Veterans in Advanced Energy Profile: Jon Gillis

JON gillis, a 2020-2021 Veterans advanced energy fellow. click the button below to learn more about the fellowship.

Jon Gillis, a 2020-2021 Veterans Advanced Energy Fellow, developed drones and robots with the US Marine Corps Warfighting Lab. Fuel consumption was just one practical design problem to solve, and he uses the same approach in his energy resilience work today. To other veterans, he says “keep showing up.” Someone might help you today, and you will pay it forward. As told to Leah Emanuel.

Why did you join the military and what was your role?

I did not intend to join the military. When I was studying journalism in undergrad, there was a disastrous event where US Marine Corps snipers had been locked in a sniper battle with Taliban snipers. They won but took a video of themselves peeing on the dead bodies and put it on YouTube. It was a big PR nightmare. One of my good friends had been a Marine Corps sniper before, and he knew those guys. We got in a big fight about why this would happen. He said, “You should go do the job before you write about it.” That really resonated with me, and I thought it made a lot of sense to get the perspective so you can accurately depict it. That was my intro to the Marine Corps—I was going to get the foundation to write about it later.

I enlisted right out of college. I was originally in the officer selection program, which was pretty backed up at the time, so I decided to enlist. My official MOS was  “machine-gunner” as part of the infantry. I did that for two and a half years then went to be a desk-worker at a two star general command. I ended up doing technology development work in that job, and my last year largely focused on a project where we designed and tested drones. The command had sent me to an exercise where I watched a unit train against drones. The military really hadn’t thought about overhead attacks since 1950, so the unit got destroyed in the exercise. I came back and started discussing how to train against this technology, and it turned out the Marine Corps didn’t have access to any drones at the time. It would have taken about five years for the military to procure them, so I had this crazy idea to design them ourselves—that was the best short-term solution. I coordinated with a wide range of people to get it done. I had a very cool hybrid career during my four years of service. 

Gillis at the us marine corpe Cold Weather Training Facility in Bridgeport, CAlifornia

How did the military influence your career trajectory into energy?

While I was working on the drones, the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab started putting me on projects that were ground robot related. I was working around a lot of tech projects focused on robotics systems and their integration with the infantry. At the time, the Marine Corps had an operating concept called “company landing team.” The idea was that you would take a company, which is around 300 people, and they were going to land and self-sustain for fourteen days. In order to do that, they had to bring everything they needed with them—and the biggest operational challenge was fuel. You need robots to carry everything, but the robots needed fuel. You end up in a rocket science problem: you need more fuel, but fuel is weight, so then you need even more fuel but more fuel is more weight. It spirals out of control pretty quickly. I was interested in energy as a weight-reduction process for infantry applications. I don’t do anything remotely close to that now, but that was my introduction to energy. 

What are you most excited about in advanced energy developments, and what are you most concerned about?

We’re at a really interesting time for energy systems and energy systems planning. There’s a lot of possible options to get where we want to go. If decarbonization is the goal, then there are a lot of possible ways to do that. But we get in our own way with resource preference and political preference. We rule out options without investigating their full utility. That is going to be a hindrance to us achieving our objectives. We’re also going to spend a lot of money going down rabbit holes, which to a certain extent you have to let happen. You can’t avoid all of it, but you can avoid some of it. I just don’t think that people are clearing their heads and looking at the full range of evidence and options. That’s my biggest concern.

Right now I work in energy resilience planning. When I first encountered energy resilience a couple years ago, it was—and still is in some ways—a very fuzzy space where everyone knew they wanted resilience but didn’t really know what it was. There was confusion between resilience and renewables, and resilience was becoming a sneaky word to say we really have a renewable preference. Resilience planning is now evolving. We’re thinking about the core questions: Why do we need resilience? What does it look like? How do we build it? It’s now governed less by resource and political preference and more by a realization that energy increasingly underpins so many things that we do. It’s getting a little less political and a little more like Marine Corps planning—which is what I really like. It’s practical planning: We have a mission, and we need to accomplish the mission, so we need to have these things in place. I’m really excited about that transition because it opens us up to really accomplishing what we set out to do. 

Why is energy important to U.S. national security?

The obvious reason that energy is important to national security is that you’ll have a breakdown of day-to-day life without it. If we were to have a long-term disruption of our electric system or electric supply to data centers, it fundamentally disrupts the fabric of the way society operates. There’s a big challenge there—if the electric system is down for a long time, as one example, the banking system is down. Almost everything has gone digital, so you can’t transact anymore. There’s an untold number of things that it would impact. 

The other component is our ability to operate in places where we’re deployed. Energy has always been a hindrance there, and many people have observed that. It will increasingly become a problem as the battlefield becomes less “boots on the ground” and more distributed, often fought in a cyber environment. Protecting and securing our energy supply is just as important to missions in this new battle space as securing fuel was for General Mattis and the Marines back in 2003-2004 when they almost over-ran their fuel supply line. If you look at the air support that we’re still providing in Afghanistan since we pulled everybody out, it’s reliant on energy. If you don’t have energy then you can’t fly those missions. Of course the fuel matters, but it matters as much as electricity does to the flight line. That makes us vulnerable at home. A mission can be taken offline not by hitting the fuel supply line when you’re deployed, but by hitting the electric system in Reno, Nevada. So the reasons for why energy is important haven’t changed, but the way that they manifest themselves have. 

Do you have advice you would like to share with other veterans?

Keep showing up. When I first got out of the Marines, I was looking for career connections. I did a google search for veterans energy networks, and, fortunately, it was the first year of the Veterans Advanced Energy Summit in Chicago. I flew out to the conference, connected with a bunch of folks, and got my first internship and job. Everyone at the Atlantic Council totally changed my career opportunities. They’ve continued to do that—every time I follow up with them, they introduce me to other folks and it opens new doors. They have really cultivated an awesome network for veterans who need it. The creation of a veterans advanced energy network has been crucial for me professionally. When connecting with other people, just remember, someone’s helping you out now, and you’ll help them out later. 

What is your greatest take-away from the Veterans Advanced Energy Fellowship? 

I learned a lot about the political process from the policy work that we did. Part of the program is writing a policy proposal. I sent out my paper to a bunch of Senate staffers and got some calls back. When I met with them to discuss my work, I realized that they are dealing with so much information that they simply cannot understand a particular topic at the level of detail that we do. I previously thought that everybody was a resident expert, but the truth is they’re working on so many different issues that they don’t have the time. I really took away that there’s a lot of value in understanding something really well, spending the time to put together the research, and then sharing the information in a manner that isn’t politically driven and just letting it speak for itself.