Episode 58: Lessons In Leadership, Intelligence Analysis, and Geopolitical Trends From Retired LTG Robert Ashley, former Director of DIA

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I'm Bob Gourley, the Chief Technology Officer of OODA LLC. Today on the OODACAST, we're pleased to welcome retired Lieutenant General Robert Ashley. General Ashley was the 21st Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency DIA. He retired in November 2020 after over 36 years of active duty service as an intelligence officer. Some career highlights included service as the Army's Lead for all intelligence. That's the Army Deputy chief of staff G2, where he was the Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Army and the Army Chief of Staff for all aspects of intelligence, counterintelligence and security. During his career, he commanded organizations charged with gaining insights into adversary intentions and making them actionable for decision makers. This included work overseas, which included six combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan at various levels of command. For Those who know DoD, you will recognize the places that he was at. The positions included work at some of the hardest and most important jobs on operational staffs, including assignments leading intelligence for the Army Joint Special Operations Command, the United States Central Command, and for all US Forces in Afghanistan. He also led Army Intelligence training and education. General Ashley, thanks for joining us today.

Hey Bob, thanks. Good to be with you. I appreciate the opportunity and thanks for what you do to really kind of share the history of intel and the story with a broader audience. So we appreciate it to you and your team.

Well, thanks. We really do like learning from folks like you and creating content that we hope is evergreen and will last for a long time and help share these lessons both in the intel world but also commercially. And although you and I never served directly together, I wanted to say I'm aware of every one of those commands and appreciate the importance of those organizations and how important they are to our national defense. I also know the pressure cooker type environments that you frequently had to lead in. As a Navy intel officer, I wanted to mention I was honored to be in the joint world where many of my bosses were army bosses. Maybe I got lucky, but 100% of my army bosses were great leaders and I think it's not a coincidence. And I'm hoping this discussion, in this discussion we can learn a bit more about what makes a great leader because I know great leaders have skills that are transferable across organizations and the lessons you will have for us will be very applicable both in the military, in government and in industry.

I appreciate it.

Well, so I want to start, if we, if you don't mind, with your foundational Story. Can you tell us what attracted you to the idea of military service to begin with and why you joined the Army?

Yeah, so I'll try to make this quick because I come from a family of service. My dad, interestingly enough, was a soldier in the Korean War and an airman in the Vietnam War. Just, you know, salt of the Earth, 10th grade education, ends up going to, you know, the Korean War as a soldier comes back, works as a mechanic in a gas station. Very good with his hands, very capable in that way, but knew that there was more that he wanted to do and wanted to get out of the mountains of North Carolina. And so he, after he left the service with the army, he enlisted in the Air Force. Now he did a career in the air Force, did 20 years. And so I'm an Air Force brat, traveled around. I have a great uncle who hit the beach at Normandy. Esther Cook. My brother was a 141 pilot, so there is service in the family. And I kind of always knew that was something I was going to do. And interestingly enough, I'm walking across campus at Appalachian State where I was going to school, and in the distance I see a guy in a battle dress uniform and we're getting ready to walk toward each other. We're kind of converging. And as I get closer, I go, wait a minute, I know that guy. Turns out it's a guy named Benny Duncan. He's a good friend of mine from, from high school. Didn't know he was at App State as a student. And he said, you know, we caught up in the cafeteria and he goes, hey, you ought to go to come over to the ROTHC department and talk to Captain Flora. Okay. And you know, three decades later, after talking to Captain Florida, you know, I went over the ROTC department, took all the battery tests, started the, you know, my last couple years I did the two year ROTC program. And in the second part of that year when they were looking at branching and stuff, I thought, you know, I love James Bond movies. Military intelligence sounds really, really cool. Only to know that when you start off at the tactical level, as I did as a platoon leader in the 82nd, it's not James Bond, but it is incredibly important. So that was kind of how I got in the military. Great, great.

Then can you walk us through a few of your early positions, like say, the first part of your career? Because this is, I mean, what year was this when you joined?

So I came on active duty in 84.

So the world is really about to change right around Then it is.

I mean, we're in the final couple years of the Cold War. So I come in in 84, and when I'm going through my senior year, they already want to do. I go, well, I want to be a platoon leader, and I want to be an All American. So I want to go to the 82nd Airborne. And I got good counsel from, you know, the RTC cadre that said, hey, look, if you're going to start off your career, you want to be in a division down to the tactical level, so you understand what it means to soldier in that capacity. And so I was very fortunate. My first assignment was in the. In the 82nd. But it was kind of fortuitous that, you know, I ended up with the All Americans. You. You talk about the things that happen in your career. And you'll know the book Secret warriors by Steve Emerson. Right. So I'm doing my platoon leader time. I go down to the infantry battalion where I'm an S2. And everybody in that kind of tactical level is putting in applications for the postgraduate intelligence program at dia. And for the soldiers that get into that, the officers get into it, they want you to have a heavy start as a, you know, a tactical background. And then they want to bring you up and kind of show you the ic, the intel community. And so we're all putting in our applications. And so I was very fortunate that I got picked. And. And halfway through the course, I'm on orders to go to Japan, and I get a phone call from a friend and says, hey, do you remember that book I Let yout Borrow, Secret warriors by Steve Emerson? I go, I do. He goes, would you like to be part of that organization? And I went, I would. And, you know, I kind of disappeared for the next six years. And then that put me in a track where I got kind of in association with Special Operations Command. And I spent a third of my year working with organizations that were part of socom, part of jsoc.

So you went to the National Intelligence University, they must have called it. Was it Defense Intelligence College at the time?

So I'm a 19. Well, interestingly enough, I went in 89, finished in 90. I was going to work on the master's program. Saddam decided he was really interested in Kuwait. So that kind of diverted me for a year. And then I went back into the, you know, do the thesis work. And so actually, I graduated in 92 a year later. Because of Desert Shield. Desert storm.

Right. So 92 from there. Where did you go after that?

So that's when I was in an organization that was part of the Special Operations Command. So I was there for the next four years where I was a troop commander, I worked as an S3. And so I was in that community for a couple years. Special Mission Unit prior to going to Command General Staff College of Fort Leavenworth.

Oh, great. Okay. And what year was Commander General Staff College?

So that was 96 to 97 out of CGSC.

Great. Now that's right about when the world is really starting to change. The Berlin Wall is falling. The Soviet Union is no more. The technological revolution is starting. The Internet has been born and starting to grow. And I'm just wondering, your early army experiences in your time with Defense Intelligence College and Command and Staff, how did it prepare you for that period of change?

What it really did is it opened my eyes to the broader ic, to looking at the geopolitical things that are taking place. And so it got us into strategy, and it got all the students to the position where you need to be something of a student of history. And, you know, I would only see that reinforced. And the other thing that I walked away from that with was a sense of, you really need to be a reader. You need to be a much more voracious reader than I had been in my past. And that kind of put the hook in me for always having a book or two in my hands or, you know, looking and trying to understand historically have situations manifest, you know, before how leaders dealt with those kinds of things. And. And so that was kind of a key one for me to really dig back into academics after having been literally a decade out of school.

Almost every CEO I work with is also an avid reader. And it's a way, I find, of establishing communications and trust with people that I just meet is discussing history or common books that we've read. And I tell you, I'm really glad the military kind of instilled that in me, this desire to keep learning more about history and extracting the relevant bits to whatever I'm working on currently.

Yeah. You know, when I had a chance to command at Fort Huachuca, one of the things that I wanted to share with all the officers and the soldiers that came through was that sense of being a voracious reader, being intellectually curious, because I found myself early on when I was in the 82nd, where the conversation would kind of go down two paths. One, it would be a senior leader, A field grade officer would have a conversation about something that was operational or doctrinal, and that doctrinal Conversation would find its way into a historical vignette. And I found myself having not read a lot of those historical vignettes, not able to contribute to the conversation, and not realizing how important history was. You know, it's the old Mark Twain. You know, history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme, if that in fact, was Mark Twain who said that. But then it gave me context that, you know, these are kinds of conversations that I'm gonna have every day going forward for the rest of my career. So you better up your game in terms of not only your understanding of doctrine, but your understanding of the context of where we've been as an army, as a military, and just history and the art of warfare and really the leaders that are involved in that and the decisions they made, how they weighed information and how they operated on the battlefield at the operational strategic level.

Right. And so very relevant to the military and also commercially and industry. I find the greatest, most successful people I've run into either are these avid readers that can extract those kind of lessons. So this kind of leads us up to the next stage of your career. You become selected for general officer and have to assume new responsibilities as a leader. Can you walk us through that stage of your career?

You know, it's kind of interesting, and it's very surreal. I had a friend of mine when I was a colonel at JSOC who had pinned on his first star, and he was deployed forward in Afghanistan. And I said, so, sir, so how does it feel to be a general officer? And he goes, you know, it's really, I just have more responsibility. He goes, I don't feel any different in that context. But one of the things that the military does and across the services, and I know the army does a very good job at this, is to try to help you grow into that position. And so the education programs that they put in place for 1 stars, 2 stars, 3 stars, are just phenomenal. And they expose you not only industry. So you see the civilian side of senior leadership, you see the military side of senior leadership. And it's really the clear message is, this is a lifelong pursuit and they're going to make us. If. If you make the flag grade, they're gonna make pretty significant investments in your education, and that's gonna be ongoing. And so even the general officer management tracks whether or not you're attending the courses. And they send you hate mail to make sure you get scheduled to go into them, because they wanna make sure that you get exposed to that. And then the other thing is, I Think it's kind of an exponential learning. If I were to kind of say, you know, through your career, you're kind of like a 45 degree angle where you get exposed to people and you learn and you get better as a leader. Once you make flag and you start seeing these four stars, the learning curve in terms of what you get exposed to and the opportunity to absorb that just increases exponential. So when you go, you know, to be able to see three and four stars and how they make decisions as a, as a young one star is absolutely incredible. And it's an opportunity to just pay attention and learn.

You know, I don't know if there's analogs of that kind of mentorship programs that exist in such a well disciplined way in corporate America. I do know that there are things that some corporations try to do to expose more junior and mid grade people to what seniors are thinking. But I don't believe that corporate America invest in people that way, the way that the military does. And I think it's a lesson that these corporations and their CEOs need to think through and consider because it really does pay off. And I tell you, by the time a person is selected for one star in the military, in my opinion, that's a pretty smart person already and good at decision making and good at operations and they're continually groomed to be just some of the nation's best.

If I could real quick, sir. And you do have a great deal of judgment experience by the time you put on that first star. But I think the other key point of that is, and for the corporate world as well, is to realize that education is never done. And one of the stories that I like to tell is one of General Mattis when he was at centcom. And so I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to observe him, to work for him down at Central Command. And every quarter we would have an exercise, right? We'd have an exercise for one of the war plans. And you sit and you think about this guy. So he's nearly 40 years in the Marine Corps, a leader of a generation, and all the experience he has. And what does he bring in for that exercise? He brings in a mentor. I mean, he brings in a personal mentor for him to kind of watch his decision making as he goes through this. And people wouldn't necessarily think that, you know, that somebody like General Mattis would have a mentor. And it was an army general by the name of Gary Luck. And so you got a chance to see that interface. And you know, in General Luck, who is a national treasurer. And not a lot of people know him because of the generation that he came up, you know, would lean over to General Mattis and, you know, he'd say, hey, Jim, did you think about this? And it's just priceless to see that interchange. But. But the lesson for me is, even though who he is as a leader, you know, General Mattis is at like the 99th percentile. He realizes the rest of his life he's working on that last 1% because he's a work in progress. And for me, that's a huge takeaway.

It's interesting story about mentors like this, and even the most senior could use a mentor sometime. Which leads to another question, and I wanted to ask you this especially. Who are your mentors? Or do you have heroes that you've looked up to through your career that you could rely on for advice and counseling and mentoring as you grew into your positions?

Yeah, when people ask the mentor question, I kind of, you know, they always say, well, who did you reach out to? Did you ask somebody to go, okay, sign this piece of paper. I want you to be my mentor? The way I kind of answer that is I'd like to think I'm a student of the human condition. So in other words, I observe. I watch good leadership, I watch bad leadership. You know, the good stuff I put in my rucksack and go, I'm going to keep that. The bad stuff, I go, I'll never do that to somebody. But I kind of. I kind of jokingly refer to it in some ways as the M's. And it was later in my career, you know, that I got exposed to Mattis, McChrystal and McRaven. But there's also Millie, there's Dunford, there's Votel, there's Thomas. So I got a chance to work with just some incredible. And a lot of them, you know, I met before they were. A couple of them I met before they were flags, but others when they were 12 stars in their career. So part of that is kind of the M's of my career and watching them. But, you know, the other part is countless sergeant majors, young soldiers, young civilians. Because when you. When you're a student of the human condition, you're not only looking up to see where you're going to be able to learn, you're looking laterally from your friends and peers. You're looking down to subordinates and, you know, who are just incredibly, incredibly smart folks that you can learn from. You know, one of the. From a Peer standpoint. There's a good friend of mine, Steve Fogarty, who is currently the Army Cyber Command commander, who's just absolutely brilliant. I absolutely just love talking to Steve because he's just so insightful. A guy named Neil Wiley. And you might know Neil. Neil was the Director of Analysis at DIA when I was there. Neil is an absolute renaissance man. Somebody that, I mean, it doesn't matter the topic. He is going to be conversant on it. It's unbelievable. And he was integral in preparing me for testimony in front of the oversight committees. But there's a number of people like that, even going back to my first battalion commander, Doug Sheldon. He and his wife Susan really set the bar for what a command team and leadership would look like for Second Lieutenant Ashley. But the other piece of that is when somebody says, well, how do you look at leadership, you know, in that journey of learning? And I said, well, there's kind of three legs to it. One of the legs is really kind of that that I just described. It's observing all those incredible people that I get a chance to rub shoulders with. So, one, it's. It's watching, you know, observing good leadership. The second leg of that stool, that triad, is just my personal experience, you know, the trials and tribulations of having made a good decision, made a bad decision, have succeeded, failed. So that's the second one. And the other is what we talked about before is history. And, you know, Secretary Mattis has got a great quote where he talks about, you know, the importance of reading. How could you not invest the time to read when the actions that you have are so consequential in the lives of young, you know, young men, his young Marines at the time. And then there are lessons in those pages, you know, that can be extrapolated, and they don't always give you all the answers, but they give you tremendous insights because you can see problems or understand issues that leaders have tackled through history, whether it's Washington or Marshall. You know, you kind of pick. And then there's going to be those leaders that their personality became so big that their genius became problematic. And you can probably figure out who one of those is as well. Back to World War II in Korea, right?

I know for a fact the United States Central Command is one of the busiest places on the planet. And the J2 there has to deal with a lot of information. And the subordinate components do also. It must be overwhelming. A lot of that information is false, contradictory, hard to understand, hard to assess. It's the real pressure cooker. Environment. And it must have really tested your abilities to maintain awareness of everything you needed to, to drive that operational command. So I wanted to ask both there and any of your other positions, what lessons, what other lessons do you have from being an operational intelligence officer at these pressure cooker kind of places that might be of use to those who follow in your footsteps or who are in industry today?

Yeah, I think the big thing is to realize you can't do everything and that you've got to, you know, you've got to put together a good team that you trust and you got to empower them. You know, the days I spent at centcom were probably the longest ones in my career. It's the only time that I didn't do PT during the week because it was just so. There was so much information to try to absorb and you know, that's so I've just pinned on, you know, a star. Just lost JSOC and got down to centcom and I've got, you know, this legend Mattis who's the commander and the read book itself, you know, it just, you can spend hours in the rebook every morning. It's not just the PDB which is very focused for, you know, senior leaders like the President. You look at all the intelligence that's come in. So I literally was at my desk at five in the morning and I would spend the first two hours before we had our first meeting, the first kind of the ops review at the three, about two hours going, okay, I got to get through as much of this as I can because I'm not going to have time the rest of the day. I'm going to be in meetings and then I'm going to come back to it in the evening. And so that was the only job I ever had where I didn't do PT during the week. I didn't carve time out. That's a mistake because I needed to make that time. But the real lesson there is that you don't have to know everything. You got to empower the workforce. You got to build the people and put them in place and trust them and just tremendous talent when I was down there in 2010 and 2011. So it's been a while, it's been a decade since I was in that job. But it really is about putting together a coherent team and let people do their job, making sure they're trained, make sure they understand what you need and it's okay to leverage them. So when you go into a meeting or a briefing and I've Seen this time and time again. You don't have to be the person that's given the brief all the time, lots of times. Matter of fact, more times than not the person we're put in front of. Mattis Millie McRaven McChrystal is the subject matter expert. Now, I'm going to be in there for sometimes what maybe color commentary or maybe an additional point that I want to emphasize or just to hear the feedback directly from that senior leader who either may agree or disagree with the analysis or say, hey, here's a follow on. Because a lot of times those sessions with the analyst for that senior leader is a great opportunity to task, not only to task the two, but to test the five to task the three. You know, if you talk about some particular event going on, it may be, hey, five, I need you to look at, you know, this port facility or three, come back and talk to me about how we're going to reposition forces. So not everything is a tasking for the two. So it's, it's that, you know, like General McChrystal put in his book, it's that team of teams that you put together and it's not all you. I had an interesting question that I was asked on my outbrief at dia. And the question was, what was the most important decision that you made when you were the DI Director and I. And my answer was most important decision I made was that I didn't have to make every decision, that there were all kinds of people that were very, very good at what they did. Keep me informed. Right. Don't let me get surprised, but don't wait for me. You know, the intent. Let's go.

Great. That's very helpful and insightful. And I wanted to draw out another lesson for corporate America. I think because the intel community is so broad and there's so many different approaches and components, the big agencies like DIA and others are heavily influenced by a history that says you speak truth to power, you produce intel analysis, and you do it in your world based on all source intelligence, come up with a conclusion and present that to a decision maker. I'm oversimplifying a little bit. Then there's this operational intelligence world where a J2 like you described is right there with the commander and the J3 as one team. It's interactive and dynamic and you provide information and you know what the plans are. So it helps you tailor that and you know what's changing. So you immediately know when to provide info and it's connected. And I think the world of intelligence that I see in corporate America is much closer to that model of deep connection between corporate intelligence, cyber threat intelligence, business intelligence, operational reading of the markets, and driving decisions. Vice a separate intel production model. That's my takeaway anyway. I think the corporate America leans much more towards that operational intel integration.

So I agree. And I think, you know, part of the challenges at the DIA and the IC level is that you gotta achieve that model. You know, I had a great conversation with General Dunford after he'd retired, and we talked about, you know, that interchange between the senior intelligence officer and in this case, we'll say the chairman. So if you really, if you're the chairman or if you're the combatant commander, you want that. You know, that. That J2, that senior intelligence officer in your inner circle, you want them to understand what it is you want you're trying to achieve, whether it's operationally or whatever's going on. It's not just intel exists as an island upon itself. We come in, we tell you about it, we walk out. The exact relationship that you just spoke to has to be where the intel officer is. They have to understand everything that you're doing operationally. They have to understand your intent, what you're doing. What's, you know, the information that you need doesn't mean that they take that data and they shape it. Right? They don't shape the information in a way that supports. And I have to kind of unpack this a little bit. You know, if the schema maneuver says, hey, I want to get, you know, two more aircraft carriers, it would be helpful if the intelligence said the threat was worse than it is or something like that. Right? So for me, that, that kind of crosses the red line. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about understanding your schema maneuver so that I can make sure that I am steering in conjunction with that senior leader, that big machine that is the ic to be the most responsive that it can for you, much like what you talked about in industry. So that relationship is not a. It's not a transactional one. If it's successful, whether it's the strategic, operational, or even the tactical level, it is a dialogue. And so, you know, one of the great comments, you know, General Dunford shared with me said, you know, before your intel guys can brief you, you kind of need to brief the intel team. Hey, here's what we're about. Here's what we're doing. Here's, here's, here's my intent. You know, from an operational standpoint and then they can figure out how they can best support you. So the conversation, you know, in some ways starts with the leader, not necessarily the intel, you know, analyst, given the brief. And so for me that was, that was a way to capture it in terms of the context of that relationship, which is not transactional. It has got to be an ongoing dialogue and that intel person has got to have access unfettered to that senior leader. And the ones that I know that have been really, really successful, they start their day with their analysts and it's one of the meetings they never cancel.

Right? Yeah. And I think the great corporations should aspire to build things like this where decision makers are being provided with information. But it's not just a one way feed. It's a very dynamic, here's where the corporation's going, here's what our vision is, here's what we need in this continuous interaction. I do see successful intelligence operations in the corporate world, but just not enough. And I think this is the model to follow. Speaking of models, I have another question I wanted to ask. Who else, who better to ask than you, a guy who led the Army's training of intelligence, what your favorite mental models are for conducting analysis?

Well, you know, just the typical intel cycle in terms of how you decide what you're going to do. Your collection, your exploitation, your process, your dissemination. So when you look at the intel cycle, I think that is, that's applicable. But you bring up a great point. Whether it's the intel cycle or the OODA loop, a lot of the frameworks, whether it's the military decision making process, mdmp, you know, how you do facts, assumptions, analysis, courses of action, things like that. A lot of those models I think are very useful for the corporate world. Matter of fact, a lot of folks have been in the military and you know this when they go in to do strategic planning or they do consulting, there's structured decision making process, there's all kinds of different frameworks, whether it's the intel cycle, OODA loop, military decision making, military decision making process. And so many of those things are easily transferred into the corporate world. And the corporate world has their models as well. If you want to do strategic planning and you ever read Harvard Business Review and you go back 20 years, you're going to look at a SWOT analysis, right? So, and then I see a lot of people that kind of go into the consulting world, it's amazing. And they talk about it said, you know, we're able to leverage, whether it's leadership training, whether it's decision making and you just really pull it out of a military doctrine. And so those kinds of frameworks are very, very good course of action analysis and things like that. So it's just a very logical way to think your way through problem solving. And those are really tried and true and have not changed appreciably over decades that we still use those. Great.

You know, I would also like to ask some of your insight into the current threat environment. Can you tell us what you think would be relevant for corporate America to understand regarding the international threat environment today?

Yeah, and you know, it's kind of interesting because the two things I would focus on are not a surprise to anybody, matter of fact. And then the second one is more in the forefront of people's thoughts in the pandemic. But you know, when somebody asked me what keeps you up at night? It's really cyber. It's the Internet of things. It's the ability to. And you know, we talked earlier about, you know, at some point, you know, you can hack somebody's toaster or you can hack somebody's aircraft carrier, you can hack somebody's refrigerator. The interconnectedness of everything from, you know, the Internet of things and cyber concerns me because it has near instantaneous ability to reach globally. Right. So when you think about, when people talk about Thucydides and the nature and the character war, the nature, you know, fair honor and interest, but the character war is changing because technology is changing. The instantaneous nature in which you can reach out from a cyber standpoint, whether it is a Trojan horse, a solar winds kind of, you know, I'm just kind of sitting there and I'm watching your infrastructure or to really get into the power grid or the banking system and having access and just waiting for the possibility that you may want to do something that is destructive in nature is concerning. I'm actually listening to a book right now that kind of goes through this history of zero day attacks, the life of hackers and all that stuff. There's a whole subculture which you're well aware of, that is out there that sells, you know, zero day vulnerabilities, the ability to patch it, paste, understand those things. And then you lay over that all your critical infrastructure and you know, you kind of have a gentleman's agreement in a lot of ways that okay, well, we're not going to go after banking. We're going to, you know, we're going to come in and do some things, but may not be as nefarious because of the escalatory nature of it, or that you may come back and go after my banking, or you kill power to a hospital and you kill patients. That concerns me. And there's so many things that shoot off of that in terms of disinformation. You look at what the Russians are doing right now in disinformation campaigns and how prolific they are in that space. But the other one is. And it feeds into the supply piece, or, excuse me, to the cyberpiece, which supply chains. You know, we saw those incredible vulnerabilities in protective equipment when we found out who's producing the ppe, who's producing, you know, a lot of the drugs and stuff that come into the US but something as innocuous as a chip or, you know, a camera or piece of electronic equipment that when you look at the second and third tier provider in a contract, you realize, hey, did you guys know that Kaspersky is actually putting the industrial control systems in your H Vac in your facility? Like, oh, my gosh, I didn't realize that. So it's doing the due diligence on supply chain. And I think the other part about the cyber, and I think this is one of the areas that we'll see mature more in the future. It's one thing to have cyber defense, but the other thing is, and I know this is already happening, which is offensive teams that hunt in your own network. So it's one thing to sit there and go, okay, well, I'm gonna put up firewalls and I'm gonna have, you know, all these great defensive capabilities. But the other part of that is you really kind of need to be offensive in your defense, in your own network, and start hunting in your network looking for those anomalies that might have gotten the guy at Firefly quicker to see two phones registering. You know, that one ominous day where he looked at it went, okay, that's not supposed to happen. You know, then he was able to discover it. But I think it was. I don't want to say it was by accident. We're fortunate that he did. But I think being offensive and hunting in your own network will be something that I think we'll be talking about more in the future.

Great. That makes a lot of sense. Do you have thoughts that you can share with us on threats to our space infrastructure? And I think this is important because so many commercial companies are now dependent on space, and they don't even realize it.

Yeah. So one of the things that we were asked a couple years ago by the deputy USDI Kerry Bingham was, hey, can you guys do something unclassified? Dia? Can you do something unclassified in the threats in space? And I thought, okay, well, yeah, maybe it'll be a trifold because there's probably not a whole lot we can say. We produced a 30 page document that laid out China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. And it's called Challenges in Space. We were literally able to talk about electronic warfare, jamming lasers, directed energy co orbital satellites that could come in proximity to your satellite with maintenance arms that could damage your satellite, direct ascent weapons that would literally go up in proximity or hit your satellite and destroy it and create a very disastrous debris field in that context. And so because the Chinese and the Russians and really North Koreans and Iran and others have studied our way of warfare and understand our dependency on space as a domain, and they're taking a very smart and very asymmetric approach to should they make that decision, how do they come after us in space? In some cases in a very kinetic way with an asat. And you know, the Russians, the Chinese and even the Indians tested an ASAP a couple of years ago, so they realized the use of space. Which means, you know, now we got to think about what's the alternative contingency in the emergency plan. Right. Kind of your pace, if you move past your primary of how we, how we operate with all those dependencies on precision navigation, timing, gps, and then a lot of that is just day to day life. Not only just war fighting, daily life and our understanding of how the weapon systems work. So we are competing in that space with our key adversaries and they are building more and more capacity with each passing day.

Right. And thanks for that, General. And I think from the position of a corporation, what should they do about it? They should understand their dependency and have backup plans in case things go out. But they should also support our nation trying to strengthen our defenses. Overall, I think it's really important that we get our hands around this and that producing a document like that is a great way to further the dialogue. So that's good. We'll link to that in our show notes here.

Yeah, and that was the tent behind it was to allow the Defense Department to have an open discussion with Congress, an open discussion with constituents. When somebody says, okay, well let me tell you the real nature of this potential adversarial threat in space. When somebody says, why am I investing X amount of dollars to do this? It's not at risk. It is at risk.

Right. One other question I'd love to ask you, before we go, is your book recommendations. We talked about reading throughout this and I know your reading didn't stop when you left the military. Do you have any recommendations for us or can you tell us what you're reading now?

I do a couple matter of fact, I'm about, let's see, about halfway through first principles. Let me see if I can get this back, which is by Tom Ricks. It's a Pulitzer Prize winning and I'll give you the subtitle of what America's founders learned from the Greeks and the Romans and how that shaped our country. It's absolutely fascinating because you go back to Hamilton, Adams, Washington, all of them and how they studied the Greek and Roman empires and what was the nature of those those nations at that time and what were the values and attributes that they brought forward when they wrote the Constitution. And there's insights on Washington as a leader and it's not a very rosy story in terms of him being indecisive, making bad decisions, how he fought, how he lost so many battles. But it gets into his character and how he learned never to make those same mistakes twice. But I'm only about halfway through it. It's absolutely fascinating. The other one that I just finished and I think it's kind of interesting as you think about where we are right now, it's great power robbery, the return of and it's democracy versus autocracy from the ancient world to the US And China. And the key takeaway on this one is as much as we're frustrated with the slow nature of a bureaucracy as opposed to how fast Putin or Xi can move, it gives you a historical understanding of why the democratic form of government is so much stronger in the long run and so much better and that the outcomes are so much better than what an autocracy will do and then the inherent risk in autocracies and moving quickly in some cases and how they operate and how they are very short lived in terms of the cycle of their kind of existence. Fascinating book. But the one that I didn't mention in one of the individuals I think that three people know about is a guy named Fox Connor. So Fox Connor, which if you ask somebody you know, tell me about great leaders from World War I and World War II, that name's not necessarily going to come out. So Fox Connor retired as a two star between World War I and World War II. There's a book that was written about him, it's very short called the Gray Eminence. And I think it's a fascinating story because we talk about the importance of mentorship. And so if I were to tell you, if you're writing your resume, tell me about your legacy, right. What was your legacy as a leader? And if you wrote on your resume that I'm responsible for the premier war fighter, World War II, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, chief of Staff of the Army, a Secretary of State, a Secretary of Defense, and a President of the United States, you would go, that's pretty impressive. And that is Fox Connor's legacy. He was the mentor that shaped and had incredible impact in the careers of Marshall, Patton and Eisenhower. But few people know who he is. So read about Fox Connor and the role of a mentor because the Gray Eminence is the kind of the nickname that Marshall and Eisenhower gave him. And they said he was the most capable man I ever met.

Fascinating. Yeah, I'm going to pick that one up for sure. I appreciate it. Well, Ashley, thanks for all the time today. It's been very, very insightful.

Bob, it's been good with you and thanks so much for what you do, and I appreciate it and the best of you and your family and your team there at ooda. Thanks. Thanks for listening to this OODA Loop production. For the latest analysis on cybersecurity technology and global risks, please visit www.ooda loop.com.