HSDF THE PODCAST

Enhanced Situational Awareness for Improved Mission Outcomes Part 1

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Welcome to “HSDF THE PODCAST,” a collection of policy discussions on government technology and homeland security brought to you by the Homeland Security and Defense Forum

 If awareness is power, precision is freedom. We dig into the real gap between knowing what’s happening right now and understanding what’s coming over the hill—from interdictions at sea to cargo screening, counter-narcotics, and port security. With a seasoned Coast Guard perspective and hard-won insights from DHS veterans, we explore how to turn scattered sensor feeds and siloed databases into decisions that buy operators time and reduce risk.

 Featuring:

 This discussion took place December 12, 2025 at 8th Annual Homeland Security & Defense Forum Border Security Symposium

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SPEAKER_02

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen.

Defining Situational Vs Domain Awareness

Breaking Down Domains And Cyber

Coast Guard Perspective On Awareness

SPEAKER_03

Good afternoon, everybody, and thank you for joining us today. We are the last panel before happy hour, so I will do my best to drag this out as long as possible. I want to just uh pause for a moment, and you heard the introductions of the panel that I'm sitting here with, and I could not be more proud to be sitting next to not only some uh esteemed colleagues and and uh leaders in their industry and their their um organizations, but every single one of them I've worked with at uh you know over the last 30 years. And um, you're not just colleagues, you're all my friends. And I appreciate the opportunity to be um brought back here to to have this discussion and uh to do it with a group of my friends that I uh trust and respect very much. So um thank you. Thank you. The admiral I worked um uh at JT or JTF West for a short period of time and out there in the Pacific Northwest, and Pat Flynn um worked with him down and started in Gallas, Arizona, 20 um almost three decades ago, and yeah, and Ryan um in and out over the last few years. So it's it's been a great uh great opportunity to be here. So um I want to start out with a couple of things. And I recently retired uh in May, and now having the opportunity to see these discussions through the lenses of a retired Govy, um, or I'm sorry, seeing that through the lenses of now industry, how that translation occurs. And and I'm doing my best to try to help bridge that Govy talk into uh industry understanding because it it there's a lot of things that get lost. And as a former speaker on the on the stage, I stopped and questioned myself did did I do enough when I was a Govy to express what the requirements are to the people that are out in the audience that are or you know, out in industry that are here to help. So hopefully we can get a little bit of that today. And today's um uh topic is situational awareness, and I want to unpack that a little bit because so much of what we heard today um is is founded on situational awareness, the solutions that help resolve uh that complication of not knowing what's out there, and I would often refer to it as shining a light in all the dark places of our environment. Um, and that is um, you know, figuratively speaking, of course, but how do we know what's out there? And then how do we open the aperture of that light to see more? So just kind of want to share a little bit of that. And um I think like most I wrote notes, but I probably won't use them. Um there's there's a couple of of things that I I would like to draw a distinction between and make sure that we're all speaking the same understanding of what situational awareness is and what domain awareness is, because often they're they're kind of interchanged, um, but I want to make sure that that we all understand and as we're we're sharing our thoughts with you and how you um can perceive what we're sharing or what they're sharing with you. Now, situational awareness is more of a present awareness, present um what is happening right now, what is happening around me right now. Um, domain awareness is a little bit more of a what's or what's over the hill from a strategic um planning and situational awareness will eventually evolve into domain awareness, but there's there's timing differences in it. For example, somebody brought up the TAC devices earlier. That is a what is happening right now that's occurring at this moment that I can see on my on my TAC device. Um, the strategic part of that is how do I plan for the next time that event happens? That's domain awareness. Domain awareness happens on air, land, and sea. And so I I want to talk a little bit more, one more level before I open it up and start asking the questions. So there are domains within domain awareness. The first is surface level. That's land, surface, and sea surface. The second is subsurface, and each one of these are unique in themselves. The second is subsurface. You have subterranean and you have submarine. Each one of these has complexities and technology and intelligence that requires specific attention to each one of these. Third is airspace, anything that's flying over us, around us, or by us. And then fourth, which is often not as tied into what domain awareness or situational awareness is, but it's uh it's cyber, it's it's um data and and sensors. So we need to know everything from money services business, what it what transactions are occurring. That's a domain awareness. That is a situational awareness and how we can counter that. Um signals. How we we talked about we talked about counter drone. How do we mitigate some of these signals that are being omitted for technology that's being used against us? Because we know darn well that the adversary is evaluating every single one of our operational steps so they can overcome and beat us at it. And we need to do that. Um, so let's get started with the questions. Um so talking about what situational awareness is and what domain awareness is, um, Admiral, I'd I'd like to know from you first um how that relates to your um to Coast Guard's um daily operations and and how those two things matter.

From Busts To A Digital Coast Guard

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, no, thank you, David. Uh, and I'll start out by addressing what's probably didn't come at the end. I care for neither Army nor Navy. So my my cheer is for sale, just saying, right? You're business people, that's what I'm saying. Um so in my career, I've had the tremendous opportunity uh to command at sea, right? To be a captain of a ship. Um, and in in those years, at those times, executing those operations, uh what was most important to me was situational awareness, right? What can I see here? What can I detect on radar? Uh, and how do I address the threats or the life-saving operations that I'm engaged in in a way that's most effective for the nation and safest for my crew? That's what situational awareness is for us, right? How do we use the sensors that are with the operator to achieve the outcome that you expect from your Coast Guard? Uh I've also had the tremendous opportunity in my most recent command to be the director at Joint Interagency Task Force South, um, where I was responsible for detection and monitoring of all narcotics movements in a 42 million square nautical mile joint operating area, working with five of the six armed services, 22 other um partner nations and allies, and 14 interagency partners. That business is all about domain awareness. So, how do we sense, make sense, and provide operational commanders with decision dominance so we can deny the adversary freedom of movement? That is what what I mean when I talk about domain awareness. And uh I'm in the Coast Guard. We have not always done this well. When uh when I was at Ensign me on my first ship, somewhere if I'm paid enough, I'll show it to you. There's a picture of me sitting on a big pile of cocaine, which was dumb, you shouldn't do that. But that's what you did when you interdicted cocaine, because it was like the holy grail of operations. Folks would send you to a box somewhere and you'd float around getting the snot kicked out of you in what was invariably beam two C's. And if you stumbled across them and they probably had broken down, well, you could scoop yourself up uh a narcotics bust. And that um was the best we could do at the time. I I think that was sort of Coast Guard Operations 1.0. Uh, we have come a really, really long way in that time. Uh we are transforming into a digital Coast Guard. In fact, just last month uh we we issued our digital transformation strategy as part of our force as part of our force design 28 uh plan. I I know we're gonna talk about future plans, and I'm excited to talk about that with all of you because you are just a key component of our success as a Coast Guard and the safety and security and prosperity that that we get to deliver to this nation. Long answer to your short question.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, no, that's perfect. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01

And Ryan, same for you. Did I hear you say decision dominance?

SPEAKER_00

I did. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

I love that. That's the word of the day.

SPEAKER_00

I'm subtle, Ryan. I'm subtle.

Knowledge Supremacy And Ontology

SPEAKER_01

I was thinking in terms of knowledge supremacy that you need underpinning that decision dominance because you know, we say border security is national security, and to us that means knowing and controlling all the things and people that come into the country. And to do that, you have to define and understand what things in a domain do you care about. I don't really bother anymore trying to define domain awareness or situational awareness. It's macro and micro. What do I care about in my world? And then what do I need to know locally to act on something I care about? And that's represented in our data. But you start with the mission in any given area. I mean, I can give you an example. Imagine this story. A boar patrol uh boar star unit that's our search and rescue, rescues a guy that fell off a cliff near Rio Gran Valley. They take him by boat to a landing, they got air support above. Um, afterward, they uh run his biometrics and he hits as prior offenses as a smuggler, they fill out a field intelligence report. And if you were following along in that sentence, we traverse three physical domains at least air, maritime, and land. And if you were tracking uh for any DHS folks, I mean we went through seven of the 13 DHS data domains. And domain is used for all kinds of things because it's useful for people, but if you're gonna try to make sense of the world and then want to leverage tools like we've been talking about AI, you have to be very precise in what you're modeling. And I kind of take more of a philosophical approach now as an agent, where what is happening in the world that people are perceiving or creating data about related to the mission and the outcomes we want to get, how do you actually capture and model that as data? And so that's where I spend a lot of my time and work in is I'm gonna say what used to be a dirty word, but I'm gonna tell you now, I'm gonna I'm gonna predict it's gonna be one of the buzzwords of FY26. Maybe you might hear it during the Army Navy game, but ontology is how you do that. I became an accidental ontologist because I had to help understand how we model the world and what agents or pilots and officers think about the world in a machine readable and computable way that in totality gives us uh the ability to answer questions and make decisions about the threat. And how that actually works is really like this. I said you have the mission, you don't define domain awareness, define context. I care about the context of the air, water, sea with these things happening. Then the next step is you define your conditions. When this behavior happens, I want to know about it and get that information to the pilots, agents, officers, decision makers, uh, or into another AI model. You can use that to create AI ready data that supports your decisions, ultimately tied to the outcomes you want to achieve. So that's what I work through in my head. Um, and I guess I didn't give a definition of ontology. Classic ontology is how people think about the nature of the universe. Applied ontology is the set of rules and language, how you model data in a graph format, map to your data uh and your systems that you can then make computable and machine readable. But the key is lowercase ontology, I'm talking about capital ontology. Lowercase ontology is loosely coupled rules that you can use to solve problems. Web ontology language, the backbone of the internet, allows loose coupling of web pages that you know we know the internet can be uh accurate or not. Formal ontology, if you're gonna use this, has to be underpinned by formal computable logic. If you hear in the next 2026, I know the last panelist said AI and cloud were buzzwords of 2025. Ontology, semantics, you're gonna hear buzzwords of 2026. And if people come around saying the O-word, you wanna understand if it's capital O ontology underpinned by formal computable logic or lowercase O. And lowercase O is fine, you can use it to solve the mission, but you won't be interoperable across um other agencies if you're not using formal logic. Uh so that's my kind of weird spiel about that.

Making Data Usable For Operators

SPEAKER_00

No, I love it. If if I may add, um, I don't know anything uh about your capital or lowercase O word, but it's intuitive to me as an O-word as an operator, right? Like all the data that you can collect is not worthwhile unless you can process, evaluate, disseminate, and visualize it in a way that is usable for the operator, right? Like time is not the ally, time is the enemy. So as much as we can do together, industry and government, to detect and sense make, and again, give that, give that commander the time um to outmaneuver the adversary, like that's what that's what we all want. That's what we want together.

Industry’s Role And Clear Requirements

SPEAKER_03

Thank you. Thank you very much. And we will have a translation of this into English in the back of the room when this is over. Um that was great. Um, all right, so Pat, this this question is for you. Um, having spent time as an agent as well and now serve in this in in industry, how can uh from your perspective, how can industry better support DHS and its mission? And what do you think they need to know from you or from from DHS officials and leaders um and in accomplishing that? So it's translating those requirements to to just to everybody. Um, and then I was having a conversation with Chief, sorry, I'm gonna interrupt myself for a second, commercial break, uh, Chief Aguilar. Um, and uh it was based off of a uh a meeting that um I or one of these type of situations that I had watched, and it was my first time after after retiring. If I am a government leader and I'm sitting in front of a group of people and I tell everybody I'm hungry, and um that's my requirement, and everybody runs out and fixes a meal and does something to resolve that hunger, and everybody comes back and they bring hamburgers and they bring steak and they they bring lobster, and then I turn around and say, I wanted Italian food. Why don't I just say I want Italian food? And and part of that is teaching the leaders of government to be more specific about what our requirements are. So again, sorry for interrupting myself, me. Oh, that's um, but uh Pat, so that's kind of the that's kind of the idea. So um if if there's more that needs to be heard, I think it would be important to share that with leadership. And then what what does industry need in return, if that makes sense?

Accelerating Tech And RD To Field

SPEAKER_02

Sure, sure. Um, and thank you for the invitation, uh Megan, and having me up here. Um and I want to thank uh David B. Miller, Chief B. Miller. Uh, I did work with him. We were young and we had we didn't have gray hair, but uh we we certainly ate some of the same dust. But thank you for your service. You know, you you put almost three decades of of time in and uh blood, sweat, and tears in those midnight phone calls. So thank you for doing that. Um, from an industry perspective, and and granted I was a Border Patrol agent, but I also served in the intelligence community with the U.S. Navy and in the reserves. And during that time I saw a lot of different things. You know, you talk about ontology and situational awareness and surface intel picture, um, air picture, uh, and and ground picture, and there's a lot of elements to that. Um at the at the basis of all that, and who built that was industry. And and and through those decades of experience and those programs, those very complimented programs, and and and there's some doozies out there, we learned a lot. And one of the things that CBP has been doing over the last probably two decades, um, some of the problems are still there, but some of the problems are far more uh advanced. Um, and I gotta take my hats off to Sonny and Jay and Bobo and all those guys. They really have brought uh a modern way of thinking to the field and what uh the folks at PMOD do. But one of the things that we do and what we're constantly have an insatiable appetite for is learning about what's next. Uh, what we spend an inordinate amount of time doing at GDIT and the others too is we we create the ability to accelerate the technology, uh, but we need that accurate picture. So your requirements mentioned is absolutely critical to that. But through that that that interface, we we can help accelerate and bring those things to fruition. We can we can accentuate the RD process, you know, that Sunil's uh trying to do, what the Border Patrol is trying to bring to fruition. Um, say, and I'll use quantum sensing of fentanyl for an example. How do we bring that to an actionable conclusion? Well, we have accelerators, we uh, you know, it can be AI, it can be software development, it could be comps, but we can accelerate that far more quickly. And then also, you know, from a strategic perspective, you know, from a legislative perspective, from a program perspective, we uh we we have a defined, well-thought-out interest on how we how we can help bring those resources to the operators. Thank you.

Multidomain Threats And Context Engineering

SPEAKER_03

All right, this one's a little bit longer. Um, and uh I'll I'll probably ask the the three of you um to respond to this one. So given the U.S. Coast Guard and CBP's in uh evolving operational demands from border surveillance to cargo screening, narcotics, uh, counter narcotics operations, and national security, what specific capabilities or uh innovations do you believe industry should prioritize to enhance awareness systems? And then how can private sector partners better align With the US Coast Guard and CBP's domain awareness strategies to ensure uh long-term mission uh success. So, Ryan, you want to start us off?

SPEAKER_01

Thinking across domains, multidomain operations, and then thinking about what that means from an industry and government partnership. Uh, we're at the point now where threats don't care about domains, they'll traverse our domains and not uh think one bit about defining it. We have now a need for call it multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary technology that takes into account multiple skills that combined are going to be need to collect, model, make sense of, transmit, or fuse data across domains, across agencies, across lexicons and cultures to create a knowledge base that is actionable to provide knowledge supremacy for operators, analysts, decision makers to use. So I don't want more data to analyze, I want more decisions to make, better decisions, and faster. So that's gonna take no one company is going to have the answer. You're seeing it now, I think, uh, that companies are partnering, bringing together multiple competitive advantages across disciplines. You need machine learning, I'm telling you, you need machine reasoning. That's the ontology approach. You need um, you know, of course, your cloud network and compute services as well. But really, it all starts with having what I'm another new buzzword you're gonna hear in 2026, context engineering. You have to be able to translate what we care about tied to our mission, based on the outcomes we want and the questions we want to make that we want to answer, tied to the data that we collect, how those answers are plucked out of the data, which is going to be across multiple missions and systems, the answers are there, and then get it to us so we can do something with it.

Coast Guard Force Design And Scoreboard

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, and no, I I I would add from a Coast Guard perspective, one, an acknowledgement that we have not, as a service, always operated at our own speed of need. Um, so one of the things that we are doing as part of our Force Design 28 um effort is reimagining our acquisition and procurement programs so that we can work with industry to rapidly develop, test, and deploy uh the technology that our field operators need, right? Our job is to deliver outcomes. And those operational outcomes are really in three distinct areas, right? Like our job is to control, secure, and defend the maritime border. Our job is to facilitate maritime commerce, which yields somewhere in the neighborhood of$5.4 trillion of revenue as part of our GDT GDP and 20 million jobs. Um and our and our job is to prepare for and respond in crisis so that your Coast Guard can be at their very best at our nation's very worst days. That's it. But everything that you all together provide to us as a government is important. And we are getting ourselves in the business of rapidly developing requirements and uh assessing what's available in the market and delivering those things to our customers. Our if I'm sitting at Coast Guard headquarters and our customers are the operators. Um I and I also, you know, I mentioned our digital transformation strategy. We really are focused sort of, right? Like there's the data you need for the operating environment, um, but we really are focused on understanding our our own readiness, right? Like there's just, as an operator, there's dynamic tension between what you employ and what you degrade. Um, you can't really generate readiness while you're employing forces. Uh, that's that's the way the Coast Guard operates. We operate uh all-time, real time. We do not uh we do not have a garrison force. So when we choose to employ forces, that means we're degrading readiness. But we do not have a one-stop shop. The concept is something we're calling a scoreboard so that we can understand what the threats are. Things like um the readiness of our ports alongside uh any natural disasters that are impending or have passed, along with any uh any illicit trafficking threats through our borders. That in the same space as we're generating information and visualizing that information for commanders on the readiness of our personnel. Um, what's their fatigue levels like? I've listened I can tell you, and I'm sure everyone on the stage can tell you, the number of times they've been awake for days uh that they just can't remember. Um but we just don't have a way to measure that and display it to commanders so they can make better choices about how to employ forces and how to ask for help, the readiness of our assets and the integration with our partners. Those are all things that we are working right now to understand, develop requirements, and get them out to you so that you can get back to us with solutions.

SPEAKER_03

Thank you. Um, and you know, I uh I appreciate that. And get in um Pat, I want to get to you on the same question next. But um so.