It is way more than that. Comcast is part of the 1000 committee centers to create wifi enabled so students from low income families can get the tools they need to get you ready for anything. Comcast support cspan as a Public Service ang with these other television providers. Giving you a front receipt to democracy. Next a discussion on Nuclear Deterrence featuring colonel Alexander Rasmussen of the Space Development he also talks about Missile Defense capabilities and innovation this is about an hour. Is urgent we look at deterrence and a broader lens. And again looking at Strategic Deterrence of which nuclear is a key foundation. But the reasonon we need to look at this more broadly is we are facing new threats. New threats of escalation. New domains that can lead to rapid inadvertent escalation in the competition conflict with china and russia. Such as space, cyber. We had adversaries that might be willing to take more risk. And we have got Strategic Systems that are not vulnerable for example in space. And again that could lead to miscalculation a rapid escalation Nuclear Weapons use. And so to deal with these new threats we need to think about innovation in terms of concepts and technologies. This is why i am really excited having our panelists this morning to discuss those issues, implementations and the challenges andt opportunities ahead. We are first going to hear from professor andrew ross who is currently the department of International Affairs of texas a m university. Also appointed International Policy studies old joint appointment with that National Labs he leads the director strategic resilience initiative. Looking at new concepts to make it more resilience. We also have colonel alexander thank you for joining us. He is the chief of the tracking layer at the Space Development agency which was established in 2019 to leverage orbit architecture to increase resilience of our Space Architectures. This is a fundamental shift. Not only in terms of increasing resilience of space satellites more numerous than launch more often. It reflects a new concept for acquisition within the department of defense for more rapid acquisition and so looking forward to hearing and the importance of how that is enhancing deterrence. We are also very lucky to have Steve Rodriguez join us today. Hees gives a very unique perspective from his understanding and deep engagement with the private sector, commercial startups and Venture Capital. He is currently a Senior Advisor of the atlantic for strategy and security. He founded one defense which is that novel Advisory Firm that leverages Machine Learning to identify advanced software and hardware commercial capabilities and accelerate their transition to benefit defense. He was recently the study director for the commission on Defense Innovation adoption. It was in the Atlantic Council which was cochaired by former secretary of defense mark esper, air force secretary deborah james. Itse really a seminole report that just came out two weeks ago on looking at how duty can improve leveraging commercial capability and innovation. Three different aspects of urgent priorities to enhance Strategic Deterrence. So let me turn to andy to kick it off thank you. Arrigo, it works. Good morning everyone. But its great to be here. Thank you for thero intro. Im going to talk about a program that i have been engaged in the inspiration for the semi manager jon scott with a theoretical design is actually the real lead for ds ri. I am privileged to have the opportunity to work on the policy and strategy say but theres also the technical side for this. But think the panel for being resilient this morning and responding to changes. The real person who deserves and should be thanked in her acknowledgment and her resilience acknowledged is nancy berlin. Where is nancy . [applause] rambling this morning to make this with general cottons prompt. To make all this work this morning for everybody. Her first email came through at 5 43 a. M. I did not see it at 5 43 a. M. I saw before six. Its really nancy who should be acknowledged when it comes to resilience. We are going to provide a quick everything is going to be kind of quick. I think are getting eight 10 10minute thing is pretty quick here. We will provide a quick overview of what dsr i is all about. What we have been doing on the policy and strategy side. We will give you a flavor of the kind of workshops we have put together. And Leonor Tomero should be credited here shes part and participating in all but one workshop so far but weve gotot her again in march for our next workshop. And so sheta could give this tak probably. An overview im going to talk about what resilience means. Resilience has been used virtually every day here not virtually, and has been used every day here. Bite virtually every speaker. Marv adams my old buddy even included it in the mission provided resilience and responsive Nuclear Security enterprise. And very much to accept some of the things we have been working on. We use the term a lot of the documents and the National Security strategy its in the National Defense strategies in the National Military strategy. The Previous Administration uses that occasionally as well. Until recently no one is trying to tell us what it means. We have tried to define it. And identify dimensions. So well lay that out for you very quickly. And then im going to turn to other work that i have done it prior to my time at the lab. And how to think about innovation because that is the heart of what our panel is about. Talk about what we have done in the Nuclear Business on that front and where we are now especially with the program of record, okay . Wellll first, go back to that o. All right, policy strategy said the emphasis has been on identifying the potential geopolitical and technological shocks and trends that might undermine the u. S. Deterrent. This is the wyatt resilience part of it, right . And push beyond cold war thinking on deterrence. We have gotten the same kind of bush weve gotten that push from strep, for instance. Former commander we need to revisit or rework deterrence theoretically. I think you went a little bit too far weal need to figure howo apply it in the situation. We are engaging a very wide community. Practitioners obviously but think tanks, academics, technical experts at the lab and elsewhere. Thin trying to bridge the gap between the policy and technical communities. We are disseminating our findings through greetings like this. There we go. All right, so, our work on apology strategy has been focused on a series of workshops. We have done for so far im not going to go through every single one of these. Focusing on the role of Nuclear Weapons and u. S. Strategy, strategic ability, management, to what escalation management focused on capabilities and metrics the next one coming up is on the future of arms control. So why resilience . We alluded to this earlier. When you get the slide should up the full deck. This is not even a quarter of it. But, why resilience . This is just the highlights of what we have been dealing with. The changes. In some geopolitical shocks that we have been dealing with since the end of the cold war. Thisg is not going to end. The mostt recent one which is a new addition to this list what we are seeing in the middle east today is result in response to october 7 but israel had to deal with the assault from hamas and the response. An vertical and horizontal arguably. And has direct implications for the united states. And so what is resilience . I am older than some of the folks around here but when i first heard what is resilience . I thought back to the old timex add. It takes a licking and keeps on ticking, right . That is resilience. We actually had in the National Defense strategy in 2022 a definition provided the ability to fight through and respond to disruption. You also think about resilience is the ability to absorb unpredictable threats and shocks we like to predict things or attempt to predict things but we are not very good nobody predicted. Nobody predicted 911. Nobody predicted the end of the cold war. All of these geopolitical shocks. They were unexpected we need to build resilience to withstand these kinds of challenges. Her kickoff emphasized we need to be thinking about Strategic Deterrence across the board. Multi domain. Nuclear focus but it is not solely focused on nuclear just like our pane isnt. Need to be thinking about conventional Strategic Deterrence. And space and cyber at the least. In addition to identify what resilience is we have identified dimensions. The list keeps growing its two pages on the slides and i will not walk you through every single one of these but you see the kinds of things we are thinking about. We keep adding to the dimenons we have gone through our workshops. Resome of these are sort of obvious, national, political, strategic, deterrence, strategic ability. Butts, attempting to identify or describe what these things actually need is the second one. Escalation management is something we spent two workshops quite a bit of time on. It is hard to get people focused on capabilities for escalation management as opposed to capabilities for doing escalation management because isnot the same thing. Our next workshop is going to be on arms control we had an hour hereur with this conference were going to be doing nearly two days worth of thinking about arms control and bringing people together. Initially i would not have included alliance resilience as a result of our workshop on strategic ability. That made it to theo list organizational operational, tactical. Given all the emphasis on pit production i should have picked resilience appeared to. Just a few words about the topics we havee covered thus far we kicked this off asking what role for Nuclear Weapons in u. S. Strategy . By strategy we met National Security strategy, defense ande military all of the levels of strategy. You can take it down into operations ass well. But what we have emphasizes different schools of thought. Df thought on the role of Nuclear Weapons and strategy. Different schools of thought for strategic stability. And for escalation management. We have always developed concept papers. I wrote the first one. My colleague at texas a m Jason Castillo to the next two on strategic stability and escalation management. I will be doing a fourth one on armscontrol. We have always emphasized and weve alwaysemphasized trad. Weve emphasized this is a tough problem. Its not clear how we do escalation management. Punishment, denial, give us different answers and theres tensions among those answers and part of what we are trying to do is sort that out and identify what might be more helpful. The problem is a lot of denial and damage limitation tell us to try to do involve involve running and one of the challenges in this business, the Nuclear Business is we have no imperical data and that increases the challenge because you arere reduced, we have to ry on theoretical arguments about what needs to be done and escalation management and different approaches. I know im talking too long. Thats the professor in me. This is very simple, we are usually preoccupy odd with the top of this, right, with technology. Ai these days, hypersonics. Whats the next big thing when it comes to innovation, no less important for doctrine and organization. Sustaining innovation, thats routine. Most of what we see in the defense business sustaining modernizing in the Nuclear Business. Program of record. People are talking about when they talk about the next big thing. Architectural innovation. Thats organizational is what they want. We got big chunks of it. Wehu are still talking about dog transformation. Revolution is one of them. That was really what its built on. All of that continues the Nuclear Revolution and architectural breakthroughs and the energy commission. The final level, massive retaliation, textbook response. Deterrence, thats innovation. Sustaining innovation, is that enough given what some of our adversaries are up to . Im not going to walkthrough all of this but recognizing that we have incredible capabilities that we have drawn on in the past and we need to harness that in the future and the defense business specifically, more generally the Defense Innovation system. In the Previous Panel we talked about emdi and the partners of that enterprise. Nuclearpl enterprise with the capability of taking on the order of the Manhattan Project and this isnt up there but in the timeline of the Manhattan Project. Thats demanding. Theres more slides but im done. [laughter] [applause] i also want to thank nancy as we had 6 00 a. M. Call to how the navigate the schedule for me meeting Space Operations and not breaking traffic when i was coming to 66 to get here in time. At least dont tell anybody. Excited to be here from the Space Development agency. I want to highlight our model on the lower left of that flight. The most important thing we can do for war fighters and our nation. We are constructive disruptor on how we are going about Tech Development and delivery. We will talk a little bit more about that. Thee focus of the war fighters architecture to identify worldwide and track them worldwide and get that information anywhere in the world to terrestrial commanders for them to take the actions against the enemy or against the threat. So thats our focus. Identifying threats, advanced threats, hypersonic, advanced missiles and getting that information anywhere in the world for commanders to respond. Well we are launching a proliferated conflict covering a lot of resiliency. A couple of things i will highlight the layer, it has the mesh network. Law latency anywhere in the world and a lot of what we have seen in the commercial sector. Thats what im the chief of. See targets anywhere in the world and getet data anywhere to anyone at any time to take action on contact. We will talk the a little bit more about that. Sorry, we have disruption here. Moving on we have a navigation letter thats supporting war fighters. Upload applications and distribute data. Might even be buzz words to some, we absolutely embrace it. We want to launch new capabilities. We call the war Fighter Council with the services we look at what can we do in the next satellite if we can get it in, we do, if we cant, we only have to wait two more years. Its a twoyear decision. Really able to take advantage of new tech coming online or respond to threats and provide what is needed for combat commanders worldwide. Youll see the transport satellite. So that consistent demand, consistent competition is enabling us to drive down cost as well. So our Business Model is element which i just went about that is opportunistic and responsive. We have a competitive marketplace. We every tranche we want to have newer entrance if we can. , every tranche, transport laye . Is anun opportunity for Business Partner to join in the war Space Architecture if someone loses out on tracking or transferring the tranche, they are able to compete in thee next tranche. We dont get into someone having locked down for years or decade at a time the. Great opportunity for more competition and new entrance. We alsoo work on inoperability. Sost using oct on orbits. Thats the backbone of our data decimation. Our partners can plug in super nova and distribute all the data and lastly we focus on affordability. We really live that so that we can deliver to the war fighters and beiv good stewards taxpayer money. This is highlevel schedule and how we work. What youll see there we are always in the requirement phase, always something on orbit to provide capability and that drives the development so in the goal there youll see our ground operations and integrations, we have to have the ground in place before the satellite, very much focused on that and we also have the management layer which will have the application so we can upload apps and take advantage of the processing on orbit. We will start tranche 4 and start responsibly orbiting previous tranches. We will see that that line of how many satellites. That is providing the backbone anywhere in the world to allies as well. That means we will have at least two satellites, maybe 3 or 4 depending where they are at the world to really give us really high targeting data to provide to our partners like nda and other and range. We also are accelerating what we callat Missile Defense capabili, works tightly with nda to get that tech, that capability across depth. We are working with nda to provide and we have a couple of different designs leveraging what nda has done and we are looking forward to a couple of weeks tranche zero launch, they launch with satellite thes, we will have a Good Opportunity there the to collaborate on the ground and on orbit. Working together to inform the development in t1 and t2. Great opportunities, Great Partnership with Missile Defense agency. I also want to quick i will say that the fda is not looking alone. And deliver on schedule. I think thats the all i have left. Last thing i would like to say sda is a joint organization, navy, army, air force, space force and others there and then i also like to tell my space force partners, the First Organization the u. S. Launched satellite was the army, thanks. So i have great news for all of you. I dont have any slides. Before i get started if anyone has other slogans, youre welcome to avail yourself before i get rolling. I started my career currently in Venture Capital and doing commission as living, apparently. Then involved in is awful duty. If any of you remember that. Walk myself in telephone booths, showing up early in the morning. Important to remember your pink code and ultimately before people realized how incompetent i was i wrote lead author nep63 under the bush administration. 43i should say. I think im old enough to be in 41. Its interesting when i was asked to talk in a panel about Strategic Deterrence, i actually like what andy, one of his slides shared about how you kind of view innovation because usually you think about innovation as tactical. You change this or change this, change the carpet, change the wall paper,wi come up with army uniform. And so you sit there and say, how the hell is innovation relevant in this kind of context and i think its useful if you view it through the triyad, icbms, at least within threat envelope that we currently face. This gets to the commission on Defense Innovation, adoption, i didnt have any slides but if youre interested you can google it Atlantic Council innovation, i hope, im afraid of what would come up. That thatll probably get you where you need to be, the focus we had at least was relatively short term and this was the next 3 to 5 years basically until 2029 and 2030. For those of you in the Defense Community involved in things like addition and subtraction you know that we have esignificant falloff in total availablel platforms as well as readiness of those platforms. Thats not just tanks and ristrikers but that also includs bombers, shortrange aircraft and dont get me started on submarines. So with that in mind, helpful kind of conversation starter. The commission on Defense Innovation adoption was launched by secretary of defense mark esper and secretary of the defense james and whole host of commissioners and if you google this, now is your chance to check the news as well while im talking. We had a bunch of very credible people and the the point of the commission was to only have people, the term i used that had Ground Combat in the space. I dont want anything talking about this that hasnt dealt with this directly. And so what resulted and i will skip right to the point, we had challenges that we identified, ten recommendations, the interim report was only 14 pages, why, sorry, i wrote you a long letter. I didnt have time to write you a short letter. The goal that people were going the read it. Of the ten recommendations, technically 6 and a half or youre in space force, we can round it to 7. 7 recommendations have been adopted, inve fact, we have link inside the commission that shows laydown of the recommendations and specifically what happened, right. That means u. S. Policy either on the hill or on the pentagon and one off the things that and the reason was the recommendations that we wereth putting out and this is the direction that we got, the most of all it cannot through bureaucracy. Fill in the blank in the department is not working so the solution too solving this coming out myself we have a similar issue is we are going to create a new director of whatever or under for whatever thats going to solve all the things while we dont actually touch anything thats really the problem. So we felt the rsda recommendation and this is im sure you guys can talk about this in q a but the recommendation is very useful to extrapolate upon successes in the department lake big safari, air force capability office, soft works and things like that. I dont think i think i left everything, i think i left everything on the field. I will stop talking. Thank you. Thank you so much to you, i appreciate it. So before we turn to audience questions let me just kick it off with one question which is the same you might treat it differently is are we going fast enough. So andy, i really liked your one of your last charts that showed hardware, software and how much change you could make one of and the bottom right quadrant was destructive, revolutionary innovation and so as we look at new threats and newat pathways towards escalatin that could lead to nuclear war, you know, are we going to lack at concepts and strategies given that china and russia certainly are making rapid progress in their adding nuclear capabilities, Novel Nuclear capabilities butcl also making steady progress in new domains that could rapid lead to escalation in cyber. Sda is a very successful and urgent example on how to approach deterrence by adding resilience, buying time and being potential if theres a conflict and withoutut leading o rapid escalation but are we moving fast number in terms of culture, bureaucracy and doing rapid acquisition and moving to new models and from the private sector perspective and i know you serve on the burden of directors and adviser to several successful startup companies, theres a lot of innovation in the private sector that should be leveraged for defense and to enhance deterrence and so given the recommendations and i think its very promising that almost some have been implemented but one of the remaining challenges and, again, whats left to be done and are we moving fast enough, so maybe let me start with andy. Okay, thanks. Thats a really good question and tough question. Are we going fast enough. The slide i ended on, i think, was is the complex up to the task of doing something equivalent of the Manhattan Project and the time frame of Manhattan Project from what im seeing right now is no. We are not currently facing a grand challenge on the order of what we were facing in the first half in 1940s, the grand challenge of world war ii, twofront war with advanced industrial country germany pursuing its own nuclear capability. There were enormous pressures and enormous resources put to the Manhattan Project and enormous talent which points to the importance, i think its been emphasized throughout the conference here the importance of people. Weve got the talent. Ive spent time in lose andys and lose alamos and ive always been impressed by the scientific and engineering talent thats out there and a lot in this room. And ive had a number of of staffers from all 3 labs in classes at this point. Talent is afacing. I suspect if were in a situation like world war ii, twofront war a lot of the bureaucratic constraints go away. But im still not convinced that we could do it, you know, meet a new challenge on the order of Manhattan Project in just 3 years. Not long ago i saw a briefing on one of what we are calling a new capability that we are developing and at the end there was the timeline. 14 years and arguably that capability isnt as new as some people would like to think it is. And we are doing this at a time when we are modernizing across the board, across the riad. Its incredible modernization effort. When a key component, 14year timeline. Its hard to a think that we are doing it fast enough. It isnt money, a lot of it are the bureaucratics of the work that we do. Its tough. Great, no, we are not going fast enough. We only go as fast as the way we makenl decisions. We need to makeas decisions responsibly in order to adapt to changing environment, to adapt to the threat, to adapt opportunities from technology thes. And the other organizational things mentioned is we have to make decisions quickly, had mentor tell me, technology is easy, people are hard and a lot of good people, a lot of good capability and talent is mentioned but how do we organize to make decisions quickly. Sda model we have, Prior Development is not easy in dod. We are working hard to bring people with us but its in the easy. We are fortunate right now weve been empowered with a lot of authorities within sda to make those decisions quickly and deliver capability but we need to keepde it that way and we ned to do that in other areas, other missionaries so they can make decisions quickly and so yeah, we need to make decisions fast the other. How many of you in here raise your hand if youre with the heritage Defense Industrial base . How many of you are here if youre a startup or what you call a startup look, the key to innovation to include a lot ive realized myself not intuitively but oneforce trauma is a key to innovation and moving fast is super unsexy stuff like modernizing budget documents, 100 . Other super cools like budget lineup, god bless you if you know what those are and consolidated, blis and that is how we go faster. Not building a hypersonic thing that idiots like me sink hundreds of millions of dollars into. One other thing, resetting Program Authority to historical norms or reprogramming authorities, no one talks the about. Whats interesting these are all recommendations that we conveniently made in our Commission Report but we programming authorities it turns out a great way to ensure your stuff is adopted is tag it to what we used to do not that long ago. Wh so our recommendation to congress and dod, hey, remember ten years ago when you did that thing, can you go back and do that thing. Weai did that thing ten years ao and i said, yeah, that was just ten years ago. Thats a great way and frustrating for me investor, startup founder myself, dont do that by the way. Certainly in the think tank world to feel that youre facing this baseless menice, if you will. We spend 800 billion plus. How the hell does that happen . Im leaving a lot of bread crumbs. It was very helpful for me because it helped me identify very, very specifically in explicit detail in 14 pages what exactly is holding us back and those are some of the things that keep us from being great again shall i say. Thank you. So we had 9 minutes. Let me turn and maybe we can take two t questions at a time . One back there. How do you balance the need to modernize and deterrent for more resilience respond with the need to manage Risk Management especially in the arms control community and the potential for post new start world where nuclear arms are unconstrained betweenth the two powers . I can i can touch a little bit on that. New initiative we law firmed software define warfare, the commission built around it is sew Going Forward. The idea behind it, how do you innovate without disrupting capability and responsiveness. How do you thats very, very difficult. The solution we are approaching at a strategic level is identifying commercial and Industrial Base software, elite software technology. Theres elite Software Capability in the heritage Defense Industrial base and then insert that the into this is the key, legacy hardware assistance. New starts are going to do a new thing. Theres nothing any of us especially any of us can do to make those things go faster but legacy hardware assistance and here is theo breakthrough i ha. It turn thes out 75 of major defense acquisition programs are legacy hardware assistance. Despite new starts, 75 of the big pots of money, the big programs are already out there flying right now. And so this is a challenge, this is a challenge, how do you transition from the legacy to the objective force. Its a spectrum. Its not a binary solution. Thats our approach. And i would also add to that, and we heard a little bit about this yesterday, is leveraging new technologies for verification monitoring that we really need to leverage the private Sector Innovation that can help deterrence including arms control and i think the other piece too is uncertainty of whether we are going to continue to have legally binding Nuclear Arms ControlGoing Forward and we talked about this, secretary maui stewart talked about this yesterday, concept of Threat Reduction and i really see the new focus on resilience can as part of Threat Reduction. Again, if you can have systems that are designed with strategic stability in mind, for example, what sda is doing with missile warning, missile tracking, if youve gotten many, over a hundred satellites, youre not vulnerable with just a handful of satellites where china could target us and lead to rapid escalation. I think even in the situation where we dont have formal arms control if you have resilience for stable architectures, again, that can reduce risks. I will justmu add to that question, kind of building on stevens comments within nsda we are starting with using existing data formats and existing networks to getex data to legacy systems and at the same time we have the ability to work with those emerging programs and emerging capabilities to be able to get them the data and format they are going to use which is the way forward. So using existing data formats. Talked about technological resilience. We also need to build policy and strategy resilience and especially arms control resilience, so that one country withdrawing from accord doesnt kill can it. And one of the things that we got from the arms control panel, i think, the call for more creative approaches to arms control and, you know, so my my quip to emily is ask me the same question after our arms control workshop and actually youve been invited to come to that. So and hopefully we can give you a more complete answer. What does more resilient arms control look like when you have two key partners russia and china that arent terribly interested in engaging in traditional arms control. How do we do that. My own thinking is based on more norms base approach. We have response out there that the secretary has been using. Nobody has really filled that out yet. Thats one of the things that i want to try to do as part of that workshop. And for one more question. [away from microphone] how do we increase cross pollination within the Security Community to bolster resiliency to bolster deterrence . Thats a great question. Part of it is simply bring people together from different backgrounds and forms like this but one of the things that weve Done Advertisement and texas a m, wexa for 12, 13 years now d a National SecurityAffairs Program that is a professional Development Program for the labs before program where they come from two semesters, two College Station in the summer, great time to beo down there. They do courses now, right now, Nuclear Policy and deterrence and on space and cyber. And then they do courses later on operations, military operations in the fall and then they do a Research Project all of which are taking the science and engineering talent that we see at the labs that the thing is amazing but teaching people how to think, to recognize how policy makers think through problems and engage at that level to develop a more complete understanding of why they do what they do at the labs and, we had some nice success stories. I cant take personal credit for this buter kim budell was one of the first people that went through that program. My former students tell me, you know, taking going through the program changedam the trajectory of my career and in this case was livermore. Efforts like that, weve got people from labs that are at pony which i think is a Wonderful Program that i supported for over a decade now. Yeah. Project on nuclear issues. Theyve got a Nuclear Scholar for program, was it p i, that we have a new cohort that just started last month. That pony has included, you know, traditional sort of security studies, people that look like me. Its had people from the services, its had people from the hill, its had people from elsewhere in the government dod, doe, its had folks from industry but people of all kinds of backgrounds, science and engineering as well as Public Policy. So theres efforts like that, the labs have long supported cfs pony program, we need to see more of those kinds of things, i think. So there are efforts, you know, all this is pipeline stuff. Its important question and we need to be focused on something we are doing, are we doing enough, probably not. So just in closing this panel, i wanted to end on a quote from the strategic poster commission so an ad for the last panel of the conference that will at noon, but here is a quote from the commission where we did emphasize the need for incorporating new concept, new technologies and innovation so effectively leveraging u. S. And allied innovation requires both cultural and bureaucratic shift in order to over come legacy approaches not suited for leveraging technologies. As eric schmitt warns, must innovate faster than before and by fail to go do so its eroding ability to deter and necessary to fight and win the next war and i would add to that, the the ability to prevent the risk of the ability to reduce the risk of nuclear war. So let me end on that note and please join me in thanking our panelists, thank you. Yes, thanks again. Cspan where history unfolds daily. In 1979 cspan was created as a Public Service by americas Cable Television companies and today we continue to take you to congress and other Public Policy events in washington, d. C. And around the country. Cspan, powered by cable. Sunday on cspans q a don scott virginias newly elected democratic speaker of the house of delegates and the states first black speaker in 405 years talk about his life including spending almost 8 years in prison. I had never been in trouble before. I served my country and i was hoping that i would get a little more grace and maybe getting the judge having latitude, he probably could have gave me more time than he did but i remember hearing my mother when he said ten years, the yelp of pain. It always stays with me and its always motivating and always lets me know how fragile our freedom is and how perilous it is and if you make one wrong move sometimes it can be literally the end of your life as you know it. Virginias Democratic House speaker don scott, sunday night at 8 00 p. M. Eastern on cspans q a. You can listen to q a on all our podcasts on cspan app. Cspanshop. Org is cspans online store, browse through our latest collection of cspan products, apparel, books, home decor and accessories, theres something for every cspan fan and every purchase helps support our nonprofit operations, shop now or any time at cspanshop. Org. Hi. But friends dont have to be. When youre connected, youre not