Lists as well as Industry News and trends through insider interviews. You can find about books on c span now, the free mobile app or wherever you get your podcasts. Now a conversation on u. S. Space systems, emerging technologies and National Security, we will hear from former republican congressman, mike rogers in this 15 minute event. Let me welcome everyone to the virtual set, we are very excited for todays discussion around securing space and addressing the cyber risk, i couldnt ask for a better group of speakers then we are privileged to have join us today. Before doing that, those of you, my name is frank and i direct the institute for cyber and Critical Infrastructure at auburn university, for those of us who follow our work, you know this is not a new theme for us but what is new is we have collaborated with wonderful partners at Cyber Solarium Commission 2. 0, as well as the foundation for the defense of democracies. We are going to be releasing a paper, more on that soon and later but at the outset, i did want to thank the amazing work by sharon on my staff, chelsea shields on my staff, and my coauthor, mark montgomery, which you will be hearing from soon and the amazing staff. Without further ado, i want to jump into the conversation to kick us off, we are going to have mike rogers framing the pressing issues facing our country right now and as everyone, i think viewing knows, mike was not only a former congressman but he was chairman of the House Select Committee on intelligence, he is a true leader on National Security issues. I think we first got to interact around the early discussions, and in the words of mark twain, history may not repeat itself, i have a lot of similar problems we are grappling with today. Mike is a former fbi agent, and we are thrilled to have you join us today, and your voice is so important for our country to hear. What i without thought i would do, i would love to have you frame the issues. Obviously where the communist party of china is in some of these issues and more broadly, why are we where we are and what do we need to do to get to where we ought to be. So, pretty broad question. Thanks, frank, and thanks for the great work you are doing at auburn, it is incredible. I think there might be a rogers wing in auburn mainly because my brother put all four of his children through auburn university, i told him, you should at least have a wing named after you for that amazing feat. They all got great education, they are out doing great things. Most of them are engineers. Space, lets talk about it for a minute, the first real wake up call when i was part of the National Security structure in congress in the United States, roughly about 2007 when the Chinese Communist party fired a missile and hit a satellite, happened to be theirs, to prove that they had this anti satellite capability. And we all started saying, this is a bit of a game changer. Remember, prior to those early 2000 years, the United States was dominant in space, no other competitor, no near competitor fired to that. So we did what we wanted to do in space and built the architecture in space based on the fact that we were on threatened and undeterred. And that allowed us some immense capability in our war fighting capabilities, and our smart planes, smart ships, smart bombs, all of that, so the Chinese Communist party for several decades has been saying, we are going to compete with the United States militarily, we will create a Blue Water Navy and do all these things. They looked at, what are the strengths of the United States and the weaknesses and they came to the collision that space was both a strength and weakness. So they invested a lot of money early on developing capabilities for antisatellite technology, both groundbased missiles, lasers and anti satellites themselves and again, not to stir up a vision that this is about a star wars type fight in space, it is more of a bulldozer pushing a satellite off its course or sapping its fuel or destroying its sensors in a small but effective way, is what you are going to see in the near term and china has stated they like to control space between earth and the moon. Lots of strategic reasons to have that happen. So when we started looking at this, it was hard to get peoples attention, even in the u. S. Government about we have this big and growing problem and im not talking about the folks who are doing the work every day who see this happening, im talking about the investment it is going to take in the United States. One, we needed to make an investment that also protects the very expensive things that we are firing up on rockets into space. Really expensive operations, are we doing enough to protect those assets . How do we protect those assets, how do we protect assets that are already up there that dont have new technology that allows them to do, to protect themselves in the case of someone trying to get a satellite out of orbit anyway . Are we resilient enough, can we fire up architecture fast and quick so that if somebody wants to take out some of our capability and lower orbit, we would have the capability to very quickly create a new architecture and fire up in a satellite, get things to happen at almost realtime speed . Have we developed that . And you have commercial space integrating with our military and security infrastructure in a way that i think is very positive but also has challenges and hurdles we have to get over and because we have this heritage system of space that says we are unchallenged, this seems crazy to me that we may have to have bodyguard satellites, which some people are calling them. Which may be a very real possibility very soon to make sure that we can maintain capabilities. You can go right down the list, the Cyber Security threat isnt necessarily just disruption, and certainly that is a concern, but what happens if the information that is coming down has been corrupted in some way . So your positioning system has you in one place and the folks who are making the battlefield decisions or seaborne decisions are getting information that has that battle group or the ship or submarine in a very different place because they have been able through cyber attack to disrupt the information flow and insert packets that lead to bad decisions on both the sea and land and other places. A real possibility unfortunately, so trusting the information comes a huge issue. Disruption, we have plans, we understood the ability to lose assets and other things, what do you do when it comes to distrusting the information you are getting because you had a successful cyber penetration of your network somewhere . You start thinking, okay, we know the chinese and the russians have designs that try to take out a lot of our satellite capability early on in any kind of a conflict. Do we have the supply chain to sustain Rapid Deployment and resiliency of the architecture that we have deployed . That is a very hard question for the United States and one i dont believe we have gotten right yet. So if you take those issues in that order, you can see where we are going to have to act faster, we have to deploy faster, we are going to have to have robust Cyber Defense up front and during in any conflict, and we are also going to have to have a supply chain that does not rely on a single other country if we believe that when the balloon goes up or hopefully not, but if it went up, we have the ability to sustain our space advantage. All of those things are hard. I dont believe the government today is configured for a fast paced rapid interoperability between commercial and space and theres a lot of reasons that legacy keeps nipping us in the backside, if you will. And i dont believe we have taken seriously enough what happens when we lose key pieces of our satellite architecture, how do we make up for that . Its not just defending it, what do you do if it goes out . Those are the kinds of things hopefully we will talk about today. Im not saying it is over and we havent done things, china moves at a very different pace. When they show up, the whole family is there. And in the u. S. , we dont quite do that. When they show up, they have the diplomacy arm, economic, military arm, intelligence, they all show up handinhand, they skip down the street together. In the United States, we have to have meetings across different sectors and we have to have some kind of a group hug meeting to get to where we need to go for Rapid Deployment. We have to change that. Im not saying we should adopt the communist system, we should adopt an American Innovation system that allows us to act quicker and faster because the chinese are moving out, they know they have a slight advantage and the fact they can rapidly deploy and innovate after some theft of intellectual property, guess what, we need to be able to move equally as fast to counter that threat in space. Thank you, mike. Very sobering thoughts, as well as, i mean, you covered the waterfront in an incredible way in a short amount of time, and im glad you brought it up, i think most americans are not aware of just how dependent our way of life, obviously from a military standpoint, economically, navigation, timing, i dont want to sound geeky but, if you can mess with that, you can be ahead of anyone, and we need to invest accordingly. Report does touch on some of the streamlining process, which i think, im glad you brought up, as well as sort of harnessing innovation in the commercial sector rather than treating them as the step child, having them as a genuine partner in this. And that is where i think we can leapfrog anyone when we put our heart into it. But i would be curious, in terms of, i see behind you, your book, and when we look at semiconductors and when we look at the whole world as taiwan in terms of production and obviously the potential implications of what is going on in the south sea and the like. What should we be doing more around supply chain . And if you were commanderinchief today, what are the three things he would like to see done immediately . Well, related to the topic . That is a very big yeah, i have three things in just about everything, and im an eternal optimist, that might be a genetic defect but i do believe we can do this if we unleash American Innovation. The three most important things, we really have had some fits on the way the government handles cyber risk across the entire u. S. Government enterprise. And we just have not gotten it right yet and i know there has been small and important steps, we have not gotten it right yet, i dont think we can wait too much longer to have it consolidated, on things like Cyber Defense. And remember why this is important, because the private sector is playing an Important Role in space, the defense, they can protect their networks, they do a pretty good job protecting their networks, not perfect, but imagine you multiply your threat factor by adding the suppliers and everybody in the chain that helps build a satellite, and now you are dependent on their Cyber Protection and resiliency to keep you safe, to avoid getting into your Networks Later on. That is a huge challenge, i dont believe we have gotten it right yet and we have to do that. Secondly, i would make sure, very quickly, that we create an architecture using our private sector and commercial enterprise to get these low earth orbit architectures so it makes it very unappealing for the chinese or the russians to start taking out these low earth satellites, they know you can get one but you wont get it for long. And we need to build that kind of resiliency and the last part is the supply chain piece. We need to build capability, not capacity necessarily, but capability in the United States. We have atrophied ourselves in a way that is very hurtful to the ongoing National Security protection of the United States in many ways, chips being a big part of that. And you think those microprocessors, how important it is, again, there are certain types, even the ones that arent very boutique and specialized, but those microprocessors, we need to have the best and latest capacity and ability in the United States, remember if this goes up, it is going to disrupt commerce and transportation and all kinds of things and we should always plan for the worst and hope for the best. Work for the best, not hope for the best. In that process, we need to make sure we have that capacity. And again, we dont have a Cyber Workforce that is going to meet the demand today and i argue we need to change that as a part of this. It is a very complicated multilayered effort and we have to go through it. I believe we can do it all at once. The u. S. Government has done Amazing Things when we have a threat on the horizon. I cant think of a bigger strategic threat to the economic and National Security prosperity of the United States then what china faces to us today and they are telling us that. We should probably listen to them. Mike, thank you for your sobering comments, please keep working for the best and keep fighting the good fight and i would be remiss if i didnt mention auburn is represented by the great mike rogers of alabama as well and on board is admiral mike rogers, so we have a lot of rogers. You cant have enough mike rogers in National Security i dont think. The next event is going to be the three of you talking, and all three of you are incredibly informed. So thank you for that and keep fighting the good fight, we are going to go into a little more discussion, unpacking some of mikes excellent preview here and we will start with sue borden who i will very quickly introduce. I think everyone knows, she is the consummate Intelligence Officer, she has been in leadership positions at the National Geospatial intelligence agency, Central Intelligence agency and also served in the high civilian Intelligence Officer role, Principal DeputyNational Intelligence director. Its almost like an ppd, but i have had the privilege of learning from sue for a number of years and quite honestly, the country is better off with the role that you played here. So i would like for you to unpack a little bit of what mike discussed here, and maybe specifically, sort of hone in on how this all evolved and what are the wildcards. I know you have done some amazing work where you looked at different ways that the Intelligence Community can work with the private sector to drive solutions and rather than me reading this, why dont you jump in . Well, thanks for having me, clearly i need to pay you more so i dont have to follow chairman rogers next time. Lets see if i can give a little context, i love that mike talked about advantage. Actually is my favorite way to think about National Security, because it forces you into the context. And if you take this concept of advantage and play it through the history of space, that neatly enough is my personal history, so i have seen it all. You kind of go early on, you have the United States and russia, nationstates using space for National Security advantage, the United States was super dominant in the capabilities that we were able to put into space that gave us the ability to not only see beyond the horizon but to project power for the purpose of deterrence, but also enable mission activities. It was one or two of us for almost all of history we are talking about, until really in the late 90s when you start seeing china, japan, others coming on the scene, but they were not big actors, so it was two countries playing out the game of advantage and i think it was disproportionately on the american side. Simultaneously, you see the bleed through of technology and the rise of commercial space and you go through what we have now and now you start thinking about societal advantage. And space as an infrastructure that allows human activity in really interesting ways to see the earth, from earth observation to communication, to now being able to use it for change detection and in really interesting ways. So, nationstate actors, commercial, narrow missions to now dominant missions, and if you look at just ukraine, you can now see that the benefit and the advantage of commercial and National Systems are very clear. The effect of that is that anything that provides advantage because of interest to adversaries and competitors. So the threat surface is now not just National Systems but, the aggregate of systems, and it was proven in front of the whole world over the last year. That means that the threat surface extends to the private sector. We need to find a way to ensure that will be protected but you protect that differently. And neatly enough, you cant insert the government so strongly that you slow down what our industry does because in fact, that engine is part of the advantage, the technological leaders as part of the advantage. What is interesting about this moment is, it is a very busy space. Its benefit has been recognized. Technology advantage has been really diminished, everyone has access to roughly the same technology. The con