Dave Anderson, Strategic Advisor and Former Digital Transformation Advisor, Chief of Combat Systems Integration
And an interview with:
Colonel Matt Strohmeyer, (USAF) Director CJADC2 Experimentation and GIDE, Office of the Secretary of Defense
Brigadier-General Chris Horner, Commander 3 Canadian Space Division and Joint Force Space Component Commander
Wendy Hadwen, Assistant Deputy Minister, Policy-Industry, Department of National Defence
Pat Thauberger Director, Business Development, General Dynamics Mission Systems – Canada
At the 10th annual C4ISR and Beyond Conference held in Ottawa in January 2024, a panel of distinguished guests came together to provide their unique insights on how the Canadian Armed Forces can effectively engage in digital transformation. Led by Mr. Dave Anderson, former Senior Advisor Digital Transformation to Chief Combat Systems Integration and a retired Brigadier-General who served in the CAF from 1980 to 2020, the discussion touches on themes of teamwork, trust, risk and sourcing talent at speed and scale to help modernize operations through increased adoption of today’s top technologies.
Dave Anderson:
Q: From your perspective as a professional and based on the part of the ecosystem you represent, what does team sport mean and what makes a good team player?
Wendy Hadwen:
Transformation is a team sport, of course. I think the issue in government is really that there are vertical silos. Our mandates are often derived from accountabilities that are vertical. But the issues are horizontal: obviously, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, technology in every way, but also climate change and, frankly, everything. The Westminster system that we have to work in is not really designed for horizontal issues.
When I think about the team, it needs to be diverse. And not just in terms of your background, but also the way you think. And in this respect, I think that it’s very important that we get out of our silos of who we’re used to working with and include non-traditional partners. So, I might say parliamentarians and elected representatives are important partners that we maybe don’t always let into the tent until it’s a bit late.
Pat Thauberger:
In terms of ISR, as we’re talking about this, there is a requirement for all stakeholders to have equal parts to play on that team. You want to establish specific outcomes that you’re trying to achieve as a team. And then, through iterative improvements, you figure out how to coalesce as a team….There are certain acquisition-type projects or programs where people would see industry as not being part of the team at all….I think when we’re talking about interoperability and integration from a C4ISR construct, industry needs to be an integral member of that team. And we can explore throughout the discussion about how industry can help the various stakeholders and practitioners to execute that mission and to win that game.
Col Strohmeyer:
I think for us, having the one team with industry has been vital in what we are doing, that it’s not a more traditional approach where you kind of throw an operational requirement over the acquisition wall to an industry partner and then hope that they figure it out. But it’s really a day-to-day iteration with them, especially when it comes to software and digital workflows. They have to be connected to the warfighter, and they have to be kind of iterative in the approach they take. So, we consider them one team once they’re on contract and moving forward, and I think that’s been very helpful.
The second thing is, how do you orient the team? What is the purpose of the team? And for us, when we’ve looked at trying to digitize the US Department of Defense, we have found that it’s very effective to take a mission-focused approach. And you might say, doesn’t everybody do that? Well, we found that actually no, sometimes we take a process-focused approach. For us, it’s what is the war-fighting mission that needs to be accomplished? And then, how can digitizing that not only potentially accomplish that mission better and faster, but how could it help us to rethink our paradigms of how we even do that mission by having a war-fighting focused approach?
BGen Horner:
The way I look at it from the Fusion Lab perspective is every year is a rebuilding year for my team. Because every iterative development we have to do requires a different set of skills or a different set of human capacity to get after the challenge.
And so, I want to recognize that sometimes we’re on the defense and sometimes we’re on the offense. And those times when we’re on the offense, and that’s the experimentation series we’re working through, or the targets we’re trying to get after, you need more data analytics and more analysis and more operational planning thinkers when it changes to a different role, or a different sport even. You need to be able to transition and adapt your team to what you need to do.
Fundamentally, it’s the mechanism to create a rebuilding year every year in that arena. To create the capacity to change on the fly, as it were, from offense to defense in a way that allows you to transition and not lock yourself into enduring contracts that are 10 or 15 years long and (worth) hundreds of millions of dollars, but short, innovative contractual solutions to deliver small, iterative development in an agile fashion.
Dave Anderson:
Q: There’s a truism that you can’t surge trust, and it’s usually followed by, trust is hard won, but it’s easily lost. From your perspective, in terms of which part of the ecosystem you represent, what does that mean to you? Talk to me about trust from your perspective.
BGen Horner:
So, the Canadian forces is a risk-averse organization unless it’s facing the enemy on the battlefield. And then we will take unbelievable risk for our country, for our countrymen, for our comrades in arms and so on. When we are here in the glorious town of Ottawa, we take no risk because we’re not allowed. And so, trust comes from creating a space, at least the way I see it, to operate with some risk.
I’m lucky that my commander…gave me freedom of maneuver and trust to solve a problem that I told him honestly, I didn’t know how to solve. And so, from that innovation ecosystem perspective, it was early conversations around, Hey I need you to de-risk, the NDOIC, or the National Defense Operation Intelligence Center. Ten years from now, we will have built it, and we will all move into it, and it will be level three and it’ll be awesome….(My Commander said) “de-risk that, don’t build it.” Right. But (I said), “You want me to de-risk this, but I don’t know what that looks like yet.” And he said, “I know, neither do I. Figure it out.”
That’s the concept of, hey I trust you to do your job, even though we are not really sure what that means yet. But when we get to the future, you better have that squared away.
Wendy Hadwen:
I don’t agree that it’s risk averse. I hear what you’re saying about the freedom to take all the risk on the battlefield and feeling like Ottawa is a place of no risk. But I work every day with CAF colleagues, and I see a lot of risk-taking, in terms of the advice that they’re providing, in terms of their appetite to do something innovative, and in terms of their willingness to take difficult decisions.
I acknowledge that there may be a feeling when you talk about big procurements that the trust isn’t there. And the lack of trust may feel like it manifests in a reduction of appetite for risk. But what I think really is that trust usually follows a proven track record and being honest about mistakes. And I’ll be honest with you, I think trying to advance major IT transformation and technology issues is an environment where there isn’t really a proven track record in government. And I know that many CAF feel like they’re not part of government. In and of itself, that is already a bad place to start from.
So of course we can do better. I think that one of the ways to get through this is to build the relationships with partners that are non-traditional inside government. I mentioned elected officials, and now I’m gonna mention your friends and mine in the Department of Treasury, or Treasury Board or Finance. The more they understand the environment and the more they understand the trust and the proven track record that you’re building, …I think the more you’re positioned for success as you take bigger risks.
Pat Thauberger:
Risk and trust are absolutely either two sides of the same coin or there is definitely a complex interrelationship. Actually, not even that complex, a pretty linear relationship between trust and risk and how that manifests itself. And I think you started it Dave, and then you mentioned it as well, Chris and Wendy, where the trust aspect of it all comes down to communication and establishing that relationship right out of the gate, where you can at least start informing some expectation management….So I think that’s the first step, establishing that and then having continuous lines of communication open where you are reaffirming your shared goals and shared objectives to try and achieve an outcome. And then right away, you’ve minimized or mitigated a lot of those levels of risk.
And I think there’s also an opportunity for us to reconsider what we mean by risk versus uncertainty. Is uncertainty the same as risk? Uncertainty is a facet of risk, and it impacts on the risk, but I think then, understanding if we are talking about the risk – reputational, institutional, financial, programmatic? All too often it comes down from an industry perspective. It comes down to very, very defined discrete risks – scope, schedule, and cost, all of which are bad. As opposed to some of what I would offer are higher strategic risks of sovereign capability, sustainment of domestic industry, the ability to respond for future requirements to CAF requirements and needs.
Col Strohmeyer:
I would offer a slightly different perspective on risk. And this may not be right, and many may disagree with that, and that’s okay. When I, and the effort that I’m leading for the Deputy Secretary of Defense, think about risk, I think about it in the way that the Army taught me to think about it in Army school like 10 years ago. And that’s in terms of risk actually being something to be actively sought out as an opportunity to seize and exploit initiative.
That’s a pretty significant paradigm shift. Obviously, we want to be prudent with how we do that. But when we think about the space of JADC2…we want to develop capabilities rapidly, because we want to try to deter a major fight from happening in the future. When we thought about the different spaces that we could be in, how we could develop out capability, we tried to actively seek out the areas where we could gain the most initiative as quickly as possible. And where are the areas that if we leverage speed and willingly take some risk by going fast, it could actually help us to generate initiative that it could allow us, even though we’re doing a department-level effort, to operate inside the decision cycle of the Department of Defense, so that they really can’t slow us down. So, for us, risk of going fast was an opportunity to seize initiative.
Dave Anderson:
Q: We have a real talent and skills challenge, and you could argue that we’re in a talent race right now and we continue to be so. How do we get that skill and that talent? Do we outsource it? Do we create the talent in-house or do we do both? Or do you outsource it to create the talent in-house? What’s the right answer? Is it all the above? And what’s your perception on it?
BGen Horner:
My initial position is it’s all the above. But you can’t do all of the above all at the same time. I mean, you have got to increase the digital literacy….You can’t just show up and say, “This is the new system of record, everybody uses it” if no one’s ever used it, and no one’s ever been trained on it. That’s a very traditional military way to do things. The challenge in that space is one of agility and finding the right talent at the right time and not locking yourself into the same type of talent for 10 years. Where we have an aversion to contractual relationships, sometimes we don’t have enough capacity to hire more public servants. If you haven’t noticed, we don’t have enough uniforms, and are the uniforms the right people?
When you build that team, you need to bring in certain people at certain times to do certain things. That increases the digital literacy of your team that works there all of the time. There are a lot of really smart infantry officers that work for me that don’t really, or didn’t really, understand what digital transformation meant, but are now talking about CJAD, C2 and interoperability and how to move from DCS and zero trust and elements of shifting from network-centric security to cloud, or data-centric security in the cloud….After having sat in the room as an operator with the experts who know all of those things and speaking to them in a language that increases their digital literacy, well, now the team functions better.
So, for me, it’s all of the above. That’s not super eloquent, but you have to get to that point of recognizing the team you may have been given isn’t the right team for the task in that moment. So how do you adapt it and augment it from different elements of the outside to achieve success?
Wendy Hadwen:
This shouldn’t be so hard, right? Everybody went from not knowing how to use an iPhone to using an iPhone. I think we are complexifying this problem just a bit. I think there’s room for learning at all levels. If you look at some StatsCan data about our demographics, the wealthiest part of the population is of course the boomers. They’re wealthy, they’re educated, and they’re retired. This is a vast cohort of people who could be contributing to Canada’s digital future in one way or another. So, it’s not just young people needing skills, it’s everybody needing skills. I think the armed forces is truly gifted at force development, at hiring young people out of high school from all over the country and offering them jobs, in the course of which, they have to learn things. I think you guys should be able to mobilize here better than anyone else in government.
I also think though, there is a vast network of not just secondary schools, but academic institutions left and right. And what’s the opportunity for government there? I do believe there’s something about curriculum. I think there’s something about certification. I think there’s something about professionalizing a discipline…. It comes down to partnerships and I don’t really see that we are super great. I welcome anybody to please explain how we are doing this well at partnering between government and academic organizations.
Col Strohmeyer:
My experience has been that, in general, the government’s role should not be building. There might be certain times where it is that role, but in general, I think in the West, one of our strategic advantages is our commercial industrial base that we have to leverage. The government’s role should be to own the mission and then to own inside that mission, the risk and the requirements. And then it should be the commercial kind of world’s job to be able to build off those broad requirements.
So how that translates into talent management is that I think the government and those that are responsible for owning those requirements need to be conversant enough in especially the digital technology transformation space so that they can best understand, how do I define those requirements? How do I understand whether or not industry vendors are meeting those requirements? And then how do I effectively own that mission inside that?
Pat Thauberger:
In terms of manpower and shortages and things like that, industry can help, right? Whether it’s through technical expertise, whether it’s through staffing support, whether it’s through training and development, we can do that as well. The war for talent is very real. So, continuing to attract people either from CAF or from Canadian society into the defense sphere, whether that’s in uniform, whether that’s as a civilian, or whether that’s as an industry partner, is very real. I can’t overstate the importance of long-term sustainment contracts like our land C4ISR, which I think is very relevant to what we’re talking about here, to provide a vehicle for CAF to continuously innovate, make sure we’re able to turn those new capabilities as they mature and get ready to be fielded into the field.
But as well, there is a very real workforce and capability sustainment from the industry side of things. We’ve got some of the smartest engineering minds in the country working for us at [General Dynamics Mission Systems]. Having that stable and secure employment path, quite frankly, really does wonders for keeping up our ability, industry at large, to support the CAF.
Dave Anderson:
Q: What closing thoughts do you have on breaking in and establishing the digital beachhead – in two sentences?
Wendy Hadwen:
I think the essence of it is defining who your partners will be and letting them into the tent. It may be industry or other levels of government or academics, and it might even be well-meaning bureaucrats like me.
Pat Thauberger:
I think establishing that relationship early on. Pick your dance partner early and dance with the one that brought you. I think fostering that relationship, sustaining that, and then that builds on that trust and that ability to really continue to innovate and drive the innovation into CAF when they need it.
Col Strohmeyer:
So, I would say that it is first a compelling war fighting narrative that is tied to a coherent plan of digital action to integrate it. And then second that in the process of doing that, it seeks out prudent risk and it has direct sponsorship from a senior leader.
BGen Horner:
You have to create trust to build trust. And you have to accept risk at whatever level you have.