Transcripts For CSPAN3 Intelligence National Security Forum

Demay, the founder and cto of hawkeye 360. And hawkeye is an rf Data Analytics company. Tina harrington. Director of cigant at the nro. And Major General john shaw. United States Air Force who is the Deputy Commander of air force Space Command. Im going to have each of them do a short introduction to frame their mission and their priorities. After we hear from them, ill start a couple of rounds of questions. As chuck said, please get your questions ready. Ive already had a few pop up on the ipad. We certainly want to be able to answer your questions from the audience. So, chris, over to you. All right. Thank you, tish. First off, thank you to insa for hosting this incredible and important event. Tish, thanks for leading the panel. Again, chris demay. Im one of the founders and the chief Technology Officers for hawkeye 360. My background is in government. Spent 14 years both with nsa and nro, in fact, my last government boss is on the panel with me today. And from those experiences, i learned quite a bit about government capabilities, but more importantly, i learned a lot about technology. And as i learned about tech kno technology, i was seeking out opportunities to create something new. The panel today will be a bit about opportunity, and the hawkeye 360 story is about opportunity. Its about a convergence of new technologies that enabled our capabili capability. Its about convergence of those technologies with customer interests and Financial Support from a great set of investors. So having the cash, having the interest, having the technology, allowed us to be built. Its been a wonderful experience. We are four years old. We raised over 100 million. Part of the theme i will weave into the conversation today is about how private equity is allowing us to create something that the government can leverage and this isnt just hawkeye. This is all of private industry that is sticking their neck out there to take risks, allowing the government, frankly, to take less risks in leveraging some of those spacebased technologies and capabilities. Hawkeye is an rf Analytics Company as tish mentioned eed were building out a spacebased constellation of small satellites able to detect and giolocate rf coming off the earth. Ill leave it at that for now. I look forward to the questions. Thank you. Okay. Very good, chris. Stacey. Great. Stacey dixon. Deputy director for National Geospacial Intelligence Agency, nga. Been in this role for just over two months though ive been with nga since 2010. And we are we exist to basically show the way. Help the country understand the world. We do this by providing Geospatial Intelligence to policymakers, war fighter, ic, Intelligence Community members who need to understand whats happening in digit places in the world. Frankly, better understand the world, itself. Theres a lot of information about the world whether its gravi gravity, the Magnetic Fields that we need to understand to be able to use the technology that exists today. We help provide that. Without our gps, wed all be lost. We help in providing that as well. More specifically, understanding whats taking place in Different Countries where we may not be able to have other sources, where we may not be able to have eyes on the ground all the time. The overhead constellation really helps us do that. Nga tries to make sure the decisionmakers understand not only whats happening to answer the questions they have but also to provide the information they need which may be different from the questions theyre necessarily asking. We want to help them understand the sensors that are out there, capabilities that are out there to help them complete their missions. I started my career, actually, at the nro, so we have a little bit of an nro nexus here on the panel. A great introduction to the Intelligence Community. Working with nga as a partner. I ended up here a couple years after that. So ill stop there. Thanks, stacey. Tina . So, tina harrington, director of signals acquisition as part of the nro. I have been with the nro since 1993. Which is hard to believe. Im in a variety of positions, first as an Aerospace Corporation then swapping over to government in 2006. Nros mission is basically everything from research and developme development, acquisition, operations, all about building and doing the right thing for intel and military users. We basically work very closely with partners at nsa, nga, and work very closely with air force on making sure we have the right partnerships and we doing the right things on both sides. We are one of our lifebloods is innovation. One of the things i love about whats happened in commercial space is its letting us focus our technologies, things that are just unique to us, but then leveraging so much that is coming out of the commercial world. And the other piece that i find just so exciting watching from 1993 to now the whole space world is that transition with the commercial now really springing more and more to life is how much more interest new professionals coming out of school have in space and thats really driven by a lot of the commercial work thats being done. You know, governments thought of as boring and takes a long time, space kind of fell as part of that, but now you see all these folks that say because of the new launch providers that we have, because of the commercial small satellite business, the ability to do things in schools and in universities to actually launch small satellites, thats been really driven by the commercial market and the ability for us to take advantage of that market thats now coming out to help us field the generation of professionals that we need as we move forward. Terrific, tina. I got a couple of questions coming out of these remarks already. General shaw. Okay. Thanks, tish, thanks to insa for hosting this forum. Im john shaw. Astronomical engineer. Full disclosure, two of my favorite assignments in my career with the National Reconnaissance office so we have a Common Thread there. In case you havent noticed, space as a warfighting domain has been a major theme in our National Security fighting circles for several years now and, you know, to invoke ricks french friend from casablanca, were shocked. Shocked to find the space as a warfighting domain, right . Actually, in truth, i think we shouldnt be surprised. That might be the biggest thing to take away. Why is that . Because space is critical to modern warfare and to modern society and only increasingly so in so many different ways. And yet, it is perceived by potential adversaries to be vulnerable. And so it is only logical and we should not be surprised that, therefore, our Space Capabilities would, therefore, be threatened and that potential adversaries would develop capabilities to threaten those, our Space Capabilities that are so critical. So the big tectonic shift that weve been facing really within the National Security arena but more focused at air force Space Command is how do we make this shift to space as a warfighting domain . The big tectonic plates that youve all been watching, im sure, have been the standup of United States Space Command, a new combatant command, bringing back the old United States Space Command but definitely not the same flavor, which, by the way, was established last week at a rose garden ceremony at the white house and we will cinch the whole thing next monday in Colorado Springs with a ceremony overseen by the chairman where general raymond will take the flag for the new United States Space Command. And that brings its own challenges in its own right and the intelligence support that that command will require and has been a major priority for general raymond as he stands up this new combatant command. The other big tectonic plate that well know more about here in a few weeks is space force. That would be the organized train and equip arm, the service, that would then supply the capabilities and the war fighters to u. S. Space command on the other combatant commands as necessary and weve been looking really hard at what we think that would look like, how do you set up a space force for success . But kind of maybe little bit below the waterline that maybe hasnt gotten a lot of attention, weve been spending a lot of time on, hey, its not just about the organizations, right . What are the capabilities that we need to develop to protect and defend our Space Capabilities . And, perhaps, the most important thing is how do we grow the people to do that . And one component of that Human Capital piece is the intelligence side. Were going to have to grow intelligence professionals for the space domain that support operational and foundational intelligence for potential war that extends to space. And its a major focus for us. A theme ill leave you with, in fact, ill even challenge you to think about this right now, when you think after space and intelligence together, you might be like me, i spent, you know, in my career, i think about intelligence collection in space coming down to the earth. Intelligence from space. We need to think really, really hard now about intelligence for space. Where is that intelligence expertise . The processes. The capabilities we have to understand whats actually happening in the space environment to support general raymond in his capacity at United States Space Command for potential war that makes it into space. So a new kind of focus area for us moving forward. I look forward to the panel and the questions. So, general shaw, let me key off something there. Not a question but a comment. Im really happy to hear you say that coming from the operational side of the house. Those of us who have been in the intelligence profession our entire career, sometimes perfect intelligence is simply assumed. So itst nice s nice to hear yo that you understand we dont know everything we need to know to support operations in space. And so getting that demand signal, understanding the requirements so that those capabilities can be built, is very important. So, thanks for that. Well probably come back to that. Im going to start off with something that was kind of woven throughout all of your comments. And so this is a question for all of you. This is jump ball. All of you can answer, some of you, but theres not an option for none of you. Okay. So, both government and industry now have a wide range of capabilities, whether its launch, whether its building small sats, spacebased communications systems, analytics, there is a lot out there. And what id like to hear from you is what are the implications of an increasing democratization of spacebased capabilities that allows any company or any adversary to operate in space . So, what are the challenges . What are the opportunities for us that are posed by this dynamic . Its exciting. Ill start there. Ill start with the good. All the potential information that will be accessible on demand, anywhere around the world, is very exciting. The creativity thats going to be needed to create the tools that are going to be able to allow us to use this information, to store it more efficiently, those are the things that are a little more daunting. Its a lot of things that were going to have to be watching and monitoring and, you know, we know that we cant expand the number of people to be able to look at everything, so its about really moving toward having that machine human teaming which provides a lot of other new challenges in the way we do things but great opportunity in the way that well be able to allow some of the more routine, some of the more repetitive tasks to be done by a machine so we can leave humans to be able to do the more creative, the more critical thinking, so that part is really exciting to me. I think in addition to sort of the u. S. Commercial and government, the ability to also leverage all the foreign partners, not only for their satellites and sensors but also for their analytics and for their product creation, theres a lot of opportunity out there to really not have to do everything ourselves anymore, to really leverage those alliances and so for us, its exciting but a little scary because of the amount of data that has already started coming and the amount thats going to be coming that we want to have eyes on. I would dare say theres a number of Industry Partners here who would like to help with that. Absolutely. Anyone else want to add on . I want i think its a great opportunity. I go back to i look at what commercial is doing and it really does let us leverage. My prior boss had a saying that she used quite often, which is we should buy what we can and build what we must. Government dollars are always, no matter what it might look like, still limited, and we want to focus that on the things that we and we, alone, need to do, not the things that others can do. Obviously, adversaries are also going to feel things. I would say put that in the same as every other domain we work in and live in. Air domain, adversaries do things. Land domain, adversaries do things. Adversaries, cyber. Space may be new to that domain, but we need to treat it the same way as we treat all the others, understanding what adversaries are doing but were not going to stop them, but we do need to, going back to what general shaw mentioned, understand how we get the intelligence for it like we have done the intelligence for all the other domains. Let me let me suggest an analogy to reframe how we might look at this. I sometime think this gets framed as, hey, a government versus commercial or thats all about the you know, are there places that are going to be friction points and such things . And that could be true, but im sure and ill let the historians actually give you the right answer, somewhere in the 17th, 18th century, im sure the british navy kind of looked around and said, holy cats, look at this empire we have with all this commerce thats suddenly kind of exploded all around the globe that is fueling the british economy, the world british economy. How did the british navy react to that . They probably acted with a little bit of, oh, what do we now need to do in a similar way were responding to the space question, how do we need how do we think about security in this domain, things we hadnt thought about, theres all this. Think theres some optimism about, hey, now the economic engines of the British Empire are driving how we do things in the maritime domain, we can benefit from that as a british navy and well look at that. At the same time, tina alluded to this, theyre probably thinking, what do the dutch and the french doing and what are they learning about trafficking on the in the maritime domain that we dont know about that we need to catch up with because it could be a threat . To or ability to maintain maritime superiority. The economic engines have been unleashed, i hope that they are sustained. Thats a key question. And that we would simply want to leverage the best of that from a government perspective and realize that there are challenges associated with that and providing security in that environment, incentivizing further economic investment, but also being prepared for new threats in that domain. Said by an air force officer. I love the maritime analogy. Chris . So as the industry guy on the panel, its important i say that leveraging those Economic Opportunities is important among u. S. Companies, in particular, in order for the u. S. To maintain their strategic advantage in space. As u. S. Companies have in 2018, there was over 3 billion put into Space Technology companies, and that money is essentially building a platform of not only the launch companies that you mentioned but also ground transports, data transports, Space Technology, that is enabling somebody to have the best and most capable space assets. It is my biased perspective and interest for u. S. Companies to be seen as the best place to go to for those capabilities in order to maintain that strategic advantage, and i feel like the relationship between industry and government is inseparable when it comes to development of that technology in order to to make sure that that technology is used in a in a way thats most beneficial to the u. S. So lets followon to that, chris. You know, necessary, inseparable, how is it going, and ill, again, make it broader, you know, several of you talked about stacey, you, in particular the partnerships that have to occur between your two agencies, with the air force, and the other military services, with industry, with our allies. So, how are we doing in developing those partnerships . Do we have an architecture that easily ingests what industry has to offer, what our International Partners have to offer, and, you know, how are we doing between intel and ops . I mean, ill just make it broad there. Is it working . So ill start with you, chris. Absolutely. Ill say where its working the best, from my perspective, from my space 2. 0 community, is that these Small Companies are being built from the ground up with interoperability and partnerships in mind. Theyre being built from the beginning with the hooks in place so that systems can talk to each other. So that technology can interface and leverage each others parts of the value chain. Ive also seen where the in the case of the u. S. Government, theres been a lot of transparency about what needs exist. Weve been pleased with how forthcoming the governments been about what they want us to do. The signals that theyre most interested in hawkeye