Need-to-Know by BOKA: John Sherman.

Welcome to the Need to Know Podcast, the world's leading podcast on dual-use technology and pressing topics in national security across August, NATO, and beyond. In this episode, Boca CEO John James and Operating Partner Teresa Smetzer sat down with John Sherman, the former Department of Defense Chief Information Officer, and current dean of the Bush School at Texas A&M. In this episode, you'll hear about the types of initiatives Dean Sherman hopes to accomplish at the Bush School, the role of technology in public policy, collaboration across August at its allies, beating bureaucracy in defense, and more. Hi, I'm Teresa Smetzer, I'm an Operating Partner at Boca Capital, and I'm a retired CIA executive. Hi, or as we'd say here at Texas A&M University, Howdy, I'm John Sherman, dean of the Bush School of Government Public Service, founded by President George H. W. Bush in 1997, or one of our primary focuses is getting leaders ready for our community, state, nation, and the world. Hi, I'm John James, I'm the founding CEO of Boca Capital, and we are a deep tech dual-use investor. Terrific. So, John, let me get started by congratulating you on your appointment at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M. It's an incredible opportunity, and they are very fortunate to have you given your broad background in Department of Defense, the intelligence community and the U.S. Army. So with that background, what are your thoughts on sort of initiatives, programs, issues that you want to lead the Bush School, what sorts of things do you want to undertake? Well, thank you, Teresa, and it's an honor to be here with you. One of the main initiatives overall I want to continue is exactly what President Bush set us on the course to do. One of the main quotes we have is public service is a noble calling that President Bush said this when he was alive and here, and so the world continues to evolve and change. We just have to pick up anything, whether reading on our phones or the paper about how the global environment is changing, and I want to ensure that we're preparing our students for all echelons of leadership, could be resolving problems here within the state of Texas that require attention for our nation, with it in national security or other types of administration, and also on the world stage. One area that I know we've worked together, Teresa, is on areas of technology, the emergence of AI, how technology is going to influence so many parts of public policy, whether it's areas like cyber, whether it's areas like one of our institutes is working, looking at small modular nuclear actors and the public policy implications of that, or just what we're seeing, for example, in the Middle East right now, on how technology is redefining warfare. We need public policy leaders that are going to be prepared for all of those areas. Thank you so much, John. So, the last four years for U.S. public service execution have been quite a challenge between COVID, conflict in Russia and the Ukraine, the Israel-Homos situation, tensions with China. Also, all of the issues associated with public sector workforce, which you and I have dealt with in the past, and the increasing reliance on, for the government, on the private sector, private sector companies, investment, organizations, and so on, what's interesting to me is your role as DOD, CIO, you were successful, despite the challenges that really have faced the public sector in the last few years. Tell me a little bit about what you think, why were you so successful, what was it that made you different? Well, I had a great team around me. When I say team, not only at DOD, but working, for example, with our colleagues at CIA and cloud works, and in the information technology enterprise, the CIO organization there, working with industry, for example, all four of the major hyperscale or cloud service providers, and other parts of the tech industry as well, working with allies, the five eyes allies, in the UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the U.S., it requires a team of teams, but also having a very clear vision about what we want to do, Theresa, on the way over here, we talked about the decision to cancel the Jedi cloud contract several years ago and moving to the joint war fighting cloud capability, which was a multi-cloud multi-vendor approach. That to me capitalized on the best practices of a team of teams, getting all four of the CSPs to lean in, but also making sure Secretary Lloyd Austin, Secretary of Defense and the other key stakeholders, the Director of National Intelligence and others were behind what we were doing. I've found being a technology leader, just as you have done in private sector and in government, requires personal invested leadership. Yes, it's about the technology, yes, it's about hyperscale technology and cyber security and zero trust and all that, but it comes down to leadership, which is what I want to make sure we can prepare our students for at the Bush School of Government and Public Service, that you need to know the technology, but you better be able to work across with different stakeholder groups to get the job done. Thank you. Great. And John, you touched on five eyes and obviously there's other alliances that we were all collectively members of like NATO as well, but as you're more than aware in September 21, started the Tri-Natural Security Partnership between Australia, the UK and the USI, Orcas. And I guess this was originally intended really to promote that deeper information and technology sharing beyond submarines with the goal of strengthening each government's own security and defense interests. Now Bocca, our investment thesis is really based on leveraging this agreement to invest not only in deep tech, but more specifically around dual use technologies across those countries. And so what I'm interested is based on your experience today, how critical is this partnership to addressing some of those needs and sort of where do you see that moving going forward? So John, I want to thank you for what you all are doing to enable and encourage and empower the investment going on in that area. As the DODCIO, I was obviously very involved in this. Not only there was the track one piece you noted about the submarines and then track two as we're looking at cyber and technologies and other areas there, which I see, of course, the submarines are going to be critical. And there's a reason the PRC is so worried about this to be able to have the allied partners leveraging the nuclear submarine technology, but also for cyber and other areas. I think it is so important and I think this harkens to the best spirit of what we've been able to do together as allied nations back dating back to World War II. There's a lot of pick and shovel work that has to go in having IT systems, not only at the secret, but top secret level where engineers and others can exchange information. As CIO had to work through a lot of issues on this that we're not glamorous. And this is back to my time as the intelligence community CIO, even pre dating office on areas like policies on on breaking inspect on on moving data packets between sovereign boundaries. Things that should be easier than they are that aren't and this is why back to the relationship with my colleague CIOs in London and Canberra and for that matter in Ottawa and Wellington as well as we work through some of those hard issues. What excites me to about August and this is well above my pay grade on some of the policy issues but the interest in Tokyo and Seoul and being kind of extended members and maybe even in New Delhi on what we're doing is as like-minded democracies to to stand up against a frankly predatory activity by the PRC and bringing the best of breed technologies. But my takeaway here is the vision is great but the hard pick and shovel work that has to be done cannot be ignored and I want to thank you all for helping us get to the technologies and the processes to be successful in that area. Terrific. To that end, John, UNI have had a lot of experience collaborating on bureaucracy and sort of thinking differently about how to do business. So what are some things based on your experience in DOD that you think we could do bureaucratically to ease some of the resistance to this sort of collaboration and how can you help also from the Bush School at putting in place some policies that might promote that sort of engagement? So a few things here. I think working with the folks that are not the technologists, the folks in general council, the people that work in contracts and acquisition, they've got to be brought into the discussion. I'll use an example. When we were getting ready on the joint war fighting cloud capability contract, this is the $9 billion ceiling contract that replaced Jedi. There were a lot of stakeholders involved and the technologists certainly understood what was needed, but I needed help from the folks working the non-material issues. So I stood up an informal group somewhat half jokingly called the Council of Elders that I would bring together because I needed the senior executive level deciders, not the folks further down doing the contract and procurement, hard working women and men, don't get me wrong, but I needed the deciders at the table who could break through and say there's a timeline we're on. We need the lawyers to get to yes on this. We need to work with our intelligence community counterparts. to be able to get to yes on use of existing infrastructure, that's what I had to do. And I want that kind of lesson or set of lessons is what I want to imbue in the Bush School of Government and Public Service. That there's kind of the textbook way to do things, but then there's the how you get things actually done. And one of the ways we try to do that in the Bush School of Government and Public Services, in addition to our outstanding 10 year tenure track professors, we have what are called professors of the practice. These are men and women that come from places like CIA, FBI, Department of Defense. And they come with practical experience of how you get things done. If I can use a quick example, there's the 1986 movie called Back to School with Rodney Dangerfield. And there's a scene I love where he's in a business class. And there's kind of the textbook way of setting up a business, but Rodney Dangerfield's character had run a clothing store for decades in New York. And he starts talking about what he had to actually do with getting contracts in places onto the students who are all turning around, taking notes from him. And not to take away, again, from our 10 year tenure track, but the professors of practice really are our secret sauce at the Bush School, trying to work through that. So that was the first half of the question. Remind me of the second half there, please, Theresa. - Well, it's just the bureaucracy more generally. I mean, one example, the U.S. recently removed, ITAR requirements for caucus members. That's an example of something that was extremely impactful, because the bureaucracy behind ITAR and applying for ITAR is tremendous. So that helps to enable then more free-flowing. So other examples of where we could do things like that. - I think this gets to the personal relationships. And you don't want to make it the quote unquote buddy net, but it can't be completely dependent on the incumbents and the joss, but man is that important to be able to pick up the phone or get on the email, 'cause of the time differences and things, and talk to my counterpart in Canberra or in London, or get on a quick call and say, we've got to be able to work this together with in the U.S., with our interagency partners, in London across the different organizations and so on. That's the, 'cause if you try to let the bureaucracy just run, it's gonna take years and years, and the concern that would keep me up, you kind of gotta get to the why on this too, is as we are working together as allies against authoritarian nations, be they in Beijing, Tehran, Moscow, or Pyongyang, they're able to move quicker because of their authoritarian nature, not that we ever want to not have our democratic groundings, our free market economies, but when G says, I want 10 data centers built next week, guess what's gonna get built? 10 data centers in a month or what have you. We've got to be able to move with that same alacrity, but with undergirding our democratic values, free market economy, free and fair competition, and as allies, but in a way that we can stay ahead of our authoritarian competitors, which is why, by the way, the sort of investments you all are making and your advocacy is so important. And this also is not just in governmental channels, is with industry, our colleague, John Edwards, who I think of often, he was the CIO at CIA for years and the Deputy Chief Operating Officer. I learned a lot from him about how he could just pick up the phone and call Amazon, AWS, or he could call another company. And I learned a lot from that is don't demure from those relationships. Stay free and stay within the bounds of the contract, but lean into it, and not just in the US, these companies want to help. And I don't think you'd mind me quoting him. It's not in the dollar. Microsoft said, look, we all live fearing our kids are under the same threat of terrorists or what may happen. And that is a powerful influence. Yeah, they may be economic competitors, but picking up the phone, say, let's help us break through this. That's something I tried to do with CIO. - Yeah. So just picking up on that, obviously, you've sort of alluded to speed being one of our sort of critical abilities, as opposed to try and stare ahead of adversaries, but also the nature of some of the technologies is going to be important as well, particularly where there's IP that we've developed that they haven't or that we're slightly more advanced in our capabilities. So I guess, you know, going moving forward and you'll have seen a lot of stuff come across your desk at the DOD and in your previous roles as well, where do you see technologies and national security headed more generally? And what are, I guess, some of the new frontiers for that type of tech. So for example, you know, space is an important domain now and something that we weren't really talking about a lot, maybe five, 10 years ago. And it's obviously of interest to our adversaries as well. But other areas now where, for example, and from a defense perspective, war fighting is more thing as well. So where sort of classic guns and bullets are moving across to things like theft or control of IP, financial threats between states and non-state actors, you know, the lines of blurring between, I guess, defense, national security and commerce in that respect, do we need to, I guess, reimagine our defense to counter these threats or the lines between our traditional agencies blurring as a consequence? Where do you see it all going, basically? Absolutely, and it's the speed of not only what I talked about, but the developments you just touched on, John, as we look across and all sorts of things, you know, there's pages blowing up on the Hezbollah members' hits. There's drones being used by both sides of the conflict in Ukraine every day and electronic countermeasures being deployed on almost daily existential basis. We just had Senator Rob Portman here yesterday. We have the Mossbacher Institute at the Bush School of Government Public Service and Senator Portman, who's been a strong ally of Ukraine was just in Levy even Kiev this past week. And saw in a room about the size of the studio we're in, I know you can't see it all here, but there were young men and women developing drones in real time for deployment. It just cuts to the nature of warfare and how quick it's changing to your question about, and some of these trends are well known among many of your audience, and certainly you all. At the Bush School, we're thinking a lot about artificial intelligence and not just GNI and how that helps with research and so on, but how it's going to fundamentally change the nature of so many things. You mentioned space. That is so critical. I mean, we see not only what's going on proliferated low-earth orbit constellations, I mean, we had the first non-NASA extra-vehicular activity this past week. If that didn't give you goosebumps with those civilian astronauts standing out on the deck of that SpaceX capsule, my goodness. And at the same time, we recognize it's still a challenging environment. Starliner did touchdown successfully, but there's still two US astronauts on the ISS for good, safe reasons that they were kept up there. And then, of course, we talk so much about cyber, but we've had the crowd strike issue here just recently and talking about how there is still push in the rock up the hill about getting not only private sector, but even government entities to take this seriously, that this is existential. There are other areas, too, as we look at technological developments, which start to get into some of the August track, too, whether it's hypersonic technology, autonomous vehicles. Here at Texas A&M, not at the Bush School, but we have what's called our Relis campus. That's the former Brian Air Force Base, or by the way, Buzz Aldrin trained when he was a fighter pilot. We have a statue of him out there. It stands for our core values at A&M, respect, excellence, leadership, loyalty, integrity, and selfless service, but this former military air base, we have the Bush Combat Development Center, which is not affiliated with our school for which I'm the dean, but we're testing things like hypersonics 5G, 6G, next technology, and our Army Futures Command is out there. And the reason I note this is, this gets to the quick development and that I see the marriage of industry, government, and academia needing to work together. And the next layer on that, John, I would say, is with our allies. And I think there's already good connective tissue, but that's the one thing that's hard is staying in formation with allies. And it's a bias for community. You can almost over-communicate. Secretary Lloyd Austin, SECDEF, former boss, would say, you cannot over-communicate in the world we live in, and that's one thing I want to try to do, too, to make sure we're moving things along. - Great. And so you just mentioned you refer to Ukraine in an example there, and obviously there are more recent examples as well, such as some of the activity in the Black Sea and elsewhere. And these essentially are all providing us real-time lessons from, certainly from a DOD and an allied defense perspective. What might you see as some of the significant learnings of coming out of some of these military engagements? - I think there's so many, John. I think the, as you mentioned with drone technology, electronic warfare, things like positioning navigation and timing or P&T and the role of GPS, and there's others by now and other systems on orbit that provide that. But how the 21st century way of war is happening? And it's happening quickly, and we have hoodies, firing missiles into the Red Sea, and with our U.S. and Allied navies trying to thwart their missile strikes. We're seeing all types of new technologies not only being used in Ukraine, but as China is trying to push on the South China Sea and elsewhere. So my takeaways from this are it's kind of like former Deputy U.S. Secretary of Defense Bob would talk about with these these very quick turn sort of software enabled, DevSecOps enabled, the future is here sort of technologies. And we see this as the civilian operations and space happening, the commoditization of what had been very classified capabilities on orbit. And my worry is now that I'm in academia getting the next generation ready is that we're not wedded to old ways of doing business. And we have men and women who are prepared to think whether they're studying the humanities or studying foreign affairs that that that digital capabilities have to be front of mind. In the same way that new technologies in World War 2 were front of mind with radar and sonar nuclear capabilities. And I'm failing in my job as dean if we're not ensuring that is injected into our curricula. So these are the kind of things that really do keep me up as a dean preparing a next generation of leaders that we're not falling behind on thinking about how technology is going to work on the battlefield. And just to follow up on that I think you know I totally agree with everything you said. I think what's interesting is that we also then have to think about how does procurement change for example. The U.S. has been particularly good I think at a lot of its research and development financing across particularly the military and intelligence community. And a relatively agile mode of granting contracts and it's created some new contract regimes that have helped it's been more open to allies contracting as well which I think is extremely helpful. But I don't know if you've got any thoughts on on how maybe that can be improved. That's sort of side of procurement and sort of modernized effectively. Well watching my colleague at the Pentagon under secretary for acquisition statement Bill Laplante going to NATO allied nations and going to Brussels for the armaments chiefs conferences and watching not only in the U.S. but the U.K. and other allies ramping up production of long range fires and other stinger missiles and storm shadows and attackums and other terms you would hear and also not just the big end items but the peace parts that go into those. This is one thing I actually talked about on my interview for the dean job. I haven't had a chance to lean into this yet but I'll give you a little preview here. I think this is almost his own trade craft of of thinking about procurement as an arsenal of democracy where you have a country like Ukraine on a front line and we as August and other allies are providing capabilities again not just missiles and fighters and so on but technological capability. It's his own way to think about this and as we've ramped up production plants here in the U.S. it was scary in 2022 when I'd be in meetings hearing about how long it takes to make a javelin missile and we had one plate we stopped the stinger line as a former air defense officer I didn't know that. Stinger missiles weren't being made anymore there was one factory that had a that does the rocket motor and you know you're thinking oh my lord you know I've heard a piece divot in but and I know we've been fighting al Qaeda and ISIS and others to last and continue to do so but in a way that's the only kind of of the of the horrible tragedy in Ukraine the wake-up call that this brought to NATO and our Asian allies that we have got to think much differently to your point John about procurement and also for these very high tech items this isn't World War 2 where God forbid we were losing Spitfire fighters and P-51 Mustangs and Sherman tanks and Cromwell tanks and all that and we could turn these out relatively an F-35 fighter is going to take a while to come off the line how the modern howitzers take a year or more to get built and it's not this the electronic parts is the barrels. My point is it's shown as like oh my goodness if we have to do something against China someday or another regional scenario we better think in a way we haven't thought about these items and be able to move quickly because we're not going back to dropping dumb bombs again we have to have the precision and the digital undergirding of it so that's what I've been thinking about from my job and now to my current one. Just a related question John is procurement is obviously important but so is risk management and coming up with more transparent but aggressive ways of thinking about whether it's security or counterintelligence how we engage across our foreign partners. That risk management piece has always been as you know tricky. That's a great point Theresa and I just had a cadet from the Texanian core cadets who's about to be an Air Force acquisition officer come to my office for mentoring and I'm going to we talked about this very thing in my experience in the Pentagon where there is the the concern I have and I think this cross cuts allied capitals as well. You're in an assignment in the military for three years or so and there is a high risk if you get too bold on something and you overstep a bound this can ruin your career. There's not the opportunity cost out there that we would sometimes see from maybe positions like you all are in or maybe like I'm in an academia where the going by the rules and playing super slow is going to yes be the safe route but we're not going to be able to deliver on time. There was just a government accountability office report here in the U.S. I'm something near and dear to my heart and this gets to your question here about global positioning system M or military code receivers in the U.S. and also for our allies. This sounds very technical but this is what gets the most secure GPS code into the into the cockpit or the bridge of the ship and this is one thing a CIO I was just pulling my hair out on trying to accelerate the acquisition and bringing not only industry but program managers and others and they're working hard patriotic Americans working hard with allies and others but it kind of got to I read a great article about what Gwen shot well in her team we're doing down at Boca Chica I bet she's a personal friend of yours where where the launch director whose name escapes me down at Boca Chica said we operate as though the world is ending in eight days. Now that's kind of almost an Elon kind of a little bit of tongue in cheek but I think we have got to change in some ways that if if and I used to in a in some of these meetings for dramatic effect I'd say pretend Paul Nakasoni folks NSA came with the pieces again signal intelligence said we have reliable intelligence that the Chinese are going to attack on one march of next year. Absolutely iron clad just hype at that oh the Russians are going to attack Poland or I can go down a list Iran is going to attack Saudi Arabia or something and we know it's going to happen all right acquisition people what would you do then would you send extra people to the factories would you work with the lawyers and say we've got to get the yes or would you work all through the night on a new contract. I've mentioned all this because not for dramatic only dramatic effect but I think we're still too much in a peacetime mode when the world we live in is a very almost wartime footing and we're seeing it all around so that's that is how I try to approach that as CIO. Great answer. So John we've talked a little bit about the increasing dependence that the public sector has on private capital private companies private innovation at universities how do you how can we accelerate really leveraging private capital whether it's venture capital private equity individual wealth which is as we've discussed quite prominent in Texas how do we how do we tap into that as a more effective way of of another vector to get to the preparation that we need to have I think Theresa your career and what you've done is perfectly emblematic of how do we approach that where you've spent many years doing intelligence work then you went out to the private sector and then doing what was truly one of the most noble givebacks coming back up to Virginia to run digital futures in our directorative digital innovation it gets down to having individuals who know how to operate in this space this is one thing I gave an earlier interview this past week about mid-career development so on I still believe the IC and DOD are not thinking widely enough and yes there's internships and and hostage swaps and sending people to industry but I think we've got to do even more to be able to have folks and seats like I used to be in being able to understand how private capital works Theresa you brought that I remember sitting around that we were talking about that conference table on the ground floor CIA there I can't remember the number 3G whatever it was that you would bring that insight into into our discussion about how we're going to leverage technology at speed of mission and so there are a number of efforts underway and what you all are doing right now I think is critical and I think it gets back to the relationships. Being able to have these sort of contacts and making sure that the government side is not in a paradigm lock that the private investment side also knows the problems or not problems but the opportunities and challenges we may need help with from a mission perspective and then being able to talk across without having things like classification and all that come to the fore and it's not easy because if you just let the system run taking your hand off the steering wheel then the walls are going to come up the the issues about opportunity cost where I don't have anything if I just kind of stay in my little foxhole here no sweat off my back it's going to take some folks who are like hey I want to go down to Austin and go talk to some folks I want to go to London and hear from some companies I want to it's going to go out to Silicon Valley and even places we're not thinking of right now but you have to have connectors to you and you all are connectors I would say and I think without that it's going to be very hard to do and I think we need it across allied capitals which we're seeing right now but this is going to be critical to have. Yeah just to elaborate on that I also think the relationship with organizations like Boca capital are less about sort of arm's length and more about how do we engage so that we can be better representatives better advocates of what government needs with industry and invest in things that really matter and not things that you know may make money but the goal is to make money and help with security and so it's a different type of relationship than I think what we've seen in the past or his arms length. And what can be done from the private investment side too and it's not just the money piece it's the vision it's the knowing what's out there is some time in the confines of government and the whether it's in the Pentagon or Ministry of Defense over at Whitehall or you know at C.I. Langley sometime we can get our heads down pencils up sort of mentality because we're you know we've got mission requirements the seventh floor is calling us for a briefing we've got we've got a real world operation underway and yes we may have some visits here and there but sometime we can get paradigm lock on some things and not realize there's a new opportunity on new technology because you all have have talked to a company and name your location and there's an opportunity for us to do things in the space realm and the autonomous vehicle realm and and something that'll leap us over into 60 and next year in a way we're not even thinking of that our officers can benefit from doing clandestine operations next month or next year or not in 10 years that's the biggest problem I found a lot of us in national security I think are kind of the fully invested not kind of I mean we were all out what am I trying to say you know full extra reading into the problem and and going to work the 12 hour days but sometimes we can have blinders on if we don't take the time to go out and do some outreach with connectors like you all and that's the big risk that we always have to check our cell phone and that's what I want the students to hear to and I told that cadet who's going into acquisition be careful about getting down and not listening to what's going on around you yeah just just one of the things I saw running digital futures quite often was what I'll call this sort of crisis of imagination yes people think about linear evolution of what we've always done we need to your point about the interview earlier in the week you did on on human capital management this isn't about evolving the way we manage human capital this is about reimagining right that's scary to people but yet that's where relationships between the investment community your new role at the Bush School here how do you help the government think about reimagining things not just extending the same old same old and that is scary for a lot of government folks it is because there's a lot of risk involved in that and I remember when we're working in digital innovation together with Andrew and Sean and the team there I thought we did a good job of invigorating a fell fast sort of attitude and I know in business you all have done that too that yes we don't want negligence or laziness or whatever but we want our thought leaders to be able to try new things and not get punished if they don't work out and unfortunately in a lot of sectors of government that is you screw up once and then you're done and it is like the I saw a CIO the conflict between DevSecOps and thinking differently about how quick for example the Ukrainians as we are discussing are moving on software development versus cyber incidents now of course you don't want a major cyber incident where a lot of personal information or mission data is is compromised but if you're going to empower your software developers to think at speed of mission there's going to have to be a balance there and not not having folks proverbily taking out back and you know shot because they they they took some extra risk and this is hard and this is where we as leaders have got to be ready to to stand up and say yeah I authorize that because it was the right thing to do and we're going to learn from it and move on and that is a tough tough thing in government I would argue not only here in the United States but looking across our allies and elsewhere and this is one thing I'm going to try to evangelize here at the bush school is as these women and men who are coming through our program they're going to start as GS nines or whatever maybe in you know other parts of a private sector whatever they're going to be the leader someday and they're the ones are going to have to to put their name on the blame line on this and say I authorize is so that's a big thing that I think about as trying to grow future leaders is about that risk tolerance and being because if we don't we are going to get outflanked by the PRC and others that's what concerns me so I mean with the private capital in that context we've you sort of alluded to the agility and I think one of the other sort of important fact is actually just knowledge so I mean it's the knowledge sharing between government and the private sector is now more and more important particularly where government's almost so big half the time you don't really know where to turn for internal knowledge so it's often easier to go and approach some external sort of some external mind so that's one side of things but what we've also started to see particularly with certain adversaries is almost the military application of private capital so in standard enterprise is investing in IP or taking IP or taking control of IP is probably better way to describe it as well as using things like finance and debt as a means of control do you see an argument for Western allies following that sort of almost weaponizing of private capital in addition to just using it for for for for for for partnership I think there has to be a close close relationship and I would want to be careful on on anything that veers us away from free market open competition but I think it's the same as we did together in the Cold War and all the way back to the Second World War being able to have the private innovation in capital and to what Theresa said a minute ago not on an evolutionary line on me these technologies but revolutionary I think that that relationship has got to be key you know one thing John I read this past week that really stuck with me in the Wall Street Journal Jim Farley CEO of Ford Motor cousin of Chris Farley the the actor went over to Beijing and I think few other cities in China to see some of their EV car production I know electronic excuse me electric vehicles here in the US of kind of evident flowed because of recharging capabilities and and market demand but he came back frankly almost a scared but startled and he brought four different classes of cars that the Chinese have built that are AI enabled very ergonomic described by one of his C-suite colleagues in Detroit is having almost an airline first class seat experience and he got his he brought the cars back and brought them to his headquarters and he wanted his C-suite to see how far the PRC had come and I know that's not a national defense application but they are getting government subsidies they do have the different labor costs they're getting heavy investment and in a way that that Detroit should frankly be concerned about being outflanked on this that was a real wake up and these are these kind of things I want us thinking about as Western democratically minded tech invested leaders that we also got to be careful that we don't get so fixated on one area that we're going to ignore something and the biggest thing John that has kept me up is the Chinese military innovation that's occurred over the past 20 years while our we and our allies have been in places like a rock Afghanistan and Africa China has been preparing themselves in the realm of space undersea cyber hypersonics in a way that we've got a sprint to catch up and we cannot do this without the private capital. So back to your question. Yes, government can do a lot of the innovation. But if we don't have this sort of relationship you're talking about, I think we're going to stay behind in some key areas. And so looking forward to the future, I suppose, now, like, what are the sort of adversarial challenges we're not thinking about, but maybe should be, and where might you see technology mitigating some of those challenges, both for defense and intelligence? That's a great question, John. I think about the proverbial black swan events. As someone who was in the White House situation room on 9/11, we all knew something was going to probably happen that fall that none of us envisioned 19 terrorists hijacking four airliners and flying them in the buildings, although I know, you know, some of my friends, Gina Bennett and others at the agency were certainly thinking deep thoughts and well ahead of many others on this. Those kind of, that was, I want to say, a low tech event. But I don't want to ignore that. But I, we are seeing very serious laboratories of technology and battlefields across the world right now. And these these terrible killing fields, whether it's in eastern Ukraine, whether what we're seeing in the mid east right now, there is evolution, excuse me, revolution happening at great pace. And it's again, not just the Houthis ability to fire ballistic missiles on on trajectories to hit civilian tankers and also to shoot at our Navy ships. But what we're seeing in terms of microelectronics, software development, risk tolerance in the battlefield that we would never take in peacetime, that's why I worry that we, as as practitioners here, are going to miss something big. And I worry that one of my colleagues and Teresa, I know you worked with them, Jack Shanahan, the former head of the joint AI center at the Pentagon. He said, the next war may be won or lost in the first 24 hours. And if that doesn't hit you in the gut, I don't know what does. Now, again, in another term, I talked to my former boss, Deputy Secretary, Cath Hicks at the Pentagon, there's also the risk of protraction, where war is not over in two weeks. It goes on for months. And it's not existential for either combatant because of nuclear weapons, but a battlefield becomes the Western Pacific or the entire Pacific or Eastern Europe. And my worries there are, are we going to be able to to move with the alacrity as allies. If I can real quick, there's one example as a I'm a historian who got into technology later in my career. And I have still read a lot of histories. And if I could share one example that really resonated with me in a book by John McManus about the US Army and the Pacific, there was a story he told in there about US and allied attorneys that were kept at Santo Tomas University and Manila. These were not the individuals that were sent on the baton death march, but they were kept in Cognito and this university campus in the Philippines. And from 1941 to early 1945, they were sequestered away with that news, with that access to the outside world. And they had gone into the prison camp when we our American forces were still wearing the World War One style helmets carrying older types of rifles, not very advanced radio technology, older tanks. And then in January of 1945, US Task Force 58 shows up off the shore under under Admiral Halsey, new types of aircraft appear over Manila. Blue aircraft, the time they've never seen before with new markings and new weaponry. And then suddenly the US First Calvary Division rolls into Manila, kicks down the gates, the Japanese garrison retreats, and there are US soldiers and new helmets, new uniforms, carrying machine guns that they've never seen, they have Sherman tanks which they've never laid eyes on with advanced radios for the era. And my point of all this was the world the allies had adapted and those prisoners who had suffered in that camp saw it firsthand. They saw what the proliferation of modern technology had done in a combat situation. My worry though, John Three, so that was over a three and a half year period. We may have weeks or months to be able to evolve in a modern battlefield. And this is, as we talk about bringing it back to the Bush School, our future leaders here, thanking in terms of you're going to have to be conversing on this. Yes, you may ride all day long about what's going on in the Israeli connessit or what's going on in South Korean politics or our understanding NATO dynamics, but you better understand what software means. You better understand what proliferated law or orbit means because in the same way Winston Churchill understood the criticality of radar and the Battle of Britain or President Roosevelt understood how our ships are going to have sonar to thwart new boats and and Japanese combatants. We'd better be thinking about that technology and we can't be on the sidelines to this anymore. And all the things about private investment and so on. I guess in a way, John Three, we're all technologists now. Whether one has a computer science degree, a chemical engineering degree, or a history major, we've all got to lean in this together. Yeah, totally agree. And even people with arts degrees have ideas. So, you know, they can bring that to the tech team. One last question, we've talked about workers and our relationships with other countries through allied relationships. What do you see as being areas that we can learn from each other and particularly around workers? Where can we learn from the other two nations and potentially others that join the group as we move forward? This is one area, John. I've been so impressed with both in my intelligence background and DOD and without getting into classified issues, I'm not sure I would be able to get into. I was always struck that there are key developments occurring in the different nations, in the realm of cyber, in the realm of weapons systems. And some of it, I would be so pleasantly surprised. I'm like, I didn't know you all are researching this and you're way out in front and able to make that connection back to what's going on across the other allies. And it may be not some new fighter jet or missile that some technology that thwarts an adversary capability or gets something on orbit better and faster or, once it's on orbit, make it more secure with the creativity. And this is, this is gets to the democratic principles we all abide by, the creation that happens in our universities, in our companies, in the private sector. And this is one area. I would argue we can go all day long against authoritarian nations and their top down economic, police state, data collected, social score, society they live in, you unleash what we can do together. And that's what I would see areas of whether it's in hypersonic or intelligent surveillance and reconnaissance, countering biometric collection, you know, things that were like, wow, I didn't know we were working on this together. And it gets back to my time of CEO and making sure that that information can be shared across time zones and capitals. And even as we look beyond August, August being a core, but what's going on with other NATO allies and East Asian allies who share our goals of of being able to have open societies free seaways to be able to have trade through the South China Sea, making space a safe place to operate for our economies and not worrying about predatory behavior there. And then on the economic front for that matter, being able to have free trade with that thread of authoritarian interference, I saw and continue to see a number of things. One thing I have to frankly, sometimes do on the US side, we can come in as the, you know, we're the US with this size economy and intelligence and defense establishment. And I've told and mentored a lot of people, you darn well better listen to what's going on with these allies. You know, our friends in the UK have been doing some of these things a hell of a lot longer than we have listened to them. Our colleagues in Canberra have some incredible innovation going on there. And not only in the city of Canberra, but down out of late and up in Sydney and Melbourne everywhere else, damn well better listen to them. And then reaching out to other key allies, be they in NATO or elsewhere, that's one thing that I think turning the mirror on us in the US, I love who we are and we're an extraordinary wonderful nation, but we better listen and have our folks at the program level, not say look we got it, we don't need to hear from you. And that is a cultural issue that I am always wanting to imbue in our students and others. John, I want to thank you that's been a really interesting discussion today and very insightful and just great to hear your perspective from such an astounding career. Thank you. And to add to that we look forward to figuring out how we can collaborate more officially and not just have the conversation today, but think about the future because I think there's a lot of opportunities so thank you. Thank you John and Teresa thank you so much for having me on with you today and I want to thank you for all you're doing to enable our success through office with the private investments and helping us look to the revolutionary transformations and just being great connectors and colleagues here, I'm so grateful to be on with you. We hope you've enjoyed listening to this episode of Need to Know, a podcast brought to you by Baka. 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