From the Crows' Nest

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Ken Miller (00:09)
Welcome to From the Crow's Nest. I'm your host, Ken Miller from the Association of Old Crows. As always, it's great to be here with you. In this episode of From the Crows Nest, we take a look inside of Infopack 2026, a conference brought to you by the AOC Diamond Head chapter in support of the Information Warfare Directorate at InfoPaycom. This is my first time at the conference. It was a phenomenal event. Kudos to all who, all the volunteers and folks who helped plan it.

great series of briefings. And I wanted to bring you three conversations that pulled on a common thread throughout the week. And that's how do we have assurance of our MSO advantage when delivering I.O. effects? In other words, how can we better integrate MSO and information operations as separate capabilities earlier in the planning to ensure that we have full capability delivered to our warfighter? In addition,

To the three interviews in this episode, I also encourage our listeners to visit us on our social media and on our Instagram page, as well as AOC's main LinkedIn page, where you'll see a number of other interviews that we posted up a live stream for social media from exhibitors and attendees, some really great insight into in those pieces as well. So if you need to hear a little bit more about InfoPack, please go over to our social media channels. So without further delay

I'd like to introduce my guest for the today's show. My first guest is Dr. William Dahler Young, retired U.S. Air Force Colonel. Many of you know Dollar Young from as the first commander of the U.S. Air Force's new 350th Spectrum Warfare wing. He is now president and CEO of security concepts and strategic design. And he gave a presentation on fog, friction, and false certainty.

Enabling double loop learning in contested information environments. I will then be joined by AOC Board of Director member and chair of the advocacy committee, Scott Sherm Oliver, a frequent guest here on From the Crow's Nest. And then we wrap up the show with a conversation with Jared Patton, Director at Booze Allen Hamilton. So without further delay, let's get to my conversation with Dr. William Young.

For many of our listeners, you will remember I've Dollar is a regular podcast guest here on the show. and we are at InfoPack 2026. And Dollar just provided a gave a great presentation on fog, friction, and false certainty, enabling double loop learning and contested information environment. And we are going to dive right into that tough because there's a lot to uncover. But Dollar, welcome to From the Crowsness. It's great to have you back on the show. Thanks, Ken.

It's always great to be here. And, you know, I I want to thank you again for everything that you do for the community and obviously what the Association of Olkro does, not just for the community, but and not just for our nation, but for all the free nations in the world. Thank you for what you guys do. Well, you know, we first met when you were commander of the 350th and you know, your operational experience over the decades as well as what you do now in retirement. What

I've always found appreciative when you look at a problem in the MSO space, you don't look at it wearing a particular service hat or even just a strict function. You look at the full problem. And I think a lot of your your presentation brought this morning was taking a look helping us reorient or relook at how we make decisions and struggling with this notion of how we handle making decisions fast or responding and taking action fast. So your

Presentation this morning was fog, friction, and false certainty, enabling double loop learning in contested information environment. So I want to start to pull that back up a little bit because you focused a lot of your discussion on this notion of false certainty, especially when we're dealing with AI-driven systems and a very complex operational environment. So could you talk a little bit about what

was your main objective in this presentation in terms of helping us understand false certainty and how it can affect operations in the spectrum. Yeah, I can I I think that you said the key word orient. And you know the those are a lot of words in the title, but but really just to boil it down, the orientation is the key to everything. And InfoPack 2026 is focused on deterrence.

And my thought is if we lose orientation, and that's we from the collective we coalition all the way down to individual commanders, if we lose orientation, nothing else matters. And so the way we continue to maintain our orientation is through double loop learning. And what is double loop learning? Because we've heard concepts of the OODA loop, but this is a kind of a

build up of from that. Yes, double loop learning. So let let's go back to you know my flying days. A tactical debrief is what would be classified as single loop learning. And what that means is that we're going to evaluate the performance on the sortie against a specific set of concrete objectives. How did I, you know, how was my formation? How was my jamming on target?

etc etc etc and so a way to simplify it is to say did i do things right that's single loop learning now you contrast that with double loop learning did i do the right things and so orientation is most valuable when it's focused on am i doing the right things because of

All of the uncertainty that we'll never be able to get away with. No matter how much AI pick your tools, uncertainty is always going to be there. And so the ability to pare that down, you don't need to know everything. You just need to reduce the uncertainty volume for the decisions that matter, such as I'm considering how best can I deter my adversaries. And I'm not going to know.

I'm gonna come into that with a hypothesis. I'm gonna use history and all those things. And then we're gonna take action. And we better be learning from the action. Not just did we execute what was on the on the playbook, but did executing the playbook get us to where we wanted to be? So a follow-up question to this, because what when you mentioned single loop learning, it it was almost, did you make a mistake? In the double loop learning, there are a number of different things that you're looking at of do it, you said mentioned doing the right thing. And you drew a very interesting distinction in your talk about.

The difference between failure and error. Would you say that failure is more of a product of a single loop? And then when you get into double loop, it's less about failure. It's just more about where there were errors or where there were not errors. Yeah, because you can consider an error a gap between what you knew and what you should have known or or potentially could have known. And so you can not fail, meaning you did exactly what you intended to do.

So it's not a failure, but it didn't give you the outcome that you were after. So I jammed the target, I, you know, I jammed the signal, but the protected entity still got shot down. Okay. I we wanted to jam a target. We wanted to take a certain action. It didn't quite have the impact that we were we were hoping for expecting. And you start and you mentioned orientation is critical to this. And a lot of the conversations at Infopact 2026 here are talking about deterrents.

Do you think, in your opinion, we confuse the orientation of where we're starting from with deterrence? It feels like a lot of times our conversations, we think deterrence is our orientation. Then when we are trying to provide analysis, we're maybe not seeing the right problem. And so talk to us about that distinction between where you're oriented and then the effect.

That you're trying to have with deterrence. Yes. So very succinctly, the why did you believe that if you could generate the desired effect, it would lead to an increase in deterrence? Or why did you believe that taking the effect would not lead to a decrease in deterrence? That's regardless to whether or not you achieved the effect and the failures you may have had in terms of tactical execution.

That's what's really important. And the double loop learning that's most important here is that I did a thing. I thought this thing would have an outcome and did it or did it not. If it didn't, why? And so I don't have no one has data on the future. And so I I think sometimes we get wrapped around the accellent and false certainty and likelihood and probability. So let's let's just clear that up right now. no one has data about the future, period.

And if you do, then contact me because I want to buy your crystal ball. And so we talk about likelihood. that the way that math really works is we would have to have the data from the future. And then we would have to be able to say, given that data from the future, what's the likelihood of a particular outcome achieving deterrence, not achieving deterrents? I don't have the data from the future. So what we have to do is we build a hypothesis.

And so what we want to be able to, I believe if I take if then, right? If I take this action, then deterrence will be increased. And so that's the theory. That's what we change through double loop learning. But I and I would imagine through double loop learning, if we're dealing with deterrence, that our understanding of what is effective deterrence could change along the way. Because you might be trying to deter a particular action, but based on

How your operational strategy, your plans, you might end up not quite deterring the way that you were expecting, but you were deterring in another way because the the adversary has a vote. And so depending on their orientation, how do And the adversary learns. So even if you had perfect data today, now I take an action. This is what I mean about you don't have data from the future. So just because it worked today doesn't mean it's gonna work tomorrow, because they're gonna learn too.

And so we just listen, I'm the king of the nerd herd. I love quantitative methods when they're appropriate, but you have to be honest and say, hey, look, this is what this is good for. This is what this is not good for. Hey, boss, here's here's all I got. Now leaders have to do what leaders have always done. That is make decisions under conditions of uncertainty. You're not getting rid of that. Period. How has AI kind of changed this conversation? Because a lot of the convert talk we have is about.

How fast AI is. And I was relaying to you a conversation when we were at our gaps in capabilities conference a couple months ago. There was a lot of talk about speed of relevance. And speed is typically linear between point A and point B, how fast you get to one place. But when you're dealing with operational outcomes, speed isn't necessarily what you're going for. You maneuverability, because again, there's so many different variables that you're trying to integrate into your action. So

How has AI either made it harder to have a desired effect or what's your perspective on this notion of speed versus maneuver? Yeah, you're hitting my third F, false certainty. False. Okay. Yes. So fog friction and false certainty. And that's where AI in the wrong hands under the wrong conditions is terribly seductive. And if we're not careful, we will screw this away. Period. Dot. I am that's that's the thing that that concerns me most.

because in in my scenario, you know, we had the scenario that I that I discussed, hypothetical, but it was based on real world incidents from the AI incident database. every system was healthy, every operator followed procedure, every AI command was authentic and within its authority, and we still lost deterrence. And we lost deterrence because the agentic capability had the should have

Terminated the jamming, but didn't. And it didn't terminate it, not because it made a failure. It operated exactly within its model data set, did exactly what it was supposed to do. It made a be a decision that was in bounds. The problem was the the GemSock got a single feed from the AI that said, you're, you know, we've got point eight two confidence that that's low risk. Well

That's that wasn't the that's based upon the training data, that was right. It just didn't match the changes in the operational environment. And so now the GemSock commanders like, yeah, I I'm good. And the boss said he wants to get the mission done. So it makes perfect sense. But the problem is that it there was false certainty. So from an MSO perspective then, I mean what I'm having a hard time getting my head around, particularly when we talk I.O. is the number of assumptions we make about

Our ability to have spectrum superiority to execute I.O. and other related capabilities. This would seem to be getting to your point when you talk about orientation and everything. How important or what do we need to do differently to ensure that MSO, our ability to control the spectrum at a time, place, and duration of our choosing in order to have the I.O. effects, how can we make sure that we have the are we're not making an assumption.

That could lead to more errors down, you know, through our analysis. I think that the starting point still becomes so we develop a a a mission logic and we call that operational design. And I think what should occur, but often doesn't, is we have to ask ourselves what would have to be true for this logic to hold. And then we should focus on.

to the best of our ability trying to refute that. And so what we're we're we're not trying to confirm, we're trying to refute, because the dangers in not is in trusting something that we shouldn't. And many times by just saying, okay, well, for this to be a good idea, conditions A, B, and C would have to be true. And then we look, so that's the logic part. And then the evidence is based on the evidence do we have that we have available, do we think it is?

And so that can be qualitative, quantitative, a combination of both. but that's that's the decision. And so really understanding what what are the things that matter. And so that flows from what are you trying to do? So that's why you've heard me for years. Theory of victory. That's the logic. One of the points that we we've made on the show is that how the MSO community is disaggregated. Yep. So if you have IO forces.

Making assumptions about A, B, and C in the spectrum, but you have the MSO community saying, hey, no, we don't have A, B, and C, but their analysis isn't necessarily geared to making I.O. effective because they're trying to fix a different problem. How do we need to integrate these two earlier in the planning process so that I.

Again, we can we can get really, really concrete. and we'll go back to the OODA loop, right? The observations are by and large increasingly a function of the spectrum. And so the way that AI capability is going to get its awareness, the input signal, that's coming from the electromagnetic spectrum because we're not dragging coaxes around the battle space generally, you know, few ex a few exceptions. But so even the ability

To shape the decision that you're gonna trust your agentic capability to make is shaped by the spectrum. And if you're just an I.O. person and you don't know that that potential that for the agentic capability to make a good decision, it needs to know what to target or you know what the available targets are. Okay. But the electromagnetic spectrum can shape.

The available what's available. So if the high value target that you really want to kill is shielded through camouflaged concealment deception in the electromagnetic spectrum, your agent can't target it. Even though it's there, it can't, it won't work. And so if you don't know, these are the inputs that I can reliably trust. I don't care that you got so feeds can be taken away. So we're going to run everything into the whopper.

All right, but feeds can be taken away through the electromagnetic spectrum, but it the flip side's also true, conveying of your action, the action to take. So if that's coming from a mobile dispersed command center where you have whether it's a human or an agentic capability that's done the fusing and made the decision, target this, if you can't get that signal from the command element to the shooter to take action, it doesn't work.

It's not gonna work. And by the your MSO people might tell you, yeah, that that frequency is gonna be gone. We know that. And so that's you have to have the ability to pull everyone together to have that conversation. And that's where the introduction of the control structure that that I showed is a great single page that you can then abstract away all the technical implementation details and just deal with the logic. Who needs to talk to who? What information is required? Don't care, not saying data. It seems like a very simple step.

Process, but when you step back and look at how we've currently handled it, it seems like a it's almost very intimidating to kind of change the way that we're we make those decisions. It so you mentioned earlier, no one knows the future. However, we're gonna try to manifest things into existence because we could do that. Infopack 2026, a lot of conversation here with MSO, IO, that integration. What are a couple action items from your perspective? Your your

your deep MSO operational experience and the work you do now, what are a couple of things that we really need to focus focus on as a whole community moving forward because deterrence and deception and all deny all these great goals are constantly changing how we're constantly changing how we're implementing those and what that means. So what do we need to do better moving forward? Yeah. Number one thing I would

Focus on being very clear and articulate. Do your operational design, period. Dot. Start there. And and again, I'll be I taught ops design at war college. the first thing is, you know, what are you trying to do? And that is not obvious. You're not gonna get, especially the higher you go, you're not getting a clear set of requirements. Let's let's go all the way back to the war in Kosovo, right? What what was medal and all rights guidance? Do something. Okay, what the heck does that mean? Means do something.

All right. So you're not going to get these clear requirements. It it doesn't happen. It just doesn't happen. And so being able to then, given that ambiguo ambiguity, the uncertainty, to kind of craft something, a set of logic, a theory theory of victory, for gosh's sake, do that first. And then once you have that, then you can start to say, to execute this theory of victory, what would have to be true in the electromagnetic spectrum?

And then you ask yourself, do I believe it's true? And if it's critical, I need to make it true. If I don't believe that I can make it true, I can communicate this, you know, this amount of data, this amount of distance, or be able to effectively counter this threat in these frequencies and these bands, and and and and and like you can get to that. If you can't, then you got to go back and say, hey, boss, you need to change your theory of victory before you before you go into your detailed planning. And that's the iterative process.

Again, that's that's operational design. I have added nothing that's not in existing joint doctrine. You just gotta freaking do it. Well, dollar, it's always great to have you on the show. It's great it was great to see you here during the week. It's it's been a great conference. Speaking I'm speaking at at the symposium in display. And you're gonna be there so speaking on the in that one. As I've said please, please, please. No good deed goes unpunished. We'll probably hear back hear back from you then too. And hopefully it kind of builds on some of the stuff you're talking about today because I do believe this is a a

a a a message that our community needs to hear a little bit more directly in in an MSO environment where and but also we have to do a better job of teaming up with our IO brothers and sisters because you can't easily separate these two capabilities when you're talking about force design and operational theory of victory, all these other th concepts. They all come together. You just made me think of a a one con another concrete thing since you asked for a concrete thing. And and this is

So let's say dollar I buy. Everything you say, what do I do tomorrow? If I wanted to do this tomorrow, it's very easy. All we would need to do is pick an incident. We there's no shortage of them. Pick an incident. And so we're not talking about proactive planning. Pick an incident and then let's step back and learn from this. What would that look like? Well, there's the process cast causal analysis based on systems theory, but then

The other thing is, well, Dollar, what's the tool to do this? And that's where I would point to some work out of GTRI, Scott Teal, Cesspool, who you know. the three of us worked on something with the some other folks at the GTRI team. And it's called IDEA integrated integrated decision engine for EMSO assessment. So we produced a prototype, really, it's a pretotype, preliminary prototype, that

gives us the capability to pull the data. It does not do the thinking for you, but it provides the ability to go out over the thousands and thousands and thousands of individual data elements. And then as you saw in my presentation, you only need a handful of them. So it synthesizes and pulling that into. So now we bring in the humans. It's like, it's like the ability to go out and gather the evidence. So imagine yourself as a detective and you've got to reconstruct the the scene of the crime.

And so how cool would it be if you had a an automated tool that pulled all the relevant evidence based on what you're trying to do and said, Ken, here you go. All what was the acronym again? Idea. Integrated decision engine for MSO assessment. All right. You you you've just unknowingly gave us another topic for a future episode. And I think we already have who the guests are going to be. So that's this all works out great. So

Awesome. So yeah, th th thank you very much for taking time always. I know I know we have to do we we have a lot going on here today. So I'll let you get back to your meetings, but I really appreciate you joining here from the cross. Thank you so much. Well, thank you, Dollar. It was great to see you at Infopack 2026 and looking forward to staying in touch here moving forward and have you back on the show soon. When we return, I am joined by two guests, Scott Sherm Oliver from AOC Board of Directors, and Jared Patton from Booze Allen Hamilton.

All right, well, welcome back for our final segment here from InfoPack twenty twenty six. I am pleased to be here with two guests. my first guest is no stranger to the show. His name is Scott Oliver. He's a member of the AOC Board of Directors, also a representative Booze Allen. And then I'm also joined here by Jared Patton from Booze Allen as well to provide an industry perspective on some of the topics that we've discussed here during the week. So, gentlemen, thank you for joining here on From the Cross Nest. It's great to have you on the show.

speaker-2 (25:00)
To be here. Yeah.

Ken Miller (25:02)
Sharm, I wanted to bring you in to talk a little bit about from a 30,000-foot level. The conversations this week have talked a lot about you know, deterrence, deception, how we conduct I.O. in Indopaycom, but a lot of those conversations also obviously had to address EMSO. The integration between the EMSO and I.

How what are some of the key messages that you heard today that our community needs to follow up on?

speaker-3 (25:39)
You so Ken y to me, you know, I've been thinking a lot about this and I and I often wrestle with you know, there's a there's a a lot of emphasis on information operations or as they say today, operations in the information environment. And then we have electromagnetic spectrum operations. And so one is talking about changing decisions and the cognitive domain. And when we're in spectrum operations, we're talking about physics.

Physically denying, degrading, deceiving communications, targeting, command and c control, all that. But the two are related because right now, PACOM is focused on it's it's all about deterrence right now. That's where we are in this stage of the conflict is deterring the adversary. But where where the overlap happens is we have incredible opportunity to do things in electromagnetic warfare.

To deter the enemy so that they they don't want to do certain things. So an example I always go back to is like every time that they cross a certain line, we may do some communications jamming to make it a safety of flight issue. And so that is deterrent in nature, and that is an electromagnetic attack to make it complicated for the adversary.

Ken Miller (27:02)
So it's basically opening up our aperture to understand that deterrence isn't necessarily just an information, a goal of information. There's an MSO element to deterrence that we can we can utilize. Or one of the things I've questioned throughout the week, and I would like to get your perspective on, is this notion that I feel like a lot of times we make assumptions of our S our EMS superiority or ability to achieve, sustain when we need to for the purposes of I.O.

How can we as a community do better to ensure that our leaders don't make false assumptions on our ability to control the spectrum?

speaker-3 (27:41)
It's things like this conference. It's bringing together these stakeholders. That's the value of this conference, is bringing together such a diverse group of stakeholders, both from industry, academia, military. I even there was somebody from the State Department here on Monday that I spoke to. So it's bringing together the stakeholders to enable, you know, have an environment where they can they can talk to each other, establish these relationships to solve these complex problems.

Ken Miller (28:11)
And I I do think that in any w modern war nowadays, you can no longer isolate one agency and in in control of it because when you deal with spectrum, it's ubiquitous. It touches everyone, both private sector and public sector, warfighter and civilian, State Department, DOD, homeland security. So the challenge of making sure that we understand what we need to the objectives we need to accomplish is critical and we need to do a better job at messaging that.

speaker-3 (28:37)
Yeah, absolutely. And and one thing I would add is the intelligence piece of this is very important because oftentimes that's the why. And so it's very helpful if when these conferences begin with what is the threat? because then we can centralize the discussion on operations in the information environment or electromagnetic spectrum operations in relation to the threat.

Ken Miller (29:01)
So I I I want to bring in Jared Patton here from Booze Allen. Booze Allen obviously plays an important role in industry. you're engaged. What are some of your thoughts based on what Sherm has just talked about in terms of the integration of MSO and IO?

speaker-2 (29:15)
Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things I wanted to jump in on is the the world is looking at Ukraine right now, right? We are watching a a new kind of war happen with all the UAVs and the all the drones being flown around. And MSO is right at the center of that. I actually had in a pre previous job, I worked for a small commercial delivery drone company and we went and talked to the Ukrainians and tried to say, Hey, how can we help? What kind of drones do you need? And they're saying, Look, we need cheap drones that we don't care about losing because they're we're denied.

Right. And that is not an I.O. problem. That is an MSO problem. They were just being denied command and control. They're being denied navigation. And that's just the new war that we're in. So everybody's keep got their eyes on that. I think the the administration and all the leadership in the world right now is really watching closely to see how important MSO is. And I think they're ri finally realizing that it is a critical piece to being able to operate in any domain. And so from but then from the industry side, we need to learn how to go quicker. How do we get things out there quicker? How do we

adapt. We need more systems that could be more adaptable that aren't don't take the long lead times to make changes. So rapid reprogramming and Booz Allen's right at the center of that. We have a core rapid reprogramming capability that we're working on for the Air Force so that we can get those iterations out there with it from one sortie to the next. That's the type of thing that we're doing.

Ken Miller (30:28)
I would imagine not just the iteration of the capability, but the scale too, because no longer are we say we just need five of these systems out there. No, you need thousands and thousands of those systems and you have to replicate that really fast. That puts a lot of strain on industry in terms of how we buy and and field next right next generation. That's

speaker-2 (30:45)
Absolutely right. So scaling from a production standpoint is really important. So that puts pressure on our supply chains, that puts on our manufacturing lines, but but then scale from an operations standpoint. So how do you actually manage the complexity? So now you're not just doing one v1 type of operations or one v few or few v few. You're looking at many v many, which is really hard to for the to understand because of the physics are so challenging when you start propagating all this RF environment.

It gets really messy really fast and there's a lot of different functions. It's not just about communications. It's not just about jamming or or countering the jamming. It's all, it's all the RF and the environment. So you gotta find ways to wade through all of that at scale. That's big data, that's big processing. They're looking at AIML to bring into those things. And that's that's where the trends are headed.

Ken Miller (31:29)
And that's putting a huge strain on traditional acquisition cycles and processes. What are some of the flashpoints that you see on in in that area that we need to really focus our energy, no pun intended, focus our energy on reforming. Yeah. So

speaker-2 (31:44)
We're we're taking an interesting perspective at Booz Allen because we're look seeing things like OTAs and CSOs that are out there that the administration's really pushing on commercial first. So we're trying to get behind that and say, yeah, absolutely. We're partnering with the right companies, making sure that the pipeline for the hardware is there for the electronics and that we can adapt our software very quickly. So what part of what we're our strategy is that we're looking at how do we have a software architecture that can be rapidly adapted to the specific implementation of

of the actual that's based on the conops and and how this these capabilities are gonna be carried into the fight.

Ken Miller (32:17)
But a part of that, of course, then is the development pipelines that we we're we're very stovepiped across n regardless of the capability, whether you're talking MSOIO, stovepipes exist everywhere. But those development pipelines are also have to be reformed. How does Booz Allen address some of those challenges on that front?

speaker-2 (32:34)
Yeah. So one example of where we're really helping the Air Force and working through the pipeline and and improve the ability to go from, you know, overcome that valley of death that people talk about in the acquisition world. We're there we're working to help build the tools. We have high fidelity modeling simulations so we can better understand the capabilities up front, get the integration tools that can go from just a good idea in RD to how do it how would it actually look like on a real system and in a real environment.

understanding that very quickly, very rapidly, iterate on any issues you find and then push that through the system. So there it's something called the EW app pipeline that a lot of people are starting to think about and really look at how do we do that as a community as opposed to each company or each individual defense organization it has to do on their own.

Ken Miller (33:19)
Now I wanna bring Sherm back in here. F based on what what we're talking about in terms of some of the reforms that we need, whether it's the development pipelines, acquisition cycles, training and so forth, what are some of the action items that are kind of right on the front of your mind that once InfoPack twenty twenty six wraps up, this is where we have to focus our our efforts over the coming year in in the EMTO community.

speaker-3 (33:44)
We

were actually I think that exercises and experimentation are ripe because if we're not experimenting about what's in the realm of the possible and exploring new ways of using technology in novel ways, or or maybe even the genesis of new technology that didn't even exist before, or even just the creation of tactics, techniques, and procedures and the innovation within that.

So I'm I'm a huge fan of experimentation and exercising. And and one of the big problems is we need subject matter experts to be informing these exercises and experiments. Because oftentimes if you don't have the right subject matter experts involved in the design of the experiment or the exercise, then there it's not a it's not facilitating the generation of these new concepts and new ideas.

speaker-2 (34:35)
Yeah, I'd love to jump in there too. So so a lot of exercises these days are are very focused, are very looking at how do you coordinate different platforms or or people or vehicles or whatever in in an environment. And bringing in MSO is still a challenging thing to do. We need the tools, we need the infrastructure to understand what is the effect that we expect to create. And then what how does that how does that bal balance with the other parts of the of the exercise and the the things that we're working through and the plans that you're trying to execute?

speaker-3 (35:03)
So I think what we're kind of both saying is that success in all domains cannot be assumed without involving electromagnetic spectrum operations because the spectrum is the one thing that brings that ties all the traditional domains air, land, sea, space, ties it all together universally all the time and you can't turn it off.

Ken Miller (35:24)
So I wanted to pull the thread on this notion of success when we talk about deterrence or deception or any of the goals of the information operations effort. I feel like a lot of the conversation, it's it's very maybe it's the stovepipe nature of it, but it's very linear, point A to point B. We're going to deter or we're going to deceive. But it seems to be a little bit more of a continuum because what you measure as successful in deterrence in phase zero.

You're still going to be deterring in some way, even when the fighting starts. So are we able to adequately adapt our understanding of some of these objectives, especially if we don't have MSO integrated in terms of understanding the the physical environment that we're fighting?

speaker-3 (36:09)
I guess that's one of the challenges is you know, just human nature is we're often focused on the problem that's right in front of us. And so we are focused on deterrence right now and we're putting all an incredible amount of effort into deterrence. but I believe that we need to anticipate possible future scenarios. And so that means we need additional investment to bring down our risk and and and further ensure our success.

If it you know, if we get into warf into a conflict, investments in spectrum operations can reduce risk.

speaker-2 (36:45)
I think one of the additional challenges in the MSO, especially, is what does deception mean? Right? How do you measure that? And I think that's something that we're still trying to figure out. People can get a better understanding of, I can deceive someone through an I.O. operation that, you know, maybe I'm confusing them or giving them false information. But if I'm just trying to deceive them in a way that they don't really know what's real and what's not, how do I measure that? And so there's a human aspect too that needs to be figured out. And everything from the interfaces of how do we interact with the MSO capabilities.

to how is it gonna be perceived on the threat side too and really come up with better concrete ways to achieve that, ties it back into exercises. How do we know what's good, what's bad, and then how do we develop capabilities to to achieve those.

Ken Miller (37:27)
Now, from an industry perspective then, just stepping outside of the walls of this conference, what are a couple of things that you're going to be focusing your efforts on for Booz Allen in terms of making sure that our indust industrial base can respond to the challenges and the requirements set forth by the our combatant commanders?

speaker-2 (37:43)
Yeah, so part of our one of our biggest focuses is on the capabilities that enable getting the capabilities, understanding them earlier and faster and getting them out to the field faster through that app pipeline. So that's all that infrastructure is really one of our big focus areas. The other one we want to focus on is how do we generate data sets so we can start to bring in things like AI and ML.

capabilities into this area because when you look at that big met it's it's ripe for research in this area when you have so much energy and so much data coming in, but there aren't training data sets. RF data is harder to train on and create data sets for compared to imagery. You have the Googles and the and the you know Waymo and all the different companies out there that have all this physical imagery they can drive around cars, take satellite imagery, take it pictures and store them all and then train on them.

But RF is a little bit different, right? It's hard, it's hard to generate that environment in a way that you can then provide to the community to develop those capabilities.

Ken Miller (38:40)
And that environment is always changing too. So if you're you're training against a model of a particular RF environment, that might not be the environment you're actually going to be fighting in.

speaker-3 (38:50)
Going to jump in and say, you know, there's a lot of commercial applic application of the imagery. The the the models and algorithms that have been developed within imagery, there's a huge commercial market for that. the difficult thing is that radio frequency data is a little bit more niche and a little bit more military application specific, unless, of course, you talk to the telecoms that are worried about guaranteeing service to their customers.

And there could be a a very good connection there where we need to the the military defense industrial complex needs to work closer with the telecoms because they may have some lessons with RF management that the military to l learn.

Ken Miller (39:31)
From. Yeah. And I think, you know, one of the natures of modern day EMSO and just war fighting in general is that, you know, we oftentimes talk about being the away team in a in an Indo-Paycom scenario or even Eastern Eastern European scenario, but we might still be the away team, but the geographic distance means absolutely nothing in modern warfare because wet w no matter where you're at, you're you're a node in the a global network and energy is ubiquitous. So how do you

from a operational standpoint, Sherm, or from an industry standpoint, adapt to that new world where, hey, you're doing something for a particular AOR, but at the end of the day, distance doesn't mean what it used to.

speaker-2 (40:12)
Yeah, that's a really tough problem. And to tie back into what Sharon was talking about from the commercial side, the commercial is kind of a steady state, even though the RF has changed and everything, but you don't have the as much active deception or active denial things that are trying to counter what you're trying to do, even when you're just trying to have communication operations to communicate with each other. So going, you know, planning for those environments is even a level above that. So we can do so much in the environment that we have in our everyday lives, but as soon as you start to you have to try to anticipate

What would they do? So you got to think like your enemy and try to and red team yourself and try to say, okay, what would I do in this scenario if I was coming in or if they were coming in and I, you know, want to counter them? How and it's counter, counter, counter back and forth. So the best thing we're trying to do is have the tools and then work with, you know, the the whole community, the intel community, the def all the defense community, all of the sources that we have available. And we just try our best. That's what we can do.

speaker-3 (41:07)
I love what you said about counter, counter, counter, because you know, that's a hallmark of our community. In my mind, there's not very many communities that are that are just it's innate in our blood because everything that we do depends on the enemy's reaction. And then we're thinking of another thing we're gonna do and it's constant back and forth. And so there's a huge degree of innovation within the MSO community, and that's why I think it's exciting to be a part of it.

speaker-2 (41:34)
The other thing, I'll add one more to that is working at the edge without the assumption that you're gonna have the ability to communicate and also trying to do less specific, you know, in in like a tactical EW standpoint, trying to do like a a less specific technique and have a more general on onboard adapt adaptation that you can react to the things you didn't expect, right? So how do how do we have systems? And that's where we're headed from a technology standpoint. A lot of people are trying to

work in that area to advance the capabilities so that we're not so reliant on those long pipelines so that we can, you know, react be reactive or even proactive and try to anticipate what's happening.

Ken Miller (42:12)
Well gentlemen, thank you so much for taking time. It's been a busy week and I I know we've had nonstop meetings, but I really do appreciate you taking a few minutes to join me here on the Crow's Nest.

speaker-3 (42:20)
This was fun, thanks.

speaker-2 (42:21)
Yeah, thank you very much.

Ken Miller (42:22)
Thank you.

That will conclude this episode of From the Crows Nest. I'd like to thank my guests, Dr. William Dollar Young, Scott Sherm Oliver, and Jared Patton for joining me here on the show. Also, please take a moment to review, share, and subscribe to this podcast. We always enjoy hearing from our listeners, so please take a moment to let us know how we're doing. That's it for today. Thanks for listening.