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The Team House with your hosts, Jack Murphy and David Bark.
Hello, everyone, welcome to episode three hundred and twenty four of The Team House. I'm Jack here with Dave and our guest on tonight's show is Tom Gaines. He's the author of Quantum Dagger, which I read here on my kindle. Tom, you want to hold up the paperback version. You can go and find both of these out on Amazon now and pick up a copy. Tom serves as a signals officer and a United States Army Special Operations Command officer, and he.
Wrote this book.
It envisions near term war and how technology is going to impact tomorrow's conflicts. So, Tom, welcome to the show. I'm really happy to have you on here. I really enjoyed the book.
Yeah, thanks, I appreciate you guys inviting me on. I really like what you all do with the team house, the discussions that you all have with different members of the community. I think what you guys do is phil a pretty important niche which is not filled by a lot of the other other podcasts that are out there. So yeah, I appreciate what you guys are doing.
That's a strong endorsement. Thank you, Tom, I'll take that.
So let's let's start off talking a little bit about you and your military career and which will of course lead us into the book.
Tell us a little bit about you.
Know, where you came from and how you ended up in the army.
What was that path like for you.
Yeah, so, I mean all stories started at the beginning. So my dad was in the Army. He was actually a Medical Corps officer, so he was a physician. He got out like right when I was in like third grade, at the beginning of a desert storm. So I was vaguely around the military, but not really for the most
of my life. Then we moved to East Tennessee, grew up always saying that I was going to follow in his footsteps, did what everybody else did, and went to college and kind of ran into some trouble because I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. You know. I finally got to the point where the world was open to me, and I struggled. Fortunately, though,
I kind of stumbled onto ROTC. I thought about, honestly just dropping out of school and enlisting, but that seemed a little bit drastic to do something I had no idea what I was gonna do. I was like, Oh, just try this ROTC thing, see what that is. I didn't have any idea what the difference would have been between and listening or you know, going through ROTC and becoming an officer. I was like, oh, just I'll do
this thing. And it turned out to me a great decision for me, right, because essentially I just lacked sort of discipline and drive to accomplish things on my own. So I kind of latched onto what the armory provided in ROTC and I just borrowed theirs and it was enough to get me get me through. I College was wasted on me then, but that's all that's w right.
I think the youth is wasted on the young. I made it through though, and commissioned into the infantry, went through the infantry pipeline, so you know, the Benning School for boys, and then Ranger school and then Airborne school, and then my first duty assignment was with three to two Striker Brigade Combat Team out of Fort Lewis. Showed up about a month or two before they were due to employee, so immediately hopped on the first deployment with
him in two thousand and six. Did fifteen months there. While I was there, I kind of decided that the infantry life wasn't necessarily for me, so I transferred over to the Signal Corps because I wasn't ready to just get out of the Army altogether. So I said, well, I've kind of got a technical aptitude. I'll try this Signal Corps thing again. I have no idea what I'm doing. I just think, oh, yeah, this will be cool. I'll go do that. So I do that transition, do another
rotation in Iraq, get back. After that rotation, they send me to school to learn how to be a Signal Corps officer. And while I was at Fort Gordon, I got a I got an email saying, hey, come to this, come to this briefing. You know we're going to We're going to tell you about you know, this special assignment within Army Special Operations Command. Maybe maybe it'll be interested. I had no idea what it was about. If you notice there's a theme here, but I was like, yeah,
I want to do something interesting. So I showed up. They said, we can't tell you what this is, but you know, come and come and try out if you're good enough. Cool. So I did that. I you know, I kept raising my hand and saying, yeah, I'll do this,
and it's it's worked out pretty well for me. I think one of the great things about the Army is there's so many opportunities for that where you know, if you're just willing to do things, there's all sorts of different paths where you can find what it is specifically that you want to go. It may not all be glamorous, it may not all be perfect. But there are so many different opportunities in the Army if if you kind
of take a chance and find them. So I did that and it worked out really well for me in this case.
Tom, I think your camera got knocked out of focus a little bit.
If I can't hold there, you go go perfect.
Cool.
So yeah, it sounds like you were constantly looking to challenge yourself and see what the next thing was and found what you were looking for.
It sounds like, yeah, exactly.
You know, I I didn't want to do the typical thing. I wanted to be able to make make an impact greater than what I thought I'd be able to do if I just, you know, stayed doing it enterprise management. You know, we absolutely need people that do that. I just would have been been bored. So I needed to do something else. And that's something else is what led me to use the SoC.
And you're I mean, what what can you say about you know, where you're at today, what you're the next step is, you know, sort of in your career, and I think you mentioned that you were You're getting towards the point of retiring out of the right my current job.
I've basically been promoted out of doing anything fun at this point, so they they pulled me back into doing infrastructure sorts of things. So my current role is I am the G six four first Special Forces Command, so I run all of the IT enterprise for for WHITESFCE, so all of the green berets and civil affairs. That's that's my current role for about another four months or so, and then I'll, you know, get my piece of paper, my handshake thanking me for my service, and I'll be retired.
Well, unlike US infantry guys, it sounds like you have a career track where you can actually walk on to a really good job in the civilian world.
Yeah. The problem is I don't know that I want to do that. I've found doing that for so long. Yeah, right out, I don't necessarily want to do that coming out. So I think what I want to end up is helping other people figure out how to be adaptable and Brazilian.
So that's been a project that I've been working on for a couple of years with a neuroscientist out of Ohio State, basically going back into the Special Operations schoolhouses and trying to figure out what it is about those schoolhouses that train operators to survive and thrive and win when they're put in these sorts of load data, volatile,
uncertain situations. And you know, kind of what we've done is we've taken those lessons learned and we've brought them back to his lab and paired it with what neurosciences is telling us about the way the brain works, and then translate that into lessons that we can give to people who aren't going on the Long Walk or aren't going to Robin Sage or things like that. Getting it into the schools so we can make kids more adaptable and resilient as they're they're coming up today.
What are there any preliminary findings from that effort about, like what is it about special ops training that is kind of like giving these qualities, giving us the types of soldiers that we hope for.
Yeah, so it really comes down to the open ended nature of what we give them. So when we so we interviewed a bunch of folks from the community on hey, you were successful, what was it about you? What was it about your training that made you successful? And all of the green Berets pointed to one specific thing, and that was Robin Sage. So Robin Sage was like the first point in their career where like it was a
it's a very open ended exercise, right. The the cadre there do a really good job of just reacting to whatever the students do. So there is no one set answer. And unfortunately most of our lives, we're taught, hey, there is one right answer. In school, you got to get to the professor's answer, that's the right answer. So we
raise a generation of students who think that way. So one they think that there's one right answer, and then two, when things don't necessarily go their way, the immediately to authority figures to solve their problems for them, right, And that's that's you see that in kids, you see that in adults. Now, people are just not necessarily given those skills. But what Robin Sage does is it essentially removes that
from them. In these sort of open ended exercises, they say, hey, figure it out, right, So what we've figured out was that a lot of the gray Beards that have gone back there, they're long since retired, but they still want
to give back to the community. They're doing it through, you know, being members at Robin Sage, and they're they're using words like, hey, trust your gut, use your gut instinct, you know, use your intuition, things like that, And what we found is that really what we're doing is we're training up four different things. We're training up intuition, so you're an ability to spot something that's different in your environment. Your imagination so, your ability to come up with a
new plan in response to that. Your common sense, so your ability to decide wisely even in the absence of a bunch of data. And then finally, your emotions, so your ability to actually, like relative regulate your emotion to take advantage of what it's telling you about yourself and your environment to make better decisions. So that's what all of these soft pipelines are actually training up, even though they didn't necessarily have those words, that's what they were
all doing. So we took those findings. We went to the Command in General Staff College and tried it out on some majors because that's where you know, field grade officers go to get their field grade lobotomies where they're good idea, fairy colonies, whatever you want to call it. So we went we tested it on them, and through we gave them an hour block of instruction on this new method, and the results were essentially that we raised
their creativity by one standard deviation, which is pretty statistically significant. Right, So if you came in with an average amount of creativity, became better than average. If you were below average, we got you up a little bit. And if you were already above average created creativity, we made you better. Then we replicated that study with some college students and so
different different testing, different evaluators, same results. So the college students were in about two hours, we raised their creative IQ by one standard deviation. We also raised their resilience by about the same amount. So what we mean by resilience is, hey, when your plan breaks, can you come up with a second plan. And then we're like, oh, this is cool, let's try it on third graders. So we tried it. We tried it on third graders, and we got the same results. So we've that's been published
in the New York Academy of Sciences. It's now like the second or third most read article in the New York Academy of Sciences. That's history, and so we're having a pretty good impact on those findings. Which is pretty exciting.
Is that is that article? Do people have to pay to download that?
Or or no, it's yeah. So you can just google New York Academy of Sciences Creativity and it's there.
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We've written stuff for Harvard Business Review, We've Google has picked up a bunch of our stuff. We work with NASA is that everybody is after this same problem, right, whether it's kids today trying to do this or folks
graduating from high school graduating from college. One of the things that we get when we go out and talk to the business community is they see their employees that don't know how to handle adversity or uncertainty right, and they don't know what to do if they think that there's like one way to do things, and as soon as you deviate from that, they fall the pieces. So this is something that everybody's kind of understood, but nobody's really had a pretty good an answer with until now.
Pulling those lessons out from the soft community and getting them out to the rest of the world.
Well, I mean that's a terrific results because the army has kind of struggled, I think for decades with how do we inject more creativity and initiative for sure with our soldiers. And you know that runs up against the micromanaging, zero defact environment that the military cultivates or did for a long period of time. So it's interesting and I think absolutely this is directionally correct about how we train and indoctrinate soldiers.
Yeah, exactly. So one of the heartening things about this program is the current CAT commander, Lieutenant General Eagle, So he oversees all of the military PM right, so all of the professional military education. He is super interested and invested in this sort of training because I think he sees the writing on the wall that it's not going to be this sort of sterile conflict like we had in g Watt if we have to go to.
To warm, humans are more important than hardware.
Right exactly. There's there's something about that in you know, the Soft Truth somewhere I don't know, I don't know it's written somewhere.
Well, on that note, let's start talking a little bit about your book, Quantum Dagger that just came out, what a couple of months ago, I think, So, how did the idea of even occur to you of writing a novel? Sounds like you're pretty busy with your military career. How did that come about?
Yeah, so honestly it came about from this research project. So my my friend and I were like, all, cool, we've written this academic piece, We've written a bunch of these other things, but like, how do we get people to sort of understand what it is that we're talking about? And he's like, well, well, uh, you could write a you could write a novel about it. It's like, I can't write it. I can't write a novel. I'm not a guy who's had any sort of desire intent to
do that. I'm not going to do that. He's like, no, you should totally write that. So again I was like Okay, I have no idea what this thing is, but I'll raise my hand and I'll do it. So that that's kind of the genesis of this novel. So a lot of our research is juxtaposed against the way that so many people think that intelligence works. Right. So the common way that people think that intelligence works is logic and reasoning based, right, That's that's what kind of got us
to where we are. That's and it's brilliant. We absolutely need logical reasoning, we need the ability to critically analyze data. The problem is, human beings are very bad at it. Yeah, we're just we're just not very good. Fortunately, computers fantastic at it. Computers are way better at it than we are. But the problem is we keep trying to make human beings more like computers and it just is failing spectaclic
because we're not really good at it. So that's sort of the genesis of this book is a way to get people to understand that human beings we're never going to be better at crunching large amounts of data than computers are, but we're really good at other things. We're really good at low data environments. Because if you put even the smartest computer up against the situation where they don't have a lot of data to work against, they
fail in spectacular ways. So the best example that I have of this is recently the Marines went up against an AI pattern recognition software. I don't know if you guys.
Have have heard this, No, I think I know this one.
Yeah, probably like a year ago, where uh, you know, these these technical engineers have been working for months on target identification software so that they could detect people moving in and around the environment. So they were like, all right, we're gonna we're gonna test. This thing is going to be great. So they gave they gave the task to play the Red team to Marines and what are marine's gonna do? The Marines are going to do marine things. So one of one marine did somersaults right up to
this turn and was not detected. Another marine like literally did like the the cartoon get under a cardboard box and was not detected. Right, a human being standing there would be like, that's that's totally a dude in a cardboard boxer somersault. What are you guys doing? But the computer wasn't trained on that, their data didn't account for it, so it didn't know what to do with it.
And it's awesome how fast some young marines came up with a way to defeat that.
Yeah. Right, if you want ingenuity, give give the Efore mafia a problem and tell them that you're gonna look the other way and go be back and need a solution. Right that they will solve every single problem you need them to. So that's Machines are fantastic, but they're also
fantastically dumb in certain certain cases. So how do we how do we imagine a world where humans are doing human things the machines are doing machine things right, Because the other problem, one of the problems I see right now is that we are investing so much money in all of these advanced technologies, and we need to because there's a lot of great things that they can do, but it can't come at the expense of training humans to deal with whatever situation comes with myself, train up
those fundamental skills that make us win in whatever conflict we need. So that was that was sort of the genesis of this novel. Hey, are what are the technical capabilities that might come out in the near future, what's within the realm of the possible and then what would it look like if those were sort of taken to their logical end, if there was, you know, a competitor that just doubled down on all of these sorts of
advanced technology. And what would happen though, if we just unleashed the power of an ODA, Right, so a team of green berets against them, just they happen to be in the right place at the right time, because that's one of use of socks, you know, guiding principles right now, is that they are out in the contact layer working with our partners, building relationships, and they just have placement and access in these regions that aren't necessarily in conflict,
but we are absolutely competing. So what could they do against an adversary who has all of these all of these advanced systems. So that was that was the genesis of this whole thing.
So to tell our listeners or viewers a little bit more, the plot of your book centers around special Ops Intel guy who's kind of out there doing Singleton stuff and an ODA that's in Vietnam, and then eventually these two plot lines come together in the book. Of course, the title Quantum Dagger Quantum is a big part of this
novel and what it's about. Before we get into some of maybe some of the details there, I would like to, you know, open it up, maybe with a broader discussion about quantum, which is a bit of a buzzword today, but it is a real technology.
I mean, I feel like I'm qualified. You know, I did watch everything in the Marvel Comics universe, so I do feel as though I have a good grasp on what quantum is.
I would I don't have a good grasp.
And one quantum is I know it's related to quantum physics, and there's quantum computing, and these are technologies that are kind of on a near term horizon, maybe in the next ten years that we're going to see. Could you tell us what this is and what its military applications are.
Yeah, so quantum computing does exist right now, we have we have quantum computers, and actually in twenty nineteen we reach the tipping point where a quantum computer can now outperform or the fastest the best normal computer. So like it, it's a real thing now, it's just not where we think it's going to be in the future. So we'll start back at the beginning again, right, So, it is essentially a different technology than current computers are. So it's
sort of like a candle and a light bulb. They both do the same thing, they both illuminate, right, but they go about it very in very different ways. So with a classical computer, you're using electricity and you're storing essentially like a bunch of on and off switches. So one bit can either be on or it can be off, right, And that's where we get the idea of like binary. If you ever see some computer code breaking down, it's a bunch of ones and zeros. That's where like medio
can see the matrix. It's just a bunch of ones and zeros flipping by. And what's great about that is a computer can look at those ones and zeros and extract that into information, and they can do that very very quickly, much faster than human beings can do. So they can do thousands and millions of computations every second by interpreting what that each of those symbols actually means
when you put them all together. But they're limited in their speed and capacity kind of by the limits of electricity, right. Quantum computers, on the other hand, use a totally different property in physics and a totally different technology based on the idea of quantum mechanics.
Right.
So in normal computers you have that zero one gase, so it's a switch that can either be on or off. Quantum computers use instead of bits, they use cubits would imaginatively name quantum bits, right, And instead of just being on or off, they can be both. They can be multiple things at one time, right, So it's what they call the superposition. So one cubit can be multiple things at once, versus on a traditional computer it can only
be one thing. So what that means is when you pair a bunch of different cubits together, now, instead of having to be a one at one point and then a zero, right, a very slow mechanical process, it can do calculations vastly more quickly, right. So it's it's orders of magnitude faster, and it's able to do things that would take a normal computer years and years almost instantaneously. And that's with the systems that we have right now.
So if you translate that into start to get a discussion of military means, one of the things that people are talking a lot about when they talk quantum computers is encryption. Right. So the current kind of gold standard for encryption in the world is something called AEES two fifty six, right, So that's a specific encryption algorithm that's two hundred and fifty six bits long.
Right.
So essentially, like the number of different possibilities that any one password could be is to raise the two hundred and fifty six power, which is a very large number. Right. Traditional computer, so the strongest computer in the world right now would take something like fifty million years or something to break that. It's just it's not even worth brute for we're attacking that password. Quantum computers as they stand right now, it's not like an instantaneous thing with where
the technology sits right now. A quantum computer now would take one hundred days to a year or so to break that password. Wow, So it's not it's not like the sky is falling right now. But if you look at where computing has come in the past, right where we had the computers that filled rooms right that we're using punch.
Cards, which quantum computers kind of do.
Right now, Quantum computers are absolutely in the room filling
space right now. But as we refine that technology where it's going to be miniaturized like everything else, and eventually it will get to the point where even those high algorithms are going to fall relatively quickly to the point where they're no longer useful, you know, like everything in the competition, it's always a competition between offense and defense, right, ever since ever since somebody had a stick and somebody else got a different stick, right, this is no different.
So on the defense side, everybody is starting to work on quantum hardened algorithms and ways to combat this thing so that they can't read the mail. But we're not necessarily there yet.
When I think about the military applications, I typically think about what you just mentioned, quantum encryption and quantum decryption. And so it was interesting to reading your book sort of like on the tactical level, how is this really
going to impact the force? And your protagonist finds one of these devices like in a server farm where it shouldn't be right, well, when it is miniaturized and it is out there in the wild like that, what does that potentially mean for us as from a national security standpoint?
Yeah, so I think it has implications at every level of the war, right, And I do I kind of go into that and ask that question in the book at different phases. Right, So from the strategic lens, if I can read your mail, if I can read your email and know what your policies are, know where your
weaknesses are, I can exploit that to my own gain. Right, So, at the strategic level, if they have the ability to just break into our base, our email, our databases, and essentially read our correspondence, that's a pretty big threat to us. Down at the operational level, if I can do that same thing, but then exploit it in such a way that I can cause doubt. And this is this is
a specific mechanism I use in the book. I can use it to delay, deterred, deny, even if it's just for a short time you acting, I gain a pretty big asymmetric advantage. So again, the ability to sort of read and understand like what an adversary's capability is and readiness to respond to these sources of threats or even you know, so a little bit of doubt can buy
critical time, especially on the onset of a conflict. And then at the tactical level, if you have the ability to understand in near real time plans and intentions of what another force is doing like that's that's gold Like, That's what we've commanders have been wishing for for you know, millennium, is the ability to understand really what's going on. And unfortunately, for the majority of human civilization, we've been kind of mired in this claus Witzian fog, right, where we don't
really know what's going on. The best we could hope for was a really good scouting report from from cavalry. Right. If you look at what we've done in the global we're on terrorism, We've we've come a long way with that, Right.
We have spent a lot of money bringing these sorts of intelligence aggregators, a lot of these systems and integrate them to in talks in jocks, in intel centers, intel fusion centers, where we're pulling in fees from everywhere, and you know, you've got headquarters all around the world that are creating common understanding and working off of a common operating picture. That's we're close to that gold standard now.
But the problem is those are going to be the first thing that go in a modern conflict, right, That's that's one of the things that we've learned. We learned quickly at the beginning of the Ukrainian campaign was if you are in a static talk location, you've got your tak mahal put up, you've got your your kill TV on like nine different screens with different drone feeds off, Like that's you're not going to survive more than a couple hours. So we know that that can no longer
be the case. So how do you get those same effects while still being sort of disconnected and either hiding in the noise or being very careful about when and where and how you you communicate. And that's one of the problems that I've been working on, you know, I'm my current role with first Special Forces Command is hey, what does that actually look like? Because we have gotten spoiled.
We've been spoiled for the last twenty years. So like my basically my entire army career and the entire army career of more and more senior folks has been where we can communicate in the time and method of our of our choosing. I can pick up a radio, I can pick up a void call, I can get on a vtc H and I can talk to whoever whenever
I want for any length of time. And it doesn't matter, Right, But that's that's not the way it's going to be in this next conflict, right, and the army gets it, like we're experimenting with how it's going to look like, but we don't know to what extent that's actually going to going to be the case.
I mean that that whole thing has also created its own unique set set of problems, because all of a sudden, you have a lot of like combatants on the battlefield being micromanaged by somebody sitting in a jock, you know, a thousand miles away telling you know, trying to make trying to make their tactical decisions for them.
Yeah, exactly right. So what what we've done is in the military is the same thing that we sort of we talked about earlier with you know, the rise of logical reasoning in the school system.
Right.
We we had this idea that if we have like the perfect general with perfect information, we can come up with the perfect plan and then we can execute it perfectly, right, and then we will achieve the perfect victory. Right Like, That's that's an idea that is intoxicated Americans for decades, right, Like, that's that's the American way of war. We love technology and the idea that technology can get us to that
end state. And that's why one of the reasons why we love the idea of AI so much, Right, we love the idea that we I can have perfect information and then I can use that to make the perfect decisions. The problem I have with that is that that's not what is made as successful. If you look at like how we've been successful in wars or just as a nation, like,
that's not success in democratic terms. Democratic success is small groups of people going and figuring it out and coming together for a common united by a common purpose, but then figuring it out on there at the lowest level, right, sort of the centralized planning, decentralized execution thing that is in army doctrine if you follow the the doctrine of
mission command. Right, what I describe a little bit ago is essentially like authoritarianism or you know, modern manifestations of communism, where I can I can rule by adict and as long as my chess pieces play the perfect game as I have out, as I have laid out, I will I will win every single time. Like, that's not that's not democracy, Like, that's that's not what's made us successful.
But it's it's so intoxicating for people to think that you can do that when what we're really realizing is no, what makes us successful is when you unleash the creativity of the guys on the ground. Right, Like we were talking about earlier that the best way to solve a problem is to give the ephors the challenge and tell them, tell them they're not going home until the problem is solved.
Suddenly that that problem is getting solved, right, Like, one of the greatest examples of ingenuity that we like to point to in the Army PME is the idea of the getting through the hedgerows in in Normandy in World War Two, right where essentially a sergeant was like, Hey, I've got an idea for how we can get through these hedger rows. And that's where they came up with the idea to put the the blades on the front of the of tanks right field expedient. Like nobody tasked that.
They didn't form a task force, hire some you know, a big military contractor to come up with a bunch of different ideas. They were just like, no, man, figure this thing out. You know, how to weld here and here's some steel, Like weld some shit onto the front of this tank. We got a war to.
Win, right.
What I think is like really interesting is the way you're describing like a high tech, low tech environment at the same time, Like we're having this conversation about like AI teaming, quantum computers and all this borderline science fiction stuff, but at the same time you're also describing how the electronic warfare environment will be intense. You know, you have ballistic missiles coming into your talk. The notion of the
golden hour is out the window. If you have a casualty, you're gonna have to treat them in place you might Your comm's windows are gonna be different. The way that that the maneuver elements communicate with the headquarters elements is gonna have to change. I mean, I'm trying to like wrap my mind around that sort of new paradigm myself, like that combination of high tech and low tech.
Yeah, so essentially, and everybody's struggling with this in the civilian world, they're trying struggling with it. But what makes our challenge unique when it comes to the defense space is we have a multi optimization problem right in the in the civilian market, they just have to optimize to use all of the technology. How can I leverage technology to create value for my firm? Like, that's that's it cool,
and I mean that's that's easier said than done. In the military, we have to be able to do that, right, So when everything is turned on, when we're going full bore, all of our assets are working, we can outpace you. And going back to John Boy's oodle loop, I can get inside your ooda loop and make decisions faster than my adversary, and I can act on them faster than
my adversary. That's with everything turned on. But then we also have to optimize our processes for when all of that gets shut off, right, Right, what happens when I can't use these systems because either they're denied to me or if I turn them on, there's a missile that's going to come into my talk in twenty minutes. And then you know that spectrum in between, so we don't have the luxury of just going all in on this
one thing. We have to optimize on that spectrum, and unfortunately, what ends up happening is we do over optimize towards one end. Right, What optimization really gets us is brittleness.
Right right. I was kind of thinking about it.
You know, you mentioned, you know, like how much we love technology, and it's sexy, right, I mean, you know when you start talking about like integrated VR like headsets that give us a friend foe and everything else like that, like everything that can happen. But then it's almost like whoever is willing to like throw out that emp and has been training like Daredevil to fight with the lights off, right, and they turn off the lights knowing that's going to happen.
What happens to the element or the side that is not ready for that to happen.
Yeah, exactly. So here's the great part. The great part of that whole thing is if I train up the humans to do inherently human things, those same skill sets translate to whether I am do it using perfect information from the vacuums of data that are hoovering everything up on the battlefield, or if I'm doing it essentially with a map and compass. I'm still coming up with a plan. I am still aligning my team to execute my intent
to accomplish the mission. It's just what sort of toys am I bringing with this.
So, Tom, I have a question in regards to that.
So you mentioned how these marines beat this AI by doing things that would not defeat a human, And obviously there are things that you can do to defeat a human, you know, like gilly shoots and camouflage that maybe AIS can recognize patterns and whatnot. How how do people so obviously, depending on the environment we're going to go into, like, how do you create a hybrid strategy to deal with either or those things or both of those things at the same time.
Yeah, ideally it's a it's a team, right. So the concept of human machine teaming, the problem is a lot of the things that I hear about when it comes to human machine teaming is the human almost ends up like the dummy minder who's essentially like the minimum wage fry guy who's just like yep, nope, yep, right like that. That's that's not really it. That kind of reminds me of like the mic judge idiocracy and state, where we
just get led around by our nose. But that's not that's not where we're actually going to create magic, right. The magic is going to be when the machines are doing machine things and humans are doing the human things because we've recognized the difference and where each one excels and also where each one fails. One of the really hard parts is getting machines to realize that they're dumb.
Right.
So a couple a couple months ago, it was all over the Internet because everybody realized how dumb chat GPT was because it didn't know how many r's were in strawberry. Right, like chat, it's just going to fail in hilarious and or catastrophic ways. The problem is it doesn't know when it's dumb. Right, So that concept of hallucinating that you hear about where it's going to give you an answer. Right, it is going to give you an answer, and it is going to tell you it with the conviction of
deep down to its core. But right it doesn't know whether it's right or not. So that's where the idea of like explainable AI comes in. XAI is is like the acronym because tech folks and military folks both love their acronyms. So XAI is the idea that not only can it can a computer come up with an answer, it can tell you how it got got there. Because right now, most AI models. They're a black box, right, we don't actually know what it's doing. It doesn't know
what it's doing. We just fed it enormous amounts of training data and kept poking it with a stick until the output was what essentially we.
Want it right. Right.
So, I was just going to say, because in addition to that, like you mentioned the human fallacy of thinking that we're logical right when we're when we're not. Almost all of our decisions we've reached emotionally, and then we create the logical.
Shit structures to support that decision. Right.
So, and if you look at our politics, everybody on each side thinks that they're right one percent right. And so when they go to train these ais, and we've seen this with like whether it's political influence or the religious influence or whatever it might be, the person telling the AI what to do is flawed. So they're giving the AI flawed you know, sort of information on how to determine whether something is information or mis information or
whatever else. And now you have an AI that it can do great computer stuff, but it also carries the vagues of the people who programmed it, right, Yeah.
I mean I don't know the extent to which program or bias influence it, Like I, okay, I don't know
enough about it to speak to it. But you're right that the models are only good as the data that's giving given them, and there's a human being involved in that, right, And yeah, we are we are fallible, right, so if we if we expect a computer to give us infallible information, but we've we haven't been able to iron out all of the foibles of it, like, right, it's going to come up with with issues, right, which is I think
one of the reasons. Rightly, so people are nervous about keeping a human in the loop, right when of the kill chain, not letting it the entire kill chain of censored a shooter be taken over by uh by machines.
Right can can I ask you that this is kind of off tangent? But I'm very curious, you know, we what is the concern of like with these.
With these ais, whether they're a military or whatever.
Of them actually being despoiled by the enemy, of you know, like the enemy like getting in there, hacking in or whatever and then telling them you know, hey, this is actually that or whatever.
And now the AI is that a concern that you.
Know that Oh it's it's absolutely a concern. So it's so the phenomenon you're talking about is data poisoning, okay, Right, So there's there's just like the human being like, oh, we made a mistake error, like yeah, that we trained it to think that buses are actually bicycles, like go, okay, cool, Right, But then there's there's absolutely malicious actors that will seek
to poison data. Right, So either through training sets, which is far worse because then essentially they're just training it to be dumb, or training it to do something incorrect, right, which we touch on a little bit in the book. We do some training data poisoning to kind of talk about this thing, or they poison the data that it's currently collecting. So what it thinks is accurate is not
necessarily accurate. Right. So it's one thing if I'm pulling in data from all sorts of different sources and I fact check it, right because I'm like, I'm not really sure if Tom's a reliable source, so i need to
fact check it from these different places. But what happens when you are getting information from a source that you trust, right, you have trust that that source is there, but it is now feeding you incorrect information because that data has been poisoned, right, And we wouldn't know with a lot of these models that that is actually the case because it can't explain how it arrived at the conclusions that arrived at necessarily right.
And I feel like in a find picks finished, like you say, the kill chain, that if the enemy could actually say that these friendly positions are enemy positions and there's not a human in there, that it could have catastrophic effects.
Yeah, exactly. And that's that's not to say that again we shouldn't use these technologies. It's just these are the problems that everybody is trying to figure out right now, like how best to use these systems as they currently exist, and then how best to uh structure our R and B to meet what we think will need in the future.
What was your impression of the story of the I know that the Air Force retracted and said it wasn't accurate, But the colonel had come out and said that the drone had revolted and killed its operator in a simulation.
Do you do you recall that story?
No?
So, so it was it was it was I think a colonel gave a talk and said that an operate in a simulation, an operator had given a drone an order to kill you, to a take out a target or something like that.
Do you remember the specifics to take out a target?
And it was against like the drones or the AI sort of, I don't know if it was you know.
Warfare rules, it was civilian targets.
But essentially the drone revolted and killed its own operator as a result of that, and then the Air Force later came out and said, no, that's not true. That's not a real story, even though it was an Air Force colonel who had given the talk. Let me see if I can find that out. Yeah, colonel, colonel saying drones highly unexpected strategies to achieve its goal in a virtual test. Maybe it wanted to kill the target, and the drone operator said no, I can't remember the specifics.
But the system started realizing that while they did identify the threat, at times of human operator would tell it not to kill that threat. But it got its points by killing the threat, so it wanted to get more points.
So what did it do. It killed the operator.
It killed the operator because that person was keeping it from a complex a complixen objective. Now that was like given by a by an Air Force officer at a talk and then the Air Force was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, that didn't happen.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know if that happened or didn't happen, But like that's not outside of the realm of the possible, right where if you give an autonomous system a list of priorities, like hey, here's what I want you to go after, you don't know exactly like how it translates that when it's being trained to execute the tasks that it's being assigned. So you have to be very careful with that because it can interpret it
any any number of ways. And you know, that's that's kind of one of the key things in you know, in that book is the AI is going to make decisions based on what it sees, what its priorities that have been given, and it's not necessarily going to take into account things that humans would necessarily take into account.
Right shades of eye robot.
Right, That's that's exactly what I wanted to dive into, was you know, most of your book is more about like operational preparation of the battle space, but the war goes hot at a certain point. And I think there's a couple of different interesting conversations to be had about the AI teaming question. One of them is how America might use these technologies versus an authoritarian country does.
And in your.
Novel, one of these authoritarian countries essentially hands over their strategic military decision making to an AI in order to make those decisions faster. But of course an AI just sees military units as chess pieces on a board, has no compunction at all about sacrificing them in order to achieve whatever goals it's been programmed. You play that out really interestingly in your novel. I'm did you talk about that a little bit?
Yeah, I mean, I mean commanders have always had a hard job, right, They've always had to make decisions that send soldiers to their deaths. That's that's a hard thing. People will always wrestle with that, and unfortunately, sometimes you do have to make those hard decisions. The good thing is a human being, at least like a sane rational one, will take pause at at spending that. Unfortunately, if you look at spending lies from a pure logic rational level,
you're essentially just trading pieces on a tession on a chessboard. Right. So one of the famous, like cold hearted quotes from World War One that I can't remember the specifica, but essentially is, how are the French gonna beat me? I can spend you know, ten thousand lives a week, like holy crap, man, Like those are those are people that all had families Like that is super callous, especially you know, modern Western ideals like have a hard time coming to
terms with with that. AI doesn't necessarily have that compunction, right like they will. If if you're gonna tell me to win the war, I'm gonna win the war no matter what. I don't care that afterwards you're gonna, you know, crucify me in the court of public opinion or like legitimately hold me accountable for my actions. I'm a computer, like I don't. That doesn't factor into it. You give me a task, I will complete the task and the best way that I see fit given the resources and
constraints that I'm I'm placed on. So you can't necessarily think that it's outside the realm of the possible that given that if you take the gloves off and say, hey, win me this war, it's not going to come up with things that a human just wouldn't want to wouldn't actually pursue as a suitable or acceptable course of action.
Yeah, And as your book demonstrates, what happens when the human beings get tired of being treated like chess pieces.
Yeah, yeah, so they I wouldn't want to be treated like that over and over again. The French mutinied in nineteen seventeen when they felt like they were that way. So, you know, in this one, the human beings decide that they no longer want to be a part of those sorts of shenanigans, and that ends up kind of being a critical moment for that military.
Other points from the book any like, you know big you know, you've talked a lot about the intersection of the military technology. Are there any other big themes that you want to talk about in the book?
Yeah?
So, I think in addition to you know, just wanted to explore the difference in human intelligence. The other thing that I wanted to get at was one of the things that use of SoC has been trying to figure out is what General Braga has been calling the soft space cyber triad. Right, so hearkening back to the nuclear triad as a theory of deterrence and competition, right, what is the new triad for competing that doesn't necessarily involve
nuking the planet. And essentially what he's come up with is hey, soft, When you put soft together with space capabilities and cyber capabilities, there's a lot that we can do to compete below the level of active arm conflict. Uh So, I kind of wanted to see, like what that looks like, because it seems like one of those things is not like the other. You've got you've got nerds in space, and you've got nerds in cyberspace, and then you've got you know, you've got this long tab
snaky ears, like what what is that doing? And really what it comes back to is placement and access, Like they they have SOFT has people in places currently working with our counterparts, right, building partners, and they're they're there, right, and they have the ability to when you cross that threshold and you want to move into unconventional warfare or regular warfare, or even keep it below, they can gain proximate access for some of these space and cyber effects, right,
because some of them you can't just do from the convenience of you know, some the NSA's basement. You have to you have to get pretty close to be able to do these things. And it's not going to be it's not going to be like a super engineer that's doing it like a computer programmer. Right, they'll get you most of the way, but at the end of the day, there has in a lot of instances, there has to be somebody that's on the ground doing these things. And
that's where like soft forces are uniquely suited. Right for the last twenty years we've been hunting hunting terrorists and we got really good at that, but that really wasn't necessarily like in the Green Beret wheelhouse, right where we are work going by with and through locals, operating in small teams in and around the battlespace, maybe not particularly in the conflict zone, but in the periphery to achieve
outside effects. And that's something that soft can absolutely do if they can help deliver some of the the effects that you know, the folks in the space and the cyber world are are dreaming out.
How do you see that sort of playing out?
Because as you point out, the Green Beret in the you know, like an essay offensive hacker guy like two very different people, different personalities, they're selected and trained for different things. How do you and I know we've experimented over the years trying to blend these capabilities and blend teams together, and how do you sort of see that playing out in the in the coming years as we try to combine these capabilities.
Yeah, So I think you're always going to need like the pure breeds on either side, right, You're always going to need guys who just want to be trigger pollers. You're gonna need girls, guys that are keyboard warriors. And I mean that in like the best sense of the term. Like the things that those folks are able to do
in cyber space is absolutely amazing. Right, But then there's there is a need for the way that I've kind of described trying to find this niche for so kind of people like me or people that want to nerd out and brow down right, so they're they're interested in technology, but they're also totally happy, you know, running around in the mud getting their gun on from time to time. And you don't need an entire force that's filled with that, but you need enough of those people two to be
able to go forward. And that's kind of like what the the SADA is doing right now. So I think it'll be something like that, but armed with a little bit different skill sets, maybe you know, just enhancing certain ways or changed, you know, as U A S has come online, that's going to figure into it, like, hey, can I have man portable U A S is that that can help deliver these sorts of effects. So I think it's I think we're gonna end up seeing more
of of that going on. So if there's a part in the book where we sort of see this where we are the team is engaged in a firefight but then supported with some of this tactical on net deception operation ends up feeding information to the the AI, who then makes decisions based on that incorrect information that ends up saving the saving the day for the Green Berets.
So I think that's gonna be the reality here in the not too distant future, where it's gonna not necessarily move from you know, independent operations, but it's going to move into real time blending of all of the different domains in multi domain operations.
It sounds like you're describing the guy or a team that can get close enough to the enemy using you know, a chief tactical surprise, but then also implement some piece of technology.
Yeah, exactly, And again, I think the green rays are perfectly suited for this because they are always genuinely curious by nature, right Like they didn't they didn't accidentally stumble into this profession because they just like following the rules and accepting whatever alignment they were told there. They tend to be pretty free thinking and curious and happy to pull threads wherever they can because they want to. They
want to be masters of their of their craft. So I think that's one of the things that makes them particularly well suited to being a large part of this equation.
Do we have all questions for Tom?
I actually uh let to see her. Actually, no, we didn't. I'm gonna ask this question from uh solely. What's the kindest someone's been to you.
In your career?
What's the kindest someone's been to me?
Yeah? The kindest?
Yeah, So I think I think the kindest somebody has been to me is helping me actually like believe in myself right, so believe in that I actually can do things. So I've had I've been fortunate enough that this has happened a couple times. But I think that's been like the the thing that in hindsight of like that not necessarily kind is because you know their mentors are going to push you. But in hindsight like that act was absolutely kindness of hey, Tom, you you have way more
to give. So specific example, when I was going through CGSC so the place where manjors go to have their brains lebotomized, I wasn't necessarily getting a lot out of it because it's built towards the media end of the bell curve. They need to make sure that they have everybody's on the same page as they they're on staff. But I had one professor, Doc ken Long, who kind of pulled me aside and was like, hey, Tom, I
know that this is a challenge for you. Find something that is a challenge is for you, and like do that. So you know him, I can draw a line from the conversation I had with him then to like this book being published, right, being curious, starting to chip away at this, accepting that I think a little bit differently, and like doubling down on that and getting getting me to where I am now. So that's that's what I would say.
I got a question here from the He says, do you think that plans to expand special forces teams to include people like drone pilots to teams would be more beneficial overall than just sending guys to more schools in those capabilities.
I mean, I think that's I don't know that we really know the answer to that yet. I think that's something that we're trying to figure out right now. So Yususak is they are made making an MOS for drone operators, so it's going to be a warrant MOS to try and figure this out. So I guess the question is is there going to be like a an eighteen uniform for uas I don't and they'll they'll have a specialization or is this going to fall into.
Like one of the others of like echo, like we send guys to j tax school or sniper school or something that someone's going to go and run school.
And I don't. I don't think that we have an answer on which one is best. I think the problem though, is you can't you can't necessarily stick somebody in here as an additional duty like you would like the Arms Room NCO right right. It has to be somebody who is interested and has the an aptitude for it, because it is hard to wrap your head around some of this technology when it comes to like programming these things
and understanding what actually is going on. So I think for a while, the best option is going to be something that's separate so that we can get people who are interested in have the aptitude through these sorts of pipelines so that we can experiment with it. But I think as you know, the technology matures and we figure more things out and people become more comfortable with it, we'll actually be able to see whether or not we could just have it be an additional duty.
Tom.
Do you think that overall that the military needs to relook for certain fields. It's recruiting requirements when it comes to height, weight, when it comes to neurodiversity, things like that, in order to.
Stay at the cutting edge of this stuff.
Yeah, I absolutely think so. I think that one of the things that makes America great again is democracy and the idea that we pull from the citizenry to get the best and the brightest. Right, there's not like a warrior class where hey, you have to be you have to be a member of the aristocracy to serve. We cast a wide net. Why would I want to discount somebody who can be super great at specific things just because of like potentially outmoded understanding of what their capabilities are.
I don't.
I don't. That's not Listen like a blanket. Let everybody in, right, you know, come together and just kumbaya. Everybody is equal. Everybody is not equal. And that's the point, right, If we try and make everybody interchangeable parts, like we fail right, right, because again that's not democratic, that's authoritarian. Where where everybody is just interchangeable parts that you can fit into the cogs in the machine. And again, as long as you
have the brilliance at the top, everything runs smoothly. Right, that's just not that's just not reality. So I absolutely, I mean, anytime I've gone down range, I want the best person beside me, right, and if that best person at whatever task doesn't have to you know, it can be neuro divergent because they're going to be they don't need to be on the front line. They can do their job from like a command center back Like I don't,
I don't care. We got really close with with the ACFT, right, like, hey, we I don't care what your what your background is, whatever, We're going to have job specific standards for these things. And then we determined that we weren't quite ready for that yet, and we you know, we've since modified.
Are throughout the science and we already do it, right, Like you have to have a higher PT to be in a range of battalion than you do in a line. Like we already have those separations. We just they're internal, right, Yeah, exactly.
So, Uh, first, I will say the only mark of a true leader is your five mile run time. But besides, besides that, yeah, I think that we could get to a point where we accept that not everybody has to be a physical specimen right to do their job well.
Right.
I still think that if you're going to be running a log pack as a as a you know, an eighty eight mic truck driver, and you actually probably do need to be in pretty good shape, right, and you do need to be able to handle yourself in a firefight. But if you're going to talk about on net operators, we should take a hard look at what those actual demands are and make sure that our recruiting policies our meeting that. And I think there's a recognition that we
want to get there. I think there's just a lot of cultural inertia that we're going to have to overcome.
And I'm sorry, Jack, I know we have another question, but that reminds me of the last question I want to ask you, is that the Army, I'm outside of special operations. Special operations has really been an exception to this rule.
But outside of.
That, the military is very slow to change, right and people get entrenched. There's a massive bureaucracy, whether it's like the latest in boots or the latest in rucksacks or whatever it is.
How do they compete?
You know, like there's so much stuff that is in the army system that you can go buy better equipment off the shelf. How does how is the military responding to emergent technology and the ability to stay competitive there?
Yeah, we're we're trying to get our act together. I think you know the So the new c IO G six, General Ray just came in like two weeks ago, and before him, General Morrison is he recognizes that he's kind of fighting with one hand tied behind his back when it comes to I T monornization because of our procurement processes, because they are very, very slow, and they don't necessarily meet pace with with what we need. So there there are a lot of people that are working on that,
but you know, I'm just as frustrated with the procurement process. Again, we are different though than the civilian the civilian market, in that there is tremendous downside to us getting things wrong. We know what worked in the past, it got us to this point, right, we are potentially making an existential decision that will cost the lives of our sons and daughters if we get something wrong when it comes to
adopting new doctrine, new hardware. So there is bureaucracies are completely designed to keep the status quo, and they're designed to change slowly. That's not a bug, that's literally a feature of what it is.
Right, they need to have you down at Softweek on some of those panels to talk to those guys who want to move fast and break things. You know, it's like, what are you guys talking about?
Yeah, like, I too want to move fast and break things, but but what I what I don't want is to go out and end up putting folks in the field with equipment that doesn't actually meet our needs. Right, And it's The other hard part is we don't know what the future is going to be. All we're making all of our choices on past data, the wars that came before. We don't know that what the next conflict is going
to look like. So everybody right now in the Inner War period, it's I mean, it's exactly like the the wars, the period between World War One and World War Two, where we're trying to guess what is going to go on, right Like, if you guessed combined arms maneuver, you won. If you guessed battleships, you lost. Right Because it turns out that aircraft carriers were the heat in World War
Two and have been for the last fifty years. Bat are aircraft carrier is going to be supreme in the next conflict with the rise of hypersonic missiles and you know, drone swarms and things like that. We don't know, right Like, we don't know if the next generation fighter is still the best thing or if it's going to be low tech drome. Like, there's a lot of unanswered questions. So figuring out what our assumptions are and coming at that,
I think we do need to be deliberate. That being said, there's still probably a lot of red tanks that we could leave on the cutting rooms for that at least, could get equipment out to exercises and experiments where it's safe to fail, to get it into the hands of servicemen and women, so we can we can learn these things, right, because it's one thing to sit back and admire the gravity of the situation, but that's just going to lead to paralysis, right because we just get bogged down and
we don't know what to do because we don't have all of the data. Yeah, but again, human beings are actually really good at making decisions with load data. If we get out of our own ways and we do that through small, safe to fail experiments.
That makes sense.
I imagine with emerging technologies, like we don't want to get excited about it, I don't know, be like the Beta max military when all of a sudden like VHS becomes the big thing.
Yeah, exactly, yea, not where we want to be, right, But we also still have to equip the four the total force now right, which probably was a huge price tag, right because there turns out that there's a lot of us and all of us need email.
Yes, so I got a question from lewis this is an interesting one. What can we do to maintain ethical oversight in terms of AI?
The biggest thing is to have conversations about ethical oversight when it comes to AI. Right, So I think that that starts at every single at all levels. So from the operator on the ground, like is it ethical for me to use this system in this context? Right all the way up through a is it ethical to deploy this capability in combat? Through A where do the authorities need to be held? Right? And we wrestle with ethical
considerations with all sorts of capability. Right, It's not like it's not like there's just a lieutenant running around somewhere and be like, you know what jadeams for everybody, Like everybody's just going to get bombs all over the fort.
We we reserve those authorities at certain levels. So I think that'll continue to happen, where the senior decision makers will delegate authority down to some level depending on the technology, but then they're still going to reserve it at the highest level for others, whether it's the capability itself or the specific use of it for specific targets. Right, That's what we do now. But I think what we need to do is one educate the force. So what is it? When?
What are we actually talking about when we mean AI, right, do we just mean a drone that if it loses signal, knows how to come home or I can put it on a pre planned out so it does what it needs to. Is is that unethical or total autonomy? Where a drone can launch itself based on an piece of intel it it had, and guide itself all the way to the target and choose to execute that target. I think the understanding what the capabilities are, what the tools are,
is the first step. And then I think we want to understand like what it is that we actually want. Right, so the American people get the army, they get the military that they want, you know, for for good or bad. A lot of the policies that you hear being thrown about in the news headlines recently, they were enacted because part of the American people wanted that thing. And now
Americans think differently. So we're we're changing to adapt. That's what we've done throughout our history, right, we adapt to be what whatever our nation needs us to be. So that's that plays into our rules of engagement That's why whenever we go to conflict, we hold ourselves to a higher standard because that's what we believe in at our at our core. Those are the values that the American
military draws from the American public. And I think that's going to be ending up where we need to draw the source of what we want, right, Like, what is it that we want to do, Because it'd be super easy, right to turn on the floodgates and just go take out all of our adversaries now, but that's not that's not who we are as a people. So I think that's what it's. It's it's an education, and it's a reconciliation with like our values of who we actually want to be.
So M.
Corbin has a question here that I don't even understand, but maybe you will. He says, given that RSA might no longer be secure de wave advantage China, do you have any thoughts on the future of encryption?
Yeah, I think it's just gonna be a constant cat and mouse game right where I'm gonna I'm gonna come up with shield and then somebody's gonna come up with a way around that shield. They're gonna make a bread better solar. So I think we are trying to figure figure this out as we go because and this goes along the lines of not only how we protect what we are, what we're saying, how we encrypt things, but then also like what needs to be what needs to
be said, and what needs to be classified. Right, So there's a there's a big conversation right now happening across the force on like what data actually needs to be classified?
Right?
Can can't do? I need to because it's been so easy we can just overclassify everything and in doubt make it like you know, super secret, double probation Jesus level and like okay, as long as you're read on cool, I don't, I don't care. But that's not what we need where
we recognize that that is hampering our ability to fight. Right, So we're having those conversations about what actually needs to be protected and maybe instead of just wrapping it in encryption, we just don't say it, or you know, find find other ways and two to maneuver around it so that
we aren't giving our adversaries the opportunity too. Uh, swing at it, right, because one of the big the big things is not only do they have to possess the capability to do it, they have to have the the opportunity.
Right.
So if I, if I never communicate over a particular method, you're not going to know that it exists, right, Right, But if I start using that for everyday correspondence, suddenly you have all sorts of opportunity to figure it out, to experiment with it, to pick at it, to find out where the holes are, right, So that I think it's going to be a more intentional and deliberate game of cat and mouse.
Did you follow the DARPA competition where they had the different AI, the different hacking teams create AIS to both defend an attack at the same time.
No, I didn't, Yeah, it was. It was interesting.
It's fascinating what everybody, you know, all the research is going into this field is incredible.
Yeah, because I think people realize that when they're when those systems are on and there, if we can get them to do exactly what we need to do, there's so much potential. Right, it's not necessarily even for our capacity to kill people easier, right, So right, making better better drugs, So AI is so much better at being able to just crunch through thousands of different permutations for chemical compounds like that's it's it's an amazing time to
be alive. It's just a frustrating time to be alive because we're sort of in the in the wild West right where we're not sure what needs to be regulated or how it should be regulated yet.
Right, Tom, I have a question for you that other people that people who watch the show, especially young people, might be interested in. You know, you mentioned that you got an email or you know you've got a letter, you know, and we've talked.
We've got other.
People on the show that have been part of SAPs that they kind of stumbled into or you know, different projects and programs. If somebody wanted to go in the military with focused on these types of things, how outside of you know, just getting a random letter, is there a way they can direct their career to like find themselves in these fields.
Yeah? I think there's there, absolutely is, right. So the advice that I give to everybody who I talk to that's interested in these things is all these organizations are looking for for three things. They're looking for, can you do the job, do you want to do the job, and will you fit in right? So, can you do the job? Do you actually have the skill sets that organizations like this need to accomplish their mission? Right? So in the discussion we're having, do you have the technical acumen? Right?
You don't necessarily have to be the world's best programmer or anything like that, But do you have a basic understanding of what these things are? Right? Do you are you curious? Do you do you read things? Right? Are you constantly learning to be the master of your craft wherever you are now? Right? Do you know other languages? Like? What is it about you that makes you unique? And how can you gain these sorts of additional skills? Right? So that's can you do the job? Do you want to do the job?
Right?
Because these jobs everybody's like, oh man, I'm going to go down and do do super swoopy stuff, hang out with the secret squirrels. But a lot of it sucks. I mean it's right, right, You're you're working in window lists offices where like, I mean, this has been super neat for me for the last couple of weeks because I have my phone on me all the time, right, Like I go in like nothing, Like I've got my
garment watch on. It's meat, Like I do you just give up these little things to be a part of this, and then a lot of the work is it's not glamorous, right, It kind of it sucks. It's it's hard because if it was easy, everybody would be doing it. So do you actually want to want to do this job? And how you demonstrate that is by mastering the things that you have control over because you don't know what's on
the other side of the fence. You don't know what they're looking for specifically, but you do know things that will set you apart, right, like being good at what you at, what your job is now, being being physically fit. Right. It may not be necessary for all of them, but given the option, would you want somebody who has more endurance or less endurance? Given that one of the key indicators of mental resilience is aerobic conditioning, right, So you can be you don't have to be strong ranger. You
can be smart ranger. But smart ranger also is in shape. Right, given two packets, the one that's if they're both equal, I'm going to take the one that's more in shape because that shows that you are disciplined, right, and it shows that you actually have stamina because a lot of this work is actually also really tedious and it requires endurance. So that's do you want to do the job. And
then finally like will you fit in? All of these organizations have their own culture, right, And I think that's if you look at the different people that you've you all have had on the on the team house like you, that's readily apparent like they're all lumped into this thing of soft or the the ic, like it's this monolith.
It's not right. Every single organization out there has their own unique personality and their own their own culture, and folks that are are thriving in one won't necessarily fit
in into the other, right. And that's where it's not necessarily a knock against you if you try out and they say, hey, thanks, but you're just not a good fit, right, because they're all honestly doing you a favor because you would put your time in effort in this thing and then you'd go there and you would be miserable, right right, Then you're not producing and you're not happy, right right, So that's that's just not a recipe for success. So
will you fit in? Is learning who you are as an individual, learning what you like to do, learning what your strengths and your weaknesses are and being being okay with who you are in your skin, and also like not being a terrible human being. Right, keep out of keep out of trouble because the other thing that these organizations all have in common is they have to play by big boy and big girl rules right right, Like you, the future conflicts are going to be distributed. You cannot
expect to be micromanaged and be successful. So you have to trust the people that you are you're sending out. And if you can't trust somebody to make good decisions when you're just going out in town on the weekend, right, how am I going to trust you with this high tech cyber thing behind enemy lines? Right?
Like?
How is that supposed to be? So make good choices, practice that now, because it, like everything else, it's a habit. So that's what I would say. Demonstrate that you can do the job, that you want to do the job, and that you'll fit in. And then like, there are a lot of these places are open secrets, right, Like they have recruiters that are constantly posting in education centers. They all have email addresses and once you get inside, now you start to open up and understand like what
is actually going on with more of these programs. You don't necessarily know like all the secrets ins and outs of the other organizations, but you know who's who, right, and you can find your way if your first one
didn't necessarily land. Like the Ranger Regiment is a perfect example of this, because they take people straight off the street, right and once you once you get into the regiment and kind of cut your teeth a little bit, you see what other opportunities are out there, and it's easier for you to hop from one place to the other because one it's it's more directed. It's not just hey, random email to random organization. It's targeted. I am good at this. This interests me. I'm going to go for that.
And you've already demonstrated that you don't suck right allah, you can do the job and you want to do the job right.
Yeah, you know, it's fascinating, you know, like knowing yourself is so important because even inside Ranger Regiment, well especially these days, there's so much more professionalized now, but like back, you know, way back when the guys in the sniper section had a very different mentality than the guys on the line, like even though they are rangers and you think of them as monolithic, think.
About the recon guys, like not every infantry man is really cut out.
For that, right and not and not every like infantrymom wants to do that. Some guys just want to kick indoors and that's fine, and yeah, so I mean that's that's great. So you know, so basically for people who might want to get into like these little fields, like,
start with the big thing. So whether it's cyber or or singant, you know, signals intelligence or human intelligence or rangers or you know eighteen X ray or whatever, and then those doors will start to open up for you to like narrow it down.
Yeah, exactly, because what's going to happen is if you go into those positions and you do well and you learn everything, you know, all these organizations want you, yeah, right, Like they they will fight over you to bring you in and put you through their assessment and selection because you've demonstrated that you don't suck and you have the ability to pick your own team, like you want to be around people that can actually do the job because that's gonna make everybody better.
Yeah.
So the book is Quantum Dagger. Where can people go to find it?
Tom?
Yeah, so it's it's available on Amazon, It's you can order it from Barnes and Noble. Uh. Pretty you can order it from pretty much any retailer. I'm not sure how much lucky you have, like going to your local bookstore and picking it up, but it is available online pretty much everywhere.
And we will have a link down the description.
And also I.
Did do a search for the creativity stuff is there?
Is there?
Do you have a website?
Can people find your work, your academic work in a central place?
Yeah?
So. The the easiest way where I have some of it aggregated is on on the website of the school dot us so t Hyphenschool dot us. And then there's a research and media tab in that that has links to some of the articles we've we've written on this, and then some of the podcasts that we've we've done that talk about it.
I think that's fast. I mean, I think it's such a fascinating topic.
Yeah, me too, really interesting research.
Yeah.
Well, thank you again Tom for coming on the show. U Quantum Dagger is the book. I really enjoyed it. I hope you guys will go check it out anything else before we get going. Is there another another book project in the back of your mind?
You know? So I have started to think about like what the what the next book would look like. It may end up becoming a possibility, but for right now, my focus is more on how I can bring creativity to uh you know, the next generation.
Awesome. Uh, well, thank you guys.
Uh we will see you all next Wednesday with Darryl retired tenth Special Forces Group guy.
Excited to have him here in studio.
Until then, well that'll be Friday for the people who are watching this, right, it'll we'll talk on.
Well, it'll be it will be Friday for the riff rapp Yes you know about with the poorest watch this on ut but for.
And Friday for you poor peasants.
Uh so, all right, thank you Tom, and uh we will see all you guys next time.