Tag: pentagon

A Washington Insider’s Advice for the New Administration

Posted on by robbie

President Obama confronted a number of foreign policy issues during his two terms in office: a covert mission to kill Osama bin Laden; the expansion of settlements in Israel; a failure to curb Russian aggression in Crimea; military strikes in Libya; a red line and refugee crisis in Syria; the rise of the Islamic State; the reopening of relations with Cuba; and a nuclear deal with Iran. Behind the scenes, NationSwell Council member Matt Spence worked on many of these issues in the White House’s National Security Council from 2009 to 2012 and as head of Middle East policy in the Defense Department from 2012 to 2015. As Donald J. Trump readies to be sworn as president this week, NationSwell spoke to Spence, now a partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and a fellow at Stanford, about the world the next commander-in-chief will face.

How did you get interested in international policy? Why did these big global issues matter to you personally?
In some sense, it’s unusual. I grew up in Southern California and lived in the same house my entire life. I’d never been out of the country until college. But when I was born, my father was in the Army reserves, and I remember him being deployed to Korea in preparation for the first Gulf War. My mom was the first in her family to be born in the United States; her grandparents and two uncles had come here very suddenly during World War II when the Nazis took over. So, in the background, there was a strong interest in international issues. I remember my dad reading a lot of military history and international affairs when I was growing up, and I was just fascinated.

You’ve credited your first White House role to a doctorate in international relations and “a fair amount of luck.” Why did you choose to join the Obama campaign in 2008?
I got very excited about Barack Obama when he was a candidate after reading a speech he gave in 2007 to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. He talked about how the way to keep America safe was by pursuing smart policy and supporting development throughout the world. I’d written my doctoral dissertation at Oxford about the impact of democratization on developing the rule of law and what America could do to support that in Russia and the former Soviet Union. I was really struck that the danger in these societies was not that they’re aggressive, but that they were so weak and broken. I remember Obama at the time talking about how a starving child in the Middle East or Africa is as much a threat to the United States over the long term as the spread of weapons of mass destruction. I think we’ve seen that now with broken states, refugees, the rise of totally ungoverned spaces. Obama got that at a real visceral level, and he was saying this, by the way, when he’d only been a senator for a very short time.

Looking back on your time in the White House, what was the greatest test of your resolve?
I started at the White House on the first day after the inauguration, and I was just working all the time. I was at my desk by 6:30 or 7 in the morning, and I would leave around 10:30 or 11, as one of the last people leaving the West Wing. There is so much that is happening at the same time; the sheer bandwidth of the diverse issues is just mind-blowing. At the beginning of an administration, one of the most valuable qualities is just stamina to come in and work those types of hours. But the key, in the middle of all that, is to try to think about how to keep your head above water. What do you actually want to be doing? How do you think about history?

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How did you maintain perspective amidst all the pressure?
I got a great piece of advice from my boss at the time, the national security adviser. He said, “Always make time to read history.” In the middle of these 14-hour days, I read the memoirs of past national security advisers, secretaries of state and other figures. I remember finding a passage in Zbigniew Brzezinski’s memoir from when, as Carter’s national security adviser, they dealt with the Iranian revolution. I gave it to the national security adviser as we were thinking through the protests surrounding Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak, in Tahrir Square. You don’t want to overgeneralize from history: Those were very different events in very different historical times. But there’s something humbling to think through the changes that occurred decades before. These issues appear very unique; everything looks new to you, in a sense. Essentially, how do you try to learn from your mistakes before you make them?

You had the chance to travel with and brief President Obama. What did you learn from him about leadership?
He has an amazing sense of priorities. Many times, sitting in the Situation Room, he would say very explicitly, “Look, this is a presidential-level decision. I’ve made my decision. You guys go execute and figure it out.” He was very clear on which issues rose to his level that he needed to handle and which he could delegate, which is incredibly important for an executive. There’s a lot of noise in national security or business decisions or running an organization. Given this huge glut coming at you, what are the key things you really need to pay attention to?

During your tenure at the Defense Department, what was the most important development that will shape the future of the Middle East?
When you ask anyone about the Middle East, they picture conflict, chaos, danger. We have to try to think about opportunities. We’re facing a real time of American isolationism. Americans don’t feel that the Middle East is unimportant, but they throw their hands up and wonder if there’s anything we can do about it. Can we maintain leadership without having tens of thousands of troops in the region that most Americans don’t really support?

I remember going to Jordan to lead defense talks with the government. We were in the process of providing a huge amount of military assistance, because they share a border with Syria and Iraq, they had a very serious refugee crisis and they were facing threats from neighbors. A senior member told me, “We deeply appreciate the military assistance that you’ve given us, and we need it. But what we need even more is millions of jobs.” In a sense, it sounds cliché, but as a representative of the most powerful military in the history of the world in a region that’s deeply hungry for security, these countries were thinking about how to educate and employ this next generation. When you spend your days thinking about war planning, that wasn’t what I expected. The most valuable export we have is not from these $750 billion defense budgets, but economic opportunity and entrepreneurship.

What piece of advice would you give to the incoming Trump administration?
Listen and surround yourself with good people who are dedicated, know what they’re doing and will be thoughtful about their role. Right now, there really is an opportunity to show what he’s going to do to govern, and he should show he’s going to govern in a very different way than he campaigned. He said he’s going to do that, and just match the work now.

To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.

The Surprising New Threat to the U.S. Military

Posted on by robbie

Even though climate change has been brushed off as a liberal conspiracy in some political corners, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has once again stressed that the evidence for a warming planet is not only real — but that it’s also an increasingly dangerous threat that the U.S. military needs to be prepared for.
Hagel recently released a 20-page report (called the 2014 Climate Change Adapation Roadmap) describing how the Pentagon is taking immediate steps to respond to rising sea levels, increasing storms and other natural disasters and phenomena linked to rising temperatures here in the U.S, as well as beyond our borders.
Hagel called climate change a “threat multiplier” that can potentially exacerbate political unrest and infectious diseases across the globe. “Rising global temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, climbing sea levels, and more extreme weather events will intensify the challenges of global instability, hunger, poverty, and conflict,” he says in the report’s introduction. “They will likely lead to food and water shortages, pandemic disease, disputes over refugees and resources, and destruction by natural disasters in regions across the globe.”
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According to the New York Times, the Department of Defense will begin to integrate “plans for climate change risks across all of its operations, from war games and strategic military planning situations to a rethinking of the movement of supplies.”
For several years now, the U.S. military has focused on climate change as a security risk. The first time that the Pentagon addressed the growing threat was in its 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review that described climate change’s major role in accelerating global instability and conflict.
As we previously reported, as the largest energy consumer in the United States, the Department of Defense is also deeply committed to reducing its own carbon footprint and has a 2025 deadline to produce a quarter of all energy from renewable sources.
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Meet the Former Navy SEAL Saving Lives — by Saving Energy — on the Battlefield

Posted on by robbie

Doug Moorehead remembers the exact moment senior Marine Corps officials rendered their verdict. In the summer of 2010, soldiers being trained near the desert town of Twentynine Palms, Calif., had been testing a hybrid generator system — a system Moorehead himself had helped engineer to power everything an off-the-grid military outpost needs. Out on the scorched Mojave Desert, home to the hottest temperature ever recorded, the devices — made up of a diesel generator equipped with solar panels, a high-tech battery and automation software — sucked up energy from the sun and stored the excess. As a result, the generator systems used diesel fuel for only a few hours each day, rather than 24/7.
Flash forward several months. Moorehead, a Navy vet and the president of Earl Energy, a startup based in Virginia Beach, Va., was at the Pentagon to discuss the results. He had just finished presenting the data that the military had collected during the tests when the senior official across the table said the line that still sticks in his mind to this day: “It’s almost too good to be true, Doug.”
If the device Moorehead had helped develop after retiring from SEAL Team Two was unbelievable —  indeed, it reduced fuel consumption by a whopping 70 percent — it was in part because the military’s setup had been in need of an overhaul for quite some time.
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mohaveThe Mojave Desert, a scorching hot area used by the Marine Corps for training. Thinkstock
But Moorehead was the right man to revamp the system. At the United States Naval Academy, he found he loved the problem-solving aspects of science and technology, and says he could have been happy studying everything from physics to electrical engineering. “Unfortunately you can’t be an undergrad for 25 years, you have to pick one,” he says. He chose chemistry. Then he trained as a SEAL pilot navigator, spending three years working with battery-powered submarines, traveling 40-plus miles underwater at a go on top-secret work in places like the Pacific and the South China Sea. Those subs’ rechargeable batteries did not last long, he recalls. He applied to grad school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to work on building better ones.
There he joined forces with Yet-Ming Chiang, a professor of materials science and engineering, who encouraged him to try for something big in his research, rather than an incremental advance. Moorehead worked on coming up with a way to make self-assembling, rechargeable batteries: mix the right set of chemicals together, the idea went, apply them to a surface, then just add heat and watch the components arrange themselves. Going big paid off. By the time he finished his master’s degree, Moorehead was riding his bike across the Charles River several days a week to help train employees at the startup company A123 Systems in Waltham, Mass., which had licensed his technology from MIT.
Then it was back to the battlefield, in summer 2005. He trained soldiers in the Philippines and Colombia, and fought in Iraq as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom. After nine years in the Navy, he headed to Harvard for an MBA and went to work at A123. In 2009 he ran into a former Naval Academy classmate, Josh Prueher (at a string of weddings, Prueher recalls), and heard about Prueher’s new company, Earl Energy.
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Fuel is enormously costly on the battlefield, both monetarily and in terms of the lives lost when fuel convoys are attacked. An Army Environmental Policy Institute study found that between 2003 and 2007, one military fuel convoy in 24 was attacked and resulted in a casualty, either injury or death, and that 1 in 8 Army casualties in Iraq during that period occurred while defending such convoys. “I recognized that fuel and maintenance and spare-parts logistics on the battlefield was a critical vulnerability,” Prueher says. Moorehead knew this issue well: “We spent a lot of time as special forces, providing security for the movement of necessities around Iraq — fuel, water, food,” he recalls. And he knew that with his knowledge of batteries, he could help.
Earl-Energy-1Photo courtesy of Earl Energy.
The generator system they eventually produced is surprisingly simple. Normally, a military generator runs on diesel fuel all day long, and it uses enough fuel to power everything attached to it, should the need arise. But often the need doesn’t arise — and that’s wasted energy. Moorehead likens it to turning your car on, driving it to work, leaving it running all day, driving home from work, parking it in your garage — then letting it run all night.
With Earl Energy’s system, the generator only needs to run a few hours, at the level at which it has the greatest fuel efficiency. The excess energy is saved in the battery, along with any solar energy that might be available. Automation software switches the generator off when it’s not needed and power is drawn from the battery, until it’s time to recharge again. It’s not complicated, but it is the change the military needed. “The technology is evolutionary, but the concept and its impact are really interesting,” says Capt. Frank Furman, U.S. Marine Corps, logistics program manager in the Office of Naval Research’s Expeditionary Maneuver Warfare and Combating Terrorism Department.
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“If we want to fly a helicopter from point A, we need to get fuel to point A,” Furman continues. “That largely involves fuel convoys, which is why our enemies have relied on the IED as its primary weapon. That tactic is a reaction to our reliance on this specific form of energy. … We’ve been living it in Iraq and Afghanistan. With the cost of fuel rising and the costs of alternative energy generation — such as solar — falling, the economics of investment begin to make more sense.”
Earl-Energy-2Doug Moorehead. Photo courtesy of Earl Energy.
Moorehead’s technical savvy and on-the-ground experience led him to that panel at the Pentagon, where the numbers proved that Earl Energy’s generator system could perform above expectations. In addition to reducing fuel consumption 70 percent, it decreased the amount of time the diesel generators had to run by 80 percent. The Marine Corps bought two units, and dispatched them to Afghanistan for 18 months to be tested in a demanding combat situation. The hybrid generator passed with flying colors: Fuel consumption dropped 52 percent and generator run time declined by 80 percent. Ten Earl Energy generator systems are currently being used by the military around the world.
Now Moorehead and the rest of Earl Energy are working with defense contractors to incorporate the technology into products to be provided to the military. They are also developing new versions that run on natural gas and can be used in oil and gas prospecting. “We have ambitions that this technology could really change the way every single generator in the world operates,” Prueher says. “Not just the military.”
This is the first story in a series about former Navy SEALS who have gone on to serve the country in other fields, from business and government to social innovation and military affairs.
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