listening to this and you want to participate in the virtual audience, you may do so, and then you can just continue to register, get the link and participate. But these episodes are available to everyone. And so we hope that you'll enjoy them. You can go back and listen to previous episodes that you may have missed. And then we also are in the process of uploading all previous episodes to YouTube so you can listen to them on social media as well. And as I mentioned at the top of the show, we are back on social media. So we're going to be working on getting that up and going.

Speaker B [00:03:16]:
So plenty of ways to reach our show. I really appreciate those in the audience that have joining us once again. If you are in the audience, this is your show. You can submit questions, comments, topics. We'll get to as many as we can. And I have of course, Laura here as to, to help me go through all the questions. We have some questions that were submitted by email before we got on air. So we'll go through some of those and just have a good conversation here today.

Speaker B [00:03:46]:
So with that I we'll get started. I want to again welcome everyone. So use the chat function if you're in the audience, please. You can see us. We cannot see you. So please take a moment to. I'm trying to find the chat function here. Please take a moment to introduce yourselves on the to the audience.

Speaker B [00:04:10]:
We do not give your name out over the air so you can use your name, you can use whatever name you want. But we will get to your questions and comments as they come in. So with that, Laura, fresh off of vacation here, I see that the world has been still a crazy place. It did not feel that way on vacation, but apparently there was a lot that going on the last couple of weeks. And so I wanted to kind of get your see see what questions we have to get to for today's show.

Speaker A [00:04:43]:
Yeah, every time you go on vacation, something happens. I know last time you're on vacation the US Went into Iran. This time Cambodia and Thailand got into it. I don't know what's going on. You can't go on vacation.

Speaker B [00:04:56]:
It's almost as if people around the world listen to from the Crows Nest and they know that, hey, we're not here to talk about it. So I know you know, so. But we are here and so we're going to catch up on all this stuff. I think the last episode we released here that I was right before vacation was an episode on an update on the Congressional defense budget that's still ongoing and obviously there Congress is now in August recess and so there's not going to be any additional developments on that front, although there was some additional guidance I saw, you know, in my 800 emails or whatever I had. There was some guidance given From Congress to DoD last week on further reconciliation measures that are continuing to go through. As we, and, and as we discussed in that episode last two weeks ago, the, the reconciliation piece of the, of the defense budget this year has been, has really complicated the outlook for where how Congress is addressing this year's defense budget. So, you know, when Congress gets back at the end of August after Labor Day, they'll have about three and a half weeks of legislative business to try to figure out a budget before the end of the fiscal year. Obviously we're going to be under a CR at that point.

Speaker B [00:06:15]:
Whether or not there is a shutdown yet, we don't know. But it seems like unfortunately conditions are a little bit more ripe this year than in previous years for a shutdown. So hopefully that can be avoided. But there probably won't be any sort of conference resolution on the defense budget bills until December time frame at least. And so there's going to be a few more months of a lot of debate in Congress and we'll just, we'll, we'll keep you updated. But a lot, a lot of stuff happening on the reconciliation, a lot of stuff happening with Pentagon right now. And, and so we'd welcome any questions that the audience might have on that front.

Speaker A [00:06:56]:
Okay. Well, we will wait and see if any of those come in. I wanted to start off with since we had some tensions in the Indo Pacific area region last week, I'm just very curious how, how could ENSO become a decisive factor in Taiwan conflict scenarios in that area?

Speaker B [00:07:21]:
Well, I think ultimately, again, I'll be interested in any comments from our audience. It already is a major factor over there. Whenever we're dealing with electromagnetic spectrum operations or mso, it's important to understand that essentially. And then there are people that will, you know, I, I don't disagree with this. You know, we'll, we'll, there are people out there that are, that will note that we're already at war. It's low intensity. It, there's, it's, it's let what they call left of launches. But there's no, there's no escalation in terms of, you know, use of military weapons or anything.

Speaker B [00:08:06]:
But from an MSO perspective, we are engaged in that region. It's already a major part of the conflict over there in terms of the signal, signal interception community, you know, jamming signals intelligence, space sat, satcom satellite communications, everything from space. And MSO is already really hot over in that region. And so when you're Looking at, I think what China is, you know, their, their long term plans here, MSO and, and dominating the spectrum in that region is essential for any, for China as well as the US and that's where the battle is ultimately going to be because whoever can project their superiority before fighting and achieve it faster, superiority, when the conflict really starts, is going to be the, that's going to be the decisive factor in the conflict. And so I think that's really important that to put on the MSO lens when you're looking at that region. And this is why we have in these. Throughout our podcast, throughout the many conversations, we always talk about the need to understand MSO from a domain perspective because it is a physical domain, it's a physical warfighting domain and it's arguably at the center of achieving superiority in all other domains. You cannot have ground superiority, air superiority, space or anything without superiority in the spectrum.

Speaker B [00:09:49]:
And so that is, that's kind of the underlying issue there. Now one of the things, before I went on vacation, I had the opportunity to travel to Alpha Air Force Base and meet with the, the, the joint MSO center, the jack under StratCom and talk a little bit about, you know, what is, you know, US mso, the reforms taking place, the positive developments on that front. And we talked a lot about the independent region. And I think one of the, the takeaways of that are that, you know, China has been very vocal about its intent within the next couple years to reunify Taiwan and they want to do this with as little of traditional conflict as necessary, both in terms of. They don't, no one wants a bloody unification effort. So how can they achieve this? And you know, on the world stage with everyone watching in a way that I would say almost maybe mirrors or looks like when Hong Kong was absorbed in China, it was almost a, not so much. It was a, a part of, there's almost a celebratory element to it like, hey, this is finally happening. That's kind of what they want for China.

Speaker B [00:11:21]:
And so, or, sorry, it's what China wants for Taiwan. They, they don't want to be seen as, you know, conquering a sovereign country in, in that regard. I think this is also playing a role in how China involves itself in the Russia Ukraine war because, you know, I was reading an article in Foreign affairs earlier and it was talking about how China's kind of have, is at an inflection point in terms of its relationship with Europe because it's come strained over the years with the Russia, Ukraine war, because on One end, they are seen as allied with Russia. Obviously there's some cultural, socioeconomic similarities obviously with the communism communistic elements of both of the, the countries. But also, you know, in terms of their long term strategic relationship, many in Europe see China as on Russia's side. However, there are people in China too that are, recognize that, you know, they see this as a territorial sovereignty issue, that Russia invaded a sovereign country. And they don't want to be necessarily seen as supporting that because they don't want to be seen as conquering another country when it comes to, when it comes to, you know, what's going on in Taiwan. So it's, it's going, they're trying to navigate a very complicated global security environment along with the US and all this, all these matters, all these pieces of that issue kind of build up and you can see that throughout the world, whether it's in Cambodia and Thailand, the conflict that happened, I guess it was last week, you know, over a long standing border issue, there's going to be a lot of other, there's going to be opportunities for other countries to take aggressive steps in that region for their own political security concerns because it is such a destabilizing aspect in the Pacific.

Speaker B [00:13:26]:
Because obviously how, how this works out with China is going to influence everything from trade to, you know, U.S. trade, the cost of goods, inflation, freedom of navigation, South China Sea, you name it. The unification of Taiwan is just the beginning of what would be a long term change in the global security environment. And so it's definitely something that we need to keep our eye on because I think it's probably we're a couple years out. I don't think we'll get to 2030 without this with and still be in this kind of status quo position. So how the current administration and what might be the next administration, how they handle this is going to be critical.

Speaker A [00:14:14]:
Absolutely. So when you look at it from an EMSO lens and you look at the lessons learned in Ukraine and you look at it from the United States and China, do you think it's going to come down to who has learned better from what has been going on between Ukraine and Russia from an MSO perspective and can take what they learned from that conflict and can harness that better in this region?

Speaker B [00:14:40]:
I, I think that there, yeah, I think that there's an element where it's, I, everybody is learning over in Russia, Ukraine, what's going on in Russia, Ukraine, war. It's, it's, it's a, it's essentially a test bed for just about Everything what concerns me is that when you look at, you know, even just when you look at how the war has evolved over the last couple years, the ability that the need to be agile and to innovate rapidly and get a solution out into the field for an immediate effect, the pace that it's going in Ukraine is astounding. And, and, and, and honestly, you have, you have companies that are going into Ukraine to invest in Ukraine because you know what, they don't have the same bureaucratic acquisition processes that we have in the US or other places in Europe. And so it's a lot easier to get your, your new technology into the field, test it in a real war environment, a real world environment. And so everyone's learning from that. The problem is how do you translate that into more major theater operations amongst global leaders? And when you look at the self imposed constraints that US and Europe place on themselves as kind of leaders of the free world and leaders of trying to create a stable world everywhere, I'm concerned that we can't adapt to the necessary changes we need to make fast enough. And so if you're saying who's going to learn the lesson first? It's going to be who can implement it first? And it's obviously going to be those countries that don't operate with the same self imposed constraints and they can just do it because they maybe don't align with the more, some of the more bureaucratic processes that we would follow here in the US or in Europe. And so when you look at, there was a, this is kind of a tangent.

Speaker B [00:17:00]:
I apologize. You can bring me back in any time, Laura. But there was an article I just read about, I think it was in actually on LinkedIn. It was Raven Whispers. So I want to give credit to whoever does that blog through LinkedIn, but it's very EW focused and they were talking about there is a DoD acquisition reform effort that was announced I guess back in June or July last month or two. And people started saying, okay, this is another acquisition reform effort, but once you start to dig into it a little bit more, you realize it's really not going to make any dramatic change. Because once you start to talk acquisition reform within the Pentagon, you instantly have the whole bureaucracy of the acquisition system coming in and trying to slow that down. And so it makes it extremely difficult to make the necessary changes to spark innovation, to get technologies from the lab into the field and into the hands of the war fighter as quickly as they need to be.

Speaker B [00:18:13]:
And so I think that that's going to be a key that I think we will continue to risk losing our advantage unless we can, unless we can get the leadership in DoD and the administration which, whoever is in the White House over the next five years. We need dramatic acquisition reform changes that allow us especially on the MSO world to keep pace with the change in innovation, the innovation that is happening out there. Because if we can't, then we're going to be playing catch up at the time when we can't, when we can at least afford it.

Speaker A [00:18:51]:
Can't move at a snail space.

Speaker B [00:18:53]:
We can't move. We won't move because honestly like look at, you know, China's not going to put self imposed constraints on, on, on their actions. And so we have to be prepared. And I just don't, I'm just concerned that, that we're going to be, we're setting ourselves up to fall behind.

Speaker A [00:19:12]:
That makes sense. It's a very valid concern. So. Well, we have a question from the audience. This question says how does the bill provide or encourage regional allies? I believe this is the bill you were talking about earlier.

Speaker B [00:19:28]:
Yeah.

Speaker A [00:19:30]:
In regards to Japan, Australia, etc. And can you talk about AOC working with these regional experts?

Speaker B [00:19:37]:
Yeah. So I mean this is, we've touched on this a little bit. I think, you know, it's, we talk, when we talk Russia and Ukraine war, we obviously it, the you immediately discuss the role of NATO in that region. Obviously. No, no conflict is unilateral anymore. Anytime we go to war we're going to have to go in with allies and partners and in, obviously in Europe we have NATO. NATO doesn't exist in the Pacific region. It does not.

Speaker B [00:20:13]:
That is not part of their, that is not part of their, the bylaws for that. So we have to. But there's not an alliance, a similar alliance in the Pacific region. So you have partner countries or allied countries but you don't have a coalition that is established. So South Korea, where AOC is going to be having its first AOC Asia conference here in October out in Seoul, South Korea to kind of mark a new investment in having events in that region that, to help shape the conversation. You know, you're dealing with South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, you know, Australia. Even though that's not technically in the, that's not considered Asia, it's still obviously affected by everything that happens in the Indo Pa. Indo Pacific region.

Speaker B [00:21:13]:
So you have Australia, then the Philippines and Singapore and we just talked about Thailand and Cambodia. Cambodia, a lot of interest in there. A lot of long standing conflicts between a lot of these different Asian countries that can complicate collaboration. And so it's really a challenge for the US is to nurture these. Some of these are bilateral relationships and for the purpose of a greater coalition effort when the time is right. Not an easy, not an easy job. The bill itself, you know, there's a lot in the bill we're still going through. One of the things that the bill does try to enhance is foreign military sales.

Speaker B [00:21:55]:
I think the key is to how can we open up more opportunities for allies and partners to collaborate with us on key systems, especially in the world, such as the F18EA 18G Growler. You know, that's, that's got a foreign military sales agreement with Australia. There's also the Compass Call. There's a lot of other system, EW systems out there that we're trying, that we want to try to open up to foreign military sales because the more of our allies that are using it, the easier the interoperability is and so forth. So that's where I think the bill can help is on the foreign military sales. There's always provisions for reports and other efforts to dive into alliances in that region. I don't know if any of those that report language is going to have enough teeth to make a difference, but I would say the foreign military sales number one. But then two, just doing everything you can to work individually with some of these countries to let them know that the US Especially is there to protect the sovereignty of these countries against any aggression that could destabilize global economy.

Speaker B [00:23:16]:
And that is a challenge that is going to keep a lot of military and political leaders in the US up all night trying to figure out because it is a much different environment. You're limited in terms of what you can take from an alliance perspective from NATO over there. Now, the other thing about this is, and I've this is, this is my own view on this is when a Taiwan scenario does heat up, you're not, it's not going to be contained to that region. You're going China, China's efforts to influence, influence global security. They, their footprint is everywhere. So you're going to see proxy conflicts pop up everywhere. Some of those are going to be in the area of responsibility of NATO. And so there, it's not a matter of we have to leave NATO over here for Russia and Ukraine and deal with it differently from the end of pacom.

Speaker B [00:24:19]:
We still have to work with NATO because NATO is going to play a very big role in any conflict in the Pacific because of the just how Everything's connected around the world. We don't, we can't have ice. We, we're no longer going to have isolated global events like we have. And you can even see that in the Middle East. I mean, part of what's going on in the Middle east is an outgrowth of the, the destabilizing effort, destabilizing war between Russia and Ukraine and, and, and the opportunities that afford some bad actors. So NATO is going to be involved in this, but it creates a different type of challenge trying to build those relationships and those alliances in the Pacific.

Speaker A [00:25:03]:
So I have a question. Being not as EW educated as you are, why is, don't say yourself short, Laura.

Speaker B [00:25:11]:
You've listened to me drone on for four years. For four years.

Speaker A [00:25:14]:
So yeah, I've learned through you. But why is there no EW coalition in this part of the world?

Speaker B [00:25:22]:
I, I, it's there, there's a lot of geopolitical considerations, I think, that prevent the countries from forming a formal alliance in, in that regard. You know, you can look at how Japan, each country has its own complete, almost unique security challenges locally in that, in that region. Obviously in South Korea, you have North Korea right above it. You know, with, with the daily threat coming from North Korea. Japan is a little bit different. Obviously, you know, their re, re regrowth from World War II and kind of how they approach defense, the defense sector in terms of, you know, building up their own military and how they engage us, that's a little bit different. So depend. There's so many different pieces that just don't align you.

Speaker B [00:26:20]:
There's no way to say we can take this one approach and it'll apply to these same countries. Whereas over in Europe, with everything's geographically a little bit more concentrated, it's a little bit easier to say you have NATO, but you have the European Union, you have other coalitions already established that bring Europe together and it creates additional fora for us and their allies to work on. A lot of, you know, a lot of these elements of partnerships, it's just more bilateral in the Pacific because of the unique challenges. And I think you're going to see that. My concern is when you, when you look at any sort of Chinese aggression against Taiwan, how US is prepared to prevent that is going to speak volumes to put potent to our allies in the region as to whether or not, because they're going to have to make decisions, do they defer to China in any way or do they ally ally with the United States and both and either option is going to have cascading consequences. And so they don't want to have to make those decisions right now either. So the I, this is why we have the two China policy and we have, we recognize Taiwan, but we don't recognize them as a sovereign country in the same way as we would other countries in the region, because we're trying to keep that status quo. We're trying to, you know, basically in that region, it's kicking the can down the road five, 10 years at a time.

Speaker B [00:28:02]:
But as we've seen now that the ability to kick the can down further is getting limited. And so now we're on a much shorter time frame. And I think that everyone's kind of starting to be a little bit more myopic and short sighted in terms of what is just around the corner. And some of the signs we're getting are it's concerning in terms of are we really prepared for what's about to come, come our way with, you know, in two to three years.

Speaker A [00:28:30]:
Yeah. So I want to kind of shift gears because you have definitely, you have the military side of things, but then you also have, there's emerging technologies, you have AI, you have machine learning. And with the emergence of those, how do you protect the spectrum? So those don't impact the military side of things and the DOD side of things. How do you balance those?

Speaker B [00:29:00]:
So this is a question that gets into spectrum management. Yeah. So the spectrum, obviously the electromagnetic spectrum itself is infinite, but the usable portion is very finite. In the radio frequency portion, there's various bands that we're operating in. And historically, you know, DoD has always had that waiver of saying, hey, for national security purposes, we, we have veto over selling off any portion of the spectrum we might need. DoD has not done a good enough job at keeping up with DoD needs to do a better job of investing in technologies that allow for dynamic sharing and where to a commercial and a military entity can both use the same frequencies on and off based on when they need it and they have it available. We have the technology for. We just don't have the policy behind to, to really push that forward.

Speaker B [00:30:10]:
We've been talking about it for a decade or more and even we were talking. Was it, was it the, was it the Forza episode about the, the, the most recent auction of a, of a band?

Speaker A [00:30:27]:
Was it that in our last Q.

Speaker B [00:30:29]:
And A might have been the last, maybe it was last Q and A.

Speaker A [00:30:31]:
Last Q and A we talked about auctioning off.

Speaker B [00:30:33]:
Okay.

Speaker A [00:30:34]:
It was, I remember it, the commercial sector.

Speaker B [00:30:37]:
You know, one wanted a specific Ban spread of frequencies. And basically through some negotiations that was narrowed down because it was revealed that, hey, if we sell this off, we're going to cause, very likely we're going to cause interference issues, interoperability issues with military technology that uses those frequencies. And it's not easy to just, you can't just like, okay, we're going to operate in different frequency. You have hardware and software considerations that you have to make. And so every jump to a new frequency that we have to do from a military perspective cost billions of dollars. And so on one hand, you have a huge economic benefit to selling off spectrum because obviously we need to invest in the infrastructure for 6G. Really now, I mean, we kind of missed the boat on 5G. I mean, we're still working on that, but we're now talking 6G.

Speaker B [00:31:27]:
We need. That's going to require a whole infrastructure investment that's going to, and it could potentially be a windfall for federal revenue. But then when you look at the cost of it, a lot of that's going to be used up in the cost that it takes to retrofit and fix the problems that we have in the military when we realize, oh crap, we gave away a portion of the spectrum that such and such radar works in or such and such system needs. And so it all comes down to spectrum management, both here at home for training and development purposes, but also overseas in terms of exercises and operations, and being able to have battle management capabilities in theater that can deconflict the usage of the spectrum between commercial interests, civilian interest and military purposes. So all of that has to do with we have not gone fast enough and invested enough in this dynamic spectrum sharing technology. We talk about this a lot, a lot of AOC shows, because it's always when we talk enso, and this is kind of for those who don't really understand what EMSO is. ENSO is basically the combination of what we call traditionally called electronic warfare, we now call electromagnetic warfare and spectrum management. So when we talk about jamming and spoofing and detection and all that that is in the EW realm.

Speaker B [00:33:05]:
And then the spectrum management piece is about how do you deconflict multiple users in a finite band of the spectrum that and you combine those two and that creates your MSO capability. And so we have to, as a community, I think, make sure that when we talk enso, we're not just talking the EW aspect of enso, but also the spectrum management element of MSO that needs to get a little bit more attention, a little bit more Pressure because we're not doing enough.

Speaker A [00:33:41]:
So when you talk about like auctioning off sections, if the US Auctions off a bandwidth.

Speaker B [00:33:49]:
Yep, it's gone.

Speaker A [00:33:51]:
It's gone. What does that do to China? Is it gone for China too?

Speaker B [00:33:54]:
No, no. I mean it's, it's, it's about the, it's about using, who can use the spectrum build the, the, the 5G 6G infrastructure for your civilian population. Now there is for those who like you, we, A few years ago there, there was a whole, I guess it was 29, you know, early or 20 around 2000-20s Covid time frame. Several years ago, you know, the, the whole debate over Huawei in China, you know, selling its 5G network. And so it has, you know, it. So if you're relying on infrastructure because all these technical global, these Global Telecommunications Co. AT&T Verizon, they're all, they, they're all global and their infrastructure is global. So if they are developing a, a 5G 6G infrastructure that they can then sell overseas and develop overseas to compete with other infrastructure like Huawei and so forth, that's where you get into some of the foreign implications of spectrum management.

Speaker B [00:35:12]:
But it's all about what operates when, how long, where and so forth. But when systems are, it'll operate on a certain frequency here, a system will operate on a certain frequency everywhere. Okay, what other systems or uses that are in that frequency are different around the world?

Speaker A [00:35:48]:
Okay, so is there ever a time where people from all these different places around the world come together and discuss the spectrum?

Speaker B [00:35:56]:
There happens to be, yes.

Speaker A [00:35:58]:
Is there really?

Speaker B [00:35:59]:
Okay, it's called, it's one of the things. And we actually, this actually came up in our, our meetings with the, the Joint MSO center is, is there's a World Radio Conference.

Speaker A [00:36:12]:
Very interesting.

Speaker B [00:36:13]:
And that happens every, I think every four years.

Speaker A [00:36:15]:
Okay.

Speaker B [00:36:16]:
And countries come together and talk policy regulatory changes to allow for continued development of, of communications networks, technology and so forth. So coming out of those establishes oftentimes, you know, overarching regulatory policies that countries sign on to that will say, hey, if we're going to follow this policy from the, that's established at World Radio Conference and so forth. This has traditionally been over in Europe a lot. I think it's been in the, I think the last time I was in the US was like decade a couple decades ago. And so one of the concerns is the next World Radio Conference I think is in 2027 and it's going to be in Shanghai, China.

Speaker A [00:37:08]:
That is very interesting.

Speaker B [00:37:09]:
So the host country which is typically more of a neutral country in a lot of, you know, it's usually like, you know, I, I think it's in either Switzerland or Sweden or it's been, it's been in more neutral countries in the past. It's very interesting that this one's going to be in China and China's going to have a bit of a head start or a little bit of extra ability to move some of its regulatory, preferred regulatory policies which could influence how we can operate in that region in the spectrum. So it's definitely a conference that the US has to go in to make sure that we do not lose ground on spectrum management issues at the World Radio Conference because it could be used as a, as almost a. I think it could easily be used by China as a way to signal the start of any sort of escalation in Taiwan because they can use the World Radio Conference to give them a. What would be, from our perspective, an unfair advantage in, in the spectrum.

Speaker A [00:38:20]:
Who would ever think that we would have to keep our eyes on a World Radio Conference to see what happens as far as a conflict goes? That's very interesting.

Speaker B [00:38:31]:
So, so and, and that's one of the reasons why with, from an AOC perspective we're investing heavily in increasing our footprint in the Asian region, Indo Piccom region, is because we, we do recognize within a couple years with, with the World Radio Conference approaching, these next couple years are critical to really kind of, to kind of jump ahead and make sure that we're ready. And so we're going to talk a lot about the World Radio Conference. We'll probably have at least a few episodes on it down the road, but it's something definitely to watch. It's. It sounds, it's not something that a lot of people understand happens this conference, but it's definitely an event that's worth for particularly from the EW community, MSO community. We need to be watching very closely and figure out what are some of the regulatory measures that might come up for debate during this conference and make sure that from an US perspective we're prepared to support or oppose said regulations to make to, to protect our, our advantage over. Over in that region.

Speaker A [00:39:41]:
Absolutely.

Speaker B [00:39:42]:
Or protect any advantage in that region.

Speaker A [00:39:44]:
How far in advance do they pick the location for these?

Speaker B [00:39:46]:
That's a good question. I have no idea. Probably. I don't know.

Speaker A [00:39:52]:
I picture like the Olympics because, you know, the Olympics, they have it set so far in advance. You wouldn't picture it being an issue at the time, but it's.

Speaker B [00:40:01]:
Yeah I honestly don't know what. It's obviously picked far enough in advance, but it might be from the previous one, but I, I just learned that it was in. Going to be in Shanghai like you know, a few months ago. So I don't know, maybe that was. I hadn't heard about it before, so maybe it's just announced.

Speaker A [00:40:20]:
I don't know if you can answer this, but is AOC going to this conference?

Speaker B [00:40:23]:
Probably. No, I mean, I think it's more. We'll talk about it, but we're not going to have a representative there. Right? That's okay. It's more just government, government, government.

Speaker A [00:40:32]:
And you could go cover it. You could be like, we could like an ESPN analyst.

Speaker B [00:40:38]:
I'm not going to Shanghai.

Speaker A [00:40:42]:
Ken, you could be an analyst. It would be great. Okay, well, I have, we're getting close to the end, but I have some like more general questions for you and I think I know the answer to this one based on the fact that you mentioned 5G but say MSO disappeared tomorrow, say the spectrum just fell apart, never existed ever again. What's the first thing that everyday people would notice? Just stopped working, I'm guessing. Phones are a big one.

Speaker B [00:41:12]:
Everything. Yeah, you, you would instantly. You know, it depends on the nature of like, obviously if it just, it depends on what you are. I mean, it's kind of a fun thing to think about as a mental exercise because it depends on what the reason for it disappearing is like. If it, if it's like a major attack or a solar flare or something that fries everything. That's one thing. If it's just, it disappears and stuff stops working, it's something different.

Speaker A [00:41:47]:
Let's say it was just like an accident and it just went out for like 30 minutes.

Speaker B [00:41:52]:
Yeah, I, I think, I think people would, would see effects everywhere. I think they'd recognize it first. Obviously with their communication, they couldn't make calls, they couldn't download anything, they couldn't connect to anyone. But you, you also through a lot of security measures, if you, you know, whether it's, you know, you, you would have, you could potentially have problems with transportation systems. You know, how, how do you, how you would instantly just say it just happened and, and over the course of that 30 minutes or whatever, you don't have Spectrum. Any civilian aircraft in the, in the sky has to land. Can they land without GPS and without any sort of electronic measures, you know, to any sort of communication? They'd have to basically land it on their own and that would be a disaster as well. So you, you know, whether it's power plants, water sourcing air, you know, transportation systems, you know, stop lights, timing, all that stuff, even your, your are mostly software these days.

Speaker B [00:43:03]:
So, and it's constantly sending signals. You're, you're every, every car almost these days is, is a node in the network in some way. So if that goes, you would have navigation systems going out, you would have, or even worse, making mistakes.

Speaker A [00:43:20]:
Yeah.

Speaker B [00:43:20]:
And so you would hear, you would see it every aspect. And I think that's one of the things that people, when they hear things like MSO and ew, they think, oh, military war bad or whatever, we are all a part of emso in, in our lives. And because everything, because of the nature of the spectrum and the ubiquitous nature of the spectrum where it's everywhere and touches everything, even civilians here in the U.S. you know, I'm, I'm, I'm coming to you from Pennsylvania. You're Idaho. Idaho, Idaho. Because of the spectrum, you know, we are just as close to any frontline conflict as our warfighters. Because you can guarantee whatever happens from a security perspective in any region is going to have far reaching effects into this country.

Speaker B [00:44:15]:
You're going to see aggression from peer competitors, be it China or Russia. You're going to see them attacking our networks here at home. You know, we, we saw back in June in Ukraine, they did, they conducted an Operation Spiderweb, which is a major drone attack in Russia. And it basically operated that, it was successful because they were communicating on Russian networks using Russian wi fi and signals. So Russian was monitoring Ukraine's communications, they weren't monitoring theirs the same way. And so they were able to hide within that. It sparked an interesting conversation I think with, with John Knowles and where, what if something like that happened domestically here in U.S. you know, we, we can't, we can't check every single cargo container.

Speaker B [00:45:11]:
So what if there was a cargo container that had drones in it that controlled by an adversary? You just need one that maybe, you know, launches the drones at a certain point in time in a certain location that takes down a civilian aircraft. You would instantly create such a level of panic that people would not get on the next plane. You would, it would ground our, our, our, our air transportation. So our ability, we have to be 100% correct against every single threat. Whereas an adversary only has to succeed once for full consequence. And I think our, you know, American people especially have to understand that you, we talk about civilian versus military, but in the spectrum we are all users, we are all nodes in the spectrum. And so therefore, we are all vulnerable and we will be vulnerable in any sort of aggression. So it's best that we have the awareness that when you pick up your phone, you get on TikTok or you get on social media or you talk to your group chat on your phone, you are participating in electromagnetic spectrum operations and you are just as likely to be targeted as our military overseas because you can guarantee the spectrum erases geographical distance.

Speaker A [00:46:40]:
Yeah.

Speaker B [00:46:41]:
And that's something I think that people have to understand that it's not. Wars aren't over there.

Speaker A [00:46:46]:
They're everywhere now.

Speaker B [00:46:47]:
They're everywhere. And that's. And it's kind of a frightening new picture, new reality to deal with and one that keeps me up at night because, you know, I've got three young. Three young daughters. You know, what world. What world are they going to be living in in 10 years? Scared to think about it is very scary because there's. No matter how, no matter how you parent, the world that they live in is going to be determined by how we respond to aggression around the world. So, absolutely.

Speaker B [00:47:18]:
It's something that I think we need to do more. We need to talk about more from a civilian perspective of how we are participating in the spectrum.

Speaker A [00:47:26]:
Yes. I was talking to a scientist a couple weeks ago and she was telling me how even tractors, like something as simple as a tractor can be like, hijacked now and used. And I. Who would think a tractor, something as simple as a tractor could be used as a weapon?

Speaker B [00:47:42]:
I've often said in the past, I'm not. I'm less afraid of China and more afraid of John Smith in Kansas unknowingly uploading a virus or something when he. He's trying to log into his bank. And it just kind of embeds a virus, embeds in that way and then does something. It sits there, you know, time activated at a certain point in time and then goes. Can take down a network. And it's just because civilians here locally weren't aware that, you know, of some of the dangers. So it's an education process that we need to do better at, not just from AOC perspective, but from, you know, the US in general.

Speaker A [00:48:28]:
Absolutely. Okay. I have one last question. It's a very hard question, Ken. If EMSO had a mascot.

Speaker B [00:48:36]:
It's a crow.

Speaker A [00:48:38]:
Exactly. It would be a crow. Okay.

Speaker B [00:48:41]:
Actually, we were just at a. I do some co working at a co working space and there is a person had this great crow T shirt. I forget what it said was. I was. It launched a whole conversation about, like, from the crow's nest. And, like. Yeah, it's. It's.

Speaker A [00:48:57]:
It's. I have the picture because your sister sent it to me. It said, crows before bros support your local murder. But the murder. We don't need the murder part. But the crows before bros part. I like that part.

Speaker B [00:49:10]:
That's. That's a nice tagline. I don't know if that'll fit necessarily in the podcast, but it. I do. I do. I do want to actually have an episode here in the future. I'm trying to find an ornithologist or somebody who come in and talk about the attributes of crows and then relate that to what makes an MSO war fighter so unique.

Speaker A [00:49:34]:
I might actually know somebody. Well, yeah, I might know somebody, actually.

Speaker B [00:49:40]:
That would be. I would love. Because, I mean, if you look. I mean, crows are some of the most intelligent species out in the world, and.

Speaker A [00:49:48]:
But I might have somebody who can help us with that.

Speaker B [00:49:51]:
I think it'd be a fantastic conversation and a fun one, quite frankly, because I think too often we get into the weeds really quickly from a technology standpoint. But as we were talking, like, let's just make this. Make mso, make it easy to understand for everyone. And that's what we try.

Speaker A [00:50:09]:
Yeah. Make MSO easy to learn, easy to know. Understand. You need to break down all the acronyms. There's so many acronyms. There are.

Speaker B [00:50:18]:
I don't even know them. I mean, I've been doing this for you.

Speaker A [00:50:20]:
How do you not know them?

Speaker B [00:50:21]:
Because we don't. You don't use them. You just say the acronym, and then over time, people forget what the acronym actually stands for.

Speaker A [00:50:29]:
Okay, that's fair.

Speaker B [00:50:31]:
But, yeah, there's a lot of glossaries out there, but, yeah, we do need to do kind of more breakdown pieces on the show where you can kind of help people understand and navigate this, because, honestly, everything you would learn from a military perspective, you can apply to a commercial. To the commercial sector as well, from an innovation standpoint, capability standpoint, everything. So it's a good. It's a good topic to cover.

Speaker A [00:50:56]:
Yes, it is.

Speaker B [00:50:57]:
All right, well, I think we're out of time for today, aren't we?

Speaker A [00:51:00]:
We are.

Speaker B [00:51:00]:
Okay, well, thank you for. For joining me. Thank you for our listeners in the audience. Appreciate your. Your questions. It's. It's. I was a little concerned, you know, coming right out of vacation.

Speaker B [00:51:14]:
I was, like, trying to figure out what was happening in the world, like, just before I hopped on here, and I was a little bit concerned. But I do appreciate the questions. And again, all of our all these episodes, the way we're going to do, they're going to be open to everybody. We're still going to have the more informal conversations every few weeks, every couple weeks, focusing on current events. And if you're an AOC member, you can still be participate in the audience. But we've ended the subscription so that it's just available for everyone now, and we hope that you enjoy it. So with that, that will conclude today's episode of from the Crow's Nest. As always, please take a moment to review, share and subscribe to the podcast.

Speaker B [00:51:55]:
We enjoy hearing from our listeners, and so we're always trying to find ways to improve the shop show. That's it for today. Thanks for listening.