Inside the CIA: A Conversation with Michael Morell
-
This event is at maximum capacity. We thank you for your interest and regret that we cannot accept more registrations.
- This event is part of the Robert G. Wesson Lectures Series -
About the Event: Michael Morell, Former Deputy Director and twice Acting Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, will be interviewed by Amy Zegart, CISAC Co-director and Davies Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Audience members will have an opportunity to ask questions after the interview.
About the Speaker: Michael Morell, the former Acting Director and Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, is the Wesson Lecturer at the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Center for International Security and Cooperation for 2017. He is one of our nation’s leading national security professionals, with extensive experience in intelligence and foreign policy. He has been at the center of our nation’s fight against terrorism, its work to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and its efforts to respond to trends that are altering the international landscape—including the Arab Spring, the rise of China, and the cyber threat. Politico has called Michael the “Bob Gates of his generation.”
During his 33-year career at CIA, Michael served as Deputy Director for over three years, a job in which he managed the Agency’s day-to-day operations, represented the Agency at the White House and Congress, and maintained the Agency’s relationships with intelligence services and foreign leaders around the world. Michael also served twice as Acting Director, leading CIA when Leon Panetta was named Secretary of Defense and again after David Petraeus left government.
Michael’s senior assignments at CIA also included serving for two years as the Director of Intelligence, the Agency’s top analyst, and for two years as Executive Director, the CIA’s top administrator—managing human resources, the budget, security, and information technology for an agency the size of a Fortune 200 firm.
Michael has been a witness to history on multiple occasions. He is the only person who was both with President Bush on September 11th, when al-Qaida burst into the American consciousness, and with President Obama on May 1st, when Bin Laden was brought to justice. Michael played a major role in the Bin Laden operation.
Michael is known inside CIA for his leadership. He inspired individuals and work units to perform beyond expectations. He mentored most of the Agency’s current senior leadership team, including a significant number of women and minorities. When he departed CIA, thousands of officers wrote Michael notes of thanks.
Michael is the recipient of many awards. He received the Presidential Rank Award for exceptional performance – the nation’s highest honor for civilian service. He also received the Distinguished Intelligence Medal, CIA’s highest award, for his role in the Bin Laden operation. Michael is also the recipient of the Distinguished Career Intelligence Medal, the National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal, and the Department of Defense Service Medal.
Today, Michael is involved in a wide range of activities. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company; Senior Counselor to Washington’s fastest growing consulting firm, Beacon Global Strategies; and a consultant to a number of private sector entities. He is the Chairman of the Board of one of those entities – Culpeper National Security Solutions, a subsidiary of DynCorp International.
Much of what Michael does today is tied to national security. Until recently, he was a senior national security contributor for CBS News. He is a frequent guest on the Charlie Rose Show discussing national security issues. He is a Senior Fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government; a Senior Fellow at West Point’s Center on Combatting Terrorism; a resident fellow this fall at the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago, a member of the Aspen Institute’s Homeland Security Group, which advises the Secretary of Homeland Security on national security issues; a member of the Board of Director’s of the Atlantic Council, a member of the Advisory Board to the University of Chicago’s Project on Security and Terrorism, and a member of the Atlantic Council’s advisory group to its study on the future of the Middle East. He served as a Member of President Obama’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technology.
Michael is the author of the New York Times bestseller on CIA’s nearly 20-year fight against al Qa`ida. The title of the book is “The Great War of Our Time: An Insider’s Account of the CIA’s Fight Against Terrorism – From al Qaida to ISIS.” It was published in May 2015.
Michael is a native of Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, and he maintains close ties to northeast Ohio. His father and mother—who taught him hard work, the pursuit of excellence, and humility—were an autoworker and a homemaker. Michael is a first-generation college student, earning a B.A. summa cum laude in economics from the University of Akron. He also earned an M.A. in economics from Georgetown University.
Michael is involved with charities associated with supporting the families of fallen soldiers and intelligence officers.
Inside the CIA: A Conversation with Michael Morell
Download pdf
Encina Hall, 2nd floor
Michael Morell
Former director
Central Intelligence Agency
Seminars
Air Power
Paragraphs
Air power has proved crucial to the exercise of imperial power – conquest, disciplinary action, transportation, and surveillance – since the start of the 20th century. Initial experiments were made by the British in the Middle East for both cultural and practical reasons and were adapted in other places across time, up to American use of drones today.
All Publications button
1
Publication Type
Books
Publication Date
Journal Publisher
Wiley-Blackwell
External URL
Shorenstein APARC Center Overview 2015-16
Paragraphs
Shorenstein APARC's center overviews provide detailed information about Shorenstein APARC's mission, history, faculty, financial support, organizational structure, projects, and programs.
All Publications button
1
Publication Type
Annual Reports
Publication Date
Journal Publisher
Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center
The Digital Dimension
-
Abstract: This presentation is adapted from two book chapters. The first one published in 2007 is “Transforming U.S. Intelligence: The Digital Dimension” and the second chapter published in 2009 is “Vaults, Mirrors and Masks: Rediscovering US Counterintelligence - Counterintelligence Too Narrowly Practiced.” Additionally, material from recent DSB and NSB studies is included: “Resilient Military Systems and the Advanced Cyber Threat” and “A Review of U.S. Navy Cyber Defense Capabilities”. Communications technologies have transformed the way information is created, stored, processed, viewed, and transmitted. But the same technologies have provided our adversaries with the tools for attacking and exploiting our infrastructure and military systems. The U.S. has long operated under the assumption that our critical systems would be secure if we applied current Information Assurance (IA) practices. The reality is that a sophisticated offense easily outmatches the capability of a defensive organization to protect its critical Information Technology (IT) systems. This briefing attempts to convey the rationale behind this assertion. The presentation represents my views and is specifically not intended to represent the views of any organization with which I’m affiliated.
About the Speaker: Mr. Gosler is a Senior Fellow at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. He is engaged in various DOD and Intelligence Community advisory boards such as the Defense Science Board.
His previous experience includes a 33 year career (1979-2013) at Sandia National Laboratories. His early contributions included red-teaming both cryptographic and nuclear weapon systems. In 1989, he served as Sandia’s first Visiting Scientist to NSA. In 1993, he established and directed the Vulnerability Assessments Program. From 1996-2001, he was on a Special Leave of Absence from Sandia. After returning to Sandia, he became Sandia’s sixth lab Fellow.
In 1996, he entered the Senior Intelligence Service at CIA as the Director of the Clandestine Information Technology Office. This office integrated targeting, analysis, technology development, and technical/human operations.
Additionally, he served as a Naval Reserve Officer from 1975-2003.
His awards include: Lockheed Martin’s NOVA award, National Intelligence Medal of Achievement, DONOVAN award, Intelligence Medal of Merit, Director of Central Intelligence Director’s award, and the Legion of Merit.
Mr. Gosler earned a BS degree in Physics/Mathematics and a MS degree in Mathematics.
Encina Hall, 2nd floor
Jim Gosler
Senior Fellow
Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
Seminars
Sources of variation in under-5 mortality across sub-Saharan Africa: a spatial analysis
Paragraphs
The ongoing decline in under-5 mortality ranks among the most significant public and population health successes of the past 30 years. Deaths of children under the age of 5 years have fallen from nearly 13 million per year in 1990 to less than 6 million per year in 2015, even as the world's under-5 population grew by nearly 100 million children. However, the amount of variability underlying this broad global progress is substantial. On a regional level, east Asia and the Pacific have surpassed the Millennium Development Goal target of a two-thirds reduction in under-5 mortality rate between 1990 and 2015, whereas sub-Saharan Africa has had only a 24% decline over the same period. Large differences in progress are also evident within sub-Saharan Africa, where mortality rates have declined by more than 70% from 1990 to 2015 in some countries and increased in others; in 2015, the mortality rate in some countries was more than three times that in others.
What explains this remarkable variation in progress against under-5 mortality? Answering this question requires understanding of where the main sources of variation in mortality lie. One view that is implicit in the way that mortality rates are tracked and targeted is that national policies and conditions drive first-order changes in under-5 mortality. This country-level focus is justified by research that emphasises the role of institutional factors in explaining variation in mortality—factors such as universal health coverage, women's education, and the effectiveness of national health systems. It is argued that these factors, which vary measurably at the country level, fundamentally shape the ability of individuals and communities to affect more proximate causes of child death such as malaria and diarrhoeal disease.
An alternate view has focused on exploring the importance of subnational variation in the distribution of disease. In the USA, studies on the geographical distribution of health care and mortality have been influential for targeting of resources and policy design. Similar studies in developing regions have shown the substantial variability in the distribution and changes of important health outcomes such HIV, malaria, and schistosomiasis—information that can then be used to improve the targeting of interventions. Nevertheless, the relative contribution of within-country and between-country differences in explaining under-5 mortality remains unknown. Improved understanding of the relative contribution of national and sub-national factors could provide insight into the drivers of mortality levels and declines in mortality, as well as improve the targeting of interventions to the areas where they are most needed.
All Publications button
1
Publication Type
Journal Articles
Publication Date
Journal Publisher
The Lancet Global Health
Combining satellite imagery and machine learning to predict poverty
Paragraphs
Policy-makers in the world's poorest countries are often forced to make decisions based on limited data. Consider Angola, which recently conducted its first postcolonial census. In the 44 years that elapsed between the prior census and the recent one, the country's population grew from 5.6 million to 24.3 million, and the country experienced a protracted civil war that displaced millions of citizens. In situations where reliable survey data are missing or out of date, a novel line of research offers promising alternatives. On page 790 of this issue, Jean et al.(1) apply recent advances in machine learning to high-resolution satellite imagery to accurately measure regional poverty in Africa.
All Publications button
1
Publication Type
Journal Articles
Publication Date
Journal Publisher
Science
External URL
Global Intelligence Oversight: Governing Security in the Twenty-First Century
-
Abstract: In a world that is increasingly unstable, intelligence services like the American CIA and the United Kingdom's MI6 exist to deliver security. Whether the challenge involves terrorism, cyber-security, or the renewed specter of great power conflict, intelligence agencies mitigate threats and provide decisional advantage to national leaders. But empowered intelligence services require adequate supervision and oversight, which must be about more than the narrow (if still precarious) task of ensuring the legality of covert operations and surveillance activities.
Global Intelligence Oversight is a comparative investigation of how democratic countries can govern their intelligence services so that they are effective, but operate within frameworks that are acceptable to their people in an interconnected world. The book demonstrates how the institutions that oversee intelligence agencies participate in the protection of national security while safeguarding civil liberties, balancing among competing national interests, and building public trust in inherently secret activities. It does so by analyzing the role of courts and independent oversight bodies as they operate in countries with robust constitutional frameworks and powerful intelligence services. The book also illuminates a new transnational oversight dynamic that is shaping and constraining security services in new ways. It describes how global technology companies and litigation in transnational forums constitute a new form of oversight whose contours are still undefined. As rapid changes in technology bring the world closer together, these forces will complement their more traditional counterparts in ensuring that intelligence activities remain effective, legitimate, and sustainable. To purchase the book, please click here.
About the Speakers: Samuel J. Rascoff is an expert in national security law, and serves as faculty director of the Center on Law and Security. Named a Carnegie Scholar in 2009, Rascoff came to the Law School from the New York City Police Department, where, as director of intelligence analysis, he created and led a team responsible for assessing the terrorist threat to the city. A graduate of Harvard summa cum laude, Oxford with first class honors, and Yale Law School, Rascoff previously served as a law clerk to US Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter and to Judge Pierre N. Leval of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He was also a special assistant with the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq and an associate at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. Rascoff’s publications include “Presidential Intelligence” (Harvard Law Review); “Counterterrorism and New Deterrence” (NYU Law Review); “Establishing Official Islam? The Law and Strategy of Counter-Radicalization” (Stanford Law Review); “Domesticating Intelligence” (Southern California Law Review), and “The Law of Homegrown (Counter-) Terrorism” (Texas Law Review).
Zachary K. Goldman is the Executive Director of the Center on Law and Security and an Adjunct Professor of Law at NYU School of Law. Previously, Zachary served as a Special Assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the U.S. Department of Defense, and as a policy advisor in the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, where he was the subject matter expert on terrorist financing in the Arabian Peninsula and Iran sanctions. In the private sector, he was a litigator at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP in New York.
Zachary is the co-editor of Global Intelligence Oversight: Governing Security in the Twenty-First Century, an edited volume on comparative approaches to intelligence oversight, published by Oxford University Press. He has testified before Congress and has published on national security strategy, cybersecurity, counterterrorism, and financial sanctions in outlets such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, The Financial Times Chinese, the South China Morning Post, Political Science Quarterly, Cold War History, The Atlantic, The Diplomat, The National Interest, and others.
Zachary is a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security, and a member of the Advisory Committee to the American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on Law and National Security. He received his JD from New York University School of Law, his Masters in International Relations from the London School of Economics, and his BA from Harvard University.
Encina Hall, 2nd floor
Samuel J. Rascoff
Professor of Law, Faculty Director, Center on Law and Security
New York University School of Law
Zachary K. Goldman
Executive Director, Center on Law and Security
New York University School of Law
Seminars
Deadly Truck Attack on French Riviera a New Twist on an Old Terror Tactic
News Type
News
Date
Paragraphs
When a Tunisian-born man drove a 19-ton rented truck into a crowd of revelers celebrating France’s national holiday in the Mediterranean town of Nice last week, killing 84 people and injuring hundreds more, it was a deadly new example of an old terrorist tactic of turning vehicles into weapons, according to Stanford experts.
French authorities identified the man behind the wheel as Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, a 31-year-old immigrant from Tunisia who had lived in France since around 2005 and had been working as a delivery driver. Police shot him dead on the scene.
Martha Crenshaw, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), said the fact that Bouhlel already had a commercial driver’s license gave him easy access to his weapon of choice.
“It was just unfortunate that he was somebody who already drove big trucks,” said Crenshaw.
“He did not have to go do something special, like train for a pilot’s license in the way that the 911 hijackers did, in order to acquire the means to kill people.”
Vehicles as tools of terror
Crenshaw said there had been around 30 incidents worldwide since 1994 where terrorists used vehicles as their primary weapon in attacks on civilians (not including car and truck bombs where explosives were used). Crenshaw noted that not all those vehicle attacks caused casualties.
If you include assaults on police and military targets, there have been more than 155 attacks where a vehicle has been used as a weapon in the way the truck was used in Nice, with over 75 of those attacks occurring in just the last three years, according to data from the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START).
However, the exceptionally high number of casualties puts the attack in Nice in a league of its own. Most of the vehicle attacks on police and military only result in one or two casualties at a checkpoint or other hard target.
Stanford terrorism expert and former U.S. Special Forces Colonel Joe Felter said he was concerned that the attack in Nice “lowered the threshold” for aspiring terrorists who would be motivated to carry out copycat attacks.
“This was a disturbingly effective attack,” said Felter, a senior research scholar at CISAC.
“The message for would-be terrorists is that you don’t have to become a bomb maker to successfully execute a mass casualty attack. With a driver’s license and a credit card you can weaponize a rental truck.”
A challenge for law enforcement
Former CISAC fellow Terrence Peterson said it would be particularly difficult for law enforcement agencies to prevent terrorists from gaining access to vehicles.
“The types of people who would show up on other lists…like the no-fly list, are not going to show up when they rent a car,” said Peterson.
“A car is such a mundane object. How do you control using an everyday object for a terrorist attack? It’s nearly impossible.”
Al Qaeda had previously advocated using pickup trucks to target civilians, in the “Open Source Jihad” section of its propaganda magazine “Inspire.”
“The idea is to use a pickup truck as a mowing machine, not to mow grass but mow down the enemies of Allah,” according to a translation on the Web site MEMRI Cyber and Jihad Lab, which tracks jihadist postings online.
The article also advised would-be terrorists to, “pick your location and timing carefully. Go for the most crowded locations. Narrower spots are also better because it gives less chance for the people to run away…Therefore, it is important to study your path of operation before hand.”
French prosecutors said that Bouhlel carried out surveillance of the Promenade des Anglais prior to his attack there, and that he conducted online research into the mass shootings in Orlando and Dallas.
Murky motivations
It is still unclear what motivated Bouhlel. He had a history of domestic violence, psychological problems and money troubles, according to media reports. Acquaintances said the divorced father of three was not an outwardly religious Muslim. He reportedly drank alcohol, used drugs, ate pork and had sexual encounters with other men, all of which are forbidden under strict interpretations of Islam.
However, French authorities have suggested that he may have undergone a rapid conversion to radical Islam. And a Web site affiliated with the terror group ISIS has claimed Bouhlel as “a soldier of the Islamic State.”
[[{"fid":"223450","view_mode":"crop_870xauto","fields":{"format":"crop_870xauto","field_file_image_description[und][0][value]":"A reproduction of the picture on the residence permit of Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the man who rammed his truck into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day in Nice on July 14.","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"A reproduction of the picture on the residence permit of Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the man who rammed his truck into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day in Nice on July 14.","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"A reproduction of the picture on the residence permit of Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the man who rammed his truck into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day in Nice on July 14.","field_credit[und][0][value]":"AFP/Getty Images","field_caption[und][0][value]":"A reproduction of the picture on the residence permit of Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the man who rammed his truck into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day in Nice on July 14.","field_related_image_aspect[und][0][value]":"","thumbnails":"crop_870xauto"},"type":"media","attributes":{"alt":"A reproduction of the picture on the residence permit of Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the man who rammed his truck into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day in Nice on July 14.","title":"A reproduction of the picture on the residence permit of Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the man who rammed his truck into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day in Nice on July 14.","width":"870","style":"width: 250px; height: 362px; float: right; margin-left: 15px","class":"media-element file-crop-870xauto"}}]]“It's plausible that the message of ISIS resonated with him as a Muslim immigrant living on the fringes of society, which would be consistent with my research team’s finding that people who feel “culturally homeless” experience a lack of purpose in their lives, which, in turn, is associated with stronger support for fundamentalist groups and causes,” said Sarah Lyons-Padilla, a Stanford research scientist in the Department of Psychology’s Center for Social Psychological Answers to Real-World Questions who’s studying the marginalization of Muslim immigrants at risk for radicalization.
The apocalyptic ideology of jihadist groups like the Islamic State (also known as “Daesh”) could be particularly appealing to “petty criminals, psychologically deranged or otherwise lost souls” such as Bouhlel, said David Laitin, James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins professor of Political Science.
“Spurred by Salafist propaganda, these recruits can work privately, away from any institutional connection with Daesh, to cause horror,” Laitin said.
“And many police forces are out of touch with vulnerable populations and are slow to identify potential recruits.”
"Confrontation is unavoidable"
Regardless of Bouhlel’s motivation, his attack would likely bolster the anti-immigrant agenda of France’s far-right political parties such as the National Front, which advocate policies such as closing the borders, exiting the European Union and deporting bi-nationals with links to Islamist groups, said Cécile Alduy, associate professor of French and an affiliated faculty member with the Europe Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
“The attacks will only strengthen the feeling that the political elites in power failed, and that the National Front “told us so” and are the only ones left to trust,” Alduy said.
Patrick Calvar, the head of France’s counter-terrorism intelligence agency DGSI, warned earlier this year that the recent series of terror attacks on French soil could trigger “inter-ethnic clashes” between far-right vigilante groups and Muslims living in France.
“One or two more terrorist attacks” and “the confrontation [between the two sides] is unavoidable,” said Calvar.
Alduy said she feared the shift in French public opinion could make Calvar’s prediction more likely.
“An opinion poll…in March 2015 put “sadness” as the primary feeling that respondents identified with following the Charlie Hebdo attacks,” Alduy said.
“After the November attacks, it was “anger”, with “hatred” following closely for over 60% of them. Now what will it be?”
Hero Image
All News button
1
New Stanford Class Targets National Security Problems with Silicon Valley-Style Innovation
News Type
News
Date
Paragraphs
It’s a quintessential Silicon Valley scene. A group of tech-savvy Stanford students are delivering a passionate pitch about a product they hope is going to change the world, while a room full of venture capitalists, angel investors and entrepreneurs peppers them with questions.
But there’s a twist. This Stanford classroom is also packed with decorated military veterans and active duty officers. And a group of analysts from the U.S. intelligence community is monitoring the proceedings live via an iPad propped up on a nearby desk.
These Stanford students aren’t just working on the latest “Uber for X” app. They’re searching for solutions to some of the toughest technological problems facing America’s military and intelligence agencies, as part of a new class called Hacking for Defense.
A student team briefs the class on a wearable sensor they're developing for an elite unit of U.S. Navy SEALs – a product they're pitching as "fitbit for America's divers."
Kulkarni’s team is working with an organization within the US Department of Defense to devise a system that will provide virtual assistance to Afghan and Iraqi coalition forces as they defuse deadly improvised explosive devices.
“At Stanford there’s a lot of opportunities for you to build things and go out and learn new stuff, but this was one of the first few opportunities I’ve seen where as a Stanford student and as an engineer, I can go and work on problems that will actually make a difference and save lives,” said Kulkarni.
A 21st century tech ROTC
That’s exactly the kind of “21st century tech ROTC” model of national service that Steve Blank, a consulting associate professor at Stanford’s Department of Management Science and Engineering, said he had in mind when he developed the class.
“The nation is facing a set of national security threats it’s never faced before, and Silicon Valley has not only the technology resources to help, but knows how to move at the speed that these threats are moving at,” said Blank.
MBA student Rachel Moore presents for Team Sentinel, which is working with the U.S. 7th Fleet to find better ways to analyze drone and satellite imagery.
Former U.S. Army Special Forces Colonel Joe Felter, who helped create the class and co-teaches it with Blank, said the American military needs to find new ways to maintain its technological advantage on the battlefield.
“Groups like ISIS, al–Qaeda and other adversaries have access to cutting edge technologies and are aggressively using them to do us harm around the world,” said Felter, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and is currently a senior research scholar at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and research fellow at the Hoover Institution.
“The stakes are high – this is literally life and death for our young men and women deployed in harm’s way. We’re in a great position here at Stanford and in Silicon Valley to help make the connections and develop the common language needed to bring innovation into the process, in support of the Department of Defense and other government agencies’ missions.”
Startup guru Steve Blank shares a light moment with a group of students.
“It’s like a smorgasbord of all these people coming together from different parts and different schools of Stanford, and so I think that’s just a really cool environment to be in,” said Rachel Moore, a first-year MBA student.
Moore’s team includes electrical and mechanical engineering students, and they’re working together to develop a system to enable the Navy’s Pacific Fleet to automatically identify enemy ships using images from drones and satellites.
Tough technological challenges
Months before the course start date, class organizers asked U.S. military and intelligence organizations to identify some of their toughest technological challenges.
Class co-teacher Pete Newell throws his hands up to celebrate a student breakthrough.
The Navy Special Warfare Group asked students to design wearable sensors for Navy SEALs, so they could monitor their physiological conditions in real-time during underwater missions.
Intelligence and law enforcement agencies were interested in software that could help identify accounts tied to malicious “catfishing” attempts from hackers trying to steal confidential information.
And those were just a few of the 24 problems submitted by 14 government agencies.
Developing Solutions
The class gives eight teams of four students 10 weeks to actively learn about the problem they are addressing from stake holders and end users most familiar with the problem and to iteratively develop possible solutions or a “minimum viable product,” using a modified version of Steve Blank’s “lean launchpad methodology,” which has become a revered how-to guide among the Silicon Valley startup community.
Rachel Olney, a graduate student in mechanical engineering, tries on a military-grade dry suit on a visit to the 129th Rescue Wing at Moffett Field.
“If you’re not crawling in the dirt with these guys, then you don’t understand their problem,” Blank told the class.
One student team, which was working on real-time biofeedback sensors and geo-location devices for an elite team of Navy SEALS (a project they were initially pitching at “fitbit for America’s divers”), earned a round of applause from the class when they showed a slide featuring photos from a field trip they took to the 129th Rescue Wing at Moffett Field to find out what it felt like to wear a military-grade dry suit.
Rachel Olney, a graduate student in mechanical engineering, said the experience of squeezing into the tight suit and wearing the heavy dive gear gave her a better appreciation for the physical demands that Navy SEALs have to deal with during a mission.
“They’re diving down to like 200 feet for up to six to eight hours…and during that time they can’t eat, they can’t hydrate, they’re physically exerting a lot, because they’re swimming miles and miles and miles at depth and they can’t see and they can’t talk to each other,” Olney said.
Image
Another group came in for some heavy criticism from the teaching team for failing to identify and interview enough end users.
But the next week, they were back in front of the class showing a video from a team member’s visit to an Air Force base in Fresno, where he logged some time inside the 90-pound bomb suit that explosive ordinance disposal units wear in the field.
“You can’t address a customer issue unless and until you really step into the shoes of the customer,” said Gaurav Sharma, who’s a student at Stanford's Graduate School of Business.
“That was the exact reason why I went to Fresno and wore the bomb suit, to get into the shoes of the end customer.”
Navigating the defense bureaucracy
Active duty military officers from CISAC’s Senior Military Fellows program and the Hoover Institution’s National Security Affairs Fellows program act as military liaisons for the class and help students navigate the complex defense bureaucracy.
“[The students] have really just jumped in with both feet and immersed themselves in this Department of Defense world that for so many civilians is just very foreign to them,” said U.S. Army Colonel John Cogbill, who has spent the last year as a senior military fellow at CISAC.
“I think they will come away from this experience with a much better appreciation of what we do inside the Department of Defense and Intelligence community, and where there are opportunities for helping us do our jobs better.”
Cogbill said he hoped that some of the inventions from the class, like an autonomous drone designed to improve situational awareness for Special Forces teams, could help the troops on his next combat deployment, where he will serve as the Deputy Commanding Officer of the U.S. Army’s elite 75th Ranger Regiment.
“It’s not just about making them more lethal, it’s also about how to keep them alive on the battlefield,” said Cogbill.
Students also get support from their project sponsors and personnel at the newly established Defense Innovation Unit Experimental (DIUx) stationed at Moffett Field.
Tech saves lives on the battlefield
Another key member of the teaching team is Pete Newell, who was awarded the Silver Star Medal (America’s third-highest military combat decoration), for leading a U.S. Army battalion into the Battle of Fallujah, where he survived an ambush and left the protection of his armored vehicle in an attempt to save a mortally wounded officer.
Class co-teacher and Silver Star Medal recipient Pete Newell explains some of the classic reasons why military products fail in the field.
“What I realized is that the guys on the front edge of the battlefield who were actually fighting the fight, don’t have time to figure out what the problem is that they have to solve,” Newell said.
“They’re so involved in just surviving day to day, that they really don’t have time to step back from it and see those problems coming, and what they needed was somebody to look over their shoulder and look a little deeper and anticipate their needs.”
One of the first and most urgent problems Newell faced on the job was responding to the sudden spike in IED attacks on dismounted infantry.
The Army was still using metal detector technology from the ‘50s to find mines, but the new breed of IEDs, which were often hidden inside buried milk jugs, were virtually undetectable to the outdated technology.
Former U.S. Army Colonel Pete Newell demystifies some military jargon for the class.
Newell’s solution was a handheld gradiometer, the kind of technology used to find small wires in your backyard during a construction project, paired with a ground penetrating radar that can see objects underground.
But by the time the new technology reached troops in the field last summer, more than 4,000 had been wounded or killed in IED attacks.
Newell said he hoped the class would help get life-saving technology deployed throughout the military faster.
“I think it’s important to enable this younger generation of technologists to actually connect with some of the national security issues we face and give them an opportunity to take part in making the world a safer place,” Newell said.
Tom Byers, an entrepreneurship professor in Management Science and Engineering and faculty director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, rounds out the teaching team and brings his experience in innovation education and entrepreneurship to the classroom.
Inspiring the next generation
Students said the opportunity to find solutions to consequential problems was their primary inspiration for joining the class.
“When I first came to Stanford, the hype around entrepreneurship was very much around, ‘go out, make an app, do something really fun and cool, and get rich’,” said Darren Hau, a junior in Electrical Engineering.
Students share a laugh during a class break.
Felter said he was humbled that so many students were willing to serve in this way.
“It’s encouraging to find out that students at one of our top universities are very interested and highly motivated to work very hard and use their skills and expertise and talent and focus it on these pressing national security problems,” said Felter.
The teaching team said they planned on expanding their class to other universities across the country in the coming years, to create a kind of open source network for solving unclassified national security problems.
For military officers like Cogbill, who will likely soon be leading U.S. soldiers into combat, that’s welcome news.
“Every time you run a course, that’s eight more problems,” Cogbill said.
“If this scales across 10, 20, 30, 40 more universities, you can imagine how many more problems can be solved, and how many more lives can potentially be saved.”
Hero Image
All News button
1