Kelli Kedis Ogborn

I was thrilled to learn that the U.S. Department of State plans to establish three Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (#FFRDCs): public-private partnerships that conduct innovative R&D for their USG sponsors on topics that cannot be effectively met by the government or the private sector alone. FFRDCs are required to have a long-term strategic relationship with the agency that supports them, allowing the FFRDC to recruit and retain scientific and technical expertise, conduct R&D to meet the needs of the sponsoring agency; and offer independent scientific and technical advice. From my days as an FSO at State and as a consultant on national security and technology for the past five years, I’ve strongly advocated for State to join its Executive Branch brethren – Commerce, NIST, DOD, NSA, Energy, HHS, DHS, NIH, Treasury, Transportation, Veterans Affairs, NASA, NSF, the Social Security Administration, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission – in establishing an FFRDC. This was a recommendation I encouraged the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence to include in its 2021 Final Report to the White House and Congress, so it’s heartening to see State finally proceed.  Better late than never! State wants to create three FFRDCs to conduct R&D on: (1) Operational support for acquisition planning and development for new technologies; and operational analysis to identify institutional and capability gaps and how to fill them; (2) Emerging threats, concept exploration, and experimentation and evaluation, developing new concepts, models, prototypes, and proof-of-concept demonstrations, and test-beds, and (3) #IT and #Cyber Operations. I hope this important step, when implemented, will facilitate two more steps that State should take to be a global leader on technology for diplomacy for the rest of the 21st century: (1) Establish an in-house “Technology for Diplomacy” R&D lab that builds off of the FFRDC's work, to conduct internal R&D, prototyping, scaling, and deploying of #AI and other emerging technologies that empower American diplomats, and (2) Fund "Small Business Innovation Research" (#SBIR) Grants to leverage the innovative and entrepreneurial talents of U.S. small technology companies to offer their own innovative tech ideas to bolster US diplomacy and build a private sector constituency for the State Department in America’s vibrant tech startup ecosystems. All of this in due time. The immediate next step is for innovation stakeholders (like FedTech) to give feedback on the proposed scope of the work to be performed by the FFRDCs and on already-existing capabilities in these areas that the Department should consider. Exciting to see State make a long-term commitment to #innovation #technology #entrepreneurism #startups #diplomacy #natsec #leadership.

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Defense innovation community + acquisition network: Please take a look at this invaluable research survey on DoD acquisition that USSF Officer, Roman Tillman, is conducting with the goal of informing a set of best practices that can be codified in creating USSF acquisition doctrine. Driving innovation can be thankless, heavy work, but THIS is a tangible way to get your voices heard + support work that has the potential to inform the next generations of defense acquisition - informed by lessons learned, inspired by the warfighter, and committed to the mission. Endless thanks to you & your thought leadership, Roman Tillman. I'm beyond excited to see what you create -- I'm certain we need it. Tagging some wonderful humans/leaders/champions for defense innovation & acquisition within my network who come to mind (+ I admire!) that may have particular interest in this survey and/or know of others to tag/share with for increased DoD visibility: Kerry Kearschner Dolores Kuchina-Musina, Ph.D. Kim Crider Justin Fanelli Jason Rathje Bonnie Evangelista Gary Koch Angela Falcini Steven Geary Adam Rentschler David H. Reggie Wesley, MSSI, PMP Matt MacGregor Scott Bewley ken kato Nicolas M. Chaillan Robert McDonald Jr. Matthew Culp Brian DeLong Robert McDonough, MBA, PMP, LSSYB Jaska Cason Gabe Mounce Alonso Segura Kris Saling Greg Fox Albert Arnold Nick Cervantes Raj Sharma Elizabeth Reynolds Tate Westbrook Mark Bailey Daniel Carroll Clayton Duncan Candace Wright Gina Sims Travis Ledwith John Shultz Strategic Institute for Innovation in Government Contracting + SO MANY MORE!

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I hope you might read this short historical case study published at The National Interest of how President Eisenhower changed out his entire Joint Chiefs of Staff at the beginning of his administration to pursue a new National Military Strategy (The New Look) while cutting the Pentagon's budget and bureaucracy. The case study is derived from primary source documents reviewed at The National Archives, the Eisenhower Library, and the Wilson Papers at Anderson University, Anderson, IN. https://lnkd.in/ewPKdKC9

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Data is critical for a global connected U.S. Army, but as the service ingests data from disparate sources and battlefields all over the world, Army leaders want to ensure it is not inundated with data that it cannot use. “There’s too much damn data out there, and we can’t overload our warfighters and our leaders with too much data,” Army Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology Young Bang said at an AUSA Cyber & Information Advantage Hot Topic event earlier this month. Michael Diorio, senior vice president of global operations at Dataminer, added that data can be collected from sources as diverse as sensors, tweets, videos, photos, audio broadcasts or transponders. As billions of data points are ingested to one location, the totality of information can give a clear picture of a location or event. “It’s been talked about for years that data is the oil, but at the same time, there wasn’t necessarily the technology to really analyze all this data, look at causal inference and then correlations. And so what we do with our large language models and foundation models is really look at the strength of signal that is happening around an event,” Diorio said.

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