The U.S. DoD has embarked on a strategic transformation based on changes in organizational structure, putting nuclear once again at center stage, a renewed commitment to the U.S. and allied military capabilities in the Indo-Pacific region, strength through power in Europe (in the form of U.S. and NATO military capabilities), and the maintenance of superiority by the U.S. in conventional weapon technologies.

Central to this transformation are supply chains. Specifically, an understanding and reduction of the reliance by U.S. military systems on foreign components, subcomponents, materials, and software.  “Made in America” is an objective, rectifying supply chain security concerns with American-made components, subcomponents, materials, and software.

As it turns out, supply chain transformation is a central military operational activity of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) – and they want their supply chain to be “Made in America” too.

We started the OODAcast as a way of highlighting insights and lessons learned from leaders and decision-makers in the OODA Network.

In the Spring of 2021, Bob Gourley had a conversation with General Jim Clapper and Lieutenant General Robert Ashley. We continue our effort to underscore certain patterns and themes found throughout the OODAcast library of over 80 conversations with leaders and decision-makers, on topics such as leadership, empowering a team, finding the right people, clear decision-making while operating in a low information environment, situational awareness and the qualities and best practices of a true leader. 

Threads that emerge in these conversations include the nature and history of intelligence, the importance of Joint Ops/Intel operations, the future of intelligence, and specific characteristics of the cyber threat.

The U.S. is in a struggle to maintain its dominance in air, land, sea, space, and cyberspace over countries with capabilities increasingly on par in all domains with that of the U.S.  In addition, information (in all its forms) is the center of gravity of a broad set of challenges faced by the United States, including information operations, cyber information warfare, foreign hostile influence, intelligence operations, influence warfare, disinformation, proxy warfare, and the perennial threat of terrorism, foreign and domestic. 

Information, then, is the clear strategic vector of value creation for the emergence of applied technologies to enable operational innovation. For the U.S., the desired outcome is continued dominance for another American Century.  For the Chinese, military capabilities usher in the dawn of a new technological superiority and, as a result, geopolitical and military dominance on the world stage.

Quantum computing is a fascinating, complex, highly technical, sometimes daunting to conceptualize technological breakthrough and driver of the future marketplace. So yes, the promise of quantum computing will happen and is happening. The question is how quantum will have an impact during a growth phase in which the capital expenditure capabilities and strategic concerns are driven more by governmental, governmental agency’s and, in our current climate, non-state actors’ (loosely tethered to nation-states for plausible deniability) ability to deploy adversarial methods only possible with next-generation quantum computational power.

I am a member of OODA Loop. The few discussions that I have been able to listen to thus far were extremely informative, especially the most recent one on Afghanistan and intelligence issues.  It prompted a few comments on intelligence collection and hedging bets amongst regional and great power players in Afghanistan. 

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