Experience

Plans and capabilities ultimately have to work under the conditions in which they will actually be used.

This work has involved operational planning, mission analysis, capability employment, and assessment of the factors that affect execution. It requires understanding how people, organizations, capabilities, systems, information, infrastructure, authorities, dependencies, and operating conditions interact rather than considering each independently.

It has also involved identifying constraints, gaps, seams, and potential points of failure and examining how decisions, actions, or changing conditions in one part of a mission or system may affect another.

Communicating on behalf of an organization or the people it represents requires understanding more than the message itself. The issue, audience, interests and perspectives involved, and consequences of how information is communicated all matter.

Work across public and private sector environments has included public affairs, organizational representation, communications and public relations, media engagement, stakeholder communications, and advising leaders on complex or sensitive issues.

This has required communicating with different audiences, responding to emerging issues, representing organizational interests publicly, and engaging people whose interests, concerns, or perspectives may differ.

Health related problems can extend beyond individual health outcomes to populations, communities, organizations, supply chains, policy, preparedness, and the systems responsible for preventing or responding to them.

Relevant experience brings public and global health perspectives to problems involving biosecurity, health security, preparedness, medical countermeasures, and the capabilities, systems, and resources needed to address health related risks.

The work considers how health risks may emerge and evolve, what capabilities and resources are available, where vulnerabilities or dependencies exist, and how prevention, preparedness, response, and resilience can be improved.

Effective preparedness depends on understanding what may happen, what will be required if it does, and whether existing plans, capabilities, organizations, and resources are sufficient.

Experience includes preparedness and planning, consequence management, response, capability assessment, and coordination across organizations and stakeholders. The work examines hazards and potential consequences, identifies requirements and gaps, evaluates preparedness, and considers how organizations and capabilities may need to operate under disrupted or rapidly changing conditions.

Preparedness cannot account for every possible event in advance. Plans and organizations must also be able to recognize changing conditions, adapt, and continue working toward the objective when circumstances differ from what was anticipated.

Determining what information is actually needed to understand a problem or inform a decision is often as important as the information already available.

Experience across the intelligence cycle includes developing information requirements and working with information from multiple sources and disciplines to support analysis, decisions, and operations.

The work has involved identifying information gaps, assessing the relevance and sufficiency of available information, reconciling conflicting or incomplete reporting, and determining what the evidence supports as well as what remains uncertain.

Foreign intelligence threats and human behavior can introduce dimensions to a problem that may not be apparent through technical information or other forms of analysis.

Experience includes counterintelligence and human intelligence problems involving foreign intelligence threats, insider threats, human sources and relationships, investigations, sensitive activities, and protection of people, information, technologies, and capabilities.

The work has required understanding intent, access, relationships, behavior, targeting, influence, concealment, collection, and exploitation and how those factors may create vulnerabilities or affect operations and decisions.

Understanding an opposing perspective is only part of Red Teaming. It is equally important to understand our own objectives, capabilities, vulnerabilities, dependencies, assumptions, and options, the environment in which the problem exists, and how each may affect the others as actions and conditions change.

The work considers what different actors are trying to accomplish, what they are capable of doing, how those capabilities may be employed, what they may observe or learn, where vulnerabilities or opportunities exist, and how they may respond or adapt.

Red Teaming can challenge assumptions, examine potential courses of action, identify gaps and requirements, assess vulnerabilities and dependencies, develop realistic conditions and scenarios, and evaluate whether existing capabilities, plans, systems, or approaches are sufficient for what they are intended to accomplish.

For Resiliency, Red Teaming is not defined by “Red.” It starts with the problem and determines what needs to be understood, represented, challenged, or evaluated to better understand what may happen, what options exist, and what the evidence supports.

Important information is often distributed across sources that were never intended to be viewed together. Individually, those sources may reveal very little. Examined together and over time, they can reveal changes, relationships, anomalies, and emerging indicators that might otherwise go unnoticed.

Experience includes using Publicly Available Information (PAI), Commercially Available Information (CAI), sensor and machine generated data, and other accessible information to examine issues, activities, entities, relationships, and environments from different perspectives and over time.

Analytical tools, automation, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, and subject matter expertise can help work across large and diverse volumes of information, but technology does not determine what matters. What is observed still has to be assessed against the problem, what is already known, what remains unknown, and what alternative explanations may exist.

Identifying a capability gap or need does not necessarily mean that a proposed technology is the right answer.

Experience includes identifying and defining capability gaps, needs, and requirements; evaluating emerging and proposed technologies; and assessing whether a new or improved capability may address a meaningful need.

As technologies mature, new information can change the understanding of both the original need and the proposed solution. Performance, limitations, dependencies, risks, requirements, and remaining gaps all inform whether a technology should continue to mature, be modified, transition toward use, or give way to a different approach.

Complex technical and capability development efforts frequently depend on more than the performance of an individual technology.

Experience within Research and Engineering environments includes the development, integration, maturation, and transition of emerging technologies and capabilities, with significant experience involving Artificial Intelligence (AI), AI enabled capabilities, autonomy, uncrewed systems (UxS), counter-UxS, and counter-AI capabilities.

The work has required understanding how technologies and capabilities fit within larger systems and missions, how they interact with people and other systems, and the data, infrastructure, interfaces, dependencies, limitations, and operating conditions that may affect their development, integration, performance, and use.

It has also required bringing together technical and nontechnical expertise to define needs and requirements, assess potential approaches, identify gaps and challenges, and inform decisions as capabilities develop and mature.

Meaningful evaluation starts with determining what needs to be understood about a capability, the conditions under which it must be evaluated, and what evidence is necessary to support a conclusion.

Experience includes T&E strategy, policy and oversight, test planning and requirements, test environments and infrastructure, modeling and simulation, evaluation frameworks and metrics, test validity, capability assessment, and modernization and reform.

The work has also involved identifying limitations in the ability to credibly evaluate emerging and increasingly complex capabilities and determining what requirements, approaches, infrastructure, expertise, or investments may be needed to address them.

Getting a needed capability from an identified requirement to operational use can involve barriers and dependencies well beyond the capability itself.

Experience includes acquisition strategy and policy, acquisition reform, capability development and transition, qualification and certification, industrial base and production considerations, and barriers affecting development, testing, acquisition, production, fielding, and sustainment.

The work has required looking across the organizations, activities, authorities, resources, and decisions involved to determine where gaps, dependencies, or barriers may prevent a needed capability from progressing.

The objective is not simply to move faster or preserve an existing process or solution. It is to understand what the objective requires, what is preventing progress, what must remain in place, and what can be changed to create a practical path toward capability delivery.

Supply chains often depend on suppliers, facilities, technologies, components, raw materials, services, and logistics that extend well beyond what is immediately visible. Understanding those dependencies can reveal where a disruption, shortage, vulnerability, or other change may affect an objective.

Experience includes examining suppliers and sub tier relationships, ownership and control, sources of supply, critical components and materials, manufacturing capabilities and capacity, logistics, geographic concentrations, market conditions, threats, vulnerabilities, and other dependencies. Due diligence adds understanding of the companies, people, ownership, relationships, activities, and other factors relevant to suppliers, partners, investments, and other decisions.

This analysis can identify sole source dependencies, critical shortages, constrained materials or capabilities, long lead items, and other potential points of disruption. It can also identify alternatives and inform decisions involving second source qualification, additional capacity, sourcing changes, or other actions needed to maintain continuity.

Because supply chains are not static, changes in suppliers, ownership, availability, capacity, logistics, markets, threats, or other conditions can change both the risk and the available alternatives.

Protection requirements have to account for both what needs to be protected and what a program or capability needs to accomplish.

Experience includes sensitive and compartmented environments, program and technology protection, information and access, security requirements, foreign intelligence threats, vulnerabilities, dependencies, and the ways people, organizations, technologies, relationships, and activities can create exposure.

The work has required determining what needs protection, from whom or what, where vulnerabilities may exist, and what measures are appropriate to the risk and consequence while still enabling the intended objective.

Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear threats and Weapons of Mass Destruction create problems that can cross policy, intelligence, operations, technology, preparedness, response, and capability development.

Experience in CBRN Defense and Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction (CWMD) includes strategy and policy, threat and capability analysis, preparedness and response, capability needs and requirements, and assessment of existing and emerging approaches.

The work has required understanding threats, identifying gaps and vulnerabilities, determining what capabilities or actions are needed, and considering how changes in actors, technologies, materials, methods, operating conditions, and available capabilities may change both the problem and the response.

These problems can extend beyond a single CBRN discipline or phase of an event, requiring consideration of prevention, protection, preparedness, response, recovery, and adaptation as threats and conditions change.