Steve Blank

We just held our eighteenth and final session of our new national security class Technology, Innovation and Modern War. Joe Felter, Raj Shah and I designed a class to examine the new military systems, operational concepts and doctrines that will emerge from 21st century technologies – Space, Cyber, AI & Machine Learning and Autonomy.

Today General James Mattis addressed the class.

Catch up with the class by reading our summaries of the previous seventeen classes here.

Our speaker for our final last class was former Secretary of Defense General Jim Mattis who gave an inspiring talk about service to the nation. General Mattis joined the Marine Corps back in 1969, and he has led Marines and then later Joint forces from every level from platoon commander as a Lieutenant all the way up to combatant commander of US Central Command as a four-star general. He recently led our entire US Defense Department as our country’s 26th Secretary of Defense. We’re fortunate to have him back here at Stanford at the Hoover Institution.

Below are select excerpts from a riveting Q&A session with the teaching team and our students. General Mattis shared a range of compelling experiences and insights that underscored many of the themes of the course.

How do we as a nation, compete against China?
The reality is that Republican and Democratic administrations have tried over 20 some years, to help China. (It was assumed) if we enable them, if we work with them, if they liberalize their economy, political liberalization will follow. It was an untested thesis. And there were a lot of people if they’d read history that might have said, I’m not so sure about that. Because as many of you are aware, the Chinese Communist Party sits on a shaky throne. They cannot liberalize politically, or they will lose power. It’s that simple. They’re not going to liberalize. They’ve made the choice. It’s loud and clear, it goes on over decades.

From Brussels to Washington, DC, certainly from Tokyo, to Canberra to New Delhi, there’s an appreciation that China wants to rewrite the rules. And there’s no reason to think an authoritarian country at home, would somehow write liberal rules abroad. That’s not what history teaches you. Countries don’t treat foreigners better than their own people. So you have to recognize the CCP is becoming more authoritarian- for example over Hong Kong, over their Uighurs, over their own people with social grades now being assigned social responsibility, job, grades, and that sort of thing.

When the National Defense Strategy came out, stating that China is our number one competitor, it was done with the idea that if we can buy the peace, keep the peace, one more year, one more month, one more week, one more day, this gives our diplomats the time to work. And try keeping our values foremost, to show the world we mean to make this work. We are not out to keep China down.

What do you think is the opportunity for Silicon Valley and the students in our class here at Stanford, to play a role in national security?
Well, the first point I would make is, we need every one of your good ideas. This is not a government that’s run in Washington and does its own thing like Beijing does, or Moscow does in their country. This is a government of the people, by the people for the people. We have no ordained right to victory on the battlefield. If we want to keep these freedoms we have – the freedoms that bring so many people from around the world to Silicon Valley – those freedoms are going to have to be defended, because there’s always people who think the way to run things is to beat heads, not to count heads.

For those countries that don’t operate off that, you cannot wish them away, you cannot make them into something you want them to be because you think the people there are like you. They are like you. A taxi driver in Leningrad, for example is much like a taxi driver in San Francisco. The problem is not with the people in those countries, it’s with a system. So we’re going to have to deal with that system, and make sure that we draw the very best of our young people.

And you don’t have to stay for 40 some years like me, but you should come in and do it for a few years. Maybe what you want to do is really emphasize education in your local community. And be on the local school board when you’re 26 years old- do your homework and go for it. Maybe you want to be on the city council and help adjust housing policies so that normal people with normal paychecks can actually afford to buy a house in this town.

We need others of you to move into these very technical issues and help us find our way forward. But the bottom line is you really need to consider that this freedom, just because the draft went away, it doesn’t mean you get to live here scot free. Some people say, a country’s like a bank, you can only take out of it what you’re willing to put in. We got a lot of people nowadays who think they can take out. But they don’t have to put anything in. Number one, that’s a good way to end up on a psychiatrist’s couch when you’re about 45 saying that in my selfish life, I didn’t do a whole lot of good to other human beings. So I don’t recommend that. But number two, it’s just a heck of a lot of fun to roll up your sleeves, and work alongside others in a great cause. You’ll never regret it, you’ll have the best days of your life, you’ll have the worst days of your life there. By golly, you’re really living when you’re doing this. And for those of you who want to go into military, I recommend it.

Are we correct to emphasize that it’s less about the technology, and more about how we use it?
Well, we’re fortunate, I think that we are at the leading edge – at the  cutting edge – on technology. It’s why so many young people who are bright come to Palo Alto and the area, or to Boston, to Seattle, Texas, all these places where we have this going on. I don’t think it’s either or, but If I was to concentrate on the area most important, it would be on the integration. I study a lot of history, not because it gives me all the answers, but it tells me how other people dealt successfully or unsuccessfully with similar situations. Not every situation is unique. And so it teaches you what questions to ask.  And I’ll give you an example of a military technology where some people didn’t develop it -didn’t develop the 2.0 version -but used it better than anyone else.

World War One, the British are sick and tired of their boys going against barbed wire and machine guns. And they say if we could cross that ground in an armored vehicle, and then fight, or fight from the armored vehicle, we’d save a lot of lives. And so they developed the tank, right in the middle of the war. They weren’t thinking ahead. They got caught flat footed. Tanks are big, they didn’t work well and everything else. But they had the tank. British had the tank. They even had some pretty good tactics to tell the truth, developed over the next few years after the war. Well, everybody else said, Oh, I want one of those too. Mankind being what they are, they’re always looking for a different way to whack each other. And so everybody starts making tanks. Guess who had the best tank by 1939? People think the Germans. Aha, not by a longshot. The French had better tanks. Tank for tank, French had the better tank by 1938/39. But the Germans integrated the tank better. So the British had tank 1.0. Let’s just say the French had 2.0. And the Germans were about 1.5. But the Germans put a radio in their tank to talk to a dive bomber overhead. And they trained their people- educated them to use initiative. And now they unleash what you and I call lightning war -blitzkrieg- across Europe in 1940. They didn’t invent the tank -they didn’t develop the tank very well. They didn’t even have the most modern tank, but they integrated that technology better than anyone else did. And they unleashed hell across Europe. So that just shows the priority of integrating capabilities better, more effectively, more broadly, in a more focused way than someone else. That’s where you get your advantage.

What new technology threats do you see?
The new threats that are coming, we can see them mostly in the cyber, and the space domains. Those are two new domains. We fought on this planet for about 10,000 years on the land and sea, then in the last hundred years, the air. In the last 15 years, we’ve added cyber and space.  I would tell you that in these areas, we are integrating them now.

But there’s also fundamental changes coming in the way we deal with one another as human beings. Talking about artificial intelligence here, how we deal with life. And all of these are double edged swords. Every one of them, I can tell you has a double edge. So we better figure out how we’re going to deal with these emerging technologies, hypersonics this sort of thing. And try to keep the peace for one more year, one more month, one more week.

What do you think the future of warfare looks like?
I got a phone call one day. I was a marine three-star in Afghanistan. The Secretary General of NATO called me. He said, I’ve been approved by your president to call you. You’re going to be put in charge of the Supreme Allied Commander for NATO transformation. And in the US, you’re going to command U.S. Joint Forces Command. Your job is to feel out future warfare. And I thought, I better start reading about this, because I’ve been an infantry guy fighting all this time. So I read 20 some books. And every military book started with Alexander the Great. There’s a reason he’s called the great by the way.

Every military that successfully transformed, successfully modernized, did one thing in particular, the ones that succeeded. They defined the specific problem they were trying to solve.  And what they did was they defined the problem so well, that the solution became more apparent to them. Go to Einstein, if he had 60 minutes to save the world, he was asked how he would compose his thoughts. He said, I’d spend 55 minutes defining the problem, then we’d save the world in five minutes. So how does that impact here? I would tell you that in this case, it is going to be a combination of the legacy systems and the breakthrough technologies that are coming right now. But remember this, I was thinking, as you all were briefing your strategies earlier, for 2022 and up to 2030. There’s a boxer who said everyone’s always got a plan until they get slugged in the face.

I remember when we were explaining to some Russian officers after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and we were meeting and actually getting along with each other in those days. It went bad under Putin, but for a little while, in this window, I remember one of our officers saying, you know, with our air forces, you weren’t going to move across Europe. He said, Oh, we weren’t worried about that.  I was kind of curious, I said, why not? He said, because you weren’t going to be flying many of your air forces when my T-72‘s. were parked on your runway.

In other words, there’s the give and take of war. Where you see an advantage that we held, and we did hold a great advantage in the air. And they didn’t have the air defenses that would have been sufficient to stop us in all most cases. But what they were going to do is using a past technology. They were going to deny us the use of ours. So what does this look like? We’ll see all these new weapons being fielded. And some will work some will not work as well, some will be destabilizing, some will actually not be used at all. Just the threat will be sufficient.

For example, right now, if you walk into a geographic combatant command, there’s a whole bunch of men and women sitting there in the senior operations shop, and they’re watching the intel on the board. And there’s a guy sitting there talking to the aircraft carriers, another one talking to the Air Force fighter, the CAOC, the fighter guys, bombers, that sort of thing. There’s the army missile people in the room. There’s your maneuver brigades in the room, this sort of thing. Well, there’s also sitting there some different  looking guys and gals, mostly civilians. And they’re sitting there and they’re on keyboards, and they’re going very quickly back and forth to some other places. And they are fighting it out in cyber warfare right then. And satellites are being turned to look at certain things. And it’s going on.

And so you’re going to see the integration from the very top, all the way down to an army battalion that’s got an Air Force officer in it. That’s bringing in certain targeting data through an integrated command and control system. In other words, it’s not like it’s all going to be fought by robot, but there’ll be a lot of robots on the field and in the air overhead. It’s not all going to be high tech. In fact, some of the units will be messaging to one another, using motorcycle riders more than likely, because they can’t be cut off by cyber. You’re going to see this mix up and down the scale of technology. And certain breaking technologies are going to then dominate in certain areas. And now it’s up to you to mix and integrate that together in a way. That’s what you do.

Let me tell you what you want to do to the enemy commander. That guy who’s going to make the decision to fall back to fight harder, to do this, do that. You want him facing so many cascading dilemmas that he cannot keep up with them. As he solves this one, three more dilemmas pop up. And you want him on the “horns of a dilemma” constantly. If he moves, he’s going to get hit. If he stays put, he’s going to get hit. If he moves over here, he’s going to get hit. But if he hits you, he’s going to get hit even harder, because he’s now had to fire and now we have more intel on where he’s firing from. It’s a great, great, tragic chess game. And it will be characterized by all the things you’re studying now and surprises the enemy has up their sleeve.

A Principled Strategy- First
When I walked into the Pentagon-my first day there-it’s noon on a Saturday. And there is the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, four Star Marine General, I knew well. A four star Air Force general I knew well as the vice chairman. And one holdover from the Obama administration required by law, who’s the Deputy Secretary of Defense under President Obama. And that’s the four of us, we’re going to be for six months, the people that make all the decisions there. I said, you know, guys, I’ve been asking for a strategy for a month in case the Senate asked me about it in my hearing, they didn’t, but you didn’t give it to me. I know I couldn’t give you an order beforehand, because the Senate would take umbrage. I didn’t have their consent yet. But I said, I want the strategy. And I need it right now, because I’m going to be signing next of kin letters, moms and dads. And, the Chairman, looked me right in the eye and said, we don’t have one. We hadn’t had one for 10 years.

This is not a partisan slam on the Obama administration. It’s two different parties, two different administrations. So I went home that night and I started writing it. I carried it with me in every meeting in NATO so I can talk to our allies. My first trip was just Tokyo and Seoul. I took my starting writing with them. I talked to every democrat and republican on Capitol Hill that was willing to talk with me about it. A year later, we rolled it out. And for two years in a row, I was getting record breaking budgets for the Department of Defense, with 87% of the House and Senate Democrats and Republicans voting for it.

So the answer is- do not give up on your principles, your values, your way of life, your constitutional form of government. Create a strategy, and say this is what we stand for, this is what we will not stand for. Put everything in your budget into it.

Move Past America First
I’d recommend the new administration take out of the national security strategy at the White House anything about “America First”. I don’t care how well it was intended. It did not work well. I didn’t like it in the beginning. I like it less now. We didn’t put any of that into the defense strategy. So it could probably pretty much stand. They may need to play with it a little bit and put their thumbprint on it.

But when you get strategies that are built with bipartisan support, as Senator Vandenberg, a right-wing conservative Republican was asked in Michigan 1949, how could you work with that terrible left wing, President Truman, he answered very bluntly, “politics stops at the water’s edge.” Right now we have so few people who’ve seen nonpartisan, bipartisan work. They don’t even recognize that when it happens. But that’s the solution. Real strategic thinking based on traditional strategies and traditional views of America’s role in the world, with less militarism in its foreign policy.

How can we (students) help advance national security and serving our country?
You should, number one, keep learning. Make this your first step of graduate level learning, and keep it going now. In the Marines, every time you get promoted, you get a new reading list, you have to read. Even generals get a new reading list to read. You have to read all these books. But never stop learning because this is a very dynamic world. It’s just awash in change and you have to keep learning.

How do you bring that to bear in your question? And remember, we’ve got a couple of branches of the government that would probably appeal to you. The House and the Senate Armed Services committees, intelligence committees, and foreign relations committees, love to get you bright young folks in there. Oftentimes you don’t stay but four or five years, which seems like a long time to you right now. It’s not, trust me. But it gives you an understanding of how the government works and steeps you in the issues de jour. Another way to do it would be to go into State Department, the CIA, or the Department of Defense, or the Department of Navy, Air Force, Army.

If a little more technically oriented, for example, that might be worth it. If you go to the Secretary of Defense’s office, and just say you’ve lived for a year in Jordan, or you lived for a year in China, we often times try to bring people like you in to be the deputy desk officer. So you can actually bring your knowledge right in. We think if we can snag you young, and show you what we’re doing, we’ll keep you. Years later, you’ll come back. The point I would make is, that even if you don’t stay there for a career, whether it be the Peace Corps, the Marine Corps, whether it be the military or State Department, try to find a way that you can go in and find that you get passionate about something. Because I would just tell you that once you get to that point, it never seems like a job. And you’ll really dig into it because you have the initiative to go deeper because you like what you’re doing.

Keep the Faith – America’s Power of Attraction
And now let me close with something.  I’m a two-star general I’m out in western Iraq. It’s 2004. It’s been 120 degrees, 127 degrees every day. At night, it cools down to 105. We’re outnumbered. We’ve been fighting and fighting and fighting and I pull in at midnight to a Lieutenant probably no more than 18 months out of his undergraduate days in college, and his Sailors and Marines. And when the sun comes up, I’m inside his perimeter out in the middle of nowhere in the desert. And he comes over and he’s telling me Okay, here’s where I’ve been fighting general. And here’s where I’ve lost men. Here’s how many enemy we’ve taken out. And by the way, General we picked up a guy last night he was putting an IED on the road you drove in on. I said, Really? That’s kind of personal. He said, Well, guess what? He lived two years in London. He speaks perfect English. You want to talk to him? I said, Sure.

Because it turns out he’s an engineer. He’s been trained in England. And so he sits down. A marine cuts off a little plastic handcuffs, the guard who’s walking around with him. And obviously, it wasn’t a good night for the man. He’s out there digging his hole. He’s got his artillery round, he’s going to put his car battery in. He’s whistling. He looks up and there’s five guys with automatic rifles pointed at him in camouflage uniforms. It is well, I think my retirement program is not in good shape right now. And I said, What are you doing this for? You’re a Sunni, I can tell that. We’re the Marines. We’re the only friend you’ve gotten this country. Why are you trying to kill us?

And he starts off well, “You’re American. You’re here to steal the oil” and all this. And I said, no, actually, we’re not. I said I pull my wallet out every time pump gas in my doggone car. “But you’re an educated man. You get to talk like that. Just go away. I don’t want to waste my time.” And the Marines stepped forward to take him away and I said, can I sit here for a minute. He said, okay. We’re sitting in the dirt right there by my vehicle. And he said, “I just don’t like foreign forces, foreign soldiers in my country.” Okay, I respect that. I wouldn’t want them in my country. I understand that. We started talking a little bit and getting a cup of coffee and he spilled it all over his hand, he’s so nervous. And I asked him about his family. He’s got a wife and two daughters. They live over on the river about 10 kilometers away. And these Marines are on ratline out in the middle of nowhere, where if they don’t stop the Syrian foreign fighters coming in they’re going to get to Baghdad they’re going to kill a lot of innocent people. So the Marines are getting antsy to get back on the road, get back on patrol and everything. And so at the time I got to get going, and he said, Can I ask you a question? I said, Sure. He said, “I guess I’m going to jail.” You sure are. You’re going to be in Abu Ghraib wearing an orange jumpsuit for a good long time for this little stunt. You’re doggone lucky you’re not dead. And he said, “Do you think general? You think if I’m a model prisoner, do you think my family and I could immigrate to America?”

Think about that my fine young friends. On your worst day. I want you to remember that story. Think about that. That he would give anything right now to be sitting where I’m sitting and his daughter sitting where you’re sitting, right now. As imperfect as we are, as angry as we are at each other in this country right now but seems angrier than I was even at terrorists when I’m shooting them. Think of how great this country is on its worst day, and then roll your sleeves up and make it better. It’s that simple- make it stronger. Keep faith with each other, help each other. And remember three words, “put others first.” And you won’t be going to some shrink when you’re 45 years old wondering what you did with your life. Have a good night, young folks. And thanks for having me here.

A transcript of General Mattis’s talk is here and the video is below.

If you can’t see the video click here.

Lessons Learned

• What a fitting end to the class
• Class summary and lessons learned in our next and final post

Filed under: National Security, Technology Innovation and Modern War | 1 Comment »

We just held our seventeenth session of our new national security class Technology, Innovation and Modern War. Joe Felter, Raj Shah and I designed a class to examine the new military systems, operational concepts and doctrines that will emerge from 21st century technologies – Space, Cyber, AI & Machine Learning and Autonomy.

Today’s topic was Organizational Design and Modern War. And Finals Prep.

Catch up with the class by reading our summaries of the previous sixteen classes here.

This was our next -to-last class. While this class focused on the impact new technology and operational concepts and modern war, we thought it was important to have our students understand the organizational and cognitive barriers that make adopting new technologies difficult. Our guest speaker was Safi Bahcall,author of Loonshots.

The pre-class assignment was to watch Safi’s video about Loonshots.

In addition to our speaker, today was presentation prep day for our students’ final papers. We met with all the teams and reviewed their final summaries. (A description of their final assignment follows the summary of Safi’s presentation.)

I’ve extracted and paraphrased a few of Safi’s key insights and urge you to read the entire transcript here and watch his video.

—

Invention versus Innovation
As I’ve been sitting in the back of the class for the last couple of months, I’ve seen great speakers on strategy, on technology, on invention. I’m using the word invention deliberately — not innovation — because invention and innovation are different things. That point is at the heart of the problem with innovation inside so many organizations.

Invention is having an idea. For example, in the 1920s, when Robert Goddard showed that we could propel metal tubes by exploding liquid fuel inside them, he invented jet propulsion. That was a great invention. It didn’t become an innovation until it was developed and deployed at scale. In the case of jet propulsion, it wasn’t the U.S. that innovated. It was Nazi Germany with the V1 and the V2 missiles, and the Messerschmitt 262, the first jet aircraft.

So what’s at the core of the problem for national security organizations? What’s stopping them from innovating faster and better? It’s not strategy. The 2018 National Defense Strategy explained very clearly and effectively what needs to get done. It’s not technology. The military has 76 innovation labs. It’s not leadership. Leaders across every service are pounding the table about innovation.

Organization Design
The military has three of the four pieces of the puzzle you need: strategy, access to technology, leadership. The fourth, however, is missing. And that’s organization design. Good teams will kill great ideas, no matter how smart the strategy, how enticing the technology, or how much leaders insist on innovation. Why that’s the case is a longer story, which I’ve written about, but the bottom line is that we need to design our organizations to solve that problem — the adoption problem. If we don’t do that, we will lose.

I’ll give you an example. For close to 60 years, IBM dominated the IT industry. The industry was known as IBM and the Seven Dwarfs because IBM’s competitors were so far behind. If there was a superpower in any industry, it was IBM in IT. There were a couple of little competitors in the 80s, who didn’t seem like much. A little company in Seattle called Microsoft. When they did their first partnership with IBM, they had just 32 employees. There was another little company in Santa Clara called Intel. They were running out of cash. Little competitors that IBM disregarded.

Does the story of a superpower ignoring distant threats from seemingly weak competitors sound familiar from the class discussions on China? For IBM, strategy was not the problem. Invention was not the problem. Just like the DOD, IBM has tons of innovation labs. Many widely used technologies originated at IBM. Leadership was not the problem. IBM has been pounding the table about innovation for years. But if you look at IBM today, it’s 1/10^th the value of Microsoft, it’s half the value of Intel. Strategy, technology, leadership – those were fine. But good teams kept killing great ideas. That’s the adoption problem.

So what can we do? There are some ways. They’re not obvious. They’re not what you read about in glossy magazines. They have nothing to do with fuzzy words like culture.

It’s About Creating The Structure for Adoption
It’s about structure. How do you create the right structure that helps with adoption? One of the things I found very encouraging over the last couple years in speaking with leadership in military or intelligence is their curiosity about what’s happening in the private sector, outside their usual sandbox.

When I sat down with Admiral Selby, we talked about Google. Google, at the time, was overhauling the back end of their search engine. They built their search engine 20 years ago. And they needed to fix the guts of it because it was out of date. Not unlike big legacy systems in the military. Google was getting that job done in blocks of six months. Selby pointed out that nothing like that could get done in the military in six months. It might take six years, if not 60 years. So how does Google get it done in six months? And what can the military learn from that?

We don’t have time to get into all the details we discussed, but I’ll give you a flavor.

Five Patterns that Impede Adoption
I’ll start with five patterns I’ve observed across the service branches, and what we might do about them.

1. The first is a preference for big versus small. Many of your previous speakers have talked about that. Bigger jets, bigger engines, bigger ships, as opposed to the small changes that can make an enormous difference.
2. The second is a preference for product over strategy. A preference for things that you can touch – ships, guns, planes. As opposed to new strategies that are less obvious, less glamorous, but can make an enormous difference. For example, the tank was invented in the mid-1910s. And it was used in World War I. But it wasn’t the tank as a technology, by itself, that allowed Nazi Germany to take over Western Europe in a matter of weeks. It was their strategy, the Blitz. Focusing on technology alone, getting caught up in the shiny glamour of it and neglecting the less glamorous strategies on how to deploy those technologies creatively, is a common trap. Not just in the military, but also in Silicon Valley, where it dooms otherwise successful companies.
3. The third is a focus on technology as opposed to transfer. In other words, a large investment in acquiring sexy new technology. With much less energy and attention on identifying and navigating the internal barriers to adoption. Assuming that good ideas and technologies will win the day, by themselves, and neglecting the often-hidden sources of internal resistance, agendas, misaligned incentives, legacy stakes. You can spend billions on great technology, on dozens of innovation labs, but if you don’t put energy and creativity into winning those internal battles, the technologies will die.
4. The fourth is a focus on prototyping as opposed to pretotyping. Pretotyping is about what to do beforethe minimum viable product. How to test hypotheses incredibly fast. In one day for $100. Doing it well bakes into the system a preference for hypotheses rather than opinions; fast experiments rather than big plans; and testing ideas and strategies, not just products and technologies.
5. And the fifth pattern is a focus on minimizing as opposed to maximizing risks. By which I mean maximizing the intelligent risk-taking you need to discover important breakthroughs. I see this all the time in mission-driven, as opposed to profit-driven, organizations. When lives are at stake, there’s an enormous focus on reducing risk. In the military, you don’t want a lot of risk in your parachutes, or in your nuclear silos. But if you want to discover a new technology before your competitor, you want risk. You want to fail. A lot. If you only try things that don’t fail then you won’t discover the truly important breakthroughs, the ones where everyone gave up because they didn’t think it could be done. And who will discover them? Your adversary, who is taking those risks, who is working through the nine failures to get to then 10^th iteration, the one that works. And you’ll see that 10^th iteration when it’s too late, when it’s a bullet coming at your head.

Three Solutions
I’m not going to talk about reforming the acquisition process, which many of your class speakers have mentioned and does need to get done. Doing that is like turning an aircraft carrier. It’s incredibly slow, because of all the stakeholders. I’m going to talk about some things that are easier to do. More like a surgical strike.

1. 1 is measurement. If you can’t measure it you can’t manage it. Conversely, the things you measure well, with easily understood and visible metrics, tend to improve without much extra push. So how you do that with innovation? Follow the money is the bottom line. But the fact that we aren’t doing that at all is a real problem. I remember speaking with someone senior at the Joint Chiefs of Staff who said, “We have no tangible way of knowing how we’re doing on innovation across the service branches. Absolutely no idea.” If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.
2. 2, rewards. A quote from a major in the Air Force, “You get promoted in the Air Force by not screwing up. Trying something new means risking failure, scaring people around you, and therefore risking advancement. Do what the guy did before you and train those below you to do what you do.” A widespread mindset in the DoD is that the No. 1 priority is don’t get fired. What are the implications of that mindset? How much risk will people take? I mean among the people that you want to be taking intelligent risks, the ones that you want to discover new technologies and strategies before your adversaries do? Do you want the No. 1 priority in the minds of those people to be how do I play it safe?
3. The need for a “special forces” for innovation. Not another innovation lab but standing up a new functional combatant command of program champions who can identify the internal barriers to adopting new technologies, come up with solutions, and get the job done. With representatives from each of the service branches. A joint surgical strike on innovation, rather than a disconnected massive attack.

There’s a widespread failure to understand that being a good inventor and a good champion are vastly different skill sets. The idea of radar was discovered by a pair of scientists in the Naval Research Labs 18 years before World War II started. They were great inventors, but lousy champions. The idea sat there for a decade until a naval officer named Deak Parsons discovered it, went around to every bureau chief, pounded the table on why it mattered, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, until he got them to cough up a check for $5,000 to fund the project. Robert Goddard was another great inventor, lousy champion. It’s because there was no good champion for that idea here in the U.S. that the Nazis – who got the idea from Goddard’s papers – developed missiles and jet aircraft first.

You heard in an earlier class from General Shanahan about a bullheaded Colonel named Drew Cukor who pounded the table to stand up Project Maven and JAIC to  bring AI to the military. Cukor is the most recent in a long line of internal champions, like Deak Parsons or Vannevar Bush, or Schreiver with ICBMs, or Moffett with aircraft carriers, or Rickover with the nuclear Navy. They were all great champions. Not inventors.

What we need is a new functional combatant command to attract, train, and deploy great champions. To develop the next generation of Drew Cukors or Deak Parsons or Bernard Schrievers, rather than hoping and praying that maybe we’ll get lucky and another disrupter will come along in time and modernize the military. We no longer have that luxury. We cannot afford to start our conflicts with yesterday’s technology and hope that we will catch up. Not in the era of data and algorithms. Chris Brose was quoting was John McCain when he said, “Hope is not a strategy.”

We need a separate command for the same reason that we need cyber or special operations as a separate command. The problem is endemic to all the service branches, not specific to just one. And there’s a unique skill set that needs to be developed. Good champions need to be mediators, buffers between technologists and soldiers. They need to be bilingual, to speak the language of each side fluently. They need to understand product market fit: why some ideas will get traction, others won’t. They need to identify hidden organizational barriers and come up with solutions. They need to understand horizontal influence: how to influence people over whom they have no direct authority. All of those are special skills, with best practices and useful lessons to be learned from years of examples across the different branches. Yet no such training exists today.

Google does it. Microsoft does it. They’ve understood the importance of having a special forces unit for innovation champions and have done it well. They create a career ladder to retain people in the role, to build experience and skill, to convey prestige and respect. They keep the role neutral, like Switzerland, neither on the research side, nor on the operation side, but in between, like a mediator needs to be.

If you create a joint special forces for innovation Sherpas, for program champions, you not only gain the ability to innovate faster and better as an organization. You improve your ability to attract, retain, and motivate talent. When I put out that War on the Rocks article, I got emails from very impressive people, with an entrepreneurial bent, who had left the military, but clearly wanted to contribute. They said, “If that division was there, sign me up.”  You put a purple rope around it, you make that command hard to get into, you make it as cool as SOCOM.

Read the transcript of Safi’s entire talk and watch the video below.

If you can’t see the video click here.

Filed under: National Security, Technology Innovation and Modern War | Leave a comment »

We just held our sixteenth session of our new national security class Technology, Innovation and Modern War. Joe Felter, Raj Shah and I designed a class to examine the new military systems, operational concepts and doctrines that will emerge from 21st century technologies – Space, Cyber, AI & Machine Learning and Autonomy.

Today’s topic was Acquisition and Sustainment and Modern War.

Catch up with the class by reading our summaries of the previous fifteen classes here.

Some of the readings for this week included How the DOD Acquires Weapons Systems, The Planning, Programming and Budgeting Process, Acquisition Reform in the NDAA, Defense Primer on DOD Contractors, and on the Defense Industrial Base

Our guest speaker was the Honorable Ellen Lord the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment. She is responsible to the Secretary of Defense for acquisition; developmental testing; contract administration; logistics and materiel readiness; installations and environment; operational energy; chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons; the acquisition workforce; and the defense industrial base.

Prior to this appointment, Ms. Lord served as the President and Chief Executive Officer of Textron Systems Corporation, a subsidiary of Textron Inc. leading a multi-billion dollar business with a broad range of products and services supporting defense, homeland security, aerospace, infrastructure protection, and customers around the world.

I’ve extracted and paraphrased a few of Ellen Lords key insights and urge you to read the entire transcript here and watch her video.

Progress in Modernizing the Defense Acquisition System.
Everything we do here at the Department is under the framework of our National Defense Strategy, or NDS. Acquisition and sustainment is focused on supporting all three lines of the national defense strategy. So they are:

1. restoring military readiness as we build a more lethal force
2. expanding and strengthening alliances and partnerships.
3. bringing business reform to the Department of Defense.

Strengthening Our Supply Chain
So under the first line of effort, lethality, we’re focused on addressing supply chain fragility. The nature of today’s near peer or peer to peer threat is not always kinetic. One of the ways our adversaries try to gain the advantage is by attacking our supply chain through methods like fraud, introduction of counterfeit materials, control of raw materials, cyber and intellectual property attacks, denying access to strategic materials and rare earth minerals. And finding ways basically to undermine our free market system.

The United States is reliant on a global supply chain for our goods, systems and services. In most instances, this is really very positive. We’re enriched by investments from other countries, which often helped to build infrastructure that supports a variety of industries. However, we really need to remain vigilant about reliance on adversarial countries, when it becomes to our defense industrial base, and our national security systems. Should our adversaries choose to restrict supplies, It’s really possible that the department would struggle to find, test, and qualify replacement sources if they even exist. So, the DODs report that we wrote in response to executive order 13806. The report came out in 2018, highlighted reliance on foreign suppliers, including China for critical materials such as rare earth elements and microelectronics.

For example, China has an 80% market share in rare earth elements, as well. As well as a significant market share in manufacturing value added rare earth containing goods, such as electric motors and consumer electronics. Rare earth elements are integral to the US military and to the national infrastructure and economy. They’re used in a wide variety of applications, ranging from guidance systems for missiles and space, space launch vehicles, to electric vehicles and sophisticated medical instrumentation.

Expanding and strengthening alliances and partnerships
In accordance with the second line of effort in the NDS, strengthening alliances, we’re actively working to better harness defense trade as a strategic tool to advance national security interests. We are tracking 37 initiatives across DOD focused on four main areas. Designing in exploitability early in programs. Facilitating technical release ability. Capturing market space versus Russia, for instance. And increasing industrial capacity.

And in addition to strengthening our interoperability with allies and partners. Reforms in each of these areas will strengthen the foreign military sales process. It will enhance the defense industrial bases global competitiveness, and it will increase our supply chain export capability. As we move into fiscal year 2021, an effort we call defense trade modernization will help implement both DOD as well as interagency process to streamline and allow the US to more rapidly export technology in order to drive this interoperability because we don’t fight alone when we fight. As well as to sustain our domestic industrial base.

Business Reform – The 5000 Series
In support of the NDS’s third line of effort, reform. Our organization is committed to enabling an acquisition environment designed to deliver warfighting capability at the speed of relevance, versus one that’s defined by bureaucracy. One of my team’s most significant accomplishments has been rewriting what we call the 5000 series.– the overarching policy on DOD acquisition that focuses on what I call creative compliance. So that acquisition professionals can design acquisition strategies that minimize risk.

The 5000 rewrite achieves that objective by decomposing a large policy document into six clear and separate pathways that we call the adaptive acquisition framework or AAD. Each pathway is tailored to the unique characteristics of the capability being acquired. The six pathways include urgent capability acquisition, middle tier of acquisition, major capability acquisition, software acquisition, defense business systems, and acquisition of services.

The software acquisition pathway is the newest pathway in the adaptive acquisition framework. Given that software is central to every major DOD mission and system, we need to acquire and deliver software with much greater speed, agility, and cyber security. The software pathways built on commercial principles that really enable innovation and rapid delivery in response to conditions of uncertainty. We have rapidly changing user needs; we’ve got disruptive technologies and threats on the battlefield. The policy tailors, as well as streamlines acquisition and requirements, processes, reviews and documents- to adopt a modern development practice, like agile and DevOps, or DevSecOps.

It’s a substantial departure from the department’s usual way of doing business, by removing procedural bottlenecks and regulatory bureaucracy. Programs are really pushed to embrace the goal of delivering capabilities on a much faster cycle time in one year or less, while emphasizing and ensuring cyber security.

Cybersecurity is Integral
One of the subordinate functional areas is cybersecurity, which is a foundational aspect of any acquisition that cannot be traded for cost, schedule or performance. To ensure cyber security is also foundational for our partners in industry, the department created the Cybersecurity Maturity Model certification, which we call CMMC. It’s scalable, auditable and repeatable. A cybersecurity standard that industry partners will be required to obtain, depending on the level of cybersecurity required in a specific contract.

This morning, the cyber security model certification DFARS rule, and we live by the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation standards was posted on the US Federal registry as an interim rule. The public’s going to be able to comment on the rule for 60 days. And then at the end of the 60-day period, the rule will go into effect. Therefore, it will require all DOD contracts by October 21, 2025, a five year span, to have some level of CMMC. Now, I think of this as we think of ISO quality. The same kind of idea.

Risk Management Tools
The department launched a pilot program with commercial risk management tools. The one we use is called Exigers DDIQ. To really assist with rapidly identifying reputable vendors and vetting the sources of their supplies. We need to know who is in our supply chain, who the beneficial owner is. Not just that we’re dealing with a shell company. So this tool is fed in to our department’s ADVANA analytics platform. And we’re able to provide supply chain illumination that is now essential to the department’s execution of all US Defense production act authorities. To be able to make sure we increase capacity and throughput in our supply chain. To make sure that we not only help the Department of Defense, but we work with all of our partners to acquire vital personal protective equipment and medical supplies in response to COVID-19.

Our enhanced understanding and rapid vetting of the supply chain has helped mitigate the award of fraudulent contracts to opportunists. And there are many, many out there. Ensuring the effective use of the CARES Act funding we’ve received from Congress.

What do you consider your most important reforms initiated under your leadership today?
One is the fact that we have made acquisition much simpler to understand and use. In terms of instead of having this big book that you read through and use it like a pilot’s checklist. We now have the acquisition process, broken into different pieces that can be adapted.

Out of all of those pieces, I think the most significant accomplishment is the software pathway. We’ve basically said, our major weapon systems are hardware enabled, but they’re software defined. And we need to make sure we continually evolve that software, from development, to production to sustainment. it’s all a continuum. And we actually are really excited to have been able to work with the hill with Congress to define some pathfinder projects for a software Color of Money. Because previously, we spent so much time on administrivia. But very important administrivia, to make sure we were legally compliant with colors of money. This is going to be able to unleash our business processes to keep up with technical innovation.

What do you what are the biggest challenges and opportunities going forward for further reform?
I think it’s really communicating both with industry, to understand middle-tier acquisition, how we no longer need clearly defined requirements. We can basically try to define a capability and see the art of the possible. To make sure that industry understands how they can work with contracting professionals to get on contract. And then also to teach our contracting workforce, what we have for capability and really unleash them to innovate.

I always think that technical innovation is way sexier and easier to do for all the obvious reasons than business Innovation. Because people are afraid, they’re going to break the law and go to jail or be hauled up in front of the news. Or get pulled up onto the hill for a hearing which can be lots of fun. What we have to do is show that our acquisition professionals, our business professionals, can make a huge difference to the warfighter. No kidding, they can get capability in warfighters hands much more quickly.

Many argue that maintaining our technology edge, it’s less about technology and more about the speed in which it can be identified and deployed. Would you agree with this assessment?
How do you quickly apply it to the warfighting gaps we have? My whole team works very closely with the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Hyten. His responsibility through the JROC is to define requirements for the warfighter.

My responsibility through our acquisition process is to get it there quickly. And the challenges is the valley of death we have between development of cool technical things and applying them in a way that the warfighter can use them. So we like to work on the art of the possible. How do we get going? How do we enable that technical collaboration to meet the needs of the warfighter?

How would your organization increase collaboration between industry and government, especially at the startup and small company level?
Most of our innovation comes from small businesses. It’s absolutely vital to us at Department of Defense. So I believe regardless of where you work, and what your mission is, everything comes down to communication. So early on, I knew that my team could only communicate and meet with so many people. So I decided we would use the industry associations as our force multiplier. To echo and amplify what messages we have. But just as importantly, if not more importantly, for us to listen to what industry needs.

So what we do is, I bring about 15 people, and we’re doing this virtually now, just as well as we did it in person, quarterly, working with three industry associations. They pulled together about 15 or so CEOs. They develop the agenda. I bring our service acquisition leads, I bring a number of A&S individuals, and we talk with industry about what their challenges are. What they’re doing. I also bring the big primes in one company, once a month. With their senior leadership team, my senior leadership team, again, service acquisition representatives, and we talk about the issues.

What’s changed in how you’re preparing our acquisition professionals for these new ways of doing business?
We used to lock them down at the Defense Acquisition University for two or three weeks and put our finger on the transmit button and lecture in what I’d call like a 30, 40-year-old way. We’ve changed that. We’ve been totally virtual since March. But more importantly, we do lots of podcasts, we are instead of taking the very what I consider dry policy, we do interviews with the program executive officers with program managers and get them to tell stories about the acquisition problems they’ve had. And how they’ve used some of the authorities we have. Because again, I want that creative compliance. People are so worried about doing something wrong, that they rather do nothing at all. Which isn’t helping us.

So it’s very different in terms of a lot of real time presentations. A lot of podcasts, a lot of self-service type of work. We also actually licensed from TED Talks, what we call TEDx DAU. And so we just finished with our second round of TED talks on Defense Acquisition. And it’s kind of acquisition at the edge.

How is the purchase of new weapon systems technologies is coordinated with the development of new doctrine or new operational concepts?
The NDS tells us that we are pivoting from violent extremist organizations, to peer-to-peer threats, that we see around the second island chain with China. So what we have to do is change our warfighting capability. We are working very closely with the Joint Staff and the services as we develop that new doctrine. It’s something we do on weekly meetings with the SecDef. Dynamic force employment for instance. We are deploying ships, aircraft, that just show up different places a little bit more surprisingly.

What we’re doing is listening to that voice of the customer, the Warfighter about what are the electronic warfare capabilities they need. What are the all-domain command and control that they need, now that we are truly an interoperable force?. And we’re working closely with the Joint Staff through the JROC with General Hyten. I So it’s taking that technology and applying it where needed with lots of cycles, lots of iterations, back and forth.

Do you think Anduril’s model where a company develops a product on their own dime and then sells it to the DOD versus DOD funds the development is the future of defense tech procurement?
I think there is very much a place for the Anduril type model, as well as the traditional companies, I think we need a whole spectrum. Because a company is not going to build an aircraft carrier or a fighter jet or a large satellite on their own. It’s just too complex, too cumbersome. But smaller options, I think are very much what we want to see. We want to see those developments. We want to get them in the hands of the warfighter as soon as possible.

That’s where we’re using Other Transaction Authorities to get going on that. That’s what DIU does. We’re using middle tier of acquisition to rapidly field prototypes and new production..

How does the DOD ensure operational security and its acquisitions when there’s such a vast range in diversity of corporate contributors to the national security ecosystem?
OPSWC, as we call it is incredibly important. On one hand, one of my prime focus areas has been cybersecurity of the defense industrial base. That’s why we rolled out CMMC, it’s like ISO is to quality, it will be for cyber security.

So that was huge, making sure that the infrastructure of companies are adequately protected. And again, scaling. it’s different, if we buy combat gear, you know, boots, or clothing, versus if we’re buying a fighter jet. You need a different level of security. But also, what we’re doing with our new 5000 rewrite, one of the functional areas was cybersecurity. We are writing in cyber security standards to how you design new systems.

We also spend an enormous amount of time with NSA and Cybercom. With exquisite intelligence we get on what adversaries are trying to do to our weapon systems. And we are going back and continuing to harden the already fielded systems. We are we have new KPPS, if you will, for designing in the cybersecurity of the new systems. And then of course, we are looking at mergers and acquisitions.

I spend quite a bit of my time on with the Committee on Foreign investment in the US, CFIUS, which was firmed up by FIRRMA. But bottom line, we when there is a national security threat can block transactions acquisitions, and now with FIRRMA we can block acquisition of real estate adjacent to critical national security spots, and we can also intervene in JV’s.

Some students in our class that that aspire to public service.  Any thoughts on advice and recommendations how they might approach this?
I was 33 years in industry, before coming into government. And this government job is by far the most fascinating job I’ve had. I was very fortunate to do some things in industry that I’m proud of, and I think were significant, but there is just so much you can do in government.

So on a fundamental level, I would say connect with people. We have rather Byzantine hiring processes. I didn’t even know that USA Jobs existed before I came on to the federal government. But that’s where we advertise all of our jobs. But you have to connect with people. And you need to talk about what you’re interested in doing. Reach out to someone currently in government and talk a little bit about what generally they’re interested in what they would like to do. Because you don’t know what you don’t know. But you’ve got to start a conversation.

I will tell you, you’re never going to make a lot of money working in government, however, you particularly at junior levels will be exposed to so, so, so much more than you could be in the same amount of time in industry. And I’d say a one-to-three-year stint would be incredibly enriching for your background, regardless of what you do with the balance of your career. I fantasize about getting people back in for one to two years that perhaps served for seven to 10 years, then went out to industry. I would just love to get some logisticians from Southwest or a trucking company or Amazon to come and work with us. Because what we do at the Defense Logistics Agency, it’s eye watering. It’s just unbelievable. So I’d say communication, communication, communication.

I grew up my father was a lawyer, he served in the army in World War Two. But we never talked about what it was to serve. And not only is it really incredible to be part of something much bigger than just you, it’s amazing how much impact you can have, and how much you can see and learn.

Read the transcript of Ellen Lord’s talk and watch the video below.

If you can’t see the video click here.

Lessons Learned

• The 5000 series is the DODs the policy on acquisition – how they buy things
  • We’ve strengthened our supply chain, expanded our alliances and partnerships and we reformed the 5000 series
  • Added a path to acquire software
  • Built cybersecurity compliance into acquisition
• These reforms have made working with the government much simpler to understand

Filed under: National Security, Technology Innovation and Modern War | Leave a comment »

We just held our fifteenth session of our new national security class Technology, Innovation and Modern War. Joe Felter, Raj Shah and I designed a class to examine the new military systems, operational concepts and doctrines that will emerge from 21st century technologies – Space, Cyber, AI & Machine Learning and Autonomy.

Today’s topic was Midterms with Congressman Mike Gallagher.

Catch up with the class by reading our summaries of the previous fourteen classes here.

Our guest speaker Congressman Mike Gallagher, a member of the House Armed Services Committee.

Congressman Mike Gallagher is one of the leading thinkers in defense in Congress. He’s a Princeton and Georgetown graduate; served in the Marine Corps, with deployments in Anbar province; got his Ph.D; joined a startup; has been reelected to his third term, representing the 8th district of Wisconsin; and is on the House Armed Services Committee.

The Congressman was gracious enough to take on two roles in this class session: First he shared his views on the future of defense, and second, he received a formal policy recommendation – our midterm assignment – as a briefing from one of our students.

I’ve extracted and paraphrased a few of key insights and urge you to watch the video of his talk.

What’s life like as a Congressman?
If you watch the news, you’d think that all of us are consumed with whatever the Twitter controversy of the day is. But there is a ton of good work going on beneath the surface, beyond what you see on TV, particularly in national security. That doesn’t get headlines, it doesn’t get a lot of attention, but is incredibly important. As a member of the House Armed Services Committee, we pass an annual National Defense Authorization Act. It is the culmination of a year’s worth of work. And at a time when it seems like everything is divided, it represents an area of significant bipartisanship. When it comes to the big questions of the day, from a national security perspective I sense an emerging opportunity to rebuild something resembling that consensus.

The biggest misconception I had coming into this job four years ago was I thought that the dysfunction in Congress was purely a function of the people that were in Congress. That Congress was filled with charlatans, or people that were incompetent. Now certainly, there are examples of that. And certainly, there’s a lot of careerism that goes on. But Congress is also filled with a lot of incredibly smart, patriotic, well intentioned people with unique backgrounds that just want to serve the country. And I’ve been blown away by the quality of a lot of my peers on both sides of the aisle.

That’s an opportunity for more bipartisanship. If you look at a lot of the work of the Future of Defense Task Force, some of those issues are going to be debated right now by the Biden transition team and incoming Biden foreign policy team. And I think it would be a mistake for us to go back, given how much progress we’ve made on China in general and technological competition.

What do you expect from the new administration on National Security?
I think there’s a serious debate going on within the Biden national security camp about what direction to go.

There are two camps within the Biden advisory team. The first I associate with the return to the Obama era approach, which would focus on cooperation with China. And if you want to cooperate with China, that leads you down a path where you put Taiwan relations on the back burner. You’re less likely to press hard against Chinese tech giants like Huawei. And you kind of go out of your way to be on extensively good terms with Beijing, because you want their cooperation on transnational issues, particularly environmental issues.

But if the second, more realistic camp wins out – one that looks at malign activities of competitor states, like China and Russia, and focuses on defending American influence and liberal values internationally – I think there will be a striking amount of continuity. I think the Biden administration’s spin on great power competition will be different from the Trump administration’s. That’s okay, if the point of departure is about defending our values internationally, as opposed to better competing internationally, which was the Trump administration’s core focus in the national security strategy. Ultimately, both approaches lead you in a similar direction. I think it would be a mistake for them to view everything that the Trump administration did as tainted, and we throw the baby out with the bathwater. Because the fact is, there has been remarkable progress made on U.S./China competition the last three years.

You’re still likely to come down in a similar place in terms of how you approach adversaries like the CCP and Vladimir Putin. And I think the Biden administration will have an opportunity when it comes to placing values at the at the center of American foreign policy. I have Democratic colleagues who are influential in the Biden camp like Tom Malinowski, who would argue for doing just that. And we’ve worked very closely on things like calling out what’s happening in Xinjiang. Similarly calling out human rights abuses at the hands of Vladimir Putin. So I think you’ll see a movement just on sort of the overall position that values-based arguments play in the national security strategy. If you talk to H.R. McMaster, he’d say that values were an integral part of the national security strategy.

Should the New Administration Focus on Europe or IndoPacom?
I think Biden said that the top threat to America was Russia. I disagree with that. His team advocates for a Europe-centric approach to US foreign policy. To the extent they change the overall regional prioritization for our national security strategy and say that European command is the primary theater and IndoPacom is secondary, I think that would be a huge mistake because there’s absolutely no comparison.

The Biden Administration and the Defense budget
I think the new administration is going to face some very difficult budgetary choices. We just spent over $3 trillion on Coronavirus response; we’re not going to be able to continue a 3% increase in the defense baseline over the next two years. So there’s going to have to be hard choices. And the biggest and hardest choice they need to make right away is the prioritization among the services. If you look at our national defense strategy, all the things that Bridge Colby talked to you about, you’d probably conclude that if you just look at our priority theater, IndoPacom, you might notice some interesting things about that theater, notably that there’s a lot of water. Therefore, it would make sense to prioritize the Navy and the Air Force and not prioritize growing the Army. That’s a huge choice they’re going to have to make right away.

Trading Climate Issues for Security Issues
The Biden administration wants to prioritize environmental issues in the way that the Trump administration didn’t. I think Biden already announced his intent to rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement. I think it would be a mistake to subordinate our security issues, particularly those with China to the demands of cooperating with him on environmental issues. However, I think there’s room to make a smart investment in carbon capture technology and nuclear micro reactor technology. I have a bill with Chuck Schumer and Ro Khanna, a progressive Democrat. It would be the biggest investment from the federal government in research and development since the end of the Cold War, and a lot of that would be in clean energy technology.

Opportunities on Trade, Section 232 Tariffs and Allies
You can’t pick a trade fight with our friends at the same time you’re trying to pick a trade fight with China. You could immediately bring some of our disaffected friends into the fold, particularly if they continue to move in our direction when it comes to 5G, which is probably the most important disagreement we’ve had with some of our European allies.

There’s an opportunity to clean up any lingering disputes with allied countries when it comes to Section 232 Tariffs – the tariffs we placed on steel and aluminum. There’s a dissertation waiting to be written about the nature of 232 tariffs and the constitutional problems with Congress giving up its ability to regulate commerce with foreign nations to the executive branch. It created a situation in which the President was able to claim that we face a national security threat from Canadian steel and aluminum and effectively impose a tax on the American people. So let’s resolve the Section 232 disputes, I’ve opposed them from the start, at the same time you maintain pressure on the Section 301 investigations, which are the investigations into unfair Chinese trade practices.

There are economic opportunities for the incoming Biden team. I think there’s just an obvious slam dunk with the UK, now that they’ve navigated their withdrawal from the European Union, in the form of a free trade agreement with them. As well as a bilateral trade agreement with Taiwan. The reason that the US Trade Representative didn’t want to pursue a trade agreement with Taiwan was because they didn’t want to screw up the phase one trade deal with China.

The Future of 5G
For all the criticism of the Trump administration’s neglect of allies, the fact is, we’ve recently had some incredibly important diplomatic wins. When it comes to convincing the UK for example, to get on the same page with us with respect to Huawei. Shifting the Huawei/ZTE 5G debate in certain European countries like Germany. We have a long way to go. But it does seem like the concerted effort from the executive branch and the legislative branch to send a signal, at least to our closest allies, our Five Eyes allies, that we need to have the same basic principles when it comes to future control of the internet and 5G internet technologies.

I think it’s critical, at least on 5G, to be in the same position with our allies. But I would say for the last four years we’ve purely been playing defense. In other words, we’ve been going around the world saying Huawei is bad, Huawei is bad. ZTE is bad, ZTE is bad. See, look at all this stuff. We’re declassifying all this evidence. And that’s good, we had to do that. And it requires some tough conversations.

The next phase of this involves some sort of offensive-minded effort in concert with our allies to cooperate better on these technologies. To form a digital development fund to coordinate the R&D and the distribution pathways with our like-minded partners. Without reinventing the wheel of existing international efforts, America can take the lead by launching a coalition of countries dedicated to finding a coordinated solution, particularly when it comes to 5G, that cannot only compete on quality with Chinese state-owned or sufficiently state backed enterprises, but also compete on price.

Reshoring Manufacturing and Economic Decoupling From China
I think that some form of selective economic decoupling from China is inevitable and necessary. And you’re going to see efforts to selectively decouple when it comes to our capital markets. To make sure that if Chinese companies list in U.S. markets, they have to follow the same reporting and transparency requirements as U.S. companies. They’re going to see it in key technology areas, not just 5G, but AI, rare earths, medical devices, pharmaceuticals. I think there’s going to be a serious effort to reshore manufacturing, or perhaps revitalize Puerto Rico as a hub for manufacturing of advanced pharmaceutical ingredients. You’re going to see it reflected in a lot of different areas.

Congress and Long-Term Planning
It’s very hard for Congress to do long-term strategic planning. We’re not optimized as an organization to look beyond two years. And sometimes it feels like we’re just looking two weeks at a time or two days.

I pay attention to this stuff. I work hard to understand it. I have an academic and a professional background in it, which I think gives me a little bit of advantage. But I feel like I’m just scratching the surface because there’s no time to really dig into the bureaucratic labyrinth that is the Pentagon.

Why the status quo wins out, why the primes are so good at defending their territory, it’s not member of Congress laziness. It’s just you have so many demands on your time and the demands of reelection. It’s hard to carve out a half-hour of my day to devote to serious defense work just because of the nature of being a member of Congress. And that’s a problem because it’s really Congress’s role. If you look at the history of some of our autonomous drone systems, it was Congress poking the Pentagon to get over their intransigence at the early stages. It requires the legislative branch to get in the game to force the Pentagon to do some things it often doesn’t want to do.

While it’s impossible to predict all the technologies that will dominate the future, if you talk to younger members of the armed services committee, some things are obvious. I think everyone agrees that we have to make an increased investment in AI, and the future will inevitably involve a lot more unmanned systems.

For example, I work a lot on naval issues. If you think about how we’re going to grow the future of the Navy, it’s obvious that we’re not going to be increasing the number of carriers we have from 11 to 15. In fact, it’ll probably be a glide path, down to 9 at some point. And then we’ll grow the fleet with smaller ships, i.e., small surface combatants, and then unmanned systems, both large, unmanned surface combatants as well as unmanned underwater vessels.

And if you look at the Marine Corps Commandant’s planning guidance, which I think is the most innovative thing that’s been written by any military service in the last decade, that’s exactly what he’s recognizing. He’s the only one I’ve seen so far that’s been willing to say, we are not going to invest in certain legacy systems like big amphibious ships that are optimized for doing a joint forced entry operation like Marines did back in World War II in the Pacific. Instead, we’re going to focus on fielding small teams of Marines, who can operate unmanned systems throughout the first and second island chain. Having the logistical infrastructure to constantly move them around to complicate our enemy’s decision-making cycle. Figuring out the basing agreements with our allied countries, so we can host missile systems there. I think he gets the mix right.

Personnel Costs and the DoD Budget
All of this is bound up in a bigger budget discussion. You can scrape together an extra $50 million or $100 million to invest in robotics, AI and hypersonics but If you look at the overall budget, what’s costing us more and more money, it’s human beings. In other words, if you compare the Reagan buildup in the 1980s, in the heady days of the 600 ship Navy real dollars adjusted for inflation, we spent more money during the Obama eight years then we did during the Reagan years.

And it’s not because our ships got more exquisite and fancier, though they did. It’s primarily because human beings got more expensive. The military has the same problem that the rest of society – funding health care and retirement costs. And that’s a very difficult problem to solve. Theoretically, unmanned allows you to have a similar impact with less human beings. But you’re still going to have a lot of human beings involved in the business of defending the country. I just bring that up to say the biggest and hardest choices that DoD needs to make have nothing to do with cutting-edge technology. They have everything to do with healthcare costs, and retirement costs and the cost of training human beings and making sure they’re ready to fight.

The Military Personnel System
The biggest problem I saw when I was in the military is really the best and brightest officers of my generation, (myself excluded) left – usually at the O-3 level. In part it wasn’t a pay thing. It wasn’t that they wanted to go to GSB and then make a bunch of money doing venture capital in Silicon Valley. It was more about flexibility. They wanted the Marine Corps to meet them halfway in terms of, “Hey, can I pursue civilian graduate school and I’ll pay the Marine Corps back on the back end? I don’t want to have to spend a year at Expeditionary Warfare School because it doesn’t make any sense to me.” And it was just more of a career flexibility and management thing. I think this is something we grappled with extensively on the Future Defense Task Force: How do you retain the best and the brightest? How do you attract the best and the brightest?

I think if you retain qualified officers and enlisted military service members throughout their career, you’ll start to get more innovative thinking at the top ranks when they become field grade officers, and when they become general rate officers. And you’ll have less of status quo military industrial complex.

Another area where we’ve given the Pentagon enormous latitude is to reach into private industry and make somebody a colonel or a lieutenant colonel if they have the appropriate skill set, and they really have been loath to use that authority.

Acquisition, Primes, Requirements and the DoD
We have a very brittle defense industrial base. It’s highly concentrated among five or six companies. I think there’s only been two defense related startups that have had a valuation north of a billion dollars in the last couple decades: SpaceX and Palantir. That’s because we build moats around these industries. And there’s a bunch of special interests that advocate for the status quo, and it becomes very hard for Congress to change anything.

Now we’ve tried. We’ve tried in the form of giving special acquisition authority to the services. Honestly, if you look at the U.S. Code when it relates to defense provisions, we don’t really need to give new authority to the services to allow them to experiment and invest in certain technologies and make bets on small and medium sized companies. We’ve given them a ton of authority. But there’s a general risk aversion among the services and almost an unholy alliance between the general officer and flag officer class and the primes. Because general and flag officers when they retire, go and work for the primes and get paid a million dollars a year as a consultant for Boeing or Lockheed. So there’s a “swampy” aspect to all of this that precludes innovation or a risk-taking mindset.

The Goldwater/Nichols Act governs the requirements processes for the services. Today, the Navy says, we need to do X. And here’s our strategy for doing X and all these documents go bounce around the Department of the Navy. We need to change that entire process. Because the result is the services generate requirements that do not align with the national security strategy. Or they’re just published prior to those documents, or without taking into account changes those documents make. It’s a totally incoherent strategy process that doesn’t drive our budget choices and allows the status quo to win out and legacy systems to dominate.

As an example, we have a shipyard in Northeast Wisconsin, Fincantieri Marinette Marine, where we built the Littoral Combat ship. The Littoral Combat ship was supposed to be the ship of the future for the Navy. You can Google “Bob Work LCS“, he wrote a great white paper on how the Littoral Combat ship went awry. And it was really a story of the Navy just getting too ambitious with its requirements and trying to do too much with one ship. They constantly changed requirements, which then screwed up the manufacturing, making it extremely complicated.

I worry that we get too enamored with the new technology and the next big thing and create these hyper exquisite platforms that are extraordinarily difficult to build, let alone operate and maintain. When sometimes a simpler, less technologically advanced approach might do just as good.

There are also some huge opportunities they have now that we’re no longer bound by the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty. Because we can field missile systems that we already have, that have ranges between 500 and 550 kilometers that can do things that otherwise require a destroyer or a big, fancy expensive ship to do.

How do we stop special interest groups in the military industrial complex from influencing Congress to make decisions that are perhaps better for business but maintain the status quo?
It comes down to the way in which the Pentagon awards money. The Pentagon needs to stop making very small and insignificant bets on a variety of small or midsize companies that can never make that next step to becoming a prime. They need to start making bigger bets on a smaller subset of non-prime companies. That’s one way you could start to get less of a military industrial complex culture.

I wonder if there’s not some sort of ethics reform or drain the swamp proposal that could be applied to the Pentagon without unleashing some unintended consequences. I’ve long thought it’s a good idea for members of Congress to be prohibited from lobbying for the industries that they oversee, in Congress, I prefer for a lifetime. But I’d take five years. That that seems like a sensible, drain-the-swamp proposal that myself, Ro Khanna and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez could get behind.

And I wonder if you couldn’t have a similar prohibition when it comes to general officers and flag officers. Or at least extend the cooling off period, so they can’t immediately go and collect a paycheck from some of these companies. Now that may sound naive and populist to some of your more cultured teachers, but you’ve got to do something about it at the end of the day. Otherwise, you won’t get any change.

Advice to Our Students
I profited from the advice and mentorship of a lot of people, including your professor Raj Shah. So I’m happy to pay that forward. I was where you guys are a few years ago, just slugging it out in grad school. And you never know when you’re going to be the person making big decisions. Whether it’s a legislator, or member of the executive branch.

And so, I would encourage you guys to keep pursuing your current policy studies. You’ll find yourself in a position where you can make a real impact very quickly. And if you can write well, and if you can work well with others, you’ll you have limitless potential.

Watch the video of Congressman Gallagher’s talk below.

If you can’t see the video click here.

Our Midterm
Our students completed their midterm assignment–- described below – months ago. In this class session, we competitively selected one student to present their proposal to Congressman Gallagher and get his feedback. The midterm assignment is below and Janani Mohan’s presentation to the Congressman follows.

Read the entire transcript of Janani Mohan’s midterm presentation to Congressman Gallagher and watch her video below.

If you can’t see the video click here.

Lessons Learned

• The new administration will have a series of decisions:
  • Whether to cooperate with China or continue to counter their activities
  • With a limited defense budget, to decide on the prioritization among the services
  • Whether to subordinate our security issues, to the demands of cooperating with China on environmental issues
  • Whether to remove the tariffs we placed on steel and aluminum on our allies
  • Whether to selectively decouple our economy from China and reshore manufacturing
• The U.S. has a highly concentrated defense industrial base – five or six companies
  • General/flag officers have a risk aversion and prefer the primes rather than new entrants
  • We’re enamored with new tech and the next big thing and create these hyper-exquisite platforms that are extraordinarily difficult to build, let alone operate and maintain
  • The Pentagon needs to stop making very small bets on lots of new entrants
    • They need to start making bigger bets on a smaller subset of non-prime companies.
• Ethics reform for members of Congress to be prohibited from lobbying for the industries that they oversee

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