Readiness is the ability to close with and destroy any enemy, anywhere, anytime. The role of the Sergeant Major of the Army is to ensure readiness. Command Sergeant Major Dan Dailey was the 15th Sergeant Major of the Army and the youngest Soldier to ever hold the position. Today, he is the Vice President of Noncommissioned Officer and Soldier Programs at the Association of the United States Army.
SMA Dailey joined Creator and Host Fran Racioppi to define what it really means for the United States Army to be “ready” to fight and win our nation’s wars. To do so, they went deep on each of the components of readiness, including:
They also cover the important mission of the Association of the United States Army and how as the largest organization supporting our Soldiers their work only continues to grow. Watch, listen or read our conversation from the AUSA headquarters and don’t miss the rest of our AUSA series.
The Jedburgh Podcast is brought to you by University of Health & Performance, providing our Veterans world class education and training as fitness and nutrition entrepreneurs. Follow the Jedburgh Podcast and the Green Beret Foundation on social media. Listen on your favorite podcast platform, read on our website, and watch the full video version on YouTube as we show why America must continue to lead from the front, no matter the challenge.
The opinions presented on the The Jedburgh Podcast and the Jedburgh Media Channel are the opinions of my guests and myself. They do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Green Beret Foundation and the Green Beret Foundation assumes no liability for their accuracy, nor does Green Beret Foundation endorse any political candidate or any political party.
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Sergeant Major Dailey, welcome to The Jedburgh Podcast.
I appreciate it. It’s great to be on the show. It’s great to see you again, too.
It’s been a long time.
It has been a long time.
1-8 Infantry, the Fighting Eagles. Scramblers. Those were the days.
They were. The early days of the war.
2005 or 2006. I think back to those days all the time. What always comes to my mind is formative years. That taught me a lot, not only as a young Lieutenant working for you and the famous, or infamous, Jeff Martindale, who was the battalion commander at the time. I learned so much from you guys and have so much in my personal life and my professional life to thank you for. I just appreciate that when I reached out to you to set this up, within minutes, the response came, “I’m in. Let’s do it.”
Let’s do it. I’m super excited. Good days, though. It seemed like yesterday, we talked about this before the podcast, but it’s been twenty years. That’s a long time. I feel like it was yesterday, and the times when I realize it wasn’t are usually when I’m in the gym.
We’re a little slower now.
It’s great to see you. We had a great team.
They were well-trained.
They were.
I think when I reflect on that unit, the culture, the morale, and the way they conducted themselves and operated, I think about what we’re going to talk about, which is readiness. A unit that was ready.
We were.
I came in, and I was a young Lieutenant, fresh out of Ranger school. Colonel Martindale fired the platoon leader in front of me because he didn’t have his Ranger tab. I’m like, “What happened here?” I don’t think we’re supposed to say that.
I don’t think we’re supposed to say that either, but it’s been twenty years, so I think we can now. The statute of limitations is up on that one. He was a good guy, I’m sure.
He was good. That’s what it was about, are you prepared? We think about what that means now. Where’s the Army now? We’re talking about where you’ve gone. You became the fifteenth Sergeant Major of the Army. You were the youngest Sergeant Major.
Somehow.
At 42 years old. You still look 42, I have to tell you that.
I appreciate that. I’m not feeling 42 anymore.
You had an opportunity to serve at every level, in every role within the mechanized infantry units, almost in every mechanized infantry unit you’ve served as well. You were able to see, over a 30-year career, a massive progression of our Army, our soldiers, and our culture as an organization. You now sit here leading NCO development and the programs that are associated with soldiers at AUSA. First of all, I want to thank AUSA and you for hosting us here in the D.C. headquarters, but it’s a tall task.
I’ll tell you, I was blessed. I joined the Army because I wanted to be a soldier. Nobody joins the Army and they dream of being the Sergeant Major of the Army someday as a young soldier, but the reality of that is far-reaching. I learned one thing along the way, when you have great leaders and you get mentored by some of the best this nation has to offer, and you listen, observe, watch, and learn, the Army is a place that is a land of opportunity. From a young kid from Northeastern Pennsylvania, from a very poor family, I grew up wanting to be a soldier. Next thing you know, you’re leading the most powerful Army in the world.
It happens fast. I figure there’s no better person to talk about readiness with, and I want to throw out some definitions. Congress defines readiness as the ability of military forces to fight and meet the demands of assigned missions. The Army says that readiness is the ability to defeat, deny, or deter hybrid, near-peer threats and meet operational demand requirements. The Army says there are four pillars when we talk about readiness, manning, training, equipping, and leader development. I want to break all those out with you here. Before we get there, I want to start with your definition. When you think about readiness, what does it mean to you?
Individual readiness. We’ll start with that because what’s most important is when a soldier themselves feels capable of accomplishing their mission. That’s easily said. When you build self-confidence down at the individual level, and you’ve got to do collective training, but when soldiers know they’re ready, like what we talked about in our unit, I honestly believe our soldiers knew they were ready.
There’s a lot that goes into that. We’re going to unpack that during this show because it builds the confidence and capability of that individual soldier, which then builds the team, the squad, the platoon, and the company, and it keeps going. It takes hard work, dedication, and precision. We talk about 10,000 hours to become a professional. Imagine how many hours even those young soldiers put in before we went to Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s easy to write on paper and put on a training schedule, but it’s difficult to execute, as we well know.
I remember my first day there, and Colonel Martindale brought me into the office and said, “We’re going to Iraq in five months.” I’m like, “That’s a long time,” thinking in my head. Certainly, I didn’t say it, but he went on to talk about how we had no time and how every minute was going to have to be spent. There couldn’t be any standing around, waiting around. There couldn’t be any delay, “We’ll do it tomorrow.” I remember we would have those times, because you get to do these fun things in the infantry a lot, where it’s like waiting on the word in the afternoon, waiting to be told to go home. We wouldn’t sit in the hallway. We’d be outside. We’d be clearing the barracks with our hands up as well.
Put some engineer tape on the ground, enter-clear building drills. We talk about that all the time, about how much time there is for training. One of the things I used to do as the SMA was go out to PCC every month and talk to the new battalion commanders, brigade commanders, and their sergeant majors. The challenge was, how do we get after the things we need to do to be ready? With all the competing efforts that go on in the Army, all the training requirements that are not necessarily combat-focused, and all the things that we are told to do and direct our subordinate leaders to do.
I used to tell them, describe it like this, if you had one hour before your soldiers went to combat, what would you train on? All you got to do is back it up. If you had 2 or 3 hours and 4, 5, or 6 days, those are the things you’re supposed to be doing in order to make your soldiers mission-capable and ready to fight and win, and to give them the individual courage, confidence, and capability to do the mission.
I’m always reminded of Special Operations Forces truths. We call them values, we call them truths. Number four, because when I left you, that’s where I went. I got to spend the rest of my career in SF. I will say that, nothing against a lot of the SF guys I served with, we had guys in 4th ID, in 1-8, who were equal, if not better, than some. I shouldn’t say that on the Green Beret podcast, but I’ll tell you that.
The truth is, we have phenomenal soldiers everywhere. There are good soldiers throughout our Army. There are some superheroes throughout the Army. We see that. One of the best examples is when you run the Best Warrior Competition. One of the things I got to do when I became an ACOM and the SMA. You’re getting an individual soldier who could be a food specialist or an Army Reserve soldier, one that dominated the competition. Incredible capability. Tactical. You wouldn’t think that, because they only train one weekend a month, but some of these soldiers that we have make you want to come to work every day.
They surprise you. You have to empower them. The Special Operations Forces truth number four says, “Competent SOF, let’s say units, competent units can’t be created after emergencies occur.” When we talk about readiness, why is it so important to be proactive? How do we, as leaders, look down the road? It is because we got to understand the operational environment, but we got to know where it is going to be.
At every level, whether we’re at the strategic level as the SMA, or you’re at a more operational level, maybe you’re at a brigade or a corps, or a tactical level in a platoon or a company. How do you now start to think about, “How do I understand what’s happening today and where my unit needs to be tomorrow?”
This is a great question. One of the things we have done with 100% accuracy since the formation of this great organization we call the U.S. Army is predict where we’re going to fight next, wrong every time. Every single time. That’s what makes it so hard. We grew up in the Army, I shouldn’t say you grew up in the Army. I was halfway through my career when we met, but I grew up in an Army where it was a completely different focus, high-intensity conflict, near-peer adversaries. We switched to counterinsurgency, which changed the entire way we trained the entire Army to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq.
We’re now back to a different set of readiness. We’re back to focusing on near-peer capability again, conventional warfare. We can’t forget the lessons we learned over twenty years of unconventional warfare because, like I said, where are we going to fight next? Who knows? That’s the difficulty with being ready. A lot of the tasks cross lines.
A soldier’s got to know how to shoot the rifle, regardless of what combat situation they’re in. How you fight, how you organize, how you train and equip your men and women to fight in a high-intensity conflict versus unconventional or conventional warfare is completely different. There’s a whole set of tasks. It starts with setting priorities from the top. What’s the focus of the Army? What are we focusing on? What are the strategic capabilities? How does it support the National Defense Strategy?
You used a great example a couple of minutes ago when you talked about the individual soldier and individual readiness, and how you have to have great individuals because great individuals build great teams. I say great teams build great organizations, but it starts with that individual. Manning comes to mind.
One of those first pillars, when we talk about readiness and we think about the future, where we have to be, how we’re going to do it, we have to be staffed. We got to have all of these folks who are ready to go and proficient, which will come to training later. You said you came into the Army, though, because you wanted to be a soldier. What did that mean to you?
I grew up in a family that served. Grandfathers, both in World War II. My father in Vietnam, along with his brother. My oldest brother had served before me. None of them stayed. They’re all, honestly, in the advent of war. World War II, Vietnam. My brother, to get a better chance at life. We grew up in a household that understood service. It wasn’t required. That’s not the way we were taught. It wasn’t, “You’re going to join the Army.”
It was understood and communicated to us at a young age, a very young age, about the value of service to the country and how it can give you a good start in life. I think we lost a little bit of that in America. I think that’s why we’re having some challenges. Those conversations are happening in families that have served. The legacy is there. The high percentage of people who serve now come from families who have served in the past.
As we diminish in those numbers, we’re going to have fewer and fewer people in hometowns in America, at dinner tables, talking about service. I would have never been where I was now had I not had the opportunities to serve in the United States Army and be a soldier. I probably would not have done that had I not been influenced by the influencers in my life. My father, my brother, my grandfather, my coaches, my teachers, all of them were proud to say they served if they had, and all of them were very positive about service in the military.
Do you think we did too good of a job over the last twenty-plus years? I put it that way because you think about World War II, Korea, Vietnam, but you think about 9/11. For us, 9/11 was that galvanizing moment. We look back, and we’ll talk later about what may be on the horizon for us as a country in terms of international terrorism and the threats that we face, but everybody had to come together.
We didn’t get it right a hundred percent of the time, but by and large, our nation has done a pretty damn good job of preventing the next 9/11. We know those were planned, and there were opportunities for people to come after us. We stopped or prevented a lot of those. We now look at something like recruiting, where we don’t have that impetus pushing people to serve. Did we do too good a job?
I thought about this long and hard. I’ve been in a lot of forums, especially in the last couple of years, and I got an invite the other day to talk about service, how we inspire the next generation to serve. We know we want a volunteer army. We know we need a volunteer military. We know that as a nation. You’re exactly right.
There’s a small aspect of this nation where we’ve built a warrior class. Our Army has got so good and so efficient that we’re like a piece of society where it’s understood that, “They’ll take care of it.” There are enough good people there, and they’re so good that we don’t have to broadly communicate that everybody needs to serve.
Back in World War II, like you said, it was probably taboo if you didn’t serve during that time period. The nation had to stop what it was doing. You couldn’t buy a new car. You had to ration items. We haven’t felt that. What we have done is got so good and so proficient, and we’ve trained and educated our soldiers so well that we’ve built this warrior class.
We tend to go in families. The next generation of the same warrior class is inspired by that previous generation. That funnel is getting smaller and smaller. We need to broadly communicate outside of our sphere of influence. We do a good job of talking to ourselves. We’ve got to do a better job of talking to the rest of the youth in America.
Manning and recruiting is the hot topic. You’ve got to have people to be ready, and depending on who you talk to, they’ll give you a different opinion of, has the Army met its numbers? What are the Army numbers? What are the metrics that have gone behind that? I’ve had the opportunity to speak with USASOC, First SFC, and leaders at every level.
There’s a lot of data out there. Here’s the data I’m going to use. I think you’ll appreciate this because it only matters coming out of the mouth of one man, that’s someone who followed you into your role as Sergeant Major of the Army. That’s Mike Weimer, who sits in the seat now. Here’s what Sergeant Major of the Army Mike Weimer told me last year when I talked to him. He said, “The Army is meeting its numbers, but those numbers need to be higher.”
That was creative. That’s good.
What’s your take on that?
There’s no doubt that the Army missed its recruiting goals. That’s not the fault of any leadership. We have phenomenal leaders leading our military, we do. We saw this back when I was Sergeant Major of the Army. We saw the advent of this occurring. I’m not going to say I predicted it, I’m not Nostradamus, but you felt it. You felt the hardships of recruiters when you went out and visited recruiting stations and recruiting brigades.
It was getting tougher. That was from 2015 through 2019 as the war drew down. In the height of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, recruiting was pretty easy. The quality wasn’t always there, but the numbers were. I have a different outlook than most people. I’m probably going to upset some of your readers with what I think is the major cause of our recruiting crisis in America.
There are a lot of factors. I don’t claim to know the one single reason. I’m not saying that. There are a lot of reasons, and every individual human being who makes a choice, whether to serve or not, has their own personal reasons. We have lost the value of service to our nation, not just from a patriotic perspective, but as a way to achieve the American Dream. What’s the American Dream? It’s not much different from when you and I grew up or the generation before me.
The American Dream is to graduate high school or college, get a good job, buy a house, build a family, go to school, raise some kids, hopefully get some grandchildren someday, and give a little bit more to the next generation. I still believe that, now, every American largely believes that. Our job is to provide for our families, be part of this great institution we call America, and make it a little bit better for the next generation.
We’ve lost sight of the fact that military service is an avenue to that dream. Why? We’ve told every young man and woman in America who graduates high school that the only way they can achieve that dream is how? By going to college. I’m not knocking college. I’m educated, just like you. I’m a huge advocate of education. What are they going to college for?
We’re not talking to young men and women about what’s good for them. We’re using one narrative. Some of those young men and women probably are not destined to go to college. We’re not having the other conversations about industry and technical skills, which we’re losing in America, the ability to do all the skills we need to help the industrial base defend this country.
We had a meeting about that, the workers, the skilled laborers, the welders, the pipefitters, the plumbers, the electricians. How about military service? I don’t think we’re having those conversations broadly across America. The standard in most guidance counselors’ offices, which I believe, and I don’t have a whole lot of facts, but I’ve spoken to a lot of folks about it, is when they go in, they say, “What college are you going to go to?”
That’s not bad. Again, I’m not trying to deter people from doing that. When I went to my guidance counselor, he talked about a whole bunch of different things. “You can go to technical school, you can go to a university, or how about military service?” I don’t think we’re having those conversations. I don’t think that American society broadly is viewing us as a means to the dream. I’m living proof right here because I lived it, I’m living the American Dream. My generation behind me, my children, are the fruits of and benefactors of service, my service, just like I was of my grandfather’s, my father’s, and my brother’s.
It’d be interesting to see the data and how it correlates to the reduction in recruiting numbers coming into the military versus those who are going into the trades. It is, because we do a lot of work with the unions in the city, and my day job outside of this show is running a security and operations company in the city. We work a lot with the unions and the trades. You see a significant reduction in folks who want to be a carpenter or a boomer, and exactly what you’re talking about, you don’t see those numbers as high as they used to be.
No. I’ll tell you, the trade industry struggles for employees all across this country. I’ve talked to them. One of the big things that I championed while I was the SMA is I initiated the proposal to create the Credentialing Assistance Bill. It’s the sister to the Tuition Assistance Bill that we’ve had since the Public Act of 1965, the Federal Tuition Assistance Program that allows you to take college courses while you’re on active duty. Up until 2019, you could not use any of that money to go to a trade school. What is 80% of the Army enlisted, and what do they do? Trades.
As a result, their skills were not being recognized or built upon. When they got out of the service, many of those people became air-conditioned techs or mechanics. Our truck drivers could not drive a truck in America, yet they’ve been doing it for 30 years. We weren’t even enabled. With the graces of our elected leaders up in Congress, who passed that bill, we’re now starting to focus on that and it has greatly reduced our unemployment in post-service. They created things like the Army Career Skills Program and SkillBridge, which we’ve talked about earlier.
As a nation, I think we have to start doing our jobs as influencers to the next generation of, “What is it you want to be?” versus directing a path for every single one of them. A singular path won’t work for this nation. It won’t. We send everybody to college. Who’s going to do those jobs? Who’s going to join the military? We do need higher-educated people. My son is literally a rocket scientist, but I knew that the best path for him was not to be a SAR Major of the Army.
He was an academic, and he did very well. I pushed him to higher education. I also told him, “You can take anything you want in college, but Dad’s only paying for engineering.” It is because I wanted value for his service. It is hard work. I wanted him to be able to serve the nation. He wanted to work for NASA, and he wanted to advance us in modern science. That’s what he’s doing. That’s how he serves. It is because I’m also a proponent of the fact that you don’t have to wear a uniform to serve this nation. You just have to serve the nation. Every single American has a responsibility to serve this nation.
There’s DOD data that is fairly recent, in the last couple of months, that says only 23% of the American population is qualified to serve in the military, whether that be physically or cognitively. How do you overcome that?
I was the TRADOC SAR Major. I had recruiting command. I was the SMA. I was intimately involved in these numbers on a day-to-day basis for a period of ten years. When I was Division SAR Major, I was intimate with Iraq and Afghanistan. I started traveling around the country and looking at how many young men and women apply for sports programs and universities across this nation every year. I’m not saying they meet all the military requirements, but physical is one of the main reasons why, and education. They have the education.
They’re obviously physically fit, or they wouldn’t be applying to collegiate sports. The only other thing that would disqualify that population would be a background thing, some indiscipline that they did throughout their lives. You know what the number is? It’s almost more than the requirements of all the services put together. I think we have an entire healthy, educated, young population that can serve. The difference is whether or not they’re motivated.
I was in the institution. I’m not going to challenge that number. That’s not my job. I don’t have the data. I’m not going to broadcast like I know everything, but I think that we need to probably take a look at that from a broader aspect. I think that’s very accurate of the people that we interview for service, who approach a recruiting commander, a recruiting commander or recruiter, or things like that. Again, I’m not going to question the data. I’m not sure it’s as accurate as it possibly could be. I don’t know how you would obtain a very accurate number. That’d be very difficult.
It is because it’s probably based on what you’re saying, of the amount of people who walk into the recruiting station, how many are capable? One in four.
Something like, and don’t quote me, I could be off, but I think it’s something like 15,000 applicants to West Point every year. That’s a large number of people. Think of the service academies and how many people. We now need those people. They need to keep trying to get into that great institution because we need great officers in our Army. I think there’s a lot of young Americans out there that are fully capable to fight and win. They’re just not inspired. They lack the propensity to say it.
If we face this, we’ll call it a crisis, a challenge, whatever you want to term it, we’ve got to overcome it. What’s been discussed a lot, and you’re seeing it in congressional testimony on the Hill right now for cabinet positions, is this conversation of standards. Sergeant Major Weimer talked a lot about the Blue Book and coming back out with the Blue Book, and the fact that we’re going to reinstitute these standards, and that has generated on our YouTube channel a significant amount of discussion around what standards look like in the evolution and the ebb and flow of standards.
You were intimately familiar during your time as the SMA with standards and even looked at some of the standards, for instance, the tattoo policy, which you’re very famous for, and said, “Some of these things don’t make sense.” Other standards have been discussed when we talk about the inclusion of women in combat arms, and people have argued that standards were reduced physically. Some will argue against that. Not saying they were or not, I’m just saying those are the two sides of the conversation. Do you think there’s been a reduction in standards to make up this gap?
Yes. That is a great question. It’s been a very recent discussion. It was a big discussion in testimony. People think of the word standard, and they think it’s a fixed object. They’re not. We raised standards. The Army and the APFT, we raised standards for years because once the service adapts to it and you realize there’s room for improvement, you set a standard, and then you can increase it. Sometimes we have to reduce standards, and because why? The Army is like society, it’s made up of its population. What you have to do is if you create a standard that nobody in America can achieve, it’s not a standard.
I cringe when people say, “You reduce this,” or, “You raise this.” There are many times that we’ve raised standards, raised standards because our soldiers were able to achieve them, they were so good, and they were getting better. Sometimes, I’m very forthright with you, building the ACFT, I was in the design phase when I was a TRADOC SAR Major all the way up until implementation right before I left. We varied the standards during pilot phasing up and down dozens of times, trying to figure out what the standard is.
When we apply this thing that’s going to have a huge effect on a very large population of people, and we want it to be fair and equitable as possible because it’s not perfect. It’s hard to determine the standard. When you do set a standard and then you finally release and tell, now the whole Army does it because you’re gauging it from a very small population when you’re testing it, then you realize, it’s not working. Sometimes you’ve got to go up and down. People look at the word standard and they think, “It’s fixed. Back in 1965, this is what we had to do.”
Tell you what, education, physical fitness, and weapons qual standards have increased exponentially over the last three decades. When I tell veterans from years ago, “The soldiers are not like we were,” I said, “They’re better.” I can show you all the statistics, and we raise standards. When I graduated basic training, I had to graduate basic rifle marksmanship, sit in a foxhole in one position, and shoot at targets. You have to do it in three positions, standing, prone unsupported, and prone supported, and you have advanced marksmanship where you have moving targets. We raised the standard.
You still have to hit so many to get expert, but it’s not the same skill set. We’ve got better. To sit outside the sidelines or on the sidelines and gauge the quarterback is a very easy thing to do. When you’re throwing the ball, it’s a lot harder. We’ve lowered standards, but for the right reason. I don’t think we’ve done it. I don’t think any leadership, in my personal opinion, that’s there now has done it because of any influence. It’s done because when we create a standard and we don’t know how it’s going to affect the entire population of an army, we have to apply it and gauge the outcome.
We have to make decisions as senior leaders on whether or not it’s in the best interest to raise or lower a standard or continue on with what we released. If anybody’s not in and has all that information, then they don’t have a true understanding of what the standard is, because a standard is not a fixed object. A standard is something that has to be evaluated and changed all the time.
Let’s talk about the Army culture. I think it’s an important part of recruiting. When we look at why people join organizations, people join organizations because they see the culture, they see the image, they see the messaging. They want to be a part of that. I always think about, and I’ll give credit to our Marine Corps brothers and sisters out there, I think they do a phenomenal job in recruiting, in their marketing.
They do an awesome job. They’re great at it.
It is because they build leaders from day one. You walk into that recruiting station, you’re a Marine from day one. You look at the posters, and you’re like, “I want to be a Marine.” I sat down with Troy Black, at the time, he was the Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps. I walked out of there, and I’m like, “I’m ready to be a Marine.” It is because it was very inspirational. I think they do a great job with that. The Army has invested a tremendous amount of time in marketing and developing that culture. We’ve seen a lot of ebb and flow in what the Army culture is.
Here’s my perspective, and I want to hear yours. The Army has a mission, to close with and destroy the enemies of our nation. What does that mean? It means that we are warfighters, and the business of warfighting is not a pretty business. It is a difficult business. It is a business that may very well involve you taking the life of someone who’s trying to take yours and possibly giving yours in that mission.
Yet, I do believe that we’ve seen, over the last couple of years, a softer side to that marketing. When we think about that, and we think about, are we getting away from the mission? Are we not presenting the mission? Do we have a populace who’s not inclined to serve? They have a lower propensity to serve. They want to go to college. As you said, they want to go be software engineers and work at Facebook because everyone thinks they can code.
At the end of the day, maybe we don’t need those people. Maybe we need the people who are willing to run down the street towards the sound of gunfire and close with and destroy the enemy. If our messaging was, “This is what the Army does. If you want to do that, we want you now. If you don’t, that’s okay,” would that help?
I don’t know. It is because what we saw was when we did the Who videos for commercials, when we did the shoot them up guys commercials, we constantly reminded the American public that we were at war. That’s a fact of reality. You just said it. The fact is, this nation’s going to have an Army, whether America gives its sons and daughters freely to do it as volunteers or we choose it, it’s going to have an Army. I promise you, we are not going to be without an Army.
America, not the Army, is going to decide how we do that. Not the Army, America. Congress is going to make the decision, obviously, but America is going to decide. Unfortunately, what America wants is something better for their children. They all have their individual views on how they should tell their children to get there. This goes back to the advent of, we’re telling young men and women, the majority of them, almost all of them, when they graduate high school, there’s only one path.
That’s what we’ve got away from. There are many jobs in the Army. You know that. The fact is, someone’s going to have to be at the business end of a rifle and do the nation’s business. You and I lived that business for many years. We need both aspects of that. I think from a marketing perspective, we were successful when we had a blend of that. We’ve got to inspire the next generation of cyber warriors, food mechanics, and all those other things.
We also need to generate the next combat soldier for the defense of this great nation. I think marketing strategy is very difficult in this nation because you also have to gain the attention of a population that is over-inundated with information. When I grew up, there was no such thing as a cell phone. I talk about this all the time. My teacher would say, “You have a homework assignment.” I used to walk to a place called a library and check out a book that was probably written 30 years prior.
This generation woke up, was born, and wakes up every morning with the world’s information in the palm of their hand, available in a microsecond on a handheld computer that has more computing power than the first spaceship that went to the moon. I think what we have to do is we have to gain attention because the conversations at dinner tables are not happening. The marketing strategy that the Army and the other services have now is not just convincing them to join the Army, but gaining their attention, just injecting it.
A wise man once told me, “It’s easier to change a perception than to instill one in a human being.” If you have a negative perception of me, it’s most likely easier for you to have your perception of me change than it is for me to introduce myself to you. That’s what I’m talking about, we have to first instill a perception at a younger age. The influencers in the lives of America, the mothers, the fathers, the coaches, the guidance counselors, the teachers, have to have honest, open, and positive conversations about service.
It’s the service’s job because their job is not to recruit. They, honestly, once somebody is eighteen years old, if they have not been influenced to join the military, it’s pretty difficult to convince somebody. That’s what I’m talking about, it’s easier to change a perception than to instill one, and it’s the Army’s job to attract them to be a viable path to the American dream.
How do we make that happen?
I know the answer. We have to convince the influencers, the mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, teachers, mentors, coaches, all those that were a viable solution to the American dream.
If it were easy, we wouldn’t be having the conversation.
I’ll tell you what, we’re not the only ones that had it. This is going to be a challenge forever. This is not easy business. Running the largest military service was not easy. It’s not a 9:00 to 5:00 job. It is not, by any measure. I know that we do have a good time. You and I served with the best soldiers that this nation has to offer. They are phenomenal, and they’re out there.
Do you think we’re close to having to instill compulsory service? What’s the threshold where you say, like, we’ve gone long enough where the numbers are low? As you said, it’s a non-negotiable that the nation will have an army. Here we go. You guys didn’t want to join, so now you get to.
The word draft is a four-letter word. It’s not. I am a product of Appalachian education. It’s got more than four letters. I know all your readers out there know that, but it’s a four-letter word in society. We don’t want to do that. I’ll go back to what I said. This nation is going to have an army, and the Congress, not the Army, is going to decide how we do it. The American people are. Are we there? No, I don’t think so. I think, along with the things I talked about, there are a lot of other things in America that set the stage for that generation to join. We’re seeing that get better because it also has to do with culture, atmosphere, political, all kinds of things. I don’t think so.
If we go to war, near peer?
Absolutely. I think that America needs to hear that. The Army is to be fighting-ready and win, but to deter a near-peer adversary? What about two near-peer adversaries simultaneously? Of course. We’re going to have to get away from, not get away from, but we’re going to have to instill something.
That’s a good segue into the next topic I want to talk about, which is equipping, which is one of those next pillars. When we talk about readiness, because of force modernization, we were joking that it’s been twenty years. I think back to 2005, and he came into the Army in 2003, and they always talked about force modernization. You went to a USA conference here a couple of months ago, and all you’re talking about is force modernization. It’s the term that never goes away.
When we talk about equipping, it does come down to, what’s the next battlefield, and how well do we understand it? Technology sits at the center of that. Everybody I’ve talked to over the last year or so, as we made our rounds through the senior leadership within the Army, has always brought up technology and the technological advancement and how quickly it’s happening. How does the Army stay on the leading edge of technology and force modernization?
This is a very difficult challenge. There are so many factors, influences. Let’s start with near-peer capabilities. We dominated the battlefield for decades because of the fact that the resources we had and the technology gap that we put between ourselves and our adversaries, that doesn’t exist now. It doesn’t. You can procure commercial off-the-shelf equipment globally that we were the only ones who had in our inventory ten years ago.
The resources and capabilities of our near-peer adversaries are consistent and almost getting close to ours. What they’re spending on it has increased exponentially over the last decade. That’s the first challenge, near-peer capability. The second challenge is the resources. We are not without a limit of money in this nation. I used to remind soldiers all the time, part of our job is to help preserve the great wealth this nation has been plentiful of, which provides us with the great equipment that we have.
I think we have to understand a couple of things. We’ve got to maintain the equipment we have. We have to ask for what we need, not what we want. We saw some of this during Iraq and Afghanistan, a lot of ACOGs laying around that nobody looked through their eyes. We have to build the right equipment and specify the right requirements. There are challenges with all of those, from the individual-level feedback all the way to the strategic level.
We have to balance that huge cost with the needs of this nation. That’s what most service members and soldiers don’t think about. When you get into the echelons of leadership that I was fortunate to be able to sit in, then you start to realize the challenges. When you go up there and say, “I need this. Why can’t you just give me the money? What’s up, man? Just open a checkbook and write me the check,” you sit in there and realize that the net national budget, it’s hard. It’s not an easy thing to do.
What do we need? There’s a lot of input that goes into that. What are our adversaries’ capabilities? What are the resources we have? How do we correctly spend those resources and allocate them across not just the Army but all the services? What’s in the future? That’s the research and development, which takes a lot of money.
There have been, I won’t even use the word dozens, because I am uninformed on it, but probably millions of projects that we start. You have to do this. You have to put money into research and development, and find out if you can create this technology, this dream of the next great weapon system or the next great platform to work off of. It fails.
All those things are very uniquely interrelated and make it so difficult to build modernization. As you said, and we’ve been saying it for how long? We’re still using the platforms that were designed after Vietnam. The Abrams, the Bradley, the Black Hawk, the Cobra, and then the Apache. We’re still using them. They’re not the same, we’ve put a lot of money and effort, but we do have to get to the next generation of equipment to equip. The leadership struggles with all those things, and more, that I talked about. They’re making progress. They are.
There are two points here that you made that I think are important to address in a little bit more detail. Essentially, what you’re talking about is the procurement process. We have a very bureaucratic and lengthy procurement process. How do you rapidly innovate when you have this process that says, like, it’s going to take 5 or 10 years to field the new Black Hawk?
I’m going to be honest with you. I’m not the acquisition expert. I dealt with a little bit of it, sat in the meetings, and smarter people, way smarter than me, I call them the wicked smart people. We still haven’t figured it out. It’s the next administration just said the other day, we’re going to get after this. We’ve been saying that, and I’m not saying they won’t or that anybody in the past has failed. That’s not why I’m here. It’s difficult. It’s hard, but I can tell you the outcome if we don’t. I do know this because I have enough experience. We’ve got to change. We’ve got to fix this.
We have technology now, like you said, under the current process that won’t get into our soldiers’ hands for five years. It’s obsolete. We have done much better. One of the things, unfortunately, that war brings us is changes in those policies, or it gives us exceptions to those, to do rapid fielding equipment initiatives. The equipment we have is phenomenal. When I grew up in the Army, I had two canteen cups, two magazines made out of canvas, and an M16 rifle with no sights, nothing.
When I turned in all the TA-50 I got from all my deployments, I had twelve duffel bags full of stuff from the rapid fielding initiative. Soldiers are well equipped, but are they equipped for the next fight? Where’s that fight going to be? It’s challenging, and it’s expensive, and it’s increasing in cost. These are all things that we have to factor into it, but I don’t know how to get it better. I’m not going to be the one to sit here and act like I know the answer because I don’t, because, like I said, smarter people than me have tried to figure it out.
I know the consequence if we don’t, and it’s going to be expensive. A great man I worked for, General Mark Milley, had an awesome quote that I love. He used to use it on the Hill all the time because this is a very expensive endeavor. He used to say, “The only thing more expensive than fighting a war is losing one.” It’s got a cost. It’s going to come at great cost, but if we don’t do it, the cost will be even greater if we lose the next war.
I’ve been fortunate to sit down with Joseph Votel, former SOCOM commander and STCOM commander, JSOC, you name it, he probably commanded it at some point. Also, with the now incoming national security advisor, Mike Waltz. Both of them talked at length about China. I think we feared Russia in a lot of ways, and the Ukraine war exposed Russia’s, at least their conventional military capability, has been exposed to a significant degree.
We know a lot more about Russia there, but let’s talk about China, China’s investment in things like hypersonic technology for missiles, reports of Chinese investment in Gen Six and Seven fighter jets, their 4-to-1 advantage in deep-water ports, and their ability to produce an aircraft carrier in like five years. It takes us twelve years to produce an aircraft carrier. Are we behind China in innovation and technology? If we are, how do we close the gap?
I’m not privy to the information I had in the past, and much of that would be classified, so I can’t talk about it. I worry about it. I listen to our elected leaders and our leaders in the Pentagon now, and they have concerns in certain areas. Do I think that they are an adversary of great concern? Yeah. Not just militarily, economically, geopolitically, you name it. That’s their desire, to do what we’ve done for the last decade. I do know this, if we don’t invest in modernization, if we don’t start moving that ball forward, we will continue to fall behind. We will.
It’s a fact of life. It’s not something that’s a secret. China has been very public about what they’re trying to do. It’s not like it’s a closed book and we’re trying to figure out and look inside what they’re trying to write down in that book. They’ve been very clear. They’ve been very clear on what their objectives are. That’s the great cost of the defense of this great nation. You either match or exceed their capabilities or fall behind.
It’s that simple. It’s not rocket science in terms of what you have to do to deter, because that’s our first mission. Our first mission as the United States military is to deter and then defeat. Deterrence only works if you’re the bigger guy on the block, if you have the capabilities and the known capabilities to give them the possibility of never wanting to fight America. I’m speaking hypothetically because I don’t have the information these leaders have today, and I’m not privy to it, but there are technologies where we may be falling behind. I also know that we’ve got to invest in the future. If we don’t, we’ll continue to fall behind.
Is it likely, though? Is a peer-to-peer confrontation with China likely? It is because you have camps who are saying we’re going down that road. You say, “What’s the impetus? What’s the match that lights the book?” I think people sometimes struggle to define that. It is because I think we’re not dealing with an irrational other side. The enemy gets a vote, whether you’re a lone terrorist running down the road or you’re Xi Jinping, you get a vote, and you have an input.
They’re not irrational, thinking there are no repercussions for going to war with America because they’re going to kick our ass. They’re having the conversation like, “This is our biggest trade partner. This upsets the global state.” It’s not like a conversation with Iran, President Trump, in the first term, assassinated a leader of Iran, and nothing happened.
That’s a great question. To answer that question, you have to define what war is. Most people look at war as armed conflict between two entities. War is a conflict of wills. We waged war against Russia for decades and never fired a shot at them. That’s what China’s doing now. Not having the military strength to deter their actions allows them to do what they want to do. We have deterred enemies for decades and never fought them because they knew the capabilities of the U.S. military and the consequences if we did act.
If we allow China to continue to do what they’re doing and we don’t meet or exceed their capabilities, they will know that they can continue to do it without friction. That, I think, is more likely than having an armed conflict against China or Russia, or worse, both. I read a great story the other day. Ukraine is not just fighting Russia. They’re fighting China, Iran, and Russia. They’re fighting three countries now.
They had a couple of North Koreans running around there.
The world’s watching what’s going to happen and what we’re going to do. I do believe there are threats in places like Taiwan as a result of us not having competing capabilities to deter war. Is armed conflict, I’ll get back to the question and answer it, likely in the very near future with China? Most likely not, in my opinion. I’m not the big analyzer of the next fights, but my opinion? No.
Is war with them?
Yeah. In a different sense, though. I think it’s ongoing now, to be honest with you. It depends on how you want to define war.
I would argue that, as you’ve defined war here, we would be at war with them.
For sure. They’re very upfront about it.
I agree. They’re not holding it tight. Let’s talk about training, that third pillar. Many believe we’re in this 1939 interwar period, where you had the culmination of World War I, and everything was supposed to be great. You had the rise of Nazi Germany, and all of a sudden, we found ourselves in World War II. Inherent within that period of time, you had these indicators. We’ve seen, over the last couple of years, the FBI director standing up and saying, “All the red lights are blinking,” and we’ve seen our military leaders hit. I’ve had a chance to sit down with so many of our military leaders who will tell you the same thing.
There’s a bunch of red lights.
If you look around the world, we see proxy warfare in the Middle East. We’ve got a land war in Europe as we talk about the Russian invasion into Ukraine. We’ve talked at length about China and their efforts to dominate the Taiwan Strait and the Pacific region. We could even argue that we have a proxy war going on ourselves with the border conflict and South American adversaries like Venezuela, who are trying to wage war on our own soil through some of their actions.
We’re trying to figure out, we have all these various things in the world that are going on, what could be that spark? What does that require of our army? It requires us to train a force that is dynamically capable of combating any one of those threats, from large or small actors, non-state supported to near-peer adversaries. How do you do it?
That’s what people say all the time, is the job of the Sergeant of the Army, Chief of Staff of the Army, Secretary of the Army hard? A little bit, because that’s their job, training and equipping. The army has recognized this, and I do not think we’re in a 1939 state. I came back from the National Training Center. My job now, being with the AUSA, affords me the opportunity to do leader development all over the army for our soldiers. I still get to see firsthand what our soldiers are doing. We’re deploying all over this world. We have soldiers in Europe, in the Pacific, everywhere, out training with our allies, everywhere around the globe. Nobody is putting any brakes on. The rotation cycle is full at both JMTC and all three locations, JRC and NTC. It’s full.
The army is adapting back to what we used to call HIC, high-intensity conflict. We went to COIN, counterinsurgency operations. It’s now LSCO, large-scale combat operations. What I like about what I got briefed on at the National Training Center, which is the army’s largest training center, is that we haven’t lost the aspects of counterinsurgency operations. It is because even if we fight a near-peer adversary, there’s going to be an aspect of counterinsurgency involved in that, or counter-SOF operations. What they have scaled immensely from when I was going to the National Training Center, they’re highly involved now. Remember, you guys didn’t like to sit out in the desert for weeks at a time.
I sat there with you. To go back when you were an operator later on, I never went back. I touched my Bradley and burned my hand.
That’s not the NTC of now. Having been briefed on that, the army is adapting. Again, I opened up with the fact that what we’ve done with 100% certainty for the last 250 years is guess where we’re going to fight, wrong. Every single time. That’s the chance you take. What’s the next conflict? I’ll tell you what, if you can tell me with certainty, I’m sure the Chief of Staff of the Army would listen to you. He would adapt the training to meet the need. You’ve got to make your training broad and flexible.
The one great thing that you and I lived and we know is the resiliency of the American soldier. The fundamental skills that we give him or her, they can adapt those on the battlefield, and they’re the best at it. That’s why we’ve been successful. It is because of the way we lead. We give them the flexibility to be able to do that. The Russian army, when they were training against us during the Cold War, hypothetically, they would look at the way we trained.
They had people in Europe watching us train. They had people all over the world watching us train, and they couldn’t figure out why we weren’t exactly following our doctrine. They couldn’t figure it out. They’re like, “Wait a minute. This is what the book says. Why aren’t they doing this? Why aren’t they doing this?” That’s the beauty that we gave our leaders, the ability to adapt on the battlefield. We did that in Iraq. In every war, there’s a learning curve, but we have quickly adapted in every war, World War I, Vietnam, Korea, World War II, and the recent war too.
I see the army going in the direction in which it thinks it’s going to fight next. That’s the best they can do. You have to pick a situation, train your army for it, and train them broadly enough so that they can adapt to the needs of some of the other things that will probably also spin up, a non-state-supported counterinsurgency or unconventional fight. I think our soldiers, their training methodology, and the leadership in the army now, I think they can accomplish that.
I told you I had a chance to sit down with Sergeant Major Jeremiah Inman. He’s the Sergeant Major.
Good man. Known him for years. Great man.
He was awesome. We sat in the bunker at Point Duha and talked about America’s forward projection of power and the importance of the organization that he’s in charge of, U.S. Army, Europe, Africa. They’ve got 170 countries or something, and there are 70,000 soldiers. It’s crazy when you look at the influence that they have in that command. One of the things that stuck with me from that conversation is he said, “America will never fight it alone again.”
You can’t say again, we’ve never fought alone. Not even during the revolutionary war, not the civil war. The civil war we were held to.
That was his perspective, and he put it in the context of our partners and allies being our strength. The investment that we make in our partners and allies creates that deterrence that you were talking about. Why is interoperability so important when we look at our partners and allies?
Not only important, the challenge. Just like everything else we talked about. Our adversaries, near-peer adversaries, would be less apt to be fearful of us if we did not have our allies. They know when they’re going to fight America, they’re not fighting just America. Why? We’ve never done that. We never will. We can’t. We need them. That’s why it’s so important that we maintain alliances with them. More importantly, when we fight, we have to be able to fight together.
Ten years ago, we had more challenges than we do today. There are still challenges now. We didn’t even have radios that could talk to each other. Our allies would come to Iraq and Afghanistan, what did we do? We issued them our equipment so we could talk to them. That’s what our combatant commanders are out there battling and fixing on a day-to-day basis, strategic capability with our European and Asian allies.
If planes can’t talk to each other, if ships, guns, and missile systems can’t work together, if shooters from one country can’t support the ground elements of another country, it’s all for naught. Not all for naught. There’s still capability there. We have to be able to talk together, not just on radio systems. Indirect fire, direct fire, unmanned aerial space. Do our satellites talk to European satellites? I don’t know. I’m not a satellite guy. I’m not a satellite guy.
If one of ours goes down, can our satellites cross-band into theirs? I don’t know. That’s why it’s so critically important, because if our adversaries know that, there are a lot of airplanes over there in Europe, and they have to deal with ours and theirs. If the credible, capable, technologically advanced systems that we have can’t work together and integrate, it makes their systems more capable. I think that’s more important. We think about being able to communicate, from a language perspective, from a cultural perspective, from a direct communications perspective.
I worry about broadband, satellite communications. Can our missile systems be tracked, guided, and targeted with their guidance? That’s the most important thing. There are layers and layers and layers of complex problems there that our NATO allies and we work through on a daily basis. It’s understood. It’s known. We’ve had challenges in the past. We’ve got better. I’m sure there are a lot more challenges now because when everyone of us develops the next great technology in our countries, the next question should be, how do we integrate it?
How do we integrate? Let’s talk about leader development, the last pillar when we talk about Army readiness.
I love this subject.
I figured you would. I had to make sure, that’s why I saved it for last. The most important job of an NCO is to develop and train their individuals and their teams. Leadership, by and large, I believe it can be taught. There are also some qualities of great leaders that are innate to a person’s character. They are born with some of those.
Development takes patience. It takes time. It takes investment. It takes our ability to, even at times, suffer short-term risk or even loss for long-term success. There are three generations in the Army. There’s a pre-9/11 generation. There’s the 9/11 generation, who saw twenty years of global war on terror and combat operations across the world. You now have a post-9/11 generation of folks.
Which one are we on now?
I don’t even know.
That’s where we’re beyond. Are we still on X?
Generation X, maybe. Is it X? I’m not sure.
I think so.
Many of these folks weren’t even alive on 9/11. To them, that’s Pearl Harbor to us, something that happened in the past, and they see the pictures. The global war on terror generation is retiring. I came in in 2003. I’ve gone to retirement ceremonies now. We’ve got guys who are getting out. They hit their twenty years. They’re going to hit their twenty-five years. That pyramid is tight. As you know, it gets tighter and tighter each year that you get past that 22–25-year mark.
They’re getting out. What does that mean at the most foundational level? There are fewer and fewer combat patches on those shoulders at the company level, now, almost soon, probably into the battalion level. I’ve met majors who never went to combat. That experience at the top now is counterinsurgency. It’s counterterrorism. It’s lower-intensity conflict, sometimes in the SOF units. The consensus is, we’re going to have this LSCO fight, this peer-to-peer fight that we’ve been talking about. Near-peer actors.
That’s the biggest threat.
It is because there are a lot of folks out there talking about the next terrorist attack on America. What does that look like? There are various people on the scale, from the conspiracy theory to an actual real threat, that we could talk about at length. What is the effect of the loss of that experience on the development of the next generation of soldiers?
I came into the Army where there were very senior leaders who were Vietnam vets, battalion, brigade commanders, corps commanders. I remember there was one platoon sergeant who was a Vietnam veteran when I came into the Army because he had gotten out and come back in, and that’s the way they fell. Like, “You guys, you know,” and then you hung around about war, and we did all right. We did all right. There’s something to be said about combat experience. I’m not going to deny that.
You and I both lived it. I was in Desert Storm, and I’ve had five tours of Iraq. There’s something to be said about that. There’s an aspect of knowledge and experience that you can’t replicate until you get there, until you do it. That doesn’t mean you can’t train and develop leaders to prepare, because you and I started off with the fact that we were in a unit where 99% of that unit did not have combat patches. You said we were ready, and we felt it. Remember, I opened with the fact that when the individual soldier feels like they’re ready, that is when you achieve readiness, when they feel like they’re ready.
Leaders can say their units are ready. I’ve heard lots of leaders go, “My unit’s a T.” I look over and go, “Wow.” I honestly feel that every one of the soldiers in our formation in one infantry felt like they were ready. None of them had combat experience, and they performed, I wouldn’t say flawlessly. We all make mistakes. Darn, I was proud. I could cry thinking about it. When you watched them, and you were like, “Man, how did we do that?” We’re going to lose combat experience. There’s nothing we can do about that.
One hundred percent of the people who are in the Army now are going to get out someday. One hundred percent. Unless they cryo-freeze us and then draft us later on, it’s going to happen. It’s just going to happen. It is important, this experience. What we have to do before they leave, and this section is about leader development, is we have to gain the knowledge and experience that they have, and we have to transition it the best we can to the next generation of warfighters. That’s what our Vietnam vets did.
I’ll give you a funny story. We went to Desert Storm. My platoon sergeant was in the latter part of Vietnam. Older guy, got out, came back in, and I was the RTO, PRC-77 with the long whip antenna out in the desert. You know what he kept telling me? “Get away from me. Go over there with the lieutenant.” You know why? It is because they were targeted during Vietnam. I remember it all the time. That’s a little thing, but I never forgot that for my entire life, to make sure that I’m concealed the best I can be in combat. It is because that’s a little thing. He gave us a lot more skills than that. He did. He transferred those skills, and I remembered him.
His funny thing was, he said, “Go there by the lieutenant.”
Let me pick up on that. I think, from a leader development standpoint, they’re going to go. They deserve to retire. They deserve all the benefits they earned. It is knowledge and skill that’s irreplaceable, but it doesn’t mean it’s not transferable. I honestly believe it’s transferable. Not 100%, experience is experience. If we don’t capitalize on that, and by the way, we’re all not dead.
We could still come back and help train. I do that every week here at the Association of the United States Army, go out there and share the experiences I have. That’s what our combat veterans need to do, figure out a way to stay involved with the service. Not necessarily always capitalize on them, the Army needs some help with resourcing, but transfer the skills. Do the best you can to predict where we’re going to fight next.
Ready your soldiers every day for that fight. What does our next generation of soldiers look like?
Better than us. I mean that.
Are they different?
Absolutely.
They are much different.
Not completely. Like I said, they’re fit. Do they come to us fit? Many of them do. Many of them don’t. We’ve always made them the soldiers they are. That’s our job. If we got delivered a perfect product from America, we’d just get rid of basic training. There’s an aspect of that that’s going to have to continue. I’ve got to give you a history lesson. Not a lesson, I don’t want to profess to you that.
I like history.
In the ’30s and ’40s, there was a nationwide phenomenon that the youth of the nation was going to destroy this great country. This is true. Think about this generation. This is not the industrial generation. This is the generation that expanded to the West. They clawed the soil, broke the ground, and built us an agricultural mecca.
They expanded, and they set the foundations very well for the next generation. The nationwide perception was that the generation was going to destroy America. Why? The Roaring Twenties. Jazz music. Smoking. The youth of America was partying. We go into the Great Depression, which the adults at the time had to blame on the youth as a result of the Great Depression.
What did that generation become?
The Greatest Generation. For everybody out there that thinks the next generation is not better than you, or that you are better than them, just look back. The one thing we’ve done since the inception of this great nation is blame the next generation for not being as good as us. One more history lesson on them. There’s a term I’m about to say that was developed during that time period, which is commonly used now, but it has a different meaning than it did then. The generation, the adults of the ’20s and ’30s, had a name for that generation or the people within it. They called them teenagers. Go back in history.
There’s some debate about where this was first used. Some say as early as the 1900s, but most predominantly, it was used in the ’20s and ’30s. There’s debate about when it was first used, but the word teenager was a negative connotation put on the youth of that day by the adults of the time. They became the Greatest Generation. Does this generation have flaws? Of course, it does. Every generation in this country has, because we’re a melting pot of people from all around the world.
We still are now, and we’re seeing that. Don’t doubt that they don’t have capabilities that we don’t. Is their attention span as great as ours? Absolutely not. There’s science that proves this. Their absorption rate? For example, I’ll just throw a number out. Let’s say their attention span is half of ours. Parents out there will probably agree with me, it’s probably more than that. It’s probably a third of our attention span.
I would agree with that.
You know what their absorption rate is?
Probably five times what ours was.
The amount of information they can consume in a single hour is so much more elevated than what we could. Imagine when you went to school, I did that book report. They can flip through more information on their cell phone in a minute than I could spend the whole afternoon at the library. It’s accurate, up to date, and relevance is gauged on who’s viewing it. That’s my long answer to, we’re going to be fine. They’re better than us in different ways, but they’re not bad. Don’t blame the next generation, or you’ll fall victim to the people who called them teenagers in the 1920s and 1930s. You’ll be wrong. I can’t predict the future, but I hope I’m right. That’s what we have to believe.
Our service doesn’t end when we take the uniform off. You’ve transitioned from your role leading our Army. You’ve come over here now to the Association of the U.S. Army and continue to give back, probably close to the same volume as you did when you were in the Army. Talk for a second about the importance of AUSA. It is the largest organization that is supporting our Army, those who serve, those who have served, and those who will serve. They’re doing some important work across a wide range of different programs.
Fran, I have to, first of all, thank you. One, for bringing me on the show. I have great appreciation for you, as I did when you were the young lieutenant. You’re a great person, a great human being, a great soldier. You also gave me what is called in this business, because I have a podcast too, a plug. Thank you. Thanks for the plug, Fran.
I’m going to take it.
You gave me the plug. Door’s open.
What a great organization.
My only regret is that I didn’t know as much as I know about it now, having worked here and seeing all the things it does behind the scenes. I could spend two hours talking about all the great things. I won’t do that now. I will tell you this, without AUSA, our Army would be missing a great component that helps us build the team from outside. We always use the term “from within.” We used to be. As part of history, the Army developed AUSA. Most people don’t know this. It was in the Army for the first six years of its existence.
It was moved out to enable it to be able to free up its job. What I found is I didn’t fall far from the tree. I can’t wear the uniform anymore. It’s tough once you’ve done it as long as I did. God, it feels good to at least have the word Army in my title. I get to do great things for our service members every day. I ran out of jobs. I found the top in the Army, and I wasn’t done being a soldier. I said I wouldn’t talk long about AUSA.
I’d ask you to go check us out. We are your professional organization. It doesn’t let me be a soldier, but it lets me continue to give back to them every single day. It enables me to do things that I would not be able to do had I not taken this job. A great leader told me when I retired, “Don’t be in a rush to get a job because a great job will find you.” I’ll tell you what, it did.
It did because this organization does so much for our soldiers and families without merit, behind the scenes, with great humility. It’s a good organization to be part of. It enables me to get out there and give back to the next generation, communicate those combat skills, conduct leader development, and all kinds of other things. It’s the Soldiers’ Professional Association, and it’s a great organization.
You get the community. That’s what matters. Talk about veteran transition and the difficulty of veteran transition. I think about when I had to leave Fort Carson. You get out, and you turn your ID card into somebody you’ve never met before. They shake your hand, walk you to the door, and say, “Thank you for your service.” You look in the rear-view mirror as you go through the gate and go, “What now? What do I have?” Organizations like AUSA and the Green Beret Foundation create this community for you to find those like-minded folks who are as important to you as your family.
I’ll open up to you. I’ll tell you, I was a Sergeant Major of the Army working in the Pentagon. I had my own access to an airplane, all that stuff. I was scared. From the time I was a child, that’s all I did. I joined the Army when I was sixteen, came in at seventeen, did the delayed entry program, signed up in eleventh grade. I knew I was going to be a soldier. I was a recruiter’s dream. I walked in and said, “Sign me up.” “What’s your grade?” “Got straight A’s. I’m an athlete.” “I’m going home early now,” is what the recruiter said.
I was scared, not because of confidence. I was scared I wasn’t going to be able to find what I had. Not the fear of the unknown, that’s what I dealt with for 30 years. The Army taught me how to be resilient, and I’m prepared for the unknown. What I was scared of was whether I was going to have what I had for the last 30 years. Where was I going to find what I’d been a part of for 30 years? There are not many places. This is one of them. I can tell you that. You can’t fire people from this place, they’ll come back and work for free.
We wouldn’t anyway. We have great people here. That was my biggest fear of leaving. I think a lot of service members and veterans struggle with that. What’s their identity going to be after service? You said it too. You drive away, look in the rear-view mirror, and you’re like, it’s not fear of the unknown. It’s fear like, “Am I ever going to find something like that?” The answer is probably not. There are some great things out there to do after service. Our veterans are doing wonderful things.
Our veterans, through history, have always shown that they will lead in the civilian world and post-service.
A plug for service to moms and dads out there, veterans make more money than their civilian counterparts. Veterans’ children have higher graduation rates. There are so many metrics we don’t talk about regarding how well our veterans do post-service. What we hear about are the bad things that people overemphasize, like PTSD and sexual assault. Those are real issues, but they’re not as big as the bullhorn. If that makes sense to you?
Last question. This is a test question. This is a tough one.
Can I get multiple choice or a lifeline? Can I call my squad leader? I just have to know where I’m standing.
You’re going to leverage your wealth of experience to answer this one with some terms that you’ve probably heard before. We talk about habits, and this matters in leadership because our job as leaders is to set the vision and set the example. Often, our effectiveness as a leader comes down to the standard we hold ourselves to, the habits that we have, and the small things that we do every day in our life to be successful, and it grounds us. In the Army, I’ll tie it back to The Jedburgh Podcast, when they parachuted into occupied France the night before D-Day, they had one mission with very broad guidance.
It was to conduct sabotage and subversion operations against the German reinforcements. Now what? I don’t know. It’s your job to figure it out. What did they have to do? They had to be able to shoot. They had to be able to move. They had to be able to communicate. We talked a lot about this from our days in the infantry, you had to be proficient in those tasks. If you were, then you could focus on the more challenging things that came your way on any given day. What are the three things that you do every day to be successful, as a soldier or a person?
Number one, stay physically fit. Without your health, you’re not a member of the team. I’m very bold and very upfront about that, you’re a hindrance to it. The most important thing every soldier does every day is physical fitness. Number one. It may not be the most important thing you do on any given day, but it is the most important thing you do every day. Number two, does it have to be just individual skills, or can I do broad guidance?
You can do whatever you want. This is your time.
Know what you have to do in your job at the skill level you are, and be good at it. Scared of yourself good. Let me explain. Land navigation, when I was a young squad leader, I had been to Desert Storm and moved at night in the desert. I was scared of navigation. That fear stayed with me the entire time I was a leader. I practiced it all the time because I told myself, “I am not going to fail this when it counts.” You’ve got to be scared good. Scared good, the fear that drives you to do the right thing. That’s number two.
Number three, never forget that you’re just a soldier, no better or worse than any other, just one of them. If your soldiers, when you become a leader, don’t know that, it creates a tremendous barrier of trust. Trust is what we live upon with each other, especially on the battlefield. It’s the golden rule that I have for all leadership. If you get that right, people will follow you. I promise you, people will follow you to the ends of the earth and give their lives prematurely, as you discussed in the beginning, at will.
Isn’t that weird? For somebody I didn’t grow up with, from a different walk of life, who was someday put in charge of me, if I trust you, I will give my life prematurely for you and the cause we’re fighting for. You get number three right, and they will do it. We saw it. It’s incredible. I don’t know why, but it works. That’s my three pieces of advice.
Be physically fit. Be scared good at your job. Never forget you’re just a soldier. Love it.
It’s all I got.
That’s great. Sergeant Major, you said in your appointment speech as the Sergeant Major of the Army that all you ever wanted was to be a soldier and be the best that you could be. I’ll tell you that you left the Army in a better place than it was before you got there. You left many of us in a better place than we were when we came under your command. I know that I speak on behalf of not only myself, but 1-8 Infantry, who served with you there, and all the units that you served in across the Army on a much broader level. Thank you so much for everything you’ve done. Thanks for joining me.
Fran, thanks for your incredible service, and thank you for continuing to inspire the next generation that wants to be guys like you.
Thank you. We have work to do.
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