Author Archive
This summer there were two posts here at USNI that grew out of Professor Joan Johnson-Freese’s article “Teach Tough, Think Tough: Three Ways to Fix War Colleges”. At the time I paid little attention as the subject was tangential to my own interests. Days later the subject became directly relevant to me and I have been able to spend the last five months thinking about the article, posts, and comments and propose that it is neither the faculty (alone) or the administration (alone) who bears review…it is the assignment policies in regards to military faculty AND students that need review. My commentary is geared directly at the Naval War College and should be considered items of discussion and items for improvement. Should none of what I address be accomplished, the school will not suffer. It just won’t be as good as I think it could be.
To begin with, Professor Johnson-Freese’s criticism of the Navy faculty “retire-in-place” concept is dead on. While some of those retired Navy officers provide interesting viewpoint, many of them are inhibiting the hiring of professors with different viewpoints than the ones provided by 20 to 30 years of naval service. Her comments on hiring practices should be closely reviewed by the War Colleges, and those practices kept in mind when contracts are renewed by the school.
But, aren’t those RIP Navy officers qualified? Well, yes. On paper. They have PhDs. They are published. But by and large those PhDs are earned after retirement at local Rhode Island Schools. Publications are done internal to the War College in either faculty papers for student consumption or in the War College Review.
To my knowledge none were published, had doctoral degrees, or any advanced education outside of the Navy prior to attendance, assignment, and retirement at the War College. In and of itself that is not unusual for Naval Officers. But should we be placing “usual” Naval Officers as faculty at the home of Naval thought?
What about active duty faculty? Well, the same problem resides there. Of the Navy officers, most have not published. The one officer who had published prior to assignment at the War College is not a member of the teaching faculty. Wait? Not a member of the teaching faculty? The Naval War College website lists 375 faculty members. 104 are identified as “Military Professor”. Of those, 70 teach one of the three core courses. The other 35 are either in the International Law department, Assist and Assess Team Members, or part of the War Gaming Department (there are some other cats and dogs, but these three have the bulk of those 30 officers. Those 30 are also almost all Navy officers and make up almost half of the 67 Navy officers on faculty as “professors”.
What kind of officers are those who are assigned to the faculty? The Army sends rockstars who have had both command and possess doctoral degrees. The Navy? Frankly? They are mostly broken careers. At least three are 2xFOSd Commanders coming up on high year tenure. There are more reserve officers on Active Duty for Special Work (ADSW) than there are post-command line officers. Rumor is that the Selective Early Retirement Board hit the College “hard”. Unpublished. Non-due course. No longer upwardly mobile.
There is not a single serving Flag Officer who served as faculty on the Naval War College.
Now, none of this makes these individual faculty members bad people, or bad Naval Officers. It just limits their ability to work as peers with the civilian faculty – both while on active duty and RIP.
Wait, the critic argues, those officers are there to provide their operational expertise. Their savvy, their saltiness. Not their academic credentials.
OK. Again. 2xFOSd for Captain. Not upwardly mobile. No command experience. But, discounting those data points there are these.
Almost no DC staff experience. Almost no combatant command or major staff experience outside of DC. When there are officers who have DC experience, they end up teaching in the Joint Military Operations Department (and teach the planning course). Operational planner experienced officers are assigned to the National Security Affairs Department (and teach the national strategy and policy course). The Strategy and Policy Department (think Military History Department) is a mishmash of officers who are hopelessly outclassed academically by their civilian peers and in some cases are ignored in the classroom by those same peers.
But, why does it matter that there be a greater breadth of experience among the faculty? Because, unlike civilian graduate programs, the Naval War College student body had no choice in course work or faculty. You can’t wait until next semester to get the “good” professor. The school determines who will teach you. That makes the mix and breadth of experience critical. Or it destroys the credibilty of the faculty in that classroom.
How to fix it? The President of the War College needs to recruit faculty rather than let them just come to him. He needs to partner with the local commands in Newport to find upwardly mobile officers to teach for a year or two and then return to the Fleet. He needs to personally scrutinize every single faculty hire of a retired officer as if that person were to become HIS moderator, instructor, mentor, commander.
If not this, then at the very least end the assignment of billets to the line communities. When an officer applies for a faculty position the President, Provost, or Dean of Academics should review that officer’s record, a writing sample, and curriculum vitae and from there make a decision on which department the officer would be best suited to teach in. This alone would go a long way in matching talent to task at the war colleges.
But, the above only addresses the faculty. The assignment of the student body also needs to be addressed. While the Junior (officially “Intermediate”) course contains significant numbers of upwardly mobile Navy officers, the Senior course does not. Resplendent with derailed careers, Reserve recalls and staff corps officers, the due-course officers from the line communities are underrepresented. Which, of course, they are in the services as a whole. However this is senior level PME. Why can’t Navy get better-qualified officers to the Naval War College?
Well, it does; in the form of Army, Air Force, and Marine Corps officers. Again, it’s the assignment processes for Navy officers that is problemmatic. And here geography and biology tend to win out. For Navy officers completing a command tour it is easier to send them to Norfolk to the Joint Forces Staff College for an eight week tour and get them back to staff or operational duty than it is to sacrifice a year of academic study. Failing that, it is easier to send them to National War College in DC for follow on assignment there (or vice versa) and provide stability for the family. Absent Surface Warfare Officer School, there are no large commands in Newport to draw due-course officers from to fill the Senior Course, or likewise to send them to afterwards and given a choice, many choose one of the alternate ways to complete JPME II.
There’s no easy fix – and this post is intend to foment discussion, not serve as a blueprint to nirvanah. The Navy only has so many due course officers and can only send them so many places. But, what Navy does with its top performing officers tells everyone where Navy’s priorities are. But when less than a third of Flag Officers are Naval War College graduates, and the last Naval War College graduate CNO was Admiral Mike Boorda, there’s a definite signal being sent of where the priorty isn’t.
Navy’s Daily “ChInfo Clips” provides a synopsis of major articles of Navy interest.
Navy Times has a cover story on CO firings. Here is how the article led on in ChInfo Clips:
27. 7 Skippers’ Downfall
As alcohol ends still more COs’ careers, the Navy digs for answers
(NAVY TIMES 14 NOV 11) … William H. McMichaelThe numbers don’t always tell the story. Navy statistics show the number of alcohol-related incidents in the fleet fell steadily over the past six fiscal years. But since the Navy also shrank during that time, the per-capita rate of alcohol-related incidents has remained relatively steady.
So the Navy’s alcohol problem is not going away. In fact, it might be getting worse. And nowhere is the problem more apparent than in the conduct of the Navy’s Amphib commanding officers.
Read that last line again…”Navy’s Amphib Commanding Officers”.
“Huh?” I say. Really? Something’s not right here.
So I emailed Bill McMichael, the author of the article.
Here’s his response.
That would be a gigantic mistake, but we didn’t do it. Chinfo Clips re-types rather than scans the clips, so someone mistakenly typed this. It did not appear in print this way. Here are the digits from our online version of the paper, which is identical to the paper.
Thanks for pointing this out. Hurts, tho. That makes me and us look stupid and it’s probably already taken on a life of its own. I’m asking Clips to do a correction but it won’t be out until tomorrow AM if they do.
Your Navy
As alcohol ends still
7more COs’ careers, the Navy digs for answersskippers’ downfall
By William H. McMichael
[email protected]
The numbers don’t always tell the story. Navy statistics show the number of alcohol-related incidents in the fleet fell steadily over the past six fiscal years. But since the Navy also shrank during that time, the per-capita rate of alcohol-related incidents has remained relatively steady.So the Navy’s alcohol problem is not going away. In fact, it might be getting worse. And nowhere is the problem more apparent than in the conduct of the Navy’s commanding officers.
So, Navy put out an article that incorrectly casts aspersions because someone manually retypes things. And it will take 24 hours to get a correction?
Wow.
But sadly not surprising.
Posted by It’s interesting to watch the difference between users of “Reply” and “Reply All”. Quite often it’s obvious that most users of email give almost zero thought to which of the two they are going to use when they respond to an email. They are on autopilot.
So, when should one use “Reply All”?
- When the response is of interest or need to a majority of the recipients.
Simple. So, if you are a “Reply All” by default, then this means that pithy comments about a your favorite sports team, or a personal thanks to a mass goodbye email, or scathing comments about a spelling error are best either sent with a “Reply” and just to the original sender…or just not sent at all.
Now, there’s a flip side. Those who default to the “Reply” button when it’s clearly a group conversation in progress. How do you know when to “Reply All” ?
- When the response is of interest or need to a majority of the recipients.
Now, in the “Replay” defaultist world there is a different set of thoughts that need to come to play. If the email were instead a conversation in a group setting, would you whisper your response to one person only? Wait until the group broke up and ask your question? If yes, then by all means, just “Reply”….but if others need the information you are asking for…then use “Reply All”.
Mundane things that we do every day…but there is no default answer and 1 second of thought can save a hundred individuals a second of “delete”.
While Admiral Stavridis routinely says the below in an elegant fashion…Seth Godin comes at it from another direction.
No one ever gets talker’s block. No one wakes up in the morning, discovers he has nothing to say and sits quietly, for days or weeks, until the muse hits, until the moment is right, until all the craziness in his life has died down.
Why then, is writer’s block endemic?
The reason we don’t get talker’s block is that we’re in the habit of talking without a lot of concern for whether or not our inane blather will come back to haunt us. Talk is cheap. Talk is ephemeral. Talk can be easily denied.
We talk poorly and then, eventually (or sometimes), we talk smart. We get better at talking precisely because we talk. We see what works and what doesn’t, and if we’re insightful, do more of what works. How can one get talker’s block after all this practice?
Writer’s block isn’t hard to cure.
Just write poorly. Continue to write poorly, in public, until you can write better.
I believe that everyone should write in public. Get a blog. Or use Squidoo or Tumblr or a microblogging site. Use an alias if you like. Turn off comments, certainly–you don’t need more criticism, you need more writing.
Do it every day. Every single day. Not a diary, not fiction, but analysis. Clear, crisp, honest writing about what you see in the world. Or want to see. Or teach (in writing). Tell us how to do something.
If you know you have to write something every single day, even a paragraph, you will improve your writing. If you’re concerned with quality, of course, then not writing is not a problem, because zero is perfect and without defects. Shipping nothing is safe.
The second best thing to zero is something better than bad. So if you know you have write tomorrow, your brain will start working on something better than bad. And then you’ll inevitably redefine bad and tomorrow will be better than that. And on and on.
Write like you talk. Often.
So, start by doing something. You don’t have to follow Seth’s ideas. Go small. Comment on a blog or a news story. Join an online forum AND comment. Write notes for the Plan of the Day. Dare the slings and arrows of the others who are also working at bettering their own writing (or just blathering along full of sound and fury).
But practice, practice, practice. Over and over and over again. I hear lots of great conversations with great viewpoints that never make it to the written, and retained, word. Share them. Practice.
Once upon a time there were physical viewgraphs that sat on a projector located some distance from the speaker. To change viewgraphs, the speaker used a Voice Activated Slide Changer (VASC) (also know as a person who responded to the phrase “next slide please”).
As we shifted from viewgraphs to slide carousels to digital presentation the concept of someone else turning the page remained. Yet the technology evolved over time so that a remote presentation mouse is available, cheap, user friendly, but also rarely used in military settings. Instead, presentations tend to fall back on the cheapest commodity we have – people.
Well, they aren’t actually the cheapest commodity but it sure does come across as cheaper and easier for senior, and in some cases junior, personnel to have someone at the computer to respond to “next slide please”. But there’s a flip side to this problem.
Outside the military the concept of the VASC has fallen by the wayside. Look at any major presentation given today. The two most common methods are either self-flipping with a remote – or careful rehearsal and timing. In some rare cases there is someone flipping slides, but it is so seamless as to not be noticed – and the words “next slide please” are never used.
Why do military personnel rely on the concept of “next slide please”? Because some leaders maintain that sense of entitlement that they need mundane tasks performed by someone else. Others just simply can’t be bothered with the task of learning how to control a remote, or even worse, don’t have the capacity.
Now, I’m certain some of the pushback will be “why does it matter?” How can something as simple and mundane as “next slide please” be worthy of time and discussion? Because I believe, as we see a generational change, that the idea of using a VASC is becoming equated with unprofessional or lazy presentation. And that in turn colors the manner in which the presentation is received. Unprepared, lazy, unprofessional presentations lose the audience and in doing so lose the message. Which is the point of making the presentation anyway, right?
Sal and others have covered this…but just for example’s sake.
The major military house of education that I attend recently had a “uniform day”. Here’s what people wore:
But they also wore
and 
and 
And being joint there were also those who wore 
and 
and 
and 
Civilians wore this:
“Uniform” day.
There’s Diversity Thursday, Full Bore and Flightdeck Friday. Typically exciting or insightfull posts and commentary. This week I am inaugurating something new and different: “Mundane Monday”, a series of tips and ideas on the mundane things that can be banes of our existence. Administrivia (or administerrorism), use of data processing and presentation programs, the side of information assurance that the dear mongering annual training won’t cover, and a host of other normally boring things that yet cause people to say “WTF” on a regular basis. This week I’m commenting on the venerable and universal PDF file.
The Adobe Acrobat Portable Document File has been around for two decades, and been the de-facto standard for distribution of text files for half of that. One would think that after a decade of common use, both in the hallowed halls of government and without, that there’d be a bit more knowledge of it’s usage. Sadly, like most data processing tools there are few educational tools for producers, and even fewer for consumers.
The PDF format allows you to do many things – all of which universalize the document as well as reduce the file size.
- Have a PowerPoint document that runs at too many slides and too many pictures but need to email it? Try printing to a PDF (look under the “Print” option in PowerPoint) and emailing the reduced and unalterable file.
- Have a form that needs to be filled in? Create it in MSWord, then print to a PDF. If you have a full version of Acrobat (not just the reader) you can add fillable blocks on the form.
- Distributing an instruction? Rather than scan in a bunch of images and sending out unsearchable files in either PDF, TIFF, or JPG files, PDF the original MSWord document (yes, you can create a fancy government seal header in MSWord, and embed a signature as well). That makes the document searchable – and if you are really daring you can go so far as to build hyperlinks into the Table of Contents – something I believe MSWord will do if you use the Table of Contents form fields.
So, mundane. On Monday. Any good stories on improper use of PDFs? Good stories on excellent use of this common tool? Places someone should have used a PDF and went with some gucci-proprietary over-costed solution? Or other ideas to talk about on a Mundane Monday.
When your 4-star boss is given a captive audience of over 200 senior officers who are spending the year reading and studying operational art, strategy, policy, decision making and interagency cooperation please pack a slide deck of something other than the canned command brief.
Or, if that is all you have, tell the boss to skip through the slides, drop the buzzword bingo lingo, and get to the Q&A as quickly as possible.
Thank you.
PS – General Kehler, great job on the Q&A.
“Here may be a good place to dispel two long-held myths: one, that the organization serves and always has served only the highest-ranking officers of the sea services; and two, that the purpose of this first meeting was to discuss how the Navy was going to cope with a depleted and deteriorating post-Civil War Fleet. Rear Admiral John L. Worden (pronounced WERE-den)—skipper of the USS Monitor during her epic battle with the CSS Virginia in the 1862 Battle of Hampton Roads—presided over the first meeting. But the bulk of the group consisted of commanders, lieutenant commanders, lieutenants, a Marine captain, a chief engineer, a medical director, and a pay inspector.”
From For Those Who Dare By Fred L. Schultz (emphaisis added)
Is that truly the case anymore? Here are the first sentences in the biographies of the current members of the Naval Institute Board of Directors:
“…over 30 years of experience providing international strategic and financial advice to corporations, institutional investors, sovereign governments and private families.”
“…is a past president of the Independent Community Bankers of America, and presently serves on the ICBA Tax Committee. He is also a former president of the Iowa Independent Bankers Association.”
“…was a staff member of the House Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee, where he ultimately held the position of Republican chief counsel. While with the committee, Mr. < – - > was directly involved in the development of legislation leading up to the enactment of the Oil Pollution Act of 1990.”
“…is an International Consultant with The SPECTRUM Group based in Alexandria, Virginia, which he joined in 2007. Prior to that he was President of Raytheon International, Europe, headquartered in Brussels, Belgium. He was responsible for all Raytheon business planning and development in Europe, and held this position for eight years.”
“…is the CEO of Genesis IV, an executive consulting firm headquartered in Northern Virginia. From March 2009 until 2010, he was Acting Secretary of the Navy. Previously he served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy (Installations and Environment). Prior to becoming the Assistant Secretary of the Navy (I&E), Mr. Penn was the Director, Industrial Base Assessments from October 2001 to March 2005.”
“…was born in Pleasantville, New York, the son of a USAAC officer. Six generations of his family were military officers among them five West Point or VMI graduates. He is a direct descendant of Commodore Thomas Truxtun, one of the earliest heroes of the U.S. Navy and Colonel Archibald Henderson, the 5th and longest serving Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps. “
“…With an economics degree from the University of Virginia, < – - > entered the U.S. Navy in 1972 and for the next 36 years was steeped in the practical side of planning, execution, and organizational leadership. “
“…is a historian and author on American naval and strategic history. His War Plan Orange: The U.S. Strategy to Defeat Japan, 1897-1945, published by the U.S. Naval Institute Press, received wide acclaim from senior cabinet and military leaders and the press.”
“…is a cofounder and Advisory Director of Trident Capital. From 1990 to 1993, < – - > served as the Assistant Secretary of the Navy (Financial Management) and Comptroller of the Navy. From 1987 to 1990, he held several senior positions in the Office of the Secretary of Defense in Washington, D.C. From 1981 to 1987, < – - > was a Managing Director of Morgan Stanley & Co. Earlier in his career, he was a Senior Vice President with Dillon Read & Co.”
“…is chairman of Innosight, an innovation-based consulting and executive training firm focused on helping companies and institutions innovate for new growth and transformation. He co-founded the firm with Harvard Business School professor and best selling author on innovation, Clayton M. Christensen. “
“…was elected Vice President at Booz Allen Hamilton in 2005 and became a Senior Vice President in 2009. In 2003, < – - > was appointed by President Bush as executive director of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB). In May 1998 she was confirmed by the Senate to serve as first deputy director of central intelligence for community management.”
“…was born and raised in Syracuse, New York. He was graduated from Syracuse University in 1965 with a BA in History and was a 3-year Varsity Lacrosse letterman.”
“…retired in October 2009 having served 35 years in the Navy. Her last position was Director, Command, Control, Communications and Computer Systems, The Joint Staff. She is now consulting and serving on the Boards of several corporations. She is also serving on a Blue Ribbon Panel reviewing the FAA’s IP-based Wide Area Network outage experienced on November 19, 2009. “
“…was formerly the Managing Director of Morgan Stanley’s Merchant Bank, Chairman of Morgan Stanley Capital partners and Chairman of Morgan Stanley Venture Partner as well as a Director of Morgan Stanley & Co. Incorporated and a member of the Firm’s Management Committee. “
I am certain some will quibble over “but…four sentences down it says” or some other such thought. The first sentance or two, to me, say what that individual holds important – how they want to be introduced to someone. The rest is important, and the real level of military service from these individuals will be covered in future posts.
In their introduction to the membership – in their “here is who I am” – only 2 mention active duty service. 1 mentions significant contributions to either the Navy as a civilian. 1 mentions significant contributions to the Navy as an Institute author. Do these biographies indicate any semblance of the spirit of the founders of the Institute?
I don’t think so.
Again, from For Those Who Dare:
…the most potent participants in the Naval Institute’s Independent Forum have been Sailors, Marines, Coast Guardsmen, and Merchant Mariners who wrote and continue to write about things that concern them. These have not been professional writers. But they are the ones—the pilots, the ship drivers, the equipment handlers, the ones with first-hand experience—who possessed what long-time Proceedings Editor-in-Chief Fred Rainbow called “the passion to make it happen.”
Can anyone point out articles, speeches, statements or provocative thought from these individuals (the esteemed author aside, of course)? Not the official utterances of position, but the thoughts and opinions of the person over the things that concern them about the Navy, the Marine Corps, the Coast Guard, or the Institute itself?
For those who wonder…the Annual Meeting was over a month ago. There was supposed to have been a Board Meeting this week to discuss the Annual Meeting, the questions and comments raised there, and the challenge to the vote held this spring.
At the Annual Meeting the membership was promised a dialogue over the future of the Institute. Has anyone seen the beginnings of a dialogue from the leadership of the Institute? Or a report on the search for a new CEO?
While the Annual Meeting is behind us, this issue is not dead and the challenge to the Institute’s spirit and soul is not over.
Zimmerman knew.
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Tags: Navy, PME, War College