#186: Communication Wins Wars - Former Chief Technology And Innovation Officer at USSOCOM & US Space Force Dr. Lisa Costa

Communication is the backbone of every military operation. How well our forces talk to each other across air, land, sea and space is what sets the American military apart from everyone else. Without communication leaders can’t lead, and militaries can’t win. From the Global Special Operations Symposium https://gsofsymposium.org/ in Athens, Greece, Fran Racioppi https://www.linkedin.com/in/francisracioppijr/sat down with Dr. Lisa Costa https://www.linkedin.com/in/drlisacosta-reimagine/, a leading technologist, former Chief Information Officer for U. S. Special Operations Command, and the first Chief Technology and Innovation Officer for the U. S. Space Force, to discuss how innovation, cyber, and modernization are reshaping Special Operations across all domains. Dr. Costa brings decades of experience at the crossroads of defense, technology, and strategic innovation. From running one of the Department of Defense’s largest IT enterprises supporting elite global SOF operations to spearheading digital transformation efforts in the Space Force, she has helped architect the future of how our forces fight, communicate, and adapt. She addressed the evolving threat landscape, including cyber attacks, space domain challenges and why staying ahead through technology, data, and innovation is no longer optional. She emphasized the importance of agility, integration, and forward-thinking capability as the bedrock of a modern force ready for tomorrow’s missions. This discussion is about building advantage through technology, strengthening alliances across domains, and protecting America by ensuring the force evolves with the threat. Highlights 0:00 Introduction1:36 Welcome to GSOF Europe3:15 USSOCOM CIO & Space Force's CTIO6:02 Communications Evolution8:51 DoD Civilian Workforce13:43 Special Operations LSCO16:41 SOF Space Cyber Triad19:24 The Space Battlefield22:17 Lunar South Pole24:35 War Today26:18 Combatting misinformation28:38 Defining AI30:22 Human in the loop31:33 Guardrailing AI Weaponization34:06 Advancing Time to Technology35:48 Citizen Based37:06 Ground Level Innovation40:46 Buying Commercial Resources45:10 The Next Battlefield Quotes “I might be the only person wearing both a SOCOM and Space Force pin.” “Communications is absolutely critical.” “It has gone from big bulky equipment to a binary signal.” “Civilians are part of the force.” “I look at SOF as the tool and capability to prevent us going to war.”“The best battle space is the one we never have to put a boot into.” “There is not even a position, navigation, and timing capability on the lunar surface.” “Is it the person who discovered it or the person who gets there first?”“We’re fighting for data.”“It’s not there because we’re using AI.”“I do not define AI as just Large Language Models.”“There are going to be mission specific incidents where AI is going to have to be trusted to make that decision.”“Don’t sign up for Chinese AI.”“Operation Spiderweb was one pilot to every drone. That is not scalable.”“It’s going to have to take everyone.”“It comes down to the operational planners that are doing that risk assessment.”“I believe that we will rely greatly on commercial assets.”“There are areas of space that we have not taken advantage of.”“I hope that the future of the battle space is much more cognitive.”“I always put the operator in charge of a project, not a PhD.”“Always prepare for the next unknown mission.” Follow the Jedburgh Podcast https://www.instagram.com/jedburghpodcast/ and the Green Beret Foundation https://www.instagram.com/greenberetfoundation/ on social media. Listen on your favorite podcast platform https://pod.link/1558608802, read on our website https://greenberetfoundation.org/the-jedburgh-podcast/, and watch the full video version on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@jedburghpodcast as we show why America must continue to lead from the front, no matter the challenge.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Fran Racioppi?

  Communication is the backbone of every military operation. How well our forces talk to each other across air, land, sea, and space is what sets the American military apart from everyone else. Without communication, leaders can't lead, and militaries can't win. From the Global Special Operations Symposium in Athens, Greece, I sat down with Dr. Lisa Costa, a leading technologist, the former Chief Information Officer for U.S. Special Operations Command, and the first Chief Technology and Innovation Officer for the U.S. Space Force, to discuss how innovation, cyber, and modernization are reshaping special operations across all domains. Dr. Costa brings decades of experience at the crossroads of defense, technology, and strategic innovation. From running one of the Department of Defense's largest IT enterprises, supporting elite

• 0:46Fran Racioppi?

  global soft operators, to spearheading digital transformation efforts in the Space Force, she's helped to architect the future of how our forces fight, communicate, and adapt. She addressed the evolving threat landscape, from cyber attacks to space domain challenges, and why staying ahead through technology, data, and innovation is no longer optional. She emphasized the importance of agility, integration, and forward-thinking capability as the bedrock of a modern force, ready for tomorrow's mission. This discussion is about building advantage through technology, strengthening alliances across domains, and protecting America by ensuring the force evolves ahead of the threat. Follow the Jedburgh Podcast and the Green Beret Foundation on social media. Listen on your favorite podcast platform, read on our website, and watch the full video

• 1:29Fran Racioppi?

  version on YouTube, as we show you why America must continue to lead from the front, no matter the challenge. Lisa, welcome to the Jedburgh Podcast.

• 1:38Speaker 01

  Hey, friend, thanks so much for having me. It's an honor.

• 1:41Fran Racioppi?

  G-Soft Europe, we're sitting here in the lobby of the hotel. We've got the last day of the conference, but really what an absolutely incredible opportunity to bring together the special operations forces leaders from so many of our European allied countries, as well as many of our partners. We even had a chance yesterday, not only to talk to some European partners, but broaden out. We had the Philippine JSOC commander here, sat down with him for a little bit, but to have the chance to be able to see what our partners... Partners and our allies are doing across the world with their respective soft forces has been amazing to sit through the panels. But then also to see some of the advancing technology. You've been critical to advancing technology in both SOCOM and the, and the Space Force, which we got to talk about.

• 2:25Fran Racioppi?

  You're wearing both pins here. So we're going to go super deep on what's happening with innovation and technology at SOCOM. Why it matters. And then also the Space Force, because as a first of the Jed Burke podcast, we never talked to anybody who's served in the space.

• 2:40Speaker 01

  There you go. Well, that's because we're an incredibly rare breed and I, I don't know, but I might be the only person wearing both a SOCOM and a, a Space Force pin. So.

• 2:50Fran Racioppi?

  That's guaranteed. That's, that's a hundred percent. So.

• 2:52Speaker 01

  I'd like to be a unicorn.

• 2:55Fran Racioppi?

  You served as the chief technology and innovation officer at the Space Force and also the chief information officer at SOCOM. Can you talk for a second about those roles, why they're important, but then also you're a civilian.

• 3:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:10Fran Racioppi?

  Not a uniformed, well, Department of War member now, but what are those roles and why are they important to both of those respective organizations?

• 3:17Speaker 01

  No, absolutely. So, um, anybody who knows the history, right, of SOCOM knows that communications, you move, shoot and communicate, right? As a military and communications is absolutely critical. And you can go back through Desert One and Somalia and, uh, many of our failures have been because of communications issues. So I'm really glad that communications have been covered here, right? At the G-SOFC Europe conference, uh, it's critical that we not only be able to talk to our different services, right? Um, and that was the issue in Mogadishu. We had.

• 3:58Fran Racioppi?

  But.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  For an air force. Right. Yeah, exactly. And I was there on the command floor at SOCOM and CENTCOM, running between the command centers. Uh, when that was happening and, uh, to see the inability of our air forces not being able to talk to our ground forces was just really, um, heartbreaking. Right. It was unfolding. In front of your eyes. So that's why that role in SOCOM is absolutely critically important. Any of our signals intelligence people, any of our comms people, really critical to the current fight and no fail missions because it is all about no fail missions and bringing

• 4:41Speaker 01

  our people home. In Space Force, a little different, right? We don't necessarily have guardians up in space, right? So we're focused on making sure that we are providing total coverage of position, navigation, timing, communications to the forces, to the other services. So it's ground, sea, air, I like to say satellite to submarine. And so from that perspective, it's very similar. In SOCOM is the J6 and the CIO, you own satellite

• 5:19Speaker 01

  to submarine communications. In Space Force, you are responsible for ensuring that signal is up, it's running, and it's not being spoofed.

• 5:30Fran Racioppi?

  When faced with a challenge, Green Berets adapt, overcome, and keep moving forward. Now's your chance to stand with them. Join the 1952 Society with a monthly gift of just nineteen dollars and fifty-two cents to provide critical medical devices for wounded, ill, and injured Green Berets. Your support fuels their recovery, helping them return to duty or continue serving their communities. A Green Beret's mission never stops. Neither should our support. Join the 1952 Society today and stand with those who stand for us.

• 6:02Fran Racioppi?

  And what you've seen over your careers, incredible evolution of what communications architecture looks like. I mean, if we go back, go back to not that far, and we're talking about hand and arm signals, you know, to be able to communicate with our guys on On the ground or between our guys on the ground. And now, just before we started, we're, we're talking about technology that's sitting here on the floor. Where I, you can have a conversation with somebody and then you through earpieces and it can isolate who you're actually trying to talk to and drown out everybody else.

• 6:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 6:32Fran Racioppi?

  But talk for a second about the evolution of what you've seen in communications where we've gone in, let's say a 30 year period. Where we were focused primarily on radio. And now we've had to evolve to the entire domain to include the cyber domain. And we'll talk for in a minute about the, the SOC cyber triad. But how has the communications architecture changed as we've evolved in warfare?

• 6:59Speaker 01

  Uh, changed incredibly. I was giving birth in 1991 when Norm Schwarzkopf. Uh, was, uh, doing Desert Storm and all of the televisions were on in the hospital, right? Watching.

• 7:14Fran Racioppi?

  Now is the first time where Desert Storm was the first time where we saw live warfare.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And, uh, I got a call. I was still in the hospital. Um, hey, can you put, um, satellite communications in and can you design a communications architecture? For the Middle East because we think we're going to be there a long time. And I was like, well, give me a couple of weeks to like, you know, to heal up, but sure.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  But, uh.

• 7:40Fran Racioppi?

  Hold my baby.

• 7:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. There you go. Well, and yeah, and of course, you know, if you, uh, my son ended up, uh, growing up around a lot of, you know, assaulters and, uh, snipers and, uh, EOD guys, et cetera. But, uh, putting that first communications capability in, right? To, you go to All you day today, you would just think you were in DC, right? I mean, it's, uh, incredibly sophisticated. The platforms are incredible. We've got wireless capability. I'm a huge fan of lower earth orbit. Direct to cell phone without a terminal. Love that stuff, right? I can send a message directly to an ATAC. And so it has gone from big bulky.

• 8:27Speaker 01

  Equipment to sometimes they only need a binary signal, right? I need to know somebody's alive. Don't hit this place, right? So to be able to give, for example, a Marine Raider, you know, an ATAC that can, I hit a button that says, hey, I'm alive, don't strike here, right? Critically important was not able to be done 20, 30 years ago.

• 8:51Fran Racioppi?

  Uh huh. I want to talk about your roles as a civilian, the DOD and SOCOM, now the Department of War, but we spend the majority of our time on the show speaking with military leaders, uniforms, non-civilian leaders who serve our military. A lot of people don't know is that a large part of our force is built up of what we call Department of War civilians and operating on the GS scale. But can you talk about the importance of the DOD civilian workforce? How it augments the uniform force? And then what that looks like when you're actually put in charge sometimes of uniformed soldiers?

• 9:32Speaker 01

  No, that's a great question because it differs, right? Differs based on the mission and differs based upon the service and the leadership and what skills are needed to bring to bear to the mission. So on nine 11, at 11 o'clock at night, I had a call from the SOCOM Command Center saying, hey ma'am, can you be in the Donovan room at 7 a.m. the next, you know, tomorrow morning to receive a mission? And I said, you know, I'm a civilian, right? And they were like, yep, we know, we'll take care of it. I said, no problem. I'm going to be there. Doesn't matter, right? I just wanted to let you know. And I got a mission. I got a mission to establish SOCOM's ability to track moving things.

• 10:17Speaker 01

  So prior to nine 11, the intelligence community was only able to track stationary items, right? A building or maybe a ship that went from one port to another port, but not while it was in transit. So and for the old timers, right, it was order, battle and BE number. Basic encyclopedia number, right? Couldn't track moving things like people, money, goods and services, logistics, etc. So it was my job to figure out how to do that. And we did that with AI. And we built the largest data repository outside of the national capital region. And it became the basis for six other well-known cells around the community.

• 11:02Fran Racioppi?

  And so as a DOD civilian, people operate in all sorts of roles. You know, at the executive level, they serve as project managers, staff augmentees. What's that relationship like between the DOD civilians and the uniform?

• 11:17Speaker 01

  It's all about the culture, right? And SOCOM really understands and relies on its civilian staff, right? They're part of the force. Civilians work out. You know, after nine 11, it was like, everybody's gonna do PT. Everybody, because people were passing out. There's like working until they were, you know, punch drunk and pass it out. So, uh, you know, with civilians, it was contractors, it was military. You're gonna work out, you're gonna get sleep, you're gonna take care of yourself because this is gonna be a long war.

• 11:55Speaker 01

  But then you go to other, you know, services and, you know, sometimes those leaders have not had that experience, right? And so one of the examples I would give to them is, did you know that at one point in Afghanistan, there were over 70% of the force was civilian, right? That was deployed. And they were always surprised by that. They also have this, uh, understanding that or thinking that there are some things that are inherently government, right? Well, yeah, that's kinda true. But when you're at war and you're in the middle of things, uh, I'm not asking somebody if they're wearing a uniform or not. Everybody's part of the fight.

• 12:37Fran Racioppi?

  I want to ask you about the direction we're going on the next battlefield. So we have a couple of terms that are being discussed across the international community. In a few of the forums, I had a chance yesterday to host a panel, moderate a panel with the Philippine JSOC commander and the Polish deputy army commander. Where we talked about innovation, but as innovation as it is with respect to large scale combat operations. You talked about nine 11, we as a military and the nine 11 generation of soldier know a lot about CT, counter insurgency, counterterrorism operations, prosecuting

• 13:22Fran Racioppi?

  point targets, precision strike type capabilities. What we look at now, as we were focused on our CT mission. We do know that there were adversaries in the background building capability, primarily the Russians, the Chinese. And we now find ourselves in a lot of ways in these kind of inter world war period. This pre world war two period of nation state on nation state potential, great superpower challenge. We have aggression in both the Indo-Pacific region from the Chinese.

• 14:02Fran Racioppi?

  And we have land warfare here in Europe that we haven't seen since world war two. Large scale combat operations are a much different animal than counterterrorism operations. Where do you see special operations? Injection into large scale combat operations? How do they support it? And then how are they supported by the conventional force in that mission?

• 14:28Speaker 01

  Now, that's a great question. So

• 14:30Fran Racioppi?

  The NPS question.

• 14:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I was, so I feel like I have two bookends in my career, right? I helped two startups in the DOD. The first one, I was at Readiness Command when it became SOCOM in 1987, and worked at SOCOM at the very beginning, and then I helped stand up Space Force. When you think of SOCOM's role, what I would say is the things that were developed from a TTP perspective, especially the technology innovation and the ability to bring in industrial solutions very quickly, and expertise also. Let's not forget being able to bring in PhDs to solve real hard problems

• 15:15Speaker 01

  is something that shouldn't be given up just because we're moving into a different phase of warfare. There are a lot of solutions that still apply, and the baby shouldn't be thrown out with the bathwater, right? You're not wanting to fight the last war, but then again, you're not wanting to give up that exquisite knowledge that you've developed. What I would say, though, is one of the things we lost over the 24 years of fighting CT was our real talent in deception, counter-deception, denial and deception. And that's something we need to bring back into the entire force, not just SOF.

• 15:57Speaker 01

  And I look at SOF as primarily the tool, the capability to prevent us going to war, right? That's what you want to use, not after the first shot has been fired. And so I look at SOF as being very exquisite, and I do like John Braga's triad of cyber, space, and SOF together, enabling one another and being able to capture the high grounds, but you also have to capture the low ground too, right? Subsurface, again, to satellite. So I view SOF having a role in every critical moment of warfare.

• 16:40Fran Racioppi?

  Well, we know that the job, as you mentioned, of SOF is to keep the decision makers of our adversaries, force them to delay their decision. So you look at President Xi in China and his decision point to invade Taiwan. And he said, oh, in 26. Well, what we need SOF to do is say, well, let's make that 28. And then in 27, say, actually, it's got to be 30. And how long can we prolong that until we find a way to just get that off the table? When we look at the SOF cyber triad, what does that mean to you?

• 17:16Speaker 01

  Right. So it's the whole SOF-enabled space, right? So adversaries have direct energy weapons that can take out LEO. So taking out those directed energy weapons is, uh, would be a good thing for SOF to do. We have space-enabled SOF, right? We've got SACCOM and position navigation and timing, which is absolutely critical. But now we also have space-enabled GMTI, right? Ground mobile tracking indicators and air intelligence and air mobile tracking intelligence. Not having to have that logistics tail for drones, large drones, right? Because you have to have refueling, you have to bring it down.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  So having that constant dwell and that constant look is absolutely critical from space. So it's a space-enabled SOF capability. And then cyber is everywhere, right? We have this term cyber and we think about it as cybersecurity. But it's really grown and taken over the entire Internet of Things, right? The Internet of Space things, the Internet of Battle things, the Internet of Commercial things. And so it's controlling that entire domain and being able to take advantage of the data that is being produced across that entire spectrum. And so that's how I see the triad working together.

• 18:43Speaker 01

  I've always said the best battle space is the one we never have to put a boot into. I think that's what you're going to. See in the future us really holding back our blood and treasure for only those very unique and specific things that need to be executed. There's going to be a lot more autonomous capability controlled by AI. And it's not just about airborne drones. It's about space-based assets. It's about sea-based assets and being able to manage them simultaneously to a commander's intent. The commander wants to do this. This is the end state. AI figure out the best way to do it.

• 19:27Fran Racioppi?

  I want to ask you more about that battlefield. We don't have to put people into when humans into the battlefield that is very realistic right now is the moon. And there has been a lot of discussion over the last couple of years and not only discussion, but action by both the US and China as to who can potentially occupy the South Pole of the moon first. When you look at an organization like the Space Force, what is there? Who controls that battle space? And why is a battlefield like the moon so important?

• 20:04Speaker 01

  So I would say it's not just the moon. It's Lagrange points, right? Um, points in space that provide special types of capabilities to hide in plain side or perform certain capabilities that you want to perform. You have to remember, there is not even a position navigation and timing capability on the lunar surface. Right? So I believe the last administration tasked the Department of Commerce to come up with a GPS capability and a timing capability for the lunar surface. There is no standard.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  What is so important about an event like this, right? NATO getting together is that we have a number of partners who have been to the lunar surface, right? Japan, India, Italy, and

• 21:00Speaker 01

  We need to be using their standards, right? We need to be interoperable with them. We don't want to force them into a position where they have to partner with China in order to execute capability on the lunar surface. So it's really important that our policymakers tackle the hard changes that need to be made regarding ITAR and EIR and other restrictions so that space partners who would be our allies are using the same types of equipment so we can communicate with one another. We can help each other refuel if necessary. So it's very important. And to your point, you know, the 1960s,

• 21:44Speaker 01

  there was a space agreement that was signed, but no one is following it except for ally nations. And so I think we need to revisit that.

• 21:56Fran Racioppi?

  What did it say? I'm not familiar with it.

• 21:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it said, "We would not weaponize," right? "We would not weaponize space," and that it was open to everyone. Believe it or not, the largest growing degree program in the United States today is space law. Who owns what, right? If a flag is planted, does that mean that's, you know? And does it have to be a human that plants it? Or an autonomous vehicle? Are we using sea-based, maritime-based rules, right, of salvage? That's been proposed. So there are a lot of questions about, oh, I discovered an asteroid and it's got a lot of lithium and helium-3 on it. And I want to mine that.

• 22:43Speaker 01

  Is it the person who discovered that? Or is it the person who gets there first?

• 22:47Fran Racioppi?

  Why do people care about the South Pole of the lunar surface?

• 22:51Speaker 01

  There are a lot of benefits to communications capabilities and being able to have continuous presence there, right? So a lot of people are very interested in having that ability to be always up from a communications perspective.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  And that's incredibly beneficial. It also is an area that does not get bombarded with space weather the way some of our LEO and MEO and GEO satellites experience. So solar flares and things like that. And so you always want to have a pace plan, right, in place. And that's kind of part of the pace plan.

• 23:34Fran Racioppi?

  Right.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  And it becomes a hopping off point if you want to go to Mars.

• 23:40Fran Racioppi?

  Yeah.

• 23:40Speaker 01

  Right? You got to get to the moon. You got to refuel. You got to create fuel. And maybe you don't have to escape the bonds of the earth. Now, maybe you're doing, just escaping very low gravity levels that are on the lunar surface.

• 23:55Fran Racioppi?

  Which takes a lot less.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  Exactly. A lot less power and exactly. And you're able to create water there. You're you're able to create fuel, et cetera.

• 24:05Fran Racioppi?

  It makes me think about the definition of warfare, because we've certainly been here in a military centric conference. You know, a lot of our conversations primarily focused around military related issues. But one of the things that we have to keep in the back of our mind is that warfare comes in a variety of different ways. Think about the elements of national power, DIME, diplomatic, informational, military and economic. We have to, when we look at our adversaries, think about how are we actually at war with this country right now? Are we in a military war with China? Possibly a gray war, certainly through some of our proxies. But are we fighting them military to military? No. Are we in an economic

• 24:50Fran Racioppi?

  war with China? I'd argue yes. And certainly an informational war, same with Russia. Russia certainly leading much more towards informational and a military style proxy war that we're definitely in with them. But when you look at the cons, the threats that America faces across the DIME spectrum, what do you see as the biggest, let's say, wars that we're fighting, whether they be diplomatic, informational, military or economic?

• 25:21Speaker 01

  I think it's all about information, right? All of it's about information, even from the cyber perspective, from the even the monetary information. It's about data.

• 25:32Speaker 01

  And we're fighting for data so that we can characterize, right, our adversaries, understand them better, and identify what it is that they're they're trying to achieve. What are their levels of effort? And what are their different avenues of actually executing those levels of effort? So I posit, we are definitely in a war, and it's no longer that gray. It's not light gray. It's darn near dark gray, right? Who else would we allow to put cyber injects into our critical infrastructure and know that they're there, right? And not declare war? And I think that that's a challenge, right? In this new, modern era,

• 26:16Speaker 01

  where there are not good definitions of what warfare is in these different dime-filled arenas. Things that would have been a trigger of this is war and we declare war are not well-defined in cyber and data and financial, et cetera. So I think that is the challenge that we face is not understanding when we're at war and miscalculation, right? An escalation that could cause miscalculation.

• 26:49Fran Racioppi?

  How do we combat this information?

• 26:51Speaker 01

  That's really challenging, especially in this AI arena. Let me tell you, the attacks are so sophisticated. I just cannot express to people the threat, not only to companies, you know, where we were worried during COVID, the huge ramp up, right? In ransomware. That is nothing. That is absolutely nothing to what we're seeing in terms of precision influence, right? Going after specific individuals with highly, highly tailored information about their personal data. And and it's good because they're using AI, right? They're using AI to now. All of the things that we would look for,

• 27:36Speaker 01

  like the misspellings and the bad grammar and, you know, it's not there because they're using AI. And things look completely legitimate. If you click on anything in your email, you are at risk. If you are scanning a QR code, don't do it. It is the number one surface attack vector for injecting malware. And then we, of course, you've got all the challenges associated with AI, right? You know, prompt injection attacks, data poisoning attacks, et cetera. So making sure that you invest in trustworthy AI.

• 28:15Speaker 01

  I work with Seeker, which is an AI company, which is focused on ensuring that there are foundational models trained on your own data because people are going to do what they're going to do. And when they want to use AI, if it's not available to them on Nipper, Sipper or JWix, they're going to go out there and use their phone and use ChatGPT and put information in there that they shouldn't be using. And so we've got to invest in, just like there was a drone imperative that SEC or Hexus put out, there needs to be an AI imperative that says DOD, CIO and CDAO need to work

• 28:59Speaker 01

  together to put AI in the hands of every single DOW individual and make it safe and secure.

• 29:09Fran Racioppi?

  How are you defining AI in this?

• 29:11Speaker 01

  So that's a great question. Look, I do not define AI as just large language models, right? People think of it as ChatGPT and that's it. No, absolutely not. I was writing AI 30 years ago, right? For Soft. And like I said, a lot of capability was developed during the global war on terror that we shouldn't lose. But AI is, LLMs are just a very small branch on the tree of what is called AI, right? And then there, of course, there's reinforcement learning, but then there's also unsupervised learning. And when you have unsupervised learning, you have to have really, really Really good data, right?

• 29:53Speaker 01

  A lot of people like to say in DOD and the IC, we've got too much data. And I have said for the last 30 years, no, you don't. You don't have too much data. Because when you have the right AI system, you don't have enough data. Or you don't have enough of the right data. I'm actually here at this conference with Babbel Street, which is a third-party data aggregator, over 150,000 sources in multiple languages. And the data that we need for AI in the DOD cannot just come from government sources.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  It has to be augmented by the broad Internet of Things. And so I would just caution people when they think they have too much data, they're going to find when they implement a really good AI system that's trustworthy, that they're not going to have enough of the right data.

• 30:52Fran Racioppi?

  When you think about the application of AI, where does human interaction with the AI become paramount? And where is it not needed, specifically with respect to decision-making?

• 31:05Speaker 01

  Right. So, look, we all love to say we're going to use ethical AI, right? We all say we are going to only do human in the loop. I think that's incredibly naive, right? We have Golden Dome, you know, kicking off. I will tell you that if we attempt to use human in the loop to shoot down hypersonic vehicles with kinetic payloads, that is a fool's journey, right?

• 31:36Fran Racioppi?

  We don't have time.

• 31:36Speaker 01

  We don't have time. There's not enough time to react. We are going to have to... So there are going to be mission-specific incidences where AI is going to have to be trusted to make that decision. And that is why it is so important that the AI we implement is trustworthy and we understand the data that it's coming from cannot be a black box, either from the data or from the algorithm perspective.

• 32:03Fran Racioppi?

  So how do you create guardrails around its weaponization?

• 32:08Speaker 01

  Uh, well, the first thing is don't sign up for Chinese AI, right? The number of people who have downloaded DeepSeek and putting information in there. DeepSeek is a Chinese AI capability. A great example, actually, of the financial, being it more financially, right? Was look at what happened to the stock market on the day that the Chinese announced DeepSeek. The stock for AI companies just tanked. They lost a huge amount of their value. So it only took a few days to figure out that the claims that DeepSeek was making were just false. Right?

• 32:54Speaker 01

  That it only cost a certain amount of money to, you know, make it. Well, that was the last training round. So it was the same amount of money that OpenAI used. They stole data from OpenAI. They stole algorithms from a number of US companies. So I think it's important that people understand they are being targeted when they're downloading TikTok. You know, that, well, of course TikTok is transitioning, but any Chinese app and capability.

• 33:25Fran Racioppi?

  All this comes back to the technology and the innovation timelines that it takes to actually develop and field technology. We've seen over the last couple of years, rapid innovation, especially in a battlefield like Ukraine, where, you know, drone warfare, autonomous vehicle, and especially aerial vehicle capability has gone from the big Predator-type aircraft down to, you know, commercial off-the-shelf applications with explosives taped to them. And but they're targeting individuals.

• 33:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:59Fran Racioppi?

  And so that's rapidly advanced. One of the challenges that we have often within the US government is the time to technology. How long is it going to take us to develop, decide we want the capability, identify the requirements, put it through a procurement process, get a bunch of companies to go through a competitive bid process? Down select that competitive bid process, run a minimum viable product on a prototype. And then actually develop the thing. And by the time you field it, it's coming into the hands of the operator and the operator's going, I can't even use this anymore. It's a paperweight. You know, it's on my hand receipt.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 34:34Fran Racioppi?

  Sticking to the conics. We can't even use it. How do we advance the time to technology and fix, mitigate, change? Some of the procurement challenges that exists in the red tape that is in the government.

• 34:48Speaker 01

  So I, you know, I think SEC war is imperative on drones, right? And putting it into the hands of users, you know, down to the lowest level is a really good example of what we should be doing, right? And we should be doing that with AI as well. And let me go back to Ukraine. Ukraine is doing incredible things, but I will point out that Operation Spiderweb was one pilot to every drone. That is not scalable, right? You can't have a thousand pilots and a thousand drones. I need one pilot for a thousand drones and they might be multi-domain.

• 35:29Speaker 01

  So we have got to invest in multi-domain operations. Again, coalesced around, we're going to create a commander's intent, an end objective. And the human and the AI is developing different COAs and adjusting on the fly. And communicating between air, ground, sea components to ensure the outcome. And that's really, I think, you know, you're going to see more gamification of warfare. And you're going to see more citizen-based warfare, where there's a lot of citizen-based prototyping.

• 36:12Speaker 01

  And capability developed and then put into the hands very quickly of our operators.

• 36:19Fran Racioppi?

  What do you mean by citizen-based?

• 36:21Speaker 01

  We've got 16-year-olds, right? Writing code. We've got 16-year-olds using additive manufacturing, right? For organization of SOF attacks and things like that. So I think you're going to see much more of that sort of warfare, just like in Ukraine, right? Look, the number one producer of pharmaceuticals in the Ukraine prior to Russia's attack became the number one drone producer. Nearly overnight, they converted their facilities. I think you're going to see that level of innovation. Roll up your sleeves, get your hands dirty,

• 37:05Speaker 01

  buy citizenry, because we have a lot of talented individuals. They don't necessarily want to or can serve in the military, but their talents can be used, and it's going to have to take everyone.

• 37:19Fran Racioppi?

  Does technology innovation at the ground level, you know, in my layman's terms, I would classify what you're talking about being at the ground level, you know, the everyday person level. A lot of people have a lot of good ideas. You know, we have a YouTube channel. I get to hear about them all the time on people's comments. We call them YouTube warriors. But at what point does the ground level innovation to combat real challenges on the battlefield outpace our willingness to use that capability? Because there are some incredible capabilities out there that are highly kinetic, highly destructive, and can change the battlefield and are being used against us and our partners and allies.

• 38:03Fran Racioppi?

  But the question is, are we willing to use that capability in return?

• 38:09Speaker 01

  Right. I think it depends on existential threat, right? What is the impact of not using them? What is the impact of using them? It's all about risk, right? And I think when it comes down to making that decision, it is about the operational planners.

• 38:31Speaker 01

  That are doing that risk assessment and understanding what we're exposing by using the capability or not using the capability. You know, I also want to say that that I emphasized investing in capability that allows an operator to just give a command. And I want to emphasize that that command doesn't have to be typed in. It can be spoken. And instead of going through multiple steps. So as an example, I'm going to do an ISR activity. Instead of telling it 20 steps to collect in this circle,

• 39:11Speaker 01

  you know, at this rate, at this revisit rate, at this whatever, and going through 20 steps. The real value you're going to see over the next 18 months is an operator saying, show me all camouflage tanks within the five mile radius. Or identify any potential hypersonic vehicles before launch. Right? Because that's where we're going to be able to take things out left of launch. And so being able to just verbalize that, have all of the assets, multi-domain assets focused on that. And by the way, this was added to the SOCOM BAA.

• 39:56Speaker 01

  There was a revision to it that came out, I think, last month, indicating what is needed in future AI. And voice to operation automatically is exactly what is in that new BAA language. And I think that's what you're going to see. I also think you're going to see small units invest their resources more quickly. And then it will move up to the higher, larger unit level.

• 40:25Fran Racioppi?

  So how does that then come into play when we talk about who is best positioned to advance technology at a rapid scale? So for example, let's talk about space. So space for decades was. Commanded essentially by NASA, we all aspects of space with the work and NASA built the space shuttles, you know, they ran that program. I mean, yes, there were contractors who built the rockets and all that stuff, but primarily the innovation was led by government agencies. And then with the shutdown of the space shuttle program, organizations like SpaceX

• 41:06Fran Racioppi?

  now have come into in the play and we've seen, you know, Boeing and Jeff Bezos's, uh, you know, company of all, all the billionaires that say we're in space race now. But at what point is it more effective for the government to say, hey, this commercial private organization can do this better than we can. And we're just going to buy it from them.

• 41:27Speaker 01

  Right. No, look, so space was a benign environment. My first day at Space Force, I said, okay, so how do you plan to do a regular warfare in space? And the answer was, ma'am, we don't even know how to do regular warfare in space. And that's okay. It was brand new service and they have made huge strides. But I wholeheartedly believe that more so than anywhere, except well, maybe even cyber though, we rely on commercial cyber quite a bit in the US government. But I believe that we will rely greatly on commercial assets. Now the question is, what needs to be different about commercial assets? So look at Starlink

• 42:09Speaker 01

  in Ukraine. They did a great job of responding very, very quickly to Russian jamming, but it was reactive, right? We in the military tend to be very proactive, spend a lot of money upfront against attacks that were five years ago attacks, right? And spend, you know, the last 35% of the budget on that last 2% of the requirements. That is a completely different model. And so I think it's okay if we adapt and become a little less risk averse, be a little more like commercial in some areas, not all, and that we have hybrid solutions, right?

• 42:51Speaker 01

  Our government and commercial assets and not just US commercial assets, right? There are a lot of other partner nations with assets up there. So the same way that we have conducted a regular warfare for centuries, right? For millennia on the ground, it's we are in the land of Thermopylae, right? Where the first irregular warfare was conducted, or at least written down. We're now needing to do that in space. It's just a different domain. I will say it's a hard domain, not unlike maritime. So the first relationship that I signed formally as a memorandum of understanding

• 43:33Speaker 01

  as Space Force was with the Naval Research Lab. Why? Because they've been doing optical comms for decades. Very difficult environment, different salinity levels, different temperatures that are extreme. We deal with the same types of environments in space. And so there's a lot we can learn from one another. And it's important we don't try to recreate the wheel. And let me just say too, there are areas of space we have not taken advantage of. So for example, very low Earth orbit, right? V Leo. No one's really taken advantage of that. Scientifically speaking, it's a little more difficult, right? Because you still have the drag of gravity.

• 44:17Speaker 01

  And so you need more fuel and you need, you know, performance characteristics that you don't have in Leo. But there's this whole area between our atmosphere and you go to space where there is opportunity to be had there.

• 44:33Fran Racioppi?

  What's that distance?

• 44:35Speaker 01

  Oh, sure. Ask me a hard question. I know the answer, but not right off the top of my head. But there are a lot of basic science questions. But if you ask basic scientists, what are they going to do? They're going to say, well, you need to just fund us more for to do research. And I'm like, no, let's put stuff up there, figure out what survives, figure out what doesn't survive, new propulsion capabilities, right? This is absolutely critical. We have been using the same fuel mixtures that we have been using for since the beginning of the space program, right? Well, we were only putting up three, you know, maybe lifts per year, and now we're doing at least one a day. We don't even know what the impact is, right?

• 45:19Speaker 01

  And this stuff is highly caustic and highly toxic to people. So having new propulsion capabilities, new power capabilities, it's the same challenge SOF has always had, right? Make it smaller, make it, you know, lighter, make it last longer. The same need in space.

• 45:39Fran Racioppi?

  So what's the next three to five years look like in terms of the evolution of the battlefield when we look at our adversaries and the application of innovation and technology?

• 45:52Speaker 01

  I hope that the future of the battlespace is much more cognitive. Again, I am highly driven by mission. I always have been. And the ultimate incentive for me as an individual has always been to bring our people home safely to their, you know, their mothers, their wives, their, you know, sisters and brothers. So the environment in which we don't necessarily have to put people in harm's way is the environment I hope that we develop and control. And make no mistake, I have to, I do a lot of education to the conventional force about special operations.

• 46:37Speaker 01

  The conventional force tends to think of special operations as just people who are very muscle bound but aren't very bright. And I don't know where that comes from because these are some of the smartest people I have ever met in my life. You know, we have Navy SEALs going to Stanford. We have, you know, Green Berets going to MIT. These are brilliant people, but it's not about the education. I led a, right after nine 11, I led a cell that was multidisciplinary, meaning I had snipers. I think I went over this. And briefly. And assaulters and I had PhDs and I had PhDs from every DOE lab and a bunch of FFRDCs in academia.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  And I always put the operator in charge of a project, not a PhD. Why? So I'll give you this one story. We're planning an operation. Lives are at stake. Time is always criticality. And planning it and some PhDs came out and said, well, we got a problem. There's a comms device. We got to get rid of it. Okay, well, our solution is we can write some software. We can do a close-in inject and we can take it out. How long is that going to take? Six months? And then we may not get approval to use it.

• 48:01Speaker 01

  Enlisted assaulter said, ma'am, can I just shoot that? I said, yes, you can. 12 cent solution. We're going in. So having these different groups of individuals is critically important to think differently.

• 48:16Fran Racioppi?

  Yeah, that's why we take all opinions on an ODA.

• 48:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 48:20Fran Racioppi?

  Sometimes the the junior Bravo might have the best decision. That's right. Have the best opinion or idea on something that's going to help the commander make a more educated decision.

• 48:31Speaker 01

  Absolutely. You never know when you're gonna need a guy who rode a horse when he was a kid, right?

• 48:37Fran Racioppi?

  Yeah, that's true. That's true. Yeah.

• 48:41Fran Racioppi?

  We're only a couple of days after the the first guys dropped in.

• 48:44Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 48:45Fran Racioppi?

  That's exactly true. Well, well, I appreciate you taking some time to join us. I mean, I definitely learned a lot here about where we are, where we're going. Now, what the innovation in technology really looks like, you know, from your level. I mean, we can't predict the future battlefield. And I think if you talk to any of our leaders who sit in roles right now, they'll tell you one of the things we're the worst at is predicting what the next fight's gonna be. You know, but I know that we've got to be prepared for everything.

• 49:14Speaker 01

  Hey, that's a great point. Love ended on that. And that is, I was always taught and soft, always prepare for the Next unknown mission. And so, investment in tech has to be about open systems that are not niche, that allow me to pivot very quickly. I think that's a really important guideline for the rest of the force. But Fran, it's been an absolute honor and pleasure. And thank you for all you do for all of our vets. I really appreciate it. And this has been fantastic.

• 49:48Fran Racioppi?

  Awesome. Thank you so much.

• 49:50Speaker 01

  Thanks so much. Bye.

• 49:51Fran Racioppi?

  All right. American Jedbergs went on to form the foundation of the United States Special Forces and the Special Activities Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Thanks for listening to the Jedburgh Podcast, an official program of the Green Beret Foundation. I'm your creator and host, Fran Rycho. Join us next week for a new episode on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check us out on YouTube for full episodes, highlights, and other long and short form content. If you like what you heard, give us a like and leave a review. Follow the Jedburgh Podcast and the Green Beret Foundation on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, X, or Threads. Send your comments and inquiries to [email protected]. As former members of Special Operations Forces, the Jedburgh Media Channel and the Green Beret Foundation remain committed to supporting all generations of US Army Special

• 50:35Fran Racioppi?

  Forces and their families. Thanks for joining us on this episode. How you prepare today determines success tomorrow.