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"Building the Base" - an in-depth series of conversations with top entrepreneurs, innovators, and leaders from tech, financial, industrial, and public sectors.
Our special guests provide their unique perspectives on a broad selection of topics such as: shaping our future national security industrial base, the impact of disruptive technologies, how new startups can increasingly contribute to national security, and practical tips on leadership and personal development whether in government or the private sector.
Building the Base is hosted by Lauren Bedula, is Managing Director and National Security Technology Practice Lead at Beacon Global Strategies, and the Honorable Jim "Hondo" Geurts who retired from performing the duties of the Under Secretary of the Navy and was the former Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development & Acquisition and Acquisition Executive at United States Special Operations Command.
Lauren Bedula 00:00
Welcome to the digital warfighting series. I'm Lauren Bedula here with Hondo Geurts. We're the co-host of building the base and very excited to be working with CENTCOM to highlight stories from the field. And in terms of the digital side of warfighting, and this episode, we're going to focus on how headquarters is thinking about digital warfighting with Brigadier General John Cogbill. Brigadier General, thank you so much for joining us.
BG John Cogbill 00:25
Thanks for having me. Pleasure to be here.
Hondo Geurts 00:26
So, John, I know, you know, we've crossed paths I think over the years want to let the audience know kind of what got you in the army and, and what you've been up to in your career bringing you here to probably the most pivotal role in CENTCOM headquarters as a director of operations. Sure. It's,
BG John Cogbill 00:43
it's been a journey going on 30 years of commissioned service here, combination of conventional Special Operations time most my soft time was in the Ranger Regiment, and served at JSOC as Chief of Staff also had some, some opportunities in academia to teach at West Point, teach economics and, and the opportunity to go to school and actually to do like a war college fellowship at Stanford, which was really impactful in terms of how I saw that the potential for tactical level innovation in the army, what got me into the army, it's kind of a family business, my dad served my brother serves both my grandfather served in the army. So, it was a noble pursuit that I wanted to get after it. So I went to West Point, and kind of the rest is history. I've had the privilege of working with some super talented leaders, some visionaries, people that really believed in empowering their people and taking risk and driving organization. So, you're right, this is a pivotal moment. This is, it's a great opportunity to be here at US Central Command, no shortage of work, and happy to be here.
Hondo Geurts 01:44
So, for those who aren't familiar with in our roles in combat, and come in, what's your role here at CENTCOM, kind of at the macro level, especially for somebody who may not be familiar with, you know, the J code structure? Sure.
BG John Cogbill 01:58
I'm the I'm the Deputy Director of Operations. So, our Directorate is responsible for operationalizing the commander's vision. So, we've got all of all of the services represented to include space. And it was subordinate commanders and distributed from, you know, all across the AOR. Our mission is really to direct and enable military operations and activities across AOR work with partners to ensure we're accomplishing our national security objectives. But that's essentially as a as a Combat Command. That's, that's what you do is as a warfighting headquarters, it's about integrating and synchronizing those fires. And really, all the warfighting functions across all your domains. Doesn't
Lauren Bedula 02:39
sound like you have a lot of free time. I want to take you on a little bit of a tangent here, because your studies of economics stood out to me. I'm curious if you use that in anything you're doing today, or I
BG John Cogbill 02:50
do I think, you know, at the kind of at the macro level, there's, you know, people responding to incentives and understanding what motivates people and understanding the value of finding efficiency and systems, minimizing deadweight trying to optimize organizations for success. So, I think there are a lot of parallels, although I'm not I'm not doing any hard econ and certainly wouldn't want to have to draw my supply and demand curves. And but I do think just those basic principles are it's kind of understanding human nature and how to get the most out of people.
Lauren Bedula 03:22
How cool. I'm gonna pull another thread from your past. I understand you came from the 18th Airborne Corps, were you served with general Kerala? Can you talk about any of the digital transformations over there that you brought with you to this role,
BG John Cogbill 03:35
in addition to the commander's emphasis on building a culture of innovation, there's really two major initiatives that stand out. The first are the innovation competitions. So general Corolla brought the Dragon's Lair to CENTCOM and created the CENTCOM innovation oasis. And as you know, these are Shark Tank style innovation competitions designed to unlock the good ideas coming from our junior servicemen and women inside of our formations. The second is the digital warfighting series. This probably the most impactful general Corolla when he arrived wanting to transform CENTCOM into a data centric warfighting headquarters. So, in order to do that, we partnered with the 18th Airborne Corps on their Scarlet dragon exercise as their higher headquarters and this is really a forcing function for us to adopt their same digital warfighting tools like the Maven smart system, that's now evolved into the CENTCOM digital Falcon Oasis, which is a CENTCOM led exercise with heavy component participation. We run it every 90 days or so using live data and real-world scenarios to drive the learning and to improve our tools and processes. So
Hondo Geurts 04:39
as you move up, and again, for those who are not military folks, you know, you move up from like a P & L center of a big corporation to now you're moving up to the, you know, the next level up in the organization. We've got multiple in our, in your case services and our service components have how has that trend? How did you think through The transformation now because now your stakeholder set has gotten much broader. You've got to worry about interoperability and rather more influencing than directing. Since you've got this broader set of has, as your approaches you've tried to scale that held true or what new obstacles have popped up that you guys are taken on. Now,
BG John Cogbill 05:21
it is definitely different problem set. And again, I thought it was, you know, complex at the three-star level and come to a combatant command that stretches all the way from Cairo to Kazakhstan 60,000 People distributed amongst those six components. So, there is a lot to try, and you know, to maintain good situational awareness to a common operating picture and to be able to communicate and warfighter effectively, through those other components. And so, it just makes the need for digital warfighting tools. Even more important, you mentioned the partner piece of this. So, 19 partners across 21 countries. You know, if you look at the number of actual combat platforms and systems that we have in theater, it's pretty significantly less than it was, let's say, 510 years ago, you know, with national defense strategy priorities in for all the right reasons. But now, how did how does general curl as a, as a combatant commander, kind of balance that risk, mitigate that risk. And that's where we're, you know, you've probably talked to others about the use of some of the unmanned platforms. And you know that things that we're doing in our innovation task forces, like to 5999 39, with all those unmanned platforms becomes even more data. So, it's having a kind of coherent way to manage all that data, organize it, and then use it as a to give you an edge in warfighting and decision making. It's, there's never a dull moment. I mean, it's a huge problem to try and solve. And it's just super exciting to be on a team. We have here at St comp.
Hondo Geurts 06:52
I mean, I've often thought, you know, we shared time with Special Operations Command, combatant commands are inherently joint. And so, by nature, I think you have you have to solve some of these interoperability issues to employ effectively. And I think that's what makes him a really good point of innovation. Can you talk to me a little bit more, I'm gonna dial back to the cultural piece, because we've been talking about digital transformation, probably since we were lieutenants a bazillion years ago. And we always talked about it, but never really started taking without call dedicated action. What did that what did you find successful, as you kind of put this campaign plan together to try and drive digital literacy and really unlocking the power of digital warfare,
BG John Cogbill 07:37
I think it's unlocking the power and the potential of the people in your organization. And that's where the culture part is so important, because it is a people business. So, you know whether you're at the squad level or at the combatant command level, it's about the people. And sometimes we fail to recognize the potential and the expertise, subject matter expertise that resides in our formations. And so building a culture and doing things like at the 18th Airborne Corps, the Dragon's Lair, or here, the innovation Oasis, it draws that out, it gives people an opportunity, a venue to demonstrate that they're not just problem identifiers, that they're problem solvers, and that they've thought deeply about some of the problems that they may be facing, whether it's in a motor pool, it's on a carrier strike group, or, you know, in a headquarters looking at basic, you know, business flows, people, the people closer to the problem, have some really good ideas, and kind of talking about people responding to incentives and wanting to be empowered, if you give them that opportunity, and then that starts to permeate the organization. And as people feel like, Hey, I'm in an agile organization, we're empowered, we're allowed to take discipline initiative, they want to do more, they're willing to, to, you know, to educate, to take courses to become more data literate, it has a snowball effect, I think, and they are more willing to accept new tools that you put in front of them, like, you know, our Maven smart system, people start to realize, this isn't just for the scientists, the data scientists, this is like, this is an everyday tool that me as an as an operator, whether I'm a watch stander in a joint operations center, or I'm a battalion commander, or I'm a three star Component Commander, like we all need to be data literate, we all need to understand how to use these tools in order to get the most out of them. I had
Lauren Bedula 09:25
the great opportunity to travel with the command into theater last summer as part of the command’s innovation community, which was just such a great experience and wanted to just refer to that because I saw people so excited about programs like innovation Oasis or having the opportunity to be heard and funnel ideas. Which to Honduras question about culture just seems to be so key. And we're always interested to hear about not just challenges, but where things actually work. And it seems like from the outside Task Force 59 was a great day. example of being able to field technologies, the private sector felt like they were able to test out and inform their product roadmaps get access to real time feedback. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about the unmanned task forces? How did that start? How did it happen and spread? Did they all start at the same time? Or just a little bit of the story there?
BG John Cogbill 10:19
Yeah, so I think it's just innovation out of necessity. If you look at how few naval assets, we had in the CENTCOM AOR, there's this needs to have better situational understanding. And if you can't have a destroyer or a carrier or sub, then what about unmanned vessels, something that could, you know, relatively low cost that you could put out into the Red Sea or the Arabian Gulf, and start to sense and make sense of the operational environment to be able to, to look for nefarious activity, interdiction or to be able to interdict weapons, etc. I alluded to this earlier, once you start getting the sensors out there, then you got to kind of make sense of the data. And so that's where the, the AI comes in. And you can look for anomalous behavior and things that will tip and Q somebody to be able to now send a manned vessel or aircraft to go and investigate. So. So that's just that's just in the maritime domain. And then it was a great case study, and a great example, an exemplar for the rest of the components. And then we saw, we stood up the task force 99, with the air component, to do unmanned aerial platforms. And then our army component is sent sort of task force 39, to look at, like, also the counter UAS, robotics, additive manufacturing additional things. So, the intent was to push innovation down to the, to the tactical level, the operational level to allow those components to really innovate at the edge, because again, they're the ones that are forward in theater. They're the ones that are living in that environment exposed to the threats, they have that sense of urgency, and they're, you know, the probably best situated to be able to, to use those things in not just an exercise, but also in combat situations.
Lauren Bedula 12:10
My impression to hear you talk about it is these aren't things being done in a vacuum, but things the whole command is thinking about at a headquarters level, which seems very impactful. And when I was out there, it was prior to the October 7 attacks. And I imagine the way you're thinking about innovation efforts has changed, because you're very busy on an hour-to-hour basis. Can you talk a little bit about how that has changed?
BG John Cogbill 12:34
Sure, it certainly accelerated our innovation efforts. Because the tools that we were using, to do the things that I mentioned, were to be able to do digital targeting, and to give commanders decision advantage. And, you know, for all the all the right reasons, it just the pace in the need just accelerated drastically after the seventh of October. And so, in order to, to support Israel, you know, we had to have situational understanding, while not physically being in Gaza, is very similar to how I think the 18th Airborne Corps deployment to Germany to support Ukraine, accelerating our digital warfighting capabilities, because we're trying to do train, advise assist. I think that, you know, that sense of urgency accelerates things. And then to your question, seven October, I did the same for this headquarters, it just out of necessity, we had to get better, we had to understand how to use the tools to their max potential how to maintain awareness, not only inside of Gaza, but across the AOR. As other groups, Iranian affiliated militia groups started, conduct, you know, increasing the scale, and the quantity of their attacks are being over 160.
Since that started attacks against US forces. Not only were we trying to support a partner in Israel, but we're, we're worried about the defense of our own bases that are forward deployed in Iraq and Syria, the safety of our partners, and how you can kind of keep track of all of that. And as you're aware, we've been conducting kinetic strikes in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and we did all three of those countries within a 24- or 48-hour period, not too long ago. And so, there's just the scope and scale is increased and, and so we're developing targets, you know, through our components to federate process, how do you keep track of the intelligence on every single location, and then what you know, coming up with firing solutions targeting solutions to solve each of those tactical problems. So, we're using these tools to kind of organize via the target workbench, which you probably get a good update on from, from nails from the chaos. So, it's been its super helpful, I think, just to organize, end to end just to have the unprecedented level of situational awareness. It's just blows my mind what our commander can see in the jock on his laptop on an aircraft.
I just flew back from DC with Um, and he was watching in real time, live feeds, you know, inside of a rack, we can see the location of ships, you can see, you know, the link 16 data from aircraft flying off the carrier, you can see what the MQ nine is looking at off the coast of Yemen. I mean, it's, it's truly amazing. Without that, I don't know how he could keep his finger on the pulse and really understand the scope and scale of what's happening across the AOR without those tools, and it would be a lot more playing phone tag commander, you know, emails back and forth, when instead, we can just look in real time and see the same cop that that a subordinate commander, that a pilot, that a ship driver, or somebody else is seeing in real time. Yeah, I
Hondo Geurts 15:43
remember I remember in the in the Wayback Machine, everybody was, you know, afraid of too much transparency and a battlefield and armchair quarterback and all that kind of stuff, which I don't know if you've experienced any of that. My sense is it enables so much more than that. You don't hear about that worry away. Yeah, in the early days you did were, where's it going. So, you know, massive amount of energy applied, putting digital really driving headquarters down Echelon to digital transformation, turned up, automate, or digitize, you know, targeting all these things that used to be tremendously inefficient from a data flow perspective. But what's your sight picture two, three years down the road, as this continues to, you know, not become the exception, but the norm and everywhere, every way we do things,
BG John Cogbill 16:32
I think it's a lot more live data and a lot less PowerPoint and Microsoft products. So you know, just spreadsheets, PowerPoint, slides, briefings, the placemats, that you bring carrying into the room to brief a senior leader, eventually, those senior leaders will be in front of a screen, and they'll it'll be displaying live data, and you'll be building out courses of actions submitting Con Ops, for approval, digitally, so that you're not having to go back and do version control. And so that's, that's kind of where we're at right now.
You know, we've, we've really move the needle internally to minimizing PowerPoint and using these tools, for instance, in a in a, in a targeting board, where, you know, the components will nominate targets to our fire’s element here in the headquarters, and then we'll approve or disapprove. And then we'll kind of prioritize those targets, that used to all be, you know, a very thick pile of slides that would get emailed back and forth and break the internet. And, but now it's, it's a display. And so as we're doing this federated and distributed from Tampa, all the way to Bahrain, or to, to the chaos that led wherever we're all seeing the same, the same products, and we're clicking through a target workbench, and we're able to drill down and see the underlying data, you can zoom in, you can see the target, you can watch a live feed, it's just, it's so much more effective. So, I think that that's good for us internally, we have to be able to do that up. And so how do you nominate a star target? You know, for presidential approval?
How do you brief the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And so, this is where our partnership with the CDOs and the digital AI office has been super helpful because we're participating in these global information dominance experiments, which allows the Joint Staff now to start to get reps and sets doing what we're doing at our level. So, there's always like that next Echelon that you're trying to, to spread the goodness and get them on board at these tools. So we're at CENTCOM is just one COCOM is participating in this and you've got INDOPACOM, EUCOM SOUTHCOM, NORTHCOM what you know, they're all kind of providing inputs but it's allowing the Joint Staff now to get comfortable using digital products and making decisions about global risk off of live data instead of the s DOD book, the giant three ring binder that goes into the SecDef and gets up to you know, and so as the more I think we're we do that or that'll increase the demand signal for those types of presentations versus the old school PowerPoint slides and figuring out what works best at you know, different co coms have different tools that they're using, which is fine because I think the challenges are different.
All the warfighting is warfighting shortening, kill chains is, is universally good, optimizing our scarce resources, increasing commanders, decision advantage is good for everybody, but the actual tool that they may be using or experimenting with, as long as they can talk to each other, and we can integrate the data across COCOM. But and I think that's, that's where CTO comes in. And I think they've made some great strides.
Hondo Geurts 19:45
So, and your role, you know, probably the busiest amongst the busiest in combatant command, particularly with real world ops going on. How do you think about experimentation? I mean, I'm struck having served at a command for a long time. There's It's really hard to focus on experimenting when you've got real time combat operations going on. But I'm struck by sitcoms, I would say, dedication to experimentation and not just not getting, how do you think about that? As director of ops, because it's always you got to be a little bit of attention there in terms of resources, attention and allocation, what we do is we are resource to conduct operations and to build readiness, and to conduct exercises. And so those exercises with partners, always with partners, gives us a great venue to try new techniques, and to do operational experimentation in that real world environments. So, it's, we're not doing it CONUS, we're
BG John Cogbill 20:39
not doing it in a lab, we're doing it, you know, in the sandbox, that is CENTCOM. And it's just it is a great way to kind of try new capabilities in a very, you know, deliberate manner, but in whether these are digital capabilities, or a counter UAS capability, or an unmanned system, be to be able to introduce it. And so, it's not experiment or war, or fight or exercise, it's kind of all of it wrapped up together, which I think yields the best results. And especially when you've got two engineers that are supporting you, that you know, if it's in the case of some of our warfighting tools, if they are co located with the operators, then that that experimentation in that learning in that iteration happens so much faster, versus conducting exercise, conduct an experiment, take the results send back to contract or whatever. I think that synergy is what has allowed us to move as quickly as we have,
Lauren Bedula 21:35
and love for you to expand a little bit on the industry relationship there. And you talked about interoperability of systems, anything that industry can be do better as partners to you all. And then do they also participate in the exercises physically? Just curious how they fit into all this? Yes, they
BG John Cogbill 21:53
do. We do have four deployed engineers that go out to our components. And they'll sit in our operations centers, and they'll be out there testing a counter UAS capability in Saudi Arabia, or they'll be in an alley deed. So, I think that helps when industry is willing to go and be with the warfighter to meet them where they are, understand the risk that they're exposed to. And then you get that shared sense of urgency to I think, when you're when you're co located. And there's, I do think that's a good model versus kind of just throwing something over the fence and saying, Hey, tell us if this works,
Hondo Geurts 22:27
and, and maybe now just kind of bubbling up just how's the command doing? How's the How's that, you know, you guys have been busy. But you're already busy October, you know, certainly accelerated things, you're on this, what I would say is really impactful digital transformation. How's morale here, everybody hanging together is a browse,
BG John Cogbill 22:46
hi, I would rather be busy than board. It's it is meaningful work and their lives at stake. And our national security depends. Our country depends on us to do our job and kind of work with partners to promote regional stability to get after deterring Iran continuing the counter VEO fight competing strategically, with Russia and China. And then at all at the same time, just the excitement of finding ways to do it better, faster at scale in ways that we've never done before. People feel empowered. They feel you know; I think that sense of purpose is what is why people come to CENTCOM like, say, this isn't somewhere you come to take a knee. And so just maintaining, you know, relevancy and knowing that you're doing things that are going to impact people's lives and have real consequences. It's, it's exciting.
Lauren Bedula 23:40
Any final thoughts? I know, we talked about several of the programs like innovation Oasis, Did we miss anything? Seems like there's a lot Oh,
BG John Cogbill 23:48
there's, I mean, there's always something going on. And you mentioned like this income innovation community like taking bringing CEOs into theater to kind of provide a fresh set of eyes. I love that concept. Because they come with everyone comes with a different perspective. And have you thought about how you could do this, or maybe this could be improved. There's also recently we've done a couple of hackathons, through the components. There's one here at the headquarters, you know, bringing coders into to look through some of the counter UAS challenges we have. And so there, I think just that that type of interaction just keeps that culture keeps spreading throughout the organization and touching people that may that would not have otherwise understood kind of what's going on or how they can be a part of the process and part of the solution. And so, I think just doing things like that and getting out into theater, talking about it. Gentle, cruel, promotes the people, partners in innovation are kind of his strategic approach. People have really embraced it.
Lauren Bedula 24:47
I think it's Yeah; it seems consistency has been key with an eye toward scale to not all these siloed efforts. So, it's a thank you so much for taking the time out of your extremely busy schedule these days to share these examples so that they can continue to be adopted by others and for folks to sign up or to encourage more talent service. Thank you so much for joining us.
BG John Cogbill 25:08
Bring the talent to CENTCOM. We're open for business now, Dave, thanks for having me. This is a lot of fun and I'm sure you had great conversations with the other folks, and I look forward to seeing how this all comes together. Fantastic.
Hondo Geurts 25:18
Thanks. Awesome.