Captain Brad Geary
speaker
303 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Captain Brad Geary’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Yeah. Well, I mean, you could just say Gen Z run, you know, because they are the science and tech. These guys, I mean, they grew up on cell phones. They understand coding. They understand man-machine pairing. in ways that we can't understand from our generations. I didn't get my first smartphone until mid-30s, early 30s maybe.
And so they are automatically looking at problems through a different lens than we'll ever get to. On top of that, while we did some great things in the war on terror and we evolved as a warfighting entity, I think that a lot of that is built scar tissue and is irrelevant in the fight to come. And so we're holding on to that.
Is my generation a little bit like, no, no, we were successful because we did it this way. Well, that's irrelevant. And Gen Z sees that it's irrelevant. And in a sense, we're almost slowing them down as a military. Our acquisition process in general is too slow. It's a five, we talked about this, it's a five-year cycle.
And that's if you have a requirement written to get something into the cycle and funded in order to get it in the warfighter's hands. And what we're hearing from the front lines of Ukraine is that they're on a 30-day cycle of evolution right now, where they come up with a new tactic, monster garage, 3D print, whatever, implement, and within 30 days, the enemy can counter it.
And so now you're having to evolve to a new tactic, a new technique, a new procedure, a new piece of equipment that helps you exploit now what they're doing differently. And so it's this constant 30-day loop, but we're supposed to catch up with that with a five-year cycle right now to fund our troops with the next piece of gear?
Let me think here. I think you were talking about drones. Yeah, I mean, there's a bunch of examples. So I was going through my files, and then I'm wondering, what can I say, what can I not? But drones is a great example. Just last weekend, we were at a hotel with some people, And we had an E6 and then a contractor who's helping them out.
And they literally brought like a 3D printer and all this stuff. And they're like 3D printing parts of a drone, soldering wires together and making this like mobile backpack with a drone, with some glasses that serve as an FPV, first person point of view, with an overlay. So it's almost like what,
Lucky was talking about with you a few episodes ago, but the Monster Garage version, low tech for sure. But so you could see through the glasses normally, but you'd have the overlay image of what the drone was doing. And they were like, just in their off time, came up with this. Are you shitting me? No, I'm just serious.
I think so. Like, we could do this. I mean, like, harness that kind of energy. Cut it off the leash. You know what I mean? Like, hey, dudes, here's your left and rights. Let's give you funding, authorities, and equipment to just experiment and have fun with this stuff. Yeah.
boom run let's see what we come back with compete by teams see what rises to the top buy some off-the-shelf stuff monster garage it we should just be giving these like limitless authorities and autonomy direction run this way you can't cross these thresholds legally whatever but but right now um
I mean, they're doing it on their own because they're hungry and they see that there's a need, but we're not evolving fast enough as a military to, I think, scratch their itch as Gen Z. And that's a problem because like we've talked about, they're not going to sit around forever and wait for us to do what needs to be done.
They're going to leave because I can go make money somewhere else doing this. Or if this isn't going to, if you're not as innovative as I hoped you were when I got here, I'm going to walk away. You only have so much shelf life before they're going to get impatient and walk away.
I did a couple of years in the acquisition world. There's so many, there's a few laws mandated by Congress. Now you do this thing. So that's, that's part of it. Those you can't bend, but then there's tons of these policies that have happened over time, which have created these procedures, which are just behemoths to get through.
And so I think what we need to do is, and I know I've read Secretary Hegseth is talking about overhauling the acquisition process within DoD. So I think we're going to get there. That's what I keep telling these young guys, like, hang on, dude. It's like, I think all the right change is coming, but
That whole system needs to be overhauled, just like we've talked about with other things here, with the legal, the administrative, to give those kinds of guys the autonomy to actually innovate and show us what, give us the solutions that we don't even know we need yet. And I think they're ready and they're hungry for that. We just have to empower them and get out of their way. Use, guys like me,
Well, I'm on the way out, but guys are still in like me. Let me use my authority and my top cover to support you, provide you a pot of money, you know, a finite amount of money, but this is your money and here's your authorities to do whatever you want and figure out how this could work.
I guarantee you they're going to come back with solution upon solution upon solution that have boggled our minds for 20, 30 years. I know for a fact they will, because I saw that when I was the CEO of SDV Team 1. I can't go into too many details, but we had a couple undersea problems that had stumped our community for 30 years. 30 years.
I walked in the room, young platoon, lieutenant and a chief running the show, young Gen Zers. Yo, dudes, here's the problem. Whiteboard. Here's a case of beer. See if you can solve this problem. Solved it. No shit. Stuff that had stumped us for 20, 30 years. They're like, oh, what if we do this? Oh, no one's ever thought of that. How come no one's ever thought of that? I don't know.
Because we're old? Because we're stuck in our ways? We're like, holy cow. They literally changed the paradigm. in our undersea ability, one platoon by trying something, having an idea and then trying it that nobody else had tried. And then they're like, well, what about this other problem that we have? That stumped people for a long time as well. Can you solve that? Another case of beer.
Solve that. These guys were delivering incredible results in rapid success that in a normal cycle, you're talking about, well, we submit this problem, this need, commander statement of needs or concerns or something.
Showing 201–220 of 303 · page 11 of 16
← Previous
Next →