At the core of GKC is a series of classes and initiatives that combine STEM skills with policy know-how in a way that’s meant to encourage students to leverage entrepreneurship and innovation in order to develop rapid, scalable solutions to national security issues. Students from both undergraduate and graduate level programs, regardless of their prior experience in national defense, are encouraged to participate.

“We’re really trying to empower students to pursue national security-relevant work while they’re here at Stanford,” explains Joe Felter, GKC’s director, co-founder, and senior research scholar at CISAC. FSI and CISAC have deep roots in this type of innovative, interdisciplinary approach to policy solutions GKC is working to implement. Michael McFaul, FSI’s director, is a founding faculty member and principal investigator for GKC, and David Hoyt, the assistant director of GKC, is an alumnus of the CISAC honors program.

Results from GKC’s classes have been very encouraging so far. Working through "Hacking for Defense," a GKC-affiliated class taught out of the MS&E department, Jeff Jang, a new Defense Innovation Scholar and MBA student, showed how implementing a rapid interview process and focusing on problem and customer discovery has allowed his team to create enterprise software for United States Air Force (USAF) fleet management that has vastly improved efficiency, reduced errors and enabled better planning capabilities into the workflow. Their product has been given numerous grants and awards, and the team has received signed letters of interest from 29 different USAF bases across the world.

In another GKC class, "Technology, Innovation, and Great Power Competition,” Abeer Dahiya and Youngjun Kwak, along with Mikk Raud, Dave Sprague and Miku Yamada — three students from FSI’s Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy program (MIP) — have been tackling the challenges involved in developing a domestic U.S. semiconductor strategy. They were among the student teams asked to present the results of their work to Dep. Sec. Hicks during her visit.

“Attending this class has been one of the highlights of my time at Stanford,” says Mikk Raud (MIP ‘22). “It’s been a great example of how important it is to run interdisciplinary courses and bring people from different fields together.”

He continues, “As a policy student, it was very insightful for me to learn from my peers from different programs, as well as make numerous visits to the engineering quad to speak to technical professors whom I otherwise would have never met. After meeting with and presenting to Deputy Secretary Hicks and hearing about the work other students are doing, it really hit home to me that the government does listen to students, and it really is possible that a small Stanford group project can eventually lead into significant changes and improvements of the highest levels of policy making.”

This kind of renewed interest in national security and defense tech among students is precisely what the Gordian Knot Center is hoping to foster. Building an interconnected innovation workforce that can “think deeply, [and] act quickly,” GKC’s motto, is a driving priority for the center and its supporters.

The Department of Defense recognizes the value of this approach. In her remarks, Dep. Sec. Kathleen Hicks acknowledged that reshaping the culture and methodologies by which the DoD runs is as imperative as it is difficult.

“My life is a Gordian knot, day in and day out at the Defense Department,” she quipped. Speaking seriously, she reminded the audience of the tremendous driving power DoD has had in creating future-looking national security defenses.  “Because of its sophistication, diversity, and capacity to innovate, the U.S. Defense Industrial Base and vibrant innovation ecosystem remains the envy of the world,” Hicks emphasized. “Every day, people like you are designing, building, and producing the critical materials and technologies that ensure our armed forces have what they need.”

But she also recognized that the challenges facing the DoD are real and complex. “There are many barriers in front of the Department of Defense in terms of what it takes to operate in government and to make the kinds of shifts we need in order to have the agility to take advantage of opportunities and partner effectively.” She reiterated that one of her key priorities is to accelerate innovation adoption across DoD, including organizational structure, processes, culture, and people.

Partnerships with groups like the Gordian Knot Center are a key component to breaking down the barriers to innovation facing our national institutions and rebuilding them into new, more adaptable bridges forward. While the challenges facing the Department of Defense remain significant, the work of the students in GKC’s classes so far proves that progress is not only possible, but can be made quickly as well.

My summer internship experience at the Asia Society Policy Institute (ASPI) was remote due to the pandemic. It was nonetheless a memorable experience as I got to explore cybersecurity issues around Southeast Asia. ASPI is a think-tank under the umbrella of the Asia Society family, which aims to explain the diversity of Asia to the United States and the complexity of the United States to Asia. It heightens understanding between the two regions and tackles major policy challenges confronting the Asia-Pacific in security, prosperity, and sustainability by providing solution-oriented recommendations and ideas for such challenges.

At Asia Society Policy Institute (ASPI), I delved into policies and developments around the data privacy issue in Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, and Singapore. I learned how these countries bring up policies and collaborate bilaterally, regionally, and globally to tackle problems around cybersecurity. My summer internship experience also enriched my knowledge and understanding of the world.

Working at ASPI

The internship started in June 2021, around the end of the spring quarter, and continued through the end of summer. There were a total of four interns in the Washington D.C. office. I mainly worked with a small team of three - Elina, my supervisor, Chris, my co-intern, and I - which focused on cybersecurity issues.

My supervisor, Elina Noor, an inspiring expert in cyberspace, especially in the Southeast Asia region, led the team with great insights and leadership. Along with my co-intern, Chris, we spent the entire three months working on a project that studies Ethical Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Data for Inclusive Development in Southeast Asia. The project itself is expected to continue for a year, and we were in the early stages of the project. 

As a security research intern, I collected data and assisted the research. Additionally, I focused on building-up fundamental understanding of the project - determining the stages of development each country is in, how they respond to the global trend and issues, and what criteria need to be included in analyzing the different characteristics of each country, considering both the local context and the global trend. In the next nine months, the project will survey countries’ positions on these issues, assess the importance and impact of the topic, and highlight the significance of engaging in international developments. I am excited for the final product to come forth, a collaborative work of all people involved in this project.

Other responsibilities also came along the way. I had the opportunity to find the correlation between the South China Sea dispute and cyber incidents between the countries claiming sovereignty over the region. These incidents are ambiguous to identify, and the attribution is not always clear. It was also challenging to make a data set from scratch as it was a whole new experience. However, I managed to conclude that cyber incidents spiked around the time of the major disputes around the South China Sea. No secret that the Global Economy class taught by Professor Aturupane from Fall 2020-21 helped me make sense of the data set and read graphs!

The interns in the New York and Washington D.C. office took turns doing daily press scans, following up with news from the Northeast to the Middle East. It was amazing to learn how Asia, as one big continent, held such a diverse set of news and events occurring each day. I also accumulated lists of people in congress, embassies, and the government to share the op-eds from ASPI. Most of these administrative works were done as a team effort, and I met a larger ASPI family through the experience.

Ending My Internship

Working at ASPI was a rewarding way to spend my summer. I owe special thanks to Elina and Chris, who were incredibly supportive and made me feel like I was making a significant contribution to the institution. I was also rewarded with knowledge and insights into new topics in Asia and its relations with the world, mainly focusing on the U.S. It provided great insight into the developments of cybersecurity issues and data privacy around Southeast Asian countries. It was a fantastic opportunity to apply what I learned at Stanford to real-world policy problems. I thoroughly enjoyed my internship this summer and feel ready to embark on new challenges that will come forth in my career path.

In a multipolar international system during the era of technology disruption, international security continues to be fragile. Whether overtly or covertly, ambitious states have been competing to obtain a comparative advantage over the one-another, such as China and the United States. While governments rely on national technical means (NTM) on tracking other states’ actions, the implications of this competition would ultimately fall on the general population. The ubiquitous nature of international security has inspired many academic experts, private organizations, and corporations to develop open-source intelligence (OSINT) analysis with the purpose of improving transparency and expanding NTM capacities. Of the most prominent OSINT fields is geospatial intelligence and imagery analysis, which has come a long way through increased cooperation with commercial data providers, particularly satellite companies.

Over the last decade, the quality of imagery collection has increased in both spatial and temporal resolution. While the former allows for the discerning of smaller objects captured on the surface of Earth and positive identification of them, the latter allows for monitoring of sites on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Therefore, both are required for a comprehensive analysis of the site of interest and proper academic practice.

Over the summer, I worked with Allison Puccioni, a career imagery analyst and a consultant at BlackSky, who provided me an opportunity to cooperate with BlackSky and Planet, two of the leading commercial satellite companies on the salient issue of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). An article from The Drive released on July 14, 202, sparked interest in a remote facility in Xinjiang, China just south of Bosten Lake.The functionality of the facility is still disputed, but the structural features suggest that it may be a directed-energy weapons (DEW) development facility. As no previous research on this facility had been conducted, we decided to conduct a comprehensive analysis together with Allison and Katharine Leede, a senior majoring in Political Science and part of the CISAC Undergraduate Honors Program.

This analysis required the acquisition of extensive imagery of the site, which was available only at BlackSky through their global monitoring program. BlackSky was more than willing to share the imagery with us in an effort to establish academic-private sector cooperation. The data consisted of 400 images of the site spanning from mid-2019 to August 2021. To manage this large amount of data, we went through every single image, noting any key features and tracking them over time. The image below depicts an aerial view of the Bosten Lake Facility, which is characterized by the presence of large hangars with retractable roofs. The imagery is also of high temporal resolution, up to 10 images a day in some cases. This frequency allows us to create a pattern-of-life where we identified the times and days of the week the hangars would be open. Assuming that the current hypothesis is that this facility is a DEW testing site, we can infer that the tests were conducted when the hangars were open. However, further analysis is required to confirm this statement. After compiling the pattern-of-life analysis, we needed to identify the objects inside the hangars in order to confirm our hypothesis.

While BlackSky imagery has an unmatched temporal resolution, it comes at the cost of spatial resolution. Therefore, we identified key images in which activity at the site was at its highest and requested those images from Planet. Planet’s SkySat satellite constellation has a resolution of 0.5 meters, allowing one to identify small objects in the image. This technique we used is generally referred to in the intelligence community as Low-to-High Resolution Tipping and Cueing. This is the process of monitoring an area or an object of interest by a sensor and requesting “tipping” another complementary sensor platform to acquire “cueing” an image over the same area.

This project has also attracted interest from major defense-related media outlets, most notably Janes Intelligence Review (JIR). Upon completion, this project will result in a published article in JIR and is scheduled for the December 2021 edition. Additionally, the project received attention from the Defense Innovation Unit in the U.S. Department of Defense, whose representatives expressed interest in establishing cooperation for future projects.

This internship provided  me an opportunity to be one of the first people to analyze an emerging case study such as the Bosten Lake Facility in China and learn how to work with commercial satellite companies. As a military officer in the Kosovar Army, I will have to deal with public-private partnerships, and the connections I have made together with the communication and networking skills I acquired will contribute to a more successful career. Additionally, geospatial intelligence analysis will be included in my job description as an intelligence officer, thus having had the chance to practice the necessary skills in both an academic and corporate setting will greatly aid me in the future.

Finally, the UNDPPA internship also allowed me to be part of the pioneering team for an environmental security project in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). The project was initiated as a result of negotiations between the UNDPPA and DPRK, and environmental security became the only area of mutual interest that will further facilitate cooperation from the DPRK government. As the framework for this project was only developed this summer, it is still an ongoing process requiring coordination between policymakers, diplomats, DPRK representatives, and the engineering team who realizes the requirements put forward into a platform similar to the Iraq Water Security Project. As I have had the opportunity to be present during the creation of this project, I will be looking forward to contributing to its development and seeing the result.