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Explore your curiosity - Interesting people with fascinating stories.
Life consists of three things:
-The stories we tell others
-The stories others tell us
-The stories we tell ourselves.
Tim welcome aboard to the show. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Good to be here.
Speaker 1:So so Tim I wanna I wanna start a little bit personal. Many many many years ago I wouldn't throw you under the bus and say how many. You made a decision to join the Air Force. I gotta ask you, what was going through your head? Why did you decide that you wanna join the Air Force?
Speaker 2:So I was an ROTC student, and it got my college back Keep
Speaker 1:us keep us honest what that means. Not everybody in the
Speaker 2:audience is familiar. Reserve officer training corps. In those days, things have changed. They would give scholarships to schools and it was free tuition, books and lab fees, and then a stipend towards your room and board. And I, I didn't come from a very wealthy background.
Speaker 2:My parents were farmers and I I wanted to go to a really good college and there was no way they were going to afford that. So this was an avenue for me to get get college paid for. And then you owe them four years. And I used to tell, I taught the air force academy as my bio says, I used to tell my cadets, you know, my story is not an inspiring one because I never intended to make the Air Force a career. It was a way to, again, get college paid for for my four years and go out and do what I wanted to do.
Speaker 2:And, I did my four years and they they gave me a pretty good assignment right before the end of those four years. And I thought, okay, let's take this assignment, give myself a little bit more experience. Economy wasn't great at that point in time. So did that. And then I kinda wanted to teach.
Speaker 2:I wanna go back into academia. And so I came in with a master's. And so I I applied to the Air Force Academy and they picked me up. And I thought, oh, this is pretty cool. So I'll do I'll do this tour.
Speaker 2:And then they sent me off for a PhD and I came back and I owed him five years. And so one morning I woke up and it's like, oh, I've got like thirteen years in. I might as well stay till 20 at this point. So it wasn't inspiring. I will say that I, I didn't enjoy every minute of it, but it was, it was certainly enjoyable.
Speaker 2:A lot of it. I never, people say, oh, you know, people hate wearing uniform. I never hated wearing the uniform.
Speaker 1:I was not a fan of it. Got to tell you, but I got through my service. When was there any moment where you're like, holy shit, what did I sign up to? Or were you pretty happy, a happy camper throughout the way?
Speaker 2:There were some tough times. It was really more right after I came back to my PhD and there was some personalities going on and and somehow I got in the middle of this. I don't know how. And I was like, and you know, I owed him five years at that point in time. Couldn't get out of that.
Speaker 2:And I was like, this is, this is not going to go well. But, but it did. It worked out. It just took someone from, from outside kind of looking inside and going, okay, I really see the
Speaker 1:problem here and it's not you. So. That's good news. Was there any kind of, what, what would you say, if any, were the big takeaways that you learned from the time in the Air Force that maybe came to bear once you left or kind of taught you something about life?
Speaker 2:It's, it's kind of odd. It's not a, again, this great, you know, epiphany, but I went to this school called Squadron Officer School in residence and most, most young officers do that. And there was a quote down there that said, you know, the sun comes up in the morning, whether you're ready or not. And it's like, well, this is true, and I can't tell you how many times that I had to kinda look at that and go, yep, it's gonna come up, I'm not ready, but it's gonna do it anyways. And it seems kind of odd, but if you think about it, you know, it it carries some weight.
Speaker 2:Outside of that, I mean, big takeaways, just things of, you know, showing up and and showing up on time. And I think actually, when I was a young officer, I was in Cheyenne Mountain, which is in Colorado Headquarters, Norad. And I was working with this young lady. She was actually worked for me. She had been prior enlisted.
Speaker 2:In other words, she had been in the listed course. She went and got her degree and became an officer, commissioned officer. And it was the day after Mother's Day. I remember vividly. And I walk into the office and she's looks very concerned and someone else they're they're talking.
Speaker 2:I said, what's going on? And she said, well, she was working with the girl scouts, even though she didn't have a daughter. And she said, we went to a mother daughter hike up Pikes Peak yesterday. And there was a gal named Carol who worked in our office, who was enlisted, a young enlisted lady. And she said, Carol never returned.
Speaker 2:She went on ahead and we got to the top and we couldn't find her. And we came back down. Her car was still there and, you know, we need to go look for her. And search and rescue had been out overnight, didn't find her. And my thought was there are people that are trained to do this.
Speaker 2:Right. And they should do this. So I kind of said, well, you know, I don't know. Maybe we, I don't know. My my boss wasn't there, so I called the colonel who's in charge of our our group and said, sir, you know, this that laid out the situation and said, oh, there's some people here that think we should go and look for it, but, you know, they have search and rescue that can do this.
Speaker 2:And he went, oh, no. Absolutely. Go up. Come into my office. Tell me what you need.
Speaker 2:What do you need for vehicles? Whatever else. I go in the office. He calls Fort Carson and said, can you throw a shopper up there to help look? And I went, that's interesting.
Speaker 2:And I came back, you know, the o six was on board and I came back and this young lieutenant looked at me and said, captain? And she never called me captain before. Captain? The air force takes care of their own. I said, okay.
Speaker 2:So I learned a big lesson that day about what the air force is all about. She, again, she had been probably enlisted on the flight line and I only had like two and a half years in at that point in time. And I never remember that. And unfortunately she, she passed away from lung cancer about fourteen years ago, but she was a great lady, kept up with her until she, died.
Speaker 1:I love that story. I mean, obviously an unfortunate end, but did they, did they find the lady?
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, of course. This is a, it turns out we, we went up, hiked up Pikes Peak. We split in two groups. One of us started at the bottom hiking up, the other drove up to the top and hiked down. And we didn't find her, but about right at dusk, and this is, you know, many, right at dusk, Fort Carson had taken a second shopper up to do kind of a training run, and they found her on top of a ridge.
Speaker 2:She actually climbed up to this ridge, seen the first shopper, but they didn't see her. She kind of sat there and she had something bright that she could wave, and they picked her off on a on a scene. Uninjured though. Uninjured. Absolutely.
Speaker 2:She just above tree line. She got off on the wrong trail, got off the backside of Pikes Peak to the front side. Yeah. And then realized she didn't know where she was and kind of just sat. And so it all worked out.
Speaker 2:It was all good.
Speaker 1:And and you did something, at least in my opinion, incredibly interesting. We're gonna have to break it down for the audience. What does simulation mean? Why do we need simulation? What does that even look like on the ground?
Speaker 2:Oh gosh. You don't have enough time for that question. The cliff note version is simulation allows us to do things that are not in the real world so that we can avoid lots of things. And I'll I'll give you the big examples. So suppose I want to figure out if there's a nuclear bomb detonated in Washington, DC, how far does the radiation fallout go?
Speaker 2:And I can put wind effects or whatever else with it. Well, I'm not actually going to do it, but I can simulate doing it and I can simulate the wind and I can figure out how far radiation is gonna fall based upon the altitude, perhaps that the bonds bonds detonated, and and many other things. That's the the big example. The smaller example are things like every day, and we do it all the time in the military. Right?
Speaker 2:I had a guy who said, if we deploy our craft or employ our craft, it's extremely dangerous. And he was a Marine, but training to employ our craft is also extremely dangerous. And so if I get in a trainer in particular, something like an amphibious landing trainer, and I'm doing this in simulation, I'm the driver of this, I can learn a lot. And I've actually, I've actually been in the latest trainer that they're developing. This guy said, hey, take it for a spin.
Speaker 2:I said, well, I've never done this before. He goes, it's okay. We'll help you. I just wanna see how you do. And it is.
Speaker 2:It it's an interesting phenomenon. If you're coming off land into the water, at some point in time, you're gonna stop power to wheels and you're gonna put power on propellers. And that's a kind of a tricky thing in the surf. So we do this in simulation because we don't tip vehicles over. We don't ruin vehicles.
Speaker 2:We don't, you know, put lives in danger. So simulation has a lot of different aspects to it. But those are some I mean, simulators are the same as well. Know, we put people in driver simulators so they don't roll vehicles and crash into things.
Speaker 1:So so let's say twenty, thirty years ago, these things looked like a pretty simple computer game. They've made huge strides since. What do the advanced simulators look like today? Does it include augmented reality or what are we looking at? How and what are the value that these trainees get from it?
Speaker 1:Do they, can they just come off the simulator and just use the aircraft or whatever, or whatever craft it is? Or is there still a gap between simulation and real life?
Speaker 2:That's a, that's a very good question. Let's, let's go into the aviation world. Cause that's one of my backgrounds. Again, we've had simulators in aviation for almost a hundred years. Link did the first simulator back years ago.
Speaker 2:Looked completely different than it does today. But simulators in the air force are used for emergency procedures. Right? If you you're coming on final landing and an engine flames out, a friend of mine who was a pilot said, if I do that in an eight ten, it's probably the last time I will do it and the trainee. So we do it in simulators, just to give an idea.
Speaker 2:We do stalls in simulators and so forth. However, nowadays with the they're called six degrees of freedom. So you're sitting in essentially a cab that's on hydraulic. I don't want to say jacks for lack of a better word. And it will roll that thing any which way, not completely over, although I don't think there's anything that roll completely over.
Speaker 2:To give you that feel and give you the same G feel and everything else, as well as you're immersed in screens, so you feel like you're in that environment.
Speaker 1:Just to give an analogy, this is kind of similar to like a Disney world experience, right? It's this whole kind of machine that kind of makes you feel like you're in the plane. You're seeing all everything that you would see in the plane. And then it's moving with you. These are good ones are quite incredible machines.
Speaker 2:Oh, absolutely. I mean, these things are are multimillion dollar machines. They're not, you know, just kind of something you'd buy at at Target or something. But, we also have the virtual reality worlds, and we use those for lots of things. We use augmented reality simulators to do maintenance tasks.
Speaker 2:I was actually out in, Twenty Nine Palms in California a couple years ago looking at this guy, took these, not the Meta headset, think it's the Microsoft headset, and got some software written and he was doing radio maintenance and you could take and you could, you know, put together radio in virtual world. And then he had an augmented reality one where it would overlay, okay, here's what you do on a real radio. It was fascinating. And he was talking about faster throughput. His students, you know, learn much quicker and so forth.
Speaker 2:And so back to your question, can a guy jump out of a simulator and go right into the real thing? I'll give you another analogy or story. Ten years ago, we did a study to look at proficiency of simulation in the Marine Corps in particular. And we chose the tank gunner trainer. So we have a trainer.
Speaker 2:It's a simulator virtual world where they practice gunnery for tanks. And so we took three crews that stayed together. They're three three person crews, and we tracked them from the day that they first climbed into the tank. So never been in one before. They climb in.
Speaker 2:They get used to adjusting the seat. I mean, know, simple stuff. And then they they have tables that they fire. So you're you're doing, you know, a 2,500 meter target or you're doing a 100 meter target with the machine gun or whatever. And we we tracked them all the way through their their training.
Speaker 2:And the last thing they do in their training is a thing called gate to live fire. So understand now they have not, they've been in a live tank, but they've not fired a live tank until they pass gate to live fire. So they pass gate to live fire and then they go in the real tank and go out in the range and do the exact same tables. And we showed that that training tracked. So the ones that did better in the simulator did better on the range.
Speaker 2:The ones that did worse in the simulator did worse on the range. Now did they did their score match on the range? No, it came down a little bit. And part of it is the familiarity with the simulator and, you know, learn the game. Right?
Speaker 2:But they still pass and they still were within certainly acceptable limits. So when we say, yeah, can you come to the simulator and go right into a real thing? You can. I don't know if you can do it flying. If there are certain things, you certainly can.
Speaker 1:I think maybe an undervalued point is we kind of think of a simulator as, you know, getting value and understanding a specific tool for one person on one tool, but there's also a collaborative aspect of being able to learn how to work together through simulation. Is that something that you've been exposed to, kind of teamwork through different simulations? I know this is kind of new.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, we've so it depends. We do teamwork in the same simulator, so you simulate a cab of a you know, a Humvee or something. And we do, it's called combat convoy simulator. But, so I was just at a conference last week called ITSYK industry inter service training, let's see. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Training simulation education conference. Is that right? Something like that. We just call it ISTE. We've done it that for, you know, years.
Speaker 2:Thousand ish people typically. It was a little down this year because the government shut down, but I think we had 44 countries, and it's all about simulations. So I talked with a a company, they've got virtual reality headsets to do, like, house clearing. So you got a squad of four or five people that go in and clear a building. They're all linked together.
Speaker 2:So they see what room they're in, but they're in in communication with others, so when someone else comes into their room they're in, they pop into their virtual world. It's all headset based. So you can do it in a gymnasium. You don't need the fancy chute houses that we have. And you can do it with building, you know, like partition walls if you want, but you don't even need the walls there.
Speaker 2:They map everything out and they do a digital twin and they can train in that. And it was pretty fascinating. They've been doing this for a couple years.
Speaker 1:It's interesting because when you think about, let's say, the failure modes of, you know, different combat situations, it's not always a person misusing the tool. Sometimes it's bad communication with another chopper or another equipment friendly fire, God forbid, and just practicing that communication with other teams incredibly valuable thing in itself, which is quite interesting.
Speaker 2:The Air Force has gone now to very early in pilot training using Microsoft Flight Sim and they use it essentially for communication with the tower.
Speaker 1:I got really lucky. I got to see the simulation for the California Fire Department. They have like six or seven flight simulators there. Pretty cool stuff. So we've been getting better and better, especially with AR coming on board with simulation, but we've had this huge hike coming from artificial intelligence.
Speaker 1:What we could do ten years ago and what we could do today is just hugely, hugely different. How is that changing the military simulation training across the board? What do you see coming in the future?
Speaker 2:I see a couple of things actually. So AI can help us evaluate and consolidate inputs because it can, it can process that much faster than we can as a human. So that's one thing that it will do for the battlefield and somehow AI inputs will be extremely valuable. But in the training side, which is where I live mostly these days, there's this thing called adaptive training. And so I wrote a couple of papers on it, but the idea that people don't train at the same speed, they come in with different backgrounds.
Speaker 2:And the example I'll use, because most people can, can put their head around it real easy is a driver trainer. So we have certain vehicles in the military, particularly our big seven ton trucks that are up armored. So they may be, you know, 20 ton with all the armor we've got on these things. They don't drive like your little Honda Civic does or, or other car. And they take longer to stop and so forth.
Speaker 2:And I won't go into the history of some of the accidents we've had with people with them. But so we have a driver's trainer course for these. And some kids nowadays are urban and they don't even have a driver's license. So they come in totally never having driven anywhere. And so we use these simulators to get them adapted and so forth and, and, you know, come up to speed.
Speaker 2:But the kids that come in urban, we've never seen anything, bounce that off the kid that comes out of Kansas, Nebraska or whatever. The farm kid who's been driving trucks like this since he was 14. And he can go in and go, okay, yeah, it's heavier than what I'm used to, but I can get used to that pretty quickly. Why should he go through the same program of instruction that the person that's ever driven before? So the idea that we use AI to consolidate inputs and this person, of course, you gotta track it by individual.
Speaker 2:It knows, oh, it's pretty much mastered this skill and this skill and that skill, but they're still having problems with this. And so it automatically on the fly redoes scenarios to say, oh, I'll give it more. Maybe it's backing up left. Maybe it's driving on ice. Maybe it's, you know, whatever.
Speaker 2:I'll give it more in in the scenarios of that and less of what they're mastered. So go back to what they've mastered because you don't want to lose that skill. But the idea being is that maybe we can get someone through a training that's normally six months, maybe we can get them through in three. Whereas maybe the person that came in with no skills or no experience, maybe he really needs seven months. So this is a game changer.
Speaker 2:It also will require us to rethink our whole program instruction in training for certain things. But it's no different, I guess, than in our marksmanship, I'm starting to look at marksmanship where we have some people who can shoot really, really well and others that need more help and we need to give them more time and more help.
Speaker 1:So there there's, it seems like almost a no brainer, In training, you're already creating almost a custom made training for the person. But the other side where I think that's what you were alluding to when you started is making decisions in combat. Where is the, and we hear rumors about this happening all over the world, but what does the military feel about using something in combat which could have very real impacts, which you don't really understand how the decision was made? Are human beings coming to a sense of comfort with, yes, a machine can make a decision for me, or is that still kind of taboo?
Speaker 2:Depends what the decision is. So The United States, and I I'm assuming all our allies, I don't know for a fact, but I would assume this, that AI will never make an automated kill decision. There's always will be a human in a loop, which there should be. I don't think we'll ever get to the point where I won't. I will never get to the point where I'm trusted worthy of AI to make that kind of decision.
Speaker 2:And I started with AI. I was doing AI back in the mid nineties in my PhD. So a long, long time ago, we just didn't have the computing power to do what we do today. But the techniques are roughly the same. I mean, they're not, they're not different.
Speaker 2:But there are people who certainly will say they don't trust the AI. There was a paper last week that I listened to about how it doesn't take that many examples in a dataset that AI trains on to make it have artifacts or to cause it to have artifacts, not make it have artifacts. An old name we used
Speaker 1:to use artifacts. Nowadays we're calling them hallucinations, but yes.
Speaker 2:Well, okay. Yes. Artifacts is an old name, but the bottom line is that's the problem. Right? You you gotta have good data, and and that's, you know, that's my world right now is the data world, and it's extremely important to get good, really solid data to train AI with.
Speaker 2:It's only as good as, as what the data is trained on. There's nothing magic about it in that aspect. It doesn't, you know, make things up and they're incredibly, incredibly right and brilliant. To answer your question, I think there's some people that say, don't wanna ever make a decision based upon AI. Others will say, no, it's a helpful tool.
Speaker 2:And it, you know, I'll use it where it makes sense. And I don't think there's anybody out there that's saying, yeah, well, let's just, let's just put the whole battlefield under AI and we'll just sit back and watch it happen.
Speaker 1:It's interesting because you, people will gain a level of confidence when they see a tool consistently working well. Cause if you've, you know, even if it's AI driven and you see it working well a 100 times, you're going to get confidence in that tool and you're going to kind of forget that it's AI, but then on the 1,001 time where it makes a horrific mistake, that's going to be in the news. So I don't know what the future is going to hold but it's going to be incredibly interesting and I think we're probably going to see a few scenes that you know from science fiction movies that we've seen kind of come up in reality. It's going to be, it's going to be an interesting future. If it wasn't enough ride augmented reality, AI, drones are also changing the battlefield like never before.
Speaker 1:What are, what are a few examples of that? I mean, you know, I think it was Einstein, keep me honest here said that, you know, World War two, you know, I don't know how we're gonna fight that or World War three, but World War four is gonna be sticks and stones. What's World War three gonna look like before we get to the sticks and stones?
Speaker 2:It's a scary thought, I think. So, yeah, let's talk about drones. I've been, I've been actually getting into this the last six, eight months for different reasons. I did an interview on drones in particularly the tethered drones that are happening over in Ukraine, Russia. So for people that might not know, they've, they're running drones on a fiber optic tether.
Speaker 2:So very, very like fish line thin line out to like 10,000 kilometers. So that's, that's a long ways from the controlling area. And the issue of course, is that there's no electronic warfare that you can do against a tethered drone. You can you can send four k video back over fiber pretty easy, and you can put power over fiber. So they can loiter over the battlefield for, you know, eight, ten hours.
Speaker 2:And once they get above you, it's kind of hard to get rid of them because you're not going to shoot them down above your own territory. So you've got to cut the fiber. And of course you've to find the fiber. Now there are drawbacks to those. You know, you can't cross them and, know, things get confused and you can't put them in tight spaces and so forth.
Speaker 2:But but that's been a game changer certainly for reconnaissance. However, I don't wanna say it's lately, but it's been maybe six, eight months, last six, eight months. We're finding drones used as guided weapons. So you'll see all sorts of videos out on YouTube where they take a drone, they smash it into a building, walk a building. They can do them against armored vehicles.
Speaker 2:I don't know exactly. I'm sure it's classified how much armor they can go through, but here's the problem. The problem is they fly at like 400 miles an hour and they can turn on a dime and the people that are really good at flying them can like send these things through obstacle courses and they can stop on a dime. And so how do you get rid of them? How do you shoot them down?
Speaker 2:What do you do? Right now we're using shotguns and other things that seem a little bit primitive in some ways. If you're a, if you're a hunter, you're a bird hunter. There's no bird out there that flies at 400 miles an hour. And for any hunter will tell you that like shooting quail or some small bird that flies really fast is really tough with a shotgun.
Speaker 2:I did see a thing from The UK where they're using lasers and it's got an automated guided laser on it to shoot these things down. And that seems to be promising as far as a counter, you call it, you know, UAS option. But, but that's a scary thought because those are hard to defend against. Anything that's hard to defend against is scary. So we'll see what happens with that.
Speaker 2:But where they're certainly they're certainly doing lots of stuff in real time right now. And the real problem is this whole thing with drones is going really quick. Like, two weeks, you know, they they say technology. I was talking to somebody last week. Oh, every six months, you know, your technology becomes outdated.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Drones is like two weeks, and you gotta keep up, and it's hard.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There's, obviously huge forces driving that innovation and a lot of money driving that innovation right now.
Speaker 2:Well, and here's the other thing. They're cheap. I wanna say the Ukraine is using Chinese ports and unskilled labor, and they're putting these things together for about $3.50 to 500 US dollars apiece. I think in The US, they're a little bit more expensive than that, but you know, my gosh, when we're talking $80,000,000 for an F-thirty five airplane or whatever that cost is, you can buy a lot of these things for 80,000,000.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, you know, these, it's by a factor of 10 to a 100 times cheaper. So it's just that many more missiles for the same price, right? It's ridiculous. Tim, this has been incredibly interesting.
Speaker 1:We have one question that we ask, all of our guests. It's the only scripted question on the show. It's a little bit of a difficult one because it's personal. If you had to go back in your career to one of your hardest moments, whether it was two years ago or twenty years ago, what piece of advice would you give yourself?
Speaker 2:That's a very interesting question. I don't have it with me, but there's a poem called Don't Quit, and you can look it up online. And so I talked about the gal that told me, you know, captain, the military takes care of their own. And it was very impactful for me. He, went through cancer and I had given her this poem, don't quit a while back.
Speaker 2:And she kept that with her as she was going through cancer treatment. So that would be what I would tell people is don't give up because you never know when the sun's coming up on the horizon. I think that's the most important thing, frankly.
Speaker 1:Tim, thank you so much for joining the show. I appreciate you. This has been a lot of fun.
Speaker 2:It has been. Thank you for inviting