Empathy is the Coin of the Realm: A Conversation with Benjamin Spencer

From wrenches to Washington, we trace a general's journey through service, strategy, and change. Today's guest is retired U.S. Air Force Brigadier General Benjamin Spencer who shares lessons in leadership from the flight line to the Pentagon. We hear about the processes, practices, and people essential to aerospace equipment sustainment and operations in the U.S. Air Force. Retired Brigadier General Spencer leads us through his experiences as a young officer learning from Senior Airmen to being the primary liaison of the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force with the U.S. House of Representatives.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics. Supply chains and support personnel are critical to an organization's success, especially a modern military. The aircraft maintenance specialty in the U.S. Air Force leads, trains, and equips personnel supporting aerospace equipment, sustainment, and operations. This occurs within an environment of physical challenges, outdated equipment, personnel issues, and an increasingly uncertain geopolitical atmosphere. Welcome to Brungart Law is Lang At, where we provide a little extra perspective through conversations. I'm Maurice Brungart, your host. I enjoy engaging with experienced, knowledgeable, and passionate individuals for the opportunity it affords to enrich understanding of the world through their experiences. The more we learn, the more likely we can become better versions of ourselves, guide others towards the same, and have a little fun along the way. Today's guest is retired U.S. Air Force Brigadier General Benjamin Spencer. Earning his commission through Air Force Training School, he was a career aircraft maintenance officer. And his last assignment, he was Chief House Liaison Office, Legislative Liaison, Office Secretary of the Air Force. Welcome to the program, sir.

SPEAKER_01: 1:09

Thank you. It's great to be here.

SPEAKER_00: 1:11

Go ahead and tell us what experiences led you through a commission in the officer training school?

SPEAKER_01: 1:19

So I'll start off early. I was born in Fort Gordon in Augusta, Georgia. So my mom was uh in the Army Nursing Corps. So she was in the military herself uh towards the uh end the final years of the Vietnam War. Um after she departed uh the Army, her and my dad moved back to Western Pennsylvania, which is where they were from. Uh so uh my dad grew up in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, and uh my mom grew up in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and that's where we resettled in 1975, and I lived there through uh 1989 until I graduated uh high school, and then my parents moved moved away down to South Carolina. Um so I had significant military background in my family. I had a grandfather in World War I, I had a grandfather in World War II, my great-great-grandfather uh fought for the Union uh in the Civil War. He actually uh grew up in Johnstown himself, so my mom's family in Johnstown went back to pre-Civil War. So I always I already had a bias, I think, for military service. Um that said, when I graduated uh college in 1993 with a degree in mechanical engineering, I came out, was interviewing, and I just wasn't finding anything that excited me. I was I was entry-level, uh, the country was coming out of the Bush recession, Clinton had been elected president, and I just didn't like what I was seeing. And so one day my mother said, Ben, have you ever thought about being an officer in the military? And I hadn't really thought about it, to be honest with you. Uh she said, Well, you should you should think about it. You know, I was I was back at home after college, you know, every every college graduate's dream to be back at home. Um so I did think about it. And my mom, as I told you, she's an army, uh, was in the army. She said, and if you're thinking about it, you probably should think about the Air Force. Um and then I had an uncle who's a retired Navy officer, he talked to me as well. He said, Ben, I think it's a great idea, and by the way, you should stop at the Air Force first. So literally one day in 1994, I drove down to the Air Force Recruiting Center in North Charleston, uh, South Carolina, because that's where my parents were living at the time, and asked, What do I need to do to become an officer in the Air Force? And uh seven months later I was in officer training school in Montgomery, Alabama. Um, so you know, there's some people out there who say, you know, when I was a kid, I went to an air show and saw an F-15 silhouetted against the sky, and but I determined I wanted to be in the Air Force when I grew up. That was not me. I went into the Air Force for a job. I went into the Air Force for a job and some experience, fully intended to stay four years, get my uh GI Bill, come back out, get a master's degree, and go back to the to the private sector. Um that four years became four more years, became four more years, the end of the day became 29 years. Um I tell folks I I came into the military for a job, but I stayed because I loved it. And I think that's what a lot of our airmen do. A lot of our airmen come in, they have a variety of reasons they come in, but they're only gonna stay if they really like what they're doing. Um so uh coming out of uh officer training school, I assumed with my engineering degree they would make me an engineer in the Air Force. And that's what I wanted to do. And they came to me and said, we have a job for you, it's called aircraft maintenance and munitions. Um, and I knew nothing about aircraft. I knew nothing about munitions, but apparently the Air Force did like to get people with heavy technical background into aircraft maintenance because I think they believe, and it's true, you can better spin up on aircraft systems, hydraulics, newlics, um, flight controls, because you basically understand the basic science, right? So that was a surprise. I didn't want to go into aircraft maintenance munitions, uh, but I did, and it's again probably one of the best things that uh that happened to me because aircraft maintenance gives you the opportunity to lead very young. So, as a second lieutenant, first assignment, my very first flight was 55 people. I would command five flights, the largest flight would be 200, I command a squadron of 600 people, I commanded two groups, one of 1,000, one of 2,000 people, and then I commanded an Air Force base. And what I found was after those first couple flight command jobs, um, that I really liked the leadership aspect of it. I I didn't know that's what I would be interested in. I didn't know that I would like that, but I I loved the leadership opportunities that that aircraft maintenance gave me. Um and again, probably one of the reasons that I stayed is because I loved what I was doing so much. I loved uh working with and and serving airmen.

SPEAKER_00: 6:13

Speaking of the leadership aspect and looking back to that time in your first assignment, young second lieutenant, surrounded by individuals that obviously and I'm sure had decades of experience. How did you feel or think at that time in the sense of how am I leading or managing, you know, these people, these programs, when I actually know very little?

SPEAKER_01: 6:38

That was intimidating, and I think that's the biggest challenge. So I go into my first flight, and there is a senior master sergeant running this fabrication flight. He's probably got 15, 16 years of experience, right? But then they put me in there as a brand new second lieutenant, and I'm in charge. I'm the commissioned officer, right? But I'm literally surrounded by 55 maintainers, all of whom who have been in the service longer than I have, and every single one of them knows more in some way about aircraft maintenance than I do, right? So what I determined over those first two, probably two assignments, the first five uh flight commands, is it's a balance of leading and learning, right? So when you're a young officer in a flight, you can't escape the fact that you're the leader. You are the leader, you can't just defer to the senior NCOs all the decisions. That there's a leadership leadership aspect there, and you are expected to lead. Um, but you also, I think, have to take time to learn. So some days I would go in and maybe it was 80% leadership, 20% learning. Some days I go in and it was all day learning, right? Just trying to pick pick up what I needed to pick up to become more uh technically fluent in aircraft maintenance, but the same time making sure I was stepping up to make the decisions and represent the flight as a leader should. Um what I finally came to, and probably my second assignment when I went to I went to a fighter base and had never been on aircraft and uh on fighter aircraft before, is you have to find, I tried to find a way to add value. Like, where can I, what can I do to make the life of the airman, even the senior ranking airman, easier day in and day out. And for instance, um I liked writing in college. Uh I got good grades in writing in college. And just like every other business, we have plenty of, we we write awards and decorations, quarterly awards, annual awards. We each airman gets an annual performance report. And I found that I was very good at putting those together, editing them. So at some point I would go to the senior NCO and say, Hey, let me take this from you. I I will do it. I will review the metals packages, I will review that, and that'll free you up, right? So he appreciated that, right? I was I was adding value, but man, I was learning at the same time. I was learning how to write for military. I was learning what a good um fitness report looks like for an airman. Uh, same thing when I went to my my second assignment, which is on the flight line. Um I found ways to add value there as well. Um, we do a lot of training in the Air Force, and there were lots of meetings on training and lots of meetings on our on our metrics. And I went to the senior master sergeant uh that I was paired with, and I said, let me take that. Let me let I will take those. I'm the face, let me go do that. But to do it effectively, I had to learn it. I had to really delve into our metrics. I really had to learn how we train airmen, become three levels and five levels and seven levels. Umbody likes to clear impoundments on aircraft because you gotta take the forms up to the colonel, the maintenance group commander, and you gotta explain to him what you did to an aircraft to clear the impoundment, right? None of the senior NCOs liked doing it. And it pulled them off the flight line, too. So I jumped in and said, How about I do that, right? Um, and they were glad to, they were glad to give me that responsibility. I took it, but then I learned. I learned what aircraft forms should look like. I I learned systems, I learned, you know, depending on what was the aircraft was impounded for, what we should be doing to clear the impoundment. So long answer to your question, um, it was intimidating, but I two things. One, divide up your time between leading and learning as a young officer, and find ways to add value to make those that you lead make their lives a little easier.

SPEAKER_00: 10:40

Learning and adding value, uh digging a little deeper, can you recall if there was any particular aspect or if it was just an overall approach, how the officer training school prepared you, uh a young second lieutenant, to be able to lead without having the experience? Like, did they how what did they do that put you in a position you felt confident? I may not know as much as these individuals that actually are my subordinates, but they are more experienced than me. But I know how to make the decisions. What do you recall the officer training school did well to prep you for that?

SPEAKER_01: 11:25

I think so. When I was at officer training school, they often often referenced OTS as a leadership laboratory, right? It's uh it's where they could evaluate the type of leader you are, it's where you could be put in high stress situations and make mistakes, and those mistakes don't uh bend metal or kill people. Uh so I think you know, putting you in those situations, constantly evaluating your decision making, your judgment, your leadership skills, identifying where you're weak, identifying where you're strong. I think for me, the most critical thing it gave me was confidence. You know, I I made it through that training. There's some really, really sharp men and women going through officer training school. Um it gave me the confidence that I had what it took to be an effective leader. Um but again, it doesn't, once you get out into the field, you're it's it's it's uh you're you're somewhat on your own, right? Uh especially in an aircraft maintenance environment, there aren't a lot of a lot of other officers. So you're really, really leaning on your senior uh NCOs. Um so yeah, I I just think I just think they build they they build confidence. They build confidence that you can do the task. However, you know, one of the most important things I look for in a leader, I think is is judgment, right? You can't predict every situation a leader will face. What you teach them to do is ask the right questions, gather the right information, look for help, talk to the right people, make an informed decision, and and then follow it up. That that I think is what uh OTS really tries to imbue in there, the airmen, the officers that they push into the force is the confidence and the judgment and decision-making skills that will make you a success whether you're an engineer, an aircraft maintenance officer, or an F-16 fighter pilot.

SPEAKER_00: 13:43

Within your first couple of assignments, uh who are your early mentors that you looked towards or role models uh that you derived um additional confidence from that enabled you to become more effective, not only as a leader of individuals, but a manager of programs?

SPEAKER_01: 14:04

So uh it's it was mainly the first two assignments, it was mainly senior NCOs, right? And and really it was my second assignment, which was at Shaw Air Force Base, um, on F-16 fighter aircraft. I spent, uh had had the luxury, because it doesn't happen that often, spending three years in in one organization. It was the 77th Fighter Squadron. Um and I was blessed with some amazing senior NCOs in that organization. Um I think they saw in me someone who was willing to work hard, someone who came to work every day to try to make the lives of airmen better, but they also saw me someone who was imperfect. Uh uh, but it to their credit, they let me make decisions. Um when I fell down, they they picked me back up and dusted me back off and let me have a run at it again, right? So, retired chief uh Booker Woods, we called him Woody Woods, he was there during my whole three years. He he was an amazing uh senior NCO. And what I took from him was he he had a passion for what he did, and he was demanding, right? He was he was demanding uh while you know during duty hours, he would not hesitate to call someone out and say, that's not right. You didn't do this right, you need to do this better. And sometimes I'd be in the office with him, and I would think, wow, that was that was pretty tough. And Woody Woods, Chief Woods would look at me and say, sir, it's it's just business. Because then later that afternoon we'd have a going away for somebody at the club, and the same guy that Chief Woods uh had a you know uh animated discussion with three hours earlier, he's at the bar drinking with them at six o'clock at night at a going away. He he didn't he didn't let you know leadership and telling people they needed here cloud the personal relationships, right? Um so I took that from Chief Woods. Um also senior master sergeant, now retired Stewart, Stu Stewart, he was my lead production superintendent during that time. And he had an amazing memory and an eye for detail that I don't think I ever saw matched. I mean, he was responsible for two dozen F-16s out there on the flight line. He ran the production effort and he was meticulous. And I learned the value of attention to detail from Stu Stewart. And if if you didn't have it in fighter maintenance, because it's it's single seat, single engine, right? There's not a lot of room for mistakes in F-16 aircraft maintenance. If you didn't have it, you better get it quick. Um, and so he he taught me how to be meticulous. He would ask me detailed questions that sometimes he knew I didn't have the answers to, which was him saying, Come back next time, sir, and be a little better, uh, which was fantastic. And to this day, I'm still friends with both. I still text with them. They came to my promotion ceremony here in DC, my last promotion ceremony to one star and my retirement. Um, and there was an officer there as well, that was uh Socrates Green. He was uh at the time, he was my first squadron commander there. He was a major at the time, he retired as a colonel. And Sock Green invested in me. He cared. He would he would pull me in, he would talk to me, he would put me in, he mentor me, he put me in for awards. That's really, and I started winning awards and started getting notice mainly because Sock Green kind of pushed me to the to the front of the stage, right? And he demanded a lot of me. But it was that mentoring from Sock Green when I was at Charter Force Base that I came, I thought, man, I'm I'm actually not too bad at this. You know, maybe I want to stay past four years or five years or six years, right? He he gave me confidence and he he trusted me, right? He when you trust someone, you take a risk, right? Uh he allowed me to go out and break some eggs here and there and then come back and say, Ben, what did you learn? Uh he but he kept me from making the big mistakes as a leader does. Um and he continued to be a mentor to me to this day. I've kept him to I actually worked for him two more times. He uh when he was a maintenance group commander, he hired me to be one of his squadron commanders. And when he was at the Pentagon, uh he pulled, as a colonel, he pulled me up to work for him in the Pentagon. So I actually worked for Sock Green three three different times. Uh I was I joked at my retirement ceremony, he kept bringing me back because I hadn't quite got it right the time before, so he kept bringing me back to give me another chance to get it right. Um, but Sock was an amazing mentor, and and it's simply because he took he took interest in me. He took interest in me, he cared enough to take the time to mentor. And you would think that's common, but it's actually I I find it's relatively uncommon out there. Um and that's probably not just in the military, but it's probably everywhere. Uh building trust and taking risk is not easy. Uh but Soccerine did that for me, he he changed my life.

SPEAKER_00: 19:17

Uh your comment regarding Woods and how he wouldn't hesitate to call people out. What's a recommendation you would give to someone when they are the subordinate? How best to inform the leadership when the leadership is wrong?

SPEAKER_01: 19:35

That is all that's that's a great question, right? So number one, you know, there's the mechanics of it, right? How you do it. You know, you do it respectfully, and you typically do it one-on-one. Uh that's always the best way uh to do it. To go in and close the door and say, hey, boss, you said this at the meeting. I don't think this is the way to go. And here's here's why I think it's not the way to go, right? And have a discussion. Um, a lot of leaders don't like being put on the spot, you know, in the middle of a meeting and getting into a back and forth with a subordinate. It depends on the individual's leadership style, right? I I tried to encourage that as a leader. I tried to, especially with bad news, I used to joke, and you've probably heard this before, I didn't bring it, I didn't invent it, but bad news, unlike fine wine, does not get better with time. So if there's something bad, let me know. And I used to tell my senior NCOs, if if I'm standing on the tracks and the train is bearing down on me, somebody please pull me out of the way. Don't let me stand there and argue while the train is bearing down on me, right? Um, so yeah, for a subordinate who wants to give uh dissent to a senior leader, I think you gotta know your senior lead, the leader. I think you gotta know your boss and how your boss best uh you know processes dissent, because every leader is different. But I think as a subordinate, you know, and as a good follower, uh it is incumbent upon you to tell your boss when if you think he or she has aired or you think the organization uh is is headed in the wrong direction.

SPEAKER_00: 21:18

Shifting slightly because this you know how one approaches the boss, this is a decision. And the overall discussion here centers around decision making and kind of setting the tone for a conversation with your experience. How would you define a productive decision making?

SPEAKER_01: 21:39

So I I would say you know, productive decision making is is decision making that gets you uh the results that you desire, right? Sometimes I think we can be trapped by process. Like what's the process that gets me to this decision? And if I check every box in the process, that that's a win, right? Well, it may be if you've got a good process, but it's only a win if that process is getting you the results that you want. I have seen leaders make decisions and go through the process and continually not get the results they want, even though they checked all the boxes in their decision-making process, right? So I think when you're looking at how productive and effective your decision making is, you have to look at the results that your decisions are generating. Are you getting good results? Are you getting bad results? That I think was the value. I mentioned my second assignment at Shaw where I had the privilege of being in the same unit for three years. So I could actually make decisions about big things, and I was around long enough to see them play out over two or three years to see if they were actually good decisions, right? A lot of them were, some of them weren't. Some of them, I'm like, hmm, if I had to do that over again, I I I wouldn't do that, right? But but that time I got to spend um in that squadron let me know whether or not I was hitting uh the results that I wanted. One other thing I'll bring up too is decisions have you you've got to be you've got to be decisive, right? Um and there has to be some sort of tempo to your decisions. You can't let your decision-making process play out overly long, right? At some point, you have to determine for a specific issue how much information do I need to make a good decision? What's that level? Is it 50% of all possible information? Is it 90% of all possible information? At what level are you comfortable making a decision? Make the decision, move on. Um, if you've made a poor decision, you follow up and you adjust fire and you come back and you fix it. You you we you can't be slowed down or bogged down by the fear of making a bad decision or the desire to have that one small bit more information that may get you the perfect decision, right? So if it's a decision about an administrative issue, maybe you need 50 or 60 percent. And with your experience, okay, I've got enough. We we can move forward. Or if it's about, you know, whether or not you're gonna serve an article 15 or prefer charges on an airman, maybe you might want to take a little longer on that, right? Maybe you might want to, maybe you might need 85, 90 percent, right, of that information because of the importance of the decision. But even then, you gotta make your decision and move on. I found that's nothing's more frustrating to airmen than sitting waiting for a leader to decide to do something. I think they'd much rather get that decision. And if it's wrong, again, you adjust fire, come back and you fix it and move on. But at least you're moving.

SPEAKER_00: 24:58

So adjusting fire also requires that the decision maker be open to the fact they were wrong.

SPEAKER_01: 25:05

Correct. Yes. And I would argue they have to get out, they have like go and see, right? They have to get out to see firsthand the impacts that their decisions are having. Um, sometimes as you gain leadership and responsibility, and this it's it's this way everywhere, um, you get these filters that that start to build up around you. And these filters often filter out maybe bad news, news you may not like, right? News maybe that your decision wasn't so great. Uh those filter, and I think there are those people around you, those processes, I think they're doing it for the good of the organization, so that bad news doesn't get to you, but actually harms uh the organization. And a way around that is is to go out and see what what what your decisions have wrought, right? If you make a decision on dorms, airmen dorms, start popping into the dorms every so often, unannounced, to see, hey, is is what we're doing here working or is it not working? There it is, there is immense value in actively seeking feedback, putting your boots on the ground with the airmen, with those you lead, and analyzing the results that your decisions are having on those people.

SPEAKER_00: 26:26

You've commanded at multiple levels from squadrons to wings to major sustainment centers. What are some of the key transitions in mindset as responsibilities scale?

SPEAKER_01: 26:38

So as you gain rank, as you gain more responsibility, there's a tendency to migrate to doing things that you're comfortable doing. So if you're a really, really good squadron commander and the Air Force says, Man, you're a great squadron commander, we're gonna make you a group commander. And you have five or six squadrons underneath you. You were promoted to group commander because you're a really good squadron commander. Those first couple months as a group command, I think you still want to be a squadron commander, right? You're still making decisions for squadron commanders because that's what you're really good at, right? The Air Force told you you're really good at it. And it's really tough to pull back and be a commander of commanders, right? And give your um your team, I always say vision, vector, and tempo, right? Vision, what's your broad vision, vector? This is about the direction we're headed, and tempo, how quickly do you want to get there? Um, and then let your squadron commanders lead, monitor them, mentor them. Some will head off in the direction that you want, and you can kind of leave those folks alone. Some may get detoured, you gotta push them back in the right direction. Um, but you gotta let them do their job, and you have to do yours. And I've heard multiple people, at least in my Air Force career, say, do what only you can do. So, as a wing commander, what is it only I could do? It was only me typically was out, you know, engaging with civic leaders downtown. It was me who would greet political leaders when they came to the base. It was me who would engage, you know, uh higher echelons of leadership advocating for my airmen. That's the stuff that only I could do. And I needed to focus on what only I could do. And then my group commanders focus on what only they can do, squadron commanders, etc.

SPEAKER_00: 28:36

That statement resonates uh uh quite a bit with me for two reasons. One, in my previous career with the government, we talked a lot about what was within our span of control and our sphere of influence. Secondly, uh with one of my previous guests, uh Ilka Rodriguez, uh, she was heavily involved as a senior intelligence officer in human capital development. And she learned uh in terms of leadership to lead from where you sit. So, what you're saying, you know, do only what you can do, uh to me overlaps with uh both of that. Um as vice commander of the Air Force Sustainment Center, how did you approach managing billions of dollars in assets and thousands of personnel across multiple locations?

SPEAKER_01: 29:26

So, yeah, the Air Force Sustainment Center is a massive logistics and sustainment enterprise. It's run by a three-star, and he has a vice commander who was me at the time. I was a colonel, and uh he also has a um a civil servant uh vice as well. Uh so it's uh it's like a three headed leadership team. Um so I I think in an organization that big, number one, you have to understand what your boss wants. Like I worked for General Kirk. What direction did he want to take the organization? Because if he's not there, if he's not sitting in a meeting, I have to be able to reflect the direction he wants to take the organization. I have to reflect the values that he holds dear because he because he is the commander. So understanding what my boss wanted out of me and what my boss, the direction my boss was taking the organization was important because it makes you a little more efficient. Fewer missteps. I don't want to make decisions that my boss has to correct because I wasn't thinking the way he needed me to think. I think the other issue too is you have to understand how organizations that big work, right? And organization that big can be cumbersome, right? But you have to understand, for all intents and purposes, who does what. Where do you go with certain questions? Where do you go to get things done? What's the most efficient way to take the decision is three-star made and translate it into action at the Oklahoma City Air Logistics Complex? So you have to understand how the organization functions. And that doesn't mean that you can't find ways to make it more effective and efficient and streamlined. But when you get up to that level of leadership, you've got to have, again, an understanding of what the direction your boss is going. You have to have a thorough understanding of how the organization works. And then I would say one more thing is as you as you gain in leadership experience and expertise, obviously you learn. I learned as a leader. I wasn't the same leader as a wing commander as I was as a squadron commander, right? I learned. I learned how to be a better leader. And one of the things that I learned was get ahead and stay ahead, right? So in large organizations, we have an immense amount of responsibility. You need to have the kind the ability to look out and anticipate what's going to happen in your organization and stay ahead of where you think the organization is going. Because in an organization of 40,000 personnel or in a base of 2,000 personnel, if you get behind that decision-making process, if the organization gets out in front of you and it's kind of dragging you along and you're behind in your decision making, that's not a place you want to be. So as you grow and mature as a leader and you go into new leadership opportunities, you already you're already starting to think, how do I want to how do I want to lead this organization? What does this organization need from me? What do I think we're going to be at six six months from now, one year from now, where do I think we're going to be? And then start making anticipatory decisions, start giving direction that gets you there, and just try to stay ahead.

SPEAKER_00: 32:50

What would you do or how would you approach your actions when perhaps, because I'm sure it's happened over your career at least once, when your immediate leader was not communicating a clear path of where he or she wanted to move uh on? What would you default to in that case? Now you're dealing with someone who that you report to and you're supposed to put into uh effect their uh preferences, but if they're not communicating a clear vision or mission, then what would you default to in the interim to make up for that?

SPEAKER_01: 33:40

So I would make sure that at least I articulated a clear vision vector and tempo. Um so I have had this experience before, and there are ways to draw your boss out as far as securing from him or her the vector or guidance that you want. One way to do it is to set your own. Set your own path and then go back to your boss and say, boss, here's what I'm doing. Do you it does do you like what I'm doing? And if the boss says, Yeah, Ben, I like what you're doing, then I'm just gonna go do more of it, right? If he says, no, that's not what I'm looking for, then that's the opportunity to say, Well, what are you looking for, boss? Because here's how I'm thinking I'm gonna lead my organization. But if you tell me this isn't quite what you're thinking, then kind of tell me what you're thinking, right? The action you take as a subordinate leader in that situation will maybe pull that senior leader out because they can see you moving forward. And that senior leader at that point can tell you, even if they're not gonna articulate a clear vision, they can tell you if they like what you're doing or they don't like what you're doing.

SPEAKER_00: 34:48

Uh what cultural or institutional barriers uh challenge innovation and efficiency in large organizations like the Air Force Sustainment Center?

SPEAKER_01: 34:59

I think I think we have the same challenges in the Air Force that the private sector has, right? The larger an organization gets, um the less flat it becomes, right? The more unwieldy it becomes, the less agile it becomes, uh, the longer it takes to move information around an organization, the longer it takes to make decisions. All that I think is symptomatic of leading large organizations, and it's the same in the Air Force. Um I would say the way that you address that, the way I attempt to address that, because I I think it's tough to get around that, right? Um, it's just a large organization is just gonna be probably a little more difficult to manage. You're gonna have more levels of management, you're gonna have more subordinate leaders. Um but I I always try to address that through communication. Um, you have to be able to communicate effectively down to the lowest levels of your organization. And how do you do that? Depends on your organization, right? Uh if you're in the Air Force, for instance, and you're a wing commander now and you're putting out stuff on Facebook. How many 18-year-olds are on Facebook now? Maybe you need to be on Instagram. I mean, maybe you need to be on Twitter, but you have to understand how you reach those folks and then try to communicate relentlessly and plan to communicate. So every time, and I kind of evolved into this, especially as I got to be an installation commander at Grand Forks Air Force Base. Every time we talked about initiative, I would say, got it. What's our plan to communicate this? We we're gonna shut down the one gate for inspections all day on Friday. Great. And you guys have a great security plan. I understand what you're doing. How are we communicating this? How are we getting this down? Um, we got a construction project that's gonna start on the runway in two months. Got it. How are we communicating to our airmen what we're doing? Right? Hey, we just secured funding for renovation of a dorm. That's fantastic. Our airmen need to know we care about them enough to fight for funding to renovate their dorms. How are we communicating that down to our airmen, right? Because bad news spreads like wildfire, good news has problems getting out of bed in the morning, right? So you have to find ways to communicate, and the best and effective, most effective means of communication will depend on the organization that you're in. Um that's how we attacked it. That's how I, you know, when I got to really large organizations, I found that the way around some of the inherent uh challenges of of managing large organizations with relentless communication.

SPEAKER_00: 37:55

How do you motivate teams to adapt to change without losing focus on the mission?

SPEAKER_01: 38:00

So that's that sounds like you know, that sounds like change management, right? That's that's that's what we're that's what we're talking about. How do you convince airmen that in addition to doing everything that they need to do in a given day, um, that we're also looking to, in parallel, change the way that they do things, right? Uh there's only so much time in in one day. So um I I would tell you that the way I approached it was adapting was part of mission readiness. If you did not adapt to change, our mission readiness would suffer. The only thing, uh we used to joke, the only thing that's consistent in our Air Force is change, right? We are we are constantly, it's there's constant change. And sometimes it's it's driven by technology, sometimes it's driven by new leadership or new secretary or chief of staff of the Air Force that comes in and wants to take the organization in a different direction. But but there is a lot of change. And so what I used to do, especially when I was a wing commander, I would challenge my airmen. I I would I'd pull a cell phone out of my pocket and say, you know, you guys, since you were kids, have had this amazing exposure technology. You've had laptops, you've had cell phones. Ben Spencer did not have his first computer until he was a second lieutenant in the United States Air Force at you know age 25, right? When I went to college, I took an electronic typewriter with me. When I went to OTS, I did not have a computer. I used my friend's laptop and barely knew how to use it. But they've they've grown up with this technology. So I would challenge my young airman and say, I if you're thinking I know best how to employ this technology to solve our problems, you're kidding yourself. Like, don't wait on me. I need you, I need 18-year-olds, I need 19-year-olds, I need 20-year-olds looking at the challenges that we face in our Air Force, and I need you coming to me with ideas. I need you driving the chain, the change from the bottom up, not me driving from the top down. Because if I'm driving it from the top down, it's probably not the change that we need, right? Especially when it comes to being being more effective and efficient through use of technology. Um, so I tried to pull them in on the team. I tried to tell them that it was important that every day they went to work, they thought about ways that we could be more efficient and effective through use of technology, through changing process, and that everyone had great ideas, whether you're 18 years old or 50 years old, everyone had great ideas and built, pull them into that process.

SPEAKER_00: 40:44

Speaking of this learning process, education, you studied at both the Marine Corps Command and Staff College and the Naval War College. What were the key similarities and differences between them and the lessons that you were able to take from those respective schools into your own professional experience?

SPEAKER_01: 41:03

So they were number one, when you uh as an airman, when you get to do um your intermediate and senior level development education with a sister service, it's a fantastic experience. Um if there's anyone listening uh now who is contemplating uh developmental education in the Air Force, I would always try to do a sister service because it's it's it's it's it's an amazing experience. So Marine Corps came out at Staff College. I was there 2008 to 2009, and that was we were very coin focused. We were very counter-insurgency focused uh because of Iraq and Afghanistan. Um, not really near-peer competitor focus. It was coin because most of us had been to Iraq and/or Afghanistan, and we were all there and we all had, you know, a range of experiences, but similar experiences in similar theaters, right? I had spent uh a few months as a squadron commander with Air Force Special Operations Command in Iraq a year before going to Marine Corps Command Staff College. So it was a very counterinsurgency focused uh discussions that we had. A lot of the reading was based on counterinsurgency. Um when I went to the Naval War College, like four years later, that the pendulum had started to swing. They had started to move the curriculum away from the coin and back towards the near-peer competitor and started to have a lot more conversations about China and about Russia. Um so they were it was interesting, they were only three or four years apart, but but they really were completely different day-in and day out discussions because of the geopolitical uh background, uh backdrop. Um that what they have in common is I met some amazing leaders in both. Uh there are amazing leaders spread throughout all of our services, and just being able to sit in a room with a uh you know, a professor at the head of the table, you know, using the Socratic method, just having open discussions about different topics, um, was an amazing experience. And and I made some friends that I still talk to to this day. Um, but the other thing, uh, and we can maybe talk about this later, um, the other thing it did too is gives as a leader, you give you time to think. You you have as you gain seniority and get more demanding leadership uh opportunities, you can't let the job overwhelm you. You have to be able to carve out some time to think. And if it's if you put it, if you just block time on a calendar, you know, a couple days a week, just to have time to go through things and think. Um otherwise your schedule drives you, right? Uh you should be driving your schedule. And where I see a lot of leaders get into trouble is they they can get overwhelmed, they don't get ahead and stay ahead, right? They get a little bit behind the curve, they're making decisions quickly, and they just don't have time to think. Not even about specific decisions, they just don't have time to think about in general, like where do I want to take my where's my squadron want to? Why do I want my squadron to be in a year? You know, you need to have time as a leader to think. The nice thing about command of staff college and war college is you get a year of that. You get a year of being able to think, to think about big issues, to think about the type of leader you're going to be when you get out of command of staff college or war college and take that next command or take that next staff job because there's leadership involved in staff that I think in many ways is more difficult. And we can talk about that too if you want to, but um uh having one year to sit and think is incredibly valuable, especially with a bunch of other great leaders.

SPEAKER_00: 45:05

This time to think uh a pause for reflection, introspection, you know. Was there ever a place for character development, education in the uh war colleges? And how does this play to operational effectiveness? And let me add a little bit to that. And where do you see the place of empathy when it comes to leadership in the military when at the end of the day, and to be kind of blunt about it, when the military is focused on killing the enemy, so to say. Or for some people, that would be the only objective of the military, and there can be debate over that. But again, when we think about what militaries are designed to do, where does empathy fall within this? Where does character education fall?

SPEAKER_01: 46:10

So I love your focus on empathy, uh, because the the question that you just pose right there, you could have easily been sitting in uh a conference room when I was in wing or group command, because this is something I evolved into, is the empathy aspect as a as a more senior leader. Um and it was one of the two or big things, three big things I focused on all the time, especially as a group and a wing commander. Because in order to lead effectively, you need to lead in a way that resonates with your airmen. Um, you can't lead every organization the same way. Every organization has needs. It's like an organism, right? It has needs. When you go in to a high-performing organization, it has different needs than an organization that may be struggling and its previous leader was removed. So you have to understand what the organization needs from you. So, how do you do that? That that's where empathy comes in. You have to put yourself in the in the boots of that flight line master sergeant or in the boots of that you know A1C who's living in the dorms, and you have to try to see the world through their eyes and say, what does this airman, what does this team need from me? Um actually uh uh tell you a quick little story here. About a week ago, I have this backpack that I've been using, you know, instead of a briefcase for about three or four years, and it's it was getting pretty full, so I started to clean it out. And I reached in and I found a piece of paper, it was like four or five pieces of papers tabled together, and it was the uh my retirement speech, my retirement ceremony. I tucked it into a corner of my backpack and it was still in there, right? And so I kind of pulled it out almost two years later, because I've been retired almost two years and kind of read through it, right? And at the end, I kind of gave, you know, four big lessons, four big things that I took away. And the last one that I hit before I got off the stage was empathy. I called it that, I called it the coin of the realm. Um, you know, any leader can crush a subordinate for a misstep. That takes zero talent, zero skill, zero leadership ability. Um but putting yourself in that airman's shoes and asking why? Why does this airman feel this way? Why does this airman do that? Um when I was uh in flight line maintenance, um, you know, it was a it was it still is a big deal if you're out there doing maintenance without your tech data in front of you, weeding through it, even if you've done the job many times before, it's a big no-no because the tech data is updated continuously based on typically bad things that happen in the field. We put stuff in the tech data to make sure no one gets hurt and we don't damage things. So an airman caught without tech data had to report in to me at the time I was a captain. And they would always come in and say, I would say, what okay, why aren't you using tech data? And they would say, No excuse, sir, no excuse, it'll never happen again. And for the first year I was in that job, I'd say, okay, don't do it again, and they'd salute and roll out of my office, right? But then I realized I was missing an opportunity. Um, while there was no excuse for that airman not to be using tech data, there was a reason he wasn't or she wasn't using tech data. And when I let them just say, no excuse and walk out, I was doing them, me, and the organization a disservice. So I started asking him, got it, no excuse. You're absolutely right, there's no excuse. But why didn't you have your tech data? And then you start to get answers like, well, they don't keep that book on the truck, it's back in the shop, and I wanted to run back to the shop and get it, but my expediter told me, you've done this job 50 times, just go do it. Oh, so I've got a bigger problem than an airman not using tech data. I've got a problem with leadership on my flight line, who seems to condone it, right? Had I not asked why this individual didn't have tech data, I would never have known that I have deeper rooted, maybe more systemic problems. So, you know, from that time on, I would I would try never to let Ariman get away with the no excuse. No excuse salute and leave the room. I would have a conversation with them on, you know, how they saw the world, what the reason was for whatever misstep that that they had, and it would make me a better leader, and to be honest with you, it would benefit the entire organization. So I still believe to this day, um, empathy is the coin of the realm. And character development is incredibly important. Um, and we have to teach our youngest leaders to be empathetic. People, when you say empathetic, they think that means soft. They think that means permissive. Um, it doesn't necessarily. I gave out plenty of Article 15s in my time as a commander. I I was when I had to be tough, I was tough. Uh, but at the same time, I didn't come off the top rope on someone just to make myself feel better or just for show, right? Because I'm putting myself in that airman's shoes. That airman had a misstep. The airman seems to uh to be truly sorry for it. We're okay, now we move on. We find a way to make that airman better. Um so I like that you've brought up empathy. I don't think we can talk enough about the benefit of empathy in leaders.

SPEAKER_00: 51:47

Applying this externally in a world of nuclear weapons, drone strikes, cruise missiles, so on and so forth, the ability to kill at extreme distances, and so this lack of intimacy with others. Is it possible to be empathetic towards the enemy, so to say?

SPEAKER_01: 52:16

That's a great question.

SPEAKER_00: 52:18

How do we factor in the human side of the costly business that a military is engaged in, the destruction of other human beings?

SPEAKER_01: 52:29

And and that's I that's a great question, and I think it's probably been a question for the military since, you know, since we've had a military. You know, we had World War II bomber pilots, you know, like area bombing cities, right? I mean, how how do they, you know, that was tough, right? They they knew you know if they would have more precise weapons, they would have used them, uh, but they didn't. They had the precision that they had. Um, and it's something that they had to live with back then. I I think when you talk remotely piloted aircraft, etc., I'm not an expert in the field, but I I think even though even though it's it's it's from a distance, I I still think that we have that that the RPA community still feels that, right? Doesn't matter that they're not an F-16, 15,000 feet overhead, dropping the bomb, that they're sitting and controlling a a uh um uh a platform from halfway around the world and dropping the bomb. I I still think mentally, I think it has the same impact on them. Um, I'm not sure the distance from the battlefield necessarily changes the impact it has on our warfighters. Um, and I think we're still working our way through that uh as an Air Force. And it will be interesting to see how that changes as we bring more autonomy, more autonomous drones uh into the service, and fewer and fewer uh as the years go on, we have fewer and fewer piloted aircraft. That's that's a challenge I think we're gonna need to work through. Um, I think we're just now on the leading edge of that, though.

SPEAKER_00: 54:19

Shifting gears. As chief of the House liaison office, you were the Air Force's initial point of contact with the House of Representatives. What relationships with members and staff were you most focused on during that time?

SPEAKER_01: 54:32

So so uh so being on the House of Representatives side, uh, most of your time is spent talking to what we call the authorizers. Um, those are the the members who sit on the Armed Services Committee. Those are the members who build uh the National Defense Authorization Act every year, the NDAA, right? There's a separate set of members who all sit on appropriations and do defense approbes. Um but in every service, a different set of liaisons handles the appropriators. I was on the side that handled the the authorizers, and I think at the time, Armed Service Me, I think had I think it has 59 people on it. So there's a there's a lot of members to deal with, but you quickly find uh the members who are focused on air and space, right? So um that's typically those who have um you know military Air Force bases or Space Force bases in their in their um districts, and it's generating employment for them, it's generating economic activity. Uh they may have uh defense industrial base in their district. They may not have airmen, but they may have people building components for F-35s or or repairing KC-135s, right? So over time you you tend to uh figure out, at least I did for my three years up there, who are the members of Congress who have the most interested and most invested in air and space force issues. Uh and then you reach out to them and you work with them and you work with their staffs. And sometimes it's goodness, sometimes you're reaching out with good news, and sometimes there are challenges. And I will tell you there's always challenges around basing decisions, right? Where there's, you know, we have a basing process and we start off with X number of bases and we whittle it down to okay, the next tranche of F of F-35 fighters is going to this base. So you make one constituency in the house very happy, and you make four or five other ones upset with you, right? Because they wanted those F-35s at their base, right? Um aircraft retirements is always a dicey issue. Anytime you're going to reduce or have the appearance of reducing manpower at a base, an Air Force base or Space Force base, you're obviously the local member of Congress is going to be interested in that. And if I were them, I would be interested in it too, right? Because it could signify a loss in economic activity, possibly a loss of jobs in the community. And some of these bases are in communities that aren't that big. You know, Grand Forks Air Force Base. Grand Forks is not a big city, right? They rely on that Air Force base for quite a bit of economic activity. So those were sometimes the challenges that we had. We had challenges around basing decisions, so we always will. Challenges around discussions about acquiring aircraft or retiring aircraft. Um, but again, you know, you you work with the chief and the secretary of the air force and you try to stay stay out in front and don't end up getting dragged behind the truck, right? You want to stay out in front and dealing with these with members of Congress. I I always found our relationship with them to be to be very productive. And if you if you will, I once I was in ledge affairs for the Air Force, I used to go down, fly down a couple times a year to the group and wing commanders training that we do and brief ledge affairs. And what I would tell them is, you know, we just in our case Air Force, but all the services do it. We have an issue, right? Um, and and we'll build beautiful PowerPoints. We'll we'll do meticulous research. We have pages of data, we'll build these wonderful PowerPoints, and then we'll take it across the river and talk to staffers or members about what we want to do. And then sometimes they're on board, but sometimes they're not. And I've noticed even when I was in the Pentagon as a younger staff officer, we would scratch our heads. We're like, what why don't they get this? Right? We don't understand why they don't get it. And after three years on the hill, I flip that. It's not that they don't get us or what we need. Sometimes we don't get them. We don't understand um everything, the, the, the depth and breadth of the scope of what they're working with, right? So we're going, we go up there and talk about something very specific, right? But but their decision calculus is more than just what's in our PowerPoint size. Their decision calculus is how does this impact the voters in my district? How does this impact the economy? How does this impact the coffee shop right out the front gate of this base? Uh, there's also a political background, right? How does this impact something I said I would do when I get elected? If I I was, you know, I ran on a platform that I would not allow X amount of aircraft to be retired from our base. That's a campaign promise, right? They're thinking of that too. Um and oh, by the way, they might be on the agricultural committee too. So as soon as you're done talking to them, their next 10 minutes are going off and talking agriculture and hybrid seeds and the cost of fertilizer. And then from there they're going to a fundraiser in the evening. And there's a lot wrapped up in their decision calculus when they're talking to us, but we go talk to them. We're very we have a very narrow focus. So what I found sometimes is we didn't maybe understand them enough when we when like my team took issues of them, and we need to understand them better and how they were making their decisions.

SPEAKER_00: 1:00:15

With that in mind, what makes for effective advocacy in a system of civilian oversight?

SPEAKER_01: 1:00:22

So I would, you know, I so as ledge affairs, right? I wouldn't say we advocated as much as educated, because advocating implies lobbying, right? Which if you're in the Air Force and Ledge Affairs, you can't do, right? But you can't educate. Um and so what do we educate on? So everything is what's in the president's budget, right? That the the the services work a budget through OMB and it gets to the president. At the end of the day, the president of the United States decides what he or she wants in the budget through the president's budget that gets submitted to the Hill once a year. Um what I have found is when you know dealing with Congress, I think it's this is it's not just Congress, it's everybody, right? Um, again, get ahead. Get ahead, uh, get out there, start engaging. My big thing was, you know, we have members up there that you know we engage with, we think we might have to engage with. It's a bad look if we only knock on their door when we want something from them, right? I was much more a fan of let's get on to a regular drum beat, let's go talk to this member or their staff, even if we don't have anything specific to talk about. Let's just go up, have a discussion, ask them how things are going, ask if they need anything from us in the Air Force and develop a relationship. That way, as an Air Force or as a department of events, when we need something, help from that member, it doesn't look like we're just showing up at their door when we need something. We've developed a relationship with that office. And so I think they're much more inclined to help us if we've built that relationship early. You can't build relationships in 48 hours. It takes a long time to build relationships. So that's one of the things I took away is we, you know, we need to good relations with the Hill means spending time building relationships and building and understanding. And for what I mentioned earlier, us, as on the government side, better understanding what's impacting the decision calculus of the members with whom we're engaging.

SPEAKER_00: 1:02:28

What do you wish the public better understood about defense budgeting and congressional influence?

SPEAKER_01: 1:02:37

That's a great question. Um I would say, you know, it's it's it's it's it's incredibly complicated, right? They there are to the you know the untrained eye, some of this stuff looks easy. Uh there's not much that's easy. Um there are reasons why the services want to do things, there are reasons why members of Congress want to do things. Again, you've got 57, 59 members on the Armed Services Committee, each one is in a district representing about 750,000 people, uh, and they all have their unique interests. And and getting alignment uh between the executive branch, between the services, and between members of Congress is is not always easy. And it takes a lot of spade work in the background. And sometimes, once in a while, you're lucky and you run into a slam dunk and everyone's on board. But uh everyone on the hill, every dollar spent in appropriations has a certain amount of members tied to that dollar. They they want that dollar spent because they're passionate about something, uh, they're passionate about some sort of research. They want that dollar spent because it's going into construction in their district. There's a reason why members want that dollar spent. So when you're moving dollars around, when you're talking about taking money from one pot and moving it to somewhere else, you immediately create winners and losers. Every time you move money around, you create winners and losers. You create instant resistance because every dollar in the budget has at least one member of Congress interested in it. And usually it's a lot more than that. It's dozens, senators, etc. So it's it's it's incredibly complicated. The the folks who work on the hill, the professional staffers and the personal staffers, incredibly hardworking people up there who do their absolute best to get everything into legislation that they believe is important. Um, but it's a challenge.

SPEAKER_00: 1:05:02

With an evolving military, and in this case focusing on the US Air Force and how dollars are spent, what's evolved most in aircraft maintenance operations across your career and what has been able to stay the same because it works.

SPEAKER_01: 1:05:22

So um taking a note down here because you just you just said something that I want to make sure I come back to. So I think what's amazing about aircraft maintenance is probably, you know, mainly maybe how little has changed. At the end of the day, you still need highly qualified, trained, proficient airmen to place their hands on an aircraft and repair it, right? We don't have robots out there that repair. At the end of the day, that airman needs to go out and pull open a panel, that airman needs to go out and remove a hydraulic pump. That there's there's there's still this human aspect in it that there has been since the Wright brothers first flew. So what's amazing about aircraft maintenance, I think, is is maybe how little has changed in the fact that those those airmen are not in any time going to be replaced. Um we have changed how we do maintenance though. Uh so when I first came in, uh we had in the Air Force, we had what we'll call three levels of maintenance. We had our depot level maintenance, um, we had our intermediate level, and then we had kind of our on-the-flight line, right? Guys can just repair something on the flight line. Um so at each base, each base has significant repair capability to take that hydraulic pump that came off an airplane, take it to a back shop, open it up, replace seals, replace, put it back together, do a functional and operational check, put it back in the supply system so we can use it. So when I came in in the mid-90s, we were moving away from that. That was called three levels of maintenance. We were moving more towards two levels of maintenance where everything was kind of you came off and it went directly back to a repair facility. It did, it wasn't repaired on the base. Uh, a lot of our line replaceable units, our avionics, et cetera, are literally black boxes, right? You pull the box out, you put a new box in, the other box gets shipped back to a depot or back to a contractor. So I think what we found in the intervening years is a lot of our maintainers lost the really hands-on nuts and bolts ability to get in and fix things because it was simply remove and replace a part, right? So when we did have really kind of thorny issues on an airplane, we really did have some sort of electrical issue that required reading electrical charts uh and actually you know doing tests and and going into Canonplug and going pin to pin, that type of really nitty-gritty, hands-on, in-depth maintenance, we we have lost some of that. So um I think we're bringing some of that back as we look at the future and we look at generating sorties, maybe in areas where logistics isn't assured, and we're gonna have to have the ability to repair things on site. So, in that case, the pendulum swung one way and it swung back. Um the main thing that's really changed, I think, around aircraft maintenance is at least on the flight line, is just the technology, right? You know, instead of using, they're not out there with paperbooks anymore, they're out there with iPads and they're looking up their tech data on iPads and they're they're generating, they're signing off jobs on iPads, and the the tech around the information management has gotten much more sophisticated. But that airman still got to come to work every day, still goes to the support section, still checks out a toolbox, still rolls that toolbox out in the flight line, and still puts hands-on an aircraft, just like they've been doing for you know a hundred years now. Um so yeah, what's what's I think amazing is maybe how how little has changed uh around around aircraft maintenance.

SPEAKER_00: 1:09:05

Um you said you had uh wanted to add a comment.

SPEAKER_01: 1:09:08

Um yeah, so so you mentioned um keeping what works, right? So I I think most organizations, and to include the ones I was in, we're really good at hot washing and studying and analyzing something we think didn't work, right? When we do, we call them hot washes in in the Air Force. When we had those, we have after an exercise or after a big event, we pour one in and figure out how we can do things better. We spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to do things better, but we never ask the question what did we do right so that we keep doing it right and don't mess with it, right? I don't think we often ask ourselves that nearly enough. Understanding what we're doing right and why we're doing it right. Like, why does this process work so well? Hopefully, the answer isn't that we've got a technician in the shop who's been in the shop for 10 years and is an expert and he just crushes it. Because if that's the answer, as soon as that person leaves, we're gonna our process is gonna be broken because it's all around one individual, right? We don't study success enough. We're really focused on studying failure. But I think there's a lot to be said for studying success so that success becomes understandable and repeatable.

SPEAKER_00: 1:10:29

Well, with that in mind, how can the Air Force balance human expertise with increasingly complex technology?

SPEAKER_01: 1:10:40

So I think we talked about a way that we tried to do that, right? We we um as our aircraft got more sophisticated and the parts in that aircraft got more sophisticated, we moved more towards a two-level maintenance where we simply pulled a part out and put a new part in. And we didn't ask the maintainer to open up the box, to check the circuit cards, to do the high-end kind of troubleshooting and evaluation that we did in years past. I think that's one way in which we addressed complexity. Um, but I think we're also finding is maybe in a world where, again, logistics is contested, not having the ability to be able to understand, troubleshoot, and repair those complex systems in the field uh could be negative for the Air Force moving forward.

SPEAKER_00: 1:11:38

Looking at this on at a wider level, is the Pentagon too good at logistics? Uh Max Boot, uh, someone who's contributed a lot to uh commentary on national security, he once suggested that focusing too much on supply lines risk losing sight of strategic imperatives. Do you agree?

SPEAKER_01: 1:11:59

So I I don't know if it's I don't it's probably impossible to be too good at logistics, right? I don't no one no one ever accused uh any organization I worked in of being too good at logistics, right? We're always working to get better. I think the main challenge we've had in logistics in the 30 years that I was in is we got very comfortable working in permissive environments. We always assumed the logistics could get through. We always assumed that the rations, the water, the parts would get through. Um, and you know, you know, a couple decades in the Middle East uh did nothing to disabuse us of that because we worked from bases not only in Iraq and Afghanistan, but you know, bases in Al-Uudid and Qatar, etc., um, which we could easily move stuff into and out of, right? At the beginning of the Iraq war, uh we had a lot of time to build up fielded forces uh before the invasion of Iraq. Uh we did not worry about uh our aircraft, suppliercraft being shot down and not getting to their final destination, right? So I often joke when I was in Afghanistan, we up at Bagram, we probably had you know at least one or two rocket attacks on the base a week when I was there. Um but you could still order something from Amazon Prime and have it delivered to Bagram in Afghanistan because there was a plane that came in once or twice a day that would bring stuff in.

SPEAKER_00: 1:13:33

Well, many of the bases even had fast food franchises. They did.

SPEAKER_01: 1:13:37

Yes, yes. We had uh I think we had a Pizza Hut, a very, very small pizza hut that tasted nothing like Pizza Hut in Bagram, but it was a Pizza Hut, little piece of home nonetheless. So so I think they're we've been working under an assumption that you know the the supply chain will get through, right? We may be at the end of a very long uh chain of supply, but but the environments have been relatively permissive. That may not be the case moving forward. Um, and so we have to, and they're doing it right now, and the Air Force and all the services have been doing it for years. We have to determine what it looks like when we have to execute the basic tenets of logistics in a contested environment. Because it means a lot of things, it means it impacts how we manage our parts, it impacts uh how we store and warehouse, it impacts the training that our airmen need to have to move forward to some of these more remote locations. Um, and that's something the service is looking at now.

SPEAKER_00: 1:14:41

Speaking of the people, you know, the airmen and women, where do you see the role of education, public education? So whether they're uh acquiring it in public schools or private schools, but those first 18 years of what would be an airman or airwoman's life, um, where do you see that?

SPEAKER_01: 1:15:07

Well, I will say, you know, I I think the airmen coming, my experience, the airmen coming into our Air Force now are probably the smartest generation of airmen entering the service now. They they are technologically astute, um, but they're also different, uh, as every generation of airmen is different. Uh my experience is this generation wants to know why, right? Uh when you ask them to do something, they want to understand the why, which I think is healthy, which I hope that's because they are coming up and and we have educators telling them it's important for you to understand why, not just rope memorization, but understand why you're doing it. Yeah, this when you troubleshoot this system, it tells you to do first, this step first, this step second, this step third. But why? Why do you do them in that order? Why don't you do the step, third step? The third step's the easiest step. That takes me the least amount of time. Why don't I do the third one first before I do steps one and two, right? So this generation of airmen has they have a craving for an understanding of why they're doing stuff, which can cause friction with you know, gray beards like me before I left the Air Force, who just sometimes, you know, were taught, hey, just do what you're supposed to do, right? Don't stop asking so many questions. Just just do what the book tells you to do, right? This generation of airmen wants more than that. And I think as leaders, we need to be prepared to give them more. Um Simon Sinek has a book, I think it's called Um Start with Why. It talks about how your organization in the long run can be much higher performing if people understand why they're doing something. And so I had a leader when I was young, and I don't remember who it was, but it was probably when I was a captain, probably four or five years. And he's like, Ben, when you're a flight commander, you can order your airmen to do something. As long as it's not illegal, they have to do it, right? But if you have the time, treat every airman like you have to convince them to do something. Even though you can order them to do it. If you have the time, treat them like you have to convince them. Tell them you want them to do this, and here's why I want you to do this. Here's the background, here's my experience and expertise, here's why I think this way. Because what happens is that airman understands why they're doing it, they understand your thought process. They also might understand maybe where your logic is wrong. They may say, oh yeah, you know, Captain Spencer, he wants me to do this, and he told me why, but now I understand he doesn't understand his his why is he he has a misunderstanding of what we're seeing out here. So, but given I understand his thinking and why he wants us to do it, I'm now empowered. If I can get to the same end by doing it differently, become more efficient, more effective, I will do it that way because I understand why I'm doing it. Um but again, that's that that's kind of challenges sometimes military orthodoxy, where you you tell your airmen to do something and they do it. But I think if your airmen understand why they're doing something, in the long run it'll make for a much more effective organization.

SPEAKER_00: 1:18:33

From your perspective, and at the moment of your retirement and since then, what unfinished business do you see the Air Force has as an institution?

SPEAKER_01: 1:18:46

I mean, you think about that one. I I think, I mean, there's I think there's probably I mean the Air Force could be around for 300 more years, it will always be an unfinished business in some way, right? Because we're always changing. Um I think we do a really good job on leadership development, but I still think there's probably more work to be done on how we develop our leaders, right? We we have um we have our squadron officer school, which is kind of our captain company grade officer level development education, then we have command of staff colleges, which is more for majors, and then we have our our war college. And I think that those that structure is solid. I think where it can get really uneven is just the day-to-day on any given Air Force base, right? That it just based on the type of leaders there. I I wish, and I don't have a solution to this, but I wish there we could be more deliberate in the way that we're developing leaders, both enlisted and officer, the way we're developing leaders day in, day out at our bases. We often we rely a lot on airman leadership school and squadron officer school and naval war college and senior NCO Academy, and we rely on a lot of these different formal education structures. And I fear sometimes we look to those as the only way in which we develop leaders. But there's so much more that can be done with informal mentoring, etc., uh, at the base level, at the unit level. And I don't think we're there. I think we've got some work to do.

SPEAKER_00: 1:20:38

Do you think there's perhaps an uber focus on developing leadership advice, focusing on how we make decisions?

SPEAKER_01: 1:20:52

So I I do, I mean, I give the Air Force a lot of credit because from the time that you come in, they are attempting to develop leaders. So there's a there's a large focus in our curriculum on leadership development. And I think that, and you asked, was it tied to decision making? Is that what you asked about?

SPEAKER_00: 1:21:12

Well, again, there's substantial literature, speakers, talks, and whatnot. I mean, even this podcast in a way, but there's always this focus on leadership. Um, and I'm kind of wondering if perhaps we've placed too much of an onus on teaching people how to guide others when perhaps the ultimate backbone of this is decision making. How are we coming to a decision? No, what is informing our decision making? Why are we making that decision? Right. Uh, and this would be say the nerve center of leadership, because if I know why I'm doing something, how I'm going to do it, uh, what I'm going to base the decision on, uh, I think this will automatically uh improve one's ability to lead others, so to say. Uh I I know in my experience with diplomatic security in the State Department, um again, and it was good. Uh we we placed emphasis on leading folks, managing the programs, but I never felt or never seemed to me there was enough attention giving to simply decision making in and of itself.

SPEAKER_01: 1:22:33

Yeah, I agree. I I I don't think we can spend enough time on decision making, right? That's um because because it's it's in one instance in one instance it's it seems you know tantalizingly simple, right? But but it's amazingly complex and varies from leader to leader. Again, what information are you getting? What information do you do you need? How much of it do you need, right? How confident of you are in in your decision? And there's a lot of that that comes with experience, too. Um I think that more focus on decision making would always be good. I would tell you, and I would love to see more of it informally done, day to day, at our bases, right? Through mentorship, uh, et cetera, supervisor mentorship, et cetera. I will tell you one of the things I did like about our formal education is the way in which we try to understand and study decision making is through the lens of history, right? So there's, and that's that's the way I like to understand it. I don't I don't have anything for the books that are like the top 10 best leadership traits, etc. It we spend a lot of time analyzing individuals uh in history who have had to make tough decisions how and how they made them. How do they how do they intake information? How do they process it? How do they reach out for assistance? Uh, were their time pressures placed, but how do they deal with those time pressures, right? And so you go through enough leaders from Lincoln to Eisenhower, et cetera, and look at look at how some of these leaders make decisions, you hopefully internalize some of that and say, yeah, that's I'd like the way that that individual in history approached that issue, made that decision. And if I ever have that opportunity to do it, I think I'm going to use that. And I'll tell you the the examples you can get by just studying biographies and by studying leaders in history, um, there's a lot to be gained from that. I the one that makes me chuckle is I'm sure you've heard of it, right? Never email angry, right? Get in that email, boy, you type an email out and you got a couple zingers in there and you can't wait to send it. They say, put it aside, let it sit for a day, cool down, and come back and see if you really want to send that email, right? Because that lives forever. Well, Abraham Lincoln did the same thing, except he didn't have email. So he used to write letters and put them in his unfinished, he wouldn't sign them and put them in his gesture and then come back to him later. And if he still felt passionately, he still felt that was good, he would sign it and send it. But some he never sent. There's an it's just like a trove of Lincoln letters that he wrote and just never sent. And it was his way of kind of working his way through an issue. Him writing, sitting down, writing something was was his way of helping himself make decisions, helping himself engage. And I think it kind of helped to slow him down a little bit and become less impulsive. If you have to sit down and write something and think about it, you gotta you gotta provide some thought and you gotta take some time. We talked about time, and you gotta take some time to do it. And that was the way that one of the ways he did it uh during his administration. So I you can go back quite a ways and still get some very, very good lessons on decision making from individuals in the past.

SPEAKER_00: 1:25:56

It'd be interesting to see if uh they would have been the same, you know, people of Lincoln's caliber and others had they had access to the same technological tools and means of conveying information uh as we do, uh, though I'm sure they probably would have exercised uh discretion much like they did in their own times. As we come to a close here, do you have any final thoughts that you'd like to share with the audience, uh whether it's addressing misconceptions about the Air Force or commentary that you'd like for people in positions of chain and command would like to know, whatever it may be?

SPEAKER_01: 1:26:37

So uh I think to wrap up, I'll I'll I'll take us back to this the story I had a couple weeks ago finding my speech for my uh retirement ceremony. And in that speech, I highlighted like four of the things I'm gonna take away from from my time in the Air Force that I mentioned, one already being empathy. Uh, but there were three others in there, and so I wrote them down so I wouldn't forget them. Uh and the first thing that I said is there there is no substitute for hard work. Uh, talent is fickle and unevenly distributed. Uh, but the one thing you can control is how hard you work. Um, that's a good thing, but it could also be a bad thing, right? Uh, because some people burn themselves out by working too hard, right? So there's balance in there. But as you said before, your time in the State Department, control what you can control. And one thing you can control is how hard you work and how prepared that you choose to be. And there are a lot of really bright people out there who have circles run around them by people who aren't as bright, but they just work a lot harder. And so my first one was no substitute uh for hard work. The next one was uh defend your signature. Um, and I use defend your signature because I I use it all the time in our maintenance organizations because we still, you know, to this day, we still have paper aircraft forms on aircraft that when an airman signs something off, he signs it off in the corrected by block, right? Puts their signature in and puts his employee number in, right? I'm like, if you sign off that you corrected that, that's your signature. If your signature loses uh its weight, its force, then I don't have much need for you in the Air Force. I need to know what your signature says corrected by that you actually corrected it. And the it's seven level who comes by and says he or she inspected it, you better don't go well have inspected it because you put your you put your name on that. And and that your name is your reputation. So for me, defend your signature was a way of basically saying in broad strokes, defend your reputation. Your signature is is who you are and what you stand for. And your reputation takes a lifetime to build, but it can be gone in five minutes. You can destroy it in five minutes. So defend it. Um the next we talked a little about this was was trust. Um without it, any organization is limited. And and it's trust both ways, right? It's not just subordinates trusting in their leadership, it's also leadership being willing to trust in subordinates, right? It's it's leaders being able to say, I trust you, go take this on, and I'm not gonna hover over top of you to make sure that you don't make a mistake, right? Um, and that trust takes a level of risk, right? As a leader, you take a level of risk saying, okay, I trust you, I trust you to do this, go forth and do it, and come back and tell me when it's done. You're trusting that individual is gonna do it and do it right. Or if something happens, they're gonna come back and tell you, hey boss, I screwed this up, right? But you do have to put yourself out there. And the folks in my mind, micromanagement is just a result of fear and and a lack of an ability to be to want to take risk. So you you've gotta move away from that fear. You gotta be willing to take a little bit of risk with your subordinates to build that trust. I will tell you one quick story here before we get off stage is I had a uh a young airman um uh keep the story short, she tested positive for use of marijuana. In the investigation, we found that she was and had been a continuing victim of some pretty brutal uh spousal abuse that we did not know was happening. And so this was the way, you know, in which she dealt with it. She managed it, right? She was going through a lot of pain. So there is a process in the Air Force to retain individuals who may have tested positive. It's it's a very narrow criteria, but I decided I'm I'm talking to I talked to the judge advocate general, they were on board. I'm like, I'm gonna go through with this, right? So I did all the work, I laid all the groundwork, I got everything lined up, and then I went and talked to my boss, who was Colonel Sock Green. Remember Sock? I talked about him earlier, it's the second time I worked for him. And I went in one afternoon and said, I said, sir, I got I gotta talk you through something here and let you know something I plan on doing, right? He said, Sure, Ben, come on in. And I stepped him through it. I stepped in through everything that was going on, all the documentation, everything we did. I tried in my head to game out all the questions he might ask, right? And I went in with just a ton of information. And I explained it to him over the course of 15 or 20 minutes, and then I kind of braced for, okay, how many questions am I gonna get on this one, right? He leaned back in his chair and he said, Ben, sounds like you've done your homework and made a good decision. I'll go talk to the wing commander about it tomorrow. And that was it. Because he he trusted me. He didn't want to see all the documentation I had, he didn't ask for proof. He trusted me and he went and talked to the wing commander. That wing commander did retain that that individual, right? So that's that's that's what trust gets you. He trusted me, and and at that point I had a realization like that that that played my mind, that was a huge responsibility I had. This man trusted me. He didn't double check my work. So it was even more important for me to do the work, to do it right, to get all the information. Because he was, if I told him I needed something, he was gonna go ask for it. He trusted that I had already done the work. He didn't make me prove it to him. So uh in my mind, it made me an even kind of more loyal subordinate because I owed it to him to do my homework because he trusted me so much. So that's trust. And then we talked about empathy, the the coin of the realm. We don't we don't talk about the importance of empathy enough. I wish we would talk about it more. Um, but I'm completely in agreement with you that I you can't lead effectively, especially at higher levels, without some level of empathy, without at least attempting to understand what your subordinates want from you. So empathy, in my opinion, is important and will always be important. But those those are the four things that I that I you know articulated at my retirement speech two years ago. And I think they're I think they're still important together. I think they're this they still stand has withstood the test of time, at least to date.

SPEAKER_00: 1:33:12

Hard work, defend your signature, trust, empathy.

SPEAKER_01: 1:33:16

Yep.

SPEAKER_00: 1:33:17

Well, sir, thank you for your time. Uh thank you to the audience for listening. Thank you to the members of the U.S. Air Force. As your host, Maurice Brungart, I welcome you to join us next week. Uh, and that you invite others to also follow Brungart Law's Lanyat, where we provide a little extra perspective because the devil is always in the details. Sir, again, gratitude.

SPEAKER_01: 1:33:38

Thank you, Maurice. I appreciate it. It's great doing this.