The finalists for WashingtonExec’s Chief Officer Awards were announced April 8, and we’ll be highlighting some of them until the event takes place live, in-person June 4.
Next is Andrew Hallman, vice president of national security strategy & integration at Peraton and an AI Executive of the Year finalist. He shares his current focus areas, career advice and a surprising early career path.
What are your primary focus areas going forward, and why are those so important to
the mission?
Hallman’s focus stems from an urgency and commitment to further assimilate technology into the Intelligence Community’s missions. There’s a convergence of emerging and disruptive technologies that elevates risk for us and opportunities for our competition across all domains. The top five technologies on Hallman’s radar are: the growing ubiquity of multimodal sensors, computing power, advanced communications, the rapidly maturing field of AI, and evolving field of quantum.
This perpetual race for technological dominance means that innovation breakthroughs are shorter-lived. The advantage will go to those that are fastest in sensing, collecting, processing, and generating insights then acting at scale to exploit the virtues of the offense-defense cycle. Mission and machine speed and proficiency in human-machine teaming will differentiate us from our adversaries.
As a result, Hallman’s professional North Star will be leveraging artificial intelligence to elevate human cognition and the IC’s intelligence tradecraft.
What is your best career advice for those who want to follow in your footsteps?
His advice is multifaceted:
Stay true to your principles because they will keep you intrinsically gratified throughout your career, no matter what you do. Your profession should be an expression of who you are. You’ll find that, in the times when you choose right over wrong—you’ll know what those are—will be stairs that elevate your character and sense of professional achievement.
Personally, Hallman lives by a 15th century motto of Do Right and Fear No One, which has served him well over the course of his career, even when it cost him jobs that he cherished. If he had not lived by that motto, and taken the easy course over the right course, Hallman wouldn’t be able to get those moments back. So, live your values and they will serve you well.
In your career, and life generally, take opportunities to do what’s uncomfortable or what you’re not naturally inclined to do, because you’ll find that you will grow the most from taking those risks.
What is something about you that most people do not know?
Hallman has a passion for the outdoors—so much so that he studied forestry during his undergraduate education. He dreamt of walking the stands of the West and Northwest, managing forest lands and public preserves.
When he learned that there were few jobs available in the profession at the time, and that he likely wouldn’t be working in that field for at least a year or two, he decided to study international affairs in graduate school.
Hallman had professional duality; a passion for the outdoors and managing natural resources combined with a fascination with global affairs.
Through his graduate work at American University’s School of International Service, he grew an affinity for the field of intelligence – and the rest is, as they say, history. But, every time Hallman comes near a forest, he feels a primal need to venture into it and walk among nature.