Illuminating Chinese Military Activity in the Indo-Pacific Region: Bonus Crossover Episode
52:18 Share

Welcome to the Hawkeye 360 podcast. I'm Tony Butera, Vice President of Global Growth at Hawkeye 360. And I'm excited to bring you this special episode featuring the audio recording of our recent panel discussion from Space Symposium 2025 in Colorado Springs.

The Indo-Pacific, thanks to the economic, geopolitical, and technical rise of Asian and South Asian nations over the last 30 years, has rapidly become the epicenter of strategic competition. The panel tackled the region's most urgent challenges: gray zone tactics, maritime domain awareness,

gaps in strategic deterrence posture, and lessons from other global conflicts that may apply, for example, when the PRC seeks to seize Taiwan by all means of its national power. We also examined the role of commercial space capabilities in closing critical awareness gaps.

apps, notably through tools like radio frequency data, remote sensing, and advanced analytics. We were incredibly fortunate to be joined by an outstanding group of national security leaders. Rear Admiral retired Mike Studeman, former Director of Intelligence at U.S. Indo-Pacific Command. Kim Len, Senior Director at Pacific Forum. Corey Johnston, Executive Vice President at Strider Technologies. Ray Powell, Founder and Director of Stanford's SeaLight Maritime Transparency Project.

The discussion was skillfully moderated by Kerry Bing, Director of the Aerospace Security Project at CSIS, who brought thoughtful questions and expert framing to the dialogue. I have seen firsthand how complex the Indo-Pacific can be. As a Navy veteran of five tours in the region, I had the distinction of serving as Director of Intelligence for two separate components of Indo-Pacific Command.

the US Pacific Fleet, and Special Operations Command Pacific. The panel underscored three points that ring true with my own experience. First, the PRC conducts tactical actions designed to achieve strategic effects, as well as to deceive and to distract.

Our ability to determine which is which has been a challenge for some of us that has been ongoing since the active defense first island chain PLA Navy of the 1990s, and it has only gotten more difficult. Second, whether we like it or not, we've returned to an age of strategic deterrence, or as one panelist noted, the need for a strategic assurance. How we make sense of the environment, react, and most importantly, work in concert with allies and partners is like navigation, both in art and science.

The need for clear, unambiguous information—data that can easily be shared—serves as a force multiplier.

Finally, in this age of information and disinformation, having a wide range of sensing capabilities, from seabed to space in Navy parlance, provides trusted and confirmatory data. When fused into a coherent picture, this data enables a resilient network of partners with both technical and societal strength to endure, deter, and act. This conversation reflects the complexity of today's security challenges and

and highlights the growing urgency and opportunity to better understand and respond to what was once considered only a regional issue. I came away with a strong sense that when technology innovators like Hawkeye360, trusted allies and partners, and government experts come together, the urgency, clarity, and opportunity in the room is palpable.

I hope you can sense that too as you listen to this very special episode. With that, let's listen in to the panel, Illuminating Chinese Military Activity in the Indo-Pacific Region, recorded live on April 9th at Space Symposium 2025. Thanks again for joining us.

Carrie Bingen, I'm a Hawkeye alum and also full-time now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. And it is such a treat to be back here with Hawkeye friends at the Space Symposium and also just to see so many friends and colleagues here in the audience. I see some Space Force folks, our allies in Japan, I'm going to call out Kazeki-san, who's in the back of the room there, Colonel Nakazato from the embassy, European allies, and just so many folks that were fortunate that you gave us your time this morning.

We thought rather than do another Space Panel, which is what you're here this week for, we wanted to take a different approach and take a step back. So we've brought together this superb panel of security and regional experts to discuss the evolving landscape in the Indo-Pacific, including China's growing influence and security dynamics and the strategic and operational challenges in the region.

We'll use this as the context for then how space capabilities can contribute and how the United States, working with its allies and partners, can address these challenges. So I'll lead a moderated discussion and save time at the end for questions from you. My opening question here is going to be on big picture trends.

I'd like each of our panelists to start with some opening reflections on what is happening in the Indo-Pacific. Each of them have extensive backgrounds where they've studied Chinese military forces, economic growth, technological advancements, commercial investments, etc.,

So from each of your vantage points, what are the most worrisome trends and pressing challenges? And I'm going to start with Rear Admiral Mike Studeman, retired U.S. Navy, who has tremendous experiences from Indo-PACOM as the Director of Intelligence, J-2, from SOUTHCOM also as the Director of Intelligence, Office of Naval Intelligence, and a tremendous array of operational intelligence roles throughout his career.

career. He's also an author of a book that we'll hit on through the course of the discussion as well on leadership. Mike, let me start with you. Okay. Thanks, Carrie. Pressure's on. Great to see so many colleagues here and hopefully new friends by the end of the conference. But it's a pleasure to be here. And I've been honored to be invited to be on Hawkeye's advisory board myself. So I look forward to that journey and making a difference as all of you do in your own country's national security situation.

Okay, so the Indo-Pacific, I think what we have to do in order to budget time appropriately is to do more sweep and depth on this. And so it's obvious that the most significant and pronounced issues in the Indo-Pacific today are probably the trade war and where those things go. You notice that the Chinese hiked up their tariff rates to an additional 50%. And so...

Where this goes, it's not just a bilateral thing. Obviously, almost every country in the world is affected by it. Nobody knows. But my observation is that it's been interesting to see that in the Chinese case, there's been a securitization of their economy where security, Uber, Allis, where it's become more important than growth, as much as they would love to have high growth rates really growing.

The security elements have put a crimp on those things and clearly have taken precedence for all the reasons we know regarding the geopolitics of today. And alternatively, take a look at the United States and the new administration. There appears to be this economicization of security. And so it seems to be almost a reverse thing where maybe those things that we would like to accomplish on the security front may in fact fall victim to some of the things we want to accomplish on the economic side.

And we'll see how this plays out, but I do think this is an interesting sort of dichotomy at work there in the Indo-Pacific. Look, with regard to the macro trends, I believe that we're seeing a return to almost pre-World War I spheres of influence thinking where the small and the middle states now have to really maneuver very carefully, very judiciously, because the big giants on the world scene have decided to become powerful

much more assertive with regard to their own particular interests. And each comes from a different point of view, but you could argue that this was a China thing with sort of neo-imperialistic intent there to recapture territories that were the expanse of the Qing dynasty. But it's not just the Chinese, obviously the Russians, and they are also in the Indo-Pacific, if I can remind you of that. But you have the Indian people

sense of what their place is in South Asia and beyond. And now America, I think, is essentially switching itself into someone that realizes that it may be time in order to protect America against some of these other kind of real politic choices that it also has to behave in this way. So I do think that the international rules-based system is clearly at risk, is already shattering and deteriorating. Globalization peaked probably in 2021.

And so we are in a time of flux. I think it's time of real dynamism where the new vision for the region and the world is not clear. And if we get back to might makes right,

And that's going to determine what borders look like or what rules are going to be followed. Then the Indo-Pacific region and many other regions in the world are going to face a more anarchic period, which we've seen in history has created more friction, more uncertainty, more anxiety. And in those cases, and you already see this in Southeast Asia and other places, people begin to arm up again the leftists.

A level of trust goes down to the point where suspicion then substitutes for cooperation. And we may find this impacts not just the security front, but also the economic front. And the whole notion of where open commerce goes and the prosperity of respective nations could all be at risk. So I think those are the trends. We could get into North Korea and agitation and weapons and crank.

and things like that, that I would just end there and allow my other partners on the table to maybe dive into some other aspects of it. Thanks. Great. Thanks, Mike. So next to Mike, we have Kim Len, who I was fortunate to get to know. We were both on the House Armed Services Committee together. She had the Strategic Forces Portfolio and the Indo-PACOM Policy Portfolio. She was the chief of staff at the CIA China Mission Center, so helped stand that up several years ago.

and longtime East Asia analyst at the CIA and also spent time on the National Security Council. So Kim, you just hosted senior leaders, including Admiral Paparo, Admiral Davidson at the Honolulu Defense Forum last month. So what are some of the most worrisome trends and challenges that you saw and maybe key takeaways from that?

Thanks, Carrie. And nice to see everyone here. I hope to meet many of you after the conversation here and continue to have these conversations. Carrie, as you mentioned, Admiral Paparo, we had him over at the Honolulu Defense Forum. He was one of our keynote speakers, which is a forum that Pacific Forum runs. It's a two-day conference in Honolulu. And you may have recalled some of the media statements that came out when he said that

China was not just conducting drills along the Taiwan Strait, but these are actually rehearsals. Those remarks came out of the forum. Clearly, China is on a dangerous course. He discussed the exercises that China is doing in the Taiwan Strait, which have become more persistent, have become more intense over the last couple of years.

And just last week, we even saw China conduct their largest joint military exercise around Taiwan since 2022 with over 40 aircraft and numerous naval vessels. Really, we've seen what Xi Jinping is wanting to do is transform the PLA, right, to have a military that's capable by 2027. We are nearing that window, not to say that they will

take force. But I think all of these signs point to a very dangerous situation where we could see China push the envelope in the street or elsewhere.

Of course, we also have the South China Sea and the escalatory actions that China has taken. These were all themes that were at the forum, but then also the convergence of countries, including China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, cooperating. We're seeing this in Europe.

We're seeing this in the Indo-Pacific. It's not just a regional issue. It's also a technology one, too. And I think we need to pay attention to that. Outside of kind of the global regional threat and trends that I just mentioned, there are things that the other kind of, I think, challenge or trend are things that we need to do internally and at home, right? Yeah.

And that's acquisition processes, right? There are things that we need to do to rapidly get ourselves in a position where we have the right capability and deterrence. We also need to continue to work with our allies and partners on this front. I'm so glad to see so many allies and partners, friends here in this forum. And that's exactly what we need to do is find ways to cooperate.

together on this. And then because of just the span and scope and the geography of where we sit and the Indo-Pacific, there's a lot of logistics, a lot of details that

We need to also continue to look at and really dive into the logistics problems, critical infrastructure, cyberspace. These are all really important components in order to ensure, what Admiral Studeman said, that we maintain the global order that we live in today. So I'll stop there. Thank you so much. Okay. Then next to Kim, we have Corey Johnstone, also a retired Navy officer who I had the privilege of working with when we were at the Pentagon together.

He has a really interesting background here as well. Past assignments as a defense attaché in Djibouti, naval attaché in Beijing, a chief competition officer at the State Department, one of the early idea generators on what became the chip

and the now current role at Strider Technologies. Corey, give us your thoughts on trends and challenges. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. And thanks to Hawkeye360 and Space Symposium. It's great to see everybody here. When I was first asked by Kerry to join the panel, I scratched my head. I said, oh, I don't know anything about space except what Hawkeye360 has taught me. So I'm glad this is about geopolitics and geo-economics.

The trends, as I think about the title of this conference, China and some of the trends in the Indo-Pacific, I think that's the wrong question. I can't think about China without thinking about global impact, global presence, and the fact that it truly is a team sport. If we're going to figure out how to enable innovation like technology, if we're going to enable more of a balanced level playing field,

It's going to require us to play team ball between government and industry, between industry and academia, and all across our partners and allies in the European Union, the Pacific, Japan, Korea, which I see a lot of our friends here, Australia. So one, it's a team sport globally. And I really saw this firsthand in Djibouti. I wasn't sent there because I knew Africa or knew French. I did not. I was sent there because I knew Mandarin and knew the first PLA base commander,

And so it was a strategic decision to say, how do we get more China expertise pushed out to the southern hemispheres? And that was eye-opening for me to see. How do I say this? I know we're not chatting house rules, so let me re-cage my brain. As we think about things as simple as foreign military financing, we sometimes think about it at a country-by-country basis.

But I think we need to take a step back and say, what can we help with regionally? In Djibouti, I was fortunate enough to learn a few figures. One, Chinese activity in not only the military domain with their base in there,

their ability to provide security assistance in a very rapid and very needed measure was a concerning trend for me because for the US, the cycle is so slow. It's so cumbersome that getting to the point where you're able to deploy something even useful took a very long time where countries have rapid needs now.

The other trends I'm seeing, I'll just switch over to technology. Technology, as we know, is evolving faster and faster, as is the geopolitical landscape. And so to be able to keep up with that, I think some of the concerning trends I'm seeing are a kind of outdated mindset of policy decisions, an outdated mindset of the ability to export goods.

technologies overseas so that they can impact. The offerings in the private sector intelligence space, whether it's strategic intelligence like Strider provides, exquisite intelligence like Hawkeye 360 provides, these are offerings that could really enable some good, refined, actionable insights and speed insight and speed action.

And that's the pop. If you want to spin it to a positive term, one of the positive trends I'm seeing is that industry and academia are finally realizing that they truly are on the front line of this kind of geopolitical and geoeconomic competition. Whereas before they wanted to say, hey, now, unless there's a compliance issue, talk to you later. But we're seeing heavy investments from private sector companies in intelligence capabilities so that they could understand and make decisions in a proactive way.

And in some ways, I think what they're saying is we can no longer rely on government to keep pace with what we need to do. So I'll leave it at that. That is a stunning statement to make. So we'll unpack that. Let me then lastly introduce Ray Powell. Phenomenal background over three decades in the U.S. Air Force. Also an attache with posts in the Philippines, Japan, Germany, Qatar, Japan.

Defense Attaché in Vietnam and Australia, currently at Stanford with their Sea Light Initiative. And I'll turn it over to Ray to explain that. But he is also in a really unique position where they are focused on illuminating activities in the maritime realm and particularly Chinese gray zone activities. So, Ray, what are you seeing? I think I'll answer the question

Telling you a little bit about how I spent my last week, which was tracking a Chinese survey vessel along the southern coast of Australia. And if you are an Aussie in the room or a Kiwi, you may have seen a lot of this in the news. There was all over the place and there was a debate going on, which is basically how paranoid should we be?

And of course, with being a political season in Australia, there was lots of room for extra paranoia. I came down on the side of essentially, actually, it's transit across the southern coast of Australia is not really a big deal, but you're probably not paranoid enough.

And so what we eventually saw the ship do was to stop over what's called the Diamantina Strait, which is off of the southwest coast of Australia, plenty outside its exclusive economic zone, and stop and do some what appeared to be submersible operations deep, deep into the Diamantina Trench, which is a very deep place in the ocean. The question is, okay, why would it do that? It's a scientific ship. It's doing science, right?

I assume every single survey vessel that China has is dual purpose. We know already that China likes to do things, for example, put sensors deep underwater that can detect vessels up to a thousand miles away. It's already done it around Guam. It told us so. It actually put out a news story.

Generally speaking, I assumed that we should be more paranoid. In fact, before it did this, it did a joint survey operation with New Zealand and several other international actors right off the coast of New Zealand, like right off the coast of New Zealand. And I remember looking at that and thought, "I wonder what made the government of New Zealand think that was a good idea?" Because again, I'm sure, I'm absolutely 100% sure it was sold as, "This is science. We're doing science. We're doing cooperative science."

But of course, in this day and age, we can't assume anything is just science, and especially with the way China does civil military fusion. Which brings me back to the South China Sea, which is where Sea Light got its start. Essentially, at this point, I would classify the South China Sea as a place where China has established a maritime occupation. So think about that for a second. We think essentially at this point,

Much of the South China Sea, especially in the Philippines' exclusive economic zone, is under maritime occupation, meaning the Philippines cannot go places that it used to be able to go because the constabulary is there to stop it. By the constabulary, I'm talking about China's massive maritime paramilitary built around its coast guard, which doesn't look anything like a normal coast guard, and its maritime militia.

And it's built around these huge island bases we saw that were developed last decade while I was sitting in Vietnam. And they were looking at the United States saying, you're doing something about this, right? And as an attache, I said, sure, we got a plan. Good plan. It's going to be a great plan. We have a plan. I think I'll leave it there and I'll turn it back over to Carrie to move this thing along. Yeah.

So you've heard here about all the different dimensions of what strategic competition with China looks like, not just the military dimension, but economic, commerce, technology, finance, information.

That segues into a discussion on, I'll say deterrence defense and what do we do about it? And when I was in DOD, I used to think, man, the Department of Defense is really good at counting ships. Their ships, our ships, their aircraft, our aircraft. But when you're maneuvering within this, I guess, gray zone or this competitive space, a lot harder, I think, for DOD to figure out how do we plan and how do we respond effectively.

So maybe, Kim, if I can start with you. You are a former congressional staffer. Talk about some of the efforts in Congress to strengthen its deterrence and defense, not just against the military threats, but some of these other areas that we've been talking about, particularly from your past role. You were the staff author of Pacific Deterrence Initiative. So maybe talk a little bit about that congressional perspective, and then I'll invite others to jump in.

Yeah, thank you, Carrie. And I would just say that today, actually, on the House Armed Services Committee, they're having their Indo-Pacific posture hearing where we'll have OSD, Indo-PACOM be speaking at that. So I'll be curious to see what comes out of today's hearing as it relates to the Indo-Pacific theater. As we think about, though, some of the things that Congress has done, I really tried to shine the light in terms of the sense of urgency and what's needed to maintain a strong deterrent, a

against threats in the region. One of the things that came out a few years ago was the Pacific Deterrence Initiative. It was really, it was created in a sense as we saw what the European Deterrence Initiative was doing in Europe and the ability to have consistent

funding, as well as a prioritization of specific needs and training exercises, looking at how different countries in Europe were able to get those capabilities and what USECOM needed to be able to do that. And we wanted to mirror an initiative essentially for the Pacific region.

Now, since that time, there hasn't actually been an appropriations to really match what is necessary for the Pacific. There's been a lot of programs that have been tagged to PDI, but it really has not, I think, hasn't really matched what's

what was the congressional intent at the time, was to actually create a funding mechanism to actually put more posture out into the region, build more munitions, focus on issues like logistics and critical infrastructure,

have more funding lines dedicated to security cooperation efforts for allies and partners in the region. Now, that's not to say that these things aren't happening. They are. There is a lot happening in the Indo-Pacific theater that the Department of Defense is doing. We

There's a security cooperation continues to occur, which is very positive. There's also a sense that there needs to be more munitions as well. So we're seeing a buildup of that. And then also the defense of Guam. And I think we've seen over the last couple of months a discussion about

about a Golden Dome or some sort of integrated air missile defense capability that would protect Guam, which is vitally important for the theater and for U.S. operations in the theater, as well as to protect Hawaii and other areas in the region and our assets there. So I think there's a lot happening. There's a lot of good things that are occurring. Of course, more needs to be done, and we'll have to see what the budget is.

It says when it actually comes out, there's been discussions of a trillion dollar defense budget. I think that we'll have to see, though, exactly what specific budget items are going to the Indo-Pacific, though. So I'm curious to see that.

Can I throw in? So I think those are all great trend lines there. I would argue that sometimes we get too fixated on the word deterrence, integrated deterrence, of course, I think is the most overused phrase that we use in the government in the last four years. And look, there are some things you just can't deter, right? There are big actors that are muscular, that are exerting themselves, and they're not stopping.

And so you haven't stopped them. You're probably not going to stop them on lots of different fronts. You have to deal with the reality that they're highly active across the world scene and not just in their own near abroad. And that's a brutal fact of your existence. Therefore, the government needs to be able to be proactive and smartly agile and reactive to all these moves that maybe people sum up in gray zone.

But it's more than that. And so I would love to have a leadership that would talk about integrated assurance, because I think assurance is a key component of what we do in foreign policy. And a lot of partners need to be assured across many different levels. And I think right now there's a lot of strategic unpredictability, and it's making a lot of folks nervous. And then there's integrated shaping, and that's what I think should be the interactive competitive phase.

What do you do? How do you raise the costs of the Chinese working with the Russians to essentially, it appears, to drag anchors and tear up sea cables across the critical parts of the world's sea-based infrastructure? What is the price for doing business?

And so we need to get better at the information domain. We need to get better exposing. I carry anything we're talking about that a little bit later. But at the same time, I do think that we need to be able to become more comfortable in the idea of exacting not just a reputational cost, but getting better at tying penalties to some of these things that are below the threshold of war, as people would say.

And so I think it's fairly simple. If you have the political will, you can tie an economic penalty to a gray zone behavior. You're not going to beat the Chinese in the South China Sea as they work to get effective control of the first island chain by building more Coast Guard ships and militia or fishing vessels or whatever. You can't compete with scale on that front. You have to go asymmetric.

So I do think we need to set the theater with a variety of different capabilities. We need to have the ability to deter a major conflict. But what are you trying to deter is a key question. Is it just a cross-straits invasion?

Are you trying to deter them from actually eroding elements, free elements of the rules-based international system? Are you trying to deter corruption? Are you trying to deter gray zone? You need to identify what you're trying to actually shape and influence and then orient your energies around those kinds of things using all instruments of your power.

And you can't keep using just the mill or the E or the financial one and expect to really compete against China, which is using all of its instruments in a very concerted and orchestral way to get effects. And ultimately, this comes down to comprehensive national power and how you use it, how you build it and how you use it. And this to me is the central question, is how are we going to build it and then how are we actually going to channel it

to get the real effects in the key terrain areas of the world, because right now what we're finding is we're just not active enough in shaping things in the right direction. That's a really great point. I promised these panelists that I wasn't going to put them on the spot on space. We didn't bring them here because they were space experts, but because they were deep on strategic, operational, and tactical challenges in the region and, as Corey said, beyond.

But I am going to pin them down on space here a bit. But I want to start with the problems. What problems do you see from a regional or a global perspective and where –

commercial space capabilities like what Hawkeye 360 is doing in the RF space, maybe other commercial sensing, other commercial capabilities could help address. And maybe I'll start with Ray, given the sea light mandate to illuminate gray zone activity, particularly in the maritime space. So most of the maritime space is in order to do what we do, which is to take

the existing open source and commercial capabilities that are out there

find out what China is doing in the gray zone and put that into the public space so that the gray zone is no longer gray. That's where space is tremendously important because there are just very few sensors out there. And most of those sensors are hidden from the public because they're government sensors. And for all of you people who've ever worked for the government, I have a news flash for you. We suck at putting out information.

That's not what we do naturally. Now, the Philippines has been the stark exception to the rule over the last two years, although I see them starting to pull back. But the reason that everybody knows what's been happening to the Philippines is because the Philippines embraced something that we like to call assertive transparency in a very open way. And that...

together with some of the things that we did on the non-government side, really helped bring out into the open what was actually happening. Space is so crucial to that. Now,

Hawkeye is a very important new capability because a lot of the worst gray zone actors do not broadcast their locations. By picking up those emanations off of the ship that are radios and radars and those kinds of things on the RF spectrum, that fills a gap. And we're starting to see some of that bleed into the commercial space, the open source space.

That is, but that's what we need. Eventually, what we want to do is we want a bright light in the maritime space so that nothing that these people do is hidden from the world. We want them not to be able to take advantage of the dark spaces of the world to advance their expansionist aggression into places where the U.S. national interest is at risk.

Corey, you saw a lot of this as well. We would have conversations on this when you were in Djibouti. Sure. You're on the front lines. What were some of those problems that you saw in the global south? Yeah, that's a great question. I go back to the Foreign Military Finance Center, how we provide security assistance in places like Africa, and frankly, around the world, Southeast Asia and elsewhere. Many times it is a long cycle to give some capability that you have to train up on, you have to maintain. And

And frankly, sometimes I would see things not used appropriately or it was just not the right fit.

And that was a country by country approach. So imagine taking a step back. And again, this goes back to mindset. I think a shift in mindset is vastly needed in how we think about technology today, because I'd much rather have a Hawkeye 360 capability. And again, why we're not only talking about the Indo-Pacific, when I got the capabilities brief back in Djibouti, your ability to hang out off the East Coast, but see all the way to LA or Utah was insane. And that was a few years ago.

I'm sure it's gotten better since. I know it has. But I could imagine a world where instead of going country by country to give things that don't work together, maybe having intelligence fusion centers like NASA

Fed by Hawkeye 360, so you could start tracking illegal, unregistered, unlicensed fishing, which again accounts for 3 billion to 10 billion of loss out of West Africa. A lot of it's, most of it is conducted by China. And then hold the individual countries accountable for the other pieces of physical security assistance to see if they're going to interdict that illegal shipping.

Hawkeye's ability to really figure out mothership communications with the ones that actually go into the EEZs, and whether it's Galapagos, whether it's Gulf of Guinea or elsewhere, that's important communications. When do those communications start to communicate also with other gray zone activity that Ray is tracking? It's not a military versus military. It's a military problem on our side looking at a whole of nation communication.

challenge on the China side, and that's globally again.

Okay, Kim, and then we'll go to Mike. Yeah, and I would just piggyback off of that. I think even if you look at the Baltic Sea too, right? There was a really great Wall Street Journal article. I can't remember when it came out, but it mapped out the Russian vessels and the Chinese vessels in the Baltic Sea. And it could, it mapped out, I think through probably satellite imaging, where the Russian vessel was able to do some undersea cable cutting, right? And China learning from these experiences, right?

Having non-classified, unclassified commercial satellite imagery of what's happening, not just in the Indo-Pacific theater, but across the different theaters would be highly valuable and useful to be able to see these trend lines and actually see what China's doing, what North Korea is doing, even in the Russian theater, and then also where they might be coordinating as well. There's a massive need for more information.

And this is really where commercial technology can play a role. If you leave it to the government, based on different security policies, guidance, there's so many issues as it relates to that. It just takes too long to be able to share information. But really, in the commercial sector, this is where a lot of that can be multiplied very quickly. Well, and Mike, you mentioned earlier about the need to counter disinformation. And I recall when you were the J2 at Indopaycom,

You wrote a pretty famous memo to the Director of National Intelligence called the 36-star memo. So nine combatant commanders signed on to this requesting that the intelligence community generate unclassified information about China and Russian malign activities. So you were the driving force behind that for many of the reasons that we talked about. Highlight some of those challenges as well. Can I address the last question a little bit too? Because we have some former J-2s that are in the audience. I saw Eric Krupp is here somewhere. Yeah. And first of all, the J-2s can't get enough information.

sensing, right? It can't get enough exploitation, dissemination, analysis. And commercials really come in where the government has done better, progressively created more capabilities, some of it very exquisite, but really it comes down to there's so much going on in so many places that you need a lot of coverage and you almost want this idea of persistent stare.

with China and everything he's doing. That's hard. Russia, North Korea, very difficult, hard targets for a reason. Great to see the increase in persistence or revisit or dwell new phenomenologies from multispectral and beyond. And I think that when we take a look at it, if you're in a combatant command, you want a full family of capabilities. So space is an important part, but it's not the only part. We would never want to be so dependent on space that if that goes away,

You can't compensate with stratospheric coverage or things that you put in Indian country or with your allies and partners or undersea or wherever. So you need a full family, a suite of systems, multi-domain that are delivering all the time. But the issue, of course, has been that the sensing has exceeded the

the capacity of the sense of making. And so there's a whole bunch of stuff. We know this is a common refrain when you come to the National Security Agency, but National Geospatial Intelligence Agency will tell you the same thing. They can't get through enough of their stuff to get it out to the people in time to really give the insights that they need. So how do you speed the cycle? And if you're depending on government to do it, I'm afraid we'll never have enough schlitz to do that ourselves. So how can commercial industry also help

with the sense-making, the algorithms and the analytics, the generative AI, and how that's going to be applied to this problem set. Because we, on the receiving side, on the practitioner side, really need the speed of how the insights are delivered. Yes, we'll still do the final enrapturing

with the multi-source fusion. But to the extent that you can take something that was just a one-off, this is what happened, versus a this is a trend, we're seeing something new here, and you offer that up, you give us a faster response

better starting point to then connect it to something that may be more high-end or may be more compartmented there. That's a service that the government really needs. So don't forget the back end, as people tend to do. And the back end, in my view, also includes analysis. And so what is your analytic capability that you can offer up? Analysis as a service, to me, would be something I would buy if I were in government.

Okay, on disinformation, look, this is really hard. And we found that countering it by volume was practically impossible. So you need to have the—if you're explaining the truth, you need to have a reputation for truth-telling, right? You need to have credibility and stature in that regard. When you open your mouth, people ought to listen. And what we found is that there's so much red malign activity occurring on so many different levels.

that we're essentially passing opportunity after opportunity to catch China out or other bad actors from their behaviors. They weren't being held accountable for it. It wasn't even registering with victims in various places around the region. And so we realized that we needed to get the intelligence community to take the higher credibility intelligence and find ways to take excerpts, not the whole thing,

You protect sources of method as always, but how you take the extracts that you can get down that may be simpler takeaways and get those out quickly to audiences that should be warned about actually what's happening in their country, which has a significant effect on their security. And we just were plain not good. We default to rhythmical.

risk adversity and protecting sources and methods. And so the risk of action was prioritized over the risk of inaction. You see how I put that? The risk of inaction was growing higher and higher because essentially you're allowing somebody to extend their malign influence with impunity through many significant parts of the region. So the 36-star memo where 9-11 commanders signed on to this was to say, Director of National Intelligence, I beg of you,

to get better at sanitizing those things that allow me to be combat effective in shaping what's happening in my region and exposing things, and including when it came to space issues, what's happening in space. It wasn't just a geographic thing. This was functional combat commands asking for it as well. We got a little better, but we have many miles to go yet, I think. That's where there's a great compliment here to be had of

declassifying and sanitizing information as well as leveraging that commercial sensor and sense-making capability. Absolutely. Right. Okay, let me open it up to questions. And Adam's walking around here with a microphone.

This has been fantastic. We really appreciate everything you've been talking about here with this China focus. Maybe just reflecting back on the last few years of the Ukraine conflict, what lessons learned do you see from that, sort of from the security perspective and how that applies to the China fight going forward?

And if I can put Mike on the spot here and just remind everyone, you were the first active duty general or flag officer to visit Taiwan in about 40 years. My secret visit to Taiwan that was compromised on the way over to Taiwan.

Perfect person to start us off here. Yeah. No, I talk to them fairly often. And so one of my briefings to the president when President Tsai was in was about lessons learned from the Ukraine war three months after it began. And we gave them the whole layout. We had great detail, tactical, operational, strategic lessons. Some of them still hold. Some of them have been added to. Everybody's watching, including the Chinese, by the way. The Chinese are learning and acting on these lessons probably faster than any country out there. Yeah.

in terms of how you have to quickly adapt, what you need to do to counter swarms, to generate swarms, how do you operate in an electronic warfare environment, how do you nuclear saber rattle in the right way to put your adversary on the back foot and slow them down. All those things have been, I think, obviously covered well in the media, and the nations that are adapting the quickest to all this are going to be the ones that are going to have advantages.

You find that the nuclear weapons element, which nobody really wants to talk about, it's back in force. There are some people before that say, hey, nuclear weapons are going to die out. They're back with a vengeance. And people are building up a full suite, a family of systems so that they can't be out escalated or destroyed.

can't hold on the deterrence ladder, and they're going to be used for signaling, and it's going to get scary because there will be brinksmanship on the nuclear front, right? There's a lot of reason why we pour our energies into nuclear command and control, communications, and our capabilities. There's a revitalization of how space plays into enabling all of that. So look, that has to be operating to spec now.

when you will need it, not if you need it, but when you will need to go up the nuclear escalation rungs.

I also think the drone issue has been well covered out there. This idea of what societal resilience looks like is probably not covered as much. What does it take to still communicate with your population, to have them have the ability to absorb damage and still come back and have the courage to fight? This is a matter of political leadership, and the willpower and the strength of your population is not something that you should ever just hold.

hope for. You have to actually work on it in peacetime to strengthen your people's preparation for a bad day. I think the Chinese are doing this ideologically with their preparation for a number of different contingencies. We are not doing the same for America with regard to what your Westpac contingencies may be. And so all these things matter because what ultimately you're talking about, not just military tactics and techniques and procedures, we're talking about whole of society readiness for

for what could be a much more likely scenario than ever before. Corey? Yeah, I go to patterns of behavior, right? Many countries did not believe that Russia was going to invade Ukraine. And it was only until you showed that blood bank movement was moving forward. And you don't deploy blood unless you need it. It can't be used again. And so once we were able to share that, and that was all unclassified, by the way,

for non-Chatham House rules. But as that was transferred, that was a pattern of behavior that indicated and gave some decision space to whatever reaction needed to happen or response. What are those patterns of behavior that

for China? How does commercial space or other open source intelligence, or how do we streamline that information sharing so that we can get to that? And I want to really quickly address the time is not to wait till 2027. We have the ability to do, and I'm going to mention deterrence and go back to that, but extended deterrence. If you know the investors in the People's Liberation Army forces that would

do an invasion or a blockade of Taiwan, if you know the logistics nodes, if you know the suppliers, which we do, that's all data-driven, you have the ability to start working better internally to government. And it pains me to say that after scar tissue galore from working both the economic side of our government and then the security and military side,

We still don't talk like we need to and as effectively. And so there's much that the Treasury could do, OFAC. There's much that Bureau of Industrial Security at Commerce could do to help with this extended deterrence problem. We just don't know how to have that conversation yet. Yeah. So just a shout out, an emerging capability that is happening on the commercial side, and that's predictive artificial intelligence.

And so going back to the question on Ukraine, there was actually a Silicon Valley company that had the invasion of Ukraine down to the day, months in advance. And they did it, and full disclosure, I've got some consulting for this company. Rhombus Power is the name of it. They did it by essentially sucking up data in huge amounts from across Ukraine.

lots and lots of domains down to things like cell phone data and those kinds of just lots and lots of data put all together into an algorithm and taking all that. When they take a look at these things, you're talking and they're looking out across the world and they're saying, you're pulling in climate data. What is rainfall likely to be in Bangladesh and how might that contribute to instability over the summer and those kinds of things? This is happening already now on the commercial side.

It is changing, I think, a lot. And so this gets back to what Mike was saying about the ability to be able to make sense of all of this data that we're getting through all of these sensors. AI is not itself the answer, but can be a huge part and answer to how we can know months in advance that this is coming, or at least suspect medium to high confidence that this is coming and be able to prepare for it and maybe deter it in real time.

And then even just from a space perspective, the first shot that Russia took was a space shot before its troops crossed the border into Ukraine. And it was a shot against a commercial space asset. We've been talking for years about how China is developing capabilities to target our C4ISR capabilities. We've seen that now in conflict. I would imagine China would be looking similarly there. Other questions? Front here.

hi good morning shelby you read the smoke excuse me shelby ritz with nightwing great conversation i work for a technology company i've worked for the government i work for a technology company now i know there's some great avenues to inject cutting-edge technology into missions we can name a few of them that work really well but we if you work for a tech company all of us by the time you do an rfp and you win it and you implement the technology

Particularly, I work for companies like Google. We're generations behind what we're implementing, but have been spec'd out. What has worked for you all? You guys mentioned some amazing technology. What's been working well to get parity with commercial sector? And there's nothing worse than a teenager has more cutting edge AI on their phone, right, than somebody that's in the field, a warfighter on a mission.

I'll take a stab at that if you want. Thanks for the question. And glad that there's other government folks that have transitioned to technology and are equally frustrated. But one way that we found is really, you mentioned it, if you're working with companies like Google,

The critical part is not to focus on the government RFPs, but to really work with those industries and companies that are truly leading innovation, because then the government's getting further behind and the RFP process is getting further behind. We have to change. And this could be a whole nother three-day conference on how to change those processes. But I think part of it is I call the diminishing return on investment for innovation. And what do I mean by this?

When you look, whether it's space technology, whether it's semiconductors, whether it's advanced communications, you name your technology, the landscape has been shaped against us in the West, in Japan, in the US and the EU, Canada.

And we see this because IP theft, right? IP theft totaling $600 or $700 billion a year of what's accounted for. What's known is $600 to $700 billion a year. And as you think about that, why does it take place? The 400, 500 some odd talent programs from China, for instance, or from Russia or from Iran that say, go forth, get a job, and figure out how to develop networks and bring that intellectual property back.

We saw this at Los Alamos National Labs, 160 individuals over a 10-year period that were part of the 1,000 Talents Program that were bringing back, and this is all publicly available, open source, but bringing back nuclear weapons technology to China to then be supersized and scaled, right? It doesn't matter which country you're at. We're seeing this over and over again. And that's why I think I go back to my point that

industry and academia are on the front lines and I'm seeing some positive trends. A lot of it in Europe may be at the beginning levels of understanding and how do we take the next step, but in the US and Japan and elsewhere, people are saying, how do we take action now? And so that's a critical piece is to protect the technologies that you're working on and then run faster.

I would offer, I agree with all that, the amount of help that I was able to get as a multi-J2 and Southcom and at PAYCOM from the commercial space side of it, where it's instantaneously releasable to

a partner where you make arrangements there, very cost-effective. We were winning in that respect more than we could through how you would, this is clunky release sort of environment for government-generated insights. I also saw work, it's on the ISR front, where the COCO and the COGO approaches if you're contractor-owned, contractor-operated, or contractor-owned, government-operated. So Skaneagle ISR systems we put on ships there, we didn't have to worry about

Actually running that capability, that was up to the company to actually do. We just were able to ask it to do certain, I need this many. And then when I want to change out a payload and make something, I'll work with you to get an EW payload that will put on ScanUgle there. The easiest possible way to do it turned out to be that arrangement. And so I think we need to find people.

those areas where they've proved to be winning in the past and go with what works. Speed, agility, government doesn't have it. So give those aspects to the commercial side, but find ways to use it just in time and to provide the demand signal when required by the government.

Okay. I want to thank everyone. This has been a fantastic discussion. I think one of the things I took away during my time at Hawkeye is just the tremendous soft power that this commercial space sector, that industry in general, and our technologies have. And I think in this time, those will be called on even more. So thank you, everyone. Thank you, our fantastic panelists, and enjoy the rest of the symposium. Thank you.