Innovating Inside Bureaucracy

Show Notes

In this episode of From the Crows’ Nest, host Ken Miller, is joined by author, futurist, and former NSA official, Dr. Eric Haseltine. Ken also welcomes special co-host, Retired US Air Force Brigadier General Guy Walsh, now serving as the Executive Director of the National Security Collaboration Center at the University of Texas San Antonio. Ken, Guy, and Eric discuss how to pursue innovation in large bureaucracies that are often resistant to change and new ideas (hint: it’s about building the right relationships and using the strengths of an organization to your advantage). Eric, a respected neuroscientist, also provided a keynote address at AOC 2022 about what we can learn from nature and evolutionary biology to maintain a military advantage in electromagnetic warfare and cyber. They discuss his presentation and his two recent books:  Riding the Monster: Five Ways to Innovate Inside Bureaucracies, and The Spy in Moscow Station: A Counterspy’s Hunt for a Deadly Cold War Threat.

 

For more information on this episode and the AOC, please visit our website here.

Creators & Guests

Host

Ken Miller

AOC Director of Advocacy & Outreach, Host of @AOCrows From the Crows' Nest Podcast

Producer

Laura Krebs

RC

Editor

Reese Clutter

What is From the Crows' Nest?

Featuring interviews, analysis, and discussions covering leading issues of the day related to electromagnetic spectrum operations (EMSO). Topics include current events and news worldwide, US Congress and the annual defense budget, and military news from the US and allied countries. We also bring you closer to Association of Old Crow events and provide a forum to dive deeper into policy issues impacting our community.

Ken Miller (00:10):
Welcome to From the Crow's Nest, a podcast on electromagnetic spectrum operations or EMSO. I'm your host, Ken Miller, Director of Advocacy and Outreach for the Association of Old Crows. Thanks for listening.

(00:21):
On this episode we returned to AOC 2022, which took place a few weeks ago. During the show, I had the opportunity to sit down with author, futurist, and former NSA officer, Dr. Eric Haseltine. I was also joined by special co-host, retired US Air Force Brigadier General, Guy Walsh, now serving as executive director of the National Security Collaboration Center at the University of Texas, San Antonio.

(00:45):
Dr. Haseltine is an accomplished neuroscientist whose career brought him right into the heart of our EMSO and cyber professions. He was a former CTO for National Intelligence at the office of the Director of National Intelligence, the director of research at the NSA, an executive vice president at Walt Disney Imagineering, and a director of engineering at Hughes Aircraft Company. Eric has authored or co-authored more than 40 patents in optics, special effects, electronic media, and is widely published in leading magazines and academic journals.

(01:17):
Guy Walsh, my special co-host today, and I sat down with Eric to discuss specifically his keynote address at AOC 2022 and two key books relevant to our community, the first, Riding the Monster: Five Ways To Innovate Inside Bureaucracies, and the second book, The Spy in Moscow Station: A Counterspy's Hunt for a Deadly Cold War Threat.

(01:38):
Before we get to this conversation, I'm recording this introduction several days after the midterm elections in the United States. And for our national members, the US midterm elections focus on Congress, both the House and the Senate, one third of the Senate and a number of state offices and governorships around the country. So while it won't have a major impact on the global security or foreign policy of the United States, it does kick off the unofficial start of the 2024 presidential election and it does set the stage for a whole range of issues.

(02:09):
We don't have all the results yet, but it appears that the Democrat Party will continue to hold onto the Senate with at least 50 seats, possibly 51, depending on the outcome of the runoff election in the State of Georgia. And then the House is still undecided, but it appears that Republicans will take control with the narrowest of majorities. Republicans have 212 seats right now, to Democrats who have 204 seats and there're still 19 seats up in the air. You need 218 to take the majority, and so it's looking, based on polling, that the Republicans will probably be around 220, maybe 222 at most. So very small majority. It does mean that the House will flip, but it doesn't mean that there's a major swing in leadership or in terms of the ability of one party to move their agenda.

(02:58):
So what does this mean for the EMSO community? Well, quite frankly, absolutely nothing, which is good. National defense and security is going to continue to be very bipartisan. The incumbents in Congress and those who are active in the electromagnetic warfare working group, those incumbents all won, Congressman Don Bacon in Nebraska, Congressman Rick Larsen in Washington, Congressman Austin Scott in Georgia, they all won. And this bipartisan environment will largely continue uninterrupted.

(03:26):
The results do have one important benefit that is very important. With the Democrats securing the Senate and no major swing in the House, it does bode well for more legislative activity during this lame duck session that begins in November, which means in part, moving forward with the NDAA, the National Defense Authorization Act and the defense spending bill. Both sides simply want to close out the work for this year and there is no incentive to kick major spending to the next Congress. So with that, I want to bring you to my discussion with Dr. Eric Haseltine and special co-host. Guy Walsh. Let's listen in.

(04:01):
So just to get us started here and then I really will stop talking, I do promise. But one of the thrusts of your discussion at AOC 2022 and through your books has been really about innovation, but really innovation through relationships. And I would like to get just a kind of take, Dr. Haseltine, to provide us some context on for the discussion today about the role that relationships play in advancing innovation and new ideas in a bureaucracy.

Dr. Eric Haseltine (04:36):
Yeah. Well, when I started off as a system engineer in 1979, we thought that if you wanted to innovate, it was 95% technology and 5% all the other stuff, marketing contracts, all that other stuff. Now, 40 some years later, I know that it was in the reverse. That if you want to innovate, it's 5% technology and 95% all that other stuff, which I would categorize as relationship building.

(05:04):
When you're an innovator, your real job is changing human behavior. You're doing something new and humans have to use it. Humans have to design it, build it, sell it, buy it, operate it, maintain it, and update it. And if that entire chain doesn't buy in from the start, you will not succeed. So the one piece of advice I'd give to any innovator is shift the focus in the frame of reference from innovating in technology to building relationships to make the technology get there.

Guy Walsh (05:37):
So Doctor, first let me, your briefing today was absolutely fascinating. And for the listeners who weren't able to attend this year's AOC International Symposium, I just want to say, number one is congratulations, Ken, because again, with the audience that you have with the expanded type piece there, but also bringing in a lot of the young crows. And so the audience did look different, had a different feel this time. And I will simply tell you that Dr. Eric Haseltine's presentation was not only fascinating, but it's different than probably most of those you've heard on this podcast because, again, his career path is much, much different being a neuroscientist, a futurist, coming out of Disney Imagineering.

(06:23):
And again, an introductory for those who haven't met and had the chance to talk with Eric, I will simply say that the best introduction was probably done on the book, his previous book, which was A Spy in Moscow Station, in where Michael Hayden talks about hiring Eric out of Disney Imagination to lead research group out of the National Security Agency. So bringing that. And Michael Hayden explained it, saying this was the most bold and audacious move I've ever made at that time, is bringing someone from industry to change and to shake things up really. And we saw that today.

(07:03):
We were making a little bit joke earlier that this is probably the first time at an AOC conference we had discussion about pompom crabs and sea urchins and porcupines. But really, that idea of convergence, of different themes and different flavors, you really did hit the nail on the head with that. So just a little bit, again, thoughts about what we've just talked about in terms of bringing in convergence of different ideas. You spend a lot of time today talking about that convergence between EW and cyber and really pulling the strings there. So just share with our audience a little bit about that.

Dr. Eric Haseltine (07:42):
Well, I think I want to start at 100,00 feet, and that is EW is primarily in most people's minds about technology. But the illusion is that technology is different from biology. It is not. It is designed and built and operated by biological entities for biological purposes, political purposes. Clausewitz said, "War is politics with violence." And EW is basically about advancing one group's needs over another. And so if you look at it that way, you look at EW in a completely different perspective. As a natural outgrowth biology, not something apart and separate from it and that's hugely important in getting fresh ideas.

(08:30):
And what I said in my talk was that you need to look at the wisdom of nature over billions of years and all the answers are there. So in my talk, I went into all the different ways that prey animals messed with their predator's heads and vice versa. And so there's got to be some fresh ideas in there for the future for EW, and I gave some examples of that. I also talked about once you have an innovation, how do you get it across the valley of death into mission, onto the battlefield?

(09:08):
And that's where we come back to things like fusion that you just mentioned. What I said in the talk is that EW and cyber are on a collision course to become something new which we don't yet have a name for. Someone will come up with it sometime. But the way I look at it is really if you're honest with yourself, an EW system is a computer with a RF front end and an antenna. And so the distinction between cyber and EW is not a distinction worth it anymore in my opinion. For example, you radiate signals that get looked at as either base band or carrier by the receiver, they get put in a buffer somewhere that's a digital, which is connected to a network somewhere. So if you're radiating signals, what's to say that those couldn't be cyber type signals? You're in a buffer, maybe you could do a buffer overflow.

(10:01):
And so I think that, that's kind of the new frontier and the biggest obstacle, because it's something new and unfamiliar to people is going to be changing people's behavior. You're going to say, "Oh, that's a cyber problem, that's in that silo." No, that's an EEW problem, that's in that silo. And the reality is it's in the white spaces of the national security enterprise. It's a new thing that needs to be given life on its own as a separate thing.

Guy Walsh (10:29):
So let me pull on that string a little bit. And you just said it, you said all the answers are there, but you earlier had also said, we're just not asking the right questions. And that was I think, key. So you spend a lot of time just as you did in that description of saying, "Here are some of the questions we really need to be answering.' So I guess I'll throw that out in a broad, what are the key scientific questions we should be answering right now?

Dr. Eric Haseltine (10:55):
I think, again, I'll start at 100,000 feet. What is the problem we're trying to solve? Zhou Enlai, the number two guy under Mao Tse Tung, "The first step to solving a problem is to name it." What is the core underlying problem that EW tries to solve? Is how to be a windshield instead of a bug, how to not be a prey and how to be an effective predator and how to do it in a very fast changing world where some of our adversaries are changing much faster than we are with resources we can't even dream of. You take the Chinese, for example, they spend hundreds of billions of dollars on cell phones and computer chips and things like that. And then they design them from the start to have dual use. We can't compete with that. And they work at the speed of commercial, not the speed of the far.

(11:52):
And so we have to understand the big problem that we're trying to solve. And like I say, biology has all the answers because prey animals live right next to their predators. If you watch that movie, My Octopus Teacher, it's fascinating because you have this octopus, which is very smart, living literally right next to a shark. There's no containment. So if you look at the cyber analogy, you have to assume that the enemy is in your system and operate with the assumption that you can still operate even though you've been penetrated. And that's what the octopus does. And if you watch that movie, you'll see 10 different strategies it uses to putting sea shells on top of it so it looks like the sea bottom, to jumping on the shark's back and going for a ride, to giving up a tentacle to the shark and healing with the rest of his body. There's like 10 different strategies, and I think the answers are all there if we only know where to look.

Guy Walsh (12:52):
One of the things we talked about in your presentation is that transition from offense and defense. Which is more important? Where can you find success? And the bio examples, you talked about several, that these are defensive, but here's also some of the, I'm going to use the word attack, give my background, but the offensive type of things and being able to blend and transition between that. So talk to us about difference in terms of our approach of offensive and defensive, whether it be on the cyber, EW, wherever.

Dr. Eric Haseltine (13:22):
Great question. I'll tell you something as a neuroscientist. Our brains are taxonomic. We put things in boxes like offense and defense. But actually, nature isn't that way. Nature doesn't see a distinction between offense and defense.

(13:38):
And I'll give you an example. You have this beetle larvae that is preyed upon by amphibians, frogs, and toads. And what it has evolved is a way of when the frog eats, it grabs onto the frog's mouth and it starts eating the frog. So it puts out signals that say, "Come here, frog, eat me." And then the frog grabs it, thinks it's a prey, and it turns out it's the prey. And that's nature. They're really this distinction between offense and defense. And it's hugely important that people get their head around that. Because again, in bureaucracies, those tend to be different people with different cultures, with different organizations, with different budgets, when in reality it's all one thing, that you can go from being a prey to a predator in a heartbeat.

(14:27):
When you come to cyber, I've always said, well look, we know that really clever nation state adversaries are going to get inside of us. It's just a fact. No one wants to admit it, but it's true. So we need to find them, we need to control it. But let's assume that we can use it. Let's play judo. Maybe we can shape their perception by steering them in certain areas and then we get inside them. So I think having the mindset that every prey is a predator and every predator is a prey is really important.

Ken Miller (15:01):
I want to jump in here. I want to pull the thread on success because I'm very curious from an advocacy perspective, which is what I spent my career doing, less technology. People always ask, "Well, what is advocacy?" And there's a lot of stock answers for that, but it's basically operating in a way that puts your organization or who you're working for in a better spot down the road, whether your mission is electronic warfare or cyber making you better off.

(15:33):
And the question of success comes up, what is success? And I sometimes feel like we too narrowly define what success is and that can lead to more failure. And what I try to talk about is understanding the problem and accepting the fact that you might succeed, but it might look completely different than what you originally anticipated. And allowing for that say, "Hey, we're going to do X, Y, and Z, and if we succeed, maybe we succeed in a different way. And maybe we've happened upon solving another problem that we weren't aware of at first." And keeping those lines of communication open, that involves relationships. So I wanted to, when you talk about valley of death moving technology forward, integration of cyber and EW, do we too narrowly define success too quickly in our efforts and can that lead us astray or how do you deal with the question of what is success in this space?

Dr. Eric Haseltine (16:33):
Well, that's a tough one when it comes to EW, because the field is esoteric. The people who make the budget decisions have a very hard time. In my experience, some of the very brightest and best government employees are congressional staffers. They're very smart people. That's why they have their jobs. But even they sometimes have trouble getting their head around, "Well, what are you talking about?" And it's very difficult to grasp. And I've noticed this and it's in my book, The Spy in Moscow Station. One reason we didn't find this Russian implant for many, many years is it was like magic. It was like voodoo. Well, that's not possible. And a lot of what EW does is like that. It's really esoteric, complex, hard to understand. And I'll just get back to something Harry Truman said, a very effective Washington insider. He said, "In Washington, you have to be clearer than the truth."

(17:28):
And that means that the people who make decisions, politicians and policy makers, have an agenda, they have something they're trying to do. And I would say how to frame what you're doing as the answer to their problem. My boss, John Negroponte, who was the ultimate deputy secretary of state under Condi Rice, but at the time he was the ODNI, and I reported to him. I said, "What is diplomacy? All your guys here, you bought in the state Department?" He said, "Eric, Diplomacy is the art of letting other people have your way." And I said, "Well, how do you do that?" And he said, "You've got to make it look like their idea." And the way you look at their idea is you don't present them, you don't sell them anything. You come and you sit down and you ask them and you say, "What keeps you up at night? What's your biggest problem?"

(18:18):
And whatever that is, you come up with something that aims in that direction, you basically push and pull. And so you're not going to change people's mind. They already have something they need to accomplish. I think the advocacy piece really is about understanding where their head is and putting what you have in there. I look at people as having a soda straw. They look at the world through a soda straw and that's their silo. But the policymaker or a politician is no different. They have things they want to accomplish. You can't get them to shift their soda straw to look at what you want them to, they're not going to do it. You have to take what you have and put it in their soda straw.

Guy Walsh (19:00):
So let's stay there with a Spy in Moscow Station, because again, this was a book talking about what was happening in the late '70s, early '80s. And I'm going to look at the bureaucracies that you deal with in that, particularly between State department, NSA, CIA, because obviously, there wasn't a lot of everybody getting that thought. So where has that come, that bureaucratic challenge, both in terms of how have we gotten better and where has it gotten worse as we've moved from the '70s and what was happening at Moscow at the embassy to where we are today? And let's just start with those agencies that you address in a Spy in Moscow Station.

Dr. Eric Haseltine (19:39):
Bluntly, no better. Many years after the book, I went to my counterpart at another three letter agency who was a deputy director of the Agency for Science and Technology. And I said, Dr. X, who will be nameless, I said, "Look, I'm from Disney, I just got here. I want to cooperate. I think [inaudible 00:19:58] the natural thing together." He says, "Eric, you don't understand. Al Qaeda is our target. You are our enemy" You, NSA. That was in the early 2000s. There have been some measures with joint purpleness and joint duty and Goldwater-Nichols, and now we have ODNI and there is some goodness there. But generally speaking, you're fighting human nature. Humans are tribal. That will never change. Like what they did with DNI to solve this problem, to get people to communicate and cooperate. I was there for two years, I saw it firsthand. We failed, utterly. We did things that on paper looked right and some of it actually did work when it came to IT plumbing.

(20:41):
But generally speaking, the silos remain very healthy and pretty much fighting each other. In my book, The Spy at Moscow Station, I have a chart called the Who Hates Who chart. And I think that chart's pretty accurate and thank God our adversaries have their own who hates who chart.

Guy Walsh (20:58):
I'm going to take this to the positive side from that book. So one of the most poignant pieces in the Spy at Moscow Station was Charles Gandy, who was one of the lead, I'll say thinkers of that time. But it's an event when suddenly under Project Gunman that Mike Arneson, a young person working there at NSA working in R9 that is not going to... He doesn't have the degree, he's not promotable, those type of things. But he's absolutely brilliant, he thinks out of the box. And he makes the discovery on the IBM Selectric III typewriter that no one else could do. It was about week nine or so. But could you talk us through what Charles Gandy does? Because it's important for all our readers to understand, you talk about the human element. But what does Charles Gandy do? After he gets the phone call, realizes that he's got a young kid that thinks he's this... But before he walks out the door, he does something very important that is life changing.

Dr. Eric Haseltine (21:57):
Yeah, he has his wife, who's an artist, make a big award because he had set up a $10,000 reward for whoever found the exploit first and Arneson did. But he realized that money was much less important than recognition and respect. And for Arneson in particular, who didn't even have a degree at the time, respect was the most important thing that he wanted. And so Gandy was a genius when it came to technology. But even more, he understood people really well, and he understood that if you want to get and keep the best people, you've got to give them the freedom to do what they want and you've got to recognize and reward them the second they do something excellent.

Guy Walsh (22:38):
So let me go back to one of the areas that we talked about that's important to a lot of the folks here today. It's all about recruiting or retaining talent. It goes back to the thing are we asking the right questions? And we talked about if all we're looking for is five years of experience in the EW or the cyber side, we're not broadening that look to bring in that divergence of talent from those other areas. Difficult to do. If you look at our HR system, it is built to do that is to say, who's the smartest guy in EW? Who's been our biggest salesman, who's been our biggest inventor, who's been our biggest, you name that. But we're not looking into areas where people bring a completely different view of what's happening. So how do we make that change?

Dr. Eric Haseltine (23:23):
Well, I want to start with the point of getting inside the head of the people you're trying to deal with, which is new talent. What motivates them? People talk about money, but in reality, most HR studies show that money is not the big motivator for most employees. It's achievement, fulfillment, and recognition and accomplishment. So I think that if you say, "Look, we've got some incredible challenges here." For example, in AI, we've got a really fascinating problem where we have our AI going up against someone else's AI. And that's the kind of thing that's going to capture the imagination of the kind of person you want. So you look at all of your problems as liabilities, but they're your biggest recruiting asset because you can go to someone and say, "Look at this problem that we have. Our AI is going up against their AI."

(24:16):
So that's one thing. The other thing I would say is, this is going to sound horrible, but one reason NSA is able to recruit some of the best mathematicians in the world is it's hard for them to get jobs elsewhere. There's only so many tenure track. Now, with Hollywood using CG and Quants and Wall Street, the demand for mathematicians has increased. But the fact is that they didn't have a lot of options. If you go to behavioral science schools, people getting PhDs in social psychology or industrial psychology or human factors, and you recruit them because any EW system, usually the weakest link is the human and also the strongest link. So behavioral science I think does need to be an added dimension. But also biologists, if you go and you get zoologists and people who are experts in the kind of stuff I talked about today, you can pay them salaries that they couldn't get anywhere else and they might be very interested.

(25:11):
So I think some of the talent that you need is out there, it just doesn't look like the talent you're looking for. And I will say one thing. I'm a neuroscientist, but I write Python code and I write C++. These people can learn to do the skills that you need. And I think you'll find that their weaknesses are also their strengths. They don't think like engineers, and that's a good thing sometimes. So I would say go to the traditional disciplines, but find out what's a big problem and a challenge that will keep them challenged and give them something they can't get anywhere else. Give them the recognition. Have your best people go out and recruit. Usually, if you have an HR person, go out and recruit for that kind of talent isn't going to work. You got to take your superstars and you got to get them out there.

(25:59):
And a new superstar who's embryonic when he sees a real superstar is going to say, "I want to go work with that person." You have to look at, we called those magnets at Disney. We got our very best imagineers and we put them on the front lines to recruit because those were the biggest magnet that brought people in.

Guy Walsh (26:20):
So one of the panels that was done earlier during the AOC International Symposium here was about one of those big challenges that we have right now is JADC2, the Joint All-Domain Command and Control. And as we sort discussed in the panel discussed, it's really about, it's not as much about command and control as it is shortening that kill chain. What can we automate? How do we really bring both the cyber and the EW type pieces in there? And right now we're seeing that as a challenge in itself. Even just getting the services between ABMS, project Overmatch convergence and bringing those together. Help us to look forward from a visionary perspective. How do we take those next steps to change the battlefield in the way we want to give us success on the battlefield?

Dr. Eric Haseltine (27:07):
Well, I want to go back to biology because when you think about nature, a new organism just doesn't pop de novo from nothing, like the particle antiparticle pairs that pop out of the void to create dark energy. They always evolve from something that just preceded them. And it's usually a little twist in a gene that does it. And so you say, "Well, that's how nature actually does it." When it comes to the fusion of EW and cyber, it's not like you create a new animal all of a sudden that does that. What you do is you take something that already does that and you do a twist to it and make it do it.

(27:43):
So the way I would approach that problem is to say, it's already happening, JADC2 is already happening, the fusion of cyber and EW is already happening. We still call it that. And if we look at all the nodes and edges in all the platforms that we have, and we took a step back and say, well, that's what they're doing now, but what could we make them do that's different and do like nature does and patch and tweak and adjust and bend it until it breaks. And when you bend it and it's out there in mission and it's actually saving lives and helping accomplish the mission, people would say, "Oh, this is great. We need more of that." And then someone says, "Well, to have more of that, you need a new platform and then a new requirement will come about." So I think it's the bend it tell it break strategy, it's a lot more practical to do modifications to program from the record than trying to get some new big program for the record through. And I think that's actually what's probably going to end up happening.

Ken Miller (28:39):
I just want to jump in on, you have two books that you talked about during your presentations today. The other one is Riding the Monster: Five Ways To Innovate Inside Bureaucracies. And without giving too much of the book away, but it's really chock-full with real good advice. And I think that what was refreshing was sometimes you oftentimes hear, well, bureaucracy stands in the way. But you offer ways to work with it instead of against it in a gentle way that makes a bureaucracy think that it's actually doing-

Dr. Eric Haseltine (29:14):
That's right.

Ken Miller (29:15):
Doing what you want. And one of the things you talk about with innovation was sometimes innovation isn't just about the new technology, but it's about optimizing what you already have, and you just kind of touched on that. Can you share with us a little bit about what inspired you to write this book at this time and a little bit about what our listeners can glean from how to engage the bureaucracy in a more healthy and productive way?

Dr. Eric Haseltine (29:45):
Well, I've been an innovation guru ever since I left the government in 2007, make a lot of money going to C-suites and offering wise opinion. And basically, everything I tried failed. I made a lot of money, but all the things I tried didn't work. And plus, most of my career as an innovator in running research labs was mostly failure to be bluntly honest. And that goes with the turf. But I think there was more failure than the need to be. So I looked back and said, "What was the thread that wove all these failures together?" And I realized it was simple. It's that the crossing the valley of death, getting innovations across really was not a technology gap, not a process gap, not a funding gap for productization money, a relationship gap that you didn't have all of the informal relationships of trust and respect that were needed to get something across the finish line.

(30:44):
And to look at it as a chain. You talked about the kill chain, the innovation chain. Someone has to have the idea, someone has to build a prototype, someone has to want that, and then turn the product into a real product and shrink wrap it. Someone has to want to put money in the budget to buy it, someone has to buy it, someone has to operate it, someone has to maintain it. And if you don't get every single one of those steps online before you start, you will fail. And that is relationships. And so in my book I talk about the way that is really done, not the way it's supposed to be done, is you do it by surfing human nature, not fighting it, which is people are tribal. So create healthy tribes and spend all your energy doing informal networking.

(31:31):
Do whatever you have to do. Join the softball team, join the corporate volunteer organization, go to churches, go to retirement ceremonies at NSA. I never missed a retirement ceremony because that's where I did my networking and that's where I got stuff done. And so you have to be street smart and look at the world as it really is not the way they tell you it is.

Guy Walsh (31:51):
So let's jump to, you always describe this as two problems. One is building those relationships, but the other one you bring up is don't underestimate your adversaries. And so that's a big piece. And you talked a little bit about, and a lot of your background, the strength on understanding Russia is where they don't just see everything as something new. They look at some of what I'll say, the traditional areas such as EW, and they become really good and maintain that skill craft in the area of RF and the area of physics, acoustics, all those things that you bring out. So underestimating the adversary is that other half of the problem.

Dr. Eric Haseltine (32:27):
Well, that's right. And underestimating is one thing, but also not understanding. When it comes to the Russians in particular, I was a Russian cyber analyst at one of the three letters, open source, completely unclassified work. And I was never failed to be surprised that they just didn't think the way we thought. And my dad taught me this. My dad was a rocket scientist at China Lake and every time there was an Arab-Israeli war, he'd look at some of the captured Russian stuff. And he told me once, he said, "They do not think like us." And he gave me an example of a fire control computer on an artillery piece. They'd taken a German design and they'd come up with a set of elliptical gears that were not shaped like gears at all. And you didn't think it worked. But right before one gear would clash with another, it would clear it just a little bit. And it was a genius computer that was simple, it would work anywhere. And he said, "No western mind ever would've come up with that." And they are different.

(33:28):
And I think that the only way to appreciate that difference is to live in their world and to speak their language and immerse yourself in it. And then you start to look at the world the way they do. And I think I would say respecting is one thing, but becoming them is another.

Ken Miller (33:47):
Well gentlemen, that is all the time we have for today's episode. I want to thank both of you for joining me. Again, the two books that we discussed during the episode by Dr. Eric Haseltine is Spy in Moscow Station: A Counterspy's Hunt for a Deadly Cold War Threat and Riding the Monster: Five Ways To Innovate Inside Bureaucracies. Dr. Haseltine and General Walsh, thank you for joining me here on From the Crows' Nest.

Dr. Eric Haseltine (34:11):
Great to be here, thank you.

Guy Walsh (34:12):
Thanks again. This was wonderful. I look forward to coming back next year. Thanks, Ken.

Ken Miller (34:16):
That will conclude this episode of From the Crows' Nest. I want to thank my guests, Dr. Eric Haseltine and Guy Walsh for joining me at AOC 2022. Also, don't forget to review, share, and subscribe to this podcast we always enjoy hearing from our listeners. So please take some time to let us know how we're doing. That's it for today. Thank you for listening.