Smart people in the last few years expended a lot of effort asking the question, “Where is our strategy?”
From “Pacific Pivots” to “Offshore Balancing” to “Leading from Behind,” as a culture, the national security chatterati and professionals have been grasping for a good “Ref. A” that looked like anything close to strategic thought – even if in reality some of them are only rough operational concept outlines.
As such, heads turned when CNO Richardson announced last week,
Adm. John Richardson, the current CNO, is seeking to accelerate learning and information processing and reportedly has decided the eight months each group takes to study a problem and generate a report is too long. On March 30, he directed retired Vice Adm. Phil Wisecup, the current SSG head, to stand down the group after the current team completes its work.
As a backgrounder,
The CNO Strategic Studies Group (SSG) at the US Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, has been working on particular CNO-directed topics since 1981. The group, according to the Navy, is tasked only by and reports directly to the CNO.Organized each year with about 18 to 22 members, many of whom are considered bound for flag rank, the SSG is thought of as a concept demonstration team, often taking on topics that could have great potential but are not being pursued in other Navy organizations. Study topics have included the integration of rail guns into operational concepts, the convergence of cyber power and sea power, and the development of synthetic fuels.
With a name like “Strategic Studies Group” and such a pedigree, one would think in a time of flux that would not be a body that the CNO would want to get rid of. Give all the squid ink about “speed” a pass and look a bit deeper on why we would do such a thing.
Why would the CNO decide it was no longer value added? I think the answer is a simple one; the product.
Such an organization produces a poor product for one of two broad reasons, neither are comfortable to talk about in the open.
1) The Process: this is what the CNO mentions as “speed.” Process is also the easiest thing to fix. Why was this not looked at in detail first? Too hard? Really not. That is what leads me to the next reason.
2) The People: if the people in the Flag holding pen are really our best and brightest, what was it about the SSG that produced such ossified thought to the point it was negative help? What does that say about either how we direct the energies of our talent, or the talent we are selecting? Those are uncomfortable and hard questions that make enemies, but they are ones that have to be asked.
This is not a process issue. Nuclear trained Admirals can fix process. The smart money is on a people problem, and that should worry us all.
As one highly respected professional told me,
SSG has been slowly descending into irrelevance, a holding pond for a bunch of post major command guys to give them a veneer of being smart guys, but the products have become increasingly vanilla. Sort of a wasted exercise where the CNO sends a really tough and important question up to Newport and nine months later the answer … comes out the other end (and sucked). I have given up reading their final reports a few years ago, a waste of time, but still three guys were selected for flag out of there in the past few years.
Why are our best and brightest producing inferior produce, and being rewarded for it? That too is a question we should want an answer to.
