By Commander Sheila A. Scarborough, U.S. Navy Proceedings magazine, February 2002
I recently read an article in which the author asserted, "The most interesting women I know have dirty houses. Not filthy dirty, but disheveled, disorganized. . . . They have surrendered to the chaos."1
If being disheveled is the criterion for being interesting, then I am downright fascinating. I am an active-duty Navy Surface Warfare Officer (SWO), married, with two children. People often ask me how I manage to combine a seagoing career with marriage and parenthood. My Great Secret: hang on by your fingernails, hope it all works out, and feel guilty all the time.
You can have it all, but probably not all at once. Said one busy mother, "Sometimes I am absolutely the best Mom there is. And sometimes I am the best businesswoman or the best technology person you will ever see. But it is a rare day when I am all three of those things at the same time."2
You must plan meticulously, make difficult choices, and accept half a loaf more often than you would like. That said, I am living proof it is possible. How to do it?
You Must Have A Plan, So You Can Change It
As a leader in the Naval service, you know how to prepare a Plan of Action and Milestones for an upcoming event. You can and should apply those same skills to starting a family. Frankly, it will be the last time any family matter will fit so neatly on a spreadsheet. For a seagoing person, starting a family must be coordinated with sea/shore rotation requirements.
Obviously, it is better to plan to have children on shore duty, especially for women. Looking at this in a SWO context, you have three windows of opportunity: as a post-division officer going ashore before your department head tour, after your department head tour, and after your executive officer tour. There are, of course, advantages and disadvantages to each.
Young persons going ashore for the first time may not yet feel emotionally or financially ready for a family. Starting a family during this time also means that you must go back to sea for the demanding three-year department head tour while you have very young children. For women, however, the early to mid-twenties is the period they would be least likely to experience problems getting pregnant.
I waited until after the second sea tour to have my first child, and I was about six weeks pregnant at the end of my Chief Engineer tour. I could still fit into the boiler mud drum for a closeout inspection. Fortunately, I did not experience morning sickness inside the same mud drum or I would have been pretty unpopular with the engineers.
I had my second child during the last window of opportunity, as a post-Executive Officer. The stars aligned for me, but I was lucky: fertility rates decline between ages 30-35, nose dive after 35, and then take another sharp move downward around 38. In addition, "miscarriage soars as women age—from about 15 percent in women aged 25 to 30, to about 40 percent in women over 40."3
Being an older mother has its disadvantages—I had to look at my son's ultrasound through my reading glasses, and I will be 56 when he leaves for college. On the other hand, you tend to be more focused and settled. You are ready to make the necessary sacrifices. An older parent has experienced life and has a broader perspective. Thanks to the Navy, I've been all over the world, had exotic vacations, and I know all of that still will be available when my children are a bit older. I do not feel I have missed anything, and I have my priorities straight. I could not have said that in my twenties.
Let's assume you choose one of your timing options and are successful in getting pregnant. One problem with being in this state at a new shore duty station is the possible reaction of your new coworkers. You may worry they will be impatient with the new gal not pulling her share of the workload because of morning sickness, doctor visits, or if complications develop, such as the ones that forced me onto full bed rest the last few weeks of each of my pregnancies. You also will be gone for six weeks of maternity leave.
As the only woman in the office for each of my pregnancies, I felt obligated to prove I was not a burden to my boss and coworkers. This was self-imposed, as I experienced only support and encouragement. Still, I felt the need to show I could pull my weight.
After delivery, women must return to Navy weight standards and the physical readiness test within six months. The more immediate threat is returning to the command, when you must fit into a standard uniform with a body that may still have maternity-like proportions. Keep working out under your doctor's supervision, but go ahead and buy some larger uniform sizes if you need them. Life will be challenging enough without conducting continuous hydrostatic testing of tight trousers.
Nursing is the best option for both mother and baby, and it allows you to connect with and care for your baby even when you are away at work. It does, however, present challenges. Women will find themselves looking for electrical outlets for their portable breast pumps and a sanitary, private place to conduct this procedure a few times per day. A good chief petty officer helped me to track down a little-used room at the Naval War College. Try not to be squeamish yourself, but be prepared for that reaction from some of your coworkers, especially when they open the office refrigerator and find your little storage bottles with teddy bears on them. Again, I never encountered any hostility in this area. Mostly, men just do not want to know any details, and many women may like it that way, too. The only problem is that if you are one of very few women in your command doing this you may feel like an oddball. Rest assured you are not: you have plenty of company. Stick with it.
Returning to work leads to the child care challenge. Planning where the child will go in case of emergency or deployment is almost easy compared to finding good daily care, coordinating pick up and drop off, and grappling with what to do on days when children are ill and a parent must stay home. Now it is time to make those difficult choices when combining work and family demands.
Making Difficult Choices
There are a number of options to consider. If both parents are working and you are using full-time child care, you still will need to decide whether both parents will be able to stay on a career fast track. When an active-duty couple consults with detailers they may hear, "Who will have the lead career and who will have the lag?" If the answer is, "We both want to be lead!" that is understandable. However, as each person becomes more senior it will be difficult to find competitive, career-enhancing jobs in the same location, to say nothing of trying to keep the parents on opposite sea/shore rotations so one is always available for the children. The geographic bachelor option to get that plum job may force single parenthood on either Mom or Dad. Is each parent prepared to do that so that both may punch those career tickets? Thoughtful examination of these questions is essential, and one parent may find that he or she must let go of cherished career plans such as screening for command or making Captain.
This cautionary note applies to civilian fast-track careers as well. One study of male and female MBAs who are within three tiers of the top job at their companies showed that "the rat race is still being won by execs who are willing and able to put in 80-hour weeks."4 Comments one consultant, "If you look inside organizations at women who are making it on the fast track, you will see women whose children have grown, women who don't have children, women who are not married. You very seldom see women with small children. They've realized that they can't manage three kids and still be the CEO."5
This certainly has been my experience in the Navy; I often heard people say I was the first married female SWO with children they had ever seen. After about ten years in the Navy I met a female ship's commanding officer with children; to complete her command tour she had become a geographic bachelor at the ship's home port and her child stayed in Washington, DC, with her civilian husband. Many active-duty personnel decide to apply for lateral transfer and change communities, usually to one that does not have the same deployment demands as the seagoing unrestricted line. That may be the right choice, but only if one truly is interested in a new field. It may not provide much of an alternative after all, since most communities including fleet support have at-sea billets. There is no "dry" or "9 to 5" naval service.
On the other hand, one or both parents may not be comfortable with full-time child care, and since consulting, telecommuting, scaling back work hours, and the like are not available to military personnel, one parent may opt to leave the Navy and stay home with the children. That person may not always be the mother. My spouse, formerly on active duty and now a schoolteacher, has been a full-time dad for a few years with each of our children.
That really has been the Great Secret to how I manage it all; I have someone to man the home front. In fact, every active-duty Navy or Marine Corps woman I know who is married with children has a civilian husband, and one or two husbands are home full-time with their children.
There are interesting parallels in the civilian world. An October 2000 Fortune magazine profile of the 50 most powerful women in business notes that four of its top five have husbands at home, including Hewlett-Packard's Carly Fiorina and Debby Hopkins, then chief financial officer at Lucent. Oracle Executive Vice President Safra Catz says, "Now I understand the concept of Wonder Woman. Absolutely, I could not do what I do without my husband at home."6
Full-time dads are a small but growing group. It is important for them to seek each other out, because they are breaking new ground and often feel isolated, not only from other men, but also from at-home moms. On military bases, dads may find only Wives' Clubs or Mom & Me toddler groups, and they may wonder whether they are welcome. Of course, it may just be a semantics issue, which can be fixed.
The option of the mother staying home presents its own issues. A good friend who is a ship's commanding officer joked to me that his female junior officers are saying they want to "get out of the Navy and be June Cleaver and have babies." I have to admit my initial reaction was rather insensitive: as a senior woman I was aghast that after finally earning the right to serve on all ship classes and fly all aircraft, these young pups wanted to give it all up. Still, I had to admit that perhaps these women know exactly what they are doing. Perhaps they are unwilling to accept that for a woman, the price of a fast-track Navy career is never having a family, since even today they rarely see any women who have had success at it.
If that is true, they probably have made the right choice: go with a family. They always can be a business dynamo or run for public office later. If, however, they are trying to escape a demanding life at sea by going to an imagined domestic fairyland, I invite them to consult with my Joe Cleaver spouse. He can tell them how stressful and demanding it is to be at home with a baby or a toddler.
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WINNER, ARLEIGH BURKE ESSAY CONTEST
Network-Centric Warfare Meets the Laws of the Navy
By Commander Sheila Scarborough, U.S. Navy Proceedings magazine, May 2001
Network-centric warfare is supposed to help us achieve a “revolution in military affairs,” a technological transformation of the U.S. Navy. The power of information technology is going to increase our awareness of both enemy and friendly forces. Using this networked “big picture” to organize our actions from the bottom up, we will respond to threats more rapidly and effectively. Some have argued that our individual ships, aircraft, and submarines are only “transitional technology”; that in the future Navy, a platform is only as good as its ability to act as a node, enhancing information flow within the entire network. It would appear that there is no turning back from this revolution.
There will be, however, some unexpected, probably unintended, and largely unrecognized consequences in terms of the impact of networking forces on the foundations of traditional military culture and organization. That innocuous-looking Palm Pilot or laptop is a window on the world, the keys to the city, the ultimate “gouge.” It allows access to huge amounts of information and to other people up, down, and across rank and service boundaries. Information no longer just flows downward from senior authority figures, but often bubbles up from the bottom. As a result, the top-down chain of command and the wire diagram-styled hierarchies will flatten. We will begin to see a loss of that deference to authority that is inherent in rank structure. The military will start to look like the networks it is using—like a web, not a wire diagram.
Is the Navy really prepared for such a fundamental cultural and organizational upheaval? I say we are not. Once the implications are understood fully, the required revolutionary changes to achieve fully network-centric warfare’s promise will be rejected, or at a minimum will be creatively stonewalled.
This rejection can be anticipated and perhaps checked if we acknowledge and attempt to understand some of the possible cultural and organizational consequences of a move to a network-centric model of war fighting. While a military organization is in many ways too different in mission and purpose to allow direct comparisons with the business world, the similarities between e-commerce’s effect on traditional businesses and the impact of network-centric warfare concepts on the traditional Navy are many.
It’s Not Just the Bits and Bytes
“E-commerce is not a technology play. It’s a relationship, partnering, communication, and organizational play, made possible by technology.”1
If we substitute “network-centric warfare” for “e-commerce” in this quote from Tom Peters, we are led directly to what is missing in the debate about military adoption of networks as a way of fighting wars. It is not technology in and of itself, but all the new things people can do by using technology that is significant. Much of the current literature on these technological revolutions is dense with mind-numbing jargon: bandwidth pipes and sensor grids, clock speed, lock-out, and OODA (observe, orient, decide, act) loops. What we are not fully recognizing and appreciating is that the most important effect of these inanimate switches, routers, and processors is sociological: how people use these systems; how networked people and organizations might act differently.
That beige box and the networks it supports operate and derive their enormous powers according to human values, especially those that support the free flow of information and communication across boundaries. This sociotechnical view holds that information technology is not just a new kind of tool. Its real power is not in squeezing more efficiency out of our current organizations but in the “potential to spark transformative change.”2
In an information technology network, the inert machines connecting to it have thinking, creative people attached to them, making the network seem almost alive because it harnesses those minds together. It facilitates the “hive mind,” which probably is more capable and powerful than any computer we could ever devise because it has emotion, intuition, instinct, and human-to-human connections. In an uncertain, frantically fast battle space, we should take full advantage of that amazing warfighting tool—the round thing on top of a sailor’s neck, especially when it is networked to hundreds or thousands of other magnificent machines just like it. We cannot, however, exploit the power of the network with a mechanistic, wire-diagram organization and a “do as you’re told” culture.
Military Culture Meets the Revolution
To get network-centric warfare on track, we might experience some cataclysmic cultural shifts in terms of the type of leaders we need to develop, our attitudes toward personnel (especially junior personnel), and how we handle challenges to our rank-driven respect for authority. Beliefs, rituals, and traditions are ingrained in military culture, many for good reason, but they have a downside—they can impair original, “different” thinkers. What sort of people are we looking for? According to a study prepared for the Office of Net Assessment, in the past, many military occupational specialties were well suited to those who prefer the discipline of solving well-defined problems and fulfilling clear organizational roles, and who have a lower tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity. A completely different mind-set and personality profile may be required to operate effectively within a C4ISR [command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance]-type force. Interaction in such organizations will require personnel who are more comfortable with higher levels of uncertainty and ambiguity, and who have highly developed skills in negotiation and coordination.3
To paraphrase the Apple computer advertising campaign, networked leaders must “Think Different.” Their education must be broad in scope. A former editor at Telecommunications magazine notes, “in the high-tech industry . . . a lot of the best gurus and researchers tend to have liberal arts degrees. . . . that’s what education should be about—giving you the tools for thought and the arsenal to deal with technological change.”4
For years the Navy has required that the majority of its Naval Academy and NROTC Midshipmen pursue technical majors, and we have duly commissioned thousands of officers who might not have the skills most needed for network-centric warfare. Our emphasis on technical degrees actually could be counterproductive: “the services must encourage greater familiarity with nonlinear analysis. A heavy emphasis on engineering, which is prominent in the officer acquisition procedure of three of the services, reflects a mind-set that is not conducive to innovation. . . . what the services lack are biologists, mathematicians and historians.”5
Network-centric warfare makes the dreaded and derided “touchy-feely stuff” a core competency for our leaders.
New Attitudes and Expectations in Junior Personnel
Intellectual property, human capital, and creativity are the most important assets for the military, just as in the business world. And while the military is moving in a “people first” direction, driven in part by the recent recruiting and retention crises, former Secretary of the Navy Richard Danzig rightly commented that the services still are “infected by a psychology of conscription” that considers people (especially junior enlisted) to be a free and limitless labor pool for all manner of work. In the Internet economy, people aren’t expendable, they can’t be replaced easily, and there isn’t always someone just as good or better waiting to step up.
Given the current and future demanding security environment, junior personnel will make battlefield decisions that may have strategic impact (hence the term “strategic corporal”)—and they will expect to be valued and to be treated well. As we move to a military of heads versus a military of hands, the price of their hard work and imagination (reflected in their paychecks) will go up.6
Keeping the best minds engaged means more than money, however. Surveys of the youth employment market show that once these young people get what they are worth, it’s about “learning opportunities, more training, cool people to work with, personal autonomy.”7 In the war for talent, does the Navy have enough to offer a bright, educated young person with enthusiasm and ideas?
(QUOTES BELOW IN SIDEBAR)
"Now these are the Laws of the Navy. . . . take heed what ye say of your seniors. . . . Every law is naught beside this one—thou shalt not criticize, but obey!" —Adm. R. A. Hopwood, RN (Retired) “The Laws of the Navy”
"Information technology is famously a great equalizer, a new hand that can tip the scales of power." —John Carlin “A Farewell to Arms” Wired, May 1997
"Too much of intranet development is focused on whiz-bang technology and not nearly enough on the cultural revolution all this implies and in fact demands." —Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger The Cluetrain Manifesto
"Technologies are not neutral, objective, or independent, but they are social because they are constructed by people." — Wanda J. Orlikowski “The Truth Is Not Out There: An Enacted View of the ‘Digital Economy’” 19 May 1999
"Why do we have a decision chain in the first place? Ostensibly it’s because those up in the organization chart have a wider view as well as more experience. . . . but if everyone has access to information, those on top no longer necessarily have the widest view." —Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger The Cluetrain Manifesto
"Leaders should no longer perch at the top of the organization but rather in the center. . . . true leadership hinges on an ability to grasp the value-creating potential of the organization’s knowledge base. . . . the shift from being the source of all knowledge flows to managing the network of knowledge lies at the heart of new leadership. —Wendi R. Bukowitz and Ruth L. Williams “Through the Knowledge Glass” Darwin, 15 October 1999
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It is hard to know when you are doing well as a parent. Nobody gives you a medal. You cannot delegate your responsibilities. There is no squared-away petty officer to help you look after a child. You don't go to the wardroom for a coffee break, take a nap, work on your Palm Pilot, or even tour your spaces on your own schedule. You can take a break only when it's the child's naptime, many of your meals are eaten standing up, and many days it is impossible to squeeze in a shower, let alone get in a workout. A complete load of laundry is a major victory.
To add insult to injury, your spouse may come home (from a day of interacting with adults, none of whom throw food or try to insert their fingers into electrical outlets) and ask why the general disarray. Social event chatter includes the inevitable, "So, what do you do?" Someone who is used to getting a positive reaction to being a seagoing member of the armed services may find a distinct lack of interest when he or she responds, "I'm making a home and raising my children." Unfortunately, full-time parents often do not get the respect they deserve, and they even denigrate themselves by comments such as "I'm just a Mom." It is important to recognize these issues ahead of time and know what you are getting into.
It is a bit easier to make these difficult choices if you actually have options and are not forced by circumstance onto one road or another. I advise all junior personnel to start early to save for retirement, and not to plan on a military pension with its tyranny of the 20-year career minimum. If you have savings set aside and you discover that combining active duty and a family is simply not workable, you can walk away from the military even well past the ten-year point. Consult with your financial advisor about whether the new Thrift Savings Plan might be used for this, along with an Individual Retirement Account or other investments.
If you still want to combine an active-duty career, marriage, and parenting, it is possible, but you will experience some aggravating moments while you are . . .
Learning to Live with Half a Loaf
The term "work-family balance" is used a lot, and balancing is not a bad goal. I try to view life as a three-legged stool, with one leg for family, one for self, and one for work. Pay attention to all three legs and your stool won't dump you onto the floor. Juggling is a good analogy, too, and jugglers tell me that when all the balls are moving correctly they do in fact have a sense of balance.
However, talking so confidently about balance also can give the impression that you have more control than you really do. A more realistic view can be gained from the labor experience. Those prenatal classes in "pain management" are supposed to come in handy during labor, but when the big event comes, you find that you are not "managing" labor pain one bit. You are only managing not to be glued to the overhead, screaming like a madwoman. Still, that in itself is a considerable victory, as is achieving even a modicum of success juggling being a parent, spouse, and military person. Give yourself some credit, and be prepared to deal with some frustrations.
You may wrestle with feelings of inadequacy and guilt. I am convinced that these conflicted feelings can be traced to a culture and expectations clash. The nature of what is required for career success collides with the often totally different demands of raising children. Perception of time is one example. Military people pride themselves on being always on time and if at all possible, a few minutes early. The parent of a young child must be content to get out the door and arrive somewhere within a 15-minute window. One's overtaxed brain experiences schizophrenia—on the one hand trying to be a squared-away, well-organized naval officer with immaculate bearing and uniform who runs a taut ship, yet on the other hand dealing with the reality of a home with small children, baby-proofed so you cannot find anything, child detritus strewn about, and macaroni and cheese and Fudgesicles for dinner.
A military background can provide some preparation for parenthood; thanks to the midwatch and deployments you will know how to handle sleep deprivation and stress. However, some military methods applied to a family environment simply do not work. I remember finishing a frustrating day as a ship's executive officer, harassing various divisions about the cleanliness of their berthing spaces and the green mung under their shower stall mats. I went home that evening and discovered that my own house's toilet was not a thing of pristine beauty, and the dust bunny behind it had reached frightening proportions. As I spun up into "XO mode," my husband (who also held down a job and handled everything including children when I deployed) pointedly reminded me, "You're not the XO here," and that if I didn't like it I could clean it myself. You have to get your left and right brains talking to one another.
We "type A" military sorts seem to enjoy overloading ourselves, but now you must fit in a family, which does not always cooperate with your well-crafted schedule. You do have limits, and you must recognize them. One active-duty Marine officer I know is a wife, mother, triathlete, mountain climber, and active in her church. She always had wanted to learn how to play the piano, which would allow her some quiet time and personal creativity. The problem: When to practice? Her solution was to rise at 0430 several mornings a week to work on her lessons, before physical training and heading to work. She commented, "I know it seems crazy, but I've always wanted to learn music. The good thing is, I've now reached my time management limit. If anyone asks me to add anything to my life, my question to them is, am I now supposed to get up at 0330?" I must say, her limitation point is well past mine, but at least she knows where it is.
The central frustration with trying to balance the competing demands of work, family, marriage, and self is: What do I ignore to carve out time to do something else? Some areas will be neglected to make time for other things. For example, I am not always as organized as I would like to be. The good news is that approximately every two years the military gives me a permanent change of station, and that is my golden opportunity to sort, donate, file, toss, label, deep clean, and buy more containers and file folders. Sometimes this gets out of hand, like the move when I actually went through the kitchen junk drawer and put all the loose rubber bands into a little plastic bag. I think I did it just for the sense of accomplishment, which shows how far one will go to achieve some sense of control over the chaos.
Personal grooming and appearance also tend to fall by the wayside. I seem to get only half of my leg shaving done at a time, although I try to get the same part done on both legs. Men may be wondering why this is relevant, but I bet women know what I'm driving at. It is a metaphor for how we neglect ourselves in response to competing demands on our time. The half-furry leg. A leg too far, if you will.
I have a suggestion to help you achieve the best possible half loaf. You must focus ruthlessly on what is truly important to you, your marriage, and your children, not what is important to Martha Stewart or your in-laws or the people trying to sell you floor cleaner. Establish your own standards. When sorting out your priorities, consider outsourcing those tasks that must get done but that you do not care to do, or that someone else could do just as well. Hire a housecleaning and lawn-mowing service; find a good dinner take-out place; have someone else change your car's oil. This is money well spent. You are buying some sanity so that you can pay attention to those things that only you can do, like reading stories to your kids or going on a date with your spouse.
Conclusion
One of the best weapons in the fight to maintain balance is a sense of the absurdity of it all. I try to recognize and poke fun at my own tendency to be a perfectionist. One of my favorite items looks like one of those motivational posters with nature photography and pithy phrases about courage or adversity, but the punch line is "When Your Best Just Isn't Good Enough."
Hey, sometimes that's the truth, and you must be able to recognize when you've done your level best, and move on. Try to avoid those feelings of guilt or inadequacy. Accept that even though you have admirably high standards and expectations for yourself in all areas of your life, you now must sometimes accept only satisfactory or even marginal performance. The good news is that the Board of Inspection and Survey is not reviewing your life. Some things may not meet specifications, but no one is going to report on you. Take a steady strain and do what you can do.
I asked my oldest child what she thought of having a Navy parent. She said the best part is the travel, when she sees new places such as Bali or London. The worst part is . . . the travel, when I am gone and our home is not complete. That is my own half a loaf: the wonder of being at sea and making voyages, and the heartbreak of being at sea and making voyages. I am just thankful I was never forced to choose one over the other, and I am willing to live with the frustrations of trying to enjoy both.
1. Shelley Joyce, "The Calm of the Storm," Triathlete, June 2001, p. 22.
2. "Power Lunch: Balance, Surprise, and Failure," Working Woman (27 June 2001).
3. Claudia Kalb, "Should You Have Your Baby Now?" Newsweek, 13 August 2001, p. 45.
4. Carrie Patton, "Balancing Expectations," Working Woman, (25 July 2001).
5. Sharman Stein, "Making a Life or a Living?" Chicago Tribune, 18 May 1995, p. 1.
6. Patricia Sellers, "The 50 Most Powerful Women in Business: Secrets of the Fastest-Rising Stars," Fortune, 16 October 2000, p. 130.
(Commander Scarborough is assigned to the Joint Training and Exercise Branch at Regional Headquarters, Allied Forces North Europe, in Brunssum, the Netherlands. Her daughter, Nancy, was a great help in writing this article.)
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Question Authority
If authority and prestige in the military no longer were driven so much by rank, but by the talent and skills one provides to the networked organization in a team setting, it would be inevitable that educated, intelligent young service members would feel freer to challenge authority figures. One of the huge dividing lines between officers and enlisted personnel has been college degrees. Through service programs and their own initiative, many enlisted personnel are earning their baccalaureate or master’s degrees. An innocuous self-improvement program is producing well-educated troops who will expect more and question more. Will a strict officer/enlisted stratification be justifiable much longer?
We say we need a better-educated force to have successful strategic corporals and to run our networks and provide good ideas, but are we ready for the possible assault on our military class structures? If we say we are ready but really are not, sailors will leave to work for organizations that welcome their initiative. The intelligent, thoughtful service member who has the same access as his seniors to reams of data about our programs or systems, and begins to question some of our underlying assumptions, must be appreciated as an opportunity. Our authoritarian culture must resist its usual tendency to question the sailor’s loyalty, remind him of his lowly position in the chain of command, or tell him to “look at the color of his identification card.”
Will We Accept These Changes?
It doesn’t look good. To commit fully to network-centricity will take guts—also known as overcoming fear. Fear of relinquishing control, of letting go of turf, of admitting that you don’t have all the answers. Fear that the information technology revolution, the dominance of the network, will lessen the importance and prestige of the “things,” the ships, aircraft, or submarines, that embodied one’s entire career.
How many of our mid-grade and senior leaders truly are prepared to believe in the revolution and to put in place a system that could undercut their authority, even if it is better for a new way of fighting and winning wars? Very few, I submit. Streamlining the current system and finding more efficiencies can take us only so far; at some point we will need radical innovation, a new approach.
Will anything push us to really restructure our organization and change our culture? “Militaries that change are usually militaries that have been defeated. And so this is a difficult time for the United States. We have a formula that has worked. . . . Do we want to take a chance on a new way of fighting?”8 The U.S. armed forces’ history of success conspires to convince many that change is not needed, that the old way of buying ever more expensive platforms still is the best way to protect national security.
It appears to have come to this: the last best hope to push change and force difficult decisions is the oft-bewailed upcoming budgetary train wreck and the finite amount of money available to recapitalize all those platforms. We won’t change fundamentally until a crisis forces us to or we implode of our own weight. Let’s hope we won’t turn around after that happens and find that our best and brightest have defected to companies where the culture rewards radical innovation instead of “keeping your head down” in accordance with the Laws of the Navy.
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"Those who thrive in this new world are a different breed. . . .they’re often young and iconoclastic. They haven’t earned their stripes, and they don’t seem to be coming up in a fair way. . . . the grizzled veterans sure would like to take an old IBM Selectric to their heads." —David Kirkpatrick “ePocalypse Now!” ecompany, September 2000
"You have to teach people new thinking skills. . . how to be heretics, how to search out and challenge every element of dogma and convention." —Allison Bass “Revolt or Perish” cio.com, 1 October 2000
"In short, the Web breaks down fiefdoms. Resistance is feudal." —David Kirkpatrick “ePocalypse Now!” ecompany, September 2000
"The real issue is whether companies have the guts to engage in creative destruction. . . . E-commerce will work to the extent that you alter every relationship in your organization. Do you have the nerve to do this?" —Michael Vizard “Business Guru Tom Peters Sees Major E-Commerce Shakeout,” Infoworld, 19 September 2000
1. Michael Vizard, “Business Guru Tom Peters Sees Major E-Commerce Shakeout,” Infoworld, 19 September 2000, (21 September 2000). (back to article) 2. John A. Byrne, “Management by Web,” Business Week, 28 August 2000, p. 89. (back to article) 3. Mark D. Mandeles, “Organizational Structures to Exploit the Revolution in Military Affairs,” prepared for the Director, Office of Net Assessment, contract DASW01-97-C-0054, January 2000, p. 5. (back to article) 4. Interview originally published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, reprinted in the College of Liberal Arts Newsletter, The University of Texas at Austin, summer 2000. (back to article) 5. Williamson Murray, “Innovation: Past and Future,” Joint Force Quarterly, summer 1996, p. 60. (back to article) 6. Byrne, “Management by Web,” p. 96. (back to article) 7. Byrne, “Management by Web,” p. 137. (back to article) 8. John Carlin, “A Farewell to Arms,” Wired, May 1997, (29 September 2000). (back to article)
(Commander Scarborough, a surface warfare officer, was the co-Honor graduate of the March 2001 senior course at the Naval War College, Newport, Rhode Island. She is assigned to J7, Joint Exercises and Training, at Regional Headquarters, Allied Forces Northern Europe. Her most recent sea tour was as executive officer of the Fort McHenry (LSD-43.)