High Impact Defense - a request for strategic takes

Introduction

A few years ago, John Fogle initiated an effort to support and coordinate people from a military background seeking career transitions with an impact focus - High Impact Defense (HI-DEF). The majority of this effort looked a bit like the career-advice services provided by 80000 Hours and others. There's a lot of context implicitly shared between military people, and I'm sure those involved appreciated John's time in trying to understand their specific circumstances. 

Owing to changes in his spare capacity, John has been unable to continue this project and graciously offered me the keys for HI-DEF. After some deliberation, I have accepted the offer, as I think I'm in a particularly good position to lead this effort:

• I have been around the EA community for a while.
• My transition to civilian life has led me to a job in the AI Security community. Military experience is precisely what enables me to add value to our team, so my advocacy on behalf of those with similar experience has credibility.
• Transferring to the Reserves, I will retain my rank and remain current in my professional niche. These come with significant networking benefits.
• I have the time and inclination to do a little work on this each week. 

There are several strategic directions I am considering for HI-DEF. The community's input on the relative merits of each would be greatly appreciated! Before I describe these, I will make transparent why I (and others) think the military talent pool is worth paying attention to. 

Military experience through the EA lens

This is a difficult thing to capture succinctly, since we are talking about a myriad of professions, hundreds of nations, and widely varying seniorities. Applying a blanket caveat that some benefits are specific to countries and professions, military experience fosters the following traits: 

• Leadership. The ability to inspire others, align them to a clear mission, and drive successful planning and execution. Several people have commented to me that (some parts of) the EA community lacks this.
• Comfort with uncertainty. Analysis paralysis would cripple a warfighting effort, even though its commanders permanently rely upon imperfect, ambiguous information. Equally, there are severe consequences for reckless decisions. I won't claim that people with these experiences make better decisions, but they do operate pragmatically in rapidly changing environments. Given the rate of technological progress many EAs anticipate, this is an essential attribute.
• Contact with reality. Though likely constrained by their professional domain, junior military personnel will form detailed mental models of how people and systems work at the coalface. Senior officers often start to circulate in government spaces. While this does not itself consitute evidence about the world, it can help to inform some lines of research and policy work.
• Sacrifice for a higher duty. While I found the military to be less patriotic than Hollywood had me believe, serving in the Armed Forces inherently requires a willingness to bear hardship for the benefit of society at large. EA is full of people who could get far higher salaries and explain more easily to their families what they do, were it not for their commitment to making the world better. This is almost a prerequisite for being a part of this community, and a lot of veterans will just "get it."
• Several other qualities that need less explanation: discipline, resilience, integrity, etc.

If your team distributes bed nets, a soldier accustomed to spending several months each year in hot countries could be a solid hire. Advocating to the C-suite of Big Chicken that they should uncage their hens? People who have led others into danger are a good bet for remaining clear and calm in tense conversations. Security expertise is abundant throughout the Defense sector and is of increasing relevance to AI Governance. 

#1 General advising

The most straightforward approach to restarting HI-DEF would be to offer an advising service. This could either be done "in-house", or I could partner with orgs who already provide this to help cater for military folks. There is an established model for how to do this, and connecting people to roles they have a comparative advantage for can be highly impactful. It seems likely that, in most cases, military people will be more receptive to EA-aligned career paths when discussing them with one of their own. I understand High Impact Athletes was founded on a similar premise. 

This might be a good approach for building initial momentum. However, my reservations about this as a long-term strategy are threefold:

• Open hiring rounds for many EA-coded and EA-adjacent jobs receive a dizzying number of applicants. The tasks military roles involve are often quite different to civilian ones. Hence, it is unlikely such a person will be the least risky hire. Connecting veterans to exciting job openings might be quite easy, but identifying opportunities for which they can clearly signal their strength as a candidate may be much harder.
• It's not clear to me that this is much more valuable than existing career advisors coming to me with specific questions or sanity-checking requests about military stuff.
• Proliferating career advice orgs might create inefficiencies. 

#2 Targeted advising/outreach

Strategy #1 focuses on the "supply" side of this talent pool. Other approaches could address "demand." 

I could collaborate with funders and teams in impact-focused spaces who plan to expand to understand which opportunities would most benefit from military talent. With that understanding, I could then leverage my network to help them find exciting candidates. 

Additionally, there are exceptional people leaving the military all the time. After a certain point (I think around OF5/OF6), continued promotion begins to detach from competence. Obviously, being good at your job is still vitally important, but reaching the highest echelons requires the right portfolio of past experience and fitting the social politics of the current top brass. Hence, it shouldn't be too hard to find people with 30 years of broad-scope management experience seeking a career transition. Some of them will want to quadruple their salary at JP Morgan. Others will take early retirement to play in the garden with their grandkids. Presumably, though, some could be sold on the idea of leading an ambitious project to make the world better. The kind of project that just won't get done without a leader who is excellent at driving a mission forward. Unlike #1, in which a key challenge would be selling the value of military people to EA, the strategy here is to sell the value of EA to military people.

Alas, this too has it's drawbacks:

• The military world is very hierarchical, and I am but a mere Lieutenant (OF2). I don't think a couple of ranks is a big deal for chatting to someone about their career planning, but reaching out to a Brigadier (OF6; ~25 years more senior) and saying "Good afternoon Ma'am, can I interest you in a job?" feels pretty weird. This is probably not a big deal in most cases, but it might feel like a social tact tightrope.
• I'm not sure how to find the senior officers who would be exciting candidates here. Perhaps I'd need to tour the Defense conference circuit and send a lot of meeting requests. This would be expensive in both time and money. Perhaps I could get funding for this if I demonstrate a clear value proposition, but I don't want to regularly cut days out of my working week. 

#3 Research x Military

Some parts of the policy and research communities would plausibly benefit greatly from access to military expertise. This might be if someone's research focus explicitly concerns conflict; my friend Liam Patell at GovAI is working at the intersection of AI development and the risk of war. Others may simply find military technology and operations to be a useful analogy in tackling predictions about future challenges which lack precedent.

I could establish HI-DEF as the intersection between research and military communities.  When researchers have questions that are difficult to answer otherwise, they could reach out to me, and I'd connect them to someone with relevant expertise.  This would take little effort on my part, and the counterfactual difference made to some research agendas could be large. 

Of course, there's never a free lunch with these strategies:

• It's obvious why this would be valuable to the researchers, but I'm not sure how to make this worthwhile for the military people. I'd like to think that being "friendly forces" for the UK military will go a long way, but ultimately, I would be cashing in credit with these people. Neither the researchers nor I can meaningfully solve their problems. Perhaps this needs to be combined with a pitch that I could help connect them with high-impact civilian careers down the line, as described in #2. Alternatively, I could include a request for soft commitments to help out with research stuff in the advising strategies discussed above. If they found my career advice helpful, I expect most people would be happy to give their time in return.
• In some fields, much of the expertise that could be helpful to researchers is classified. Furthermore, there are limitations in what people from one country are allowed to say to people from another. I have no intention whatsoever to solicit classified information (outside the proper functions of my Reserve role), but the risk of inadvertently spooking someone and getting placed on a watchlist by some counterintelligence cell seems uncomfortable. I think these requests could only be made to people with whom I have an established rapport, which does limit scope. 

#4 Community engagement

Easier than all of the above, I could simply try to foster a feeling of community among those who overlap EA and Defense. This would provide a softer landing for new joiners, while helping existing members support one another. Not only is the barrier to restarting this lower, but it is closer to my skill set than voracious networking.

I think a newsletter could add value in a few ways for a manageable effort on my part. These emails would collate: the most relevant job openings, ideas for impact-focused projects that would de-risk military hires, news events as seen through the EA x Defense lens, opinion pieces from inside and outside this group to spark discussion, celebrations of recent successes from this community, etc. Hopefully, people could easily forward this to their friends and hook their interest.

The only downside I see is that I'd be competing for attention with the rest of the Internet. There's probably no harm in trying it out, although there may be an opportunity cost in not using this time on other strategies. 

Networking

Needless to say, I would happily connect with any serving or former members of the Defense community. Additionally, I would be particularly interested in finding a co-director to help lead HI-DEF. I think it would significantly increase the impact scope of this project if such a person were American, and ideally still holding at least a reservist position. Admittedly, the number of such people who consider themself part of EA is likely very small. 

Concluding remarks

Hopefully, I have been clear in sharing my perspective on this project. I'm excited to meet others interested in this space and find a shared path to impact! Other strategies that I have not yet considered would also be very welcome.

As an officer of His Majesty, neither love nor money could have persuaded me to spell Defence with an s. I do so here for the mitigation of x-risk alone.