 Welcome back to Think Tech. I'm Jay Fidel. This is the two o'clock block here on a given Thursday. We have Pono Chang and Jason Chung. I get Pono Chang and Jason Chung. Not related, right? And we're talking about the Hawaii Defense Alliance here on the military in Hawaii. Welcome to the show, gentlemen. Hey, Aloha, Jay. Aloha. Thank you for having us. Great to have you here. So, you know, we've been covering the military and Hawaii for a while. We've been covering various aspects of the MAC, called the Military Affairs Committee, the Chamber of Commerce. We met a lot of people, but you're in a different category in a sense, because you're talking about the connection between the Military Affairs Committee and the Winter Civilian Community, the business community. I really want to know about that. So, Jason, how did you get involved in the Hawaii Defense Alliance? And how did you get involved in this nexus we're talking about? Yeah, Jay, thank you. That's a great question. And so, as you know, the Military Affairs Council primarily advocates on behalf of the military here in Hawaii. But we also kind of bridged the gap with the local communities, as well as the businesses that do business with the military. So, the Hawaii Defense Alliance came into play as it wasn't one of our primary priorities that the MAC would normally look at, you know, which was training lands for Harvard Naval Shipyard and Red Hill. But on the periphery, we always did work with local companies to really build out that local industrial base, right? The more jobs and opportunity we can get for local companies, we knew that would benefit the military in terms of readiness, but as well as help local economy and opportunities here for the local folks. And so, an opportunity came up after a deep ed SWAT analysis about looking at standing up a Hawaii Defense Alliance. And so, the MAC put in a bid for it to win the grant. And we did. And, you know, Pono, we brought on as our program manager for it with his background experience in workforce development, some other areas to really formalize this process now where we look at how do we get more opportunities for local business? Very important, you know, because we have a long relationship with the military in Hawaii. It's really part of our DNA. And people sometimes don't realize that, but if they're going on for a long time, like 175 years altogether, it's got real legs here in Hawaii. And so, this is an important thing to do, particularly in view of, you know, the future of this nexus and the future of our state, our need to have all the business opportunities we could get and our need to have the military here and happily ensconced with the business community. So what you're doing is very important. Well, let me, oh, and I wanted to ask you that now you had some time in the military, which also qualifies you to take this job as president, but of the alliance. So, can you talk about your time in the military, what you did and how much you enjoyed it? Sure, Joe, love to do it. Born and Waste in Hawaii, but I joined the Reserving Guard about 40 years, a little more than 40 years ago. But then I went on active duty after doing that for a few years after graduating University of Hawaii. So I was a Army Intelligence Officer, did that for 30 years, spent the majority of my time in Fort Bragg, North Carolina working with special forces. And then the other half of my career primarily here in the Indo-Pacific region, with tours in Korea and then tours here also in Hawaii, and really enjoyed doing what I did as an intelligence officer. When I retired, I actually took a job with a tech company, but then got offered this position with military affairs council. And I thought what a great opportunity, you know, two things that I really care about, obviously Hawaii and obviously the military, which has been a part of my adult life. So that's how I kind of got pulled into the military affairs council and doing that work. So really fortunate to be in this position. Great. It's great to talk to you, great to meet you. So Panro Chan, you bring a consultant's point of view to this. You had some experience in consulting with military affairs council. Can you talk about how you got involved in the alliance? So thank you, Jayce. I was talking to both Jayce Thin and Jennifer, and they were talking that this project was coming along, that they were going to apply, or place a bid in for D-Bit, who by the way is the sponsor of this program, and the overall Hawaii defense economy project. And they were looking for kind of like a program manager to one service the steering committee as well as the working groups, provide the deliverables, do some of the research. And so I thought it was a great opportunity, I mean, like Jayce, to be able to one help military in Hawaii and help residents and small businesses be able to work with the military. Yeah, so when you say you're a consultant, you're really a business consultant, right? And when you say you're in an alliance, I'm just guessing here, but the alliance would be alliance of businesses and military commands that are allied together for the common good, both sides of the equation. And you also bring experience in the political arena, experience in the business community, on Bishop Street, all those things. So I don't know if it's the right way to put it, but you're the local side of the equation. Oh, thank you for that. Yes, I hope I can bring that experience to the table and help all of the stakeholders. And as you mentioned, so we have a lot of small businesses volunteering their time to kind of help the alliance, give their expertise of what it's like to be a defense contractor or people in, say, from the university or the private education sector of how they can help educate the workforce for today and tomorrow to meet the needs of not just the DOD, the public employer, but also many of the small businesses and as well as large defense contractors who need that talent pipeline to be able to service our military and their needs. You say workforce and I want to trip on that for a minute. You know, you say workforce in this context and I see two arrows, each one pointing to the other direction. In other words, the military provides employees for the, you know, the local business community. I know this and I can tell you from the practice of law, they were always very attractive to us, the spouses and also the retirees. But the other aspect is the local business community provides employees to the military. So how does that work and which one prevails? They're both integral and both very important. On the public sector, the Department of Defense employees, I don't know, maybe just under 20,000 people, civilians. I want to clarify that, civilian workers here in Hawaii on the contracting side. I should know this number. I don't know well to 15,000 employees in companies who get contracts and that number will fluctuate depending on the type of contract and how many people are contracting at any given time. So when you're talking 35, 40,000 people and they are good paying jobs and that's I think the key for us is these are a wide range of good paying jobs, both in the say blue collar to white collar to PhD level. So it has the wide gamut to be able to provide, you know, local residents and local businesses an opportunity for good paying jobs. Does the Alliance, you know, facilitate, you know, the job applications, job market, getting jobs for people? So right now the Alliance is focused on kind of doing an assessment of where are some of the gaps that we can focus on to fill, whether it be the needs for DOD, the public employer or small I'm just going to say businesses in general who contract with the military in Hawaii. And I think it's we're doing that assessment now like Jason mentioned the Alliance was a creation of a SWAT analysis that deep bed conducted a couple years ago and a lot of that is focused obviously in data sciences, cybersecurity, as well as in the shipbuilding area. Jason, I have a million questions. My first question too is who is in fact in the Alliance? That's a great question Jay, you know, it's actually like a very representative of what is actually in the MAC, right? When you look at the membership of the MAC, it's primarily retired general officers, flag officers, folks from industry, from the local community, nonprofit organizations, academic institutions, that's University of Hawaii, etc. Native Hawaiian Organization Association. And that's what you have within the Alliance. And Poland will talk probably more detail about the different working groups that we have that break out very specific areas like a small business ecosystem, too small business support to workforce development. But what we've basically done is we just more formalized this process in terms of when we look at this challenge of how do we expand more opportunities for the local businesses and people here in Hawaii? How do we get about doing it? So let's develop these working groups. Let's figure out what the gaps are that exist. Because as you know, there's some great programs out there like the small business administration, P-TAC, etc. that help out a lot of companies are starting out. But there are some gaps. And so what are those gaps? And then we also know that doing business with the federal government is not an easy thing to do. There's a lot of barriers to entry. So how do we identify those barriers? You know, how do we help companies navigate those barriers? Because not only does it help Hawaii again, as you've seen very significant, it helps the military in terms of the readiness. When they have a ready force here in terms of personal and services that they can rely on, it really increases your readiness and your ability to execute your mission, whether it's peacetime or war. So that's kind of what the makeup of the alliance is. Okay. You know, everything you say makes me think of another question when I asked you. So, you know, talk about readiness. Well, you know, Hawaii, you know, as here we are remote in the Pacific, subject to the possibility of storms, maybe extreme weather, given climate change and the possibility that we're going to need help as an isolated island state. Does the nexus that the alliance provides, does that help in terms of, you know, having the military assist the civilian community in the event of some sort of disaster? Yeah, Jay, I think it does most definitely. And there's actually a very close relationship when you like that Indo Pekong, US Indo Pekong with the state, as well as with the National Guard and Major General Kenny Karai. In fact, in my last duty station, when I was a senior intel officer at US Army Pacific, we actually would set up a joint operation center with Kenny and his folks whenever there was a potential disaster situation that would potentially impact Hawaiian islands. So whether that was from an electrical standpoint or flooding, and we had to get people from different areas within the big island to just humanitarian assistance in general. So that nexus is, it goes back to even when I was a lieutenant back here in Hurricane Iniki, and we deployed folks from the 25th Infantry to Kauai specifically to redo the power lines, to get food and water to folks, and to kind of help with getting, you know, kind of the general services back on island before the state and local counties could do that. So there's a very, very close relationship with nexus. It's comforting to know that, you know, people worry that, you know, the larger mission of the military is national defense, of course, and they may or may not have time to, you know, assist humanitarian assistance, you know, to their venue here in Hawaii. But I believe from everything I know that if that ever happened, if we did have some sort of natural disaster, what have you, the military would be in a position and motivated to help us. And it's just, it's human nature and it's, what do you want to call it? It's people, it's caring. And I believe that the military commanders here would go out of their way, take special pains to make sure that they use their resources to help the civilian population. Do you feel the same way? Oh, Jay, 110%. It definitely is. I mean, it's, if it's not an explicit part of the mission statement, it's definitely an implied task. You know, quite honestly here within INOPACOM, one of the main talking points when you're talking about the military is that, you know, INOPACOM is a very unique region of the world, the most consequential, right? When you look out the next five, 10, 15, 20, even 30 or 40 years in terms of the amount of people, comrades, and also the thing to highlight is the amount of potential threats or competitors that we have in this area, right? Four out of the five main ones exist in this area, North Korea, China, Russia, bond exchange organizations, and they also include very significant humanitarian assistance disaster relief. So about 40 to 45% annually that occur in the world, occur within this region alone. But the majority of impact to human life and our way of life, not just us, but our partners and allies in the region, it's an 80% significant impact to them. And a lot of it is when you start to look at human geography within a region, you know, it's very close to the littoral areas, very close to, so from tsunamis and hurricanes and stuff, very susceptible to those issues and flooding. And so the military basically has operation plans specifically designed for all those, the situations, whether it's to help partners, allies as well as here in Hawaii. And the thing I would highlight about here in Hawaii, as you know, Jay's of serving time in the military too, is, you know, the military is all about, you know, the extended family and being part of the community that they reside. And they do a very, I think a very good job of really trying to be a good community member in terms of how they do outreach and integrate it because their families live day to day. They work off post, their kids play baseball, baseball teams, they go shopping, you know, they do all this and they're part of the community. And so, you know, if that community is threatened, the military is going to come to the aid. We want that. We want that. On both sides of the equation, we want to have that relationship. In fact, I would go a step further and say, we want it to be especially close, especially tight, especially warm and loving here than anywhere else in the country. And I think we actually have that. That's my observation of it. So let's talk about some of the projects, Pono. You know, Jason talked about outreach. I guess you're the outreach man. Could you talk about some of the projects you're consulting with to where the alliance reaches out into the civilian community? So right now we have four working groups who are kind of tasked with certain areas. So one was the obvious is workforce development. And there lies a group of small businesses, some large businesses, as well as various people from the education community, as well as, like, say, Kayla Chalk from the chamber who runs the sector partnership program. And their job, kind of like what I talked about earlier is, right, taking a look at the needs for DoD as a public employer, as well as the business community needs for talent by buying. Then we have the small business support working group. And their job is to come up with programs, well, one, again, assess what the needs are, and then come up with programs to say, you know, how can we help small businesses get certified? As Jason talked about, being a federal contractor and then being a defense contractor has a lot of barriers and loopholes, I mean, not loopholes, but qualifications and requirements that you have to meet that are fairly rigorous. The newest and latest is obviously making sure you are certified and have certain levels of cybersecurity in your organization, even if you are not an IT company, you still have to have certain certifications to be just a contractor with the military. So, I mean, depending on your work, and Jason can speak much better to that, but I mean, even if you are a painting company, you still need to have a certain level of cybersecurity certification because it's so important. So that group is making sure companies have what they need in not just U of D procurement certifications and meeting the guidelines, but also cybersecurity. Then we have, so making sure you are able to do business with the military. Next is then the ecosystem. How do we help companies get together to be able to successfully contract with the military? And that often includes not just helping the small businesses, but helping the large companies doing some matchmaking, doing industry jays, making sure there is that relationship with the contracting agencies so people know who they are and feel comfortable to reach out to them. And then the last group is taking a look at how can we make the defense sector resilient? And that means our businesses able to weather the ups and downs of the spending of the Department of Defense in Hawaii because it's not all up. So if there's dips, are you well diversified? Do you do other public work, city, state work? How about private sector work? And taking a look at some of those other opportunities. So in each of those areas, we're taking a look at programs, whether it be, like I mentioned, industry days, matchmaking, thinking of doing resume banks, especially in the tech sector, keeping up a host of resumes on hand so as both public and private sector need to have access to people still looking forward. So those are some of the things that we are looking at and working with the various stakeholders. We need to have a strong tech element in this because ultimately, and I hope it's soon and not later, we'll have a residual workforce from the process that you're describing where people have had experience in and out of the military that will help them organize tech companies because that we need to diversify, that's my view. But I wanted to ask you, you mentioned ups and downs and changes and what not. And nothing so constant has changed. And certainly we've had some changes in the past what 18 months. And I would like you to discuss how COVID affected all of this, one way or the other, the flow to the military, the flow from the military, the relationships, the amount of business that the local business community was getting or not, how it was affected. Because we know that COVID has changed our world in many ways permanently. Can you talk about that? Sure. I'll start off and Jason probably can add a lot more. I mean, at least for this project, I mean, right, like everybody else, you're doing things virtually. But the one thing we've learned in the few months we've been together is clearly and no surprise that the military has been a great economic partner and benefit for Hawaii. It has been stable, both on the public employment side as well as the private contracting side. And it is, what is it 15, 18% of state GDP, it's second only to tourism and it's a stable part and also provides, like I mentioned earlier, a lot of good paying jobs. And I think that's an important part of that. And Jason, yeah. That's a great OP point. I mean, some of the data points, Jay, that's one area that we've seen that federal spending, especially during times of economic downturn, specifically Department of Defense, has been very stable. So even if you go back to 2008, 2009, and kind of the economic crisis that we had here in Hawaii and then recently here with COVID, thank goodness that we had the DODS number two economic driver, right? Because that spending stayed. And actually, last year, it went up. So the year prior, it was $2.5 billion in just contracting dollars that were spent out by the Department of Defense. Last year, it was $2.7 billion. And a little more than half of that went to companies, local companies here in Hawaii. So as we look at that, that's pretty tremendous. And that doesn't take an account of some of the other contracting jobs. The military refers to SRM, which is sustainment, restoration, and modernization. So think of everything it takes to upkeep a small city. So from HVAC-prepared to plumbers to yard folks, et cetera, that all the 11 bases here in Hawaii, I mean, they're basically many cities. And that SRM budget is pretty significant and provides a lot of opportunity and jobs for a lot of small companies here in Hawaii. So that's what I would say anything, what the last 18 months has done. It is really shine the light on the importance of creating this Hawaii Defense Alliance, of why exactly what you're saying, Jay, why we need to embrace it, we need to look at, and we need to further take advantage of it and have more opportunity for the local businesses as well as our folks. So when we look at it, I give you that statistic of about half of that $2.7 billion has gone to local companies. Well, the owner's job we passed Pono is, okay, we'll make that all $2.7 billion. You go figure it out with the working groups of those, what you didn't talk about too was the payroll. So payroll or the military, this includes civilians, is about $5 billion a year here in Hawaii. And like Pono said, 20,000 of those are civilian jobs, GS jobs or WG jobs working down at the shipyard. So within that $5 billion, there's a portion probably about $1.5 billion that is just for civilian employees. And so our other goal is, okay, how do we maximize that too? So instead of the organizations here having to go recruit from DC or Texas or from California, is there a way for us to kind of create that education pipeline workforce development. So we're growing some of those key jobs here in Hawaii, right? Workforce development and getting more folks locally here employed in those positions. So I think if anything, last 18 months, I really shine a light on what a tremendous opportunity this is. And the timing of the Hawaii defense alliance just happened to be, you know, right at this time, it's like perfect timing because everyone is, you don't really have to do a hard sales pitch to it about the benefits of this. I think everyone kind of gets it when you start talking about it. But there's more. This is like one of those ads on TV. There's more. Okay. And what is the more? Well, the more is, you know, we're having kind of a de facto pivot because of the trouble and the threat of China and its aspirations over Taiwan and the like, some of the aggressive things it's done and has said it will do. And, you know, if I were the president, nobody's actually voting for me right now. But if I were the president, I would put more resources in the Pacific right now in order to preserve American interests. It's very important we do that. And what does the Pacific mean in terms of military? Well, our most important, you know, focus is here in Hawaii. This is where the action is. This is where the force is, so to speak, more than any other place in the Pacific really. This is where we have the talent, the equipment and so forth. So I would guess, and if I were the president, I would probably make this happen, that there'd be more resources coming out here into the system that you described. In other words, you know, I have a certain amount of need by the military for help from the civilian community. You have a certain amount of, you know, connection between the two. And if I'm right, and we have more commands out here, more troops out here, more equipment, personnel, what have you, we're going to need, we're going to need more from the civilian community. And the whole connection will be more robust, more demanding, if you will. And so I think the alliance will be faced with that change going forward. Do you agree? How do you see it changing with changing times? But Jeff, I'll vote for you. You know, you get your ticket and I'll vote for you with that platform. I agree 100%, Jay. It's great, right? Everything you say, I agree with. I mean, I do, but I agree 110%. You know, the strategic importance of Hawaii has only gone up in a number of years. You know, back 100, 150 years when they said Hawaii was so strategically important to the Pacific, it's even more so now for the reasons that we have discussed. And you're right, what you see that manifest in is the physical presence of the military organizations that reside here in Hawaii. Hawaii is the only state that has a geographic command and every component, right? We've got the Navy, the Air Force, the Army, the Marines. We have a special operations command here as well. And we have a thing called, this thing called NSA Hawaii. We also have NETAMS, which is out there, which is the largest communications facility in the world that's here. And we have this thing called Pro Harbor Neighborship Yard, right? One of four public shipyards, actually the top rate of four public shipyards. And so you see some of that resourcing. It's the number one shipyard. It looks like it's going to get the majority of funding that is being allocated to the upgrade of the shipyards and to the fleet in general. You see a lot of the organizations out of here that are actually at the leading front of the experimental designs that you're doing, whether it's for the Army and multi-domain operations. The US Army Pacific is the pilot for the Army. Pacific Air Force is the pilot for the Air Force in terms of looking at this concept of agile basing. The Marines at Conning Marine Corps base for a littoral regiment, which is kind of redesigning how Marines fight. And so you're seeing that. The second point I'd like to bring out, and you mentioned this earlier on, which is a really key point, is all this technology and all the things that are going on when we look at our main competitors, China and Russia, it's this evolution of technology which is going so quickly, which the argument is that folks like to peer China as well as Russia are now pacing peers that in some areas they're on a equal footing with us in terms of technological advances. And that's driving this huge demand for these tech type of jobs, whether it's an IT, cyber, data science, data analytics, and intelligence. And that's something that we identified as we look at the Hawaii Defense Alliance that is this second emerging industry that is rising the prominence here that we really need to take advantage because as you know, Jay, it goes to the opportunity for the local kids here who are looking who want to get into the tech sector and be very relevant. And so instead of us having to recruit from the mainland, we want the mainland to be trying to recruit from Hawaii because we've got all these folks who are really skilled in a tech field. So it's bringing this new industry to light and the opportunities are really, really significant. That's great. We're almost out of time. Conor, could I ask you to tell me what you see in the future for the Alliance and for your consulting? For the Alliance, I think a lot of good energy ideas and programs to be able to help our residents be able to fill a lot of those jobs that the Department of Defense has and has needs for and then helping more companies get more contracts and continue to serve the needs of our military in Hawaii. For me, hopefully continuing to work on projects that help our state move forward. Great. All good. This is really interesting to learn about. So, Jason, we are out of time now, but I want to give you the opportunity to leave a message. What message would you leave with the people who are watching this? What would you want them to think about going forward? Thanks, Jay. What I would say is I think we've got just a tremendous opportunity here to take advantage of the military presence here in Hawaii, the strategic importance of it, the jobs, the opportunity, and really look at how do we get the key stakeholders together to really provide more opportunities not only to our businesses, but to our young folks who are in school and aspiring to go to college or to get a job in a great trade and support both the state of Hawaii as well as the military. How can they learn more? How can they learn more about the alliance? Where do they go? Who do they talk to? So, right now, Jay, I think, and Pono, please add to this. Our link is Hawaii Defense Alliance, which is within the Chamber of Commerce right now as a link. Pono, have we actually stood up our separate website yet? It's just a landing page right now until we put up more content, which we will shortly. Okay, what will the address be? I think what Jason said is HawaiiDefenseAlliance.org. Well, thank you, Jason. Thank you, Pono. Great to talk to you guys. It's actually very encouraging to hear this, and I wish you all the best and all the members of the alliance. You're part of the backbone of Hawaii. Thank you so much. Thanks, Jay. Look forward to you on the ticket. Thank you. Thank you.