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Brigadier General Adam Ake · Five Questions for a General

• 0:00
  Speaker A: Foreign.
• 0:03
  Speaker B: You're listening to five Questions for a General, a production of the Modern War Institute at West point. I am Dr. Charles Fate, the team lead for this podcast series which features interviews of senior military leaders conducted by specially selected and trained West Point cadet hosts. These exchanges produce timely, relevant and inspirational insights for professional development of leaders at all levels.
• 0:25
  Speaker C: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the west point class of 1974 recording studio and the five questions for a General Podcast. I'm Cadet Zach Olson, your host and it's my pleasure to be here today with Brigadier General Adam Ake. General Ake graduated first in his class from West Point in 1997 and was commissioned into the armor Branch as a Rhodes Scholar. He studied at Oxford for two years before serving in the Republic of Korea and at Fort Lewis, Washington. General Ake completed his active duty service and transitioned to the National Guard in 2004 to attend law school. He then served overseas in Iraq, Jordan and Kuwait, as well as in numerous stateside assignments. General Ake returned to active duty and joined the Joint Staff J3 in May of 2024 and currently serves as the Deputy Director of Operations OT4. He joins us today for a discussion about leading and learning in complex and uncertain environments. General, welcome to the show.
• 1:13
  Speaker A: Yeah, thanks for having me.
• 1:15
  Speaker C: General Ake, you attended West Point and did quite well here. What prompted you to come to the academy in the first place and why did you decide to branch armor and later transfer to the infantry?
• 1:24
  Speaker A: So in terms of coming to the academy, my dad was an Air Force Academy grad, so I'd grown up in military brat, so it was not mysterious at all. And I really had thought that that was the best way to go generally just coming out of high school and never even dawned on me to apply for a student loan. And my sister, she was just a year behind me in school and she went to Duke on a Navy art disease scholarship and I thought she was kind of a schmuck, she actually had to pay for it. So I was like, ah, you're, you know, you're getting taken advantage of. But no, I, I just had, had had this in my head that hey, I needed, I needed to make my own way of life and get through so didn't want to incur any debt and figured it was seemed like a good career field to get into. And then in terms of why I branched armor, I was very interested in maneuver, but I'd had a lot of injuries as a cadet, including serial knee injuries, shoulder injuries, and I was very concerned that my body wouldn't hold up if I branch infantry especially. So my first this summer I did two. I did a cadet detail and a CTLT. And so I did CTLT in the 82nd. And I didn't feel like I was playing to type down there. I thought if I went infantry I was going to have to start dipping, get a pickup, think that I like country music, like this whole identity, I felt like I was going to have to assume to fit in into that world. And then I spent the second half of my summer doing something that we don't do anymore. But we used to send all the Buckner cadets down to Fort Knox for a week and give them exposure to mechanics. And so we called it Mountain maneuver training. And it ran for essentially five weeks. But each cadet company would only go down for one week during their, their Buckner summer. We would rotate down three companies at a time. And so I got picked to lead that as, as the cadre. So it was my summer command as a, as a firsty. And just the, the contrast between the firepower I saw available in the mechanized world in particular because we did a big combined arms live fire exercise at the end of every week. And it would have tanks shooting on the move it target down range. They had Apaches coming in. Sometimes they even had a 10s coming in, do strafing runs. So it was definitely showing all the impacts of not only the joint world, or not only combined arms in the army, but the joint world as well. So I was enamored of that and I was like, yeah, compare this to, you know, where a 240 Bravo is your most lethal weapon. I said that's not really much of a comparison. So I, I decided I was going to go arbor. But that's long story short, or maybe short story long.
• 3:54
  Speaker C: That sounds like a fun experience. I went to CTLT this summer too, and it was an aircraft in the 160th and Special Forces groups. And it's like a whole other world out there, right?
• 4:03
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And unfortunately it was just became a budget issue because they had done it at Knox for many years because they had a, a small independent armor brigade called a separate armor brigade. Think like an acr. But anyway, they had armored infantry, so they had Bradleys, they had tanks, they had their own artillery. And it was just this, this pocket armor brigade. But they were getting rid of it while I was a cadet. And so it had, I think it was the 192nd. And anyway it just after that went away, that formation went away. They had to import all these Mechanized units from around the country because all they had left there was the armor school. So they had tanks but they didn't have self belt artillery. They didn't have all this other stuff. Then they had to truck it in or railhead it in. So it just became too expensive and. But it's too bad because you guys don't really. The mine run cadet doesn't get it necessarily ever get any mechanized experience or exposure before they make the branching choices, which I think is unfortunate.
• 5:00
  Speaker C: I think they have a couple of my ads now that you get to go to maneuver courses and kind of see it. But yeah, it's still, it's a pretty small number of cadets.
• 5:06
  Speaker A: But my daughter graduated in 24, never having visited another, another army post because she did all academic IEDs and she did air assault here. And I, I said, you know, you're branching infantry, you're nuts. You haven't, you've never even seen an infantry unit like except you know what, I was commanding one. And then she, yeah, even then she only came to ceremony. So I was like this is crazy. So she still hasn't got to her first infantry unit. She's been through tribal and sitting around in like a whole platoon for many months waiting for rancher school. But.
• 5:33
  Speaker C: Well sir, when you graduated from the academy, your first top of the class in academics, top of the class in overall standing and you continue your education as a Rhodes scholar, can you talk about how did the scholastic discipline that you refined at West Point and at Oxford, how did that shape your mindset to serve in an operational role?
• 5:51
  Speaker A: So I think there's two part of the discipline. One is the self discipline to just ruthlessly prioritize your time, focus when necessary, get hard tasks done first before you proceed on to easy tasks. Just kind of mental games. I learned at West Point to make my time as productive as possible. So that continued with me through Oxford, probably to a lesser extent with Oxford because I was, I wasn't quite as serious. You know, I just worked hard for four years, decided to take the ruck off a little bit. It was pretty chilled out anyway, the course schedule was even the first year when I did an mba, which by Oxford standards was considered a rigorous academic experience because they had 10 week quarters and only three or four weeks off between terms as opposed to eight week with six weeks off between terms, which was the standard fare over there. So nothing was approached to rigor. But later than when I went to law school I was able to really use my academic discipline or at least studying discipline much more to my advantage. And then too, I'd already been a company commander. And so all those things put things in perspective much better. And people that are West Point graduates wind up doing very well in professional schools later on, especially if they've been out in the regular army, because they know what real stress is, and so they're not getting too stressed out. But in terms of like, outlook, discipline. And what I learned at West Point and started, you know, I picked up pretty early was some critical thinking skills and also an appreciation for my own limitations of how I understood things. And so it probably now the best way to refer to it as a frame, because a lot of people understand what framing is. We didn't use that term until it kind of came in vogue about maybe 15 years later with operational design. That's really where it kind of came into vogue. But even as a cadet, I learned that most things in the world were not susceptible of like a monocausal explanation. So most problems were not caused by one thing. Right. It wasn't just a simple, this is the problem, this is what caused the problem, this is the problem. But it actually may be a multifaceted problem with disparate causes. And so that always made me a little suspicious of people that posed simple solutions to difficult problems. And so I had an appreciation that problems may be much more deeper and spending time in the diagnosis of problems is well spent rather than rushing to a solution. So that's a lesson that I've kind of taken through my whole career.
• 8:27
  Speaker C: I think there's some psychology or some heuristics out there that we have that we want to find that simple solution to the problem. What actions, what kind of habits, what kind of education can army officers go through to change how they think about complex problems?
• 8:42
  Speaker A: Yeah, I think probably the folks that are from the more technical disciplines that are more susceptible to looking at simple problems because they see something as a system. And if there's a malfunction in the system, it's probably something that's broken down, that's maybe discreet. And I think the folks that are coming from more of a people focused discipline, so your social sciences psychology understand intuitively that there is a lot going on and there's dynamics. And even if you define it as a system, it's still a system with a lot of inputs and outputs that are interactive. So that's maybe more like the computer science folks would, would understand that a little bit more than your civil engineer. And I don't want to denigrate any particular discipline, but I Think coming at it from a humanities perspective probably helps. So I think in the sense that what makes for a good army officer, I like the, that West Point provided a good grounding in math, science, engineering, but also allowed you to pursue humanities degree without it being a shortcut. So it wasn't perceived necessarily like at West Point or like at the Naval Academy where I did an exchange and they called the humanities majors bull majors. It was short for bull. Right. So yeah, it's people that did those majors were looked down on. Right. Whereas at West Point there was no shame in being a political science major or international relations major relative to being a civ engineer. You know, just it. There was, there was parity there and it wasn't looked down upon. So I thought that was an advantage that West Point had in, in terms of being able to prepare officers that are going to be able to function in these complex environments.
• 10:26
  Speaker C: General, holding roles from the tactical to the strategic. What's your approach to balancing the strategic demands maybe on the Joint Staff with the tactical realities at the small unit level?
• 10:37
  Speaker A: So we try not to get into the tactical level at the Joint Staff, but we get drug into it a lot of times and unfortun it's just because some, some things at the tactical level have the potential to create strategic results. And so I'm working in current operations, but I work closely with our future operations. We call it regional operations in the Joint Staff. But the Joint Staff really acts as the, the one entity and this is in support of the chairman. You know, the chairman and then his staff is really the one entity within our military apparatus that not only looks short term, which is what the Joint Force is really focused on. All the combatant commanders, they just want to get through this year. The longest time horizon the combatant commander has is three years because that's generally it, and then they retire. So the combatant commanders are. The voracious appetite never goes away. They always want more. And then the services are the ones that actually have to provide that. And they're looking further down and the services, and a lot of cadets don't understand this, the services have no real war fighting mission. Like the army staff plays no role in planning operations. The Army Staff plans on how we're going to generate capabilities, recruit, train, man, equip, and then present forces to the Joint Force for deployment. So the military services are really the ones that are the custodians of the future. They're developing future capabilities. They have to generate readiness. They know what the impacts of extending a force in Theater is going to create. And so ultimately though, those two things come up to the Joint Staff, and then ultimately we make a recommendation to the chairman who makes a recommendation to the Secretary of Defense. And that's how those disparate equities get balanced or at least get arbitrated. There's a decision at the, at the back end of it, and it doesn't always work in favor of the combatant commanders, but usually it does. So usually the services are left kind of holding the bag and trying to figure out how we're going to regenerate readiness, do modernization, all those things, because we just got overtaxed and our plan got blown up by the needs of the combatant commanders.
• 12:40
  Speaker C: So I've got something here. Famously, the Greek historian Thucydides, he claimed that the nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools. I want to get your reaction, but I also want to get what responsibility lies on the shoulders of soldiers to educate themselves, and what role does the army, maybe the combatant commanders or the services play in supporting and resourcing that intellectual development.
• 13:08
  Speaker A: Yeah, so I don't want to overplay it because we definitely need a lot of doers. Right. We don't need a lot of people kind of sitting around in ivory towers wearing a uniform that are. All they're doing is thinking big thoughts and thinking about the future. We definitely need something, and unfortunately we need a lot of people that know how to do both, but need a real good grounding in how the doing gets done before they rise to levels where maybe they're now going to be the custodians of the long term future of the army, and they're going to be tasked with making changes because inevitably we're in a conservative organization. And the military in general is very conservative in the sense of we make very prescriptive rules, we create incentive structures through our personnel system and through received wisdom. Everybody goes, and if you have an interest in becoming a general officer, what do you do? You go look at general officers resumes and see what jobs they've done and then try to map what you're doing. And so we create sort of ultimate conformists that ultimately become most of our general officers. And then unfortunately in their late 40s, all of a sudden we're expecting them to be non conformists and you know, do things different and maybe even choose people that don't look like them in terms of their career path behind them, because that may be the skill set that we need. And that's a really tough ask based on how we've created our officer corps. And so it does become much more in demand at the highest levels. And so I think what, what I warn people is that, hey, just because you're a really smart cadet and you may be able to go get a graduate fellowship or something like that, that's not necessarily going to be an advantage early on. And not only because you may be seen as somewhat different. You took a couple years instead of being a platoon leader and you went to graduate school, or you're doing something non traditional ultimately that may get you voted off the island too early before you can really arise to the level where you're going to be. Use that to the advantage of the Army. So what I tell people is you got to kiss the ring. You've got to do all the things that the army needs you to do in order to get promoted. And then hopefully you're stewarding your own academic development and intellectual development and you can help the institution along because there is always a desire for officers that are out in the field to write for journals, come up with better tactics, techniques, procedures for the tactical fight. Right. And so you can hone sort of your writing skills and cut your teeth on that and then hopefully maybe come back to West Point or when you get a chance to go to war college, really get dig your teeth in instead of just kind of skating along and viewing it as like, hey, this is just a waste of a year or something like that. It is incumbent on the individual. There are ways in the army that you can get the support for that and do wmy civil schools, but it always comes at a risk if you want to stay operational and want to get promoted that there's a big tension there. Unfortunately, we have created a situation where doing a lot of odd things and broadening experiences is not helping to get you promoted unless you're in one of these weird kind of niche functional areas and even those kind of top out. So, yeah, we've created some structural impediments perhaps, and General George is actually really interested right now. And it's, it's a timely question because we're relooking the function areas and General George is interested in more permeability between the operational folks instead of like making a hard right turn at the major grade plate and saying, okay, I'm going to spend the rest of my career as a strategist or as a operations research systems analyst to potentially allow folks that are staying competitive for Command to go back and forth. We'll see. The whole reason we created the function areas is because that dual tracking wasn't working and people that spent too much time in what we now call functional areas got penalized and we're not getting selected for promotion. So if we figure out the magic special sauce to make it work this time, that's great. But there's some tensions there, so we'll see how it goes. But I'm encouraged and I'm actually one of the proponents for the strategist career field branch, at least on the Army Reserve side. So I'm involved in relooking how we do the career fields for those folks that are kind of the designated thinkers right now and trying to get some of that thinking back into the operational side and not make a hard distinction between fighters and the thinkers.
• 17:33
  Speaker C: What informed your decision to leave active duty and then go Reserve National Guard to go to law school? Was there kind of just not like a clear path to go to law school in the army or did that.
• 17:43
  Speaker A: No. Was there something else? This was all driven by family concerns. So my wife is still regular army and she's a research physician, but she was in medical school when our oldest daughter was born and we were both active duty starting in 2003, which you might recall became a big year in terms of deployments. And so I was in a brigade that was just equipping with strikers and I was facing down being gone 18 in the following 24 months. And my wife was just starting a residency and we had a 12 month old, no family support. So I said I really liked the army, but at the same time my commitment was ending in another year. My wife was just starting what was going to be at least a seven year commitment at that point. And so I, I said, well, hey, I'll take me, you know, go to law school for a couple years. I still had another graduate fellowship that I had been putting off and deferring for a Truman Scholarship. And I had considered coming back as a judge advocate, but I ended up deciding just based on where my wife wanted to be, that that wasn't going to work because she wanted to do a fellowship polling her her residency training. And so those, the fellowships were only at Walter Reed and down at Brooke Army Medical Center. So neither of those was really compatible with what I would have to do being a judge advocate and go be a brigade judge advocate somewhere. So ultimately just decided to stay combat arms in the, in the, initially the National Guard. Plus I just had too good of a job offer coming out, I was able to get a federal clerkship for the chief judge of the U.S. court of Appeals in D.C. and that seemed like not a, not a good thing to, to pass up. So. Yeah, but it's all, it's all worked out in that regard.
• 19:18
  Speaker C: How's your experience been on the Joint Staff? What's the biggest challenge that you run into in trying to execute your job to the best of your ability?
• 19:24
  Speaker A: I can't say enough about how cool the Joint Staff is. It's relatively small, given again that unique perspective. It's the only organization in the whole military, the uniformed organization that's looking at every service, every capability, every time horizon. So not just everything from current operations to future basing decisions, investments, capabilities, joint capabilities. So there is so much in the joint world. Right. And a big part of my current job is the whole nuclear weapons enterprise. And so the whole, we call it the strategic enterprise that is so out of the realm of the normal army officers experience. Outside of the few folks that are in nuclear operations career field, which is a pretty tiny, tiny little, I think it's functionary 52 I think is the name of it. But yeah, we have a really tiny number of folks that go into that career field. But it's been so eye opening and just getting a front row seat to everything that's going on while I work in the National Military Command center for two years has just been a fantastic opportunity. So I mean any joint assignment is going to be good, but between the COCOMS and the Joint Staff, again, the Joint Staff is looking at the entire world and not just your one little problem set. So the Joint Staff is the global integrator and really supports the Chairman in providing advice to the SECDEF and the President. And so it's a big honor and it's a bunch of superstars and it's been a fantastic experience so far.
• 20:57
  Speaker C: What's the most actionable piece of knowledge or idea that you would want to disperse to every formation out there in the army right now, from your vantage point on the Joint Chiefs, maybe specifically for the army, what would you want all the soldiers to know about what's.
• 21:10
  Speaker A: Happening from where you're at? Yeah, I think getting some joint experience and getting up out of the formations, getting your head up, you know, maybe out of the foxhole or out of the turret, you know, so to speak, and understand where you fit into the entire Joint Force is at the same time eye opening as well as somewhat humbling because you realize that when combatant commanders are asking for Capabilities. Most of the time it's not the capability that you're in and from the Army. A lot of times it's, it's our long range munitions, it's our air defense capabilities, it's some other niche capabilities and generally it's not. And particularly if you like the China fight and what we've been doing in centcom, it's, it's a lot of intel driven precision targeting, long range guided munitions battles. Right. And so I mean, I think if you got that perspective, you can really see sort of what the needs of the Joint Force are. Perhaps where the, the growth industries are, we're talking cyberspace and then all things long range precision munitions are kind of still the growth industries. And so this is probably something that in sense of like why every army officer should know this. We get in our own bubble and we, we have things that we value as an organization and we, I don't want to say fetishize, but we, we prioritize and we honor the things that produce badges, essentially that, so we have a kind of a badge seeking culture. And the things that produce badges and tabs are the things that get, get all the respect and what people want to strive for. And those aren't necessarily the things that the joint world needs and the combatant commanders need. So I think that's probably, you know, some humility for the badge wearing crowd. It's helpful, but it's, it's also very useful in terms of incentivizing people into going in these career fields that the army is still a vital service provider or vital force provider to the Joint Force. But we need to get some of our best and brightest into these career fields that have not been at the fore of the institutional hierarchy. Put it that way.
• 23:12
  Speaker C: If you could go back to Second Lieutenant Ake and tell him something about what you've learned now, what advice would you give your younger self?
• 23:19
  Speaker A: I think the biggest difference in my outlook now is focusing on relationships. So not just family relationships and romantic relationships, but relationships generally. And I think too often we, but also specifically me, when I was in your seat, I was fixated on attaining particular goals. Be that degrees, be that particular jobs, rank, that sort of thing. Honestly, even if you get all those things, if you don't have relationships, good relationships, particularly with your family, and that's where everything has to start. It's all going to be meaningless. You know, you're going to get a couple years at best. Even if you're, even if you're wildly, fantastically successful and you get everything you ever wanted. If you don't have those relationships afterwards that have to sustain you, then, yeah, you're just going to be forgotten on the dustbin. Right. So the ride ends for everybody. So while it's nice to have those things, if I was going to prioritize one thing over the other, I would say first it's a marital relationship and then it's a relationship with your kids, and then it's relationship with your peers and your friends, and that's just so important. And you're blessed as a cadet with not only the friends you have right now, but once you graduate, you're going to run into classmates that you barely knew and you're going to make fast friends at every post you find yourself at. And it's so easy to pick that up just based on the common set of experiences you've got. And you're going to have a network that is the envy of your peers, not only in the army, but out in the regular world to. And you're just going to have so many people that you can consider close friends eventually, that those aren't really accessible to people that are not coming out of this institution and at a few other peer institutions. So take advantage of that and make sure you give it the attention and the energy that it deserves and not just an afterthought. I think too many people see relationships as just another way to get ahead. And I think it's. It's almost the opposite. It should be use your, your positions in the various place, you know, the, the opportunities that you have to just continue to develop relationships up, down, sideways, because that's, that's what's what you're going to value in the long term.
• 25:43
  Speaker C: General Lake, thank you for your time today and for a great discussion on the Joint Chiefs, your experience in the army, and lessons for future leaders. On behalf of Colonel Pat Sullivan, the director of the Modern war Institute, and Dr. Charlie Feint, the director of this podcast series, it's my pleasure to present you with this rare and coveted MWI coin.
• 26:01
  Speaker A: Oh, wow. Thank you, sir. All right, thanks so much. Appreciate it.
• 26:09
  Speaker B: This has been an episode of Five Questions for a General, a production of the Modern War Institute of West Point. If you like what you heard today, please download, like, subscribe and share this podcast to help us reach an even larger audience. All statements in this podcast represent the personal views of the speakers and do not represent an official position of the United States Military Academy or the United States government.