Special Episode: Defense Innovation with former acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller

ACME General Corp: All right. Well, welcome to the latest episode of Accelerate Defense. My name is David Bonfili, and I’m here today with former acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller. Chris, it’s great to have you with us.

Chris Miller: David it’s been a bit. Do you think confession’s good for your soul? 

ACME General Corp: I do.

CM: I gotta confess something, remember when we did that national urban What’s that outfit that Pat runs the National Center for Urban Operations? Yeah, I get it wrong all the time. Remember when we had that event a while ago. I was Counter UAS. Yeah, remember that yeah How long ago was that like six months ago six months give or take I stole a book from you man You did dude you have the best library of anyone, like, do you charge those as business? I hope those are marketing 

ACME General Corp: It’s like a lending library, yeah. You’re supposed to check them out. 

CM: You are? I just stole it, man. That’s all right. It’s like a good, it was like artificial intelligence in war, and it’s really, really good. It kind of does a philosophical thing. forgot. So dude, I brought you…

I replaced it. I’ll bring that book back next time I’m here. But I brought you, and I’m not shamelessly plugging my book. I’m not even going to say what it is. But since I borrowed that one, you can have this book. And now it’s my conscious claim. Hey, David, no kidding. I stole a book from the George Washington University Library. was doing- 

ACME General Corp: I’m in good company. 

CM: And I don’t know how you’d steal books from the library anymore with all the tech, but I just, I won’t give you my trade craft. And it was this book about William Tecumseh Sherman, because I was trying to learn about the military and all. that guy, he was a trendsetter, right? I always go, you play that silly game. If there was an ancient general that could come back to current times and be effective, he’s the dude. That guy, he figured this out. He’d be like, drones, got it, okay, artificial intelligence guy. That dude. So I stole this book, man. had it for like 25 years and then when I moved back to DC guess what I did? Turned it back in. So I only have one stolen book right now. from you. 

ACME General Corp: If we have an excuse to get you back here, I am very excited for that. And if that’s returning the book, I’ll take it. I’m looking forward to reading my copy of Soldier’s Secretary by Christopher C. Miller. And I encourage everyone listening to this podcast to pick up a copy. 

CM: I was not plugging my book. I’m plugging your So I made my money on the book. This is like our first plug on this

You have not written a very non-commercial. Have not read, you have not written a book yet. I have not. All right. Let me tell you what it is, a scam man. I like, I got paid and I got paid you get in advance and then I did I think I just need the money man So I did not read all the terms It’s like 45 pages of gobbledygook. So I get my first Tax thing from the publisher and I can’t understand it so I get online, I Google the heck out of this thing, I finally figure out how to read it. I’m like, I will never make another penny off of that book. It’s a racket, and we’re in New York, we’re in your city, my friend. This is the place where it all happens. Speaking of, my publisher is 

ACME General Corp: So are you telling me that books don’t make money? Because my wife just wrote a book and I was really banking on this. Banking pun intended. I like that. All right. 

CM: Hey, so you want humble brag? Yeah, yeah, you know me I’m not a I’m not an arrogant guy 

ACME General Corp: For our guests I should say Chris and I had the opportunity to spend, was it a week in Australia this summer, talking to folks down there about the US Australia UK security arrangement and so we’ve had a chance to get to know each other before this clearly very intimate podcast. 

CM: There was absolutely no drinking at all involved. We were sober as church mice the entire time. that was a great trip man that was really good. Learned a lot. Thanks for going on that. That AUKUS Pillar 2, you know, we went down there to kind of tease out whether we could connect finance slash U.S. businesses with the Australian kind of defense innovation ecosystem. I think we came back, I shouldn’t speak for you, but my takeaway, we really didn’t talk about this, was great, huge opportunity, however, mechanisms, process, procedures, not there yet. Really think that that’s something we need to work on. Have you been doing much on that? I’ve been actually doing a lot behind the scenes on that. We’ve been doing a little.

ACME General Corp: The observation you just made, I think, resonated with me in the sense that there’s often great rhetoric and great ideas and even good setting of intentions of conditions. So the work that we’ve done around ITAR reform and preparing the regulatory environment, but where things get disconnected is then matching the resources. to that to move forward. If you look in Australia, for example, there’s about a half percent growth in their allocation of the budget to defense two to two and a half percent over the next several years, all of that going to pillar one, which is buying submarines. So there’s this whole pillar two that’s everything that’s not submarines that has basically de minimis funding in Australia right now. There’s sort of clear intent for funding devoted to pillar two in the US. And so if you want things to happen, you have to not just set the conditions, but you have to put resources against that. And so it’ll be interesting to see with a new administration coming in how they think about matching resources to intent. 

CM: I got one for you. I just made this up. Metaphorically, could AUKUS Pillar 2 metaphorically describe the challenges we’re facing here in our own? Department of Defense and acquisition and finance community like lots of good intent. Yes, lots of good ideas however not really a lot of outcome. Oh no, am I gonna offend your audience on that? 

ACME General Corp: So Chris, you’ve met me. I’m often referred to as the grumpy muppet in the balcony in the defense innovation space. So anyone who’s listened to me doing this podcast has already heard how depressed I am. I’m interested in that context to hear someone who has thought a lot about these issues and has looked at what’s been done not just over the last four years, but over the last decade. Your thoughts on where the real art opportunities moving forward to move the ball in innovating modernizing at speed 

CM: I just dropped my pen good. That’s good. If you think that hit on the podcast, we’ll see how the rest Chris dropping his pen Or else maybe it was maybe I fell over in shock at your Completely negative. I loved it. I loved your the Muppets like we’re showing our age that Statler and Waldorf they hold up. Hold up. 

ACME General Corp: Where are the opportunities? 

CM: I’m going to say something really arrogant. I got into this business in 1987 as a 17-year-old punk private in the Army National Guard or Reserve. I can’t remember which one. eight. know, mind is the second thing to go.

And I was like a total, the funny thing is like. So many people in the military, like that becomes their life and they study it. I became really quite involved and, lived through Goldwater Nichols, right? That was the last major defense reform. I thought there would be a major defense reform with the attacks like just down the street here in 2001 and all of it. I guess the major reform there was the establishment of Homeland security, DNI and the defense. yeah.

ACME General Corp: It felt a little like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic though, didn’t it? Sort of like, or change without material. 

CM: Yeah, exactly, you know. And I was like, this will be the major change, right? And actually all we did was we up-gunned a bunch of existing organizations. In my world, special operations, was an Army Green Beret, right? And then I really got into counter-terrorism, but I’m really, my passion is a regular warfare, which is, you know, direct action, meaning shooting people and all that kicking down doors. Obviously we did that for 20 something years. My passion is irregular warfare, is more the human terrain, right? How do you understand a culture? How do you bring this stuff together to create the effect that you want? the exigencies of the moment where you’re gonna do direct action. So we did that and we created like the most profound killing machine probably in the history of the world. Stan McChrystal gets credit for that team of teams. He writes a book like every three months now. 

ACME General Corp: I think his books make money.

CM: Hey, my book made money. That’s why you got me off You cut me off and you took me on a tangent my book made money. 

ACME General Corp: That’s great to hear 

CM: So I hope your wife’s I’ve that’s a, that’s an encouraging thing coming on. Well 90 % do not make money. That’s not even a humble brand made money, which is you know was really I mean it was serious. It was really it was kind of humbling that, because most books don’t. But back to your point, I think we, how many times like in the national security community, we always chase the shiny object. How many have we seen? It started with cyber, and now we’re in, then we go to counter insurgency, then we go to network centric warfare, then we’re kind of in this artificial intelligence joint all domain command and control. I think we put a C in front of it now combined. We talked about AUKUS and recognizing that partners and allies have to be able to get into our systems too so that we can like, you know, everybody can talk and understand the environment. In summary, I think this change of administration, which is all about transformation in a non-political statement, which is just as an observer, I think there’s going to be an opportunity to fundamentally transform all of Goldwater Nickels. Every 40 years we change how we do business. It’s coming up in 40 years. Here’s my thing that I’ve been really thinking about trying to put in place structures, personnel, procedures, is your audience is extremely well read. I’ve been going through the classics. but elite. 

ACME General Corp: Small but elite. 

CM: I know that’s why I’m really… It’s like an SF audience. I’m privileged to be here, man, because we’re going to make some news today. For the 25 of you that are listening, no I know your numbers, I went through the website. You’ve had some amazing people on here. Obviously, I should not… You are scraping the bottom of the barrel now, David. 

ACME General Corp: It’s an honor and a privilege,

CM: You know, I’m reading Freedom’s Forge again. You’re going through Arsenal, Democracy, those books that talk about the preparation for World War II. The key takeaway I’ve gotten from those books that really surprised me, to tell you the truth, I didn’t understand so much. Like, I didn’t know that New Deal and all that crap, but I didn’t understand the conflict between the New Deal people that were like, the government needs to do everything to rearm America.

FDR was brilliant when he went with the dollar a year men, know these people from industry and he said and he made a decision against the counsel of a lot of his Supporters was like just let the free market work, baby If we start trying to regulate this it’s gonna go off the rails. Here’s my takeaway though thinking about that Actually, the next freedoms forage is gonna happen Coming out of the private sector with finance this time not so much like hard-built, these huge factories willow run largest factory in the history of the world. So this has been my big takeaway and my what I’m trying to do David with your help and thank you for all your advice and mentorship on that, is how do we flip the model from public-private to private-public and how do we connect financial flows capital markets into the Department of Defense and there’s some really interesting, so I know I’m talking too much, there’s some really interesting things going on right now. There are these little pockets of excellence throughout. 

ACME General Corp: What are those pockets of excellence in your view? 

CM: Office of Strategic Capital, a new effort that started under us but got signed out by this administration, which is basically, VA loans, house loans, but underwrite the risk so that financial markets, capital markets, private industry can accept the risk calculus of going into defense because you and I know the defense industry is so difficult to break into. So that’s one of the things that we’re kicking around, but that’s my big idea right now and it actually came to me recently because I’m doing these listening tours right now trying to understand.

It’s easy, I’m a bumper sticker guy, you know that. I’m a big hand wave guy. My book, by the way, 10 things. Like, come on. I’m trying to take those big ideas and really neck them down into meaningful, operationally relevant, outcome driven things.

ACME General Corp: That’s super helpful. It’s funny, you mentioned the Office of Strategic Capital. I had an opportunity to talk to some folks from OSCE recently. And it’s a great group. They’re doing interesting things. I wonder whether they’re not.

CM: Go there, call it out. Go there, Mr. Negative. So look, as an example, the latest initiative out of OSCE has been to start issuing direct loans using a new loan authority that they were given to purchase equipment for companies doing critical functions in the defense industrial base.

ACME General Corp: Great idea, but I can’t help but look at that and say private credit is probably the hottest area in finance right now. You can’t like throw a stick without hitting a new private credit fund. And the reason that that credit doesn’t flow into areas that OSCE wants is that the risk profile is too high. And so rather than becoming an originator of loans themselves, which is what OSCE is trying to do right now and hiring investment professionals in to underwrite those loans, wouldn’t you be better off essentially providing insurance to the private sector to just change the risk profile of those investments so that all of that private capital is willing to do it now because you’ve made the risk look more like the risk they’re comfortable with rather than risk they’re not. And I think you could take the billion dollars you have to do direct loans and get a hundred billion in private loans coming in by just putting your finger on the scale of risk for them.

CM: David, that’s why you’re one of the greatest thinkers in the business right now, an opinion shaper. What you just described, I think, I want to give credit though, pun intended. was good. Credit to the team. I think what you just described, I think, is a misuse of the authority. And what you are advocating for is exactly the direction that the organization needs to go.

And that ties back into my big idea, which is… Right now we have a bunch of policy people. You sprinkle a little like, you’re a Wall Street guy. That has to be a much more deliberate and meaningful thing. And so that’s what I really want to see happen is a more fulsome discussion about that. That’s why I think there’s an opportunity here for input. So here’s another big idea. just had this joint, we could go on all day about this. I really, really am intrigued by this. You’re the expert on this. unsuccessful business person actually. Now, three years in the, four years in the business I’m kind of an expert, which really is the point is I should not be making meaningful decisions. We need to have the right team of expertise which plays into my next crazy idea. is the Office of Strategic Services 2.0. While Bill Donovan, this was the organization that was created, it was the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency and the United States Special Operations Command. And it was at the time, remember, they brought in finance people, white shoe lawyers, they brought in marketing people to basically developed the field of psychological warfare. They were the ones who figured out how to actually do intelligence assessments using commercial methodologies, a lot of it finance methodologies.

What I would like to see and what I’m advocating for is a new OSS 2.0 where instead of maybe lawyers and, you know, yell Ivy League educated people, which is fine, we need them. This is probably people coming in out of Silicon Valley. We’ve seen that with DIU. Defense Innovation Unit, but we really haven’t, we had this stuff in the Pentagon. Who were those, who were the crazy kids who did all the cyber stuff? The Director of Digital Services, DDS. Yeah, yeah. Well, I was just gonna bounce off you. Here’s where I think we are in the evolution of these things.

To do anything in the government is like fighting that bureaucracy is exhausting. Like let’s use Defense Innovation Unit. Ash Carter sets that up, brilliant idea. I think I would describe them, you know, in the military you have like initial operational capability, which means you basically have your computers plugged in, but fully operational. I would argue DIU’s not there yet, but I will say this, all of the work that has been done has put them on the cusp of really being a powerful innovation engine, and I just wanted to recognize all the people that did the heavy lifting, but I think we are in this really rare pivot point, David. And this is where everybody gets hyperbolic. But I feel it. I said I’ve been doing this since 87. I just feel like we’re in this incredibly interesting moment. And it’s transitory though, so we’ve got to exploit right now. We’ve got eight months to exploit before the board, you know, of it wasn’t invented here. So I just, that’s kind of where I am. I don’t know where you are.

ACME General Corp: Well, you said several interesting things in there that I’d like to drill down in on. One, When you look at the Defense Innovation Unit, my view is the most interesting thing that they did was they came in, they understood the difficulty for non-traditional companies, anyone who’s not part of the traditional defense industrial base, in operating under the doorstop called the Federal Acquisition Regulations. And they said, how can we put in place a solicitation structure and a contract structure that allows us to open the aperture and make it easier for businesses to compete that don’t have a far-compliant accounting system, that haven’t jumped through all the hoops of doing cost-plus accounting and things that the defense a base does every day and a non-traditional company does not at all. And so they looked at the idea of using a commercial solution opening as a solicitation mechanism and using other transaction authorities for contracting. And they not only figured out how to do that, but they then started training acquisition officials from around the rest of the government, bringing them in, showing them what they were doing, teaching them how to be comfortable using non-traditional mechanisms, and then putting them back into these contracting commands around the in a way that I think had a huge impact and has been very useful. Where I get more concerned is when you look at the latest sort of innovation pushed out of Congress, and that was to give a billion dollars in colorless money essentially to DIU to help accelerate these projects through the so-called Valley of Death.

It’s great to have flexible capital. It’s great to have colorless money. I’d love to see that money pushed down either to the services or better yet in some cases out into the field to allow people to solve their own problems and see organizations like DIU essentially being a validator of what can you spend that money on because you don’t have the capability to decide is this particular small group one drone compromised or not at a unit level. But if you said, like, here are things you can buy, here’s money, you buy what works out to operators in the field, I think you’d see things move faster. so you talked about the free market approach that FDR took in the Second World War. Like, that to me is that. Have the people with the problems with the money to solve them, put some guardrails around how they can spend it, and then see where things go.

CM: You know, if we were at the bar right now, or we were out in the street having this conversation, I’d start pushing you and going, yes, yes, yes, but we’re on this podcast. I don’t want to punch you in the arm because that would be bad. And I’m feeling pretty bad about this podcast because we’re green. It’s good to catch up. Here’s my thing is we need to flip the funnel on its head right now. All of the requirements development, all that BS starts at the Pentagon. And you just described, like, here’s my big idea, and it’s gonna sound tactical, and everybody can Wikipedia and call me out that this is stupid, but I’ve got an idea that it would be fun to crowdsource this. You just described the challenges or the problem right now. I’m going to badmouth, my last bad mouth of anybody or anything is I’m disappointed. Most of the innovation funds are going to a handful of companies and you are very modest about it. Well, it should trickle down further. Yeah, we are not truly leveraging the innovation and the ideas that are out there in small business and you, Acme deals with it every day, I know, I’m preaching to the choir. I’m disappointed right now that, In many ways, all we have done is taken the prime contractors, which exist for a very good reason, and we’ve turned them, we’ve just kind of re-flavored it because the innovation economy right now in the Department of Defense, I get like 4 billion to 4.5 billion. You can literally say that that’s true innovation money. By the way, budgets about a trillion, David, last time I checked. That is literally spit in the ocean. So there’s an opportunity here with the incoming administration, there’s going to be an effort to try to really put some serious more money. Like you go to 2X man, that’s still like probably the Pentagon spends that in copy paper. Although we don’t use copy paper anymore, but the Pentagon does because every briefing still has to have 20 hard copies made to go around the table for all the old people at the conference table that can’t see. That was a joke. You’re not laughing. 

ACME General Corp: I’m wearing my glasses today. I call it the over 40 test, except now that I’m over 50, it gets worse. 

CM: You know I’m right. My little, the copy paper still exists. Here’s my idea and I’d love the Army, I actually Googled this. I found, I kind of got, there’s about 150 battalion size units. A battalion is typically 400 to 500 people commanded by an O5 Lieutenant Colonel or Commander in the Navy. I don’t know what it is in the Space Force. 

ACME General Corp: Me either. 

CM: Do you know what their ranks are there? 

ACME General Corp: Not at all.

CM: I don’t want to pull my phone out and check. 

ACME General Corp: I know they’re guardians. 

CM: They’re guardians. you the idea. Those are pretty much the units of action. And here’s the idea. If you have 150 million, 150 of them push out a million dollars to every single one of those units and say, put in, like you said, very fuzzy kind of outline and let them figure out how to spend that money. Now, I guarantee you some units, some, you know, captain will spend it on, you know, the blankets with the weights in them so that you feel like that’s probably not a, here’s my thing, here’s my thing. Maybe that’s not a bad idea. So instead, like right now, right now you remember in the Navy, remember the inspector generals would come, you were a submarine, a submariner, a submarine. I don’t know. You were on submarines. was. You would have your inspection protocols in the army. It’s the inspector general who comes down and you know in airborne units they look at your parachute logs, the jump logs of everybody and they’re like, my gosh, you know, this guy, column four is filled out instead of night combat equipment, that should have been a night jump. for us it was naval reactors and they were, that’s important. were pretty serious. Yeah. So take, maybe we shouldn’t have them do it, but in the army, instead of having the inspector generals look at jump logs and, you know, make sure like, everybody’s files are in order. Why can’t they be the ones that then go down every year and inspect this innovation fund?

And if the captain that bought the weighty blankets, you know the ones I’m talking about when you’re watching football, your kids love them. 

ACME General Corp: My daughter’s got one. 

CM: Yeah, same here. And they look through what was spent, like weight blankets from, know, whatever Amazon, $500,000. Well, what was the idea behind that? Maybe they have a very good idea or maybe they just resold them because if you’re sending this stuff to Green Berets, they’re just going to like end up with this doggone racket going. That’s what you use your inspectors for. I know you want to say something, I’m closing with this. I read all this crap about we aren’t incentivizing innovation. These officers and senior NCOs don’t understand innovation in the armed forces. And I think there’s something to that. How about we start with that? And can you imagine the conversations like you are going to create this entire energy into the system. People are going to read the innovation books. They’re going to want to understand what does innovation mean? And I want to be very loose with it because I want them to argue. And then if we could actually use our data management and machine learning models, we could create like an archive, a database that then is going to go, because really what you’re doing is problem identification. It’s not innovation. You’re going to see what everybody did and then you’re going to be able to cross reference and like we got a problem and that’s what the Defense Innovation Unit now focuses on. 

ACME General Corp: That idea of Oversight is even maybe not the right word to use, but monitoring what’s happening at a subordinate level, collecting that information, disseminating it to where it should be going, sharing best practices, conducting lessons learned like that function doesn’t exist in a formal enough way right now across the department are, depending on how you count, roughly 300 innovation organizations across the Department of Defense. The Army alone has the Army Applications Lab, the Rapid Capability and Critical Technology Office, the Army Applied Sibber Office. And that’s before you get to the DEVCOM enterprise of all of the labs and engineering centers that have been around for the last 50 years.

There’s not a coordinated function sitting on the top of that, I think, looking at who’s doing what, thinking about if you should be consolidating, where there’s overlap, where there’s a lack of coordination, what information systems you should be using. And so what ends up happening is you get this experimentation with R&D dollars that should be funneling into the development of concepts and requirements, but it occurs in so many stovepipe pockets that it’s sitting on someone’s hard drive somewhere and no one even knows where to send or how to get it. That’s a function that groups like DIU or service level groups I think could be doing that aren’t being done right now so that you identify what’s going poorly, identify what’s going well, and do less of the former and more of the latter across the service.

CM: That’s my big idea and I think we need to crowd source that because I literally came up with this. was on a panel or something and I didn’t know what to say and I could tell I was losing everybody. So I just threw that out there. I don’t know where it came from, but I’ve really started to tease it out. I talked to other people. I’ll give you a quick example. There is a special operations unit in the United States Army that will remain unidentified because I don’t want the Army to go down there and inspect their purchase who recently went out to Africa to do a partnership opportunity and used Starlink off the books to learn and to communicate. Of course, Starlink was not the G6, the signal officer. That’s not an approved thing. Of course, the young captain was like, shh, don’t tell anybody I did this. Of course, we’re like, how’d it work? He’s like, worked great. The point- 

ACME General Corp: I absolutely will not talk about this on a podcast. 

CM: The challenge, of course, is he’s not going to report into some sort of lessons learned database or something like that because, so we do need to flip that on its head, but what I heard you say, I’m doing bumper stickers right now. And one of the best documents about war fighting I’ve ever read is called the United States Marine Corps War Fighting. It’s a very small pamphlet. Cominac Gray did it years ago. He wrote the intro and it talks about what war is, what the Marine Corps’ role is. It’s just like this magical document. I would love to have the same thing about, you know, whatever words we want to use, transformation, innovation, that, you know, young people in the field would read and understand. And one of the bumper stickers on that is centralization is evil. But we can now based what I heard you say, I didn’t know we had 200, 400, whatever. That is pretty typical. Probably too many. Probably too many. But I think if we try to, there’s going to be this urge to centralize everything. we need to have this overarching think at this aggregated decentralized approach is essential because we can do that now without the typical waste by having a data layer in there or communications layer in there because how man I’ll tell you what quick war story, you would, I was in special forces, and we would be working on something in our specific unit. And then like once a year we’d all get together at some big conference at Fort Liberty, then Fort Bragg, and you would find out like three other units were doing the same thing. And that’s all right, but it’s not necessary. If we would have had an ability to get a ping, like, wait, guys, you know, it’s all about how you label data and I don’t understand any of that you do. So I think there’s something there that we really need to tease out. 

ACME General Corp: Well, and there’s a difference between creating hierarchy that imposes control where in order to do anything at a lower level you have to request permission up and up up and up, echelon until someone can finally say yes. There’s a difference between that and providing some visibility into what’s happening at lower levels so that if you’re sitting at the bottom of that pyramid, you know what your peers are doing on either side of you. And at the top, there can be some effort to say, someone’s doing something better over here, or you should share what you’re doing with these people because they could benefit from it. That conduction function at the top is different than a control function, I think, and you have to enable that with technology because… 

CM: You think it’s doable? 

ACME General Corp: If you have the right information systems in place, and it gets hard because you also have to have the right entitlements and permissions, and it turns out… If you think about your example of the group in Africa using Starlink, when you’re doing creative things sometimes, you worry about getting in trouble. And so you’re concerned about having too much transparency because you don’t know how people who are outside of the context you’re operating in are going to respond to that. And so there have to be relationships of trust, and there has to be thoughtfulness about who controls the information. But right now, there’s nothing. There’s not an emphasis structure there in place. One of the things that we’re doing with our good friends at CMI2, it’s a program called Catalyst Pathfinder for the Army. What it’s essentially doing is going into different units on their request and providing software tools for them to identify, individual soldiers to identify problems or concerns that they have. And then to flow those up echelons so that if you’re sitting at a battalion level or a brigade level or a division level, you can see the sort of heat map of what are your soldiers saying is an issue or what would they like to have solved or what suggestions do they have? And you can then decide whether to promote those into projects for solutioning and how. it enabling the soldiers to solve the problem themselves? Is it creating a partnership with a research university? Is it sending it out to the private sector to solicit at actual solutions, but like you have that visibility and you have to allow for that infrastructure but then also for control of that information at a suitable level so that people are willing to share. 

CM: Let me ask you this because there’s now there’s I don’t know if it’s a body of work but there’s some people that are claiming that these innovation labs and like every unit now has their own something works right which is which frankly and none of them have any funding which frankly supports our contention that If there’s such demand and need at the operational level, like the unit level, that they take their own resources to create some sort of process procedures organization to develop or get what they need to do their jobs, indicated Pentagon’s not doing their job, obviously. So what I wanted to ask you is this, you’re seeing some kind of the counter-reformation where the experts, some think tankers or these self-proclaimed acclaimed experts are claiming that innovation money is wasted with these bottom-up approaches. this is cute that the 101st Airborne Division developed this new thing that can stop that can improve training readiness by virtual, you know, training mechanisms. You got any thoughts on that? Because I think it’s I think I’m good, well I’m bearing the punchline, I’m good wasting a little bit of money because we’ve wasted a hell of a lot more money on these insane legacy systems that are going to be destroyed within the first 48 hours of active combat. So where are you in this? 

ACME General Corp: So, you know, it’s funny, was talking to a senior official at Army Futures Command recently and I was asking him about this thing that I’m sure you’re familiar with, but maybe all of our audience is not called the Rapid Equipping Force that the Army used to have. And the idea of the Rapid Equipping Force was if you’re out in the field and you have a problem and it’s not like I need a new tank, but it’s I need something that’s commercially available or something that could be available with limited modification, you could go to the ref and they would go out and find it and they would get to it. 

CM: I really thought that was a great organization. during it was based on the failure of the system to supply people in the field with really life-saving capabilities that was available and that they needed 

ACME General Corp: yeah and so you know the the army in classic army fashion shut down the rapid equipping force a few years ago and part of the criticism of that was that well they bought all this stuff and there was no institutionalization of maintenance and sustainment for the things that they bought so things would end up in like a where house somewhere in a con xbox and people didn’t know how to use it when they came into the next rotation and a lot of those criticisms were totally valid. Some of them I think weren’t as valid because you weren’t buying things that needed to be used for 30 years. You’re not buying them like tanks. You’re buying like discarded. Yes. So like so that was okay but what didn’t happen there that I would still love to see happen is a postmortem that is actually looking at what worked and what didn’t work and how to make it better. And I ask about this and the response was, well, we only have, whatever, 500 people at the headquarters to look at these things and so there’s no capacity. you’ve got to create that, whether there is or isn’t, you have to create that capacity to take these lessons learned, to think about how do you devolve authority and processes down to be more agile and quick, but to also be responsible and have adequate oversight and just continue to improve that rather than saying we tried it once, it failed, we’re shutting it down. 

CM: 75th Innovation Command. We’ve got plenty of capability out there that is not connected to like that’s such a that problem is like that angers me to hear that. I am respectful of the fact that they’re overworked understaffed under resource perhaps I don’t know I doubt that’s the case but you know what I’m saying. just there’s so many opportunities out there. The ref was great and I was part of the shutdown. fought there. There were a couple, there were four organizations that were created during the war for this reason. And then as soon as the war ended, the bean counters came in and we had to derationalize them and get rid of them. One of them was Jada, the Joint Improvised Explosive Defeat Device Organization. I probably had that wrong. And then that got like downsized. It survived. And of course, you know, they were supposed to go into counter UAS before it counter UAS before counter UAS most of the world ever knew what it was. And they’re like, you guys, you’re just chasing a mission. Remember that? You remember that, David? 

ACME General Corp: I do. I worked under Jayito in Baghdad in 2006 and 2007.

CM: And then just to close that thought, lessons learned. when you had OCO, Overseas Contingency Operations, which was this huge slush fund that was required to actually fight a war because the base budget was being spent on other things. So they had this huge slush fund. Heck, it would go $100 billion a year sometimes. And one of those things that we used at Foreign Special Operations was we recognized that the lessons learned piece was critical, but people were so busy that they couldn’t, were rotating so quickly. The last thing you could do was sit down for a couple days and do your lessons learned. So what we did was we hired like old timers that had retired and they became basically lessons learned facilitators who would do all the work. They would go out and do interviews and then they basically were admin assistants. They would plug it into the system. You want to know how long that lasted? As soon as OCO dried. And the first thing that left, guess what? Like, we We’re not going to pay for that anymore. 

ACME General Corp: Well, that is, I think, a great example of the fact that we’re constantly thinking about how to do things better and looking forward. There are a lot of examples looking backwards of things we have done that we stopped doing that are worth understanding why we started doing them, what worked, what didn’t, and whether they’re relevant today, and OCO funds, the Overseas Contingency Operations Funds, are in some sense just a form of what you and I were talking about, of pushing funding down to operational units to let them solve their own problems. I that was the… 

CM: I had a real eye-opener because I thought after the three Americans were killed, it was at Tower Three or whatever. Was that getting on a year ago now? I expected that there would be this all hands on deck, throw as much money as we can at it, let’s solve this problem. That is kind of the way the American military works, frankly. And I thought Army Futures Command, which had the lead for the Joint Counter UAS Office, the JCO, would all of a sudden get plussed up and nothing happened. nothing happened David, you can argue with me and say, Chris, you don’t know, and you’ll get all sorts of nasty grams. Like actually the JCO, the Army Futures Command did this, but then I had a revelation, there was no OCO. So it all came down to the programming process and the budgeting process and I felt like such a dunce, right? Because I should have known that we don’t have OCO anymore, but really what we’re talking about is the flexibility of funding. There has to be more flexibility of funding. Your OTA, other transaction authority, I’m so glad to hear that they’re kind of promulgating the best practices because not too long ago, there were like four people in the Department of Defense. One was at Rock Island who actually had the courage, commitment, and just didn’t give a crap. They’re like, this is a great authority, I’m gonna use it, and accepted all that professional risk. And they’re like, no, we need this. 

David, there were literally like four people that had the you know what to use that thing and I’m so glad to hear that we’re kind of trying to spread that out. 

ACME General Corp: But DIU has done a great job of getting more people comfortable with that and I think that’s a real legacy that they’ll carry on. 

We’re running up against time so I just want to hit on one last thing before we wrap here and that is looking overseas at allies and partners. You and I mentioned spending some time together in Australia talking about the AUKUS relationship. We’ve seen over the last several years efforts to build tighter connectivity with industry in places like South Korea. Hanwha has a maintenance agreement with the Navy now to maintain ships in Korea. Hanwha Ocean recently bought the Philly shipyard. Hanwha Defense recently brought in Mike Smith, who previously was at Lockheed and HII to run their US defense subsidiary. So they’re an example of one of many Korean organizations that are moving strongly into working more tightly with US partners and the US military directly. You see similar things happening in Japan. You see similar things happening across Europe. I’m curious on your perspective on the what the opportunities that looks like to work more closely with allies and partners, not just at a force to force level, but at an industry level as well. 

CM: You know, for your listeners that, like, who’s this moron, Chris Miller? I actually was the acting secretary of defense in the last administration for the final, last Trump administration in the final days. So I’m going to say something that probably will preclude me from any opportunities of influencing the next Trump administration. But I thought this Biden administration did a good job with their thoughts about the defense industrial base. I think the policies, procedures, strategies they put out were a little nascent. But that’s all right. They started the conversation. think one of the most important pillars of that strategy is recognition that the US defense industrial base is capable of creating the mass and volume of supplies equipment required to fight a major war. And I thought their notice that we need to expand the defense industrial base to partners allies was essential because we cannot produce the quantity, perhaps quality of capabilities we need. I think I’m really going to strongly advocate that we continue that process. And let’s go there. Let’s just go there real quick. I’m a national security guy, professional. I’m bipartisan in my support of, you know, our kids who are going to have to do the heavy lifting on this. And I’m going to strongly advocate that we expand those relationships. And let’s be honest, President Trump understands business and recognizes the deficiency in our current defense industrial base. You talked about shipbuilding. I went out to Busan in South Korea. I think that’s one. Yeah, it is that company. I think they had like 18 dry docks. I love HII. I really do.

But you go down to Ingalls in Mississippi, I think they have two to four dry docks with a couple more available, but frankly they can’t get workers in there right now, trained people. So to answer your question, I’m going to aggressively and strongly advocate that that’s got to be an essential pillar of our national security strategy.

ACME General Corp: That is a great note to end on. Chris, thank you so much for your time today. Thank you for your service. I look forward to seeing what you get up to with this new administration. 

CM: David, pleasure. I really hope that what you guys are doing here is so important. In closing, I’ll tell you, know, Petraeus did his counterinsurgency manual and he brought in all those academics and all. We need… What I’m going to advocate for is the new joint war fighting concept comes together, maybe even the national military strategy comes together. We need to business and finance into that process because we’ve never done that before because these are usually standalone, hollowed documents. We need to bring expertise from outside of the NatSec space. So I’m really going to advocate that and you’re going to be a key part of it. Thanks for you and your listeners caring about this. You’re 25 listeners. 

ACME General Corp: sign me up and thank you again for coming. Again, my name is David Bonfili. This is Accelerate Defense and thank you for joining us today.