How data is helping the Army create a deadlier force

Colonel Salen, back over to you, if I can. Talk to me about some of the ways that you feel you're using data and ytics to better match soldiers with missions and sort of the intent behind what that means for overall readiness

So we've been working on that for the better part of five, six years now, trying to figure out how we quantify the individual skills and talents that our soldiers are coming with in a way that we can match it to the readiness ysis we do when we design our force structure

That's been a little tricky because people are coming in with all these different skills

and we don't necessarily know how we're going to utilize them against the Army requirements yet

But one of the things that has jump-started that in a huge way is generative AI

With that, we can bring together and cull together thousands and thousands of documents

start bringing together these starter sets that we can then work with Army Research Institute

create validated assessments for these different attributes, say definitively, if somebody has this particular range of skills and start looking at what the commensurate job

ysis is on the requirement side. And the piece I'm excited about is that we're getting faster and

faster at doing that. We've piloted and prototyped it a little bit with our logistics core, and we're

expanding this year to do the rest of the Army so that we can really start looking at the nuts and bolts of what people are doing and what the job requirements are That makes us more flexible because we not looking at

just having everything built into a single grade or a branch. We can look across multiple

specialties and we can look at the individual and say we have a whole handful of individuals in this

particular technical niche space that all of a sudden has become important to the Army

and we put these individuals into about two weeks of upscaling and we can field them to the force rather than saying

we have to create a whole new branch or a whole new MOS or a whole new whatever category you want

We can be a little more fluid. Yeah, I think a natural extension to that point is the reality

that cyber is not simply a technical issue. This truly is a leadership issue

And so an open question for all of you, perhaps Colonel Sealing, you'd like to pick it up

How do you cultivate leaders who understand code, understand the technicals, but obviously also understand the command component about what these roles entail

So they have to be curious. Our leaders have to realize that they can't have a static skill set

that they have to be evolving with the times and have some relevant context for how the technology works

so that they know what their people are doing and how to best employ them One of the things that we found the folks who found that we do this really well are our special operators because they come raised up through teams where the whole team is made up of experts who know more about certain things than them

we're trying to figure out how to break the mentality that a leader has to be both a leader

and a subject matter expert that they have to be curious about the technology curious about what

their people do build a culture of trust and communication so that they can figure out how

to best put all of the these technical processes into the business process model because if we

don't contextualize the data and ytics at least that's the area i've been working in the

most. If we don't contextualize this technology in a business process that can be acted on

then it's kind of the tree that fell in the woods. Yeah, another open question for all of you here

and it's a bit of a jumping off point to something Colonel Hosey and I talked about a little bit ago

What is one myth or maybe a bit of an outdated assumption that you feel a lot of people have

about military cyber or innovation that should be debunked? And I'll start with Mr. Tamburino

Perhaps there's a popular myth you've come across in your work that says, eh, maybe people should have a little bit more

context to the truth. I reflect on my 40 years of government service and the worst myth was people in the government are not creative They not innovative I encountered some of the most innovative and creative problem solvers at

all levels. It was a privilege to spend 40 years in that environment. It's this idea that the

government is this faceless thing that is just bogged down in its behaviors and its processes

and I'd say it's quite the contrary. It's an incubator of ideas at our warfare centers

at our laboratories, in the military medicine environment. Phenomenal things come out of those places

It is a creative place to work, not a bureaucratic place. We invite you to continue this conversation on social media

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