Richard O'Neill

Richard Patrick O'Neill is an American military consultant. He is the founder of the Highlands Group.

In 1989, O’Neill, then a cryptologist with the United States Navy, wrote a paper for the US Naval War College titled “Toward a methodology for perception management.”

O'Neill served in government, in his last position as deputy for strategy and policy in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence (ASD C3I).¹⁾ He retired from the United States Navy after a 29-year career.

O'Neill founded the Highlands Group in 1994.²⁾

On April 5, 2001, O'Neill participated in a “Seminar on Intelligence, Command, and Control” hosted by the Program on Information Resources Policy, sponsored by Harvard University and the Center for Information Policy Research.³⁾ In his presentation, O'Neill described “a process that [the Highlands Group] created for the Department of Defense in particular but for the U.S. government in general,” which was “also adopted by a number of commercial entities.” He labelled it an “intellectual venture capital process” and “an idea engine.” O'Neill's task “was to write the strategy and policy for the secretary of defense on where conflict will likely be going in a future information-age setting.”

On September 7, 2010, O'Neill spoke at the Gov 2.0 Summit about “government and private use of online technology.” Among the topics addressed were computer security issues, privacy and governmental transparency, and public-private cooperation.⁴⁾