USC Viterbi School of Engineering:

To Kenneth Michel, the military threats to the security of the world’s democracies have only intensified in the past five to 10 years, especially from ever-improving ballistic and other missiles.

That’s why Michel, an operations officer who works in the strategy and policy directorate for the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command in Honolulu, recently flew from Hawaii to Southern California to participate in the opening session of the USC SHIELD Executive Program in Global Space and Deterrence.

From Sept. 15 to Sept. 17, Michel and more than 20 other high-level military, government and industry security experts met at USC for the kickoff of USC SHIELD. The eight-month program aims at teaching U.S. and other leaders to understand how to tackle growing issues of national security while bridging bureaucratic gaps between policy and new engineering innovations.

Michel said he looked forward to collaborating and making connections with other leaders in security issues and learning from them.

“As someone who works in the policy shop, I think it’s important to gain [new] perspectives on missile defense,” Michel said. “It’s great that [USC SHIELD] brings a lot of people together – not just military, but people from academia, government personnel and other areas to discuss the missile defense problem, which is especially pertinent in today’s age given the potential areas of conflict.”

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