#186: Communication Wins Wars - Former Chief Technology And Innovation Officer at USSOCOM & US Space Force Dr. Lisa Costa

How well our forces talk to each other across air-land, sea, and space is what sets the American military apart from everyone else.

“Without communication, leaders can't lead, and military's can't win.”

From the global special operations imposed even in Athens, Greece, I set down with Dr. Lisa Costa, a leading technologist, the former chief information officer for US Special Operations and the first chief technology and innovation officer for the US Space Force. To discuss our innovation, cyber and modernization are reshaping special operations across all domains.

Dr. Costa brings decades of experience at the crossroads of defense technology and strategic innovation. From one of the Department of Defense's largest IT enterprises supporting elite global soft operators to spearhead digital transformation efforts in the space force, she's helped to protect the future of how our forces fight, communicate, and adapt.

She addressed the evolving threat landscape from cyber attacks to space-w-intelligence, and while stagging ahead to technology, data, innovation is no longer optional. She emphasized the importance of agility and integration, and forward thinking capability as the bedrock of a modern force ready for tomorrow's missions. This discussion is about building up the English through technology, strengthening alliances

across domains, and protecting America by ensuring the force of bombs are ahead. Follow the Jedberg Podcast of the Greenberry Foundation of social media. Listen to any favorite podcast platform, read our website, and watch the full video version on YouTube, as we show you why America must continue to lead from the front, no matter the challenge.

Lisa, welcome to the Jedberg Podcast. Hey, Frank, thanks so much for having me. It's right on our G-soft Europe, we're sitting here in the lobby of the hotel. We've got the last day of the conference, but really what an absolutely incredible opportunity to bring together the special operations forces leaders from so many of our European Allied

countries. As well as many of our partners, we even had a chance yesterday not only talking to some European partners, but brought it now, we had the Philippine J-Saut Commander here sat down and him for a little bit, but to have the chance to be able to see what our partners and our allies are doing across the world with their respective soft forces has been amazing to sit

through the panels. And also to see some of the advancing technology, you've been critical to advancing technology in both so-called and the space force, which we've got to talk about. You're wearing both hands here. So we're going to go super deep on what's happening with innovation in technology at so-called

why it matters.

And then also the space force, because as a first of the Jedberg podcast, we never taught

to anybody who's served in the space. There you go. Well, that's because we're an incredibly rare breed, and I don't know. I might be the only person wearing both of this so-called and a space force pen. So that's a guaranteed, that's a hundred percent.

Like to be a unicorn. You served as the chief technology and innovation officer at the space force, and also the chief information officer at so-called. He talked for a second about those roles, why they're important, but then also you're a civilian.

Right? Not a uniformed, well, Department of War, remember. Right. What are those roles?

“And why are they important to both of those respective organizations?”

No. Absolutely. So anybody who knows the history, right, of so-com, knows that communications. You move, shoot, and communicate, right, as a military.

And communications is absolutely critical.

And you can go back through Desert One and Somalia and many of our failures have been because of communications issues. So I'm really glad that communications have been covered here, right, at the G-South Europe conference. It's critical that we not only be able to talk to our different services, right?

And that was the issue in Mogadishu. We had both for an air course, right? Yeah, exactly. And I was there on the command floor at so-com and set-com, running between the command centers when that was happening.

And to see the inability of our air forces not being able to talk to our ground forces was just really heartbreaking, right? It was unfolding in front of your eyes.

“So that's why that role in so-com is absolutely critically important.”

Any of our signals and intelligence people, any of our comms people, really critical to the

current fight and no fail missions. Because it is all about no fail missions and bringing our people home. In space force, a little different, right? We don't necessarily have guardians up in space, right? So we're focused on making sure that we are providing total coverage of position, navigation,

So it's ground sea air, I like to say satellite to submarine. And so from that perspective, it's very similar. And so-com is the J6 and the CIO, you own satellite to submarine communications. In space force, you are responsible for ensuring that signal is up. It's running and it's not being spoofed.

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Join the 1952 society today and stand with those who stand for us. And what you've seen over your careers, incredible evolution of what communications architecture looks like. I mean, if we go back, go back to not that far and we're talking about hand-in-armed signals.

To be able to communicate with our guys on the ground or between our guys on the ground. And now just before we started, we're talking about technology that's sitting here on the floor where you can have a conversation with somebody and then through your pieces and it can isolate who you're actually trying to talk to and drown out everybody else.

But talk for a second about the evolution of what you've seen in communications, where

we've gone in, let's say, a 30-year period, where we were focused primarily on radio. And now we've had to evolve to the entire domain to include the cyber domain and we'll talk for us in a minute about the socks, cyber, triad.

“But how has the communications architecture changed as we've evolved in warfare?”

It's changed incredibly. I was giving birth in 1991 when Norm Schwarzkoff was doing desert storm and all of the televisions were on in the hospital, right? Watching. Now it was the first time where we were, yeah, it was the first time where we saw live warfare.

Absolutely. And I got a call. I was still in the hospital. Can you put satellite communications and can you design a communications architecture for the Middle East because we think we're going to be there a long time?

And I was like, well, give me a couple of weeks to like, you know, to heal a lot, but sure. But hold my baby. Yeah. Exactly.

There you go. Well, and yeah. And of course, you know, if you, my son ended up growing up around a lot of, you know, assaulters and, uh, snipers and, uh, you guys, et cetera.

“But, uh, putting that first communications capability in, right?”

To, you go to all you date today. You would just think you were in DC, right? I mean, it's, uh, incredibly sophisticated.

The platforms are incredible.

We've got wireless capability on a huge fan of lower-thorbid direct to cell phone without a terminal. Love that stuff, right? I can send a message directly to an ATAC. And so it has gone from big bulky equipment to sometimes healing the binary signal, right?

I need to know somebody's alive. Don't hit the splice, right? So to be able to give, for example, a marine radar, you know, an ATAC that can, I hit a button that says, hey, I'm alive. Don't strike here.

Right. Critically important was not able to be done 20, 30 years ago. Uh-huh. Want to talk about your roles as a civilian, if a DOD and so-called, no, now the Department of War.

But we spend the majority of our time on the show speaking with military leaders. You've formed non-savillion leaders who serve our military. A lot of people don't know is that a large part of our force is built up of what we call Department of War civilians, and operating on the GS scale. But can you talk about the importance of the DOD civilian workforce, how it augments the

uniform force, and then what that looks like when you're actually put in charge sometimes of uniform soldiers?

“No, that's a great question because it differs, right?”

Differers based on the mission and differs based upon the service and the leadership, and what skills are needed to bring to bear to the mission. So on 9/11, at 11 o'clock at night, I had a call from the So-com command center saying, "Hey, ma'am, can you be in the DOD of the room at 7 a.m. the next tomorrow morning to receive a mission?"

And I said, "You know, I'm a civilian, right?"

I know problem. I'm going to be there." Doesn't matter, right?

I just wanted to let you know.

And I got a mission. I got a mission to establish, so-com's ability to track moving things. So prior to 9/11, the intelligence community was only able to track stationary items, right? A building, or maybe a ship that went from one port to another port, but not while it was

in transit. So, and for the old timers, right?

“It was order battle and the E-number, basic and cyclopedean number, right?”

Couldn't track moving things like people, money, goods and services, logistics, etc. So it was my job to figure out how to do that, and we did that with AI. And we built the largest data repository outside of the National Capital Region, and it became the basis for six other well-known cells, around the community. And so as a DOD civilian, people operate in all sorts of roles, you know, at the executive

level, they serve as project managers, staff augmenties, what's that relationship like between the DOD civilians and the uniform? It's all about the culture, right? And so, so-com really understands and relies on its civilian staff, right? Or part of the force, civilians work out, you know, after 9/11, it was like everybody's

going to do PT, everybody, because people were passing out. They were just like working until they were, you know, punch drunken and pass it out. So, you know, it was civilians, it was contractors, it was military, you're going to work out, you're going to get slay, you're going to take care of yourself because this is going to be a long war, but then you go to other, you know, services and, you know, sometimes

those leaders have not had that experience, right? And so, one of the examples I would give to them is, did you know that at one point

“in Afghanistan, there were over 70% of the force was civilian, right?”

That was deployed and they were always surprised by that.

They also have this understanding that or thinking that there are some things that are inherently government, right? Well, yeah, that's kind of true, but when you're at war and you're in the middle of things, I'm not asking somebody if they're wearing a uniform or not, everybody's part of the fight. I want to ask you about the direction we're going on the next battlefield.

So, we have a couple of terms that are being discussed across the international community. We've been a few of the forms out of chance yesterday to host a panel, moderate a panel with the Philippine J. Saut commander in the Polish Deputy Army Commander, where we talked about innovation, but as innovation as it is with respect to large-scale combat operations. When you talked about 9/11, we as a military and the 9/11 generation of soldiers know a lot

about CT, counter-insurgency, counter-terrorism operations, prosecuting point targets, precision strike type capabilities. What we look at now as we were focused on our CT mission, we do know that there were adversaries in the background building, primarily the Russians, the Chinese, and we now find ourselves in a lot of ways in these kind of inner world war period, this pre-World War II period

of nation-state on nation-state potential, great superpower challenge. We have aggression in both the Indo-Pacific region from the Chinese, and we have land warfare here in Europe, that we haven't seen since World War II. Large-scale combat operations are a much different animal than counter-terrorism operations.

“Where do you see special operations injection into large-scale combat operations?”

How do they support it, and then how are they supported by the conventional force in that mission? Now, that's a great question, so, the NPS question. I feel like I have two bookends in my career, I help two startups in the DOD.

The first one, I was at Readiness Command when it became so calm in 1987, and worked

at so calm at the very beginning, and then I helped stand up space-first. When you think of so-comps role, what I would say is that things that were developed from a TTP perspective, especially the technology innovation and the ability to bring

bring in PhDs to solve real hard problems, is something that shouldn't be given up just because we're moving into a different phase of warfare. There are a lot of solutions that still apply, and should the baby shouldn't be thrown out with the bath water, right? You're not one on you fight the last war, but then again, you're not wanting to give up

bad, exquisite knowledge that you've developed. What I would say, though, is one of the things we lost over the 24 years of fighting CT was our real talent in deception, counter deception, denial and deception, and that's something we need to bring back into the entire force, not just soft, and I look at soft as primarily the tool, the capability to prevent us going to war, right?

“That's what you want to use, not after the first shot has been fired, and so I look at”

soft as being very exquisite, and I do like John Braga's try-ad of cyber space and soft together, enabling one another, and being able to capture the high grams, but you also have to capture the low ground too, right, subsurface again to satellite.

So, I view soft having a role in every critical moment of warfare.

Well, we know that the job, as you mentioned of soft, is to keep the decision-makers of our adversaries, or force them to delay their decision, so you look at President Xi in China, in his decision point to invade Taiwan, and he said, "On 26, well, what we need soft to do is say, "Well, let's make that 28." And then in 27, say, "Actually, it's got to be 30."

“And how long can we prolong that until we find a way to just get that off the table?”

When we look at the soft cyber triad, what does that mean to you? Right, so it's the whole soft-enabled space, right? So adversaries have direct energy weapons that can take out Leah, so taking out this directed energy weapons is one big good thing for soft to do. We have space-enabled soft, right?

We've got saccom and position navigation and timing, which is absolutely critical.

But now we also have space-enabled GMTI, right? Ground, mobile, tracking, indicators, and so on, and intelligence. And air, mobile tracking and intelligence. Not having to have that logistics tail for drones, large drones, right? Because you have to have refueling, you have to bring down. So having that constant dwell, that constant look is absolutely critical from space. So it's a space-enabled soft capability

and then cyber is everywhere, right? We have this term cyber. And we think about it as cyber security. But it's really grown and taken over the entire internet offends, right? The internet of space things, the internet of battle things, the internet of commercial things. And so it's controlling that entire domain and being able to take advantage of the data that is being produced across that entire spectrum. And so that's how I see

the triad working together. I've always said the best battle space is the one we never

“have to put a boot into. I think that's what you're going to see in the future.”

Us really holding back our blood and treasure for only those very unique and specific things that need to be executed. There's going to be a lot more autonomous capability controlled by AI. And it's not just about airborne drones. It's about space-based assets. It's about sea-based assets and being able to manage them simultaneously to a commander's intent. The commander wants to do this. This is the end-state AI figure out the best way to do it.

I want to ask you more about that battle field we don't have to put people into when humans into the battlefield that is very realistic right now is the moon. And there has been a lot of discussion over the last couple of years. And not only discussion but action by both the U.S. and China as to who can potentially occupy the south pole of the moon first. When you look at an organization like the space force, what is there? Who controls that battle space and why

it is a battlefield like the moon so important? So I would say it's not just the moon. It's

hide and plane side or perform certain capabilities that you want to perform. You have to remember

“there is not even a position, navigation and timing capability on the lunar surface, right?”

So I believe the last administration tasked the Department of Commerce to come up with a GPS capability and a timing capability for the lunar surface. There is no standard. What is so important about an event like this right? NATO getting together is that we have a number of partners who have been to the lunar surface, right? Japan, India, Italy and we need to be using their standards, right? We need to be interoperable with them. We don't want to force them into

position where they have to partner with China in order to execute capability on the lunar surface.

So it's really important that our policy makers tackle the hard changes that need to be made regarding ITAR and ear and other restrictions so that space partners who would be our allies are using the same types of equipment so we can communicate with one another, we can help each other refuel if necessary. So it's very important and to your point, you know, the 1960s, there was a space agreement that was signed, but no one is following it except for allied nations. And so

“I think we need to revisit that. What did it say? It's not familiar with it. Yeah, it's so it's”

said we would not weaponize, right? We would not weaponize space and that it was open to everyone. Believe it or not, the largest growing degree program in the United States today is space law. Who owns what? Right? If a flag is planted does that mean that's, you know, and does it have to be a human that plants it or not autonomous vehicle? Are we using sea-based maritime-based rules right of salvage? And that's been proposed. So there are a lot of questions about, oh, I discovered

asteroid and it's got a lot of lithium and helium three on it. And I want to line that, is it the person who discovered that or is it the person who gets their first? Why do people care about the South Pole of the lunar surface? There are a lot of benefits to communications, capabilities, and to be able to have continuous presence there, right? So a lot of people are

very interested in having that ability to be always up from a communications perspective. And that's

incredibly beneficial. It also is an area that does not get bombarded with space, whether the way some of our Leo and Neo and G.O. satellites experience. So solar flares and things like that. And so you always want to have a pace plan, right, in place. And that's kind of part of the pace plan.

“And it becomes a hopping off point. If you want to go to Mars, right? You got to get to the”

moon. You got to refuel. You got to create fuel. And maybe you don't have to escape the bonds of the earth. Now, maybe you're doing is just escaping very low gravity levels that are on the lunar surface. Which takes a lot less. Exactly. A lot less power and exactly. And you're able to create water there. You're able to create fuel, etc. It makes me think about the definition of warfare, because we've certainly being here in a military centric conference. You know, a lot of our

conversations primarily focus around military related issues. But one of the things that we have to keep in the back of our mind is that warfare comes in a variety of different ways. You think about the elements of national power, dime, diplomatic, informational, military and economic. We have to when we look at our adversaries think about how are we actually at war with this country right now? Are we in a military war with China? Possibly a gray war, certainly through some of our

proxies. But are we fighting the military to military? No. Are we in an economic war with China? I'd argue, yes. And it's certainly an informational war, same with Russia. Russia certainly leading much more towards an informational and a military style proxy war that we're definitely in with them. But when you look at the threats that America faces across the dime spectrum,

diplomatic, informational, military or economic? I think it's all about information, right? All of it's about information, even from the cyber perspective, from the monetary information, it's about data. And we're fighting for data so that we can characterize our adversaries, understand them better, and identify what it is that they're trying to achieve. What are their

“levels of effort and what are their different avenues of actually executing this levels of effort?”

So I posit, we are definitely in a war and it's no longer that gray. It's not like gray. It's

darn near dark gray, right? Who else would we allow to put cyber injects into our critical infrastructure

and know that they're there, right? And not declare war. And I think that that's a challenge, right, in this new modern era where there are not good definitions of what warfare is in these different, dime-fill arenas. Things that would have been a trigger of this is war and we declare war are not well-defined in cyber and data and financial, etc. So I think that is the challenge that we face is not understanding when we're at war and miscalculation, right? An escalation

“that could cause miscalculation. How do we combat this information? That's really challenging”

especially in this AI arena. Let me tell you, the attacks are so sophisticated. I just cannot

express to people the threat not only to companies, you know, where we were worried during COVID, the huge ramp up, right, and ransomware. That is nothing. That is absolutely nothing to what we're seeing in terms of precision influence, right, going after specific individuals with highly, highly tailored information about their personal data and it's good. Because they're using AI, right? They're using AI to net, and now all of the things that we would look for like the misbellings

in the background are and, you know, it's not there because they're using AI. And things look completely legitimate. If you click on anything in your email, you are at risk. If you are scanning a QR code, don't do it. It is the number one surface attack vector for injecting malware. And then we, of course, you got all the challenges associated with AI, right? You know, prompt injection, attacks, data poising this attacks, et cetera. So making sure that you invest in trust

where the AI, I work with Seeker, which is an AI company, which is focused on ensuring that there are foundational models trained on your own data because people are going to do what they're going to do. And when they want to use AI, if it's not available to them on nipper-sipper-j-wix, they're going to go out there and use their phone and use chatGPT and put information in there that they shouldn't be using. And so we've got to invest in just like there was a drone imperative

that Seeker Hexas put out. There needs to be an AI imperative that says DODCIO, CDAIO need to work together to put AI in the hands of every single DOW individual and make it safe and secure. How are you defining AI in this? So that's a great question. Look, I do not define AI as just large language models, right? People think of it as chatGPT and that's it. No, absolutely not. I was writing AI 30 years ago, right, for soft. And like I said, a lot of capability was developed

during the global war on terror that we shouldn't lose. But AI is, "Ella limbs are just a very small branch on the tree of what is called AI." And then, of course, there's reinforcement learning,

“but then there's also unsupervised learning. And we have unsupervised learning. You have to have”

really, really good data, right? A lot of people like to say in DOD and I see we've got too much data. And I have said for the last 30 years, now you don't, you don't have too much data. Because when you have the right AI system, you don't have enough data. Or you have enough of the right data.

I'm actually here at this conference with Babel Street, which is a third-party data aggregator

just come from government sources. It has to be augmented by the broad internet of things. And so I would just caution people when they think they have too much data. They're going to find when the implementer really good AI system that's trustworthy that they're not going to have enough of the right data. When you think about the application of AI, where does human interaction with the AI become paramount? Where's it not needed? Specifically with respect to decision making.

Right. So, look, we all love to say we're going to use ethical AI. Right. We all say we are going

“to only do human in the loop. I think that's incredibly nice. Right. We've golden-dom,”

you know, kicking off. I will tell you that if we attempt to use human in the loop to shoot down a hypersonic vehicles with kinetic payloads, that is a false journey. Right. We don't have time. We don't have time. There's not enough time to react. We are going to have it. So there are going to be mission-specific incidences where AI is going to have to be trusted to make that decision. And that is why it is so important that the AI we implement is trustworthy. And we understand the

data that is coming from cannot be a black box either from the data or from the algorithm perspective.

So how do you create guardrails around its weaponization? Well, the first thing is who don't

sign up for Chinese AI? Right. The number of people who have downloaded deep seek and putting information in there, deep seek is a Chinese AI capability, a great example actually of the financial being at more financially. Right. Was, look at what happened to the stock market on the day that the Chinese announced deep seek? The stock for AI companies just tanked. They lost a huge amount of their value. So it only took a few days to figure out that the claims that deep seek

was making were just false. Right. That it only caused a certain amount of money to, you know, make it. Well, that was the last training round. So it was the same amount of money that open AI. Yes.

“They stole data from open AI. They stole algorithms from a number of U.S. companies. So I think”

it's important that people understand they were being targeted when they're downloading Tik Tok, you know that well, course Tik Tok is transitioning, but any Chinese app and capability. All this comes back to the technology and the innovation timelines that it takes to actually develop and feel the technology. We've seen over the last couple of years rapid innovation, especially in a battlefield like Ukraine where, you know, drone warfare, autonomous vehicle,

and especially aerial vehicle capability has gone from the big predator type aircraft down to, you know, commercial off-the-shelf applications with explosives taped to them and there, but they're targeting individuals. Right. And so that's rapidly advanced. One of the challenges

that we have often within the U.S. government is the time to technology. I'm always going to

take us to develop the side we want the capability, identify the requirements, put it through a procurement process, get a bunch of companies to go through a competitive bid process, down select that competitive bid process, run a minimum viable product on a prototype, and then actually develop the thing. And by the time you feel that it's coming into the hands of the operator and the operators going, I can't even use this anymore. It's a paperweight,

you know, it's on my hand receipt. Right. Stick it into the comics. We can't even use it. How do we advance the time to technology and fix mitigate change? Some of the procurement challenges that exist in the red tape that is in the government. So, you know,

“I think, uh, sex war has imperative on drones, right? And putting it into the hands of users,”

you know, down to the lowest level is a really good example of what we should be doing. Right. And we should be doing that with AI as well. And let me go back to Ukraine. Ukraine is doing

incredible things, but I will point out that operation spiderweb was one pilot to every drone.

That is not scalable, right? You can't have a thousand pilots and a thousand drones. I need one

operations. Again, coalesced around we're going to create a commander's intent, an end objective,

and the human and the AI is developing different coes and adjusted on the fly and communicating

“between air ground sea components to ensure they outcome. And that's really, I think, you know,”

you're going to see more gamification of warfare. And you're going to see more citizen-based warfare, where there's a lot of citizen-based prototyping and capability developed and then put into the hands very quickly of our operators. What do you mean by citizen-based? We've got 16-year-olds, right?

Writing code. We've got 16-year-olds using additive manufacturing, right, for organization of

soft attacks and things like that. So, I think you're going to see much more of that sort of warfare. Just like in Ukraine, right? Look, the number one producer of pharmaceuticals in the Ukraine prior to Russia's attack became the number one drone producer. Nearly overnight, they converted

“there their facilities. I think you're going to see that level of innovation and roll up your sleeves,”

get your hands dirty by citizen-oriented because we have a lot of talented individuals. They don't necessarily want to or can serve in the military, but their talents can be used and it's going to have to take everyone. Just technology innovation at the ground level, you know, in my layman's terms, I would classify what you're talking about being at the ground level, you know, the everyday person level. A lot of people have a lot of good ideas. Now, we have a YouTube channel.

I get to hear about them all the time on people's comments. We call them YouTube warriors, but at what point does the ground level of innovation to combat real challenges on the battlefield,

outpace our willingness to use that capability. Because there are some incredible capabilities

out there that are highly kinetic, highly destructive and can change the battlefield and are being used against us and our partners and allies. But the question is, are we willing to use that capability in return? Right. I think it depends on existential threat, right? What is the impact of not using them? What is the impact of using them? It's all about risk, right? And I think when it comes down to making that decision, it is about the operational planners that are doing that risk

assessment and understanding what we're exposing by using the capability or not using the capability. You know, I also want to say that that I emphasized investing in capability that allows an operator to just give a command. And I want to emphasize that that command doesn't have to be typed in. It can be spoken. And instead of going through multiple steps, so as an example, I'm going to do an ISR activity. Instead of telling it 20 steps to collect in this circle, you know, at this rate,

at this revisit rate, at this whatever, and going through 20 steps, the real value you're going to see over the next 18 months is an operator saying, show me all camouflage tanks within the five mile radius or identify any potential hypersonic vehicles before launch, right? Because that's where we're going to be able to take things out, left of launch. And so being able to just verbalize that have all of the assets, multiduming assets, focused on that. And by the way, this was added to

the so-called BAA. There was a revision to it that came out, I think, last month, indicating what is needed in future AI. And voice to operation automatically is exactly what is in that new BAA

“language. And I think that's what you're going to see. I also think you're going to see”

small units, invest the resources more quickly, and then it will move up to the higher larger unit level. So how does that then come into play when we talk about who is best positioned to advance technology

by NASA. We all aspects of space with the work and NASA built the space shuttles. They ran that

“programming. I mean, certainly, yes, there were contractors who built the rockets and all that stuff.”

But primarily, the innovation was led by government agencies. And then with this shutdown of the space shuttle program, organizations like SpaceX now have come into in the play. And we've seen you know, Boeing and Jeff Bezos's company have all the all the billionaires that say we're in space-trickers now. But at what point is it more effective for the government to say, hey, this commercial private organization can do this better than we can. And we're just going to buy

it from that. Right. Now, look, so space was a benign environment. My first day at space four. So I said,

okay, so how do you plan to do a regular warfare in space? And the answer was, man, we don't even know how to do regular warfare in space. And that's okay. You would brand new service and they have made huge strides. But I wholeheartedly believe that more so than anywhere except, well, maybe even

“as cyber, though, we rely on commercial cyber quite a bit in the US government. But I believe that”

we will rely greatly on commercial assets. Now, the question is, what needs to be different about commercial assets? So look at Starlink and Ukraine. They did a great job of responding very, very quickly to Russian jamming. But it was reactive, right? We in the military tend to be very proactive. Spend a lot of money up front against attacks that were five years ago attacks, right?

And spend, you know, the last 35 percent of the budget on that last two percent of the requirements.

That is a completely different model. And so I think it's okay if we adapt and become a little less risk of Earth be a little more like commercial in some areas, not all. And that we have hybrid solutions, right? That are government and commercial assets and not just US commercial assets, right? And there are a lot of other partner nations with assets up there. So the same way that we have conducted a regular warfare for centuries, right? For millennia on the ground, it's we are in

the land of Thermopylae, right? Where were the first irregular warfare was conducted, or at least written down, we're now needing to do that in space. It's just a different domain. I will say it's a hard domain, not unlike maritime. So the first relationship that I signed formally as a memorandum of understanding as space force was with the Naval Research Lab. Why? Because they've been doing optical coms for decades, very difficult environment, different salinity levels, different temperatures

that are extreme. We deal with the same types of environments in space. And so there's a lot we can learn from one another. And it's important we don't try to recreate the wheel. And let me just say, too, there are areas of space we have not taken advantage of. So for example, very low Earth orbit, right? Vileo? No one's really taken advantage of that. Scientifically speaking, it's a little more difficult, right? Because you still have the drag of gravity. And so you need more fuel.

And you need, you know, performance characteristics that you don't have in Leo. But there's this whole area between our atmosphere and you go to space where there is opportunity to be had there. What's that distance? Oh, sure. Ask me a hard question. I know the answer, but now right off the top of my head, but uh, there are a lot of basic science questions. But if you ask basic scientists,

“what are they going to do? They're going to say, well, you need to just fund us more for to do research.”

And I'm like, yeah, let's put stuff up there, figure out what survives, figure out what doesn't

survive, new propulsion capabilities, right? This is absolutely critical. We have been using the

same fuel mixtures that we have produced for since the beginning of the space program, right? Well, we were only putting up three, you know, maybe lifts per year. And now we're doing at least one a day. We don't even know what the impact is, right? And this stuff is highly caustic and highly toxic to people. So having new propulsion capabilities, new power capabilities, that's the same challenge, soft as always had, right? Make a small or make it, you know, lighter, make it last longer,

of the battlefield when we look at our adversaries and the application of innovation and technology? I hope that the future of the battle space is much more cognitive. Again, I am highly driven by

mission. I always have been and the ultimate incentive for me as an individual has always been

to bring our people home safely to their, you know, their mothers, their wives, their, you know, sisters and brothers. So the environment in which we don't necessarily have to put people in harm's way is the environment I hope that we develop and control and make domestic. I have to, I do a lot of education to the conventional force about special operations. The conventional force tends to think of special operations as just people who are very muscle bound but aren't very bright.

And I don't know where that comes from because these are some of the smartest people I've ever met in my life. You know, we have navy seals going to Stanford. We have, you know, green berets going to MIT. These are brilliant people. But it's not about the education. I led a right after 9/11. I let

“us sell that was multidisciplinary. Meaning I had steepers. I think I won over this and breachers”

and the salters and I had PhDs. And I'd PhDs from every DOE lab in a bunch of FF-40Cs in academia.

And I always put the operator in charge of a project, not a PhD. Why? So I'll give you this one story.

We're planning an operation. Lives are at stake. Time is always criticality. And planning it. And some PhDs came up and said, well, we got a problem. There's a comm device. We got to get rid of it. Okay. Well, our solution is we can write some software. We can do a close and inject and we can take it out. How long is that going to take six months? And then we may not get approval to use it. And listed a soldier said, man, can I just shoot that? I said, yes, you can. 12-cent solution.

We're going in. So having these different groups of individuals is critically important to think

“differently. Yeah. That's why we take all opinions on the ODA. Yeah, exact. Sometimes the junior”

bravo might have the best decision. That's right. Of the best opinion or idea on something that's

going to help the commander make a more educated decision. Absolutely. You never know when you're

going to need a guy who wrote a horse when he was a kid, right? Yeah, it's true. That's true. Yeah. We're only a couple of days after the first guy's dropped in a thick set. That's exactly true. Well, I appreciate you taking some time to join us. I definitely learned a lot here about where we are, where we're going. Now, what innovation and technology really looks like from your level, I mean, we can't predict the future battlefield. And I think if you taught to any of our leaders,

uh, you know, who's sitting, uh, roles right now, they'll tell you one of the things where the worst stat is predicting what the next fight's going to be. You know, but I know that we've got to be prepared for everything. Hey, that's a great point. Love's ended on that. And that is, I was always taught and soft, always prepared for the next unknown mission. And so investment in tech has to be

“about open systems that are not niche that allow me to pivot very quickly. I think that's really”

important guideline for the rest of the force. Uh, but Fran's been an absolute honor and pleasure and thank you for all you do for all of our vets. I really appreciate it. And, um, this has been fantastic. Awesome. Thank you so much. Thanks so much. Bye. All right. The American Jet Birds went on to form the foundation of the United States special forces in the special activities director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Thanks for listening to the Jet Bird podcast on the official

program of the Greenberry Foundation. I'm your creator and host, Fran Richard. To end this next week for a new episode on Apple Spotify wherever you get your podcasts. Check out on YouTube for full episodes, highlights, and other long and short-form content. If you like what you heard, give us a like and leave a review. Follow the Jet Bird podcast and the Greenberry Foundation on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, extra threads, send your comments and inquiries to Fran at JetBird podcast.com.

As former members of special operations forces, the Jet Bird Media Channel and the Greenberry Foundation remain committed to supporting all generations of U.S. Army special forces and their families. Thanks for joining us on this episode. How you prepared today?