Tag: military officers

Talking About Military Leadership

vietnam

W.J. Astore

In 2004, when I was still on active duty, I spoke on leadership at the Panetta Institute in Monterey, California.  At the time, I was the associate provost/dean of students at the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center.

To prepare for my talk, I jotted down a few notes; I’ve decided not to update these or change them.  (I’m sure I’d say a few different things today; then again, I’ve been retired from the military since 2005.)

Here are my notes from 2004 (with a few additions for the sake of clarity):

What is uniquely military about military leadership?

  • Life and death situations (but also true of Police, Fire, MDs, etc.)
  • Mandate to take the lives of others under certain ROEs (rules of engagement)
  • Inherent chaos (fog and friction) of war.  Thus leaders must promote cohesion—bonds of trust within a unit—else the unit may collapse under the stresses of war
  • Possibility of routine loss of leaders on the battlefield requires the development of junior leaders with the willingness and emotional strength to take command when needed
  • Importance of an officer’s commission from the president, and his/her oath of office to the Constitution.  Fidelity to the Constitution, and Integrity and Honor in general, are essential qualities
  • Role of long-serving NCOs (non-commissioned officers)—take care of them, and help them take care of junior enlisted.  Put their needs before your own.  Share sacrifices: Yes, RHIP (rank has its privileges).  But officers should eat same grub as grunts.  Take care of the needs of the men and women you’re leading before you address your own needs.

No one personality type.  Our greatest leaders have been everything from vainglorious (MacArthur) to self-effacing (Gen Bradley)

“They don’t care how much you know, but they’ll know how much you care.”  Actually, your subordinates care about both.  Combination of emotional intelligence with intellect and hard work.  You don’t have to be the brightest or best, but you may need to compensate with work.

Respect for subordinates; and don’t play favorites

Listen before acting

Keep calm in times of stress

Role model: As a leader, you are always being watched

Humility but not diffidence: If you don’t lead, who will?

Refuse to tolerate incompetence

Recognize top performers.  Don’t take your best people for granted.  Remember to reward them.

Communication: Telling people to suck it up sounds tough and appropriate in a military context.  But are you sucking it up too?  Nothing more corrosive than hypocrisy at the top.  Integrity and sincerity are essential.

Look inside yourself.  Why do you want to be a leader?

Academic leadership: Irony is that many academics avoid leadership positions because they distract from individual scholarship and academic achievement.  [This mindset is] foreign to the military.  Officers and NCOs trained to lead.  Necessary because war might quickly knock out commanders; subordinates must be ready to act.  Thus department chairs [in academe] often rotate; “burden sharing” rather than leadership.  Healthy iconoclasm in academe, but it should not get in the way of leading.

“Question authority” is not enough.  “Change authority” or “Become authority” if you don’t like the answers you’re hearing.

At the USAF Academy, there was a “Bring Me Men” ramp, but that slogan was removed due to sexual harassment scandals, even though the sentiment was based on a quotation from the late 19th century.  But what it always was intended to mean was “Bring Me Leaders.”  Leaders have moral courage to take responsibility and report clearly to the people.  As commissioned officers, we swear an oath to the Constitution, and to protect it against foreign and domestic enemies.  We do not swear an oath of allegiance to a specific leader or monarch.  But an officer must also respect the chain of command.  You go outside that chain at your peril.

Get to know your military.  How many of you plan to serve in the military?  Congress is ignorant of military matters.  A minority have served (about 30%, whereas in 1969 it was nearly 70%) and even fewer have sons and daughters who are willing to serve.  Only six congressional representatives and one senator have children serving in the military.  7/535 members = 1.3%.  Among the rich and connected, the military is not seen as a desirable profession compared to law, medicine, business, or other, honorable professions.

How to get to know “your” military: Take an ROTC course at your college/university.  Attend a military ceremony.  Ask questions.  The U.S. military needs your interest.  Perhaps too narrowly drawn from the lower classes, but that’s not the military’s fault.  No recruit is turned away because he or she is too rich or because he or she attended Stanford or Berkeley.

How would you like to be the leader of a U.S. military unit in Iraq that was expecting to rotate after a year, after which your men and women are told they have to stay for six more months, possibly longer?  How do you keep people’s spirits up?  Keep them focused on the mission while they’re separated from loved ones for months at a time?

End of notes.  Comments, readers?

More Thoughts on America’s Military Academies

West-Point-Cadets-Marching1

W.J. Astore

The passionate discussion generated by our last article, America’s Military Academies Are Seriously Flawed, was heartening.  Our military academies will not be improved if we merely accept the status quo, with allowance for minor, mainly cosmetic, reforms.  But truly radical reforms are difficult to achieve since the academies are so deeply rooted in tradition.  A reluctance to change can be a good thing, especially when an institution is performing well.  Yet since the Korean Conflict, and certainly since the Vietnam War, America’s military performance has been mediocre.  Placing blame here is obviously contentious, with military professionals tending to point to poor decisions by civilian leaders, among other causes.

Rather than placing blame, let’s entertain some probing questions about the future structure and mission of military academies, with the intent of making them better schools for developing military leaders, as well as better institutions for defending America and advancing its values.

Here in no particular order are a few questions and proposals:

1.  Is America best served by military academies that emulate undergraduate colleges in providing a course of study lasting four years? Or should the academies recruit from students who have already finished most (or all) of an undergraduate degree?  The academies could then develop a concentrated course of study, specifically tailored to military studies, lasting roughly two years.  In effect, the academies would become graduate schools, with all cadets graduating with master’s degrees in military studies with varying concentrations (engineering, science, English, history, and so on).  Such a change would also eliminate the need to kowtow to undergraduate accreditation boards such as ABET.

2.  West Point and the AF Academy rely primarily on serving military officers as instructors, whereas Annapolis relies primarily on civilian instructors. Is this a distinction without difference?  Would West Point and the AF Academy profit from more civilian instructors, and Annapolis from more military ones?  Should all the service academies work harder to bring in top instructors from the Ivy League and similar universities as full-time visiting professors?

3.  How much of today’s experience at military academies is busy work? Or work driven mainly by tradition, i.e. “We do this because we’ve always done this.”  Do we still need lots of inspections, marching, parades, and the like?  Do freshman (call them plebes, doolies, smacks, what have you) truly profit from being sleep-deprived and harassed and otherwise forced into compliance as a rite of passage in their first year?  Does this truly develop character?  Or are cadet schedules so jam-packed that they have little time to think?

4.  Why do cadets continue to have limited exposure to the enlisted ranks? NCOs are the backbone of a professional military, a fact that is not stressed enough in officer training.  How do we increase opportunities for cadets to work with NCOs in the field?

5.  A strong emphasis on physical fitness and sports is smart. But is it necessary to place so much emphasis on big-time sports such as Division I-A football?  What is gained by focusing academy recruiting on acquiring athletes that will help to win football games?  What is gained by offering such athletes preferential treatment within the corps of cadets?  (Some will claim that athletes receive no preferential treatment; if you believe this, I suggest you listen very carefully to cadets who are outside of the charmed circle of celebrated athletes.)

6.  When I was a serving officer at the AF Academy, cadets used to ask me whether I believed they were “the best and the brightest.” Certain senior leaders had told them that, by virtue of being selected to attend a military academy, they were better than their civilian peers at universities such as Harvard or MIT.  Is it wise to sell cadets on the idea that they are America’s best and brightest?

How I answered the question: I told my cadets that comparing military academies to universities such as Harvard or MIT was an apples/oranges situation.  First and foremost, military academies were and are about developing military leaders of strong character.  If you compared cadets to their peers at Harvard or MIT, of course you’d find smarter students at these and similar top-flight universities.  But that wasn’t the point.  Military academies had a different intent, a different purpose, a different mission.  This answer seemed to satisfy my cadets; what I sensed was that they were tired of being told they were America’s best, when they could see for themselves that this often wasn’t true.

We do our cadets no service when we applaud them merely for showing up and working hard, just as our civilian leaders do the military no service when they applaud us as the best-led, best-equipped, best-trained, and so on, military force in all of human history.  Any student of military history should laugh at such hyperbolic praise.

7.  And now for a big question: Are the academies contributing to America’s current state of perpetual war? Have we abandoned Washington’s ideal of Cincinnatus, the citizen-soldier, the soldier who fights reluctantly and who seeks not military honors but only a return to normalcy and an end to war?

Some will argue that the world today demands perpetual vigilance and a willingness to use overwhelming “shock and awe” force to intimidate and defeat America’s enemies.  And that only a professional corps of devoted regulars can lead such a force.  Perhaps so.

But is it time to consider new paradigms?

What are the most serious threats that America faces today?  For example, American infrastructure is crumbling even as we spend hundreds of billions in Iraq and Afghanistan with indifferent results.  Should West Point return to its roots, unleashing its officer-engineers to lead a new Civilian Conservation Corps to rebuild America?  (Recall that George C. Marshall ran the CCC.)  Should America’s military be refocused not on winning the “global war on terror” (unwinnable by definition, for terror will always be with us), but on preserving the global environment?

As humans wage war against our planet and biosphere, should not a force dedicated to the defense of America focus on preserving our livelihood as represented by our planet’s resources?  With its global presence, the American military is uniquely situated to take the lead here.  Indeed, the U.S. Navy already advertises itself as “A global force for good.”  Can we make that a reality?

Too pie in the sky?  The U.S. military has enormous resources and a global role in leadership.  What would it mean to America if our military took the lead in preserving the earth while rebuilding the core strength of America?  Aren’t these “wars” (against global environmental degradation; for America’s internal infrastructure) worth fighting?  Are they not more winnable than a perpetual war on terror?

There you have it.  Let’s hear your ideas in the comments.  And thanks.