I'm Joanna Guy, lead associate in Booz Allen's global defense sector focused on accelerated readiness. And this is Master the Mission with Wes Haga. Wes is Booz Allen's senior leader for C6ISR in the Pacific. Prior to joining Booz Allen, Wes had a combined service career of 35 years in the Air Force and intelligence community. Wes served as a chief of mission applications and infrastructure at Air Force Research Laboratory and then as the chief scientist of data and infrastructure at the Defense Intelligence Agency. Wes, thank you for joining me. In your role with the Air Force A2, you were involved with the development of the first Tactical Assault Kit. What is the Tactical Assault Kit (or TAK) and what was that experience like? So the Tactical Assault Kit it is basically a small Android device that has been reloaded with a bunch of DOD software that provides near real-time or real-time situational awareness to war fighters in disconnected and connected operations. They're getting their feeds, they're getting their information from the TAK or the ATAK, and the ATAK means it's an Android Tactical Assault Kit with an Android operating system. My role with the A2 was actually at the 497th Intel Group, and that's where we actually provided the requirements to the Air Force Research Lab up in Rome, New York, to where that they could actually turn those operational mission requirements into actual capabilities that could then be fielded. The Army actually took those fielded capabilities from the Air Force Research Lab and turned that into a program of record, and it is common space throughout our warfighting community today. How is the attack still relevant on the battlefield today and what is Booz Allen's role now in furthering the development of that technology? Well, the relevance continues to become greater and greater, as our need to understand what's going on around us becomes more and more in a highly complex and congested environment, so we, our soldiers, now have the ability to get more and more feeds with greater and greater fidelity, accuracy, and timeliness to be able to make decisions. Booz Allen? We just acquired Par. Par was the original creators of the TAK from the Air Force Research Lab. That was the contractor underneath the Air Force Research Lab. We acquired Par Government, and that whole team has actually joined our digital battlespace team and our aerospace team up in Rome, New York. So it's extremely exciting. Why is Booz Allen uniquely positioned to deliver acceleration of these technologies and to improve C6ISR and networking systems? I think what makes us unique is the way that we organize Booz Allen and the way that inside of our DNA in Booz Allen is to be able to go find the problem and solve it. For example, in a live fly operation that we just did in upstate New York, we kind of got after a problem in Booz Allen called Fusion and we wanted to reduce the timeline to do process exploitation, dissemination of an intelligence product from 24 hours down to less than 5 minutes. So we got after that problem, and we actually got with a teammate, we got an airborne asset with a bunch of collectors on it. We created a mothership environment. We put some automatic target recognition algorithms that were pre-positioned to the battlefield that we thought we understood. Then when the battlefield changed, we were able to sense those changes through the mothership. Process those on a high-performance computer airborne, send that to a ground computer, retrain the algorithms, and put them back up in flight to be able to identify the changes in the battlefield. And then we were able to take a full motion video and a frame, a full motion video, and then an ELINT or a COMMINT hit, which is a form of an ellipse, and burn that ellipse right onto that frame and then submit that, transmit that into the existing comms infrastructure in INDOPACOM. We transmitted that to an ATAK to where now when you're collecting information in theater, you have to get it back to the national agencies. And that's doctrine. It's a beautiful thing. We did that in three weeks, and we proved that it was not under 5 minutes, it was under one minute that we can do the collection, do the fusion, do the dissemination. And I was actually down in SOFWeek when this happened, and we had another team in upstate New York, and I was actually watching the live fly from the console and seeing the fused intel on the screen down in SOFWeek in Florida. So it's pretty cool. That's incredible. Wes, thank you so much for sharing that. What was the time to decision before you implemented that solution and how much greater than 24 hours to actually do PED? And that's what our people are telling us today that are sitting with the clients and understanding the pain points that they have, and they need this information quicker. So we brought that to under a minute. Wow, that's incredibly impressive. And for DOD clients who want this technology implemented today, what is your advice to those leaders to get this into rapid development and out on the battlefield? But there are ways that the U.S. government has the ability to acquire these very rapid solutions at a low volume to be able to put them to work quickly. So organizations like your special operations community that have the desire to work these high-impact, low-volume type environments, I think they work with the research lab today. Why is it so important to have this technology implemented rapidly in today's landscape in the Pacific? It comes back to time. How do we make that time window go for our time window from decision, from understanding what's happening to a decision that a leader needs to make to counteract what's happening, or move something so they can get a better look at what's happening? Thank you so much, Wes. I appreciate your time today. Booz Allen is at the intersection of mission technology, and your team is in the heart of the mission. It's inspiring to hear about your work and I look forward to seeing what you do next.