My name is Sean Smith. I'm a retired Air Force officer. I served as a Space Missile Operations

Officer, but I also spent a lot of time doing operational planning and working in a field called special technical operations

which deals with sensitive capabilities.

And I also had assignments where I was designing and then executing operational testing of

Air Force weapons systems.

And then at the end of my career I was assigned to an office under the Office of Secretary of Defense called the Directorate of Operational

Test Evaluation, where my responsibilities were to oversee the operational testing of all space

systems under development and operational tests in the Department of Defense except for satellite communications.

So in that capacity and throughout my career I had a pretty significant exposure to the kind of threats that foreign nation states

pose to our weapon systems and national security systems including in

particular the cyber security threats.

Early in my career I had written some of the first operational procedures

for what at the time was called computer network defense

for the Department of Defense, what would now be called cyber defense.

And I also, after I retired from the Air Force in 2017, I spent about a year, little over a year as a contractor,

supporting my old office as a favor to my old boss,

doing something called Adversarial Assessment,

where I was helping a team on a project to assess what some specific

adversaries could understand and do with the intellectual property and

information and access they had stolen and

exploited for US national security and defense systems and with our

national security contractors and defense organizations.

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