Podcast: Affecting the strategic calculus with Michele Flournoy

Michelle Flournoy was under secretary of defense for policy during the first Obama administration  and is the founder of West exec advisors and CNAS where I’m an adjunct fellow.

As of yesterday, she is also CNAS as new board chair. Apologies in advance for some audio issues in this episodes. I promise it’s not the whole show. Welcome to China acquisition talk.

glad to be with you.

So first off, how are you thinking about evaluating Richard Fontaine’s performance? Uh, CNA as a CEO, he was on the podcast a few weeks ago and he spent two hours with me on a Friday.

It seems like he’s reading too many novels. I don’t know. Maybe he has too much time on his hands or something

It is a fantastic leader. He’s actually brought CNAS through the pandemic with flying colors and is in the process of rebuilding the staff. Having contributed a number of folks to the new administration

I’m very excited to work with him.

 , how would you apply , a social, psychological approach to U S China relations? I’m not sure. Yeah. Uh, That’s a great question.  We have a lot of work to do, to understand how Chinese leaders think what their strategic calculus is, what they value, what costs they fear, the sort of fundamentals of what would actually deter their problematic action.

There was a whole industry around this during the cold war with vis-a-vis the Soviet union of people whose only jobs were to really understand how the Soviet leadership thought I am not suggesting we’re in a cold war with China, but I am suggesting with them as a rising and an increasing competitor, we have to do a much better job of really understanding their calculus and how to influence it.

How would you rate the performance of that cottage industry during the cold war?

 it’s a mixed record as in any of these things. I think there were some really good insights that helped influence us policy, and then there are play places time. So when we came dangerously close to getting it wrong as in the Cuban missile crisis

The lesson I take from that is that you really need a pretty diverse range of views around the table. Not only the people who are narrowly focused on the question, but people that are going to bring orthogonal perspectives to the table.

And so that you can debate the issues. You can hear descent, you can think about managing the risks associated with getting it wrong and overall make better decisions.

So another another riff from your archives. I have two sentences for you, Michelle, in the words of the Holy father, we need a moral about faith.

And I don’t think I’ve ever said that doesn’t sound like me. Oh, no, it’s not. It’s not you. This is the, Oh, okay. I thought you were saying from me and I was like, Oh, I don’t think so. So another one, this one’s house, the Holy father, I just don’t, I’m not in the habit of coding him. Sorry. So I’ll finish it.

the whole world was some in the moral courage and technical means to say no to nuclear conflict and no to the moral danger of a nuclear age, which places before mankind indefensible choices of constant terror or surrender. Yeah. And McGeorge Bundy’s response nations have never come near to any agreement that would reliably eliminate nuclear weapons.

 Fear of the bomb itself has always been less powerful than fear of an adversary’s bomb.

I think the question today is how do we continue to reduce the numbers and the importance of nuclear weapons in  strategy, put them on the back burner as the background of nuclear deterrence, but, prevent power rising powers like China revanchist powers like Russia from ever thinking about.

Using them. I, and I also think the real name of the game is opening up the aperture of strategic stability. It’s not just about nuclear weapons anymore. It’s about how countries will use cyber tools. It’s about how they will behave in the domain of space. It’s about a lot of other things that can affect strategic stability between the nuclear power.

So I think. That is a great area for dialogue with both China and with Russia, it’s tough to get them to the table and to honestly discuss these things. But I think it’s imperative to try.

What do you think the debate around nuclear policy in the U S led by the Catholic church can teach us about what lessons does that episode have today?

Are you talking about the bishops flutter way back when. Yeah. That’s what I was quoting. Yeah.

 You may be digging into that archives to discover that I wrote my master’s thesis on the ethics of nuclear deterrence. That may be where this is coming from. But I think the, I do think it is worth trying to apply, the principles of just war theory to how we think about the use of force generally, including how we think about.

The use or threats to use nuclear weapons and so very key principles, which we’ve now integrated into domestic law, international law, like discrimination. We’re going to make a dis discriminate between military targets and civilians. And we’re going to try to avoid  targeting civilians directly, but also avoid collateral damage indirectly proportionality that you want to make sure that any response to aggression is proportionate.

I think there’s some very important principles that came out of just war theory that are frankly pretty well wrote, woven into how we think about these issues in places like the situation room today,

One of the big topics that has been going around recently is this debate. About divesting from quote unquote legacy weapon systems in order to reinvest in the future for this great power competition with China.

And it seems like some people seem to find legacy to mean systems like the FFA team. And we recently had the first flight of the F 15 E X, but that’s based on a model design in the sixties first built in the seventies. Other people would actually say things like the F 35 and the Ford class carriers are actually also in the legacy bucket.

So there’s lots of definitions running around. I wonder, where do you stand on this legacy debate? Yeah, I think it’s really important as you say, to define your terms, the way I think of it is we have a program of record and that includes everything from. The F-15EX to JSF to the carriers and so forth.

 What concerns the Pentagon leadership and others is that if you project that program of record, that force planned force into the future and you war game that over the course of the next decade, the United States loses its competitive edge. It loses its ability and we are at much greater risk of being on the losing end of any kind of conflict with China.

And so if you just. Continue with the plan for you’re eventually going to be in a pretty bad situation. So the question I think we should be asking is, are there trade offs in the quantities of some of what we’re buying in that program of record that we want to trade off some capacity, some quantity in order to move that money into the emerging technologies and capabilities.

AI cybersecurity compute at the edge, we can all go through them. But those are exactly the capabilities that when they’re integrated into the program force, we’ll make it survivable, combat effective, have the reach and the lethality that will be needed. To deter China in the future. So it’s not an either, or it’s not, nobody’s talking about throwing away all the legacy systems and starting over.

It’s a question of how do you pair or integrate new capabilities and emerging technologies onto the force that you’ve got in place and the one you’re buying now, but you, the way you and what trade offs do you make at the margin in terms of quantity versus investing in the new capabilities?  .

I like that  thought about the trade off is not one or the other, but it awfully feels China has a very different stance where they’re at. It seems like the interwar Germany Situation, China’s kind of been building a military more or less from scratch in the past 30 years while the department of defense, many elements of the force structure, actually like prior to that time.

And even the DOD is modernization money. Like the average age of an MDF, like the larger programs is over 14 years old. So that’s like before cloud, before, mobile AIML and many other technologies. Of course we have these communities that will try to protect those quote unquote legacy weapon systems.

So how do you see this , political economy of the encumbrance, of those, the weight of that playing out relative to what China has in their kind of clean sheet designs. Yeah. And if we leave it to just inertia, there are a lot of vested interests, both in the Pentagon and outside the Pentagon on the Hill and industry in the program of record, it’s very hard for a new capability to elbow its way into that.

But I think it requires bringing Congress inside the tent, bringing industry inside the tent to show them if we stay on this course, this is where it  leads and it will be very, have very dire impact for our interests, for our allies, for our economy, our economic competitiveness, for our ability to protect our interests abroad, in the coming years.

So we’ve got to make a change

Speaking of chickens, coming home to roost, this is certainly something we’ve seen recently in supply chains, debates on the Hill.

It seems like they’re pretty gung ho to spend tens, maybe hundreds of millions, of dollars to reinvest in certain domestic strategic industries. Do you have any thoughts though, on what the trade offs are there and how best to structure these sorts of incentives in a way that is economical and doesn’t to the sort of regulatory capture and

suboptimal performance , that you see in other countries, industrial policies.

I don’t think we want to take a reassuring approach across the board. As controversial as that may sound we do have to pay attention to the economics. Behind these supply chains and what will keep our own companies and other competitive globally.  But there are key areas where we need to apply a national security lens and say, where is it really important to have more of a home-based.

Supply chain or a supply chain that is inclusive of our allies, but not necessarily reliant on China.  So there are obviously semiconductors, there’s a lot of discussion about starting a U S investing in a U S Foundry.  People talk about rare earths as another area of vulnerability. So we need a systematic analysis that goes through and says, where are those.

Critical vulnerabilities that we don’t want to be beholden to China or others. And we want to have other options and then using federal policy, whether it’s leading with federal R and D money whether it’s tax policy to create incentives for private sector investment, whether, there are lots of different levers.

The government can pull to try to attract investment in those areas and to make the economics work because of the strategic imperative.

  I wanted to actually circle back to something you just mentioned on working with Congress. Because there’s actually a great report out from a couple of folks stand Pat and bill Greenwald, and they took a look back at China and China, the way that they structure their funding.

They don’t have these programs of record takes years of requirements and budgeting to go get these things started. And then once they start like you have that 35 is planned out to 2070, and we can have the debate over what’s the quantity. Like we. Whether you want to cut it off now, reduce the quantities or continue to completely, but I just wanted to  get your impression on how does the DOD work with Congress in order to free up a little bit more flexibility to do exactly what you were saying, which is bringing some of these emerging technologies to compliment the major programs that we’ve already invested a lot of time and effort into, and that will still be part of the forest structure.

I think instead of throwing a budget over the transom, to Congress each year they’ve really got a brain congressmen and brief them on the war, gaming, brief them on what happens if we just stay the course brief them on the stakes get con some of the members of Congress feeling Sarah sharing in that sense of urgency and the need for change.

Congress should get credit. They’ve actually done a very good job of giving the department particularly driven by the late Senator McCain and rep representative Thornberry. Lot of authorities to do things more flexibly, to prototype technologies, to use other transactional authorities to acquire things more quickly to break out of the traditional requirements, driven process of acquisition, which takes, as you said, it’s very sequential.

It takes many years. And it’s totally antithetical to the way that software driven systems are developed using this agile iterative approach and where most, how most emerging technologies are developed. The problem is the department has not trained or incented. A portion of the acquisition core to really adopt those at scale and to use them regularly.

And so you still have this situation where once a promising technology is prototyped and demonstrated, it might win awards that might, be the greatest thing since sliced bread. And then there’s this huge Valley of death between the successful prototype and actually getting a spot in the program of record.

So that is where I think the DOD needs to do a better job. I think both DOD and Congress need to. Except a little bit more risk in the development cycle of technologies that are critical so that we can get there faster. Cause you do have to accept a little bit more risk, not in, into the war fighter downstream, but in the development cycle of the technology, because the agile process, you’re going to have some failures.

You’re gonna learn from those failures. You’re going to address them and build better capability.  But, you will ha you have to have tolerate the the occasional learning from a mistake or for something that doesn’t go well, rather than beating people up on the Hill, every time such a failure in the development process occurs.

Yeah. I think that the need for risk is definitely an urgency kind of like for us to move in that direction to combat what we’re seeing as the threats. But for one of the big deals for emerging tech firms that are trying to break in, there’s been like, I saw this study, they were saying like army applications, lab just last year got 5,500 like applicants and people looking to try to break into defense industry.

But they’re having a lot of problems and. So I want to get your view on two kinds of solutions that can help reinvigorate the department and how it can transition these new technologies and be more welcoming to, the commercial sector first is like this idea of a bridge fund.

And last year you brought this up to Congress because we just need, if it takes forever to line up a program of record, you need some kind of flexible pot of money to fill that gap and get them over the Valley of death. Another view is that might just push the Valley of death a little bit to the right, or it’s not really solving the real institutional problems of portfolio management and what’s that real relationship and conversation with Congress.

 You need both. I do think occasionally you’ll need a bridge fund. When you actually have a successful prototype, you have an end user customer who wants it and is willing to put money against it in the program of record.

But just because of the budget cycle, that peer, that point in time is 18 months away. So how do you. 12 to 18 months away. So how do you use that time to continue the development and the refinement of the capability? So that you’re that much farther down the road when you actually go into production that’s the bridge fund case.

But I think the portfolio management is also really important because . It would be hard to find a CEO that’s in the world of manufacturing. That’s not doing some form of portfolio management. You have to be able to regularly assess. How different efforts are performing against an objective and, and move resources around to accelerate the ones that are working and cut off the ones that are failing or put them on the back burner.

The way our system works doesn’t really allow that. So if you could get the Congress to give the DOD. Some kind of authority for portfolio managers within missionaries to make some of those trade-offs and you can require reporting or testifying or engaging Congress, and so forth.

But that lack of flexibility is really hurting us. Because even when we know we should make a off, it’s very hard to actually make the change.  , we had a George Mason or starting a series of events around these topics. So we’ve been very interested in, what does we have a legacy of an industrial yeah.

Era system. And then how do we modify that or update that in order to address the problems that we’re facing today? Because , we can’t just have these 20, 30, 40, 50 year plans and presume that. Commercial technology or other things won’t change in that time.

 And, I came into DOD, in the nineties as a reformer thinking we needed to completely change the system and we do, but I’ve also over time, really come to believe that.

You really can’t boil the ocean. And if you try to change the whole acquisition system, you’re just, it’s a fool’s errand, it’s not a fool’s errand and it’s a noble cause, but ,  different metaphor, tilting it a window. So I think the more important thing to do is to take a sub cadre of folks and really train them well on how.

To manage technology and emerging technology programs and how to accelerate development and adoption. As I think it was Eric Schmidt has said that DOD doesn’t have an innovation problem, it has an adoption problem.  Because we haven’t trained people and we haven’t incented them, we haven’t made it a great thing for their career.

To move to this approach. So we need a sort of cadre of Greenbrae, emerging technology, acquisition experts. It doesn’t have to be a huge number of people, but if we were to train and incentive and reward them as a for if for the department, I think you’d get faster development and adoption of some of these critical capabilities.

 That’s always something that’s like a conundrum or maybe even like a paradox to me. Cause it’s like the department of defense does all this planning, but then they outsource everything to industry. So this like we’re making use of markets, but then it seems like to me, Oh, and what you’re saying is we actually need the technical in-house skill back in the government as well in order to manage these programs.

And that actually improves the interaction with. Our supplier base in the contractors and makes the whole market system work better. So even though , you’re internalizing work into the government to some degree you’re also making the interactions and the whole system work better in terms of how they can contract.

Yeah, absolutely. You’ve got to help DOD to become a better smarter customer, both in terms of understanding tech, the tech and the tech development and acquisition cycle, but also in terms of understanding the business models and how to, what to negotiate in a contract, how to drive price down. Are costs down when you’re dealing with an industry partner we don’t give, invest enough in the tech or business acumen of our professionals.

And that would make a big difference. And when you do see, like you see some work that’s being done in the Navy where they really are driving down the ONM costs associated with key platforms, like the FAA team. What’s happening there is they’re helping, the Navy is becoming a smarter customer in terms of negotiating those contracts and dealing with that supply chain.

So there’s a lot of goodness there’s a lot that we could get out of investing in that human capital. Do we know how China kind of approaches that human capital aspect in relation with its industry? China is a totally different system. The sort of, civil military fusion, which is, if something interesting is happening in the commercial world, they step in and direct it to be shared with the PLA.

So that is obviously not a system that would work for us, but we need to find our own, answer to that. In terms of accelerating innovation and the adoption of innovation.

One of, one of the things that we’ve been hearing about in terms of just like getting the department of defense ready for this great power competition is something like a Manhattan project for AI which came from the future of defense task force and your colleague Bob work.

Also talks in a little bit different manner. He says something like Rick over style, nuclear reactors model for AI. So I wonder what’s your kind of take on what is needed in the AIML for scaling that the various solutions, but also the kinds of like enterprise tools and architectures we need. Yeah I think machine learning and AI applications are going to be critical, not only for the us military and for, speeding the quality of decision making for the for the military and enabling human machine teaming with, ma operators and unmanned systems.

It’s also going to be really critical to our own, economic competitiveness commercially around the world. I think I’ve just been reading through this national security commission on AI that Eric Schmidt and Bob worked chaired their report. I think this is one of the most important permissions since the nine 11 commission.

And they really. Argue for putting the, cutting us on a national footing with investments in scientific science and technology and research and development and human capital and the whole nine yards to really be competitive in AI, across the board. And I actually would like to see the vast majority of those recommendations implemented.

 . But the point about recover is a good one too, one of the big challenges in DOD is for both civilian and military leaders is the short tours that they do. So military leaders, general officers, flag officers typically turn over every two to three, maybe four years at the most.

And it’s very hard to do change management. Over for three or four years,  when a CEO takes on change management and company, they plan for a decade of stability and leadership to do that. So we’re making very hard arse on ourselves with all the churn and then on the civilian side, the average life of a political appointee is what, 18 months, 24 months, something like that.

That doesn’t help either. So I do think in areas where we really want to double down, make a big bet on technology and accelerate our advancement. We’ve got to stabilize some of that leadership to make sure we can drive the change over time. Yeah. I love the Rick over part because he also backed up what we were just talking about with workforce.

He spent so much time recruiting people. He interviewed like tens of thousands of just like anybody coming into the nuclear division. And then he spent all this time making sure they’re trained up and he was there. I think he started on nuclear reactors in the late forties. And he was there until the seventies or early eighties, even.

Yeah, it just seems like we need that kind of stability and leadership. Cause we’ll have like multi-decade programs and then people just turn within there. And so how do you. Who’s accountable for such things. He, and he understood the human capital’s long pole in the tent. Not only getting recruiting the right talent, but developing them, creating career paths for them, incentivizing them managing that pipeline of talent over time and that really creating that whole cadre.

Was what was going to ultimately, put nuclear power on the map for the Navy. Again, I think that’s, there’s a huge bunch of lessons to be learned there. One of my favorite things to ask nuclear Navy folks is. Yeah. Tell me your Rick overstory has every single one of them had to sit down with this very tough ad role and who to ask them.

It was a classic stress interview model. And so they there’s some great recover interview stories out there. He would ask someone to delay their engagement and marriage until after they’ve completed, or you’ll put them into these closets and you’d do the classic. They were cut off part of the leg chair so that you’re rocking back and forth.

It’s a wrecker over is. Yeah, it’s definitely an interesting model. And. I think that could be, one of these areas, that you can’t just boil the ocean to you, as you said, we have to pick areas, build out the human capital. And then with that human capital, then you can leverage the flexibility and flexibility in the current construct might just.

Take things off the rails, a little, even more potentially. Yeah. I agree. And human capital and then the right incentive structure. I don’t mean financial. Rewards other kinds of rewards, promotions, opportunities that really align behavior with your objective. Those are. Two critical things.

And I will just note that a lot of people talk about how do we get outside tech talent in to the DOD. And that is very important and we should be doing better there, but we have enormous amount of tech talent in the military, graduating from the academies every year. I think it’s two thirds of each class is in some kind of STEM major, but they come into the officer Corps and then.

We make them put them in something that has nothing to do with their tech background. And even if they want to be a technologist for their service, they’re told that’s a career ending. Probably, that’s a blind alley. You can’t make it to flag officer. You can’t make it to general officer.

If you’re a technologist that has to change, we just got to start making better use of the tech talent that we actually have in our hands, but we’re not managing them well.

how did we get to this point?

I think a lot of it is the. Outsourcing of most of the tech and engineering jobs to the private sector that the folks inside the department are given as much of a role, but I think given the era that we’re entering and the criticality of people who understand how to integrate commercial technology into military systems, I think it’s, I think we have to change that balance.

Yeah, I think that’s just a very interesting point there on, on the workforce and how we can bring them back up. Cause I have some nostalgia for the Bureau in arsenal, days of old where the government would actually help develop at least components or some pieces in house. But then a lot of people also saw them as like backwards, right?

Like they are fixed to their own things and they love their own legacy solutions. So there’s like an ossification that happens in government. If you let it. Go too long. So how do you think about I guess a system of churn or a system that keeps dynamic like a dynamic like field? I’m not suggesting we go back to the arsenal model, but I am suggesting we need people who understand technology peppered throughout the system, as operators, as experimenters, as concept developers as acquisition program managers, all of that.

Th there has to be more. Tech savvy throughout the ranks for all of this to to work. And then we have to Really make it exciting for people. I think, if you asked the current generation of young officers, we don’t have the concepts and systems that we need to be effective with China longterm.

We want you to be part of the solution. So you’re going to do competitive concept development for your next chair, and you are going to take new technologies coming out of school. Silicon Valley. And you’re going to experiment with them, for a tour or you’re going to be the one to figure out how to to accelerate getting this really cool new thing.

That’s going to save lives into the fleet faster or into the force faster. But we’re not making those, the sexy jobs for young people coming in. I think actually there are pockets of the force that are doing that. I think one of the advantages. Of, SOCOM and the special ops world is just, they’re so small that they have very much easier to have it to gain that agility.

And they have such urgent requirements from guys who are in harm’s way every day, that they’ve actually done probably the best job, one of the better jobs of figuring out how to. Bring new technologies, adapt them for military purposes and get them into the field very quickly. I’ll be at small scale because they are small, but that’s the kind of muscle that we’ve got to develop a department wide.

The other thing I’ll just mention is coding. Right now the department is dependent on an industry for everything. There’s some. Coding that we should be able to do in house simple coding for different applications. There’s now in the AOI world move towards low code or no code building of AI applications where it’s literally putting building blocks of existing algorithms together to build new applications.

That’s the world of the future. And again, we’ve got to prepare the tech talent to be able to do some of that in house.

There’s also an aspect to this where once you spin up this kind of work working for the department of defense starts to sound more appealing  than being the three thousands project manager at Facebook. .

Yeah, I did.

  There’s This debate that Jordan and I like to have about the kind of relative importance of basic research and applied research. And then I guess, full-scale development or something like that as well in there.

 Where do you land? Cause we hear people saying. Oh we really need to boost a more basic research, but is it the basic side or are we really just failing on the application side?

 I don’t think it’s either, or   I do think that we need to be investing more in basic science and technology research. The defense science board did an interesting study that sort of came up with a percentage of the defense budget that should be going in as a sort of foundational element.

And we are below where we need to be. So I do think that’s important, but given the urgency of what we’re facing with with China and the fact that we don’t have enough good answers to some of the asymmetric approaches that they’re going to confront us with. I think we need to put a particular emphasis on applied R and D and moving that into development and fee rapid fielding.

I think in two timeframes, there’s a sort of five to seven year timeframe, which is really not about new systems. It’s about how do we take what we have. And use it differently, combine it differently. You get a new capability. For example, if you want to have of options for a president, other than striking the Chinese Homeland, the Homeland of a nuclear plant power president, better have other options in that.

But you want to be able to hold at risk. The forces that are projecting power to take Taiwan or to go to some, to intimidate a part us partner in the South China sea. You want to have the ability to hold those forces at risk? That means, the first question is how could we do that better with what we have today, maybe you pair a Navy long range, precision munition that gives you extra range with an existing air force bomber.

But we’ve got to think out of the box across services to say, if we have the whole everything on the table it’s the Apollo exercise. How do we mix and match these pieces that we have to solve this hard problem. And then looking beyond, to 10 years and beyond that’s where the emerging technologies and accelerating development and adoption can help you, that you’re going to get something fundamentally new that you can integrate into the force in the mid to longer term.

 You gotta think in both of those timeframes to be successful, I think. Yeah. You mentioned that China is a perching us in a nascent metric way. And I’ve definitely seen like these pictures of them having like 20 or 30 new drone developments and they’re dropping all these ships like dumplings and what they’re doing with hypersonics.

And they’re also focusing on systems, destruction warfare as well, going after our concepts of how we operate. So can you just talk a little bit about what you’re seeing there and what you think the DOD needs to do to react . So systems destruction warfare is really the idea that China will try early on to disrupt and defeat and degrade our networks.

So their preferred scenario is using cyber attacks, using maneuvers in space that they mess with our ability to see, to navigate. To move to target before we even, get out of the East coast basis or the West coast basis, they and we the key thing is that the U S the environment.

That we will encounter in the end of Pacific is going to be highly contested and it’s going to stay contested. So the traditional approach from the Gulf war and sense where the U S comes in, we establish domain superiority. We gain air superiority. We gain maritime superiority. We gain superiority in various areas, and then we have the freedom of action to go in and prosecute campaign.

That moment of sustained periodicity is never going to happen. We will get it. We’ll lose it. We’ll have to regain it. It’s going to be episodic. And so what we have to do is think asymmetrically about China, meaning how do we fight in that more contested? Domain, how do we build a resilient network of networks to be able to continue to operate effectively and communicate and command and control in that contested environment.

But also where are the points of vulnerability for China just as they’ve focused in on for us. So on cyber attacks on critical infrastructure tax on space-based systems that could blind or mobilize us. What are the, what’s the equivalent insight for us? Where, how do we take an asymmetric approach to them?

I do think. The network of networks, the resilient, what’s called being called joint, all domain command and control or AVMs by the air force. That’s a really key piece, I think, leveraging AI for decision support so that we can call through the data and skip the insight and make the decision faster than they can.

That’s critical human machine teaming. We’re always going to be at a quantitative disadvantage in their backyard. And they end up Pacific given just the time distance equation. How do we marry unmanned systems with man systems to get some of that capacity back and regain some of that advantage and be able to operate.

In a very lethal environment where we may not want to send, 5,000 people on an aircraft carrier. And so the kinds of it, it’s an asymmetric thinking. And as important as the technology is the mind share the, that the intellectual conceptual development piece is really critical as well.

One last fun, one to close. Are there any corners of the deal of DOD history that you think it would have been particularly fun to either work in or just be a fly on the wall for?

  I’m really interested in periods where.  Someone figured out they had to break doctrine and make a fundamental shift to operating differently. And somehow. The, the institution figured out how to insent that behavior and create a competitive environment where that innovation happened.

I think there’ve been periods, in, us Naval history where that was true. There’ve been periods in German, the German use of the tank,  the tank was one thing, but it when I came up with the concept of Blitzkrieg, it became a very, something with much more impact.

So marrying the technology piece with the new way of thinking, the changes, how we fight. I think those are the most interesting areas to plum for lessons learned. But I hesitate to say I would have wanted to be a fly on the wall, even for the German period of injury in a patient. I think that would have been a horrifying to watch from any angle.

Given the context for sure. We’ll stick to the Merrimack and um, maybe like carrier development for your, for your time. Let’s stick with that one. Okay.

 Jordan and I just, you get the award for being the first person who’s ever asked me about my Oxford thesis. So yeah,  I actually got a scanned copy of your undergraduate one as well. Oh God. You know that one’s hard. So did you see all the different type faces and the pages didn’t met?

Did you see that? my typist for my thesis, he was accepting chapters for weeks and the night before it was due came and gave it all back and said, I’m so sorry. I’ve over committed. I can’t do this. So I had 20 friends divide up the pages of my thesis all night. Yeah. And then slap it together with a letter at the front, the AMEA culpa letter from the typist in the front.

So that, yeah, it wouldn’t be  downgraded because of the way it looked. You must’ve seen that and said, what’s her problem? Why can’t she type approximately

 like the psychosocial question kids thought that was from a totally out of luck.

okay, good to talk to you guys. I look forward to hearing the final version.