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Riki Ellison

Chairman & Founder at Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance and Youth Impact Program

USC SHIELD Innovates Security For Land, Earth and Beyond Maria Vittoria Borghi | May 9, 2024 USC SHIELD: Executive Program in Global Space and Deterrence has new tools to preserve peace everywhere and anywhere, together Deanna Ryals, the director of international affairs at the U.S. Space Force in Los Angeles, was ecstatic to be selected for the USC SHIELD Executive Program in Global Space and Deterrence. To her, it presented a unique opportunity to gain a fresh perspective on forging global partnerships for space access and defense. “I had heard about the program from my counterparts who had been in previous cohorts,” she said. “I knew how much they enjoyed it, how much they learned, and was really excited to be considered for it.” On April 27, Ryals and her 23 classmates, high-level professionals from the Department of Defense, U.S. Army, U.S. Space Force, U.S. Air Force, The National Guard, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon Technologies, concluded USC SHIELD program. This year’s session, jointly run by the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy, in collaboration with the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance (MDAA), took place between September 2023 and April 2024, culminating with a three-day residency between April 25 and 27 and group presentations at USC. The program’s hybrid curriculum on integrated policy and technology readiness for peace and stability equipped top-ranked defense experts from America and beyond with critical skills, especially with international conflicts surging around the world. “I think working with other students has been most beneficial because you see similar challenges in different organizations and realize that we’re struggling with the same things,” said Col. Minpo Shiue, the Warfighting Integration Office director at the Space Systems Command in Los Angeles. “It makes you want to work together to make a whole government solution on different issues.” In groups of four and five, the cohort came up with policy and technology solutions to deter war on land, sea or space. Topics included how to leverage assets of non-governmental organizations to ramp up capabilities in space, how to establish joint defense solutions in absence of treaties, and how to use Ukranian acoustic sensors that detect low-flying threats underwater. Importantly, the USC SHIELD program allows professionals to think outside the box to accelerate innovation. This is facilitated by the multidisciplinary background of the participants; USC’s strong academic resources; and access to a network of leaders provided by the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance (MDAA). For example, students could visit SpaceWERX, the innovation arm of the U.S. Space Force, on their first day in Los Angeles in April. USC SHIELD fosters “one of the rare environments where there’s trust to convey ideas and concepts for the military,” said Riki Ellison, founder and chairman of the MDAA and a Trojan https://lnkd.in/ezs6dWCU

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