Lessons for Pentagon Procurement from the Special Operations Enterprise

(upbeat music) - Welcome to the Cogs of War Podcast. I'm Jonathan Panther, executive editor of the Cogs of War Vertical, brought to you by Warren the Rocks and Booz Allen Hamilton. Today's question is this, how do you take an acquisition model that works small and fast and make it work for a department trying to buy hundreds of thousands of drones? I'm joined by Carateter, Chief Technology Officer for Special Operations Forces Enterprise and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations Analysis, Resources and Capabilities. In the office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict. I'm also joined by Bonnie Evangelista, Acquisition Director, Direct Reporting, Portfolio Manager for Unmanned Systems and Project Agent Court. Karen Bonnie, thank you for joining Cogs of War. - Thank you. - Thanks for having us. - I think to start out our listeners would just be interested to hear about your backgrounds and what brought you to your current positions. No, so I started this journey at 18 years old. I went off to the Air Force Academy with eyes towards the stars, some ridiculous wanting to be an aerospace engineer and a test pilot and kind of all of the traditional things and very quickly found myself falling in love with a different mission set than the Air Force looking at intelligence analysis in particular. And then that really started this crazy journey that's brought me here to be the CTO of the Soft Enterprise. So I was an Intel Officer on Active Duty jumped over to the Air National Guard where I started a dabble in cyber operations and understanding that and had a really unique opportunity to go stand up a cyber portfolio at Air Force Special Operations Command ended up not leaving. Crossed over to the civilian side there was a civil servant in the Air Force got called over to the Army to be a program manager for research and development in electronic warfare and multi-domain operations. And then about a year ago was extended the appointment to come here and join the Salt Lake team. So for me, it's been a long walk from being very downstream within that process and an end user and a consumer of technology starting to build into understanding the problems they're in on how do we bring in new things amid a speed of relevance. It was able then to do that from a program management capacity from the Army and then come to really put that all together in the portfolio here. And along that journey when I was in the Army really started the conversation two, three, four years ago about needing to change our relationship with technology and change the way that we bring that into the formation. I was introduced to Bonnie and Bonnie became one of my heroes in the acquisition space about people really leaning in and doing things differently. And so she and I have stayed in touch and when we had an opportunity to join forces before she very right to sleep for the nation is gonna go over and lead in the counter-UXS land we were able to bring her over to special operations and intensity conflict to be our acquisition director. - When we crossed paths a few years ago it was kind of in my early journey of trying to bring trade-wind solutions marketplace to as a model or an exemplar for how we can do this. Didn't have to be the path for everybody but I was like this is a pretty good way to think about this and a lot of the learning that I've talked about it on this podcast before that in terms of like getting to people to do this at scale is not easy and there's a lot of unlearning that has to happen there's a lot of culture things that get in the way as well. In that journey I haven't left that journey I feel like and that's when I crossed paths with Cara again and she asked me to help her do that for the soft community essentially like let's do this at scale across soft and then very quickly right after that like so we did a big thing. I felt like we created another exemplar for them to potentially follow with the accelerator day which I think we're gonna talk about today and very quickly after that I was kind of asked to do the same thing for the unmanned systems portfolio. So that's where I'm currently trying to wrap my hands around and understand like how do we do that? How do you create the acquisition engine that's necessary at that scale? - So what we're gonna be talking about here today is essentially how to buy things and how to buy things faster and perhaps how to use a model of procurement and acquisition that you learned in one place and that we're now expanding. You've mentioned a lot of different things just in both of you in that introduction but let's start with one. You mentioned something called trade winds, what's that? - It's a buying model. It is technically I'll call it an acquisition pathway in the set for a like a procurement pathway in the sense that we did something that had not been done before in the sense that we took some of the best pieces of what was going on. We looked at the defense innovation units the way they purchase commercial technology and we looked at how they thought about commercial and from a buying perspective and they had something called the commercial solutions opening procedures. I don't want to get into the weeds of how they view commercial solutions opening procedures, CSO versus the defense regulation CSO that's maybe another conversation but we took that model. We looked at Afrox, we looked at how the Air Force was doing innovation kind of left of requirements and they had something called the open topic model. So we liked how they did broad announcement, general solicitations and nothing prescriptive, things like that. And we kind of smushed it all together with some other things that we thought were innovative. Basically we found a way to have a direct pathway to buy products and solutions that were commercially viable based on merit, similar to using what's called the commercial solutions opening procedures. So we were stacking multiple authorities together under one general solicitation so that we were trying to be compliant with as many authorities as we could so that we could have flexibility as a government buyer. So when Cara came to me and said, "I need to buy, I have no mechanism to get to company X." Run them through our competitive evaluation process and then you can choose that company on the back end of the marketplace based on merit if there's an operational need or a mission gap or something like that. I called it simply an accelerated competition and assessment process. That's a very like top wave way of thinking about it. And then another way we think about it is we have a post competition environment. So if you, there is due diligence, like there is a competition process, there's evaluation criteria you have to meet. If you get through that, you are essentially, quote unquote, "awardable" so that there's no further competition to be done. There's no source selection, there's no additional rigor. We have a post competition environment and we can execute contracts based on merit. So that's probably the planest way. - Yeah, and I think based on timing also. So when talking about that ecosystem that exists on the back end, I think is a really important part of the conversation. There is a lot of different dependencies that are at play at any point when we were trying to bring new technology into the formation. Sometimes that's the operational environment. Sometimes, and we've seen just what's been going on in the Middle East as things continue to change, you can look at the war as Ukraine as another example. When you're doing acquisitions that only give you that singular moment in time, hey, you need to make a decision right now and you're gonna have to stick with that decision, you're leaving a lot on the table that you can do the work on the back end and say, hey, it's not no, it's not right now. And if the situation changes, you can go back and revisit that same pool without having to gen up an entire new ostensibly acquisition cycle to attempt to recompede something, you've already competed the baseline concept of what you have to go after. So that really creates then an ecosystem that you can start to pair and tailor based on your needs and where you are in the storyline, 'cause there's storylines happening at all points in all times. That's one of the big things that we're trying to change. It's not just how do we buy and not what do we buy, right? I think we get very, very focused on that moment of acquisition when it's time to make the decision and apply money, but from really my CTO seat, maybe it makes me a bad CTO to say, hey, that's not really the technical issue that I'm trying to tackle. It is re-contextualizing our relationship with technology in general. That is re-looking at what the fire team of the future really is. That is the center of gravity being the warfighter. That is an acquisition professional being close to their ecosystem that is both the person that knows how to go out and touch industry and technology and bring that in, but also close to the decision maker on who can give them that permission to win. But the third leg of that triangle is private industry. Is these technical minds that really can answer these difficult questions? How do I create synergy around them and start to really remind the warfighter that acquisition works for them? These are not different pillars of things that you input an idea or requirement on the back end, coughs out technology. The world doesn't work that way. Any more technology changes too quickly. The war environment changes too quickly. We have to be responsive to them within that and create really that ability to be flexible and to give choice, ultimately designed towards the risk owners. And that's where I think that we've been disconnected in the technology realm. We've looked at it very myopically through, is it technically feasible? Is it going to do all of these things and getting stuck and trying to build perfect solutions where you have operational command or screaming I will take good enough because this is the reality that I exist in today. So it's trying to close that loop throughout the entire process. And I'll add one more, I don't know if this has been yet, or just a kind of layer on top of what she's saying because I think part of our conversation today is not, I don't think either of us are wedded to the tactic at all, but we love things that work. And when they work, we want to promote that to the extent possible. The whole trade win solutions marketplace, the genesis of it came from the soft community, whether I'm not sure if I've ever told this story before publicly, but it was interacting with lower echelon unit members and understanding that's the story arc she's talking about and the timing issue. And I didn't understand, you know, just sitting in my seat, you know, far away at the other end of the spear. I didn't understand deeply what she was talking about until I saw and felt what she was talking about. And I realized a lot of people in my position in the acquisition community, all good intentioned, would throw the rule book in their face when they asked for help. Like, that's how it felt like to me. I was not going to judge kind of some of the things you were talking about, the other parts in the acquisition process that do need to happen, I was gonna own my part though and be like, I'm not gonna be the problem for getting them what they need when they need it. And I wanted to give them a pathway similar to what, if you're familiar with small business innovation research, Sibber phase three contracting, where you can go direct to vendors because they've already been competed. And so solving this problem, like put the rules aside for a second, what could this look like? How could I do a contract in a day? How could I get this person, what they ask for when they ask for it? And that's where the ideas came from. So the model was a result of an end state we were driving or an outcome we were trying to get to. And the model still works, it's still around. So like yes, please use it as much as possible, but like I think in our community, we lose sight of like sometimes building the right pipelines and the right models or workflows, buying models in particular. We're not solving for the right outcomes sometimes. Yeah, I mean, 'cause we're grading ourselves in our ability to follow a process most of the time. That is easy to measure and that feels very good, but at the end of the day is what outcome have you generated? And starting to switch that vernacular around to understand because this is a Rubik's Cube that we're trying to spin to get this to look right. Sometimes speed is the leading indicator. Hey, I need a 60% solution to field tomorrow is gonna be better than the 90% late to need. And so being able to balance all of these and I think really the bottom line of this is saying there is no singular right way to do this. They're certainly wrong ways. And I think that we're getting better as a community at identifying that. But getting people comfortable, not having an exact, you must do step A, B and C because you have choice. I think that people actually are inherently just want to follow the same process over and over again. And that's not with the mission demands anymore. We need to be able to meet the need and sometimes that is still a far-based contract. That is not the enemy, that is still okay. But pushing towards using the max extent of the law possible to generate those outcomes. 'Cause it is life or death. And that's the other large portion of what I am designed to do is to say we can talk a lot about technology on the other end of technology as a person. And it's the first soft truth that humans are more important and hardware. And that is the way that we measure against things and how we tip the scales is to say acquisition at the end of the day really is just trading harder and taxpayer dollars for human lives. Either the protection of our own or if we are called to use violence in support of the missions of the nation that we are effective. I'm in good stewards of that, moving forward. - You're both saying a lot of things that I think buck the conventional wisdom and I'm having a hard time keeping track of them in my head but two of them really stick out to me. One thing you said is sometimes the most important thing isn't the technology that we're buying. It's the processes behind it and we've gone into that a bit. And the other thing you said is that there's no one right way of of doing something. And the reason I say that bucks the conventional wisdom is at least when you read the trade presses or you're exposed to what's going on in LinkedIn or sub-stack or you're following, the defense tech sort of literati universe. You would think that the most important thing is the technology and you would think that there's only one right way to do it, which is the commercial solutions opening or one in particular path. So what I'm getting out here is I'd be very curious to hear from you guys what translates from you think the experience that you've had it at soft with special operations forces where speed is it a premium adaptability is it a premium, but sometimes the capabilities aren't those that might be as relevant to the larger force. What lessons translate perhaps first and then maybe what doesn't? - I think that there is a little bit of a misnomer about soft peculiarity. We talk a lot about that. It's the foundation of how we go forward and get money for soft. It is a separate major funding program, PLEV and funding it's designed to do that. There are some things for us that are not applicable to the larger joint force 'cause they just may never find themselves in that situation just due to the nature of the mission. But quite often it's not that it doesn't apply, it's that it's just really early. And I think we have a lot of key examples through 40 years next year since U.S. Special Operations Command was established where things that started in soft and started as soft peculiar have come over the fence line and are now in larger programs of record. As warfare has changed right and really I think autonomous systems starting to come into the cornerstone of this, there's not that much daylight in between us anymore. And like I said, not that there ever was, but it's really about the speed of adaptation and sometimes the soft peculiarity is just how quickly we're going to go do that or in some cases with partnerships that we do have this deep nexus of doing it with allies and with other partners. So I think that the biggest part of that that I would say that does transfer, it's that mentality on getting to a best athlete model, where we care a little less about the programatics and more about the efficacy of that technology and in having that willingness to pivot and say, hey, just because, and this is why getting after how we approach technology is important. If I lock myself into a good piece of technology but now I'm stuck with the same thing and need to sustain that for the next 10 years, that might not serve the mission space anymore. Do I have the ability to pivot away from that and bring things in? So I think that that does translate into some of the problems, not all of the problems and that goes back to the saying, there's no single BB that fixes anything. The answers you have to be able to do, I call it, are we gonna put a human being in a pressurized tube? So think things that go in the sky, things that go underwater, is a different process and a different approach than when we're talking about edge compute power and UAS systems and things that are gonna mature in the private sector more quickly. So I think that the biggest thing that you can take away from SOF is that ability to say what problem am I going after and who do I have to be to go solve that problem and kind of changing to meet that? - Kind of what I see is I've always believed procurement contracting is the easiest part. We are kind of in this cycle because of our budget cycles where there's such a rush to obligate funds, especially with, you know, CRs that seem to extend really late into the year, et cetera. And everyone thinks their job is done when the contract is awarded. And that's actually like farthest from the truth. So there's in terms of things like that work and that don't work for like to have buying models like what we're talking about where you're placing bets, early bets. And you wanna look at the efficacy of something and you have a community like the SOF community who is willing to take that on probably more so than other communities. So you have like this proving ground of an ecosystem where you can inject things very quickly and they can give you that quick feedback. But somebody has like you don't know the answer when you award the contract. You don't know if it's going to work. And this is kind of the flipping the acquisition script. We are used to planning for certainty. We are used to planning and thinking we know the answer. And I think there's been lots of GAO reports and other articles that I think criticized where we bought the exquisite capability and we thought this was gonna be the thing and then it goes in the field and it's quite maybe not exactly what we were planning. So we get into these planning cycles where we are delaying and we're pushing decisions and that increases risks on the operator and we've done it at what cost. So if you flip that script and we say okay, we're gonna place multiple bets early on, spend less money upfront, but now you don't know if it's going to work. So someone has to stay engaged after contract awards. Somebody has to keep a pulse on what happened in the field. And so to me, it's your creating decision space and you're leaving enough runway to collect enough operational evidence to make the next best decision. Do you pivot? Do you keep investing or do you divest? And that's the harder part that I think is going to challenge the department because that's a new way of doing business. Like that's not a muscle I think we're used to exercising. - No, and I'll say I think that they're very candidly. I think that there are corners of the department that are doing that better than we're doing in this off-community. And I think that's a large part of making change and advancing is willing to have the humility to sit and look around and say who has this figured out. And what I would offer is the Arnie's drone marketplace right now being a really key example of a really great way of doing business from the perspective of we're not really putting as much of the burden on you need to have the singular right solution and you need to go feel these to every single unit that's gonna go and do all of the things. We are finding better ways of doing asset management and carving off kind of pots of money and going. Here is the money you commander need to go by drones. Here are your options that have been vetted right to be on this marketplace there is criteria for that. So doing that kind of umbrella acquisition work that creates an ecosystem, but that instead of me handing something that isn't gonna work for you, you now as the commander who is the ultimate risk owner in this has some choice in the matter. Based on the task that you are given, which of these 200 things are best suited for that, that I think is a really pervasive model that starts us to walk away from what I really think is an obsession with programs of record. I don't think that back to my point on pressurized tubes that you put people in, sometimes it makes a lot of sense. And sometimes we are just going back to old behavior because we're comfortable and in really need to step in to be comfortable being uncomfortable. I think that we are ready to do business like that. Congress is ready to support that. If you look at exactly what we're doing kind of within the UX else around going, we are going to let the technology lead in this case, but it's an intelligent conversation between where is the technology in a state of maturity and where is the use case and how that's needed and working that back and forth before we come in and affirm some large amount of decision, but it's returning some of that decision back to the people who lives depend on it back to that previous point that I think is probably one of the biggest Well, one of the challenges, though I see here is what I'm what I'm hearing from both of you is a premium on decentralization for instance on a premium on no size fits all a premium on closer cooperation between the the warfighter and the procure and feedbacks and all that Certainly I agree with and I think most people would find unobjectionable the same token There's a reason we have centralization sometimes right we have it for compliance purposes We have it for ensuring the taxpayer money is stewarded wisely We have it because you can't really scale without it to some extent right unless it's a stable demand signal coming from the government And now we're starting to see it with something like auto warcom which you know bony or I think a huge part of building from where I understand With unmanned systems and with counter unmanned systems because the technology cycles are so fast the adaptation is so fast How are we going to do that sort of standardization and control from the above and also allow this you know sort of these iterative feedback loops You're talking about the devolution of authority for procurement decisions. How can we square that circle? Yeah, I think that that's where you have to accept that two things can be simultaneously true So innovation and that's the buzzword we love to use for anything innovation is inherently disruptive However, institutionalizing innovation takes some amount of discipline and takes some amount of oversight So I think that we tend to see these models as either we're going to centralize everything and you're going to get what you get And somebody's going to make a decision and you're going to be happy with it or the opposite of here's some money Don't worry about it go to find your end-future There's a middle ground and I think that that goes into what we were already talking about in things like marketplaces and things like White lists of capabilities where you can apply all of the compliance Base things that you need to through a centralized contracting office But it's starting to disaggregate back to that who is making what decision and why that we can begin to push that down Two lower commanders where it makes sense and this is where it's it just can't be a one-size-fits-all model But I think that Giada 401 being a great example in the work that they've done to bring some standardization and kind of communal site picture They still have the ability to be a focal point that can help Parentaler and I think that that is the biggest difference is that all of this will still require some amount of centralization It's still going to require guideposts It's still going to require oversight to make sure that it is compliant and legal but instead of whether it's end-users or commanders and pick whatever down-stream echelon You want to do that coming back to the acquisition system and saying I have a problem or I need help and or this is not good enough People will look at them and say well, you just don't know how to use it or Yes, it is and you don't understand or too bad and just really culturally problematic ways that I think that we've forgotten people that are either in or adjacent to the acquisition system that we serve them, right? And so this is one of the things that I tell my team And I'll say very publicly is if somebody brings you an issue and And you are the program manager and an end user comms and says hey, this is why this isn't working for me If your first-cut instinct is to be defensive or to try to explain to them what they are the problem within that process You have forgotten what it is that we do your answer should be thank you Thank you for starting to have the trust back into that centralization to be able to bring those problem forwards because that That's the other cornerstone of this is that there's a lot of things that we have to be able to sit with quite frankly Before we can move forward and to change all of these ecosystems and one of those is that we has lost the faith of the people whom we serve And I think that you can go to the end users and say hey, you know People don't listen. So we need to earn their trust back. We need to earn the trust back of private industry to understand that hey We owe you being better customers. We owe you a better way of articulating what our needs are We owe you a fast yes and the fast note and to be able to kind of move you through this process and and we you know We really owe it then to ourselves. We able to sit down and say hey, are we measuring ourselves against the correct thing? And that is not to transition technology and that's the other interesting part of this is we start to weigh all of the tangential things Not just writing the contracts, but you can look at S&T and RDT&E work holistically right large We normally measure that by a transition rate that has been the gold standard metric by which we look at that and I I don't offer I don't think that that serves us anymore rather than using transition as a metric What have I done to de-risk a larger acquisition decision down the road? Maybe I you know if I apply a hundred thousand dollars two hundred thousand dollars whatever the number is to something and I do Learning in such a way that either this approach is going to work great and we can proceed or even better yet We were off base in our approach to this to begin with I would much rather that figure that out early in an RDT&E process Then figure that out after I've made a hundred million dollar procurement and I realized that that I made a bad decision Five years down the road when it's not working. So it's about risk right and and just finding a new way to articulate Where is the risk actually and risk is the boogie man that lives under the bed? What is the real risk and how do we apply value to what is the risk of if I don't do anything or if I don't change and so that's I think the other hard part of this is there is risk that we are not thinking about because back to my point on the Back end of that is People without technologies to defend themselves from inbound drone attacks. I mean we are we're not there yet And I think that you can you can look at the news and even what happens in the nation at airports, you know They all right. We're gonna stop. We're gonna wait and that's not an adequate answer Yeah, we got to do a whole episode on counter UAS just at airports like I'm really fascinated by this but So I actually would really want to ask you about culture because you've now brought it up a couple times and you and I discussed this Briefly before the before the show a lot of things you're talking about you're thinking talking about how to encourage people to accept a higher level of Risk or how to get officers to deliver a faster yes or a faster no to industry or if you're talking about I'm making sure that people are aligned on the importance of centralized compliance But also not being afraid to dissolve some decisions making so on and so forth. These are all cultural questions But culture is just one of these really fuzzy Concepts and it's very hard to operationalize it, right? So how do you change the culture and I mean in really specific terms? I mean you guys are you're both in positions where I imagine you hire People or you find allies within the building. You know whom you have to lean on perhaps whom you can't how do you Build the culture you want into the people around you. I've been thinking deeply about this in straight wins because I realized very early on It started and things were you know, it was very early. We had nothing and we we started seeing success I thought I had gold. I was like man acquisition community is going to love this and The more I kind of did my grassroots remove it and we would go to the services we go to lots of we went to so calm The more we talked about it, I could see the resistance and I would simply ask people though what is Stopping you from using this model and the top two answers I got were my boss will say no and legal will say no And I may have said that last time I was on the podcast as well because this is an example of the culture we're talking about So I want to share a quick anecdote on something she was touching on there's many layers of culture There's the department's culture you have like enterprise culture and then you kind of have your sub cultures Like you have a command you sit in you have your team culture You know if you're in a unit like it's totally if you're military versus civilian like there's many layers to culture One part of our culture from an acquisition perspective. I want to see change is that relationship with the end user You were talking about I don't remember the specifics, but I think you'll get the gist of the story or the sannicto where it was I think two or three years ago something happened in the field where Somebody I think used a technology they weren't supposed to something like that and there was this story going around And most of the narrative of the story that I heard at my maybe level was how like was very punitive Toward somebody did something they were not supposed to I've heard this whole like end user shouldn't write requirements like narrative I've heard this my whole career This is not unique to the department because the end user in it kind of goes towards that whole like customers We'll just ask for a faster horse like we need an engine kind of thing like they you know you can't how do we do that How do we plan for that how do we control for that things like that? I was teaching a class and somebody like brought this up as a way of like why we shouldn't do something and I kind of Went a different approach like Kara was suggesting. I said did anyone ask how did it get so bad That this person felt like they had to break the rules to get a technology into their hands because they needed something I'm like did anyone ask that is and so and that was not a popular, you know Uh opinion, but like that is a cultural friction and we have got to fix that now to your question like how do you fix these things So that's like one element of culture and then there's the risk averse culture of acquisition one thing I truly believe If we are not humble and honest with ourselves as individuals. It starts with individuals Everyone is looking for someone else to save them They're looking for the perfect policy to give them the permission. They're looking for whatever. I've stopped Holding my breath and I'm like everyone has got to stop doing that and look at themselves and look at the daily choices You are making for example one of my litmus tests on culture is the silent staff meeting and I always ask like leaders I'm like when you hold a staff meeting who talks and that is a reflection of your culture So if you are a leader who says I love innovation. I love diversity of thought if you have a silent staff meeting That's not a reflection of the things you're saying that that and that's to get a you know layer deeper like you asked so when it comes to Changing culture. It's hard to scale. It can be done But it takes people actively making certain choices Like that align with the actions and behaviors we need whether it's whatever the objective is go fast Break the status quo like whatever the ask is someone has got to be encouraging the right actions and incentivizing the right actions and behaviors that happen on a daily basis. I'm not even talking about like weeks or months and things like that. And so that's kind of where I always start. Yeah. For you, that's on this too. I do. And I'll really approach it from the other side of the coin. I think we are stuck at large, right, with this mentality of I think part of it is just a loss of focus. And that goes back to my, hey, what are we doing and why are we doing this and getting people to kind of pick their head up out of a sand for a second and get out of their own sandbox and look around and, you know, being in DC, I do it all the time. And I'll point over to Arlington Cemetery and say, hey, if you haven't been over there in a while, maybe it's time to go take a walk and go take a look. And we can go talk to some of my friends that are over there and say, hey, this is if we're not doing it to reduce the number of white stones in that field, then how do I find something on the outside for you to go do that may be a better use of our talents? It's time for some brutal honesty. The other part of that with culture change is not just incentivizing and we don't do that well. Quite frankly, everybody loves innovation until you get innovators and they're disruptive. And their whole reason for being is to change the status quo. And I have watched people look at young captains in the field who are doing exactly what, you know, in senior leader echelons, we're telling them to do and they will get their hand slapped and it literally turns into the conversation of, yeah, but don't innovate like that. That's that's disruptive. So that comes into it's not just highlight the good behavior, right? When you see somebody doing something that is good, you need to go screen that from the rooftops and from a much higher level than you would think that you need to do that because it's not the senior leaders. Everybody's on the same page and everybody is saying the right words and pointing in the right direction. It's not the people on the ground. They are doing the same thing. They are, they've been ready. They're screaming for this. They're running regardless of the support that they're getting. This is somewhere in the middle. And somewhere in the middle, at some point in your career, and I hope that I never find it, I think that people wake up one day and they want to be right more than they want to get it right. And when you can realize that that is it, those are two different positions by what you're going to approach a problem is where you start to have culture change. For me personally, in my entire career, I have been deeply lucky to have always found myself sitting at the head of a table where the people around the table were much better than I was, just about everything that we had going on. And it went from accidentally stumbling into those scary situations going, oh man, how did I end here? To doing what I do today, which is going out and finding the bodies and finding these people and actively going, if I am collecting people who are sitting at this table with me that are better than I am, that are the experts in their field. As a leader, I need to turn and look and say, what do I need to do to help you do your job and to go remove problems? That's not normal, by the way. It's a great special power that she has, not just collecting humans. People will follow her true leadership, right? Two, she wants to make sure that the person can go do. That's what we did with accelerator. You unleashed me. And I remember I was like, are you sure? And you said, no, we're going to do this, we're going to do it right and stuff like that. And that is not, I've been told to be less mavericky, for example. I've been told to tone it down, Bonnie, you know, like, so like that's just to give it, I'll add a little color to what she's talking about. That's not a shared view at someone at her level. The other side, so you can, you know, you have to empower people. You have to realize that true empowerment means that your reputation and that's fine because a real leader, hey, you, you know, and I tell folks all the time, hey, you're going to go succeed. I'm going to take the fall for the failure. And that's the whole point. It's why you, it's why executives get paid more, right? It should be. It's risk ownership. But the reverse of that is accountability. And I think that that is really at the core of it where we're sitting at this point. And we can champion things. We can highlight the good. But until there is honest accountability, and not just the blatantly bad, right? And that's where I think that we get stuck. We are, we do hold people accountable for you. If you do something illegal or non-compliant, there, there is a, the system that is going to come in place and correct that. But what we haven't gotten good at yet is having the accountability when you're not doing anything illegal, but you're still wrong. And in wrong in this case is not moving quickly enough, not being supportive, not getting serious. We're not moving the needle. We, we allow this churn. And I think that we are, I think that culture is changing. I think that we are more willing now to lean in. But, but at the end of the day, we don't, we don't have technology problems. I don't even think the nation has technology problems. We're going to figure that out. That's who we are. We have people problems. And that boils down to leadership problems. And that's kind of my, my challenge is, is going, hey, the senior leaders, and I was in a conversation the other day. I had a general officer talking to me. And you know, he made some comment on, hey, you know, we really need your help on this to get the department to let us to do x, y and z. I said, what, what are you talking about? I'm screaming at you to do it. That way you are somewhere in a middle echelon is choosing to not get you to yes. And either you begin to hold those people accountable, or you're pointing right back at the person in harm's way. And saying, I'm not serious, right? So we're going to get there. We have to. But it's a, I think the culture change starts from the top. And that's happened. It's bubbling from the bottom. And now it is about our senior leaders holding that middle management accountable. Well, let me just say, Karen, and I hope you take this as the compliment that it is. It's so obvious that you're a former military officer in the way, and I'm just speaking as one of myself, in the way you speak about leadership. And I really appreciate him. I'm really happy we, we ended there in this conversation. And we got through culture and went into the absolutely fundamental role that plays as the substrate between all these processes and what we buy. And I know we've said that we have the technology that we, you know, that we need or that, you know, it's not all about the technology a few times in this conversation. But just to wrap us up because you guys are working at the forefront of how we use drones. I mean, at special operations, low-intensity conflict, you guys are sort of the pathfinder, I think, for new applications of drones. And then, of course, Bonnie, with Durbin, you access, you'll be building out sort of a new portfolio here, trying to send those lessons. So my final question for both of you to wrap this up is getting to drones. What's one thing everybody's getting wrong today about them? I kind of already tease this, I feel like the problem is not the contract. And when I say problem, these are not insurmountable problems, but it's like to her point about, these are all human problems. There is an orchestration of things that has to happen. I don't know if the department is ready for, I don't know what to call it, other than cyclical technology changes. So we're getting ready to do iterative gauntlets where we're looking for the best of the best, you know, and we're going to prove out what right should look like at a point in time. What right looks like today might not be what right looks like next year. So I don't know if our force is ready for that tempo of change from a technology perspective, from like a force generation, a training perspective, a coordination and logistics perspective. Everyone who is hyper focused on the acquisition part, again, this is my community, this is my dojo, like there's plenty to do better here. I am confident we are going to figure that part out. I would love to feel more confidence on some of the other harder parts between awarding the contract and getting it into the person's hands. Canally, I think we're still struggling on the price point. And I think that if we look at that from an adversarial perspective, when we're talking about mass, right, and I think it depends, this is one of those going, and what do we mean by drone? Because that can mean so many different things. But if we're looking at the problem set of what our adversary can do to hold at risk, our people and our formation and how they used to do that, I think that we're still and I hate to use the term over-engineering. But I think we're trying to get too fancy when the answer is be able to do something at mass well and then be ready when that is no longer valid in the con up to pivot and continue to make those improvements. So I think, you know, very, very quickly, it, hey, that baseline price is this and by the time you get to what the operational variant is, it's quadrupled 8x, something in price and now we're suddenly starting to price ourselves out of that. And I think that that's, it's more than drones. I think that we're at a really weird point with technology when we're talking about military grade. And that's another thing, if I could change the way our relationship is with technology, it's to maybe take that back and to not make it the almost slur that it is. So when I was in uniform right, and we talked all about this, when you hear, you know, to the public, I think when they hear, oh, it's military grade, well, that must be really tough. And we would always know in the military, oh, that means it's probably, you know, really clunky and way over expensive and why am I getting charged, you know, and I've seen examples of this of something you can buy basically on Amazon's about $2,500 in the government's paying about $144. So, hey, hold on a minute. At the end of the day, we have to thread that needle and I'll go back to read what I said in the beginning. This is taxpayer dollars being traded for human life. And we need to make sure that that scale balances in that way. And that would be my message to industry is, hey, we owe you better, but UOS better too on this. And I think that we've been through a period where, you know, in whether it's bad contract writing or bad decision making, you can point fingers all day long, but the government, we, we created this ecosystem that we are now pretending that we are a victim of. So there has to be some rebase lining that looks at this and understands really looking to the commercial side and what does this really cost versus what do you think you're going to sell it to me for? And remember, it, you know, we believe in the American dream, I think everybody can win in this scenario, but I need industry to hear me when I say, you know, truly, if I'm going to, you know, if you ever deal with me and I'm being a stickler about price, it's not, it's not my money, it's a taxpayer's money. I am running a calculation of how far can I stretch the money that I have, because that's just that many more people in my formation I can either provide capability to or provide coverage to. And I think that more than drones, counter drones is where I get really passionate about that because I was involved in an Army program when I was a program manager that the whole reason that the Army program existed was the current solution from a different formation cost too much and they had to come in and go I can't cover all of my bases at that price point I just can't make it make sense can we do something else that gets us there that's the reality of what we're dealing with and I think that asking folks to meet us in the middle on that is how I would end. There are a lot of threads that we have to continue I'll have you both back sometime but for now Karen Bonnie thank you so much for joining colleagues. Thanks for having us. 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