Welcome. I am delighted to be here today with my colleague and friend Professor Javed Ali. Professor Ali is an associate professor of practice at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. Where he teaches courses on cybersecurity, national security, and counterterrorism. Professor Ali has had a host of really interesting jobs and leadership positions. He'll tell us more about that in a moment. But it does include very high-level positions in the US Defense Intelligence Agency, Department of Homeland Security, and also the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He has a JD degree from the University of Detroit. Again, a wealth of experience and knowledge and Javed. I'm so grateful that you're giving up some of your precious time to chat with me today about your experience working for the public sector in this important area, and especially talking about the role of data and data analytics in this work. Paula, great to be with you. I'm really happy to be here and look forward to our conversation today. Well to get started, just take a moment and tell us about all the cool things you've done over the course of your career. Well, I'll try to be brief and consolidate it. But as you mentioned, I had a number of different roles in my time in Washington DC. I spent 26 years in Washington. Which was a long stretch of time and of that 16 years in government. You've already described some of those departments and agencies. But across all those different positions which even included a year in the White House under the Trump administration, I was for the most part solely focused on counter-terrorism, but because of that diversity of all these different positions I managed to look at pretty much everything, analysis, operations, strategy, policy, resources. Unlike most of my colleagues who would generally spend most of their time in government service in a single organization, even if they had several different jobs, I did the complete opposite. I had six different jobs across 16 years of service and increasing levels of seniority, responsibility management. It was a really unique career, but now I am so thrilled and privilege and honor to be working with you here at my Alma mater, the University of Michigan. As I jokingly say to my students, I would have been voted least likely to ever be a professor. Takes me some time to get used to being called that. But again, I'm really glad to be here. Great. Thank you. Well, so far in our course, the learners and I have been talking about public goods, and national security is certainly a very important public good, but it's also huge. Could you just take a moment to unpack this big concept of national security? National security is an incredibly vast and complex space. Within that broad topic of national security, there are different issues and disciplines and they can be regional or functional. I spent my whole career in, at least on the government side and one functional issue, counter-terrorism. But counter-terrorism isn't the only national security priority for the United States. Even though I would argue that post 911 after the September 11th attacks here in the US, that counter terrorism became the dominant one. Going back and looking at history, perhaps that was a mistake. We were so focused on dealing with terrorist threats both at home and abroad that perhaps we lost our ability to understand this whole range of other national security priorities. Fast-forward to where we are now in 2022, I would argue that, yes, counter-terrorism is still important as a national security priority. But perhaps there are other equally important or more important ones. That involves great power competition and the Russia, Ukraine conflict is just a manifestation of that, cybersecurity, as you mentioned, I'm teaching a course here at Michigan on cybersecurity and that crosses all these different disciplines as well. Climate change has become such a huge issue for national security. Biden administration has recognized that probably unlike any other administration in the past 20 years, obviously public health and we are still in the midst of this COVID pandemic. I tried to be as optimistic as I can. I know you have a different perspective. But again, this is very much a national security issue as well. Look at what's happened to the economy too, and the impact it's having on how people live their lives every day. That is having an impact on our ability to conduct our affairs in the national security space too. I guess what I'm trying to say is there are a lot of different issues under this broad banner of national security. The glory days of my career and counter-terrorism being the dominant one, those days are gone. I think counterterrorism is now competing with a bunch of other topics. Great. As you know, a lot of the learners that we're speaking with right now are from a number of different countries. In your experience, what are some of the similarities, but also some of the differences across countries and nations in terms of thinking about and organizing government around all these important national security issues? There's no model of national security. There's no one. Size fits all approach. At least in my government career, I was lucky enough to travel across the world and meet with our foreign partners and understand, how were they approaching, even if it was counter-terrorism, again, is one issue within a broader framework of national security, or how are they set up from a national security perspective relative to us? What I found through all that travel when I traveled to almost three dozen countries in that stretch of time, so I was on the road a lot, is that there's no parallel to the US system because we're so big and we're so unique and we've got so many different departments and agencies involved in different aspects of national security. But that in and of itself is a major difference between how the US is organized and other countries, but at the same time, some of the common themes are strong approaches in defense, intelligence, and then again, how those different countries view the mission priorities in those two worlds. I think you have to look at each country differently. I would argue that the countries that seem closest to us, maybe not in scale, but in terms of focus are Britain, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. One way the US operates in that national security space on this common priority is something called the Five Eyes relationship, and that relationship goes back decades and decades and decades. These five countries, to include the US, we almost have an identical philosophical approach on national security because of this Five Eyes construct. But once you separate out from that Five Eyes approach, then it becomes much more individualized and tailored. Even strong partners to the US like Germany and France, we don't operate a national security under that same Five Eyes approach. We've been talking in this course about government bureaucracy and I think that is something that cuts across countries in government as a big bureaucracy. There are challenges to public administration and public policy because of the unwieldiness of most large government bureaucracies. Can you talk a little bit about, in your experience, what are some of the things that have been done in the area of national security to try to prevent against siloism, and on the positive side, increase collaboration and communication across all the different parts of the bureaucracy that are extensively working on the same issues? Again, this is an enduring feature of our US national security establishment, is this entrenched bureaucratic priorities and cultures. Again, whether it was good or bad, I was witness to it because I served in so many different departments and agencies. Each one of these six that I served in had its own organizational culture, its own language, its own bureaucratic processes. Was up to me to figure out how to navigate through those. Even in my own career, I had a lot of interesting experience seeing those challenges. But one of the things that US has tried really hard to do, at least in the counter-terrorism world, and that's the world I knew as much or more than anyone else, is break down those silos and break through the bureaucratic barriers that prevent information sharing and collaboration and integration. Because what we learned, pre 911, if you're not doing those things, something like 911 will happen. I teach a class on this, walking through the missteps and the missed opportunities and the organizational failures that got us to 911. In the aftermath of that terrible attack, something dramatic had to change. We couldn't just operate as status quo. One of the things that had to happen for US counter-terrorism was to come up with a new paradigm and a new set of structures. One of the things that happened as a result of that was something called the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in 2004. That was a recommendation by the 911 Commission. That organization, once it got up and running, was chartered with driving integration, collaboration, and information sharing through at least the intelligence community on counter-terrorism to prevent something like 911 from happening. Then, again, my career rode that wave to include serving in two different jobs in this new organization. I'd like to think, at least from the US side, that made us better in counter-terrorism, because of all those things we were trying to change after 911 didn't mean we were perfect and didn't mean we weren't going to get attacked again, we have been attacked in this country and we've been attacked overseas, but at least you don't have to fight the culture and at least you don't have to fight bureaucracy to get you to these n states. The adversaries and the enemies always get a vote. As bureaucracies move slowly to get to some new place, they can move faster, and that's what we saw in the counter-terrorism world.
