Sea Control - Sea Control 343 - 10 Years of CIMSEC with Sally DeBoer, Daniel Stefanus, and Dmitry Filipoff

Episode Date: May 8, 2022

The celebration of CIMSEC's 10-year anniversary continues! Former presidents Sally DeBoer, Daniel Stefanus, and Director of Online Content Dmitry Filipoff join the podcast to celebrate the organization and reflect on their respective tenures.

Hey folks, it's Jared. We are continuing our ongoing celebration of SimSec's 10-year anniversary. Today I'm joined by former presidents Daniel Stephanus and Sally DeBoer, as well as our director of online content, Dmitry Filippov. We are still looking for additional audio editors, and we're happy to provide you some very basic training materials and instruction in a low-stress environment. So if you're interested in finding a way to contribute to SimSec, add to your resume and your personal skill set, please send us an email with your resume to ccontrol at simsec.org.

Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec Podcast Network, The Bilge Pumps. You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of iron brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. On that note, I'll turn it over to Kimber's men. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. This is the second to last in our series of podcasts celebrating 10 years of SimSec. So my guests today are two former presidents, Sally DeBoer, who served from 2016 to 2017, and Daniel Stephanas, president from 2018 to 2019.

Daniel, you're going to have to correct me if I got the pronunciation wrong there. Yeah, it's Stephanas. Stephanas, thank you. Sorry, we practice and practice. But as well as our director of online content joins us today, Dimitri Filippov. So welcome to everyone. Sally, we're going to start with you. Could you introduce yourself to the audience, please? Hello, my name is Sally DeBoer. I'm a former naval officer, current mother of two insane but lovely children. You may know me better as the spouse of Michael DeBoer, who's recently published on SimSec.

Well, more recently than I have. And we live in the D.C. area. Thanks, Sally. And Daniel, would you mind telling us a little bit about your background? Yeah, so I was a surface warfare officer for six years. I was on amphibs the whole time. And then I was the Pentagon working as a strategist for the chief of naval personnel for two years. And that's when I was the president of CIMSEC. And then now I'm finishing up my MBA here at Harvard Business School. Great. And Dimitri, could you tell us a little bit about yourself? sure yeah i'm uh i've been the director of online content for simsec for a number of years now um also work at the foreign service journal a professional publication for uh u.s foreign service um and currently just wrapping up my first semester here at georgetown security studies program here in the dc area well thank you all and as a reminder all opinions are our own and

not representative of any institutions with which we might be otherwise associated so sally i'm to come back to you. How did you originally get involved with CIMSEC and what made you want to be a part of this organization? So when I was just getting out of the Navy was when I started to be aware of CIMSEC and it was actually at Matt Hippel's introduction. I was working on my master's degree and became interested in sort of publishing and writing and organically got involved through there. And what made me want to be a part of it was I feel that the space was so needed for this discussion to happen among the junior officers and other folks interested in the naval profession. It's kind of like proceedings for the modern generation. So I found that

exciting and that made me want to help. Well, there's being involved and then there's being the presence. So what made you actually decide like, no, not only do I want to be a part of this organization, but I want to actually steward it through a two-year period and lead it? Well, I could give you a canned answer or I could tell you the truth and I'm going to tell you the truth. And that's that Matt Hipple encouraged me to do it. And I doubted that I had the bona fides to do so, but it was a wonderful experience. And I found the whole process to be rewarding. Thanks. We'll talk a little bit more in detail about your presidency in a little bit. But Daniel, how about you? How did you initially get involved with Sunset?

yeah so my my memory is that uh I'm not sure how I discovered that you can be an associate editor assistant editor uh I think I was just reading SimSec and saw that and I like writing a lot uh and so that's kind of how I got into it I think that's how uh Dimitri and I first met um was me editing pieces and so then I like stayed involved with SimSec for I don't know three or four years through that um and then when andrew poolin was stepping down as uh as president he reached out to me and we had a long talk and i uh thought just kind of like sally i thought it would be a cool opportunity and and so uh jumped at the chance and you know i was president for a year and had a great time thanks um i think a common thread here and you know dimitri when i

ask you this question you can back me up is that there's a serendipitous nature to the way that people come to be involved in the organization but Dimitri you know same question for you is you have been kind of a constant in the organization almost for the entire 10 years but probably the longest tenured member of the staff if you will so how did you initially get started and then how is your position within SimSec evolved over time? Yeah so I got involved around early 2015. And I had just been in D.C. for maybe half a year. I was still kind of getting established, you know, going from internship to internship, sort of building my background, building my expertise. I was just starting to get more interested in naval affairs, maritime affairs.

And I just wanted to volunteer as an associate editor. So I stepped into that role early 2015. And then a couple months later, the great Matt Hipple himself was moving on to, I believe the presidency of SIMSEC at that time. And so the director of online content position opened up and I sort of, you know, decided, Hey, I'll put my, my hat in the ring for that. Um, and I, I, uh, I got into that position and I didn't really realize or have a full appreciation from SIMSEC until I was kind of in the driver's seat of that position and kind of seeing the correspondence and all the drafts that are people sending in and seeing what it meant to the folks, the authors, especially. Um, and so, yeah, I, I stuck with it. It'll be probably

seven years in june um and yeah but the position has evolved a lot um in terms of you know i've taken on the thing of the of the flotilla which is sort of our new naval professional society um where we uh hold like uh multiple off-the-record talks each month on naval force development topics um and other things and so on but the core thing is the editorial work of the director of online content position i think that associate editor job is probably the way that most people initially enter the organization. So could you explain a little bit for anybody listening, what exactly does a SimSec associate editor do? What are sort of the roles and responsibilities and what they're asked to do? Because if there are people out there

listening to this right now who want to get involved with the organization, that's probably their best starting point, besides just being a contributor. Yeah, the editors are really the backbone of the operation here, and everyone's a volunteer. Typically, they have some sort of national security publishing background. Usually many of them are active duty or former naval officers, folks that have some background in these issues. And I mean, their main job is to work with the authors and provide them with a really solid experience in terms of taking a draft from front to back to getting it ready for publication. And, you know, we kind of pride ourselves on things like having a quick turnaround and having a good editorial experience for folks. That's kind of

edge i would say over over some other publications there and um and also being able to to have like very substantive kind of interactions you know we're not just copy editing we're not just doing you know dotting the the eyes and crossing the t's here you know to make it a meaningful experience for both the the volunteer editors and the authors um you know i try to pair folks up with with the authors that kind of match the the interests of the editors um and so there's a there's that element to it as well um but the bottom line is that the editors are are basically the folks that keep the website running, as everyone knows. Thanks. Daniel, what were some of the highlights of your presidency? Yeah, so I think that one of the big highlights, you know, it's kind of like

going across these things we're talking about here is opening access, like Sally talked about, this is kind of like a, to me, a little bit more of a democratic proceedings. And so I think one of the big things we focused on was trying to get even more international authors, and really trying to get more commercial people into the space like it's awesome obviously to hear from a bunch of naval officers but but really being thoughtful about getting industry involved and a part of the conversation i think is extremely important especially if it's industry and overseas because that's just such a a different perspective um so i would say that those were kind of the two big things jimmy did a lot with that uh you know can't can't uh not mention jimmy he did a ton of work

um and i think that the other kind of big thing is i think back on this time and even just again this discussion of the associate editor position is just allowing really junior people in the military and in industry to have a forum to you know voice things to get some initial titles to get some experience um i think that that's what simsic is at its best is it's kind of this great entry point for a lot of people who want to get in on the conversation so the barrier entry is quite low and so making sure that we have contests and things that allow for people to feel like their opinions are welcome, I think was another big part of it. Do you feel like you left anything on the table during your presidency, just limited

by either technology at that point or time? And then what have you enjoyed about the site's development since you departed the presidency? Yeah, so I think one of the hardest things is taking a volunteer organization that doesn't have a lot of hard resources and then trying to make things a little bit more tangible. So we had talked about a lot of engagement with industry, and it was just hard with everyone's, you know, schedules and time and we weren't in the same places. And so I think kind of, you know, the, my ultimate vision for SimSec would be something like a little bit more of like a budget and ability to have a space, you know, just like the USNI, you know, now has their conference center that they're building out at the Naval Academy, like that kind of a thing. I think that that's what I would be most excited about in the future. So we, you know, try to lay some of the foundational work for that, but it was quite difficult. And then let's see, the site since then, I mean, I would say, I think that really, it's just the persistence of the site, you know, the fact that, you know, it's crazy. when I started as an associate editor back in like 2015, it was a few years old. It was kind of this,

you know, other forum. And I think since then, you know, it's become really robust and it's become pretty established. And then also, you know, Jeremy with the Flotilla program, I think has also been a really cool development in those talks. And I'm sad that my schedule here at school has made it kind of hard to get as involved in those as I would like. But now that I'm basically done. I'm really excited to go to some of the future meetings. Sally, what were you most proud of during your time as president? During my time as president, kind of to echo a little bit of what Daniel said, is I was proud of the caliber of author, speaker, thinker that we were able to give a platform to. For a specific instance, we did an interview with Steve Wells on NC, or excuse

me, on LCS that was pretty good. And then we had Captain Jim Fennell on. So we're able to really have kind of interesting substantive discussions that didn't have a space otherwise. So that's certainly the thing that I'm the most proud of. And then what are your thoughts as you watch the organization grow and develop after your presidency? Well, you've touched on this already, but I would be remiss if I didn't offer Dimitri my sincere congratulations. You should be rightfully proud because you've truly been the backbone of this organization and made it so professional so just congrats to him and from everyone from the associate editors to the other presidents have worked very hard and i tip my hat to them but um it's been exciting to see simsec grow you know

we've seen articles published on simsec in the chinfo clips so to be able to tangibly see these conversations being had at higher levels like people are reading this this is getting heard at the decision maker level and i think that's really exciting no that's a good point i mean one of the highlights of my time with simsec has been being in the room at west it was west 2020 right before the pandemic started and hearing the commandant of the marine corps reference a simsec article that had been written by walker mills so is being read as being a reference by it wasn't uh common opera it was a commandant of the coast guard but it was one of the uh one of the assembled four stars there brought it up and come casual conversation up on the dais with i

think it was former depth sector work up there but dimitri um back to you before i ask you sort of this final list of questions i have for you as a georgetown student are you just pulling maritime security into every writing project that you have now and just bombarding your professors and fellow students with it well my uh my one of my final exams that i have to do in the next few weeks uh one of the options is to write an essay about the falklands war which i might be doing so there's an option there but uh but i have been trying to use my georgetown education to try to diversify a little bit about you know the things that i i know because i know so little about you know the land warfare and air domains and so on and so it's a little bit of a broadening experience

for me um but it is cool to you know on the first day of of class we're all doing our introductions. And two of my professors right off the bat kind of acknowledged that they knew what SimSec was about, and they followed our stuff. So that was cool. No, that's great. And yeah, whichever professor that is doesn't realize the can of worms he's opened up by just offering you the thoughts on this topic. And it's like, well, let me reference these conversations with Commodore Michael Clapp, the amphibious task force commander on it. But you've been able to pursue a lot of different projects recently. And I've had to see some of those behind the scenes here, you were sort of the driving force behind the Flotilla, which you

mentioned here, our organization to vote tactics, and our Naval Wargaming Discord. So have changes in technology changed what we're able to offer members and how those changes affected kind of your ambitions for the site in the future? Yeah, so SimSec has always been particularly made possible by technology, because we are not a physical organization with a physical office, everyone who volunteers is doing it remotely. So I felt like this has always kind of been in our dna um but it was especially driven home during the pandemic that we really needed these kinds of uh platforms and assets to to bring people together um and so yeah the flotilla uh you know it's it came about in this time where everyone's doing zoom everyone's doing google

meets um and so it was a pretty natural kind of thing to put together in this time where people can come together from wherever they're posted um and just kind of have these conversations and it's kind of hard to imagine it being as successful as it has been uh you know in the pre-pandemic era where folks may have had a preference for like physical chapters and so on as we we have done in SimSec in the past and the discord is another thing I didn't really know much about discord but I saw the potential there doing to have like a like a naval wargaming component for the community something a little bit more hands-on or folks can you know not just prognosticate about tactics and stuff but maybe we can actually try some stuff out

and so that's just another platform that we've added to the community for folks to engage on and I'm sure there'll be other platforms that will give us cool new ways to kind of connect and have these conversations so that's that's just something that we always have to keep an eye out for for SimSec. Yeah you've all kind of referenced the fact the organization has no real physical component and talked about some of the budgetary limitations it's always funny to me when people suggest that SimSec should quote-unquote sponsor something them and then I have to explain to them is like now SimSec is basically like the is the metaphorical manifestation of like the three raccoons in the trench coat it's like it looks looks like a very powerful organization with like

all the volunteers that you have working very hard behind the scenes but there is very little infrastructure uh that is actually supporting is being done by uh sheer will and uh all three of you have contributed to that unfortunately I think that's all the time that we have or I think that's all that we have time for today. I'd like to thank my guests, Dimitri, Daniel, and Sally. Dimitri, where can we find you online and what are you working on next? Sure. You can find me on SimSec. You can reach me at content.simsec.org. If you've got ideas, drafts, or just want to talk about these issues, you can reach me there. In terms of what I'm working on next, I'm going to be taking a good look at how to evolve the flotilla over the next few months and see if we can do some

more activities and ways to engage those members um so nothing nothing promised just yet but i'll be taking a good hard look at how we can continue to evolve uh that organization daniel where can we find you and what does your future look like post harvard uh so i will be traveling around for the next six months um hopefully i'll be writing a lot more soon getting back into the naval writing stuff. So you can't really find me anywhere besides LinkedIn, I guess. But yeah, so I'll be starting at Boston Consulting Group in New York in January. And until then, I'll just be kind of bopping around. I want to do like an intern for a defense tech company and I'll be living in Spain and learning Spanish for a few months. So it should be a good summer and excited

to get back into the naval world now that I'm done with this graduate degree finally. thanks and sally where can we find you and what else you have planned like daniel uh the best place to find me is going to be linkedin i've taken a step back from um this world to raise my two sons but i'd certainly like to try like daniel to kind of get back into it writing maybe a maybe an associate editor position if dimitri will have me um but that i just kind of trying to figure out how to get back into that world well thank you all again for joining us for the work you've done and continue to do the sports insect to listeners thanks for tuning in we'll see you next time

Thank you. We'll be right back.