Implementing Digital Transformation in US Intelligence with Former Director of NGA, Robert Cardillo

We were able to give our decision-makers more confidence at their point of decision, which by the way I think is the essence of intelligence, confidence at point of decision. You know, hey guess what, we just cracked the code on something like we have a new breakthrough that's going to provide intelligence information in areas that you didn't think was possible last week, but it's not possible. I do hope people keep knocking on the door and taking a peek inside. It's a wonderful career, it's a rewarding career. Hi everybody and welcome back to Intel at the Edge, I'm Chip Usher. This week we're joined by Robert Cadillo who's a senior advisor to us here at SESP. He's also got a long, storied intelligence community career. He served as Deputy Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Director of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and he was the first ever Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Intelligence Integration. In this episode Robert explains to me what that Deputy Director of National Intelligence job is all about and his thoughts about what the intelligence community needs to do to reform and adapt in an age of AI and advanced technologies. We also have a chance to talk about his new venture with Quantum and what that might mean for the intelligence business. As always, you can follow us at www.scsp.ai or wherever you get your podcasts, just look for Intel at the Edge. Robert Cadillo, thank you for coming on Intelligence at the Edge, it's a pleasure to have you today. Chip, it's both a personal and a professional pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. So there's a lot to talk about, but before we launch in, you have had so many interesting jobs in the intelligence community over your 35 years career with the Federal Service. Tell me a little bit about how you got started, what attracted you to the IC, what was your first job? So, my origin story, so, you know, one, I think it's important to note, I'm an Army brat, father was a West Point grad, and for the longest time I presumed, assumed, he went there, I'm going there. So, I was heading into some sort of service, and I remember applying and being accepted and then just took a strange left turn at the front door at West Point, New York, and ended up in Ithaca at Cornell. So, didn't do West Point, got a government degree, which everybody said, you know, pre-unemployment. I had a theory that with a government degree, what do you do, you go to Washington, so I went to Washington, I think after my junior year, and obviously the world was not as well connected, it is now, so you're literally driving around and filling out forms with ballpoint pens and sliding them under doors because there was no opening, right, in mysterious doors around town. One of them was your old agency, and I was going through the interview process, at Langley, and my father, who was still in the military, was in town for a promotion board, and he said to me, dinner, he said, why don't you apply to the Defense Intelligence Agency, oh, wait, I missed the joke there, he said, why didn't you apply to DIA, and I said, just tell me what it stands for, and I'm, you know, I want a job, so I never heard of the Defense Intelligence Agency. So I wandered over to Furnstreet, not far from here, with our personal office, and slid yet another package under the door. So with that as background, my answer to your question is, I got in through pretty much dumb luck, meaning the Reagan Defense buildup was happening, and as I think most listeners know, when Defense budgets rise, the intelligence community budgets tend to rise with it. So there was a growth in the community, and this is 1982-83, most of the talent that Defense Intelligence Agency had acquired up until then, was coming out of the military. So either retired, or they transitioned mid-career, warn officers and captains and coloners. Well, because of the growth though, they needed to actually hire beyond that. So I became a civilian hire, Defense Intelligence Agency, I remember getting the letter, and they said, you know, you've been, you're being offered a position as an intelligence research specialist, parentheses, photographic interpreter, close parentheses, dash GS7. And a GS7. Well, they even said in the letter, the GS, you know, it was like $11,452. And I remember thinking, I said, how can I possibly spend that much money in a year that it's so much money? Well, seriously, I was just thrilled now. I knew the word intelligence, I knew the word research, but after that, I didn't really understand what's a photographic interpreter. I didn't have a GSB shell. It was my first job, right? And so I really think my piece of paper went under the door at the time they were saying, we need to go find college grads, you know, that can walk into gum, and we'll teach them how to be photographic interpreters. Did you work over in the Navy yard? I eventually did, but they first sent me to Lowry Air Force Base in Colorado, which by the way was like being thrown in the briar patch because I spent some time in Colorado. I go, I have to go to school in Colorado, and you're paying me for this. What year was this? I think '83, '84. My father was the commander of the Lowry Technical Training Center. Okay, so I was under his command, okay, young, 21-year-old, Robert Cardillo. So I went to school for six months, and the basic school then went back to, because I was DIA, we had some people in Building 213 in Southeast, but most of our people were actually in Arlington Hall Station, which doesn't exist anymore. An old NSA station off Route 50, Gala's Road, in an old Army barracks building, which by the way was not good place for light tables. So for your viewers to know the way that we exploited imagery is we would take big schools of film, cans of film, you know, hard copy film. And then we would wind it across the table into the other end, and you would spin it, right, as you were scanning across the Soviet step, searching for your target of interest. Well, you're looking through a microscope on a glass table with a light underneath it. When people walk down the hall, what happens? You would have to wait for people to stop walking because your objects were shaking at the time. So it wasn't the most high tech of environments, but-- Things have evolved a little bit since then, I hope. Things have evolved a little bit since then. And you went on to several senior positions, including one that I think at least some of our viewers may not know anything about. And that's the principal deputy director of national intelligence for intelligence integration. Yeah. And we-- It actually count with two business cards, because I need a title head to run across both of them. Yeah. But you served there under President Obama. Tell me, and our listeners, what was the job about? What did you do? So it was a fascinating job. One of the best jobs I've had, and I had good fortune to have many rewarding assignments. In this case, I need to give you a little background in context. So I had gone back to the Defense Intelligence Agency after serving at NEMA, National Immendory and Mapping Agency, and at NGA, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. And I was the director of analysis there for first general maples, director maples, and then general Burgess, director Burgess. Tish Long had just gotten the job of NGA director. She was the fifth NGA director. And she had left the deputy position. So they had an opening for the deputy director at DIA, which is the senior civilian position at DIA. And as a young GS7 employee, zero, I said, oh, that's the job I want to get, right? That's the dream job. So I applied, competed, and was selected in the summer of 2010. Ron Burgess asked me to come over. And I was thrilled. And I thought this is a career culminating job, right? I've gone from zero to number two, right, or whatever it is. Never end in number two. So I get that job, my family flies in, there's cake, there's balloons, I mean, it's a celebration, there's a swearing in ceremony, it's a big deal. About that time, Secretary Gates asked Jim Clapper, who was the undersecretary for intelligence, to consider becoming the next director of national intelligence. That's all happening the same summer. Jim Clapper is a mentor of mine, and I'd work for him a number of times. He gets the job on August 6, and I think I got the DIA job late July, so just weeks after. And he calls me like two days after, and he goes, hey Robert, I need you to come out here and help me. I go, well, I'm happy to help you. But what do you mean? He says, no, no, no, I need you to come out and do the job you just described. And I said, sir, I would do anything for you, but I can't just leave the job. I just spent my whole career trying to get. There's no way I can go, so I had to tell Jim Clapper, no, it was very hard to do. So I went back to work two weeks later, Ron Burgess comes to my office. So now my boss comes to my office and he goes, Robert, I think it's time for you to go to the director of national intelligence, and I go, are you firing me? He's going, yeah, yeah, kind of, but I talked to Jim Clapper, and I think it's the right thing. So sorry to wind up for your question, but it's important because what Jim wanted me to do with that crazy title was his singular focus as the director of national intelligence was throughout his almost six years of service in that position was integration, right, that the community is good as it was where, and he was especially had the conviction that that office, the office of the director of national intelligence, should be singularly focused on integration. Not on creation, not on over, I mean, yes, on oversight for the right things, but not on micromanagement, you know, macro management, that was his style and his approach. Conducting the orchestra, not that's right, that's right, that's right, you know, D and I was still in new entity, it was still trying to figure out who it was and how it was. And Admiral Blair had a certain view that didn't comport with Mr. Pinetas, and so they clashed and they Admiral decided to leave. Because that happened a lot of people left, I want to say Liberty Crossing, which was and is still the home of DNI, felt a little echoey when we got there, we kind of went where is everybody? It was not fully staffed. I remember one of our first nights, somebody came over with a triple lock bag from Langley with tomorrow's president's daily brief. And here are two officials for seniors we'd been, we had never seen the president's daily brief the day before, right, because if we were lucky, we got it the day after or two days after. Did see I actually give you the key or did they take that? That's a good line. No, they actually did, God bless them. And I remember, you know, there were like two big binders in it and I'm happy to talk more about the, I think the magic of the PDB process, because I lived it for four years. But literally we were sitting in and joining offices and he says, you know, he's yelling, hey, I'll take article one, you take article two and I would start going through article two and there's a very deliberate process of final review and editing and approval. You got sourcing and you got background and you got questions of coordination and all that. But it was a long night because we had not done that before and so that was kind of thrown into the deep end. But the broader answer I'm happy to go deeper is that my job was to take what Jim Clapper saw as the right instrument for integration called mission management, the name evolved to national intelligence managers or nims. And while we had four when we arrived because there were four that were in part of the enactment, Jim wanted them extended across the globe and across all accounts. So I should know the answer, but I think I ended up standing up 17 national intelligence managers. Your audience thinks that sounds like too many, they're right, it was and we did ratchet back after a while. But then my job was to work with them to be that orchestra leader and to be that macro manager and to create what we ended up calling unifying intelligence strategies, UISs, that would just help NSA know how they fit into the bigger picture and the same for an NGA or any component of the IC. It would try to be a lens, if you will, to let the strongest light come together at the right time for decision management. And these national intelligence managers did things like there's a NEM for East Asia. There was at one point in NEM for China, NEM for Russia. And they would look across all the collection agencies, all the analytic arms of the IC and try to harmonize the effort into what is being delivered to the president and to senior customers. That's right. And they had not a lot, but enough resources, money to make a difference. So as you looked across a hard target like North Korea, that's an easy one to pick then and still now. That national intelligence manager could say, wow, I really think this collection angle or approach could really be meaningful, but poor old fill-in-the-blank NGA, NSA, whatever, doesn't have the resources. And so you could accelerate where you thought made the most sense. And so my old line was because obviously the NEMs all came to me for more resources every day. And I used to say to them, I said, the first day you don't come to me for more resources, I'm going to come to you to get some back because I realize I've over-resourced you. Because, you know, Chip, look, you know, since IRTPAA stood up or was enacted, there's always been an inherent tension between that office right and the community. And predominantly with our friends at Langley at CIA, because, you know, there were some authorities that were there that got shifted. And I felt strongly that if we were going to be successful in doing that integration and bringing together more unity, it had to be through a cooperative touch, not this, you know, coming in and directing. And so, you know, a little bit of money and a little bit of expertise went a long way. And look, we didn't get everything right, but, you know, through my four years from 10 to 14, I really felt like we were able to deliver on what I thought the promise of the original intention of the Office of Director of National Intelligence, which is to just make the whole better. You referenced IRTPAA, which is the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 that created the ODNI and codified its responsibilities and authorities. I can ask you to unpack it maybe one level further. So you talked about how ODNI had a little bit of money, but otherwise, how would you or the NIM Council sort of make course changes? All right. We need more of an NSA effort on Venezuela this quarter or this year. Is that just through job owning or where there are some budget authorities or what other tools were available? So a good example, I think, of the how was when NIMs would create a hard target program. And so, you know, obviously, I can't go into any detail, but your viewers will understand. So there's a particular part, let's stay with North Korea, because it's a very present then and present now, they come up with a new strategy to get inside of the leadership dynamic and the decision-making process that was leading to unannounced launches and continued violations of UN sanctions and continued threats to not just its proximate neighbor in the South, but the region to pan, especially. And Chip, you'll know how hard that target was and so I'll say traditional methods weren't as effective to include the one that I'm closest to, geospatial intelligence. You know, North Korea is about the size of Scotland, and it's got the same weather. So it's very cloudy, it's very mountainous, it's very rugged, and they're trying to hide, right? So they're actively. They're more people. They're underground. So, you know, the exquisite optical satellite that I could have been part of creating, you know, just, you know, there wasn't nearly as much value out of that as there would be against other targets. So back to your question, the NIM would put together a proposal. Now that proposal would include an existing capability at Fort Meade and an existing, you know, Avenue that Langley might have and the, you know, DIA approach, but then putting them together in a way that they weren't operating before or proposing that they go together and. Because it wasn't a command authority, it was really a coordination influence authority. And then being very strategic about the resource piece. So, you know, incentivizing the behavior we want, which, you know, and I'll just make this up. You know, NSA was reporting out its take, you know, at top secret code word result that wasn't able to be ingested into the NGA system, you know, because it was operating at, you know, secret, you know, collateral or severe no form. Well, there's ways to solve that, you know, some through policy, but there's also ways, you know, through either gateways or technologies that can bring high-low. And so, let's face it, agencies, when they go to, you know, allocate their budget, they tend to take care of themselves. So things between agencies don't get as much of attention, so that's where I would want the NIM to focus is the connective tissues that would then, you know, fill gaps, create connections, ultimately the object was to create new insight. And, you know, and, you know, in most accounts, it was then reinforcing because let's face it as humans, when good results come out, people go, oh, you know, it's like, you know, that mouse finding the cheese, you know, they'll do it again, if you know the, the cheese in this case being budget, but, you know, it's Washington, so that's how it works. But I always appreciate it about, particularly the hard-darket boards, is it the best ones ignited this conversation involving the analysts who were often the closest or most frequently in touch with the policy maker, right? The collectors. And sometimes the collectors will come in with, you know, hey, guess what, we, we just crack the code on something, like we have a new breakthrough that's going to provide intelligence information in areas that you didn't think was possible last week, but it's not possible. And sort of would drive an interesting conversation about where we could take the production of ANLIT against it, and that was really, when I sought work at its best on China and some of these other places, that was really exciting. Well, let's bring it to the Ford, bring it forward to the present day. One comment on your observation, because, you know, I grew up as an analyst, right, and I affectionately call my analyst whether I was at DA or NGA, or the joint staff, or PDB, as my prima donnas, right? And, but I mean it affectionately, because, you know, they're very confident, right? They're very short, and they don't like to be challenged, right? They like to be listened to, you know, because they have expertise that they need to share. So I've got that in me, I, and by the way, I arguably my favorite job, because it's my account, right? Those are my targets, right? And I, and there's an ownership piece. Midway through my career, I was sent to run essentially the collection arm of NEMA, soon to be NGA, and I've, because that was now my responsibility. I finally got what you said, because as an analyst, I, you know, collectors do what I tell them, because I'm the analyst, right? And if they do what I tell them, they're good collectors, right? So it was a very kind of, you know, higher article, thank you. You were a prima donna. Yeah, that's right. When I got to that collection spot that I said, wait a second, you, you cannot be a good collection officer unless you're an analyst. You just can't be. Because if you don't understand what it is we're trying to uncover, you know, how can you design the strategy? And so I actually changed the name, because I think they were called collection management officers or something. I said, no, no, no, your source management analyst. Now I did that overnight and you can't change somebody overnight, but I thought it was important that that's how they showed up at work in the morning and they saw that on their, you know, door plate or their, you know, email, because to me it's important because I guess what, that was a long way to say, Chip, is what I think you said isn't commonly accepted or understood. And I think it's worth saying twice, I just did. Okay. Well, it sort of brings me to the next thing I want to talk about because your senior advisor to us here at SCSB, we've had loads of conversations prior to this one about sort of the state of the intelligence community and the need for new ideas and reform, particularly as we look at AI coming down the road, actually it's here and now, other advanced technologies quantum and others. And I just want to kind of get from you your sort of 40,000-foot-level thoughts about, what is it culturally that perhaps the IC needs to start thinking about as it approaches its job? Yep. Could go a lot of different directions with my response, but let me start here because I, again, this is my career and just as I mentioned the comment about Premadana, I'm also a big believer that somebody tells you they're not biased, well, they're just not aware of the biases they're not aware of, right? So I have a bias, I'm a prisoner of my history, my career, my experiences, my point of view. But to answer your question, my point of view, early on, I was hired in the Cold War, right? This was, you know, the Soviet Union was the target, you know, I worked the target, albeit as GS7, you know, my little corner of the Soviet account. The way that we fought and ultimately won that battle was by, I believe, owning the collection. There was a space race, which people saw publicly, right, either to orbit and to satellites, etc. But then there was a capabilities race to put on orbit. And again, from my background, geospatial intelligence, not the term we used in those days, but, you know, remote sensing, we ended up building much better, much more capable, much more valuable sensors in space than they had. And what did that do? That gave our decision makers better knowledge of their capabilities. Whether you were negotiating, or you were, you know, posturing, or you were, you know, threatening, we were able to give our decision makers more confidence at their point of decision, which, by the way, I think, is the essence of intelligence, confidence at point of decision. Well, what I just described was a collection-focused enterprise, right? We're just going to build better collectors and we're going to win. And I'm oversimplifying, but to make my point where I think we are now, where I, I know we are now, but of course, I don't know everything, so I'd be happy to have this challenge, is I think the win or the lack thereof is in the outputs. Now, you could say, and you're ready to say, well, it's always been an output. And I said, I get that, right? Because that collection becomes an output, but the reason I say it this way now to your question about where does the IC need to be is I think, I think we need to shift our mindset from the, oh, I'm going to own and, you know, I'm going to buy and build and own and protect and classify that collector, which, by the way, we should still do for very exquisite and purposeful reasons. But I'm going to engage in the chaos and the confusion of this output, of these analytics, of these not just sensors, but sensing, not just, you know, data, but, you know, the algorithm, not just, you know, the one in the zero, but now the LLM, it is messy, it's chaotic, but I think it's necessary in order to get back to the value proposition that I strongly believe in, which is, you know, increase confidence and point of decision. So, we can talk more about it, but I just think the IC, if it can change that mindset, and by the way, I do think it's changing, like most things in government, I don't think it's changing fast enough, but I do think it is changing, and I think it's going to require different skill sets to succeed in that, in that kind of output, you know, grounded, you know, view of the world. I like the way that you describe the essence of the mission, confidence at the point of decision for a senior policymaker. It seems to me that part of the recent things have changed is because the technologies have become more diffused, it's no longer the case that the U.S. intelligence community has a monopoly on electro-optical imagery around the world. There are plenty of other countries that have their own capabilities that are almost as good as ours, and increasingly now private sector companies, such as ones that you are presently involved with, that are doing the same. Same thing with SIGINT, SIGINT used to be this very dark art that was the purview only of government and intelligence services, but increasingly now it's becoming more widely available. So it seems to me that, you know, there's democratization of the collection, and so the edge is conferred to those who develop the insight fastest, most accurately, right? And so that's, when you say output, I think of speed to insight. I agree. And so, you know, in the old days, right, winning was, "I have an image you don't have it, I win." Right? So I've collected something you don't have I win. Today, and I'm going to make a broad generalization that has exceptions to it, but broadly speaking, we share the same information base, right? We share the same potential. The winning is going to come from the combination or application or algorithmic manipulation, and I mean that in a positive sense. And we should talk about the protection, right, because, you know, the upside of open is it's open, the downside of open is it's open, meaning there are bad actors, and there are adversaries, and there are counterintelligence specialists who will, you know, infuse that openness with their, you know, purposeful clutter, right, if not worse. So I'm not trying to say by any stretch that this is a simple transition. I think it's quite complicated. Again, though, what pleases me and what gives me great hope is, I think the IC has broadly made the mental shift. But I also like to say that it takes a while for the programmatic shift to catch up. You know, as you will know, programs of record exist for a reason, and they don't really turn that quickly, right, or adjust. And so I do, you know, in this might be rose-colored glasses and just a wish for too far, too big of a wish, but I feel that, you know, the budgetary process that worked quite well for the Soviets, you know, five-year plan versus a six-year plan isn't the one that's going to work now, and my goodness, I don't know when this will air, but as we sit here today, our government is shut down. So we don't even have, not only we don't have a budget for the fiscal year, we're in, which is unfortunately becoming quite common. We don't even have a government today. Now you would know and I know that essential people are in working day at risk, and we hope they get paid and all those good things, but in some ways, I, you know, I see if this is too cartoonish, you know, China couldn't design this any better. You know, it's like, really, we're doing this to ourselves, and that's what's frustrating. You know, I take some hope in the fact that the House Department of Select Committee, this term has a subcommittee looking at open-source information under Amwag, right? And Wagner, right? Well, I just saw out in St. Louis a week or so ago. So I think their Congress is sort of seeing the light and understanding that perhaps there's some new forms of collection that can go towards this informing and enabling of speed to insight or focus on outputs, if you say, but how do you, how do you interpret Washington's preparedness for this sort of shift? So two ways, one, I agree with you, and by the way, I think in general too, the legislative branch Congress has been generally ahead forever, but that's kind of their business, right? They interact with companies more, they have more exposure, they work in the open more than we tend to in the IC, so that, so I think Congress has been a positive pressure on that point, and obviously they have the power of appropriation so they can, you know, infuse it where they want. But I will also tell you, going back to my prior frustration with our current shutdown. I don't know how many times I testified before the Hill dozens, you know, four, five, six dozen, almost every one of those committee hearings opened with the following statement from the chairman or chairwoman. Mr. Cardillo and Phil in the blank, whatever my title was. Thank you for coming. We appreciate, you know, your service to our nation, but what we're here for today is to get you to be more agile and more innovative, and you, you know, you need to evolve your capability, and you need to be more like a commercial company, you know, and I said there night, listen, and I, you know, and of course, you know, you go to class, I don't know if everyone knows this, we're taught how to engage with the Hill and, you know, things that you do and don't do to try to make sure that the relationship's a positive. So in my head, right, well, in the mic, let me go there first, I mean, you know, thank you very much. Yes, ma'am. Yes, sir. Here's what I'm trying to do to become more innovative and agile and innovative and more commercial like in my head. I'm going to go, this is the person who won't give me a budget in the fiscal year that I'm required to operate in. Can you imagine a board of directors yelling at a CEO by saying, well, you're not being innovative and they're going, well, sir, ma'am, you didn't give us any money. So, but look, I don't mean to be too, you know, critical. I think that's, frankly, as frustrating as the magic of the American system, right? I think those tensions are built in by our founding fathers and I think that's all to the good, but, you know, you know, I guess back to your question, where we need to be comfortable succeeding in the open. And I know that's hard, right? And, you know, when I was NJ director from 14 to 19, I used that as somewhat of a mantra to try to not literally kick the people out of the building, but to, you know, open the building up so that we could have more open discussions because every time we told a company that didn't have a facility clearance as authorized through the defense counterintelligence service, which by the way, very expensive to get. And so why would a young company have one? And we told them, no, you got to stay at the outer gate and leave here a hard copy. And then, of course, they don't have a hard copy. They have a microchip, you know, nope, we can't take that because that's a risk. It just made it too hard. I mentioned seeing Representative Wagner last week, we were opening the new NGA campus out in St. Louis. And I was proudly the director when we selected the site in North St. Louis and so that was 2016, nine years, $1.75 billion under budget, though, under budget, okay, I know 1.75 is a lot of money, but it was under budget. But we built that building by design to be open now and does it have classified spaces? Of course, it does because we have classified missions. But we want people and companies and academics and nonprofits to be able to engage with the workforce because I think that is also the American secret sauce. No interest in trying to outshine a China, China's got its system, it's got its processes, it's very capable, but we've got innovative entrepreneurs and we have risk capital, right? And we have markets that compete and we have winners and losers and investors and et cetera. We just need to lean in on that. It's there. I mean, SCSP is a perfect example, right, of just how powerful that ecosystem can be and is. And at the risk of just sitting here and talking good about ourselves, I think SCSP has done a great job of opening up those conversations and those connections in ways that do advance towards the answer your question of building that innovation in. So I don't know that SCSP would have been a successful going back seven, 10 years, it was a real hesitancy on the part of private sector companies, particularly technology companies. Right. To deal with the Department of Defense, the intelligence community, it was sort of an anathema, but that seems to have changed in recent years and there's a more, there's more willingness. Yeah. There's certainly more economic opportunity with some of the capabilities that they're delivering AI and otherwise, but I think there's more of an openness to on the private sectors part. I think that's right and well, I know it's right. Look, I was one of the plank holders for Project Maven and to remind that was a computer vision project that was formed in the Pentagon, a good friend Jack Shanahan, also a good friend of SCSP, was the first director of that under USDI, under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence. And the idea was really the challenge that you describe, how do we, how do we get these algorithms and these computer vision tools in the hands of users, right? Like marine squads, right? And you know, army platoons and, I mean, it was, so we started low and we started with air breathing, you know, drones. And famously or infimously, right, Google was a supporter until they weren't, right? And there was, there was a bit of a pushback, not a bit, there was a pushback from their team, said, wait a minute, we, you know, we're for good. And we're not sure we want to be supporting, you know, war fighting or war targeting application. I thought it was unfortunate the time, I mean, I don't know if it would have been useful. I would have been happy to go, quote, talk to the Google or workforce with the following approach. Now this is probably way too naive, but one, I would have said, I fully respect and defend your ability to express your opinion and devote with your conscience and work where you want to work and don't work where you don't want to work and to include this place, right? Google's a company that should decide with whom it wants to work. And I will be your biggest defender, you get to make that choice. But my second comment would be, but do it with full awareness of your decision. I don't know my, in my dream, I was going to hold up my iPhone at the time and put on Google Maps and say, you know, that blue dot right there comes from something called the global positioning system, GPS was built by the Air Force for the Pentagon and for the intelligence community really to do one thing, to get nuclear weapons closer to the market. It was targeting. Obviously, that would not have been a welcome, you know, comment in the middle of the Google War for my point was, it was, yeah, it was, it was and is a defense application and it gets you a cup of coffee and saves you some traffic time. You know what I mean? So there's ways that we maybe could work together that doesn't have to be good, bad, et cetera, but I never got to make that speech. Now, thankfully, you're right. The feeling has, and the reality has changed and I spent a lot of time, I was out in San Francisco last week with, with Planet Labs, a company I work with and there is a palpable difference that it isn't good, bad, it's, you know, national security is economic security is personal liberty is, you know, is, is the values we as a liberal democratic society, you know, treasure and cherish. You can work for those things, you know, by helping us protect that, but, but again, I go back to my first point. I love the fact that America is still a place that people can, you know, vocally and viscerally disagree, but let's have that debate. So now you're getting into yet another advanced technology, one that's really exciting, quantum. And I think you've, it's now announced, but you're the executive director, if I have that right, of IonQ, which is a quantum solutions delivery business, quiet IonQ federal, so you'll be focusing on the federal government. Can you tell me a little bit about your new role in what you'll be doing? I can tell you a little, because I know a little, and now don't be, it's a publicly traded company. I want to give everybody a sherdness that the company is running fine, but the federal piece was just stood up on September 10th, so less than a month ago. And, I mean, what my job is to do at IonQ, as the chair of IonQ federal, is to help position the company, which obviously wouldn't have joined if I didn't think was well positioned to win the quantum race in all phases of it, whether that's compute, networking, and sensing, and encryption. It has all those components. Now, people should not take this as investment advice or a play. IonQ is a proud participant in DARPA's quantum benchmarking initiative, QBI. So we're being vetted, along with competitors in this space, and again, remember I said about the American secret sauce, DARPA, right? I mean, thank goodness we have that crown jewel. DARPA is putting all of these companies through their paces. So my advice is watch that, okay, because that's a good, you know, diligent practice. But back to your point, my job as federal is how can we show up to federal partners and customers, and just looking at my calendar in the last few days, that's Oak Ridge National Labs, right? So obviously a computing center, and a classical supercomputing center now, but ultimately, and this is where the debate is, when quantum will arrive as a useful computing technology, Oak Ridge will need to be a center of quantum technology, and obviously they have a quantum program. Department of Commerce, who we've been meeting with as well, now. They obviously are interested in markets and the security of those markets, and so things like current forms of encryption, RSA 2048, and how long will that hold against advanced computing techniques? And there's a theory, and it's just a theory, well, I think most people agree that eventually quantum will be a risk to our current encryption approach, and people call it Q-Day. You know, Q-Day's coming, and when it happens, the way we use to protect data will go away. And so people are doing what they call scoop and save, right? So they're scooping up, you know, a lot of encrypted data going, oh, and Q-Day, I'm going to open this up. Now, it will be dated, but it'll still be useful, right, because it'll have historical facts. So anyway, back to my role, though, is that when we go and interact with Pentagon, and I appreciate everyone, there's a long line at Golden Dome right now, but let's face it, there are applications that one could imagine with both the sensing side and the networking side that could put together coherence in a very incoherent picture. So those are just a few of the examples that I'm back in my orchestrator role. So I hadn't thought about that till now. So by the way, nobody in last, but not least, INQ, did not bring Robert Cardillo on, because he's going to help them with the quantum science. That's, they know that's not my role, right, remember the liberal arts major from Cornell. But I do know value propositions, and I do know, you know, confidence at point of decision. And so how can I shape those pieces and parts of the INQ family? Which continues to grow in a way that provides value to the government today and tomorrow. And it's terribly exciting. I have on my phone the audible book Quantum for Dummies so that I can, you know, at least become conversant with these just really scary smart people. But it's a terribly exciting domain to be in. I roughly equated to that space race that I was at least around in the 80s. There is a quantum race out there. China is a very serious competitor. I use the analogy the other day up in New York, you know, at least in the Olympic second place, they give you a silver medal in this race. It's, you win or you don't. So it's very important from a national security, economic security, military security point of view. That's why I couldn't quite pass up the opportunity to try to contribute in this way. There's all sorts of implications for the intelligence community from quantum technology. You've mentioned a couple, but which one or two do you think will be the most consequential or the first to arrive or both? I think on the first to arrive, I do think, again, as a public company, we post our targets for quantum compute and scaling capability, so that's all available. I do think you're going to see a marriage of, let's call it, classical compute and the early stages of quantum that are going to hypercharge, and I'm afraid exactly how to draw this slope, you know, because there's a lot of debate about how and when that will happen. Things like computer vision. We haven't talked much about large language models, but with my work at Planet, it is just ridiculously exciting to see what you can do with a clot or an open AI or a Gemini now with just a little fine tuning and put pixels next to those letters and words. My mind boggles with what we can now do with machine and analyst going back real quickly. I try to accelerate the move of automation into NGA as director. I frankly got some pushback from my old friends in analysis because they saw it as, oh, I know what you're doing. You're replacing me, right? You're going to outsource and save money and have the, and I said, no, it's not about elimination, it's about elevation, right? Let the computer do what the computer is really good at, answering the what, where and when. Those are important three questions, but the two really hard ones are why and what's next. I'm going to save you for those. That wasn't just my pitch, it's what I meant, but back to your question, I do think quantum is really going to hypercharge that what, where and when and enable the additional. I also do think, I do think our encryption approach is at risk today, and I think it's called quantum key distribution, it's a different way to do it. I think that's proximate, notice I didn't give you a date, but proximate, so I think I think that'll be a relatively new term. The one that excites me that I know less about and I believe for some confidence is further out is quantum sensing. It's even hard for me to explain, but it has to do with, so you and I are sensing each other optically, because that's what we have as sensors as humans. There's a potential for those, if you can control those qubits in a way that they can sense, and I'll say vibration, movement, change, temperature, just orders of magnitude of changes that obviously we as humans don't comprehend, but imagine that at scale. And I, it's hard for me to imagine that at scale, but I think that sort of mind-blowing isn't it? Well, I think a future episode we're going to have to devote entirely to quantum and we'll have to invite you back for that. I might bring a friend, okay, right? Yes, I'm in a white lab coat, right? With a couple of PhDs. Absolutely, I've got a degree in it. As a final question for you, a question that I asked all of my guests, we have a lot of listeners who are in school or just starting their career, what's one piece of advice that you would give a young person who's considering joining the Intelligence Committee? If you are passionately and deterministically curious, you have a place in the US Intelligence Community. Look, I didn't have a choice, right? I told my story, it was dark, you know, doors. There's a lot more opportunities, there's internships here, right? There's internships in the agencies. There's conferences that you can go to and become exposed to this, so, you know, and if you combine that curiosity with a willingness to serve something greater than self, which I believe is in all of us at some level, there is a place for you in the Intelligence Community, and I will be frank and say that, you know, that things are a little more chaotic these days politically, and we are more polarized, obviously, as a society. It's a wonderful career, it's a rewarding career, as I told you, I had a tiny, tiny little account and a tiny part of the Soviet Union, and I just felt like a king, you know, of that region. And it's hard to replace that. Yeah, and so please do give it a try. Great advice. Robert Cardillo, thank you so much for being here. It was great to have you on Intelligence at the edge. Thank you, too.