 Good morning, everyone, and welcome back from the network break. Our next speaker we are going to hear from is Dr. Raj G. Iyer. He is the Chief Information Officer for Information Technology Reform in the Office of the Secretary of the Army. As CIO, Dr. Iyer serves as the Principal Advisor and directs all matters representing the Secretary of the Army relating to information management and information technology. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Iyer. Good morning, everyone. Hey, pleasure to be here. My first do-it-is conference. I hope I survive. And I know I'm interacting with the IC community here for the first time, so let's see how it goes. So what I want to do today is we've got 30 minutes. I'm not going to do Q&As, but I really wanted to spend some time talking to you about the journey we began on digitally transforming the Army of two plus years ago, wherever you are today, because obviously many of you are tracking some tremendous efforts and initiatives underway. Those of you who follow me on LinkedIn probably tracking just got a bunch of stuff going on right now. So why don't I really kind of bring everybody up to speed on where we are, where we're headed, some of the big strategic choices we've made as an Army. So let's see. There we go. So why is the Army on this journey? You have heard our Secretary-in-Chief talk about this many, many, many times. We're successful in deterring, you know, facing challenges like China in the future. Really it's about us getting to establishing strategic deterrence. And that strategic deterrence for us is how we can fight and win with multi-domain operations, giving our commanders multiple options, both kinetic and non-kinetic, and then enabling what we call decision advantage or decision dominance. And that is about giving our commanders data at the point of need in real time to enable them to make decisions in real time against an adversary that's pretty sophisticated. And for us to be able to succeed and win those kinds of wars and fights, it's very clear that we have to take a very different approach than what we've been doing for the last 20 years fighting counterinsurgency. As much as we were successful fighting and winning at the Brigade Combat Team and at the battalion level and lower, it's very clear that for us to be successful in future with large-scale combat operation, it requires a whole different way of us fighting. A whole different way of the army structuring or restructuring our force to be able to take advantage of technology and data. And for us to be able to rapidly adopt digital commercial technologies at a scale and at a pace that we have never in the past. That is the imperative. And there's no ifs and buts about it and there's no plan Bs or plan Cs. When you hear our Chief McCann will talk, he'll tell you we're here to fight and win the nation's wars and winning matters. There's no second places. And that is a challenge that we're here set out to accomplish. So this journey that we've been on, you know, digital transformation is all about us transforming the entire United States Army to be able to fight and win with data. Our weapon system platforms are most sophisticated platforms, and though even the ones that we continue to build through our modernization priorities will continue to play a key role in delivering effects, delivering lethality at a range and a scale that we haven't in the past. But as I said earlier, for us to be truly successful in multi-domain, it's about how we integrate all these effects and how we integrate data across platforms, across systems, across sensors to enable our commanders to make the right decisions at the right time. So what's fueling all of this? The most recent field manual 3.0 that the Army released three months ago, you know, you don't have to read more than the first 10 pages of it. I'm telling you, if you read the first 10 pages of it, it shows how the Army is fundamentally changing how we're going to fight in future. This is our doctrine. This is our doctrine on manual that says how we're going to fight in future in multi-domain. And every page you read through it is about data. You may not call out data specifically, right? It talks about, you know, the importance of data in many, many of these things. How do we see ourselves? How do we see the enemy better? How do we get to situational awareness and situational understanding? How do we make sure that we are able to hide in plain sight in contested environments? How do we make sure that we maneuver in a small footprint than what we're used to? How do we make sure that we reduce the size and complexity of our command posts so that we're much more distributed in terms of command and control? All of these concepts are now codified in how we're going to fight in future. And, oh, by the way, for us to be able to succeed in doing that, we now have to really completely rethink how we've architected the Army from a digital infrastructure perspective. This is what we used to call the network in the past. I don't like to use the word network anymore. The networks of the past were how we were able to go fight at the BCT level. What we're talking about here is really establishing a digital ecosystem, a global infrastructure that enables us to pass data at scale at echelon worldwide to enable decision-making in large theaters. So, a year and a half ago, we established the Army's first digital transformation strategy. Since then, we've followed it up with a number of more specific plans such as the Army's data plan, the Army cloud plan, the Army's unified networking plan. Each of them, over the last 18 months or so, have gotten us enough momentum where we're actually now starting to see results. And I'm going to walk you through some of them. So, I got plenty of help from my boss, the secretary. When she came on last year, she noted that getting to a data-centric Army was her two of six top objectives for her role as the Army's 25th secretary of the Army. And that means a lot. That says a lot. This is not one that's being driven by the CIO. This is one that's being driven by the secretary and the chief of staff of the Army. And so, when she says, we got to ensure the Army becomes more data-centric to conduct operations in contested environments, that means a lot. And that has led to the domino effects across the Army today in terms of us looking at force structure, looking at all of our platforms and weapon systems and where they need to be, looking and re-looking our cyber posture to see whether we're protecting all of our attack surface area with the agility that's needed, with the resiliency that's needed, and, oh, by the way, how do we make sure we do that by continuously bringing in innovation at scale? Not just pockets of the Army, but starting at the grassroots level and up. So, as I said, data-centric Army is now in doctrine. And what that means is it's no longer the tech geeks in the Army that own this. It's the warfighter. It's senior leaders starting with senior leaders down to theater commanders, corps commanders, division commanders, down to the individual soldier. Everybody now has a role to play in getting to a data-centric Army. So this kind of mass transformation effort, if you look at how other large industries have done this on the commercial side, can take years and years and years. We don't have years and years and years. And so what I have done as a CIO really is help accelerate this effort in a few ways. One is to make sure that we establish a common set of tools, platforms, digital ecosystems to help the Army innovate. The last thing you want a corps commander to do is to have to worry about IT and all the barriers that comes to adopting cloud. That's not their job. But that's typically how the Army has operated in the past, which has been very, very decentralized and letting the commands and the units to have to go struggle with whatever they got to do. Our approach now is to make sure that we are providing all of the digital tools available in the commercial marketplace in a fully accredited, highly secured environment so that our warfighters can now start to take that and take advantage of those tools to really do what they know best, which is warfighting. How do you fight with data as your new ammunition? How does the digital ecosystem, the digital infrastructure now become your warfighting platform? And we're going to talk about that just a little bit. But the other thing here, too, is really, at the end of the day, it comes down to enabling optionality for our commanders, enabling mission command, enabling common situational understanding, a common operating picture. For all of you folks in the IC world, you've done this before. You know what I'm talking about on the Title 50 side. On the Title 10 side of the house, extremely complicated. And that's just only because of how we have been prosecuting our operations for the last 20 years. But the way things stand right now is that this is, for us to be successful as an Army, and that, for us, that's the Army of 2030, that's our objective. This has got to happen at every echelon in the Army. Every leader, every soldier needs to understand how they're going to take and leverage data as a strategic asset and how we empower them to make decisions at echelon with the best data, the highest quality of data that's available to them. So the Army Digital Transformation Strategy, written, like I said, almost two years ago, had three major objectives, 13 lines of effort. And almost two years later, I can tell you that we've checked every one of these boxes today to say that, yes, this is done. This is the vision we laid out, and yes, we're well on our way to be able to implement and execute the vision that we've laid out. And because this is transformation, this cannot just be about technology, and that's why this is not a technology strategy. This is always about digital transformation, because, again, if you Google what digital transformation is about, it's about changing your operating model. It's changing your business model. It's changing fundamentally how you operate, leveraging data in ways that, you know, either your competitor or your peer has not figured it out and you're disrupting the market. For the Army, that's disrupting the warfighting market. That's the business we're in. And so for us to be successful doing that, obviously a huge component of leveraging digital technologies such as cloud and AI and cyber, and we'll talk about that. But it's also making sure there's two other pieces of the puzzle that are equally important. How do we reform our processes, our institutional processes that are not so agile? And making sure that they can move at the speed at which we want digital to move in the Army. And whether that's the acquisition process or whether it's the requirements process, every one of those things have to move at the speed at which the Army of the Future needs to be at. And so absolutely critical that we look at it as well. And then the last piece is people and partnerships. We know from current operations and what's going on in Europe that one of our key strategic deterrents is really our ability to bring our coalition partners with us. And so making sure that we are able to share, collaborate, and exchange data with our partners at a scale that we haven't in the past, especially in new geographic areas and new theaters where we don't have robust partnerships such as NATO is going to be key to success. And then obviously transforming the size and scale of the United States Army means that at the end of the day, fighting and winning with data and all the digital technologies means that we absolutely have to rescale our workforce across the board, the total Army, to be able to truly understand and leverage what it means to be able to fight with these new technologies. So where are we with this journey? So two plus years ago, we started on, we literally had nothing called a cloud. And two plus years later, we have probably the most robust sophisticated cloud ecosystem in the DOD that's being operationalized by the warfighter. Not just as a back office computer and store environment, but we're going to talk about how we're actually allowing our course and divisions to experiment with this digital infrastructure as part of all of the experimentation and exercises. And that is a huge game changer. And that is how at the end of the day, if we need to move large volumes of data across the globe and enable decision dominance, that cannot happen when you have a whole bunch of data sources all over the place and a bunch of data centers connected through networks that are not resilient and then having to work through a whole bunch of cybersecurity layers to get access to it. That is just simply not survivable and is definitely not resilient for a future fight. So cloud is an absolute necessity. There's just no way this will happen without the cloud. Cloud brings scale, elasticity, resiliency, and oh, by the way, the advantage of cloud is that you're now able to leverage a commercial platform and you're now able to process, store and manage information in a zero-trust cybersecurity architecture where essentially our adversary cannot make us out from any other traffic or any other data that's in the commercial cloud. And that is how if you talk to our three stars and four stars or our core commanders or theater commanders, the one thing that they have in mind, the one thing that they ask of me is, how do we make sure that we hide in plain sight? How do we make sure that we start to transition away from all of the things that we have built in the Army that's militarily unique to the Army for the last 20 years? How do we transition away from that to leveraging a lot more commercial? Because everything that is uniquely military, everything that we built over the last 20 years, whether it's the networks, whether it's SATCOM, whether it's our regional hub nodes, whether it's our all our different points of presence or fiber, they are all either contested or worse, could be completely degraded and made completely unusable by a sophisticated peer adversary. So it's important to make sure that we are now re-looking this whole war-fighting business from the perspective of, you know, leveraging commercial infrastructure, commercial transport. But all that means that's a huge culture change. That's not how we operate it. We're all, I mean, when you talk to the network folks in the Army, they'll tell you, hey, I got Nipper, I got Sipper, and I got to keep the two separate because they've always been separate. Right? We've always said there has to be physical separation of data. Physical separation of data is not a good thing from an adversary perspective. That's what they want you to do because now they can clearly make you out. They know where you are. So getting to, you know, being transport agnostic, being able to leverage any commercial transport globally, being able to leverage the highest level of quantum-resistant encryption to be able to move different classifications of data on the same transport is the journey we're on because that's the only way we're going to achieve that, that's the only way we're going to be survivable in the future. It also means that, you know, as our core commanders are looking at things like distributed command and control, where we're trying to move away from what we've always done in the Army is, you know, a hub and spoke approach to command posts, where we try to, you know, consolidate decision-making at a command post and where we put everything we need in one place is not survivable. And so if that's the case now, what we have to do is we got to break things out where your command and control is much more mobile, much more distributed. It's on the move, which means that you cannot expect to have access or connectivity to your data in one place at one time. It means that you now have to look at, you know, splitting out all of the different warfighting functions and then make them all completely distributed and mobile. So that, again, is a whole different way of saying that, okay, you can't count on your infrastructure to be in one place. Your data has to be now distributed all the way to the tactical edge. Your networking has to be distributed. Heck of a lot more reliance on use of things like commercial Leo and Mio and Satcom on the move. That is just going to be the nature of the game. And oh, by the way, doing all of this, like I said, with the right cybersecurity defensive overwatch on it, because as you bring more commercial technologies, more commercial infrastructure, it's a very different operating environment where how we work with commercial industry and how we share and exchange information with them, understanding the roles and responsibilities, absolutely critical to make sure that they understand how we're truly leveraging data infrastructure. So the other piece, too, is then making sure we get access to this data from any device, from any place. If you are a commander and the only way for you to get access to data is on a government furnished equipment that's connected or needs a VPN connection to some wired network, again, as I noted earlier, that's just not going to be how we fight in the future. So it's got to be where we enable our warfighters to be able to access data from any device anywhere. And this is where all of our efforts around getting to virtual desktops is so important. If the data is in the cloud, and that's where it resides, and you're able to leverage commercial transport to get to that data anywhere in the globe, then you should be able to bring any device to be able to get access to it. So again, this is one of those things where digital technologies and how what we have today that's available today is actually influencing and changing the nature of warfighting. Is technology enabled? It's no longer where the network, as they used to call it in the past, was a supporter or an enabling function. These digital technologies are now fundamentally changing how we're looking at warfighting. So our ecosystem is now ready to go across this four-tier architecture, all the way from a KONUS commercial cloud to us expanding our footprint into O-KONUS, Army Enterprise Private Cloud, down to a command post and some kind of edge computing infrastructure and then even down to a dismounted soldier if needed. If you're all tracking what our IVAS program is, our integrated visual augmentation system, it is all about us bringing AI and compute into AR, VR headsets at the individual soldier level and enabling full situational understanding. So this fabric, this cloud fabric is ready to go. And what we have done is really enabled, as I noted, our warfighters to take advantage of it and start the experiment and see how they're going to fight in this new digital ecosystem. So some of the bold moves that we've made to modernize the Army of 2030 and as I noted, these are bold. Distributed command and control requires distributed data at echelon. And as I noted, the only way to do this is through cloud. We have made a strategic choice that as much as speed is important, it's also important that getting access to data and making sure it's truly open and available and accessible at the point of need is just as important. And so we're beyond the days of us getting locked into proprietary platforms where the data cannot be leveraged outside of the platform. I know the IC community has gone through the same level of maturity in the past and there's some tremendous lessons learned. And we continue to work with all of the stakeholders in these ecosystems to make sure that we're not reinventing the wheel here. Modular architectures are no longer just buzzwords that are thrown. We have to make sure we decouple the network or the transport from the hardware, from the software, from the application, from the data. Like, these all have to be pieces that we have to be able to break out because that's what the warfighting approach calls for. If everything's going to be packed together in one place and you can't move things, pieces around, it constrains our ability to be able to do distributed command and control. And that's why modular open source architectures are so important. Getting to cloud-native and cloud-first is a decision that we have made. It's no longer where we're saying, hey, cloud is plan B. Cloud is plan A. And we have made a conscious decision that we're no longer procuring any more hardware infrastructure in the Army. So even when we do operate our Army Enterprise private cloud environments, what that means is it's an Army infrastructure, Army facility. But then we get commercial hyperscalers to come in and provision the compute and store within our facilities to enable that private cloud infrastructure. And the reason for that is when you have that common operating environment established, it's very easy for us to push common services all the way from the strategic to the tactical. And this is where the cloud plays such a huge role in enabling that integration, because you're no longer siloed. You have the same sort of common services like identity management that you can now push all the way from the strategic to the tactical. Leo and me are huge game changers and will continue to be. We've already shown in current operations in support of Ukraine today how critical these assets play. And over the next five years, we're going to see an exponential growth in terms of additional commercial SATCOM coming on in theaters that currently may not have the best coverage. But again, this is the Army leveraging investments that the private sector has already made. We will never be able to compete with the billions of dollars that the Amazons and the SpaceX of the world and the Googles of the world are putting in place when it comes to transport. And they have a business interest in doing that. They want to make sure every individual part of the world can get access to the Netflix movies. That's in the cloud. That's what's driving their business decisions. All we're saying is, hey, we just want to be a piece of that. DevSecOps and how we build software applications is the way of how we're going to start doing things moving forward. And again, these are all decisions that we made over the last nine months in the Army through capability portfolio reviews led by the vice chief of staff of the Army and the undersecretary of the Army. Which means that if you really did DevSecOps, there's no such thing called sustainment. No more sustainment for digital solutions in the Army. We will be in this persistent modernization effort to ensure that as the threat environment changes, as needs and requirements from the warfighter change, we are able to respond rapidly with new software applications and solutions. And then really, really big is user experience. Not an afterthought anymore. We're no longer talking about soldier touch points after everything's all baked. And then you get their feedback. And then when they don't like it, we go, hey, too bad. This is that if we did human-centered design first or soldier-centered design, it's about putting the soldier first. And then building around it with real soldier inputs and requirements driving what we need. That's what DevSecOps is about. So we can't say we're doing one, but not the other. And that's, again, a big change in terms of how we work the requirements process and some of these other institutional processes. Also in user experience, it's not just on the warfighting side. It's the generating force as well. And this is another area where we have made some tremendous advancements over the last six months or so with things like bring your own device, which will desktop infrastructure and other capabilities that enable our users to be able to get access to data in the cloud from any device from anywhere in the world. If you can't make that work for regular office users, how are we going to truly operationalize this in a tactical environment? In terms of bold moves that we're doing to reform the Army, as I noted, the capability portfolio reviews, CPRs, took literally the entire Army for us to reassess all of our requirements in the digital portfolio. Many that had been written about 10 years ago when we were still, you know, encounter insurgency operations and ensuring alignment to the Army of 2030 is that truly meet the requirements of large-scale combat operation. It's truly insupportive of multi-domain operations. Re-establishing priorities, ensuring synchronization, ensuring deduplication, ensuring that we don't have a separate tactical requirement and a set of solutions and capabilities on one side and then a whole different set on the enterprise. Because that's not what we're talking about here. We're no longer making that distinction. The unified network and the ability for us to move data seamlessly across the spectrum means that we no longer can make these artificial distinctions that we've done in the past. We've made conscious decisions to fully leverage existing acquisition authorities and things like software acquisition pathways. Congress has given us these authorities. We just haven't operationalized them at scale on large complex programs. So that's the decision that the Army has made to do that. Maximizing everything as a service. This changes the whole model of how we procure and how we buy and how we support and sustain things. If we really want to keep up with pacing threats, especially in the cyber domain, and we want continuous modernization, we got to make sure that we absolutely are able to leverage everything as a service. But as I noted, the caveat there is making sure we understand the roles and responsibilities between us and commercial service providers across the spectrum of digital technologies. Talent management is huge. We've made some tremendous progress this year under General Barrett's leadership at our Army Cyber Command with establishing the cyber-accepted service. And in 23 and 24, I expect that across the Army, everybody, the cyber workforce, will be on this new talent management system with much greater flexibilities to enable our workforce to not just bring in the best workforce, but also to retain them. But what we've found Cloud to do is that we really are starting to centralize more and more services because that is the nature of the Cloud. When everybody was running their own data centers and they had their own shadow IT and they had their own contractors running their local services, that's how the last 20 years of the Army was. When we have moved so much to the Cloud, including our office productivity environment or collaboration tools, what we're seeing is that now is the time to pivot. And we have made that pivot by saying, hey, the Army is now going to deliver centralized services to everybody with the right service levels to make sure that it's standardized. And that, from a CIO's perspective, some tremendous cost savings and efficiencies to be got from taking that approach. And all of these, we address through their capability portfolio reviews. And finally, for everybody that knows the building, you got to follow the money. And we had to make sure that how we were budgeting and executing the Army's $16 billion budget, annual budget, was efficient, was agile, was responsive to the changes that we needed and reflected all the decisions that we had made. So we are now on a new path forward with a subset of the Army's budget with the CIO and my counterpart, General Morrison, the G6. Now co-chair the oversight for all those funding all the way from the initial planning through execution. Not letting commands do this, not getting it distributed, where there's all this distribution and siloing, but ensuring that we're now able to provide the right oversight in managing this from a centralized perspective. Big, big changes. So as I noted, the persistent experimentation to data readiness, all of this that we're doing here really is to support our warfighters, figure out how they're going to fight in future. So the other thing that we've done in my office is to make sure that we've embedded ourselves in all of the experimentation, not just project convergence. Project convergence is a huge success in terms of us looking at how we can bring in modern technologies and making sure that we can validate them from an operational perspective. But it's also all of the different warfighter exercises. It's Carl and Dragon from the 18th Airborne Corps. It's all of the exercises that USERPAC and the First Corps are doing in the Indo-Pacific. It's us working with our sister services on things like Northern Edge and Scholar Dragon at Sencom in a couple of months. So this digital ecosystem now supports a joint force and our combatant commanders. And it's allowing the Army to look at ourselves as part of the joint force to see how we can be structured and how we can bring the best to the co-com commander in a future fight. And so what we've done deliberately is to make sure that we connect up all of these exercises and experimentations so that they're not just individual siloed events that get done and then move on to the next, but really that we now have a path where we're incrementally building digital capabilities as we go for the next 18 months. The first one might be building a tactical computing, a cloud infrastructure in one exercise. And in the next exercise, we might take that to say we're now going to enable a mission partner environment using that. The third one might be, okay, now we take those two and then we link it up with Leo and Mio. So we now have established not just learning objectives for these exercises and experiments, but a clear roadmap when it comes to capabilities for how we're going to incrementally build the capabilities out with the foundation that we have, but truly in support of operations and tailoring it to the warfighter needs. This is the journey that we're on. This is Army-wide. This includes, as I noted, four short commands on logistic side for contested logistics, on the warfighting side with the cores and ASCCs, with Army Cyber Command playing a key role in terms of making sure that we have both defensive and offensive cyber capabilities integrated into the effects that we deliver. This is an Army-wide effort to make sure that now we can take and leverage data as a new ammunition. So key takeaways. I think in just two years, we have set the Army on a strategic sustainable path for the Army of 2030 like we've never had for the last 30 years. The change and the pace at which we've made these changes all the way from the grassroots level up to the senior-most levels of the Army and how we've been able to get everybody fully aligned on the vision, the objectives, the roles and responsibilities is one that I think is irreversible momentum now for the Army. There is no going back. Every leader in the Army now at echelon understands what it is to fight with data. Just a year ago, I couldn't have made that statement. I can tell you now, every one of our commanders are hungry. They want to establish their own common operating pictures. They want the ability to be able to build and integrate workflows and automation into their unit-level processes so they can move off of analog processes and power points to truly leveraging data from authoritative data sources for decision-making. There's a sense of urgency that everybody understands. You all know this. Change doesn't happen unless there's a sense of urgency. Our pacing challenge could be as early as 2027 and we don't have time. And that pace at which we're moving now is one that everybody feels. We've created a whole army of change agents. What we've done is we've empowered every individual to say question the status quo because the last 20 years of the Army aim the next 20 years of the Army. And we have empowered every individual to say, do things different. Look out of the box. Think different. Look greenfield. We cannot get from where we've been 20 years to the next 20 years by taking a brownfield approach. Some things we're just going to have to rip and replace and it's much faster to do that because we're leveraging commercial technologies. And finally we've built some tremendous relationships across the community whether it's the DOD-CIO. You heard honorable Sherman talk about this yesterday. For the first time in the DOD, I can tell you that I spent more time with my counterparts in the Air Force and Navy and Mr. Sherman and I have never before. We're fully aligned on things like the Joint Warfighting Cloud. We know how we're going to operationalize that. We're fully aligned on Zero Trust. We're fully aligned on how we're going to get to secure access service edge. We're fully aligned on things like ICAM. We're fully aligned on so many of these programs while enabling the services to uniquely tailor what's needed to meet our mission requirements. That is the hard balance. But that can come when we collaborate and we talk. If it's... This is no longer a one-size-fit-all approach. Our commanders are asking for flexibility, optionality, agility. They're not asking for a lot of solutions. These are three things they're asking for which means that we got to make sure that we have every tool in the bag to bring to the future fight. So folks, this is what changing culture is all about. I think the future of the Army is strong and is digital strong. Thank you again for your time this morning. Thank you, Dr. Ayer, for the insightful remarks. I will now turn the mic over to our moderator for our next panel, Ms. Ann Marie Schuman, Senior Cyber Threat Advisor to the Director, Joint Staff J6. All right. Thank you. In the interest of time, I've asked my panel members to come up and join me, and I'm going to keep my opening remarks very short, mostly because Dr. Ayer apparently has delivered them all in a much better polished way than I was going to anyway. But thank you for joining me today. Rear Admiral Breyer Joiner, Deputy Director of Joint Staff J6, sends her regrets. She also sent me. Ann Marie Schuman, I'm the Joint Staff J6 Senior Cyber Threat Advisor. And a large part of my job is integrating the intel and communications directorates on the Joint Staff. So I'm really excited to be here attending my first DOTUS Worldwide conference. Joining me today are Colonel Phillips from AFRICOM J6, Mr. Amruiz from StratCom J6, and Mr. Yu from SpaceCom J6. I'll provide, as I said, some brief opening remarks, turn it over to our panelists for them to provide their remarks and will reserve plenty of time at the end for questioning answer from the audience. I apologize for being so much on my script and reading today. I could blame it on the short notice in attending or the travel delays, but the truth is they really don't let me out of the Pentagon very much, so I need to not screw this up. So as I was thinking today about what I should say to you by way of introduction, I reflected on the year that I've spent in the Joint Staff and the 10 years that I spent at the Defense Intelligence Agency to try to identify those common linkages between intelligence and C4. And what I came up with really wasn't very groundbreaking, but it was that both of these disciplines use technology to convey information to support military operations and decision makers. And if we fail to communicate that information, we've failed our mission. Full stop. So at this point, this is where I'm going to start editing my remarks for the sake of time. I was going to put a point of emphasis here and ask you to remember it and then talk about a lot of things that many of our other speakers today have already spoken to you about. Starting with information and how that's really just data put in context and what the future is of data to multi-domain operations, as you already heard Dr. Iyer talk about and what that might look like in the future. Also how we're on our way there, but our data is currently too siloed, too hard to find, too slow to enable the DOD to stay ahead of potential threats and maintain its competitive advantage in the future. And how we need to focus on addressing the issues of data security and integration, the volume of data that our war fighters are faced with today and our decision makers are faced with. Data integration from multiple sources and data ethics as well as data analytics. All themes that you've already heard about today. Foremost among those challenges I think is the development of the capability to share data and this obviously goes far beyond the need to make intelligence releasable. What we're really talking about is that data fabric that connects data storage and management solutions across the enterprise and that allows data to flow between title 10, title 50 systems, creating a unified view of the data and enabling data-driven decision making. Our data fabric has to be rapid enough to enable collaboration, integration while also providing security and governance capabilities to ensure integration and the confidentiality of the data. However, as you've already heard, all that data can rapidly overwhelm decision makers without proper analytics and this is where artificial intelligence has to be applied. Now, I could talk to you more about that. We've already heard AI. We know what it's supposed to do for us. AI is supposed to deliver this data at the speed and accuracy to face the complex and rapidly changing battlefield scenarios of tomorrow. In order to leverage the power of that AI, the final piece that I was going to speak about at length and now in short was the human aspect which you've also heard repeatedly again today, how in order to harness the power of artificial intelligence and all this ubiquitous data the workforce of the future will need to have a strong understanding of data analysis, machine learning, programming languages while also developing the soft skills to communicate and collaborate across functional teams and harness the power of problem solving and critical thinking. Additionally that workforce will need to understand the ethical implications of AI and be able to implement responsible AI practices and at this point this is where I was going to pull the big reveal. So the big reveal of all that condensed information was at that point where I said full stop and then had about 10 minutes of prepared remarks. I wanted to emphasize that if you doubt the transformative power of AI or think that relevant applications are years away about 61% of the remarks that I had originally prepared were generated by chat GPT an open AI application a large language model and while I'd like to think that I'm a better writer than the AI what it turns out is that the AI is actually pretty good at the general level of capturing and delivering these thoughts not with the specificity that our other speakers have given you today but at a competent, compelling level. And the point of all this really what I want to get at is that the useful, relevant easily accessible AI has arrived. It's not tomorrow, it's here now and that this really has to be a wake-up call to the department that the time to act is here or we risk losing our competitive advantage to our adversaries and that the developments in data in talent management in interoperability in AI cannot be sequential and we don't have the time. We have to partner across the CIO, community, CDAO the IC, the warfighter academia industry allies and partners in order to make this push this leap into the future. The Joint Staff J6 for our part is focused on prioritizing the operational requirements that enable the commander's decision cycle with this rapidly evolving technology through Joint All-Domain Command and Control we're accelerating the delivery of both material and non-material solutions for the fight tonight and in the future. But JADC2 can't be a concept that is just for the J6s of the world. Command and Control doesn't function well when divorced from intelligence. And intelligence falls short if it's not fused with other sources of information and delivered at the right time and place. In the future it won't be enough to have these Intel systems that are fast integrated in AI enabled over here and these C2 capabilities that are the same over here. The Joint Force our allies and partners need these systems to communicate seamlessly at every echelon in every domain it's what the warfighter requires that we owe to the warfighter to deliver. And with that I'm going to sit down and get to the good part turning it over to our panelists to introduce themselves and provide opening remarks. So good morning Colonel Jesse Phillips I am the AFRICOM J6 I've been in the sea for about 18 months we're stationed out of Stuttgart, Germany and I'll just tell you a couple things wanted to kind of set the stage to hopefully lead to some very good questions. So again, thank you Mr. Casa, of course General Barrier for the invite being back here in Texas is a great opportunity to see some old friends and co-workers but also I did some command time up at Fort Hood in the 1st Cavalry Division so it was good to come back to Texas as well, get some good barbecue and some good Tex-Mex. So on behalf of General Mike Langley and Major Richard Thresher thanks for this opportunity to talk about the problem set and the opportunities that persist that really present themselves in the United States Africa command if you don't know that it comprises of our components but also it comprises of our 53 African partners that we work by, with and through down on the continent and the approach that General Langley is taking is it's really about the strategic deterrence but doing that so it's not a strategic distraction and the two examples that he uses Tango Tango which occurred back in 2017 or as an ODA and some Defense Forces from Niger were ambushed and ended up some casualties there. How do we avoid that but then go back even farther we talk about Benghazi in 2012. How do we avoid those situations are those events so it doesn't become a strategic distraction for our nation and for the Department of Defense. So how do we do that his approach is goes back to the 3Ds you know diplomacy development being the big Ds but his approach is to kind of do the defense and do the little D and we do that again taking a step back but doing it by with and through those 53 African partners that I talked about so I did my in brief with him after he took command in August I had a brief with him shortly after that and I talked to him about how do we collaborate how do we share information and data with our African partners and we do that through two different venues through the J6 we do it through our AFRICOM mission network or AMNET which is our mission partner environment but the problem with that is when I came on board it was an episodic capability we stood it up and we did it for an exercise then we collapse it down and it really was just isolated at the headquarters and maybe with a couple of our key components and I quickly identified that as an issue of how do we get something that can be persistent to get after what I talked about earlier about sharing information, collaborating but then also even from a C2 perspective is that when we need to reach out to those African partners for any type of event that may occur on the AFRICOM between humanitarian assistance to countering VEOs to hostage rescue so on and so on we need to be able to reach out to them quickly and collaborate, share information but then also hopefully get a decision or support on what we want to do down on the continent and then we also took the approach and we were trying to get that at the zipper rail level which that's great for certain partners but for the majority that just is not feasible because secure comms for a majority of our AFRICOM partners is probably Gmail and what's that so how do we get past that so we currently as I work with the J2 we have four multi-lats and one multi-lat so that's only really six AFRICOM partners that we have the ability to share zipper rail information with so that leaves 47 my Minnesota public education math is good 47 other AFRICOM partners that we need to try and share information with so as I reached out to partners I reached out to old friends, old co-workers we reached back into where in the different communities that I've worked with I was like hey maybe we need to take a step back and look at deploying a mission partner environment at the IL-2 level, at the very commercial level because then we can get after like what Dr. Iyer talked about leveraging commercial industry and commercial capabilities that are much more rapid much more easily to be stood up and then much more easily deployable and extended out to our AFRICOM partners so that's the kind of approach we're taking towards it because one that then gets it to them, that capability to them much easier it also builds trust in being able to share that information between partners but then it also builds proficiency and talent in our AFRICOM partners because let's be frank not all are created equal and some just don't have the capacity the capability or the commitment to share that information that we need to so that's kind of the approach we're taking towards it but of course it's all got to be built on zero trust principles and the zero trust pillars because that's the cybersecurity framework that the DOD is driving us towards and absolutely what we need to do so and I will also say the last point I'll make is as we look at building out capability and capacity we've got to get away from these network centric models and move towards a data centric model of how we distribute and share information and I think it's very much in line with Dr. Iyer said as well is about that digital ecosystem where you put information out there data that is out there that then is being able to be accessed through roles or attributes that you assign to those individuals that are trying to access that information or data and then they can only get to that but then what that requires us to do is the data producer or the information producer is to make sure we're labeling it properly make sure we're tagging it properly and I know this may come across in the Intel community a little differently is make sure we're classifying it accordingly and I joke around a little bit about that because it seems like we always want to over classify something the holiday social event always has to be put out on J-Wix for some reason I don't know why but it just seems that's the easy button and we got to get away from that especially if we want to be that we need to to make sure it's impactful and makes a difference for our mission partners but then also our commanders. Well good morning my name is Liz Jerome Ruiz I'm the J-6 at United States Strategic Command I've been there for about four years for those of you who may not be aware U.S. Strategic Command or STRATCOM is located located at Alfa Air Force Base, Nebraska which is near Omaha, Nebraska which is just about in the geographic center and at the time when STRATCOM previously Strategic Air Command was established that was a reason for that the idea was to have it as far from each coast as we could. So I first like to thank Mr. Cossin and the entire team for giving me the invitation to come speak today and kind of tell you some of the things that are on our mind out at U.S. Strategic Command so a little bit about U.S. Strategic Command we're responsible for assuring strategic deterrence and being prepared to respond with the nation's nuclear arsenal should strategic deterrence fail so it's a mission that's kind of it's kind of a big deal we think it's kind of a big deal and as our commander our commander General General Tony Cotton took over as commander of U.S. Strategic Command last Friday what we are charged to do within the J-6 is just make it all work like a light switch 24-7 65 under the worst conditions that any of us would ever want to experience, right? So a little bit different than what my teammate here in AFRICOM has to deal with our partners if you will are really many partners so we've got to work directly with the services because the services provide us the weapon systems and the command and control the very tailored nuclear command and control systems that we depend upon to execute the mission that's part of our partnership but the other partnership we've really been leveraging extensively and even more so within recent years especially since we've moved into our new command control facility as our partnership with the intelligence community our partnership with the IA our partnership with all of the combatant commands going forward and you heard if you were here yesterday you heard both Mr. Sherman and General Skinner talk about nuclear command control communications or NC3 that's what NC3 is for some of you who may not be aware is a portfolio of 204 elements or if you're counted by IT systems there are 92 different distinct ITC4 systems that we manage as an enterprise and those are the systems that we need to depend upon for doing our actual mission on a day-to-day basis in addition to the seven networks that we depend upon the networks we're talking NIPR, SIPR, JWICS and several other networks that we depend upon to do our mission so it's kind of a rich environment so I wanted to maybe provide a couple remarks along the lines of the theme of this panel which is transcending strategic competition through innovation, adaptation and collaboration so transcending strategic competition our strategic competitors right now are really who you see on the global stage our previous commander, Admiral Richard would tell you that never before in the history of this country has this nation been called upon to deter two nuclear capable adversaries that must be deterred differently so we spend a lot of time understanding our adversaries I'm talking about Russia, I'm talking about China understanding those particular adversaries and how do we deter those adversaries differently so transcending strategic competition we do that a couple ways first of all through innovation a little bit about strategic one of the journeys that we were on recently in about 2016 we had a catastrophic flood it off an Air Force base that destroyed 60% of the base and the infrastructure that was there with it it's 100 years flood some of you might have heard about it in the newspapers some of our people that come up to me said we never really paid attention we didn't even know you were destroyed 60% of the base why is that? because our systems are so resilient that we were able to operate through able to operate through that 60% catastrophic situation at off an Air Force base and at the same time we were building a purpose built command and control facility right across the street so our commander at the time we were supposed to have had 18 months commander and then went to be the vice-chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and I know you're supposed to have 18 months 60 days is the answer 60 days you will be in that building in 60 days and we were in the building in 60 days it was through a lot of partnerships people at the base people at Headquarters Air Force who really came to the rescue and fielded a lot of our capabilities really very quickly all of our sat-com facility so all of that wouldn't have been possible without those partnerships our DISA teammates were just invaluable at getting those comm systems into that new C2 facility so we had this purpose built facility we got over there in 60 days nothing works the first time you're in a new house so it took us about a year to tune all of the systems in there and then we had this small thing called COVID Strat-com is an organization you talk a lot about using Google and public publicly available communications that was not the Strat-com way of telework it just wasn't a thing so 4,000 people in the Strat-com headquarters because of the way that the facility was built we were able to get everybody on telework on an unclassified system all 4,000 in 10 days and so that was really a huge partnership with specifically with this trying to get us on unclassified telework and then with our partnerships with folks in the intelligence community and again with this trying to get to classified telework for us with the innovation that took us a long way I would be remiss if I didn't mention our industry partners who were there with us along the way also providing us industry capabilities to jump start some of that as well secondly, adaptation when I say adaptation I'm talking about moving fast and demanding excellence so moving fast I talked about a little bit about the historic flood but talk about Russia Ukraine just for a minute it just kicked off and we had struck and we leveraged everything we do is threat informed we leveraged intelligence for just about everything we do so as we were watching the situation develop about a little over a year ago now you remember the nuclear command control system that 92 system infrastructure the enterprise we have we were trying to determine whether or not it was ready we were really expecting cyber attacks in that particular area of the world so how do you ensure that it's ready that was a good question so we developed a readiness situation which we call this readiness construct called NC3 conditions and what it was most like force protection conditions where STRATCOM issued orders to our components and to others within the entire DODIN within leveraging cybercoms we leveraged orders directing particular actions to be taken to harden the nuclear command control system enterprise it was a huge feat we didn't really have good idea on who to send the orders to who does the message go to you remember Richard and I talked about this who does the message go to to get this order to Cheyenne Mountain it was a good question it took us a good two months to implement our first NC3 condition fast forward to just about a month ago there was a 28th of November I guess it was less than a month ago we issued an order to go to a lower NC3 condition and that order was issued and complied with in about 20 days so an opportunity to harden the nuclear command control enterprise by moving fast and demanding excellence and I guess finally collaboration I talked a lot about you know the commander directing us just make sure everything works like a light switch that doesn't happen without partners it doesn't happen without partners like my partners in the COCOMs my partners on the joint staff with DCIO Mr. Costa and his team DISA team many more across the community and with our partners in industry as well you know we recently looked at JWICS STRACKCOM depends a lot upon JWICS when we implemented our new command and control facility one of the bedrock systems was JWICS and previous our old headquarters you probably had I don't know maybe 50 JWICS terminals they were all in the J2 the new C2 facility JWICS terminals on each and every desk and so now we leverage JWICS on a recurring basis on a daily basis in fact we were co-authors of a 44 star memo that was published by the Department of Defense talking about the imperative to continue to maintain JWICS as a war fighting system across the board for not just for STRACKCOM but for all the combatant commands as well so that was a huge watershed event and we've been on that journey with our DIA teammates to make sure that JWICS as a weapons system continues to be maintained and modernized and I guess finally I'd like to just leave you with a thought about talent just like everybody else the war on talent and so how do we get that talent first of all when you talk about nuclear command control communications they don't teach it in college so you really have to get folks to come in with those skillsets so we can teach them about the intricacies of that very complex infrastructure but even things like data artificial intelligence we also are on the data artificial intelligence pathway we've got a pilot so it's actually about a year old now where we are solving four very complex mission oriented problems leveraging a commercial company to provide analytics to provide algorithms based upon our data which we don't have in a cloud by the way some data we just don't put there yet but leveraging StratCom data to be able to solve very hard problems as well as intelligence community data from open source bringing all that together to solve four very hard problems that commander StratCom gave to us to solve so we're always on the lookout for talent we have found being in Omaha Nebraska even though it is the geographic center of the country it is not necessarily the talent hotbed for data artificial intelligence or C4 shocking as it may be so we are open to leveraging talent from many places remotely in fact our chief data officer lives in Illinois and that person is we're able to leverage his skills to bring on board our data and artificial intelligence capabilities at US StratCom so those are just some of the things that we're doing and kind of where our mind is at StratCom but I will tell you if I can leave you with one thing we at StratCom especially in the joint J6 we are war fighting J6 we are a war fighting CIO we are there right there in the foxhole with the J3 when we're doing the Russia Ukraine or any activity we are there on the battle deck right there with the war fighters and in fact I as the J6 not only am I the J6 as well as the CIO but I'm also the deputy J3 for nuclear command control communications defensive cyber and space operations so it's very much a war fighting J6 mentality that we have at StratCom within the J6 thanks and back to you Richard good afternoon I'm happy to be here let me pile on and thank the host for inviting us and inviting me specifically you may not want to do invite me again next year but hopefully that won't happen but also thank you for being here as well but this is a really august group I'm learning a lot just by listening to them if you look at our title our titles are pretty much the same except there's a bit of peculiarity on my title I am also a CIO of the U.S. space command I'm also a C4 plus cyber directorate but we chose to call ourselves a digital superiority for one reason and that reason is we acknowledge and recognize actually not attributed to me acknowledge and recognize that most of our maneuver as a combatant command, U.S. space command most of our maneuver is done on the digital space we are the 11th combatant command the youngest of the three here so and we are not the space force there's a common misunderstanding of that that we share the same last name but the different first name space force is one of our service component we have also Army Navy and of course Air Force component to our 11th combatant command so in our activities most of our activities are actually done in space but you also know that space is not just for space sake our commander is an Army commander General Dickinson it will remind me that the last tactical mile is important because if we see something that we don't get that information to the last tactical mile to the ground commander or the maritime commander or air commander it wouldn't work so that's what we do to make sure that not only the networks are established and resilient, robust but also bringing those capability whether we see how we see things how we measure things we send down from the space down to the terrestrial base to all the last tactical miles to get the commanders supported with what things they do and those are the services we provide there's the other part that we also do as a US space command we block and tackle if you will what that really means is that we need to protect our space capabilities again not just space things but also terrestrial things from the information being beamed down if you will to our C2 nose terrestrally and also from those nose spread out to the last tactical miles to all everyone we need to protect all those things block and tackle if you will so we do that as well a lot of those things block and tackle category we don't usually talk about because of classification but you can imagine what they really are one thing is that again we are the 11th but we are the largest combatant command we're not measured by geographical combatant command but astro-graphical so everything above 100 clicks above is basically our AOR so that's pretty cool the problem is that that AOR is not very friendly in fact one of the things I want to ask that you already know this is at an unclassified level one of the adversaries that we're looking at Chinese for example the average age of their space assets can you imagine what that is four years old you know what, average space assets of our capability ten times that so that creates a challenge from a data perspective and a network perspective coupled with a digital information and blended into the high definition capability to be able to then send it out all to the last mile to our commanders at each echelon in real time or real time as measured by their operational ops and tempo if you will that's very difficult so digital superiority come back to digital superiority by the U.S. Space Command that is important because what we're trying to create exactly all the things we have talked about data centric for applying analytics resilient robust network all those three things we need to do plus all the other housekeeping things like cyber resiliency cyber defense those kind of things so that we can actually reach one thing for our commander we are a combatant commander so while we fight tonight and that one thing we're trying to establish is to give him the decision dominance I'm not the only one who said this already decision dominance at the combatant command level so that we can think see things better think faster and command control our forces quickly so that we can get inside of their decision cycle so that we can deter them from doing something silly and when they want to do something silly we can actually persuade them not to or defeat them winning does matter so that's part of the J6 mission from U.S. Space Command and I really love Mr. Liz, sorry Jerome Rees the last word we are a combatant command J6 is an operational directorate of our combatant command because what we do again everything we do here in this space capability are through the digits and we are right there with the J2 to make sure that we understand what kind of information can provide us so we can inject those into the decision dominance equation and then with J3 to make sure that we can fight tonight and win winning does matter and also J5 so that we can actually partner with our allies and we are doing that globally without allies having a space capability because there are a lot of interest in that triad of space assets emanating down to the C2 and the from C2 terrestrial distribution of the capability so that's very important and also we stood up a commercial operating space operating center commercial space operating center in Colorado Springs that's where we're at please don't ask me about their basic decision that commercial operating center is actually ingesting all the commercial data space data helping us do our mission and one of the mission primary principle mission we're looking at is a space domain awareness not just about talking about what objects are flying around and that's so that we can avoid them doing anything that's good for making movies like gravity for example so that we don't get hit by them but we're also a space domain awareness is important importance of the SDA space domain awareness is making sure that we understand what those objects are where they're at and what they can do kinetically and non-kinetically so we have the joint commercial office operating our operational center to ingest those data to share those data with our allies and mission partners as well and then be able to correlate those kind of data with our data from classified so again another key point to take away from data centric discussion about how do you do that with all domain or all classification levels so in a way that we can facilitate decision dominance but anyway so I'm really happy to be here I'm a long horned grass so it's really you know it's a stone away from my alma mater and in about two weeks time I think they're gonna come down here to Alamo Dome and do some playing football so I'm looking forward to that as well but thank you for having me and I'm really impressed with our panels and for learning from what they're doing as well so looking forward to Q&A yes thank you for your comments given that we are standing between these fine people at lunch I think we should move directly to question and answer I had some prepared ones but I think the ones the audience gives us are always the best ones so or we stunned you into silence are they ready for lunch all right we did have one question earlier from the audience it happened during the J2 panel that was I thought very interesting and I think that we probably have a different perspective on it so the question was related to the application of wireless technology and the importance of that particularly at the tactical edge so I thought Colonel Phillips given Afrocom's perspective with all these partners and the variety of the environment that might be a question that you could take a stab at so I know as we talk about anything as far as wireless into collateral spaces and skiffs that seems to always be a non-starter and I completely understand that but I think we need to take a look at policy to see is there is a time for change when it comes to that so being in some of the communities I have been in that is a capability that has been allowed to be able to be utilized because of the ongoing operations the need to be able to work simultaneously in different environments or different spaces that you may be in like a conference or in an OPT or something like that and being able to take the device off your desktop and bring it into where you're going to be working out of and being able to utilize that I think it's something that we should be able to take a look at but then take that from a tactical application standpoint and take it down to the continent especially as we start looking at 5G capability and being able to put mobile devices or a BYOD type environment where they'd be able to bring in that capability and allow users to access capabilities, resources, services much more rapidly and in a secure means I think it's something that is definitely advantageous for us Great. Did we get any questions now? All right, so I will just be loud. So we really appreciate first of all we really appreciate the relationship between the J6 and the J2 thank you very much for all your support and working with us and helping us with many things I know StratCom specifically helped us out with GCCSiCubed thank you very much that's one of our fundamental capabilities Dr. Iyer talked a little bit about how we were going to start to create I call it a distributed cellular structure where we're going to have from command and control distributed out in different locations from a strategy from a J6 standpoint what do you think are the where do you think we can go with something like that and how would you implement that in your environments? Okay. So having had some good very good discussions with Lieutenant Colonel Randy Linneman the 101st G6 and if you don't know the 101st Airborne Division is the division that's operating right now in Romania and Poland in support of the operations are going on there and he described the environment that he has to operate in as far as a very small size elements because C2 nodes are an HPT for the enemy and how do we operate in that presence and a C2 capability but then also how do you maintain that small presence and signature from a spectrum standpoint when you have all of these government furnished systems, programs of record and the approach that he has taken is if it can't be reached from a distributed network or from a cellular or a satcom or in a cloud per se, then it is something they cannot afford to take with them because of that smaller signature and spectrum signature they need to maintain so it's been a big that was very enlightening to me and I think it's something that we as a 6 working with the J2 and also really the commander of understanding what that commander needs as far as capabilities to be able to make that decision at the time and the place that they need. I think this is very much a conversation that is happening now so actually if I wasn't here I was going to be at a summit at DISA that's happening concurrently called security interoperability at the tactical edge and that summit is tackling some of these issues about how do we interoperate and yet remain secure in these environments when we're incorporating 5G or technologies to achieve this distributed C2 how do we move that data from an army unit through an air force network to a navy ship how do we do these handshakes and how do we interoperate in this way that the joint war fighting concept tells us that we need to be able to have this immediate flexibility so I don't think we have an answer but I think there's a lot of effort going towards working on it to add to that I think the one thing that we need to start looking at trying to leverage is commercial infrastructure you talked about well an army network or an army service through an air force network to a navy network possibly as I look at the African continent where we don't have large commercial transport providers beating down our door to provide networks and transport across the continent how do we leverage commercial vendors for that through cloud and utilize their transport infrastructure to move the data like Dr. Iyer said in regards to what classification that data is but move it from where we produce it to where we need it let me just say maybe a couple things from a U.S. strategic command perspective distributed command and control structure is something that we've been doing at U.S. strategic command for years our mission we take our direction from the president and all the combat commands do in accordance with the unified command plan but I'm talking on a daily basis we have to be ready to employ forces and the president is the one who must direct us to employ forces so we have a very specific infrastructure that allows us to ensure that that communication can take place with the president with his combatant commanders with the director of national intelligence whoever else the president needs to have in that conversation that infrastructure is already in place and we use it every single day in fact we exercise it over 400 times a year just at U.S. strategic command and so from a distributed command and control perspective our purpose built systems that have been employed for decades we're in the process right now our nuclear command control enterprise center on behalf of commander stratcom is looking at the next generation of nuclear command control enterprise systems some of which are there today some of the space systems are already field today and that's going to be what we have going forward into the future but some of them we're looking at mesh networks working more with commercial if we were to take a green field approach like while we still make sure that that communication that decision making capability up to and including the president can take place 24 7 365 under the most dire conditions so but we are also mindful that the infrastructure that we developed decades ago there are now more modern capabilities that can be leveraged commercial industries got a lot of capabilities that are now out there for me to talk about mesh networking talk about cloud computing I joked a little bit that we don't do cloud computing well we're trying, we're getting there right we've got our nippernet into cloud which is huge for us but you know trying to leverage more of those diverse capabilities for command control I think is where we as a combatant commander going as well if I may just add to it this is awesome input the one thing that I would like to add is that we are learning combatant commands so what's happening in Ukraine for example we learned a lot a lot things that we didn't think that we were going to learn but we learned a lot in a positive way so all the things that we talked about absolutely the mesh network commercial applications and all that wonderful things hiding in plain sight absolutely we're doing all that the key is that we have a great robust people in our war fighters they're smart they know what to do how to do it and our our role is to provide them the timely information that they need so that they can be better and there's a lot of means to that end all the means that we talked about so far anyway just one thing to mention that commercial partners is critical to what we do in the US space command and we learn that as well with the Ukraine situation so absolutely I think we are actually we are at 48 seconds so I am going to cut off any further questions but if any of our panelists want to stay afterwards I'm sure we can take questions as well so thank you very much for having us one last before she turns it over back her to you to head to lunch thank you so much to our commercial partners that are here today are this week as well you bring those opportunities those capabilities that may we're just not looking at at the current time and place so please continue to bring those to us because it's always an opportunity and trying to solve the problems that were presented on a daily basis so thank you for being here as well and I guess I'd pile on to that if you think you came and told us what you've got two years ago come tell us again right because in some cases because to Mr. use point we've learned a lot from Russia Ukraine so maybe as being learning combat we're going to think differently so don't give up on us the last we're still recruiting we're three years old we're still recruiting so anyway thank you alright thank you all thank you Ms. Schumann and the panel members for that engaging discussion this now concludes today's plenary speaking sessions we'll see you back here tomorrow in the afternoon after the breakout sessions in the morning thank you