Episode 111 Transcription

Welcome to episode 111 of Behind the Mission, a show that sparks conversations with PsychArmor trusted partners and educational experts. My name is Duane France, and each week I'll be having conversations with podcast guests that will equip you with tools and resources to effectively engage with and support military service members, Veterans, and their families. You can find the show on all the podcast players or by going to www.psycharmor.org/podcast.

Thanks again for joining us and Behind The Mission; our work and mission are supported by generous partnerships and sponsors who also believe that education changes lives. Our sponsor this week is Comcast. Comcast creates incredible technology and entertainment that connects millions of people to the moments and experiences that matter most. You can find out more about how they support the military affiliated population by going to corporate.comcast.com/impact/military.

On today's episode, I'm featuring a conversation with Dan Kunze, Vice Chairman of Taskforce Movement and Taskforce Cyber. Dan currently works in support of the Department of Defense involving enterprise software and digital transformation enterprise modernization. His prior experience includes working with Fortune 500 organizations across industries, enabling them to drive and deliver outcomes in enterprise technology. He currently serves as an Officer in the United States Army Reserves, where his work is focused on workforce and talent management innovation.

One brief point that I'd like to make, the audio on Dan's side is a bit wonky on this episode. It sometimes happens when we're having great conversations with real people, with real lives. I've done my best to clean it up a bit, but don't let the audio cause you to shut the episode down. I truly believe that you're gonna get a lot out of this episode. I know I did. So you can find out more about Dan by checking out his bio on our show notes. So let's get into my conversation with him and come back afterward to talk about some of the key points.

duane--_29_02-20-2023_070055-1: Dan, great to be able to connect with you and, glad to be able to have you on the show to continue our conversation in this series talking about taskforce movement and taskforce cyber. Before we get into that work though, I'd like to provide you an opportunity to talk a little bit about your background, maybe from your military service to what you're doing now and why this work with taskforce movement, task force cyber is so important to you.

Dan kunze: Yeah. thank you Duane. I really appreciate that.  I have a 13 year career, in the United States Army between guard reserves and active duty. And in parallel, because I got to do that work in guards and reserves for most of the time I've had a corporate career focused in enterprise technology.

So I've worked for some of the largest brands in the world, Gartner, VMware, Pivotal, and all ServiceNow. And so in those organizations I've gotten to see the difference between the military and how that organization works. Then how private sector for-profit industry works as well. And I've gotten to see the need and the demand for about talent that the private sector has and then the talent that the military has, and sometimes how they do not connect with one another.

And Taskforce Movement is this beautiful organization that we've created outta the Biden Harris administration to link private sector needs and private sector jobs with military talent, military veteran talent and spouse, military veterans, who need jobs as. And so why does this matter and why is this so important?

At the very highest level, we have a talent and a workforce shortage. And some of our most critical areas. And those most critical areas are supply chain, logistics, and as we've seen by the COVID 19 pandemic, but also, cyber and technology. We have to believe and we have to know that we have to grow our talent within the United States of America cause some of the threats that we face from national security perspective are nations outside of it. But there's also that we have cultivating our own talent. And what better place to start the military and Veterans and spouses.

duane--_29_02-20-2023_070055-1: You know, I think that idea, and you talk about your varied experience on the military side, both active duty and then guard reserve. As we were talking briefly before this, the idea of transition for active duty service members is consecutive, one after the other I serve, and then I go into whatever logistics or cybersecurity.

But really it's simultaneous with the garden and reserve because you are, if you're not deployed or activated,you are doing your military job and then the next week or what have you, you're doing your civilian job. and that's something that's almost like you have a foot in both.

Dan kunze audio repair: Yeah, I would contend that the model by which we use our military for certain jobs, like data, cyber technology, work that we know that we need to do for the Department of Defense, is well served by thinking about flexible employment models and, and, job models for garden and reservists, that they can transition in and out of active duty service as needs and demands arise.

So I have a true passion for both industry and the way that we create an economy that works, but also the way that we protect our country, the work that we do there. And the old model of a single mode employment where you worked with the same employer for 20 years never leave that employer and you grow up with that organization.

I think that's going away. Full pension is going away in lieu of blended retirement. So people are gonna have incentives to be able to leave service at times, come back in at times using their Garden and Reserve status to be able to do that.

So Duane, you asked a little bit different question. When you think about it generally as a linear career path where you do your military service one way and then you leave, you retire, and then you go to a different career path if you're so lucky. What I think is probably the way that we're gonna tackle some of these problems, especially it's hard to find and growing needs is a more flexible employment model. Leveraging guard, reserve and active duty as three different components across the entire force. That allows us to bring talent into organizations that they have to be in, organizations to solve whatever specific need or mission that is. Then come back out of that service and go back to your private sector job that really integrates the industry. It integrates the soldier and it integrates the Department of Defense in a way that actually supports, achieving the mission. So I think that's probably more what we're gonna see. I hope to see over time.

duane--_29_02-20-2023_070055-1: When I think, and especially with things like cybersecurity, like it's changing so fast and you have to be so responsive to what's going on. What a cyber reservists or Guardsmen may learn in their civilian sector. They can apply in their military training, but then also in their military civilian sector. Whereas if you're just learning civilian stuff while you're on active duty, those are two separate things. By the time you get out, maybe obsolete.

Dan kunze audio repair: Yeah, I, so I was one of the, one of the first groups within the Army that was able to submit a 17 series packet. And so 17 series packet is what cyber is. So I got my designation as a 17 x-ray. 17 x-ray meant that I still had to go through my military professional military education, my pme.

My PME was gonna take me down to Fort Gordon for about a year, a little over a year to fulfill the Army's requirement for what they said that I needed to be a qualified cyber X-ray. In my civilian job, I worked with qualified cyber experts every single. And I worked with STS of the organizations chief information Officers of organizations talking about security postures, talking about the demands and needs for cyber and talking about these things every day of my life.

And so the dichotomy between the military saying that I had to spend a little over a year, learning a domain to get the credential by the military that I already possessed on the civilian side, didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. So I decided to not pursue the 17th series route because that would've taken me away from my family and away from my life and away from the things that I do.

And actually just decided to pursue what my passion was, which was talent management. How do we figure out, how do we use people and how do we use a workforce better to achieve the goals that we wanna achieve? To your point, the whole notion that you need to be in a singular track to possess the skills, experience requirements. The things that you need don't just exist within the military, so we need to start to be able to call on people that have exceptional civilian talent and skills that they've learned outside of the Department of Defense. Bring them the bare when appropriate, and be able to move us forward at things, especially important in places like cyber and technology.

The pace of change there is so fast. And then obviously we've also seen news recently about the layoffs that have happened in large technology companies. What better place for them to reuse their skills and talents than saying, Hey, you know what? I just got laid off by so-and-so company. I have these skills to bear.

Let me put back my uniform on. Let me go served by country for a couple more years. Let's bring those experiences there and then come back. I don't think there's any, I don't think there's any, anything wrong with using organizations that you believe in and you're passionate about for where your career is and where you need to be in a more flexible way that makes sense.

duane--_29_02-20-2023_070055-1: Yeah. No, I always said that at 22 years in the Army, for me, it really was a gig economy, right? We changed jobs every two or three years. You don't have one particular job only, it was all within the same corporation, so to speak. Now you're talking a lot about cyber and technology and stuff like that.

And we're talking here about task force movement, and it's been interesting to me as I've been digging into this, is really, it seems to be sort of two different buckets. And I'll set this up in, in saying that transportation maybe specifically. and I'll maybe push the point a little bit. It's a little bit low tech, right? It's left foot, right foot steering wheels in the middle, like it's transportation as people generally consider it is truck drivers, right? and I know it's more than that, but then you also have this task force cyber but really I'm getting a sense that it's much more integrated than people think.

Dan kunze audio repair: Yes. So you're gonna, you're starting, that's one of my favorite topic areas to talk about. So if you believe, like I believe that the largest barrier to entry is the original barrier to entry into whatever organization you're talking about, then you'll start to see it like, like I see that we need to help people transition from one organization that we care about, which is the Army or the Navy or whatever, air Force, space Force with whatever DOD organization we wanna talk about into that next transition point, which is their civilian career. So our job is to help people overcome the original hurdle from how do we get from one place to the next place. That hurdle is the single greatest hurdle for people to understand how to get into organizations. That is, regardless of industry, it's regardless of skill level, it's regardless of anything.

So how do we take an organization here, and had to be, create a bridge between places? So it's the first point of task force. Isn't to care about the industry or the domain or even the employment, necessarily a specific employment. What it really is, is to help people get from one place to the other place and act as a bridge between organizations.

So that should be, regardless of industry, should be regardless of skillset, it should be regardless of anything that's, it's the primary point of task force movement. Secondarily, now we start to think about what does career fulfillment look like? what skills, what expertise, what work do you wanna do?

From the time that you transitioned in the next place? Or what skills do you have to be trained on? So we've been very fortunate to have funding partners that have helped us put together programs, and those programs help, individuals in one specific instance, we had Afghan refugees, that were acting as interpreters or work with the Department of Defense that all live here.

We've matched them to a program to get them a CDL credential through some of our community partners, which are the Montgomery County and Bucks County Community College, specifically Pennsylvania. And now we've got them credentialed and now we've got them jobs in the trucking industry. I'm really pleased to kinda announce and also work through, we're doing a very similar model with Villanova University and different funding partner to create cyber jobs and cyber credentials for those work as well.

So what I'm saying is the first thing we need to do, Is create a bridge to get people from one place to other place. The second thing that we need to do is help them train and learn how to do the job that they're being asked to do. And so you mentioned this as Hey, most people perceive trucking as a low tech industry, and the people as truck drivers and those truck drivers are, uh, a certain sort of work. I found that to be very different from the reality of what I've experienced. I probably had that same perception when I started doing this about a year ago. I didn't realize the skill, competency and the ability to grow that you have as a truck driver, as if you just start there, right? So I think about an 88 mike, I think about some, one of the guys that was driving me around or driving our organization around and those folks, had to do, pmcs on their vehicle.

They had to know how to get from one place to the other place, which is skill in itself. They had to understand the world around them, and then they had to be able to deliver the thing that they had to deliver, where they needed to deliver it. Trucking is indifferent. There's so many different flavors of what that looks like.

There are, folks that have to haul hazardous material that have one sort of thing. There's a different folks that have to, do last mile work. There are other folks that do over the road trucking. There's just a lot of different, lanes. Pun intended in the trucking industry about what path you can go down.

But what I thought was most interesting was at core of the trucking companies is technology that supports how they do logistics, how they do routing, how they do, hauling, what they haul, when they haul it. There's a technology infrastructure that supports a lot of these things. So when we think about cyber as separate from trucking, what we're really saying is that we're all integrated in an economy that's extremely complicated and needs work.

So they aren't different. There's an ability to grow within each of the organizations. Our most important part is to create a bridge between organizations. Once we do that, we said you help them credential. And then the third part is you need a talent and a labor pool that can, you can help grow your organization.

So that's where the people, part of it comes into play. But that's up to the organizations we're working with. How do we cultivate and grow our own people within the organizations we support?

duane--_29_02-20-2023_070055-1: No, I appreciate that. And I was being a bit disingenuous because I was an 88 mike for 22 years in the military, and as a senior NCO I realized, that it was more than just the delivery, right? That it was the communication and really thinking about the civilian logistics industry.

It is about the people who are doing the delivery stuff, but also their infrastructure. And this was, I think the light bulb moment that you just helped me have, was that their infrastructure, their digital and technological infrastructure is vulnerable to disruption. And so the disruption in our logistic system is not just a lack of workers. It's also disruption in their technology, and that's where cybersecurity comes in to secure the technology that is used in our logistics infrastructure.

Dan kunze audio repair: I think that's very well said, I think that's very well said. I agree with you. And I would also say, and continue to say that we try to make these things simple. We try to make these things sound simple, black and white. You either a truck driver or you're not, or you're a cyber specialist or you're not, cultivated talent, well-rounded talent that has global experience like you generally get in the military do very well when they've gone through the transition and they, the very difficult hurdle of taking their military experience and applying that to their industry. And so why I'm saying that is we live in a pretty complicated world. There's a lot of nuance that we need to work through.

There's a lot of credentialing that we need to do work through. I've worked for big companies and those big companies have 15, 20,000 people I've served in the military with 1.4 million people. It's very different and very difficult to go across the whole company and see one consistent culture across the entire organization.

Every unit has their own particularities. Every unit has their own culture. Every region has their own specific culture, language, way of doing business. A lot of different things have to happen. And what we need are people that understand how to get the job done wherever that job has to get done at.

And so that continues to be the point. Military folks, because of our backgrounds and because of the people that we meet, the very first day we're in basic training, have to work with people up and down the socioeconomics categories, across diverse places and they have to understand how to get something done.

And that, that skill, the how do I get something done? How do I get show up to work on time? How do I do the work that's transferrable across any organization in any industry. It's just a matter of where specifically do you apply your time and talent and your energy to. That's a long me military folks, spouses, veterans, whether you're active guard or reserve, and you're still in service and how are you doing are valuable assets.

Because of the things that they learned in their service and our job at taskforce movement and our job as industry is to help bridge the gap between their service to industry and whatever that looks.

duane--_29_02-20-2023_070055-1: No, and I appreciate that distinction too. Cause as you were talking, I'm thinking when I left the 82nd Airborne Division and I was stationed in Germany to very different cultures in the units. And my wife, as a military spouse leaving Fort Bragg and that culture there to obviously adapting to a different culture in Germany. Aot only are we transferrable, like in space, in jobs. But also we have the ability to adapt to different cultures. And I think that's the other piece of what taskforce movement. We talked a little bit about the importance of plugging service members, veterans, and their families into the industry. But also, as you had mentioned before, there's the how do we get the talent that's there, the veterans and their spouses, and help leverage them and bridge them into those different areas.

Dan kunze audio repair: That's right. I'm gonna make a funny anecdote in my life. So my, I have a little brother, through Big Brothers Big Sisters. it's a it's an organization that I believe in a lot. So I was a big brother mentor about 15 years ago to a little brother in the Philadelphia area. My little brother, he's never come a lot, a lot more than I wanna talk about here, but, he graduated from high school in Philadelphia.

He was living in his car at the time he graduated from High School. Just there's a lot goes into it, but that's where started. he graduates from high school. He goes onto a trade school. Finish his trade school and he decides to join the army much to my joy. He goes to Fort Benning. He, puts, puts on his blue ribbon, becomes an infantry, goes to Fort Stewart does couple, does his first contractor, Fort Stewart. And he says, Hey, he calls me pops. Hey pop. I'm gonna go over to Germany right now. I got a rotation over there. I get to go too. That sounds awesome. So he goes over to Germany and he marries a woman there.

And then he just has a kid recently. So I say that cuz there's this kid that grew up in Philadelphia who grew up,in a difficult home environment. Home life joins the military, gets to live all across the world now gets to live in different places and I'm just excited that when he decides to depart from the military, cause we all leave at some point in time, he had the experience of the experience and the brotherhood and the fraternity of having in the military and the cultural experience of having lived in Georgia and in Germany, and then traveling to the Czech Republic, the, all the things that he's done now.

I'm a little jealous. It's really impressive, that he's been able to do that. Duane,  my point in saying that story about my personal story is we've got 1.4 million people that serve in the Army. We've got another 750,000 serving there. Navy got a couple hundred, 500,000 serve in the Air Force.

We've got 5 million people, give or take, that are across our Department of Defense. Those 5 million people just come with exceptional stories and exceptional backgrounds. And our job continues to be, Hey, it's really nice to talk about hiring Veterans. It's really cute to put that on your company's website and say, we're pro Veteran. We're pro-military. We're pro of those things. Nothing is better than helping somebody transition into a new job and the trades and characteristics that we've built from our military service. Using my little brother as an example, in what world does a kid like that get to go live in Germany? And you got to shake hands with some ambassador a couple weeks ago. And what world does that happen other than the United States of America and in our Department of Defense where you can go from one place to the next place and our job is to help them transition to the next job after that.

duane--_29_02-20-2023_070055-1: And I think that's a, that it's a, as you mentioned,suburban kid from St. Louis, I've been to more countries than I've been to states, right? It’s really the story of the military and then being able to adapt that in our veterans and their spouses to really come back home and support the country and the work we're doing.

Dan, this has been great. I'd love to be able to hear if people wanna find out more about taskforce movement, taskforce cyber, maybe get connected. How can they do that?

Dan kunze audio repair: Yeah, there's a worldwide web out there. We've got a website. It's called www.taskforcemovement.org. We've spent quite a bit of time there, so you can reach out to that website. You can reach out to me on LinkedIn, uh, Dan Kunze. There's no shortage of ways. Get a hold of us probably starts with website. We've got a whole group of great people that are working with us right now to. Make sure that when you do reach out to us, that your time and your talent are. And languish on the sideline someplace.

duane--_29_02-20-2023_070055-1: No, that's great. I'll make sure that all those links are included in the show notes. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Dan kunze audio repair: Thank you, Duane. This has been great.

Once again, we would like to thank this week's sponsor Comcast. Comcast creates incredible technology and entertainment that connects millions of people to the moments and experiences that matter most. You can find out more about how they support the military-affiliated population by going to corporate.comcast.com/impact/. 

Again, I appreciate you sticking with the episode through the bit of odd audio on Dan's side.  My conversation with Dan, which is the third in the series, highlighting the work of taskforce movement after episode 1 0 5 with former Congressman Patrick J.Murphy and episode 1 0 9 with Liz Bellcaster me look at this initiative in an even deeper and rich way. I had a couple of aha moments during this conversation, which you heard me reference during the episode. 

Task force movement was initially about how to address two different problems, the difficulty that some have in transitioning from a military career to a post-military career and the challenges that our country is having in the supply chain and transportation industry, that then evolved into a third challenge.The same difficulties we're seeing in our cybersecurity workforce, and eventually will lead to other industries like healthcare.

 But one thing that Dan helped me understand is the task force movement is not entirely about helping veterans find jobs in these particular industries. 

It's about helping service members, veterans, and their families move from wherever they are in their military career to any industry that they want to explore.It's not the movement of goods and materials, it's movement as in the progression of career. It's sort of like one of those negative space optical illusions where you think you're staring at a picture of two people talking and then realize that you're looking at a goblet. Once you make that shift in thinking that it's not only about helping veterans find jobs in the transportation or cybersecurity industry, it's about helping people move from one industry, the military, to any other industry they want to explore. That's when all sorts of possibilities come into play.

The industry may change, the person may change, but the infrastructure to help them move from one to the other is replicable and adaptable, and that's what makes this concept exciting. 

The other aha moment that I had was how the seemingly different goals of supporting the transportation and supply industry and supporting the cybersecurity industry are actually integrated. Listen, I referenced it in the episode. I spent 22 years in transportation and logistics in the military. I don't mention it often because when I do people make certain assumptions,  Let me put it this way. When I joined the Army back in the early nineties and I told my recruiter that I had chosen a job as an 88 mike or motor transport operator. He literally said to me, wow, we all thought you were smarter than that. There is a belief that truck drivers or workers in the transportation industry are somewhat simple, uneducated, and have to settle for lesser jobs. Just ask a Marine what they think about motor T Marines. I've heard a lot of stories, but having served in the career field and had options to change jobs several times while I was in the military. But I didn't, I know how complex, dynamic, and overall critical the job is. 

The largest logistical movement in Europe since World War II was when the first Infantry Division replaced the First Armor Division in Bosnia in 1996. Two entire division's worth of people and equipment was swapped out in a manner of months. My battalion was a key part of that.During the height of the surge in Iraq, I and my team were responsible for transitioning seven battalions out of Baghdad and seven different battalions into Baghdad simultaneously. Our small, one mile square camp Rustam looked like the Port of Baltimore was shipping containers stacked four high and six deep. In Afghanistan, if it weren't for units like mine, securing the routes for food, water, materials, and fuel, our far flung forward operating bases and combat outposts would've been cut off in a manner of weeks, if not days.

So you're not gonna hear any arguments from me about the importance of the transportation and supply chain industry. I've lived it and know exactly how important it is. Even with my experience, however, I didn't make the intuitive leap from how taskforce movement went from supporting the transportation industry to taskforce cyber until this conversation with Dan and I think back to all of the technology that we used to track those divisions, those brigades, to communicate along those routes in Afghanistan, from radio frequency identification devices, R F I D tags to the good old Blue Force Tracker, satellite phones, radio communications, the technology infrastructure of the supply chain is as vulnerable to disruption as the workforce infrastructure, 

They're not two separate things. They're integrated, and as you consider, the concept of taskforce movement is not limited to these two industries. then you see how the cybersecurity infrastructure of other industries are vulnerable to disruption, banking and finance, oil and gas, healthcare, education, entertainment. So taskforce, cyber can now serve as a hub, a workforce that can be adaptable to any industry and serve as a viable post-military or even concurrent military option for those who served and their families. 

So I hope you appreciated this conversation with Dan as much as I did. If you did, we'd appreciate hearing from you. So if you do have some feedback, let us know. Drop a review on your podcast Player a Choice, or send us an email at info@psycharmor.org. We're always glad to hear from listeners both feedback on the show and suggestions for future guests. 

For this week's PsychArmor resource of the week, I'd like to re-share the other two episodes this series, our conversation with former Pennsylvania Congressman and the 32nd under Secretary of the Army, Patrick J. Murphy on episode 1 0 5 and our conversation with the Senior Advisor of Communications and Public Relations for Taskforce Movement Liz Bellcaster on episode 1 0 9. All three of these episodes provides a comprehensive introduction to the efforts of taskforce movement and taskforce Cyber, and will be linked in the show notes.