Bill Thompson

To the amount that we could, my job was to come up with solutions and conduct passive and active signals analysis on these things and then inform the commander so that we could mitigate risk.

It was all about mitigation of risk.

So this is 2008 or so.

I'd been doing this for about seven years, eight years.

And from there, it shifted to the phone's getting smart.

And essentially, it went from you walking around with a 2G phone or a 3G phone that had limited compute capability to now there's robust compute capability with the advent of like the iPhone.

And now it's like, well, now we've got to get after guys who are essentially walking around with a computer we could never have envisioned 20 years ago in their pocket with all this capability.

Because the military and our forces that we're fighting against, it all comes down to our ability to shoot, move, and communicate.

Communication being the part that I was focused on.

So as the advent of the iPhone and those things came out, the Army realized we didn't have a computer network operations MOS.

We didn't have an offensive cyber component.

We didn't have a defensive cyber component.

So we kind of – I was there at the ground floor when we were building out these new MOSs now that are all over the military.

But at that time, there was a thought going into, you know, we need to have people who know how to be on it.

Operators, ethical hacking is paradoxical as that sounds.

That's how the lawyers called it that.

So attacking at the end of the day, but ethical hacking because you've got the backing of the U.S.

government.

And so we set up that framework and really started launching into operations, you know, 2006, 7, 8, all the way into my last deployment in 2017 or 2017.

It was all focused on computer network operations and how they lash up with terrestrial networks.