Steve Blank, national security, and the dilemma of technology disruption. (Part 1 of 2)
Steve Blank: I say this a lot, and I truly mean it. We have world-class people, world-class organizations, designed for a world that no longer exists. It's a big idea. If we would understand the world we're living in and get out of our skiffs or buildings or wherever we are and spend some time outside, first of all, leadership's head would explode going, what? I mean, mine does. Every time I find out, wait a minute, I could buy an iPhone crack or an Android crack here, and we were spending, you know, N dollars inside of a building trying to solve x or y? Well, why don't I just have a -- and we kind of do. [ Music ]
Brandon Karpf: Welcome to part one of our two-part special edition series with Steve Blank, adjunct professor at Stanford University and co-founder of the Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation. Now Steve Blank is a well-known entrepreneur, educator, and author. He's the pioneer of the lean startup movement and creator of the Hacking for Defense program. Now I wanted to bring Steve on to the podcast to talk about technology innovation and technology adoption to support national security. I specifically wanted his insights about how the Department of Defense has both effectively and ineffectively implemented technology adoption processes that might provide lessons learned to the cybersecurity industry. Here is part one of the two-part series with Steve Blank. [ Music ] I'm joined today by Steve Blank, adjunct professor at Stanford University and co-founder of the Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation at Stanford University. Steve, thank you so much for joining us today.
Steve Blank: Oh, thanks for having me.
Brandon Karpf: So I want to start at a high level. You are a well-known expert and entrepreneur. You've written numerous books and articles on national security innovation. This is what you spend, it seems to be, the majority of your life and work doing. Can you give us a sense, where are we today? What is the state of play in national security technology innovation?
Steve Blank: Well, you know, I would separate out the two. What's the state of innovation and what's the state of national security, maybe, adoption of innovation? And you have to put that in the context of, and what's the state of our adversaries, vis-à-vis, the United States in national security innovation? I just want to remind your listeners, something which might be obvious, but people inside the national security space are still having a hard time getting their heads around. It used to be that the U.S. owned all the technologies necessary to deter or win a war. Whether they were drones or cyber or autonomy or AI or ML or, you know, semiconductors, et cetera, we owned it, and our primes owned it or our contractors owned it or our weapons labs owned it. You know, University of Maryland or wherever else we went for cyber was the world's best at x or y. That's simply no longer true for most of these areas. We still own some exquisite capabilities, whether they're hypersonics or nuclear weapons or exquisite sensors or capabilities or whether the ability to throw hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of people on a program and keep it black and whatever and put stuff in space at scale. But all the other core stuff we used to own now is like you could buy half of it on Amazon and the other half, I mean, you know, we kind of predicted, you know, with General Mattis, the world would be now two plus three, you know, Russia and China and then North Korea and Iran and still the non-nation states. Who would have thought the Houthis would have been, you know, throwing --
Brandon Karpf: And a legitimate threat. I mean, to bring up that non-state actor.
Steve Blank: Yeah, right. Well, obviously, they're not making that stuff. They're getting it from a regional, you know, disruptor, which is Iran. Gee, that wasn't in the playbook, right? So what do you do? Bomb Iran? Well, maybe, but right now we're throwing SM-3 interceptors a couple million bucks, at $20,000 drones. Kind of insane.
Brandon Karpf: Right.
Steve Blank: The same thing like, you know, again, I forget the name of the book I just read, but the fact that you could buy zero-day, you know, breaks for a couple million dollars are now, oh, you want to get into the latest iPhone? You no longer need to go to Fort Meade, you're just, it's an auction. Who would have thought that 10 or 20 years ago? It's like, what?
Brandon Karpf: Yeah, there's a market for that. Right.
Steve Blank: There's a whole market, and you kind of go, well, maybe we could lay off a couple of divisions at some of our agencies. Not that I'm suggesting that, but who would have thought that -- my point again is that this notion of everything was owned by our national security establishment, and the point isn't that we've gotten stupid or whatever, is that a lot of this stuff has A), become commoditized, and here's the big idea, is that our systems and organization, and more importantly, our acquisition organizations, there's an impedance mismatch between how we buy, how we organize, who we hire, and how we deal with the outside world and the organizations we've built. And that still hasn't kind of gotten aligned, and what's worse is our adversaries have done that. So for example, both Russia and China understand that this is a whole-of-nation approach. That is, their economies and their military are aligned and interconnected. For us, you hear any agency say, well, the problem's money. We have a, you know, it's a zero-sum game. And you kind of -- at least I look at them and I go, no, the problem is it's a lack of imagination of where to get the money. You know, how come we're not figuring out how to engage the folks who are already building this stuff or could be building this stuff with a set of incentives? And the answer is, and I'll stop here for the next sentence, I say this a lot and I truly mean it. We have world-class people, world-class organizations designed for a world that no longer exists. It's a big idea. If we would understand the world we're living in and get out of our skiffs or buildings or wherever we are and spend some time outside, first of all, leadership's head would explode going, what? I mean, mine does. Every time I find out, wait a minute, I could buy an iPhone crack or an Android crack for here and we were spending, you know, N dollars inside of a building trying to solve x or y? Well, why don't I just have a -- you know, and we kind of do, but not -- think about it. Senior leadership grew up in a world 20 years ago, right? And that world no longer looks anything like the world that it -- and so you kind of get stuck with the things you knew when you were kind of coming up the ranks, and when the world is changing at such a rapid rate, the older you are, the harder it is for you to kind of adapt and adopt. Not that it's impossible, but you need to understand that it's not just the rate of change, but the delta rate of change is increasing. Number of adversaries, number of capabilities, number of whatever, you know, we could just focus on cyber, but we could talk about the national security space writ large is incredibly complex today. It looks nothing like it did even 10 years ago.
Brandon Karpf: Sure, and that context matters, right? Because when we talk about whether it's cyber security or national security, the political contexts matter, the interstate competition matters. So when I think about what you just said in my own context, right, I spent nearly 10 years active duty in the Navy. The last three years of my life, I stepped outside of the building, and I've been in the private sector. And what I've seen is from the outside, it looks like the defense world is refocusing to great power competition. You see that in their strategies. You see them kind of refocusing their efforts primarily to China, and it seems like a lot of the technology that they are pushing for the development of is focused on that threat from China. At least, that's what the outsider in me is seeing. So I'm curious from your perspective, what is the national security community getting wrong in terms of the nation-state adversaries, in terms of reorienting ourselves to the China threat and competition with nations like China?
Steve Blank: You know, I'm going to admit my bias, which, again, brings all kinds of baggage. But my professional career was an entrepreneur at Silicon Valley where you operated with incredible speed and urgency because there was a virtual gun to your head of, back then, of running out of money before you could actually generate revenue. And so you would build things now we call minimum viable products; you'd ship them. You'd get feedback, et cetera. You know, there was no notion of a JCDIS process or a POM process or, you know, two to three years to get something into a POM that then we had to argue with some staffer who says it's -- you know, not in my district and a congressman who has some political agenda. And again, that's the nature of the business, but that's not how the world operated in the world that a lot of these innovations are coming from. And that was fine when we were competing with another nation state like the Soviet Union that had the equivalent bureaucratic stuff. I mean, obviously, communism worked from state planning and then a whole another -- but the clock speeds were essentially the same. The problem is, is that China, and if we just want to look at, like, why this next statement is not bull- [beep], look at the number of DDGs. There are destroyers they're putting in the water, their ship in the last 10 to 15 years, they've figured out how to operate at a different clock speed than we have, period, end of discussion. And so the question is, is like, you know, we could have lots of discussions of why we can't do that, but the other part that just flabbergasts me is that we do have a part of the nation that still knows how to operate on that, and those are the innovation clusters. And when I say Silicon Valley, I don't mean the physical place. I mean all the innovation clusters that know how to operate with speed and urgency and could be delivering capabilities to the DoD and the rest of the national security establishment. It's not that we don't do that as point things. So let me be clear. It's not that no one knows that it's here. But if you look at the list of what's called the MDAP, the Major Defense Acquisition Programs, which is basically the top tier-100 or so things that we spend billions or hundreds of billions of dollars on, there's not a single startup or scale up on it. And in fact, that list hasn't changed in the last 10 or 20 years since the consolidation of the primes. Well, that's a symptom of, you know, we basically do innovation theater when we talk about adopting innovation at scale. But we really don't do innovation deployment at scale. And by deployment is there are more demos of, hey, look what we have, shiny object C, Admiral, you know, x or y, or we show it to Congressman Z. And then you ask, well, how many ships is this on? Well, it's on one. Well, when does it get on the other 50? Oh, that's not really budgeted, or it's budgeted for 2045. Well, wait a minute. Don't we have a 2027 problem with the Taiwan Strait, or gee, aren't we learning lessons from the Ukraine? And so when are we deploying, you know, drone stacks, let alone drone swarms? Well, we're working on it. Well, wait a minute. And again, you know, and I know Bill LaPlante didn't really mean this, but when he says, you know, the war in Ukraine is really all about artillery and not about innovation. Well, clearly, it's a hybrid war. It looks like a combination of World War I, you know, with trench warfare, you know, with World War III, with drone stacks and advanced technology and literally a meat grinder like World War I. And clearly, we need new factories for, you know, for artillery shells, but also the amount of drones we attrit are probably as many as the number of shells we're attriting. And I'm saying that as a, obviously, not exactly. But, you know, so us buying, you know, a thousand drones a year is kind of silly when they're attriting a thousand drones, you know, a month, if not a week, right?
Brandon Karpf: At least. Yeah.
Steve Blank: So there's an impetus mismatch between -- and the reason why I think, you know, I've been spending time in large organizations, not only in the government, but in commercial companies to understand why is this so hard to deal with disruption? Because in the commercial world, when that happens, it's kind of Darwinian. You know, it's the creative destruction metaphor is that companies, you know, when new entrants come in or new technology shifts or culture shifts, some adopt and adapt, and others go out of business, and that's just fine. It's just fine. It's the nature of commerce, but if that happens in defense, we lose a war, we miss a technology shift, et cetera, that's the rise and fall of great powers. We can't afford to have that happen, and so we really need to deeply understand why is it that senior leaders have such a hard time dealing with disruption? And the answer is pretty simple, and not that the solution is simple, but when you really go talk to senior -- well, what's hard about making massive changes? Well, if you make a massive change in a large service or a component of a service, what if you're wrong, you know?
Brandon Karpf: Right.
Steve Blank: I mean, that was the argument about General Berger and Force Design 2030. It wasn't that he hesitated. In fact, people argued whether it was the right shift for the for the Marines, because he not only said we need to do x, but he also said we need to divest of a set of equipment. And that just like panic, people said, well, you'll no longer be able to do mission x or y. So number-one is, is the disruption coming really a threat, and number two is what magnitude of the threat is? What's the timing of the threat, and then what should my response be? That's the job of a senior leader, service chief, a secretary of defense, a head of an agency or whatever. At the same time, you've got all these innovators on the bottom who are seeing the future banging on the walls, but at the same time -- but remember, between them and the senior leaders, it's a whole set of frozen middle. And by frozen middle, I don't mean that as a pejorative. That's another nature of large organizations. Large organizations are built by people and process, and you build process to have repeatable processes. You build doctrine, you build operating concepts. So there's not people randomly running around doing their own thing. We are focused on this is the way we execute mission. This is the way we deliver analytics or pointy things or kinetic things, et cetera. But when change happens, that's hard to re-steer that middle because of two things, and these two things are common to commercial and government companies. One is something called the Semmelweis effect, which named after a doctor in the 19th century who noticed that women in his hospitals were dying in childbirth 20% of the time. Amazing. And then he discovered that there was another hospital he was working in where there was only 1%. He said, well, what's the difference? It turned out that doctors in the 20% were doing autopsies in the morning and delivering babies in the afternoon, and he said, there's something going on. This is before germ theory. So he now had some evidence, and you would think when he presented it to the doctors, they would have said, oh, maybe we should not do that.
Brandon Karpf: Do the autopsies in the morning.
Steve Blank: And of course, guess what? They ignored the evidence. They ignored the evidence for 30, 40 years, and we see that a lot. Not only do innovators come up with a shiny object, but the best of them create examples in actually operational execution. They actually run a new concept and get some evidence and put it in front. And people go, that's great. Now let's go get back to work. [ Music ]
Brandon Karpf: We'll be right back. [ Music ] I want to bring in now just from my own experience, right, in the military, in this structure as an action officer, one of those people at the bottom seeing the new technologies, new ideas, new ways of doing business. We called this, that frozen middle, we called it the brick ceiling. That we could talk to admirals all day, and they would love our ideas, but the moment it got up to the commander or captain level, it would seem to kind of fizzle and die on the vine. And so that was my own experience, kind of seeing what you're talking about is very real. And it's not because they don't want to innovate. It's because they have other responsibilities, requirements, and jobs that they have to get done.
Steve Blank: And I'll give you a way to solve this, or at least a possible way in a second, but there's a couple of other obstacles, and again, common to commercial. And one is, as I mentioned, is the Semmelweis effect is unconscious. It's what human beings tend to do. It's not like there's malice involved or stupidity. Even though it looks like malice and stupidity, it's really not. But the second part is conscious, and it has a little malice and that's hubris. Gee, I'm a PEO, I manage a billion-dollar project. Screw you guys, I'm important, and it's all about my budget, my headcount, whatever, and anything you do that threatens that, like I'm going to actively sabotage that. So that's another problem. The third problem, which is unique to the military is even if you have a senior leader who gets it, who's in charge, they have a two- to three-year like life cycle. That does not exist in the commercial world. In fact, the only example which over their dead body for the Navy will ever happen again was when Rickover created the nuclear Navy, right? He basically had a congressional support base that made him invulnerable, and boy, that was never going to happen again. Yet at the same time, and by the way, unique to the government is the fact that Congress is coin operated, and what I mean by that is, you know, if you're a prime contractor, you're smart. You put jobs in every district, you know, your campaign contributions, if you're on the House Armed Services Committee or the House Armed Appropriations Committee. Those are your biggest donors, and so when someone says, perhaps, we ought to delay or cancel one carrier, you know, to buy 20,000 drones, guess what's not going to happen?
Brandon Karpf: Or decommission five cruisers in the next couple of years, and then Newport News says no.
Steve Blank: Yeah, I'm not picking on the Navy. Pick, you know, whatever weapon system we're talking about, and rightly so. That is the nature of our system, and if we don't understand that, how that works, and so let me give you just an alternate universe. The problem is, is that if you go to the Pentagon and say, are we in a crisis? People will go, maybe, but well, how long does the paperwork take to go from one side of the building to the other? Is it any different than it was like three years ago? And the answer is probably not in most cases. I mean, obviously, we have some programs that have been accelerated. But then you go out to the combatant commands, go ask IndoPACOM or CENTCOM, are we in a crisis? Their hair is on fire. You know, CENTCOM is shooting down drones on a daily basis, and IndoPACOM is counting the number of DF-21s and range of F-18s versus like how far they've got to pull the carriers back. And I mean, it's just a math problem, and they're going like, what are you talking about? Well, here's the problem. We've not said, either from the president or the secretary of defense, we're in a crisis. Whatever we were doing last year, we can't keep doing, and we've not communicated that to Congress is we appreciate all the jobs and whatever, but the country is at risk. Not only is the country at risk from China or Russia, the country is at risk because the whole geopolitical chessboard has changed. Some of our actions have forced China and Russia and North Korea and Iran to operate as an axis of evil but coordinated in a way that like never existed before. And so we need to change how we operate. Yet to me, it comes back as if you're in a crisis, you don't appoint the same people you would have appointed when it was a process-driven organization, right? It's not that those people were bad, but the same people who know how to play golf are not the same people who are willing to walk through walls to make stuff happen. The best maybe visible example is people probably know about General Groves, who along with Oppenheimer built the Manhattan Project. Well, do you know what happened to him after World War II?
Brandon Karpf: I don't.
Steve Blank: Any idea?
Brandon Karpf: I don't, no.
Steve Blank: Eisenhower told him he was never going to get promoted again in his life because he pissed off so many people in the Army. Literally, Groves never got promoted because this was the guy you needed in a crisis, and this was the guy. That's exactly what happened to Churchill, right? He was voted out of office when the war was almost over. Why? Because he was perfect for a crisis. He was a crazy person. The analogy here is that there are a lot of great -- and again, crazy people are the wrong answer, but a lot of innovators who will operate with speed and urgency who need to be promoted or at least be allowed to operate as the number ones or twos in a crisis who you would never want to operate in peacetime because they break glass, they piss off people, they stomp whatever.
Brandon Karpf: They steamroll.
Steve Blank: They steamroll, et cetera, which again is completely unacceptable in peacetime, and if we don't understand that distinction between, you know, operating in a crisis versus operating in peacetime, we keep promoting peacetime, you know, people and organizations and everything is calm. But on the other hand, incumbents have figured out how to sabotage and weaponize organizations to delay or stop innovation. For example, in the DoD, the primes have figured out how to weaponize the IG's office. You know, there's no way that the head of DIU should have been investigated and the day he resigned got cleared, or there's no way the IG office should be investigating Replicator versus pick your favorite prime. So we've just figured out how those things have been captured to sabotage and delay for making the status quo continue.
Brandon Karpf: Well, I want to ask because this issue of allowing and encouraging and internalizing good disruption, this is not just a problem faced by DoD, right? Private companies face this too. This is why we have something called the innovator's dilemma. And so I'm curious, your perspective structurally, where these two worlds collide, I see, is the primes that you were just discussing, the prime contractors and their interaction with the government. So where do the primes, what's their role in helping to drive innovation? I mean, they really have no incentive to do so, do they?
Steve Blank: Well, not yet. So if we had -- so let me break this down inside of the DoD and companies and then bring in the primes, as well. So if you think about it, that in peacetime and wartime and/or in civilian companies, we need repeatable and scalable processes, right? And in the army, we call it doctrine, other services, operating concepts, et cetera. They need to be written down, people trained, et cetera. And we need very little deviation of that because we need operational excellence, right? And whatever our doctrine is and, you know, for fires or intelligence or sustainment or whatever. And those processes need to be fail-safe. That is, lives are dependent on us following this stuff. But at the same time, we're not going to get any innovation unless we have separate organizations that deal with disruption. So think about not only the operating part, but also the development part. If you're developing a new gun or tank or whatever, people have built guns and tanks before.
Brandon Karpf: The Bradley fighting vehicle.
Steve Blank: Or fighter planes. I won't go into the F-35. But I mean, we should know how to do that. So here's the point: What goes in should come out, right? That is, there should be a one-to-one correspondence. If I've written a requirement that it should be on schedule and whatever, what goes in should come out. There should be very little failures if I'm managing those processes well. And by the way, that's innovation. That is, you know, a next-generation radar or moving Aegis from one platform to another. Yes, there are. But in fact, that's innovation around our core known standard systems or platforms. But there's a whole other set of innovation that does not belong in those processes, and those are disruptive innovation. And I'll give you an example. You know, using unmanned vehicles, whether they're ships or aircraft or ISR or mine-clearing or mine laying or, you know, take your pick of, or using cyber or using EW in a way that's never been used before. Well, those are actually disruptive things that create new operating concepts. But most of the things you want to do with them are going to fail, and so you need a different process that's safe to fail versus the ones that you're operating with, which should be fail-safe. That is, we need a parallel process that looks like a funnel rather than a pipeline. That where failure is not considered, oh, you failed, there's a congressional -- that is, it's not an F-35 or a Ford-class carrier. It's a set of experiments that said, no, what will come out of that funnel is a set of tested things that have been iterated, tested. We figured out what the best was. And then we could actually feed them into the mainstream. Let me give you the world's best example of that.
Brandon Karpf: Yeah, please.
Steve Blank: And it's in the commercial world. It's called SpaceX.
Brandon Karpf: Uh-huh.
Steve Blank: And if you really think what SpaceX is doing, it's this. They have execution, and they have innovation going on simultaneously. By the way, when you do both, both execution that is sustaining innovation, disruptive, that's called an ambidextrous organization. That's a $20 word for being able to chew gum and walk at the same time, right?
Brandon Karpf: I don't know anyone who can do that.
Steve Blank: Right. No, chew gum and walk at the same time, and what I mean by SpaceX is, think about this: They're launching Falcon 9s every two and a half days from three launch pads, operational excellence, no deviation from like the checklist because there are human beings every once in a while on top of those. And they're launching Starlinks and they had in -- what, 300 or 200 before they had a failure in the second stage. I mean, just an incredible track record. But at the same time in Texas, they have crazy people. They're building the next generation called Starship, and Elon's model was, if you're not blowing things up, you're not innovating. And more importantly, if you're not blowing them up on a regular basis, you're not innovating fast enough. They've now been through three generations of Raptor engines. Now everybody understands in that company that today's paycheck is Falcon 9, but tomorrow's paycheck is going to be that Starship. And no one is jealous of each other because everybody understands execution pays your salary, but innovation pays your pension. And more importantly, those two groups are not standalone silos. They're talking to each other. The Falcon 9 people are reminding the Starship people, man, did we screw up where we put the ground service equipment plugs. When you build the next one, make sure their access panels are over here. And even though I said the Falcon 9 can't change much because it's operational excellence, the Starship people are reminding them, you know, you can crank up that chamber pressure by another hundred pounds, and people like haven't paid attention, but the payload capacity of Falcon 9 has actually gone up a couple thousand pounds because they've been making these small little tweaks that have been tested elsewhere. So imagine that. So the DoD has components of this. You know, we've got R&D labs. We've got whatever.
Brandon Karpf: I was going to say, don't we have DIU and Ensign and Naval X, AFWERX, all this innovation ecosystem?
Steve Blank: And more importantly, we have all these software R&D labs in every service. We have FFRDCs, but the clock speed and culture, and more importantly, the output for deployment are not connected, and they're not connected to match the threats. It's, again, not that we have dumb people or we're not doing pieces of this, but then you have to step back and say, great, given what's going on in the external world for innovation, what's going on in our labs, you know, and we'll talk about DIU in a second, you know, so how much of this stuff is being deployed? And then they'll say, well, look at this great demo. And you go, no, no, no, how much is this on -- has this like -- is there any billion-dollar contracts for any of this stuff? Oh, look at this, you know, whatever, and so we haven't yet connected this into an end-to-end innovation pipeline whose clock speed matches the threats or our adversaries. That's the big point. We've built these systems and components, DIU, I'll get to in a second, to match 20th-century threats or non-nation state threats, which operated fine. But there's just a huge impedance mismatch between this and the outcomes we need, and it's not unfixable. It just requires somebody stepping all the way back and going, wait a minute, I've got three million people here. I got, you know, a budget, you know, approaching, gosh knows how many hundreds of billions of dollars. Why am I not getting what I want on the other end? And why are our adversaries running in some areas, not many, but enough that matter, rings around us and the ability to field things? DIU, my opinion, just my opinion, in the last year or two under Kath Hicks and Doug Beck, is basically a slap in the face to the services that says, well, since you can't deploy this stuff and acquire it at speed, remember the services are the ones who are responsible for, you know, coming up with weapon systems' needs, and it's the combatant commands who get them. Well, Replicator is basically a way to say, well, so you haven't come up with what we need in the South China Sea. We're going to do it. Well, that's a little insane, but if you step back -- and then the rider programs out of Heidi Shyu and R&E, which Congress doesn't understand. Again, we've done a bad job of publicly educating those folks, you know, are another attempt to kind of do this. And again, it's happened in the past where OSD has kind of -- it's what Bill Perry did to kind of get the offset strategy. You basically ignore the services and started building the things we needed. [ Music ]
Brandon Karpf: All right, that is it for part one of our two-part series with Steve Blank. There was just way too much great content there with Steve to shove it all into a single episode, so please stay tuned. Later this week, we will be releasing part two. In our next episode, Steve and I are going to dive a little bit deeper into the future of defense technology investments. So we explore more ways to accelerate deployment of technologies into the Department of Defense, including cybersecurity technologies and unique ways of getting the critical capital needed for defense technology innovation to cross the chasm. We talk about SpaceX. We talk about the mismatch in venture capital. It's a really great episode. And that's our show brought to you by N2K CyberWire. Now we would love to know what you think about this podcast. So your feedback really ensures we deliver the insights that keep you a step ahead in a rapidly changing world of cybersecurity. So if you like the show, please share a rating and review in your podcast app. It really does help others find the show. And also, please send an email to cyberwire@n2k.com with anything that you'd like to hear on the podcast. We are privileged that N2K CyberWire is part of the daily routine of the most influential leaders and operators in both the public and private sector, from the Fortune 500 to many of the world's preeminent intelligence and law enforcement agencies. This episode was produced by Liz Stokes. We're mixed by Elliot Peltzman and Tré Hester, with original music by Elliot Peltzman. Our Executive Producer is Jennifer Eiben. Simone Petrella is our President. Peter Kilpe is our Publisher, and I'm Brandon Karpf, Executive Editor of N2K Cyberwire. Thanks for listening.
