You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast on Strategy, Defense, and Foreign Affairs.

My name is Ryan Evans. I'm the founder of War on the Rocks.

In this episode, I was joined by Alex Miller, the chief

technology officer of the U.S. Army. We discussed how he wants to see industry working with

the Army, counter drone solutions, and so much more. And thanks so much to our friends at

Helsing for hosting the event at which this live episode was recorded.

Enjoy the show.

Alex, how does one become the CTO of the Army?

How does that work?

You said no hard questions.

I don't know how I got here.

I know what happened.

So General George actually found me at the National Training

Center because I owned the Intel architecture for what we had this experiment called Project

Convergence. And I was the sole ISR task force rep that was out there and I was willing to get dirty

and I was willing to go out into the field and I was willing to just get my hands in everything. And I had an opportunity. I was

out there for a couple weeks. I came back to the Pentagon for one day. General Potter, who was my

boss, Laura Potter? She said, hey, go brief the vice, General George at the time. I had about 20 minutes.

He goes, cool, send me an email directly, which petrified me because I was like, this is definitely how I get fired. On your observations, and he asked for something like direct, which was tell me what's not working, which scared me. The next day, I got a note from his exo that said, hey, the boss is going out to NTC next week. You're going to be attached to him the whole time. The night after he got out there, I walked him through everything. He goes, hey, you're going to come to work for me. So he has given me a tremendous amount of opportunity. Originally, it was just fixing the network. He said, do what you do best, do it for the entire army. And what I am most thankful for is, is with Secretary Driscoll coming on board, he has said you're the dude make, make sure you do the right thing, use your rank for good, go forth and conquer. So it turns out if you could small, moderately sized problems, they just give you even harder problems to solve. And that's how ended up here today. Roof shots become moon shots. So I know one of the things you're really focused on these days is counter UAS, counter drone. Let's start here. To what extent can we look to Ukraine for those lessons? To what extent do we need to look elsewhere? We are not the Ukrainians and we are not the Soviets, so we don't fight the same way they do. The thing that I'm most worried about is actually learning the wrong lessons. So I'll take that statement and I'll put in a shoebox and we'll come back to it later.

Who here has gotten blown up by an IED or an S-Fest or anything else?

Okay, IEDs fly now.

And they fly at 100 miles an hour.

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