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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 00:01
Welcome to the digital warfighting series with CENTCOM. Hondo Geurts and Lauren Bedula here co-hosts of building the base but doing a special series with US CENTCOM to explore the components of digital warfighting that they're pursuing and looking to modernize. And today's episode will be focused specifically on the digital side of counter UAS, which is an incredibly important focus for the command and no one better than Colonel Molly Solsbury to talk us through it. Colonel Salisbury, thanks so much for joining us today.
Col. Molly Solsbury 00:30
Awesome. Thanks so much to for both of you for having me and for doing this with CENTCOM. You guys are both obviously renowned in your field. And it's just great to be here to talk to you today.
Hondo Geurts 00:40
Yeah, it's great to see you, Molly. And for those who don't know, Molly commands to 513th Military Intelligence Brigade, which is a pretty awesome and important job. We'll get into that job a little bit. But Molly, just for our listeners, a little background - What got you into the army, what set you down on this path? And how does one go from growing up somewhere to now be commanding such an awesome unit as a 513th?
Col. Molly Solsbury 01:08
Um, well, so that's kind of a, I think I have a pretty normal story, if you will, I think that I, like a lot of American kids was probably looking for a way to pay for school. I grew up in Orlando, Florida, I worked at Disney World, I was kind of thinking about, you know, how am I going to pay for school and saw some ROTC information, and it seems like a great opportunity. And so here I am kind of 20 some years later. But I think to somewhere along the way I got I kind of fell in love with the team aspect of it. And, and the mission, certainly, and Intel is a very cool thing to do. So as soon as I got into the army 911 kicked off. And I got an opportunity to do Intel in the field and to work with just such high performing soldiers from conventional army to the special operations side and intel sort of, in at the ground level, of all of those things. But at the strategic level, all the way up to down to the tactical level. I just, yeah, I've gotten a chance to kind of work at a lot of different spaces and meet a lot of different faces. And I think every, every year, and I, I'm just more feel more fortunate for the exposure and the opportunities and the people that I've met.
Hondo Geurts 02:18
And you're now at Fort Eisenhower – so give our listeners a little of what the 513th does, and kind of where your normal focus is and mission, kind of what the scope of that activity is.
Col. Molly Solsbury 02:35
Yeah, the 513th is located primarily in Fort Eisenhower, as you mentioned, that's right in Augusta, Georgia. I love Ford Eisenhower because there's so many awesome nerds here. We have a lot of military intelligence teammates, both our brigade and a couple others. And then we also have the Cyber Center of Excellence is here. And so you have a lot of Signal, Cyber, and Intel soldiers, and so that just brings about a very kind of creative mix. But most days 513th is focused very much on the Middle East and on the CENTCOM area of responsibility, which is why I'm talking to you today. So, we are at CENTCOM theater intelligence brigade. Our headquarters is the Army Central Command. And they're located at Shaw Air Force Base, just about just over a two-hour drive from here. But most of the time, we're all located or portions of us are located in theater. So my boss I think most days General Frank is in theater in either Kuwait or Jordan or Saudi or, or Iraq or Syria. And so same with our soldiers were spread out throughout the entire CENTCOM AOR.
Lauren Bedula 03:43
Well, Molly, you've built a reputation around being such an effective leader for innovation. I know Skye was telling us that she looks to you for inspiration in this space. And I'm curious if you could talk a little bit about how you think about fostering a culture of innovation or really trying to encourage folks to embrace new solutions, try new things and approaches to the problems that you're focused on.
Col. Molly Solsbury 04:08
So, I'm first just extremely honored, that Sky would say that because we all look to Sky for inspiration. And she's, she's been incredibly impressive and both extremely down to earth to work with. But also, I think, really willing to listen to the people with the problems. And so that's the first thing I'd say is that to inspire the culture, we have to start with our people, our operators, our analysts, are collectors or agents. In Intel, it's our collectors, agents and analysts primarily that are close to problems. And so because they're close to problems in close proximity to those problems, they come up with the most, I think, feasible solutions, and then it's our job as leaders in terms of creating culture to help either figure out how to scale that solution or augment that solution or break down any impediments that exist in terms of getting that to market, if you will, and making it a workable solution for the unit. So, I think that's the biggest thing is first, listen to the people that are closest to the problem as leaders empower those people by trying to clear hurdles for them and clear space for them to succeed. And then I think the other thing I would say is that, in terms of creating that culture, I have been extraordinarily fortunate in my life that I've, as I've spent a lot of time in special operations, the thing that struck me is the empowerment of our NCOs and our warrant officers. And as I came into the gate command here, I was absolutely struck by how many incredible NCOs we have both from, you know, all the way from the sergeant five level up to our Sergeant Major, I was getting ready to leave last night, and my Sergeant Major said to me,“Hey, I'm working on this, this, there's a large language model we're testing right now.” And he's, he's sitting working on tuning it. And I don't know very many Sergeant Majors in the Army that are sitting down working on tuning a large, large language model, and he's comparing the performance of it and giving feedback is what he's really doing. And so I think, he sets the example and our Sergeants at every level, and our Warrant Officers at every level, are part of that culture. And so that's really where we try to focus because they are the largest part of the formation. And I learned that and especially from so many good Sergeants Majors and senior NCOs and special operations community that that's their ethos, and that's how they function. And I'm very proud to say I think the Sergeant Major the Army kind of comes from that as well. And I think he definitely is instilling that that same culture.
Hondo Geurts 06:35
Yeah, so speaking of hard problems, you know, something a lot of us have been worried about for a while, which is kind of coming to bear now is this counter UAS problem, you know, seeing it now appearing on a battlefield everywhere, I would say its scale and its strength. And I know that's an area that you and your team have really been trying to get your arms around, and go after. But before we kind of go into how you're attacking that problem, you know, a little more specifically, kind of, can you give a little bit of maybe a counter UAS background for some of the listeners who may not, you know, have a deep understanding of it, and kind of how you see how you're approaching it at the kind of macro level?
Col. Molly Solsbury 07:22
Sure absolutely, Hondo, I think the first thing I'd start, I think we have to start with this, what is the AU and UAS? It's unmanned and, and I know, everybody knows that. But I wanted to put emphasis on it. And I think it's important to, to just imagine that I think right now we're seeing unmanned aerial systems, we're also seeing unmanned maritime vessels. And then we're starting to see unmanned ground activity. And so as we think about the world of autonomous vehicles, autonomous aircraft, I think that unmanned piece is really, really important. And it whether it's in single unmanned vehicles, or unmanned aerial systems, or it's in swarms that are operating autonomously thinking through solutions. So that starts with that first understanding point of how is it operating unmanned? What is the what are the control mechanisms, that the programmer or the designer of this unmanned technology put into place, and the counter is all about how we build the systems that are going to defeat these and I don't think there's any one tool I think there's multiple tools, but at our at in terms of a philosophy and how we approach it, we start with detection and trying to understand where these things are located. And I focus the brigade, mostly on detection, we're very big into the detection space. But then at speed, we also have to identify what those threats are before we can precisely defeat them. And so detection and identification is a huge component of what we do. And then of course, a lot of the community focuses on defeating the actual unmanned aerial system. And so recently, there is challenge that counter UAS has really faced is the advent of one way attacks. And so those you, you've heard of these, probably in the Ukraine, you've heard of them, and in terms of what Iran is pushing into different areas of the globe, most concerningly into Iraq and Syria. But I think the idea that a robot essentially is operating in any domain is something that is just we were just starting to see the initial pieces of that, and we're gonna see more and more of it over the course of the next couple of years in terms of what that looks like. So this counter UAS philosophy approach, the way that we're attacking it, new systems, I think, is just really critical to the future of how we approach autonomous, counter autonomous anything in the future.
Hondo Geurts 09:45
Yeah, I mean, it's a it's a one, you know, like many technologies, it's got lots of benefits in terms of what it allows folks to do commercially to do good in the world. And then it's got, you know, lots of nefarious elements to it as well. And I think your point is, is well taken. You know, we're, we think of it right now from the air. But it's going to be one of these things that that cuts across many different domains. Does the way you think about it from an intelligence perspective change per domain, or is it just kind of adapt, you know, took out unique elements of the domain?
Col. Molly Solsbury 10:25
I think it's a little of both, I would say yes, to that. That question. I, we definitely think about the way that we do identification, and particularly the way we'll talk about data, and how we approach data in a way that's not or that's domain agnostic. But then when you look at the detection and the defeat, I think there's a lot of facets of it that are specific to the air. And organizationally, how we integrate the air in the land is absolutely critical to our approach. And so I think counter UAS is inherently a multi domain fight. And I think because of that, this specific threat is a little bit unique, but I think we'll probably see it, a lot of different threats will be capital will be multi domain.
Lauren Bedula 11:13
I had the great opportunity last summer to visit a couple of the BDOCs, in theater. And for listeners who don't know the acronym, that's the Base Defense Operation Centers. And Molly, I know you've spent quite a bit of time working in several of them was wondering if you could give our listeners a sense of what it's like to work there. I know, the impression I had is it was an incredible team - brilliant, lots of energy working together. But if you could talk a little bit about what it's like to be there.
Col. Molly Solsbury 11:42
So I think that it's a 24/7 nerve center. And it's the nerve center, that is the most important nerve center of protecting our forces, whether that's from land threats, or air threats, both of them are handled at the BDOC, there's day to day business that's handled at the base defense operation center. And what's hard about a BDOC is I think it can feel many times as sort of monotonous or routine, you're going to do a lot of things like in a lot of jobs, you're going to do routine things routinely. But as those threats come in, and as you're doing training for those threats, for actual threats come, it's moving fast. It's a very fast-moving organization. So it's a team that has to really understand and practice. And these teams and platforms and crews have to operate together, they have to have great SOPs, and they have to understand what they're seeing on camera, what they're seeing different intelligence feeds, they have to know what's going on when the three different networks of phones are coming in. And so there's just I would say a ton of information that is that they are processing on a routine basis. And then it spikes sometimes when there's an actual threat that's coming in. So they have to be very agile and ready to kind of handle any situation. But then I'd say the other thing is they have to think about everything as layers. And so their defenses are never it's never one thing that helps us defeat these threats and helps us identify these threats. It's a layered approach. And so that's what really why they get all this information at once is there's all these layers that are feeding them. And they have to think about we always say defense in depth and that's essentially saying multiple layers of defense. And so that's how they're IA processing it that's how they're dealing with it. But yeah, that's that is kind of the abstract BDOC, but the day to day BDOC is busy, and it is it is a well-oiled machine.
Hondo Geurts 13:36
Yeah, I mean, we all have the advantage of seeing folks downrange and all the amazing things that our soldiers and airmen and sailors and guardians and Marines are doing downrange every day to get after this. What's your sense, right? speed matters, scale matters in this problem. And you're constantly kind of fighting the speed and scale game threat moves and looks for vulnerabilities. What kind of techniques or, or activities are you doing to bring in, you know, innovation to help drive that scale and speed thing and looking for new ideas? How do you approach it, while at the same time making sure you're doing those hard jobs every day as the operational battle rhythm dictates?
Col. Molly Solsbury 14:25
Yeah, so, I think we're doing a couple of things. The first thing I would mention is that we are working across CENTCOM and across AFCENT and ARCENT to work across warfighting functions. And so that means working together with the air components together with the link component. There's a whole team of protection experts and electronic warfare experts and kinetic experts. And there are routine meetings that our senior leaders are pulling together to ensure that this isn't just an intelligence approach. And this isn't just air defense approach and this doesn't you know, you could name them all, but it takes a multi layer approach to deal with the problem. And so that's the first thing is those routine collaboration spaces that we're analysts’ leveraging. But then as we, as we move through those at the senior level, what one of the things we did at 513th, then that I'm seeing others do it is built embedded data solutions, or DAT, accretive tactical data exploitation teams, we call ours our Intel Data Solutions Groups, and its data engineers and data analysts and data scientists and developers that are sitting right with the, with the analysts, and they're looking at the problem from a data centric perspective. And so as they look at different detection opportunities, and from the different intelligence disciplines, they're saying, How can I look at this data differently? How can I combine it? How can I make it make sense? And how can I help? How can I help the team move faster when it comes to detection, so that Intel Data Solutions groups really embedding those data scientists and data analysts at the at the you are Intel analysts level has side by side has been huge in terms of solving tactical problems. And then the other thing I would mention is then there's been some efforts that CENTCOM’sput together, and I think together with a couple of the DOD counterparts, like DIU. DIU and Skye have put together hackathons. And these hackathons have provided opportunities to bring some of these data scientists and developers together. And when they bring them together, it's amazing what they come up with, they not only then bring other ideas together, but they bring data together. And then they drink a lot of monster and coffee. And they don't sleep for a good three or four days. And they challenge one another to come up with hard problems. And they almost always have an analyst or an operator who is with them at the hackathon who's really providing that vector on the problem saying, “Well, this is what I need as a BDOC operator”, saying, “Look, I have this interface, it's coming in. And I have that interface that's coming in. And I can't swivel chair to five different screens at once.” And so those hackathons I think are just great in terms of bringing together problems with data scientists and developers that can come up with real practical solutions. And so I, I think the last one that Skye and team did was called SATCOM sand trap. And I know we sent a team down and they have worked on a solution. And now that is they have essentially a minimum viable product, they bring it back to our team. And so we're going to work on that for the next couple of months. So it was just like a huge shot in the arm to move forward on something. And now we've got the longer term work of figuring out how we scale it and implement it throughout our formations. So those are some of the things I mean, I know there's a there's a ton I could go on and on. But that's just a couple of the things that we're trying to do.
Lauren Bedula 17:51
And how exciting for the teams working these issues and to work every part of the process that you outlined from detect to defeat. Last number I heard was earlier today, there have been over 160 attacks on US and partner forces in theater since October 7, which is so significant. How does do those real-life events impact your efforts around some of these exercises and innovation related teaming,
Col. Molly Solsbury 18:20
I think they both accelerate and decelerate them. So I in some senses when the problem is more clear, and it's crystal, it's crystallized in the mind of the problem holder or the developer that accelerates it both accelerates the urgency, but it also accelerates the vision of what you need. And so in many ways, our innovation efforts since all of these attacks have just moved forward with a greater sense of urgency and clarity. But it also comes with challenges because you have to really focus sometimes on the problem at hand with the tools that you have. And so your that might look like having to do some swivel chair for a little while before you can go back and fix something. There’s a lot of technical debt in all of these systems to try to bring them together. So you may have a kind of a big project that you want to work on that, you know, could help accelerate something, but you don't have the capacity and the time because you really got to kind of solve the problem at hand. So sometimes that's a challenge. I think that's when you have to reach out to the community and reach out to the department and ask for some help. And we've been really fortunate, I think with different partners. I think that’s the long and short of it. There’s a ying and yang to it I guess or as Hondo said earlier, there's two sides of every so, technology.
Lauren Bedula 19:38
Molly, I think you're the first person to bring up the idea of technical debt on our show. And I'm wondering if you could just quickly define what you mean by that because it's a really important concept.
Col. Molly Solsbury 19:49
I think that for me, I define it as there's lots of tools and systems in place that do the job that we need them to do, but it might not be in the most efficient or effective manner. And so when it comes down to it, to create a solution we have some times whether it was 10 years ago or 10 days ago, we picked our way to something, we put something in place. And then it's taking us either a lot of people or a lot of money or a lot of machines to compute, to keep it running. So we know there's a lot of technical debt, we know there's a way that we could make it more streamlined, maybe there's a new technology out there. And so I think when you start to layer on all of these, either time expensive or compute expensive, or just kind of look at some of the architectures that I see just in counter UAS, or in theater, and I think there's a more streamlined way to do this now. But we've incurred we've accrued all of this kind of debt that we're now having to keep some of the current less streamlined, less efficient ways to do it in place.
Hondo Geurts 20:55
Molly - besides just the counter, UAS things, you guys are always putting new tools in place. You've got a ton of requirements. In terms of feedback you could give to listeners from industry out there, what are things that they're doing that, that you appreciate, and doing well, and where are areas where they could help you help them get capability downrange faster, to ease this burden of actually getting fielded capability that makes a difference?
Col. Molly Solsbury 21:29
I think. So there's lots of things that come to mind. But the we have one that stands out the most is the idea of data integration. As, as so many different industry partners are building tools, and they're making a commercial solution, they're often doing it kind of in a vertical stack, if you will, or they're doing it in a way that, that it integrates extremely well with their own technologies. And, and there's oftentimes a business model for that. There's also a speed model for that, both of those things are helping them go fast. And they're, they're helping produce commercial value, which I think makes a lot of sense. But when you go and see a cottage industry in a in a base defense center, and you see four or five different tools that industry has created, and none of them have a way to actually work together at the data level in terms of they don't have API's exposed, or they don't have any sort of standardization of their data. I think industry partners are super and there's lots of intelligence in these fields. And there's lots of collaboration. And so where they can collaborate with one another, where they can integrate with one another and where they can find a way to balance that business model with an operational model so that we can integrate their data streams integrate their, their their interfaces, either their data in a interface or their actual user interface on screen. Ideally, both that I think those are the places that can make a huge difference for the fight right now. But also the fight in the future.
Lauren Bedula 23:02
And it's something I want to foot stomp because we've been hearing so much, and there's a lot of industry issue and trying to contribute help solve this problem, if you will, but the need to have interoperability across the chain itself, but even within so not just from detect to defeat but different defeat systems as well, for example.Molly, we've talked about how busy you are right now, so we don't want to keep you too long. But we did want to ask how are your teams doing? Is morale okay, these days?
Col. Molly Solsbury 23:33
Oh, yeah, morale is really good. I think that this brigade and ARCENT as a whole and CENTCOM as a whole. I think I would say that just constantly based on the leadership and of empowerment that I see from General Kurilla down to General Frank, and certainly down to our level. That actually helps morale an awful lot, and that the soldiers love the idea that people partnerships and innovation is the focus. And so I think the soldier likes to be able to contribute to solutions and contribute to getting after the enemy. And so that's, I think that is a natural help to morale. We're all busy. And that's definitely can be a challenge. But I think soldiers are doing well.
Lauren Bedula 24:16
With that. Thank you, Molly, for taking time out of your busy day to talk to our listeners. And more importantly, thanks for all the work you're doing and your leadership in this area.
Col. Molly Solsbury 24:24
Great. Thanks, Lauren. Thanks Hondo.