It will come as no surprise to anyone who even remotely follows the goings-on within the Defense Department that DoD and the Services all have a bit (or more than a bit) of a crush on Silicon Valley. In fact, it may be more than a crush: sometimes, it seems to border on obsession.
And why wouldn’t it? DoD used to be the leader in innovation; now, it can’t even remotely keep up. A 10+ year development and acquisition cycle versus Moore’s Law In Action (the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years – it is actually closer to 18 months now). Silicon Valley gets its pick of the top recruits from the top schools every year. Getting a job at Google is more competitive than getting accepted to HARVARD. Silicon Valley and “innovation” seem to be the buzzwords of the year at the Pentagon.
So I want you to imagine the following scene: Dean Kamen, inventor of many, many things, including the Segway, standing in front of an auditorium full of (mostly) Marines. This group has gathered for a meeting entitled Marine Corps Force Development 25 (FD25), and was meant to introduce more innovation into the process. Mr. Kamen was one of the keynotes, and kept the entire audience enthralled for his full allocated time – and then continued for another hour beyond that.
His company, Deka Research, is fairly small (about 500 employees). When large companies want to be innovative, they either bring him in to help “teach” them to be innovative (which he does not really think is possible in a large organization), or (more often), they hire him to do the innovative thinking/product development. He can do this: he is the sole owner of his company, and other than keeping employees paid, he has no obligations to outside parties. The company is not publicly traded, it has no shareholders, etc. And failure certainly does not come with a risk of “death”.
His bottom line: the military should not try to be innovative (as a whole). There is too much at risk. Slow, meticulous, planned, consistent. These words mean death in Silicon Valley; but for members of the military, they provide the best chance of long-term survival. There may be places for innovation within the services, but trying to emulate Silicon Valley and other innovation hubs is both impossible and impractical. And just plain not a good idea.
As the Army (and DoD) continues to focus on Silicon Valley, I hope they heed the words of one of the most prolific innovators and inventors of the past 50 years: proceed with caution, and do not risk lives in an attempt to be more like “them” on the West Coast.
Every year I try to go to at least one totally new meeting. One where I am unlikely to see another Beltway Bandit. One not run by AUSA, or NDIA, or the Army itself.
In 2013, one of those meetings was the first conference held by the Defense Entrepreneurs Forum (DEF) in Chicago. DEF is the brainchild of some then-junior officers, representing all 4 services, who were frustrated by the lack of innovation in their organizations. They came together to brainstorm ideas to different Big Problems. From a single weekend-long event, DEF has expanded to include an active social media presence, day long conferences in different locations called DEF[x]s, and recurring (often monthly) local meetings called DEF Agoras, in addition to our annual (fall) national meeting.
This past weekend was the DEF[x]William & Mary. Held at the Mason School of Business, about 80 people – a combination of military (no uniforms allowed), industry, and students – spent the day taking on some Big Problems. The topic of the day was the Third Offset, but with breakout sessions on Force of the Future, the Human Offset, and Civilian Perspectives as options, and Ori Brafman as a keynote speaker, I was looking forward to a day of thinking about the Human Dimension.
Ori started the day as you would expect him to (if you’ve ever heard him speak to a military audience, anyway). There was a lot about the Spider and the Starfish, and resilient organizations. But then he started talking about the military-civilian divide. Now, that’s not an unusual topic, but it did set the tone, at least for me, for the rest of the day.
In Force of the Future, we wound up in break out groups. Each group formed to discuss military recruiting. My group – consisting of 4 active duty officers, 2 students, and myself – focused on college students with STEM degrees. Our task was to develop a profile of what a typical person of this description would look like, so we could figure out how to recruit that person. (Two other groups were talking about retaining drone pilots and mid-career accessions of in-demand specialties like cyber.)
We named our recruit Jill Stephanopoulos – mostly to make everyone write the name “Stephanopoulos”. She’s 20 years old, from Virginia, and a mechanical engineering student at W&M (as it turns out, W&M does not have a mechanical engineering department). Why would Jill want to join the military when she had so many other options?
At this point, the group turned to our two college student members. Why would YOU join the Army? Well, the answer was: they wouldn’t.
This was a little shocking to the usually-uniformed members of our group.
But not to me. I’ve had this conversation too many times in the past year to find it at all surprising.
Less than 1% of the US population serves in the military. Less than 7% of the US population has ever served in the military – and that includes veterans from the draft era. What most people in this country know about the military is what they see on television and in movies. Between Wounded Warrior commercials (IMO, possibly the worst thing for the military recruiting top talent); news stories about PTSD, TBI, homelessness among veterans, and the issues with the Veterans Administration; and movies and television shows including all-too-regular stories about soldiers suffering from PTSD, the average American does not have a favorable impression of the military. Not because of the military itself, but because of the results of serving. They just don’t hear – and therefore don’t know – the positive stories.
Both student members of the group agreed that this is, in fact, a big part of their impression.
No wonder it’s difficult to recruit. Not only does the military pay less than engineering firms, for example, but choosing the military, in their minds, is choosing psychological or neurological damage (or both). And not being able to get help. Not a lot of 22 year olds are going to sign up for that, not when they have so many other options.
This discussion continued at lunch, though with a different group – a DoD civilian, an Army officer who is currently in school full time, an Army general officer, two different students (one majoring in Arabic, the other minoring it), and myself.
Until yesterday, the two students didn’t know you could go into the Army and not start in the infantry or armor. They knew about Defense Language Institute, but thought you had to go into the Army and “do Army stuff” first. What changed?
They met actual members of the military and had conversations with them. They heard about the wide variety of jobs the different individuals had. They learned that the military is more than uniforms, and saluting, and guns, and violence. They experienced the passion. They witnessed the pride for the job. And, yes, they also heard the frustrations, but tempered with an understanding that we all choose to continue to do this work. Because of that passion and pride.
The military wants the top students. To get them, they have to acknowledge the civilian-military divide, they have to fix the public impression of the military, and they have to educate civilians on what it really means to be in the military. This requires regular interaction with the public – not just public affairs officers, and not going where contractors will be. It means going out and talking with students – not just to recruit them. It means having actual conversations and exchange of ideas. It will not be easy. And it won’t always seem like ‘the juice is worth the squeeze’.
But recruiting the best not only means being the best, it means making sure everyone else knows you’re the best.
Next week’s post with either be about Data Analytics, Google, Amazon, and Army Recruiting or USMC Force Development 25.
Coming in May 2016: DEF[x]DC, hosted at Georgetown University.
Every October, the Association of the United States Army (AUSA) holds a conference. It is quite the event. Especially if you like looking at the Big Toys being sold to the Army. The Washington DC Convention Center is filled to the brim with tanks and helicopters and everything else you can think of.
Besides the various materiel, and social events, and athletic events (Army 10 Miler anyone?), there are also Professional Development Opportunities, full of panels on different Army-centric topics, and always with an impressive lineup of speakers. This past year, for the first time, I attended one of the Family Forums.
The panel included Secretary McHugh, just a few weeks before his retirement, GEN Milley, and SMA Dailey. The focus of the panel was Taking Care of Soldiers and Their Families. If you take care of your people, they’ll take care of the mission.
Very few 17-24 year old Americans are eligible to join the military, even using fairly low standards. Obesity and academic performance (graduating from high school and obtaining a minimum score on the ASVAB) are two of the key reasons.
But even once they’re in the Army, many young people do not succeed in boot camp and in their initial years in the Army. I’ve heard that 1/3 of recruits do not complete their initial term. That’s a huge number.
SMA Dailey opined that part of the reason for so many issues in boot camp is that recruits enter the Army having never failed at anything before. Their parents, school systems, even athletic organizations (participation trophies anyone?) protected them so much that many fail for the first time in boot camp. Here’s the thing: boot camp is designed so that everyone will fail. How can they build you up if you they don’t break you down first? (Also, there’s that thing about the enemy not caring if they hurt your feelings.)
So everyone fails at boot camp. Hopefully, everyone also recovers from that failure. That’s what resilience is all about. But many recruits, having had no experience in recovering, don’t know how.
Since October, I’ve been thinking a lot about resilience. Has our society become less resilient? Is the amount of PTSD more “proof” that soldiers today are weaker than soldiers of WWII? Or has it just become more acceptable to admit your weaknesses? Or, maybe, it’s both.
My contention is that there are two forms of non-resilience:
A baby is born and, assuming all else is equal, will hit certain milestones within standard windows. A baby who tries to stand and falls down will, generally, try again. Some will take longer. Some will get frustrated. But they will (again, with all standard caveats), eventually, walk. But as children age, far too often, parents step in and help the child. So the child stops learning how to pick himself up and try again. This is learned non-resilience.
On the other hand, some children – some people – are just softer. They do not have the emotional reserves to try again. This could be because they never had them. This could be because they’ve already reached their emotional limits and have nothing else to give (either until they heal, or ever, depending on the depth of their scars). This is natural non-resilience.
It is pretty important for the Army to distinguish between these groups. But simply conducting resilience tests may not provide the necessary data. As I said: these distinctions are MY idea, and they are totally untested, and I’m unqualified, in a have-the-professional-background-to-prove-it kind of way, to know whether both groups would test the same way.
But I do know this: WMC (see last week’s post) has been correlated with resilience. Because it is not a direct test of resilience, I believe that it will show the individual’s ability to learn to be resilient.
If we know that the person can be resilient, boot camp becomes the perfect place to teach them. Preferably without breaking them.
Tonight is the Superbowl. I assume most people watch it because they want to see the commercials, or because they actually care about who wins. That’s not me. (Partly because I don’t actually watch it.) (Don’t get me wrong – I’m a New Orleans Girl at heart, and want to see Peyton win, but really, if the Saints aren’t playing, I don’t care.) I do think a lot about professional athletics, especially football, but not in the typical “care about sports way”.
OK, after last week’s post, you may be thinking that I focus on the head injuries and future cases of CTE. That’s reasonable, since I am working with a doctor who has healed brain injuries. But that’s not it either.
I think about the difference between #1 and #2. In professional sports, there is very little difference. Every one one field, whatever the sport, is one of the elite in the field. Why does one team win? Why does the other team lose? (Other than that, eventually, one will win and one will lose.) Everyone has good days, everyone has bad days. That’s part of it. The ability to work as a team is another part of it (training, interpersonal issues, etc).
But I think a big part of it is cognitive – and this is never really tested in professional sports. (Yes,th the combines use the Wonderlic. But teams, from what I understand, pretty much ignore the scores. They have not been predictive of a player’s performance.) What kind of cognitive skills does a professional athlete need? He (or she) needs the ability to read the field – the opposing team, their own teammates – and react. Quickly.
What cognitive function does this? Well, possibly several. But one of them is Working Memory Capacity (WMC).
WMC is a cognitive processing capacity system responsible for maintaining focus (attention control) on a given set of items (short-term memory), retrieving relevant information (long-term memory) related to those items, and manipulating the relevant information to apply to those items. It is correlated with intelligence, language comprehension, multitasking, attention control, situational awareness, problem-solving, impulse control and decision-making.
WMC very well may make the difference between #1 and #2 on the sports field.
It also may make an even bigger difference on the battlefield. Where all “players” are not elite, where US troops already have the advantage of training and materiel, using WMC as a characteristic will likely provide those troops an increased advantage over the opposing forces, who have the advantages of knowledge of the terrain and going home to their families each night.
More on WMC in the coming weeks.
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