The Department of the Navy is putting the finishing touches on a new AI strategy. Officials say it's a direct response to lessons learned from recent conflicts and the increasing speed at which adversaries are able to adapt their tactics and technologies. The strategy has undergone two rounds of review, and it's expected to be signed soon by the Secretary of the Navy. As Federal News Network's Jared Serbu reports, officials say they're trying to build on the Navy's own operational experience and on best practices from industry. The strategy is built around six main goals, improving data readiness, accelerating AI operationally, strengthening data and AI infrastructure, streamlining data and AI governance, building a data and AI workforce, and partnering and collaborating with industry. Stuart Wagner, the Navy Department's chief AI and data officer, says the strategic approach comes as the Navy focuses on finding ways to translate the data it collects every day into real-world operational effects. My view is data and AI engineering is like SOF, special operations forces. We can't rapidly onboard engineers and infrastructure during an emergency, so we really need to invest into it now. And what we want to do is establish a method to rapidly produce effects with data, right? And the way in which I think about this actually is night after. So in the night after the start of a conflict, I would assert every commander faces a digital learning dilemma, a digital learning dilemma. How do you take the data from yesterday and use it to fight better tomorrow? And so we need to make the investments now to prepare for that. Wagner says there are five basic ways to create those operational effects out of Navy data. The first is you adapt the system or platform itself. You can think of that as a software update. The second is you adapt how you use the system. Those are tactics, techniques, and procedures that have been discussed as well. The third is you adapt strategy and operations with data, potentially automating or increasingly automating indicators and warnings in the way in which you take action against those. The fourth is you adapt exercises with data. And the last one is you can produce emergent capabilities with data. And the Navy's approach is premised on the idea that the data it's turning into operational effects needs to be recent and relevant and that the Navy and Marine Corps need to be able to innovate and adapt new technologies quickly. In some cases, that's where the adoption of AI and data best practices from industry are going to run headlong into the Defense Department's not-so-quick cybersecurity approval processes. But not always. Tomer Atsili, an IT specialist in the Navy CDAO's office, says it's not necessarily a bad thing that obtaining an authority to operate on DOD networks is a major hurdle. We are putting software on weapon systems and ships and things that it's very important that we get safe capabilities to. And so we actually want the ATO to be a difficult process, but we want to still be able to innovate before we necessarily get to that point. And so we need things like a permissive development environment where we can go fast with AI and with data before we hit the ATO boundary, before we're going on to real systems and real ships. And we need to test along the way. Atzili says the Navy also needs new ways to think about how things like model drift in AI models interacts with DOD's ATO process. Models need to be updated, right? So data drift happens when the world that the models are in is changing, which our world is constantly changing. And so the models don't perform as well after the world changes because they were trained on the world three months ago rather than now, right? So data drift happens to counter that we update our models. We need to think about how we still go fast when we're updating models. And we're not traditionally built to work with software that goes through major updates like that. And so I kind of challenge our community to figure out a way How do we go fast when we updating models Does that mean looking at how significant the model updates are and deciding when do we need to retest When do we need to re-ATO? Because there's a range, I think, where updating the model does not change it significantly enough to the point where we need to do some of our re-evaluations that slow things down. But there is a range that it passes that and we do need to re-evaluate the models. And in other cases, the department might choose to make AI tools available to the workforce, but with restrictions in place that obviate the need for things like full authorities to operate. That's the decision the Navy Department made two weeks ago when it made the decision to designate DOD's GenAI.mil portal as an enterprise service. Dr. Dan Corbin is the Chief Technical Advisor for the Marine Corps' Command Control Communications and Computers Division. If we want to succeed in this area, meaning the adoption of AI across, certainly across the DoD to do the things we need, we need a culture that will accept it. And that means generally they use it and start to understand it. But we also need to build the expertise. AI.mil, which is now available to everybody, which is good, gives them opportunity to at least use those large language models. But I suspect when most people logged on, if they don't sort of work in this space, they probably didn't even recognize that they're not allowed to put PII and those kind of things in there. So that's a risk that somebody determined was worth making. We've got to be able to make this available to folks, realizing that some people may not follow all the rules, not that they're malicious. But I suspect that there's probably opportunities for that type of information to be in those systems and then be exposed to others. Jared Serbu, Federal News Radio, part of the Federal News Network. You can find Jared's story at federalnewsnetwork.com. Sean O'Keefe, former Navy Secretary, NASA Administrator, and Senior Leader across multiple presidential administrations, reflects on the principles that shaped his long federal career. In this episode of Lessons in Leadership, he joins Shane Canfield, CEO of WEPA, to discuss motivating teams through uncertainty, leading across agencies, and staying rooted in mission during times of public scrutiny and change. Hello, and welcome to the Lessons in Leadership podcast. I'm your host, Shane Canfield, CEO of WEPA. Today, I'm honored to be joined by Sean O'Keefe, former NASA Administrator, former Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget, former Secretary of the Navy, former Comptroller and CFO of the Defense Department, and Professor Emeritus at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Public Affairs. Welcome. Welcome and thank you for joining. Well, thank you, Shane. Delighted to be with you. Appreciate it very much. What first drew you into public service, and when was it evident to you that leadership was an important part of the roles you played? Well, I grew up around the public service. My dad was a career naval officer. He was a submariner, and we lived all over the place throughout the country. And as a result, I got an up-close and personal understanding through him as well as through all the folks he associated with and the environments he was working in, just what the extraordinary value is of public service and why, what is it that would motivate people to want to be engaged in it and to be really involving themselves in what is something larger than themselves. And the only place that that is really formulated properly is within the public sector and the public service that, again, is the beneficiary or the beneficiaries are the citizens of the nation, the community, and the region in which you live. Did you think about leadership early on, saying, I need to be a great leader, and therefore I'm going to learn how to do it? Or did you just naturally evolve into it Any thoughts on that I guess it evolved by the great good fortune of being a witness to several really extraordinary leaders people who really did take the initiative to engage others in the task, to pull together and motivate folks to really contribute their very best to achieve an outcome. and I saw the value of that on multiple occasions and found that was the primary ingredient, the trait, the characteristic that needed to be exhibited is the fundamentals of leadership in moving everyone engaged towards a common objective. You have served under several presidents. Can you talk a little bit about that? Were there challenges to overcome or were you away from politics so you didn't get... Talk about that a little bit. How does it differ as you serve through a transition or does leadership stay the same? Oh, no, it's really critically important in transition cases, to be sure. But the two presidents that I served in their administrations were President George H.W. Bush and President George W. Bush in two different eras, obviously. But as a consequence, that was the closest I came to understanding the nature of the individuals who were in that leadership, ultimate leadership capacity, and their capability to motivate. Both of them were just extraordinarily inspiring people who motivated everybody to be part of the solution. But most importantly, they also had a capacity of really designating what something needed to be done. And you knew that they were perfectly prepared to do it themselves. And that made the task that much more achievable. There were several different circumstances in understanding what the objectives of the senior leadership are all about. You've worked for different kinds of organizations, political administrations, and then, you know, government departments, agencies, and then private sector, and now academia. how does that affect your leadership style? Or do you find that leadership, the core tenets of leadership, are applicable no matter what the organization you find yourself in and having to lead? It doesn't matter where you are, that the core leadership characteristics are the same? Are they different? Are you adapting? Well, there's a common myth in my judgment, and I'm probably the minority view of this in the academic field of public management. That common myth is that you can't apply the same principles in the public sector that you do in the private sector. I never found that to be an impediment. It was always a circumstance where strategy, the focus on the talent, people engaged, the process to going through decision making, the integrity imperative that must be there in order to demonstrate the absolute conviction of what's intended here, as well as the moral standing of what it is you're attempting to achieve, all those factors are very much the same. It's going to have its nuances, and there are very distinctive differentiators within those organizations and those sectors. But at the same time those basic principles those tenets foundations of what make up organizations and organization theory in so many ways are fundamentally the same And how you employ those may be slightly nuanced to match the condition, but they all are imperative in the same direction. A little bit of a different direction. You were part of the very first cohort of what is now Presidential Management Intern Program. became the presidential management fellows program what did that early experience teach you about leading within government the presidential management intern program as it started was designed for just that purpose a focus on public management a focus on implementation and its evolution over time has been extraordinary it mystifies me why that has been the subject now of an executive order that has dismantled it. And it's absolutely unconscionable given the nature of the hundreds, thousands of people who've moved through that program in the course of the last nearly 50 years that have gone on in some cases to be senior executives within the federal government, and in other cases, they've moved on to other kinds of pursuits. But even with that, even for those who have left the service, they walked away with an appreciation of what public service is all about, why it matters, and why this is so critical to get it right. Because by and large, the reason why these functions are delegated to the public sector is because no one else can do it. Usually that's the case. It takes that kind of focus of a public entity in order to achieve an outcome that frankly would not be achieved in other spheres. So as a result of that, it gave me an incredibly in-depth understanding of that process at a very early stage in my career that has lasted the entirety of that professional experience. A closing question. Who has influenced your leadership style? And what about their example stays with you? And that question can be cast broadly. So, you know, inside government, outside government, perhaps not government at all, somebody that you've met, reported to, been mentored by, a broad net. But when you think about broadly, when you think about who has influenced you, who comes to mind? I would have to say that the number one, hands down, greatest influence during the course of my life was my dad. He was an engineer, so everything was a calculated risk. I think I was probably 25 before I realized the answer was not to be found for everything in a slide rule, But that was his bent and his mindset. And he taught me how to think critically. And it really was one of the most extraordinary attributes. And he was an inspiring parent and mentor in so many ways. All the different things I've done throughout the course of his life, I had the opportunity through much of it to be able to consult with him on a variety of things and always walked away with a more informed perspective. Ed was an extraordinary public servant in his own right. Well, Sean, thank you very much for sharing your insights and experiences. It has been a pleasure talking. I'm delighted to be with you, Shane. Thank you so much for doing this. And this is Shane Canfield, CEO of WEPA, reminding you to empower your team and embrace challenges. Until the next time on Lessons in Leadership. Find the full podcast and future episodes of Lessons in Leadership on the Federal News Network app and anywhere you enjoy your podcasts.
