Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: This is the Spear the Story of the Profession of Arms, a production of the Modern War Institute at West Point, brought to you by the west point class of 1984.
Welcome back to the Spear of the Story the Profession of arms. I'm Dr. Charlie Feint, your host and today's guest is Chief Warrant Officer for Dale Hunter, formerly the senior Intelligence Warrant Officer and Collection Manager for the Multi Domain Task Force, who's now on his way to being the Chief technology officer for U.S. forces Korea. D Dale, welcome to the show.
[00:00:29] Speaker B: Thank you. It's very exciting to be a part of this. I would love nothing more than my shared experience to help somebody else.
[00:00:35] Speaker A: Well, I think we'll talk a lot about your various experiences today. You've had an amazing career and I understand that you're on your way to being a W5A Chief Warrant Officer 5 which the myth and lore in the army is, is those are unicorns. You never see them. In fact, I've only met one other one, Aaron o', Hara, who of course you know and I spent some time with him, used our pack and hope to have on the show. So really pleased to have you here and congratulations on your pending promot.
[00:01:00] Speaker B: Thank you so much. It's a humbling experience and hopefully one of your previous interviewees, Lt. Col. Ben Blaine, will also be able to attend my promotion.
[00:01:08] Speaker A: Well, that's an interesting tie in because Ben was our first guest on the SPEAR under the new format. We used to be the story of the combat experience, now the story of the profession of arms. Had a great discussion with him about the mdtf. We're going to talk to you about that also. So we've got a long list of things to discuss with you, which you actually helped me with. But before we get into that, can you talk to us a little bit about your background? What was your life like growing up and why did you make the decision to join the army and go in the intel field?
[00:01:31] Speaker B: I don't really have a hometown, so to speak. When I was younger, we moved around a lot and it was mostly in the west, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado.
So most of my life experience comes during that time.
Why did I join the military? It was really two reasons. It sounds kind of dumb now, but I joined because I was not ready for college at the time. It was a easy way to start a job and to grow up then. The other reason was my father and my grandfather were both in the military. So I felt a draw to be a part of that and continue on the legacy. Those are the real Reasons that I joined, I didn't think I would be in this long. I was just going to be four years so that I could get college after 9, 11. I, I kind of knew that I was going to stay in for a lot longer.
[00:02:24] Speaker A: Is that the reason why you moved around so much when you're younger, because your father was in the Army?
[00:02:28] Speaker B: Yes, he was in the Army. He was active duty, Army Reserve and National Guard.
[00:02:34] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:02:34] Speaker B: And those three things kind of took us all over the place.
[00:02:37] Speaker A: Did that impact your decision to join the Army?
[00:02:39] Speaker B: Having a parent that was in, Definitely my father and seeing him in uniform, seeing, hearing his stories about the service, had a lot to do with my reason to join the Army. Originally I thought I was going to join the Marine Corps, but because my father originally joined as a Marine, he was wholly against that idea. And so I ended up joining the Army. I spent the first 11 years until 2009 as an enlisted soldier, was a senior non commissioned officer before I was selected for warrant officer.
And then since 2009 I've, I've been a warrant officer, which has been a great experience for me and kind of expanding and magnifying my role wherever I go.
Being a warrant officer kind of gives you a little bit of ambiguity about what you're supposed to do. And it's been, it's been great for me operating in that grace.
[00:03:37] Speaker A: For our listeners who are not familiar with warrant officers, can you explain what a warrant officer is? The difference between being a warrant and a senior non commissioned officer and a
[00:03:46] Speaker B: traditional commissioned officer in two ways.
One way is a warrant officer is someone who is a technical expert who is brought to become an officer based on a warrant from the Secretary of the Army. And so originally, and when we first come in as warrant officers, we're appointed as opposed to commissioned. After we get promoted, we'll become commissioned. But the career path of a warrant officer is that of increasing depth of knowledge. So you continue to learn one field very deep, as opposed to an officer that learns lots of fields and continues to widen as they go forward.
So Captain, a major, they're going to be very specific to a branch and as they get to a general, they're going to have a wide berth of knowledge about many topics. The joke is we were sitting in a meeting with some Google representatives when I was with the mdpf, the Multi Domain Task Force, and the commander at the time, Brigadier General Eisenhower was sitting around talking. He's like, I need some experience from people to talk about how the army runs and budgeting.
And I Had said, I had some of that experience in General Eisenhower was like no, no, I need an RLO to kind of run these things down. The regular line officer, the Google representatives didn't understand what that was. And so he had said, does that mean that you're an irregular officer?
And so the joke is if regular officers are regular officers, warrant officers in my mind would be irregular.
That's the joke.
[00:05:27] Speaker A: I like that joke. I've heard the differentiation between warrant officers and rlos, but I heard rlos being explained as, as real live officers instead of real, real line, regular line officers. I think I like, I like your explanation better. Okay, so it sounds like the award officer kind of bridges the gap between the, the doers on the listed in the senior non commissioned officer side and the supervisors on the officer board. Is that a fair kind of description?
[00:05:54] Speaker B: Yeah. The way I capture it in my mind is that if something just needs to be done, whether it's complex or simple and everyone knows how to do that, that's definitely an nco. If there's a mission that needs to be accomplished, the person who plans and orchestrates that as the officer, when there's a piece of that that doesn't know how to be done, that's where the warrant officer comes into play.
So the warrant officers take the places where you have the friction and unknown and they make those things solid.
But yes, highly experienced technical expert where their expertise is the skills that we're looking for. It's not necessarily an education.
It's about the experiences we've had and being able to bring that to bear.
[00:06:44] Speaker A: So it seems like the intel field has a lot more warrants than the many other fields. For example, I don't know if there are any in the infantry.
[00:06:53] Speaker B: Zero in the infantry.
[00:06:54] Speaker A: And aviation has a bunch for obvious reasons. So do you think that there are certain branches that are more predisposed to having warrants than others? And if so, why?
[00:07:04] Speaker B: Yeah, you can see this in other services as well.
The Marine Corps, the now, the Air Force and the Navy have warrant officers in these fields. And you generally see these kind of similar across all of the intelligence fields because there's not a clear analog in the civilian sector. There's not an education that will make you a good intel person. And so you need someone who can do that intelligence activities and have the depth of knowledge for those ambiguous types. Other ones are technology.
So your, your cybersecurity, your cyber operations, your network operators, all those things that require a high level of skill but not necessarily command time. You're Going to have a lot of warrant officers. Okay. The U.S. army does a lot of warrant officers for pilots because our rotary ring fleet.
And so we, we definitely have at least 50%. We separate them between aviation technical works.
And so at least half is aviators and then the other half are technicians.
[00:08:13] Speaker A: Okay. You have a lot of experience in a multi domain task force and that's going to be the focus of our discussion. Yes, but you didn't just become part of the mdtf. So what were some of your other earlier jobs like being a warrant officer in the intel field?
[00:08:28] Speaker B: Yes, my experience that led me to the MDTF, the Multi Domain Task Force. I started around 2016 where I was a capability developer in a. What they used to call a trade off, capabilities manager. And those people would be like, it would be the bridge between systems that the army was trying to purchase and users that would have to use the system. And so I learned a lot about intelligence architecture. I learned a lot about how to stitch things together. That drove people to push me into 4th Infantry Division going to Afghanistan as a collection manager. I had zero collection manager experience in 2018 when they told me that I was going to be the collection manager and they said, well, it's a crucible of learning. You're going to go forward and find out. And so I studied every day and every night and I became proficient at doing collection management. At the time Brigadier General, now Lieutenant General retired, Hale thought that I was a good collection manager and he had nominated me for a program, an ISR program where you spend a year learning collection management. During that internship, General Hale recommended that I go look at this new unit at the Multi Domain Task Force because since it was a new unit, if you got a traditional collection manager in there, they may not be able to do collection management because there's no doctrine for it.
[00:09:58] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:09:59] Speaker B: So you're always going to look towards doctrine first when you don't know how to do something. But for a Multi Domain task force, there was no doctrine. So it was a airplane being built in flight. So General Hill recommended that I come to the Multi Domain Task Force.
And so I did. When I showed up, the first two people I met was Colonel Al Word, the G2 and Lieutenant Colonel Ben Blank, the 3. And they kind of set my trajectory of what I would do with mdtf. They were both highly motivated, aggressive leaders.
They wanted to get things done. And my experience with collection management was I was always responsible for the care and feeding of the three, but ensuring that the two got the answers.
And so I tried to make sure I got that balance.
MDTF was very new at that time, so being in on the ground floor kind of felt like being part of a startup.
[00:11:00] Speaker A: Can you explain a little bit more about a collection manager's job? I think our audience can probably have something in mind about what collection management is. Can you describe in a little more detail?
[00:11:11] Speaker B: Yes. Collection management and sometimes in other branches is called rista, Constance surveillance, target acquisition, called isr, Intelligence, surveillance, Request management, istar. There's a lot of names for it. It is where you take your eyes and ears of which you don't have many to answer questions which you have significantly more of.
So the collection manager is responsible for doing four things for using their own assets. First, we're taking a multi intelligence discipline approach.
So using all the intelligence toolkits, identifying requirements early so that they could be developed.
And then the key one is they help with prioritization because you'll always have more questions than you'll have things that can answer questions.
You have to understand where you draw.
And so a collection manager, an ISR manager, they're primarily responsible for controlling that chaos.
The inputs to those are very critical because if we don't sequence it, we're going to collect things that are going to be perishable beyond the time of when they're valuable.
So that's really what a collection manager does. And as I was going through the education, I kept hearing that the collection manager was responsible for establishing and maintaining the PED architecture. PED is the process, exploitation and dissemination.
That's kind of like where the sensor exists and where the person turns it into something useful. To answer the question, everyone said that that was the most important role of a collection manager and nobody taught that skill. They said you just have to figure it out when you get there. So that's really what a collection manager is. They're figuring out how to tie that stuff together.
[00:13:13] Speaker A: Okay, and you did that for the mdtf and this is a, a new organization at that time period. So not only was there not doctrine for collection management, there wasn't doctrine for the MDTF or at least not support significant at that point. Is that accurate?
[00:13:28] Speaker B: Yeah. The collection management doctrine that existed, existed for divisions cores, it existed for primarily what we did in Afghanistan and Iraq and the collection management that we were doing in the MDTF with the type of things that doctrine wasn't going to exist for years.
And so how did how to do collection management with long endurance, high altitude systems, using what you would think of as now expansive sensor networks, all that Stuff was in its infancy. We didn't have any doctrine for it in 2020. So when I got there, that was my first challenge is figuring out what I was collecting against and what I was using to collect with.
When I found out this term what I was collecting against a 2ad, that's really when I started my vision quest.
So a 2ad is a pretty significant part of the MBTF mission.
[00:14:38] Speaker A: Can you explain what that acronym means and then what it means in practice?
[00:14:42] Speaker B: Yeah, Anti Access Area Denial.
I heard the term first in August 2021 when I signed into the multi domain task force from Lt. Col. Plain who told me, hey, we're gonna find components and neutralize parts of a 280. And so I had to start down the path of what a 280 is.
So anti access area Denial in simple terms is a modern day defense in depth whole of government approach, restricting our ability to gain access to a large area and if we gain access, isolating our movements within that area.
So the anti access creates the big external fence and then the area denial stops us from moving around inside of the yard. And it seems like it would be. People confuse it with integrated air defense or they confuse it with anti or air defense artillery, but it's always on.
It consists of everything that that government can throw and it's always tailor made against a country's capital class, most expensive flagship products.
They're high altitude stealth bombers, they're stealth fighters, they're aircraft carriers and they reverse engineer our concepts and ensure that those things don't allow us to project power into that area.
[00:16:27] Speaker A: And the MDF that you supported, MDTF that you supported, focuses on the, on the Pacific.
And there's one key adversary there, but, but we also have Russia in addition to China. And if I remember correctly, MBTF was doing some really interesting experimentation with some non traditional collection methods, I'm sure many of which are classified, we can't discuss. But some of them included drones on sea and air as well as things like balloons, if I remember correctly. Is that accurate? And so what can you tell us about them?
[00:17:03] Speaker B: Yeah, my first experience in the Pacific trying to look for a 2ad was trying to find moving maritime targets against an adversary inside of a maritime environment.
So we didn't have the traditional ISR that, you know, we didn't have the large aircraft, we didn't have drones, large drones that could go far.
We had at that time in Batan 22, which was my first experience, we had some solar powered UASS because fuel was really hard to get. To and then we had quite a few high altitude balloons which was my very first experience with high off 2.
And they were very difficult to maneuver because they have no propulsion.
And the things that you were looking for were always moving.
And so you really had the ISR asset, the thing that you were using to look for stuff that you couldn't really control.
And the things that you were looking for were always moving away from you.
So that kind of dance that you do with the collection and the target was. Was very challenging and it really opened up our eyes to how challenging it's going to be when this turns into crisis. Well, we learned a ton about high altitude balloons.
Most of them were ours.
I don't know who they. There was one that was watching us launch balloons and if that was the first time that I had realized that doing whatever we were going to do forward is what was going to impose cost.
Doing things in California or in Washington was never going to impose the costs that we were looking for.
So those high altitude balloons, even at an unclass level had some cameras on them and we had a radio that we were using to hold the camera feedback.
And we took literal 550 cord and tied the antenna to the top of a water tower so that we could get enough reach out to the ocean.
You are maritime targeting.
[00:19:41] Speaker A: Oh amazing, amazing. So a little ingenuity there. Some duct tape and 550 cord. You solve a lot of problems.
[00:19:48] Speaker B: Always, always duct tape, 550 cord and super glue that. That summarizes my experience in the multi domain task force. Yeah, that's been really challenging and really
[00:20:03] Speaker A: rewarding from my days in the intel field. I remember that collection management largely existed to support decision advantage for the two, the three and the commander and also the collection manager was heavily involved in targeting. The targeting process that I'm most Familiar with is F3EAD 5 Fix, Finish, Deploy to analyze, disseminate. But the one that I think is more in vogue now with what we're talking about is F2T2EA. Can you explain what that is and maybe how those two things differ? Yeah,
[00:20:34] Speaker B: again, the first time I had heard F2T2EA was similarly in August of 2021. And that was fine fix.
Then you had track, target, execute, assess.
Now the key differences is that those targeting methodologies always assumed that the target was moving because D3A F3EAD.
Those were largely army targeting methodology.
[00:21:08] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:21:09] Speaker B: The joint targeting methodology because it included the Air Force and the Navy, those things were always moving targets.
So being able to hit a Moving target, you had to have tied ons.
It wasn't that it was there 10 minutes ago, it was that you had it there within plus or minus five seconds.
And so the track piece of it was very challenging.
And for a traditional commander, it's about my targeting, my execution.
And in the multi domain task force there's about our problem.
And so it wasn't really data centricity, but contribution centricity.
It wasn't what could I get from data, it was what could I contribute to the whole approach.
And everything had to be very well sequenced because when you do a cooperative targeting of a very advanced ship, you have to make sure that all of the things land at the same time.
So timing is key. And when we look at that methodology, the collection manager is really halfway through the fine. We generally keep track of generically.
But the fix is tough because it may not be your asset alone that does the fix.
It may be an orchestration of many different things to be able to get your fix. And it may not all be intel. Some of it may be unclassified transponder information.
We learned a lot with the Combined Information and Effects Fusion center, where sometimes unclassified data that was fast was a lot more valuable than classified data that was fast.
So we could do a lot with the Philippines AFP and the Armed Forces of the Philippines with unclassified data cooperatively than we could do unilaterally with pilots.
[00:23:29] Speaker A: Did you do a lot with partner nations in the area while you were a collection manager?
[00:23:34] Speaker B: Yes.
The best story I can tell, it's during My Time in 2022 or BK20.
The collection and the things that we discovered we shared with the Armed Forces of the Philippines.
That sharing with the Chief of Staff of the Philippine army led to our continued access, basing and overflight for the Multi Domain Task Force in the Philippines.
[00:24:08] Speaker A: Oh wow.
[00:24:09] Speaker B: It set conditions for long term success.
They were primarily focused, the majority Philippine military was primarily focused on counter terrorism.
And this was the first time where he turned Chief of staff. The Philippine army turned to his staff and said, we need to stop just looking at counterterrorism because that's not an existential threat, what this is. And so that was the first time I saw campaigning turn into direct access where it improved the access of the US military in the Pacific.
And it really set the tone. We knew at that point that anything that we were going to do, we were not going to be able to do it alone or unilaterally. Everything was going to go through a partner and everything was going to be with a partner.
[00:25:08] Speaker A: That's a pretty significant development because I served in the Philippines as well. And it's kind of a hot and cold relationship for decades in that area.
[00:25:17] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:25:18] Speaker A: And that's pretty amazing. The threat from the largely Islamic insurgency down in the south, which drives a lot of that terrorism from the MIL and the other organizations down there. I think that is an exactly right determination on that. Yeah, that, that's a problem. But they're not going to get taken over by Mindanao terrorists. But they might by China or some
[00:25:41] Speaker B: other large regional hegemon that may, that may exist now or in the future.
But their maritime environment is in a critical area that even if it wasn't China, it would, it could be another regional hegemon that would be challenging. That area.
And the free flow of items through that area is really, really the backbone of the economy. I mean, that we've seen that with the Strait of Hormuz that one small cut in the logistics of the world will change all kinds of things.
So keeping those things open is essential.
[00:26:24] Speaker A: Well, yeah, you're absolutely right. That's such an important point because the Philippines has territorial disputes with any number of people that they don't have the same type of negative relationship with China like Vietnam. And I think they have problems. Indonesia and Japan and basically everyone in there, they're all fighting over the same resources, the same territory.
[00:26:42] Speaker B: That's correct. And some of those. The Spratly Islands.
[00:26:46] Speaker A: Right.
[00:26:47] Speaker B: Some of the Spratly Islands are so contested that the power dynamics are where you would see Vietnam and the Philippines pitted against each other, but also the Philippines or the Vietnamese pitted against the Chinese. And so there's so much uniqueness and territory in that area that drives a lot of.
A lot of friction.
And so for the multi domain task force, being able to help extend the awareness of aggressive maritime behavior, especially in the Spratly Islands or anywhere in the first island chain, is essential for their sovereignty.
And so we made sure that we helped, wherever we went, whichever country we were partnering, we not only provided subject matter exchanges, we made sure to help provide that maritime domain awareness. And that was very powerful for them. And they saw this could be an existential threat.
A lot of people maybe overlook that there was a Pearl harbor in the Philippines as much as there was in Hawaii.
And ostensibly there was a larger loss of life in the Philippines. They were attacked simultaneously because they were just as much a strategic target as Hawaii was.
And I think they are starting to look back on that and realize that whatever is going to happen.
They're going to get hit pretty hard.
[00:28:28] Speaker A: We talked quite a bit about technology so far in this podcast and our exquisite technology definitely gives us an edge. But when we were talking beforehand, you mentioned that technology is a tool, but talent is a decisive edge. So can you expand on that a little bit more and talk about the talent in the mdtf, how you got it and how you used it?
[00:28:46] Speaker B: Yes, the technology was the tool. The data is not the end, but sometimes the means. The people in the MDTF were what made it successful. They had the right talent. All coalesced and it really brought one of the tenets of the multi Domain Task Force and multi domain operations convergence.
You had amazingly talented individuals that were invested in the mission. You had strategic leaders that were providing the direction and support.
All of those things fell together and created massive amount of success for the first multi domain task force.
The talent management piece of it is a zero sum game and I think it gets overlooked a lot.
The multi domain Task Force when I was there, we relied heavily on warrant officers to help bridge the continuity between the ingoing and outgoing of the officer Corps and the NCOs.
And so they leaned heavily on that. So you needed very strong warrant officers that were very motivated to get out and to make things happen forward.
And that's.
That meant that we had to start doing talent management two or three years out before somebody would be postured to leave.
We'd start having conversations and start hunting for talent everywhere in the force. At the time, my leadership gave a lot of leeway in trying to hire that would get the job done. So we would go around, find the best and the brightest in all kinds of organizations and it had a huge impact on the success of the multi domain Task force.
I think, and I don't know this for sure, I think that the unique mission of the MDTF, as well as the charismatic leaders in that unit, they brought a gravity to bring those people in. They had the kind of charisma that was magnetic and they would drag other talented individuals right into the organization.
People were excited to work, people wanted to get out and do that mission.
Those charismatic leaders were excited about the mission. It wasn't we're going to ntc. It was hey, we're going into the Pacific and we may be sleeping in mud, but we're doing amazing things. I was responsible for hiring warrant intel warrant officers or providing recommendations and my boss at the time, Colonel Word, told me that I needed to go find the absolute best talent of every job and I had to Hunt down. And I would go to, you know, special volunteer courses for intelligence.
So we have a course called the Digital Intel System master gunner course, which embodies the duct tape, chicken wire and super glue that's needed to keep stuff together.
And I would go and teach at that course because when I was giving a block of instructions, I was able to feel out who in the course would make a good fit. Sure hope I don't maintain tasks.
People who were really good at having the kind of mental elasticity and mental agility when.
When you told someone that they were going to be targeting a moving maritime target and that person would say, that sounds like not our job, then I knew that they were not the right person. Right.
When it was the person who would be like, oh, that sounds like a challenge.
I'm willing to learn something new. Those are the people that we were looking for.
[00:32:56] Speaker A: Yeah, I can't imagine that a whole lot of people in the army have had a lot of experience outside of the MBTF task force in tracking maritime targets like that.
[00:33:04] Speaker B: Man.
Even when they're not underway, ships are always moving.
They call it mean sea level because it's not zero.
It goes up and down all the time.
We had to learn about weather in ways that I never thought I would have to learn about. We had to learn about sea states, composite wave heights because generally when you do ISR and targeting, you're worried about weather like the clouds. But now if the sea states were too rough, you wouldn't be able to hit the ship.
So you had to wait for it to calm down a little bit so that when you fired it, it wouldn't go under it or over.
[00:33:45] Speaker A: Oh, wow.
[00:33:47] Speaker B: There was a huge campaign of learning and everything had to be learned. It's like this is something that was new to the army and we were going to have to figure it out.
Whenever we tried to figure it out at home station, it was never really figured out. We sort of conceptually sought.
It's like trying to explain baseball to somebody. You can talk about it all the time, but until they see doesn't really resonate. And so for a lot of our cadre of people in the multi domain task force, when it started to stick was when they went out into the Pacific, tried to track a target with 99% relative humidity at 100 degrees, that it really started to resonate the channel.
And then they realized how much preparation went into it.
Those people were the ones that were learning those hard lessons that really set the multi domain task force up for success.
[00:34:55] Speaker A: It seems like you and the other members of MDTF were pretty aggressive about going out and getting good talent. And I think that's clutch. I think a lot of elite organizations make the mistake of thinking, hey, we're at this great organization in this great duty station. People will just come to us. And I think the best people always have options. And if you don't go get them, somebody else will.
[00:35:17] Speaker B: That's absolutely true.
The people who reached out to us and the people who reached out to the organization were interested in the location.
They were zero interested in the mission.
It was the people that we went out and hunted that were interested in the mission.
And we had the right people the day the market opened because we were hunting well before. Best time to plant a tree 20 years ago. Next best time is right now, but waiting for someone else to plant the tree.
You kind of get what you get, right?
And it is zero sum.
There's a, you know, a certain number of those that are going to be the right talented individuals.
They will be good in whatever job you give them, but they're going to be courted by organizations or they're or they're not. And so we decided to take a very what we called active talent management, which was we sought to find the right talent vice react to talent.
We didn't wait for people to do applications and review applications. We weren't interested in that. We were interested in finding the dream team. And so we went to cgsc, we went to career courses, we went to all those places, Warrant officer career courses. We went to find the best town wherever they existed. And we found a really good route.
And they spent an awful lot of time in the first island chain, which was great because we learned a lot of good lessons.
[00:37:05] Speaker A: It sounds like the MDTF has a great location, has a great mission. You've got good tech and funding, you've got good people. But another component of that is leadership. If you don't have that kind of falls apart. You mentioned you had some really charismatic leaders in there. You already mentioned Colonel Ward, you mentioned Lieutenant Colonel Blaine. Anybody else jump out at you as particularly useful in the process?
[00:37:25] Speaker B: Absolutely.
Now, Lieutenant General Eisenhower and General Harrington, now Major General Harrington, when they were in the seat as the MDTF commander, they were working in just as hard as anyone else.
They were always forward as well. So if we were sleeping intense, they were sleeping intense. And in Balacatan 22, we were all in this little tent, tiny little workstations trying to find a moving maritime target.
And it's, it's Literally just like four of us.
And it's General Eisenhower, Colonel Blaine, the targeting warrant officer. And we're on little tiny keyboards trying to figure it out.
So it was there if it was, if it was good enough for them to go forward.
Everybody else was going to work.
Your presence speaks volumes. And they were always present for the most critical things.
They were never absent when it was critical, which really set the tone. I wanted to work harder because I saw them working.
And whenever I had a channel, they were always supportive.
So General Eisenhower and General Harrington, Colonel Word, Colonel Blaine. They were enabling.
They always enabled you to work hard.
They would let you go and get after it.
Sometimes you'd get a little bit of guidance on the back end. But they were always very good at giving you the maneuver space as a warrant officer to do as much as you needed to.
[00:39:19] Speaker A: It sounds like they were putting themselves at the decisive point, which is often forward, which is a great skill for a commander to have. But also sounds like they trusted the organization to exercise some disciplined initiative. Would you say that's accurate?
[00:39:32] Speaker B: Yes. And it was a representation of what it would be like in crisis and conflict.
We knew that we were not going to have good comms, good connection with all the strategic leaders that would need to make the decision.
There was going to have to be discipline, initiative that would get us closer to success in the event that we were going to get shut down, comms wise.
So it was always about discipline, initiative and our enabling.
The things that the ops, the, the three would do is they would blaze a trail right through all of the things that people said were not possible.
Says we can't do that. It's never been done. It's like because it's never been done doesn't mean we can't do it.
And that really set the tone.
And there was a.
The four minute mile is really what I used to help remember that.
And the four minute mile thought to be the limit of human achievement in the 50s.
But Roger Bannister.
Roger Bannister broke the record of the four minute monument, which was unheard of. Whenever someone hears this, they think, Roger Bannister is an Olympic athlete.
But he was a student.
He wasn't even an athlete. He just trained up for it, broke the record.
He had realized that that record was mental because within weeks of him breaking the four minute file, somebody else broke four minute model.
It wasn't so much that it couldn't be done. It's that we slowed ourselves and stopped ourselves from being able to do it. Meant whether that be through bureaucracy, whether it be through. We didn't know what the process was. So it was an implicit no.
We started with the idea that it was going to happen and worked our way back to what we needed to do to make it happen. That was different than most organizations that do very forward momentum linear type activities. We went the other direction. We're like bring us to where we were going to be successful and what do we need to do to get there. It's like four minute miles in there. Like okay, well we're going to break the four minute mile. And we just made that assumption.
We assumed that there was going to be a medium range typhoon missile in the Philippines.
They're like well that's never going to happen. Like, well it's going to happen because it's got to be there right at this time. So it's going to be there and it was there.
And I think that's a testament to where, where we don't stop ourselves because we're uncomfortable or because it's not something we've done before.
Definitely, you know, move forward in kind of a path.
And now people are starting to go down that path. People are talking about automated targeting processes. They're talking about joint targeting cycle 2021. Nobody was talking about that.
People thought we were crazy.
And now, now you see kind of the evolution of army concepts that are going next gen C2 all kind of pulling from these ideas of how we were doing a unclassified data fabric to be able to share quickly with partners that was just. Nobody was doing that. No. We'll put it on highest classification.
Yeah, that's what I learned there. I think that it was important.
The best success I had was when warrant officers were doing the things that warrant officers could do best.
You can treat a warrant officer like a third lieutenant. You can treat them like a generic action officer.
You could expect them to also run four minute miles and you'll be shocked to realize that they'll run four minute miles.
So my challenge when we went to CGSC or we went to some of these development programs was you're going to get warrant officers.
Expect more, more from your warrant officers than they're getting and they will rise to the challenge.
[00:44:15] Speaker A: I think the no self limitation aspect is such an important thing, especially in, in our world right now where we got to do things like transformation under contact, where we have some, where technology is changing so quickly. I think a lot of people just make assumptions about what they're allowed to do with authorities are and what they can and can't do and to the detriment.
[00:44:36] Speaker B: That's right.
If everyone thought that things that we were doing now we couldn't do and we are absolutely doing them and now they're just regular routine things.
General Flynn was also forward.
I remember we were sitting on a small classified laptop doing target tracking and sending fire missions to a high Mars to run digital kill chain rehearsals from a small hotel room in the middle of the world.
Everyone thought that that was impossible and now it seems routine.
I think for me the tooth to tail the strategic to tactical leaders having the same vision created the environment that we could make unique things routine. And it doesn't happen very often. And I think it's because the MDTF had the crucible of experimentation which meant you're going to have to do it in limited funding and you'd have to do it without any of the,
[00:45:53] Speaker C: any
[00:45:53] Speaker B: of the help of your normal programs.
You, you're going to have to track ships and you're going to ask the army for ship tracking software and they're going to look look at you all funny.
So it was that crucible that really created the leaders that are now continuing to drive the MDTF forward. And those people went out and now those people are the drivers of our transformation and contact. They're the drivers of our C2 Fix or C2. Now those concepts are starting to really socialize.
It was once said to me that you know, when would the MDTF no longer be needed? And to me at the time I was like, I don't think it's, I don't think there's ever going to be a time where it's not needed. There's always going to have to be that forward momentum because you cut through the trail.
You're always going to need someone to do that.
It creates speed for the other people behind you to come up quicker.
So I don't know that MDCs or MBTFs are ever going to go away. Multi domain commands, I think they're going to continue to evolve our understanding of those things. Just like the, just like multi domain operations, Agile Combat employment, Distributed Maritime Operations and advanced expeditionary Basing operations. Those kind of concepts that are counter A2AD concepts, those are going to continue to evolve because the A2AD threat is going to continue to evolve and it's important that they exist. And I understand that everybody wants to be a multi domain something.
Not everything needs to be multi domain. You don't have to do multi domain logistics, you don't have to do multi domain Healthcare, right. There are things that are valuable for MDO, for counter A2AD, but not everybody has to do it. Whenever the fight occurs, God willing, there's not going to be a fight.
But if it is, it's going to be the army, the deliverer, sustained combat power, divisions fighting, maneuvering and killing the adversary.
That's going to still be a requirement.
The multi domain component of that is extremely valuable in competition and crisis.
Really those transition windows, it becomes a lot less useful when that turns into a straight kinetic fight. Your electronic warfare system is less useful because you're just shooting at people.
And so I would say that we often seek, you know, buzzword bingo and some of that's good to keep everyone on the same page. Not everything has to be multi domain.
[00:49:06] Speaker A: Are there other MDTFs in other theaters?
[00:49:09] Speaker B: There is. The second MDTF is in the Europe theater.
And they looked and acted very different than the first multi domain testers. We would come together once a year, share concepts, share lessons, and we would have a checklist of kind of our innovations team.
So we would often get people approaching us with a technology that we would test out and that they would then go to another MDTF and see if they could test it out there.
We would kind of share what works and what doesn't. And we kind of whittled stuff down. The technologies that provided value and technologies that would SAP all of your time away just to get them to work.
And so we definitely focused on things that were just complementary.
[00:50:05] Speaker A: In the intel field, we talk a lot about architecture, and when we have that conversation, we often think about buildings or software. But what does intel architecture mean from the perspective of a senior warrant officer? And what is your role in shaping
[00:50:18] Speaker B: IT Industry or the service is never going to deliver a turnkey solution.
It's always going to have to be adapted. And we're never going to figure out that adaption.
Adaptation. We're never going to figure out that adaptation in a lab.
It's always going to be figured out on the battlefield. It's always going to be figured out in the places where we're going to have to use them.
No one is going to give us the key to making sure everything works.
A great example is a single pane of glass.
Many people talk about this common operating picture in the single pane of glass.
If you deliver a single pane of glass, it doesn't do everything, but it may be able to show you everything.
A warrant officer in this, specifically an intel warrant officer, is going to be heavily responsible and required to Stitch all of the pieces together.
They stitch the intel sensors to the exploitation, they stitch the exploitation to a customer.
They stitch the feedback to the sensor.
They have to stitch all these sensors and networks together to make sure that they work.
And it doesn't matter how much money you spend, it's always going to require that guy sitting in the middle of Luzon with, you know, trying to suck JPA out of a truck to fuel a generator. It's always going to take that guy to be able to ensure that your tactical intelligence target access node works. It's never going to be a solution that just works out of the box. I would love it if that was true.
My and maybe in the future it will be. My limited 28 years of experience, I've never seen a turnkey solution come out that just worked. It it required someone to have the ingenuity to have the drive to spend the time to learn all the things and stitch it together. I think that we often get caught up in the doing intel and we often forget that we have customers and consumers and they don't always consume it in the way we like to produce. So the intel warrant officers are responsible for that intel architecture.
They need to be in the intel architecture.
[00:53:02] Speaker A: Trench, want to return to your job as collection manager? So we talked quite a bit about what it does. Can we go into a little more detail on what your average day looked like and put it together for our listeners in terms of what you were doing, what you're contributing, what you're thinking about in that job?
[00:53:19] Speaker B: A collection manager, first and foremost, the first thing they think about in the morning when they get up is weather. They're going to look at the weather forecast, they're going to look at the ceilings and the cloud cover, precipitation, and then the multi domain task force that also included maritime weather, sea states, composite wave heights, whether or not your targeting activity was going to be affected, whether or not your sensors were going to be able to see through the mess. The next piece was taking everything that you had planned prior, being mentally flexible enough to realize that it's entirely possible not none of those things will occur in the time or place that you plan them.
And being able to shift those around, you're trying to grab them as they're flying away from you, you're trying to move them.
It's kind of if all of the sensors are instruments, you're trying to build a good symphony, sometimes you may not be able to control some of the instruments. So a collection manager is constantly trying to do the feeding. They keep their finger on the pulse of the collection, they keep their finger on the pulse of the objective. So whether that's targeting situational awareness, whether you're trying to do support to force generation, you're always keeping your finger on the pulse of the consumer and customer.
And you're also trying to keep your finger on the pulse of the collection so that you can match those together. My role as a collection manager, as I understood it, was always to be for the care and feeding of the three.
I knew that when I was doing collection management, it was because the three was going to task it to some. I worked for the two, but I kept the three out of the two's periphery so that the two could focus on other things.
My responsibility continued throughout that day to ensure that all of the collection made it to the customer. And sometimes I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to get the customer provide feedback so that I could build a better piece. You're always in this 72 hours where you're planning for all three days of the same time.
Called it the air tasking motorcycle. So you have your D +1, your first day, your D +2, your second day, and your D +3 third.
And you're always in this cycle planning for all three days in the same day.
And so that was.
That was really how my day looked when I was doing collection management. When I wasn't in an active collection mission, I was spending time memorizing assets, memorizing what they could do, looking at other people's collection to see how well it did against this type of target or this type of thing. And you would continually build your repertoire of how to use things. You would sometimes realize that you could use unmanned assets to determine the location of something.
Just as likely, you may be able to use commercial OUI sensors to determine the location of them. So it was constantly this system of evolving collection awareness. So you would do all this planning, and when you were in the collection mission, it's just heavy rowing planning three days every day. That's kind of what my day looked like.
You would always try to make sure that things generally went according to plan and not generally according to plan, like generally free of ram or ears, very flexible, how things would flush out at the end of the day. It wasn't really what I planned, but I got the customer just enough that I didn't get fired today.
[00:57:13] Speaker A: Not getting fired today was always a good goal.
[00:57:15] Speaker B: That was my goal.
[00:57:17] Speaker A: Many of our listeners are junior officers. So what is something that you'd like, Young RLOS in your words to know about the warrant officer career field.
[00:57:28] Speaker B: If I could only say one thing it would be expect more. I think we confuse this idea of expect more with respect them and I don't think that those are the same thing. Warrant officers have a vast knowledge and they have a vast technical repertoire. They don't mean a lot if we don't have what's expected of us. If you give us a low bar we will absolutely achieve a low bar.
Sometimes warrant officer will exceed that bar. Young officers should be continually trying to raise that bar of what to expect.
Don't try to expect us to be regular officers. We have equivalencies but we're not really equivalent. Our version of intermediate level education is vastly different than the command general staff where we go for three weeks. You know they will go for an entire year. I didn't read Clausewitz until I was a W3 and it was only because I was in a group of in that internship with all of these post CGSC majors that I had realized that they were talking about this concept in Clausewitz is on war. And I look back on my career and been like those people were talking and saying words I thought I knew I meant I wasn't even part of the conversation. And I gained a lot by reading those books. Clausewitz, Jomini, the Prince, the Republic. I learned a lot from kind of that that knowledge that the regular officers get but we don't get that opportunity intrinsic we have to seek those things out. Don't expect us to know the academics that you guys went through that the regular officers went through. We, we don't get that.
We do get highly technical experience through hands on and so we'll have a very long term view of things. Expect us to do more with that knowledge and experience.
There is amazing things that we can push out.
We can solve the coffee cup. They can solve problems that you didn't know you had in ways that you'll never understand. And expecting them to do more with that is going to set not just the officers up. It's going to help create a positive environment where the NCOs are training soldiers and soldiers are doing the hard things and where officers are providing that guidance and the warrant officers can focus on the gray friction.
And so when we get those roles right and we get that that command climate set we get a lot expect more of your warrant officers. If I was going to put it on a bumper sticker in terms of
[01:00:20] Speaker A: your job in the MDTF collection management Senior intel warrant, what were some of your biggest lessons learned from that experience?
[01:00:27] Speaker B: My biggest lesson learned was if I wasn't going to do it and I wasn't going to allow someone else to do it, it wasn't going to get done. I had to put my hands on a lot of things and I thought as a senior Intel Warrant, I could be very passive. I didn't realize at the time that the things that I was learning and doing there were.
It just seemed like daily work. Looking back, that was, you know, trying to sink ships with army high marks was kind of a weird thing.
Looking back on it now, it was really odd. I took a lot of time to do warrant officer talent management to find and hunt the right people. It wasn't until later on, a little bit later, that I tried to start implementing Warrant officer proposals professional development program. I had realized that I was getting all the talented people, that they weren't sharing any of that stuff because they were working really hard, they were doing day to day. So I tried to create a program where we could share all of our knowledge with each other. And so I should have done that first or I got the talent. I think the lesson that I learned there was you can't just do the one, you've got to do them both simultaneously. I found talented people. I didn't give them the opportunity to teach others.
And so I would have to continue to keep hunting the talent.
I had to keep burning people out. And so that concept of, you know, sharing that knowledge so that they could build their replacements, I didn't build that in. So probably my. The thing I look back on the most and say I could have done better, there was probably that professional development. It eventually worked well, but I should have done that first.
[01:02:26] Speaker A: Well, Dale, before we wrap it up, I just wanted to turn the mic over to you and see if there's anything else you wanted to add, anything that you'd like to revisit or last thoughts you have for people that are interested in dtf, the warrant officer field or career in Intel.
[01:02:40] Speaker B: Well, crucible of innovation. Innovation is going to be hard when it's real. When it's artificial, it looks easy and it feels easy.
If it is really tough and it doesn't work out of the box and it takes all of your late nights to get the stuff to work, you know that that's. You're in the space. That's the crucible of innovation.
MBTFs were charged to be the centerpiece of modernization and that was not good for the people in it because we had to live through that crucible, it meant that on top of all the other things we were doing, we were going to have to work really hard to get innovation to happen. No one was really going to hold our hand.
Warrant officers, Multi Domain Task Force. That mission, it's really a crucible and if it's easy, we're not doing it right and it's going to take a lot. It's not that it's not rewarding.
If you were looking for this job because it was easy and relaxing, it's probably not the right job.
It's hard, it's tough, but it's rewarding because you'll do things that you'll look back on and you'll see them years, decades later starting to permeate the rest of the force and you'll be like, I was on the ground floor. I was part of the startup of that. Colonel Blaine helps me a lot with my reading list. He would give me a book to read almost every time I saw oh wow. And there were a lot of books that I didn't understand until I was out in the Pacific.
The lean startup future is faster than you think. Those books started to make sense with convergence. They started to make sense in the scope of the CSA White paper number one, when you went out there and saw how you had to stitch it together. So I would say that the, the parting shot is the crucible of innovation is going to be hard and I think we're a lot better off than we were six years ago.
I think the MBTFs have gained a lot of traction. The Joint Force absolutely wants mbtf. They need someone to pick up the share of the burden from the ground because they can't maintain presence because their systems are mobile and they require them to go out and come back. Ground presence that delivers multi domain capability is absolutely the key to neutralizing a 280 they're looking for.
We're, we're able to provide it. I think sometimes we dilute the message a little bit to be inclusive. But I am absolutely sure that the multi domain commands will continue to go through the crucible of innovation on behalf of the entire joint.
[01:05:37] Speaker A: Well, Dale, the MDTF is kind of in your rear view mirror. Can you talk to us a little bit about the job you're going to be doing when you're promoted to W5 at US Forces Korea?
[01:05:46] Speaker B: Yeah, a lot of the lessons and technology that I experimented with in the Multi Domain Task Force are just now coming to the Korean peninsula.
So I will get to see the 2.0 version of a lot of the kit that I was taking out into the Pacific before.
Data centricity, contribution centricity.
And there are whispers on the wind about a multi domain task force standing up inside of Korea.
I feel like my time as the chief technology officer is going to be how do we provide those concepts that we learned in trailblazing?
How do we integrate them in a combined environment here on the peninsula?
How do we work and develop a combined effects capability with the South Koreans?
How do we rehearse those things for crisis and conflict? And I'm really excited to use my language skills while I'm here because of all of the skills that we had. Foreign language skills was the one thing that could disarm our apprehension from our partners, that could build immediate relationships with all of the people we were working with, that could change the tone and message of what we were doing in the Pacific.
Nothing was more powerful than us speaking their language.
[01:07:25] Speaker A: Is your ability to speak Korean something you learned on your own?
[01:07:28] Speaker B: The army taught me this in California, and I am on a continued campaign of learning for Korean. I will keep learning it because it's. It's more like golf. You simple to start, but it's a lifetime endeavor. I will continue to learn Korean, but the one thing I'm most excited about is working with my South Korean counterparts here on the Korean peninsula and using my language skills to help bridge a lot of those topics.
[01:07:55] Speaker A: Well, speaking of Korea and Koreans, we are having this conversation not in the class of 1974 recording studio at West Point, but in the Dragon Hill Lodge in Yongsan, Korea, the old 8th army garrison headquarters.
So the Modern war institute team is here on one of our contemporary battlefield analysis trips. Last year we went to Ukraine. This year we're here in Korea. But why are you here, Dale? Why are you here right now? Because your job hasn't started yet.
[01:08:21] Speaker B: Yes. So I came out kind of as a pdss, kind of a preliminary view and to do some groundwork. Since there are things that are moving already.
I want to make sure that I keep my pulse on it. I came out here TDY in order to help the USFK efforts, Some critical meetings with partners, and I wanted to do that because I didn't want to leave any of those things to chance because there may be something that's said in those meetings that I won't get in an exam that I won't. I won't get the re. I won't be able to see the reaction, what that feels like in the room.
So I wanted to make sure that I was here for those and the USFK team here really advocated for me to come out and help with that. And so I truly appreciate the USFK team as well as my, my leadership back at the Pentagon for allowing me the maneuver space to really come out here and help. I think that that is going to be critical to my future going forward.
The best successes I've ever had were because officers enabled me with decision space and maneuver space. So I'm really here from the government to help.
Terrifying words, right? That's right.
[01:09:39] Speaker A: Well, it's interesting you you mentioned USFK and then bringing you out and make that investment because that's why we're here also. So General Brunson, USFK commander, invited us out here to do this. Well, Dale, I really appreciate your time today and on behalf of the director of the Modern War Institute, it's my privilege to present you with this Rare and company. Thank you Modern War Institute coin and for me personally, thank you so much for making the drive up and so we can do this in person.
[01:10:04] Speaker B: Thank you so much for having me.
[01:10:14] Speaker C: Thank you for listening to this episode of the Spear. The Spear is produced by the Modern War Institute at West Point. What you hear in each episode are the views of the participants and don't represent the position of West Point, the Army, or the US Government. Be sure you're subscribed to the Spear on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher or your favorite podcast app, where you can also give the podcast a rating or leave a review which helps us reach new listeners. And if you aren't yet following MWI on social media, please find us on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Thanks again for listening.
