Join Bill Alderson in Austin, TX (Lady Bird Lake in the backdrop) for a frontline responder story from the U.S. military’s digital warfighting era. This episode breaks down how biometric enrollments (fingerprints, iris, facial) powered intelligence watchlists to identify insurgents at checkpoints—and what went wrong when the system hit scale (~1.2M enrollments) and stopped replicating mid-war.

You’ll see how we instrumented the network across Iraq, Afghanistan, CENTCOM, and CONUS; traced packet loss, duplication, latency, satellite hops, asymmetric routing; and worked with Fort Huachuca engineers to fix replication logic and restore global dissemination. Beyond the tech, we focus on lessons learned, best-practice amplification, and how to build tiger teams that turn chaos into recovery.

What you’ll learn

How biometric intelligence (BAT/HIIDE-style pipelines) fuels watchlists and checkpoint hits

Why large-scale replication failed—and how telemetry exposed root causes

Practical DR/IR methods: diagrams, test points, throughput/CRC analysis, WAN asymmetry fixes

Leadership alignment: exec/CISO, board communication, culture of readiness (“more fun to be ready”)

Guest spotlights

Charlene Deaver-Vasquez (FISMACS): Mathematical models for forecasting cyber attacks

Jon DiMaggio: The Art of Cyber Warfare—nation-state tactics & threat intel

Chapters

00:00 Austin intro & “more fun to be ready”

02:10 The call: Army G-2 → Joint Staff → CENTCOM → Iraq

06:40 Biometric watchlists: enrollments, checkpoints, CSI workflow

12:30 Replication stalls at scale: timing, keys, rows, retries

18:45 Telemetry wins: packet loss, duplication, satellite latency, BGP churn

25:15 Fixing asymmetry & WAN optimization pitfalls

31:00 Fort Huachuca lab: code changes & validation

36:20 Lessons learned → best-practice amplification

41:00 Resources: Charlene & Jon (links in description)

Call to action
Have a responder story with real lessons learned? Comment or reach out—we’d love to feature your team and translate hard-won experience into best practices others can deploy before the next crisis.