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Brigadier General Brendan Raymond · 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 Morris Institute at West point. I am Dr. Charles Feint, 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.
• 0:24
  Speaker C: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Modern War Institute's 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 Brendan Raymond, Deputy Commanding General of the 4th Infantry Division. The focus of today's episode is taking care of soldiers and families. General, welcome to the show.
• 0:43
  Speaker A: Thank you. I'm happy to be here.
• 0:44
  Speaker C: Fantastic.
• 0:45
  Speaker A: Sir.
• 0:45
  Speaker C: For the first question, during your promotion ceremony to Brigadier General, you remarked, it's not about me, it's about the soldiers. What does taking care of soldiers mean to you?
• 0:53
  Speaker A: Well, thanks for that question. And I've been doing this, this army thing for about 28 years now. I think what I've learned over time is that the army is a people business. You know, unlike other services, the Navy that invests in ships, the Air Force that invests in the next airplane. Our decisive advantage in the army is our people, and we invest in our people. So I think that taking care of soldiers begins with the fact that the Army's mission is to fight and win our nation's wars. And as a leader, as an officer in the United States army, your job is to train and prepare your soldiers to fight and win our nation's wars, to go to combat. And that training for all officers begins at their commissioning sources where they learn the character, they gain competence and confidence in themselves, and they really start to understand in those commissioning sources the dynamics of being a soldier, leading, demonstrating your Karen's concern for soldiers and actually doing some training. So I think, you know, number one, as a leader, taking care of soldiers is, is training them. Officers come out of their commissioning sources, they get opportunities as lieutenants, the in lieu of officer in the command. So commander's command and a bunch of lieutenants are there to, to enable that commanding it. It is all about developing tough, realistic, battle focused training that brings soldiers to as close to combat as they possibly can be within the resources that the organization has so that it builds the technical proficiency in the force, the tactical proficiency in the force. And as an officer, you're sharing in the hard of your soldiers and you're doing that alongside them. So as you're building this battle focused training and looking to change the conditions in that training. You're getting closer to your soldiers, you're getting to understand your soldiers that much more. You're building cohesion in the organization. And together you're becoming more mentally fit, you're being, becoming physically tough and, and you're ready then to go to eventually the crucible of combat that your investment in the training of, of the force is truly taking care of people. You know, number two, it's the enforcement of standards. And I say that because soldiers in the army don't want to be in units that are indisciplined. Soldiers in the army want to be in units that are highly trained, that are disciplined and fit. And as an officer, as a leader, it is your responsibility to know the standard and to understand what the regulation says and then to enforce that standard. And it gets at those things about the spirit of discipline and Schofield's definition and the approach that you do. You don't have to do it in a way that is caustic or tyrannical, as Scofield says, but it's enforcement of that standard that soldiers expect. I think, you know, the next piece, if I'd say it's number three, it would be, you've gotta reward good performance. You've gotta incentivize the formation. When a soldier performs well and it meets the standard, exceeds the standard, you got to recognize that. And as a battalion commander, I can remember, you know, I held formations routinely each week, the, the companies and batteries did it more frequently than I did, but I held one formation at the beginning of the week, and I held one formation at the end of the week, beginning of the week. It was absolutely out there to communicate with the soldiers of the formation, to give them what essentially the priorities that work for the week were to give them objectives and to explain, you know, my sergeant major would say, hey, this is our go home criteria. And then at the end of the week, I took it as a time to get out there in front of the soldiers and to recognize excellence. And whether that was graduating a soldier from the Air Assault School or a Pathfinder or a soldier who just raised his or her GT score, that would make them eligible for another mos. I mean, it was pulling that soldier out and recognizing their performance and rewarding them. And the other thing I think within that is you need to reward good performance and you need to counsel and fix poor performance in the formation. And that's done so through many means. And as a commander, you have the Uniform Code of military justice and all that. But what that gets back to is that a soldier wants to be in a formation that they can trust the person to their left and to their right. And when there's a breach of trust inside the formation, you got to correct that. If it's immoral and ethical behavior, then that kind of thing gets taken a different route. But counseling and good old fashioned mentorship for poor performance was really the, the, the next thing that I think taking care of soldiers is about, I think, you know, I'd say number four is you got to be an engaged leader and you got to talk to your soldiers. So that builds trust. It allows you to get to know them a bit. It allows you to get to know what their aspirations are, what their goals are. And it also gives you some insight onto how you can help them achieve those goals. So engaging with your people and being engaged leader is all about sitting down, getting kneeboard to kneeboard, eyeball to eyeball with your people and getting to know them. And if a leader does that at echelon, you're going to touch every soldier in the ranks. Taking care of soldiers to me as well is, I thought about this. It's treating the young lady or the young man as, as an individual first. You got to treat them as people first, you treat them with rank next and all the rest of that. But it's showing empathy, it's being compassionate and understanding that you are leading the sons and daughters of America. There's somebody's kid, there's somebody's parent, they're somebody's child, there's somebody. I mean, these, these are people. And as I said up front, you know, people are a decisive advantage. When you treat them as people, you develop, you know, the commitment that is needed to do the business that we have. I think, you know, two more points here, I guess. One is you got to give predictability to soldiers, you got to give predictability to leaders they want to know. You got to keep them informed. And by keeping them informed, it increased trust. If every day you come into the formation and you change the priority, you change the go home criteria. Soldiers don't know which which end is up. So when a young officer gets in front of the formation and says these are the priorities that work for today, you can expect that you're going to be in the field for the next two weeks and you execute that and they can plan against that, then that builds trust with the families. And taking care of soldiers and being predictable with soldiers also means you're being helpful to have the family plan around that. And the last thing I'd say is officers, NCO's leaders take care of soldiers by learning and growing with them, by sharing in their hardships. We Start in the 4th Infantry Division sharing in the hardships of our people as teams and taking care of our soldier as teams. Every morning at 6:30 when the cannon is sounded and the flag is raised, we sing the song of the steadfast and loyal division. And we get after good old fashioned, hard, tough, challenging PT with our people and we share in the hardships with them. And that gets compounded in everything that we do throughout the day. We have leaders that are present, we have leaders that are communicating purpose and they're empowering their soldiers to go out there and to learn and grow. And I think that's what's taking care of soldiers.
• 8:03
  Speaker C: Over the course of your career, how have you managed to balance the natural tension within the Army's mantra of mission first, people always?
• 8:10
  Speaker A: Yeah, that's a good question. So it's funny because the VICE is giving a leader professional development series to the staff and faculty right now over in Washington. I'm sorry, in Thayer hall. And this topic came up about mission first and people always. He had a different approach to this, but I'll stick with mine. So I think that over the years I've engaged with many of my colleagues on the topic, officers, non commissioned officers, civilians that some opportunities to be close to political appointees and ask them similar questions. And also my buddies that got out and our business leaders, titans of industry on this tension between mission and people. And I think that honestly it's, it's critical for leaders, especially commanders, to get this right, to find the balance between the mission and the people. And I think it does a bit go hand in hand, but I'll explain it a little more. So as a commander or as a leader and when you get to be a commander, Our army regulation 620 command policy says that the commander is responsible for everything that the unit does or the unit fails to do. So that is an awesome amount of responsibility. Awesome amount of responsibility. You are responsible for training, organizing, equipping, leading and in the crucible of combat, motivating your soldiers to get right back in after bad things happen. You know, and winning and accomplishing our mission a lot of times is exactly that. It's, it is the task of getting right back there on the seat and accomplishing, you know, the mission. Whether that's take this hill, whether seize this objective or get down in the motor pool, pull Pack and fix this engine. You know, the mission does take precedence. You know, this is the United States Army. Our job, our mission is to fight and win our nation's wars. So you do this, though not at the expense of the people. It is to do it with the people. You are going to do this and you're going to train the people so that you can accomplish the task, the mission at hand. And, and, you know, really, you know, this, this, this balance of mission and people becomes a risk conversation. It's a risk to mission, you know, or it's a risk to force. And in some cases, you know, the mission is going to be accomplished even though you have not mitigated all that risk to force. So talking ahead of this interview about maybe weaving in, you know, something from my past, vignette from combat. So in 2010, I was a battalion operations officer in 2nd Brigade 101st. I'm a field artilleryman by trade, so you would expect that at that time we were deploying our artillery to perform any number of missions, whether that was a take a mortar out there, take a cannon out there, but it was to provide fires in support of a brigade combat team or provide reinforcing fires to some other organization. But this was, you know, at the precipice of the surge in Afghanistan. And every single soldier that we had in this brigade was going to need to be employed in the counterinsurgent concepts. We were going to need every soldier to go into the fight to be provisional infantry in some way. And that's what we did. We were, we were responsible to clear, hold and build in Kandahar Province, Arghandab District, Afghanistan. So we knew that this mission was, was going to be a very challenging mission. On the onset. I was one of the only Ranger qualified leaders in the formation. So we had had some experience. I had taught military science here. I had taught trooping procedures. I had done plenty of live fires. I had some non commissioned officers that had served in, in regiment and some other places, Ranger regiment, some other places. So we knew how to build basic live fires. We knew how to train battle drills. And we became this cohort about, about 12 of us in the, in the battalion, the trainers for an artillery battalion, the transition from shooting cannons to, to conduct basic maneuver, more complex maneuvers and live fires. And what this allowed me to do is really get to know the formation. You know, as a major, you're looking down two levels. You're probably looking at the platoon levels. That's usually the leader team for your battalion commander at the brigade Level, you're looking down two levels at the company troops and batteries. I was looking down at the soldier name tape level, because, you know, I had to know, is this kid that shot his saw weapon, his M249 on a range three weeks ago, and I was out there with them as they qualified night fire, prepared to go into a maneuver, live fire, to enter and clear a trench. And could he shoot with the optic that was there? I knew, I knew soldiers down to the name tape level is what I tell you. And what that allowed me to do was really understand when we got to combat, what their constraints were, what their limitations are, and what capabilities they needed. So we ripped into southern Afghanistan in the summer of 2010, and right during the relief in place, the unit that we were relieving had casualties. And it was clear that this unit was highly trained. They had been through a year long of combat, they had lost soldiers, and they were physically, emotionally and mentally exhausted. It was a dismounted fight. So we were not traveling to work by helicopter, excuse me, by ground transportation, MRAPs, M. ATVs or Humvees. We were going to get there by helicopter or by our own feet. In that summer, the government of Afghanistan and International Security Forces Afghanistan said, we're going to do the Argandav first. So my battalion, a provisional battalion, became the main effort of the free world in the summer of 2010 with, you know, 402 soldiers going into that fight. We rapidly made friends with our Afghan counterparts and saw what could be brought the bear when you brought in another 700 plus soldiers. And we trained with them and we got to know them very well. And we slept in the same combat outposts and we shared the same meals, and we got to know them very well because they were our best friends in Afghanistan. And we knew we were better than the Taliban, we knew we were better than Al Qaeda, and we knew we were better than any foe that we were going to face. But they had had several months to prepare their defense with IEDs. And these IED minefields that were in front of us were not something that any of us had trained, we had never trained. Combined arm breaching. And that goes for the provisional infantry battalion as well as the rifle battalions inside this brigade. So I turned to the brigade commander and asked for additional resources. And we knew what we could do. And we launched this campaign to successfully clear the area, build additional combat outposts in these gardens that they call them, this very dense vegetation of pomegranates and grape orchards. And we fought back the terrain so that we could remove the enemy's ability to make war where they were drying homemade explosives on the tops of roost just beyond this IED minefield. And we were successful. But it did. Cause there was a cost to that. In about two months there, we lost six soldiers. About nine more were horrifically maimed by improvised explosive devices and had multiple soldiers wounded in action. That got back to what I was saying to you about the mission. You know, the mission was going to be accomplished. I knew these soldiers and so did my battalion commander, and so did the brigade, battalion xo and so did the command sergeant major. We had trained with them, we knew them down to name tape level. And when we lost them, we knew what it was going to take to get them back on, to get that formation back on the horse so that we could reduce the, the risk to mission by making sure that the force was taken care of. But this whole thing was a balancing act when we didn't have the resources you would recommend, hey, I recommend no go on this. So what did I learn from that? Well, number one, I think the approach we took was exactly right. You gotta understand intent two levels up, you gotta operationalize that intent at your level and then translate that intent two levels down. And then when you translate that intent two levels down, you gotta assess the risk. You got to assess the risk of the force and at the same time balance the risk to mission. And by really knowing those soldiers at that level, we were able to understand the sum of the small parts and when and where we were going to meet a breaking point or a culmination point.
• 16:28
  Speaker C: While at the Naval war College in 2008, you wrote a paper on joint force decision making which mentioned the age old debate over whether military operations are an art or a science. Do you believe military leadership is more of an art or more of a science? Which do you think offers the best way for young leaders to tackle the wicked challenges you describe in the paper?
• 16:46
  Speaker A: So you know, this is a long time ago. So I was at the Naval War College in like 2008. This is at the tail end of the nine month course that you have there. So to provide the audience a little bit more context as to what this paper was about, let me kind of describe it to you. So it was part of the joint military operations block at the Naval War College. So there was a leadership block, there was a national security and policy block. And then you were in your joint military operations block. And we were, we had this very huge volume of reading that we did. And one of them was Done by this guy, Milan Vega, who I would, I would encourage folks to look into. And he was a historian, military historian, that would link doctrine and tactics to military operations and tell the stories of things like Crossing the T at Trafalgar and a series of other things. But in one of his lectures that he gave to us, it was about this age old debate on whether military operations are more an art or are they more science. And I was fascinated by it. You know, I just got done, and I can't believe I'm saying this, but I actually read On War by Clausewitz, you know. You know, and obviously everybody reads Sun Tzu, but those are kind of the practitions of, of the art, the Kudor, it's the commanders working, you know, vision, his gut and his intuition, which allows the commander to make decisions. And then you had some others that were there, some, some practitioners like Jomny and, and at that time, coincidentally, the Joint Staff and, and at that time, an organization called Joint Forces Command down in Suffolk, Virginia, were writing new doctrine for the joint Force called effects based operations. And effects based operations were the belief that you could do systematic analysis, causal and relationship analysis to predict behaviors and war. I was like, this is a very interesting topic. So I looked into it a little bit more and I wanted to take this paper and try to determine, maybe through the lens of a couple case studies, can you apply something as incredibly difficult as decision making at, you know, at the joint level, at the army operational level, through systems warfare, through science, the science of war. And really, you know, I took on one case study which I thought was fascinating. It was the 2006 Arab, excuse me, Israeli Hezbollah conflict. And the Israeli army had adopted effects based operations in the prosecution of, of this, of this war. And what they were doing was they, they believed that they could predict the outcomes of their military operations before they occurred by taking metrics and applying them against what had previously happened and what they were predicting, things to happen in the future. They were kind of jumping the gun on, like, we've actually accomplished this task. And instead of evaluating the task at the offset of accomplishing the task, kind of like a measure of performance, you've achieved that. So which. What is the effect now we're going to reassess? They were predicting what was going to happen and it actually caused them to culminate. So I thought it was a very fascinating case study. And, you know, I think what I found is that there's really no foolproof method to weight either the science of war or really the Gutting intuition that is the commander for military decision making. But I think this still has a place today, you know, so I really think that the science of warfare might not be the best way that young practitioners should approach making decisions in, in that very difficult thing of, of decision making in the military. Especially when you're trying to tackle complex, or I think we used to call them vuca wicked problems. You know, I think we call them complex, ill defined problems now. When I left the Naval War College was really the, the we really brought back army design methodology, which is a fascinating way to approach complex problem sets that I'm absolutely much more of a practitioner for now. So I would advocate that to, to those that are in the design design business and the strategy business there at the operational level of war. But I think again, this, this still applies today because we're in a ever changing, very complex world. This is the most complex, strategically, geopolitically challenging dynamics that I've ever seen in 28 years of my service in the military. When you look at the very volatile nature of world politics, of geopolitical situations, the things that the Russian Federation are currently doing and their desires to be revisionist, and you got a revanchist state here with China that is absolutely trying to expand and to create dominance regionally. You got North Korea that is absolutely at the onset of being able to create additional challenges for Western society. And you've got Iran that's not really helping us out too much in U.S. central Command and in the Middle East. So, you know, and the dynamics are so significant and they say that the nature of war is not really changing, but it is absolutely changing in the character of war. With this explosion that I would say of technology, you know, whether that's artificial intelligence or machine learning or robotics, the potential to have quantum computing here in the near future, I think all that is good. You know, we're leveraging science, we're leveraging, you know, technologies to help us make decisions. If you look at the cognitive hierarchy kind of approach of decision making being at the top and you're just flooded with data right now, you know, all those things, applying technology to rapidly aggregate information to help in decision making is good, but I think that the art of command is still going to prevail even in the future, because even with all those things coming in, it is absolutely the American way of war and the conscious of the American people that we're going to put a human in the loop and we're going to put commanders in the loop.
• 22:42
  Speaker C: How do you think Artificial intelligence and machine learning play into this conversation?
• 22:46
  Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I think that right now artificial intelligence is amazing. I really do. I think that if you have data that's out there that you can aggregate rapidly and get away from doing 80% of your time aggregating information and you can take that and remove 80% and spend 80% of your time analyzing the information to make informed decisions, then, then that's, that's clearly going to be a benefit. You know, machine learning and some of those things. I mean, I think that there is still going to be challenges that we're going to have as we would prosecute a fight in the future. First off, we live by, you know, the law of armed conflict. We live by a rule of law inside the United States of America and we would prosecute war criminals if we started seeing that we were not absolutely applying, you know, the rules of engagement and all the rest of this. But you know, to answer your question, I think there's a place for artificial intelligence, like there's a place potentially for quantum computing. Absolutely. I mean, to think through what that's going to be able to aggregate for decision making. But I think all this is going to be to help us in the speed that decisions will have to be made in order to stay ahead of our adversary. So we talk now in the Army FM3.0 multi domain operations. Multi domain operations is our ability to leverage joint capabilities and army capabilities at the critical time and place and converge those effects to create relative advantage. And if we're able to do that by a thinking computer that can scrape across the Internet, an opportunity for a target, for us to target something and we can close our kill chains that much faster, then let's get it. Or if we can find, by doing that same thing and using these, this technology to scrape across, to find a target that we can disrupt the adversaries decision making. If we could affect his sensor, his shooter, really put a pause in the adversary. I think that's where the place that this is going to be in the future.
• 24:52
  Speaker C: Sir, in addition to being a class of 1996 West Point graduate, you completed a broadening assignment as a professor in the Department of Military Instruction. Can you describe that process for us and how it benefits you and your soldiers?
• 25:05
  Speaker A: Yeah. The Army's purpose for broadening assignments are to provide opportunities for officers and senior noncommissioned officers to gain, you know, new skills, new knowledge, in a lot of cases, new perspective outside of troop assignments. So you'll have your operational assignments in the military in all in all services. And then all services have these broadening opportunities. So for the United States army, officers can participate in any number of frauding assignments, but they're usually kind of tied to three or four areas, I would say. I think first it's, you know, it's like the, the functional broadening assignment and a functional broadening assignment. The examples would be things like you go to the 75th Ranger Regiment and you're going to have the opportunity as an officer to be a platoon leader, an executive officer in the 75th Ranger Regiment, or you just get done being a captain, a company commander in the United States army or a major. And one of the combat training centers recruits you to go there. Human Resources Command has some. The army, the army commands have them. The army subordinate commands have them. Then there's other broadening assignments, more on the academic side, so the scholastic route or the civilian enterprise route. And in these, you can, you can get internships. There's opportunities for you to do internships. There's, in some cases, army officers will compete for the Joint Chiefs of Staff internship or the army staff internship, where you're going to go to Georgetown or George Washington for a year, you're going to get a master's in National Security or in public Administration or another field, and then you're going to come into the Pentagon and you're going to serve as a fellow on the Joint Staff, on the Office of the Secretary of Defense Staff, or on the army staff. There's Olmsted scholarships, there's Downey scholarships. So that's more on the scholastic side. Advanced civil schooling is another one. Then you can come back and teach at one of the academies you can teach at, or be a professor of military science in an ROTC program. And then you, you have other broadening assignments, things on the joint side, on the multinational side, things with the NATO alliance, and you go to a joint task force in the NATO alliance, or you go work on the Joint Staff or in one of our combatant commands. And all these are opportunities, as I said up front, to learn a new set of skill, gain more knowledge, represent the Army. I think a lot of times in each one of these things, you're representing everything that you've learned and everything that you're aspiring for in the army. And it gives you a new perspective. So officers can participate in broadening assignments, as I said, kind of to pursue master's degrees, doctorates. But usually these things take place and you're given the opportunity to get broadening assignments after you've commanded, after you've gotten qualified in your your current rank. So as O3 captains, you've commanded a company trooper battery and then you can seek to go do a broadening assignment when you're done being you call it Katie Complete. You've gotten your key in developmental time as a field grade officer major. You can compete for a broadening assignment. You can go go out there and try to get in involved in any number of those functional scholastic, interagency or joint multi multinational assignments as a lieutenant colonel, that could be your your next assignment. Or you could have the awesome opportunity to command a battalion and then post battalion command. You can go out and do a broadening assignment. And then last year you see that at the 06 level brigade commander. And then you go out there and you serve in one of those capacities. But all of this really, and I've served in several of my gun my opportunity to serve here at West Point, which was a great one. I've served on the army staff for two years. I've served joint staff for two years. I've served on served in a component command of the army in the Pacific for a year ahead of my brigade command. And all of these were absolutely personally and professionally developing for me. They were extremely rewarding. I got to increase my network of colleagues. I got to leverage some experiences that I had going to schools in the Joint Services to see people again in the Pentagon on the Joint Staff. And there are some times that you need that Troop assignments are tough. You are there to educate and train, develop and lead and in some cases go to combat with the soldiers of our country to do our mission. And in these broadening assignments, you know, it's very predictable for your family. You can tell your kids that you're going to be there at their hockey game or at the lacrosse practice and you're probably going to make it. So these are times for officers and our senior NCOs to give back a bit to their families. You're going to try to do that and balance your work life when you're in troop assignments. But you can definitely provide some predictability to your family there. So you know, ultimately I think these jobs, they made me a better person, they made me a better leader. They allow me to give back to my family at the critical time. So that when I turned to them and said, hey, you going to be with me for these next couple of years? And they said yes, that's kind of why I'm still in it made me a more credible leader, made me a more well rounded advisor to the People that I was advising. And I think ultimately right now, in the role that I'm playing, it's given me the ability to provide context down in a division, because after serving in the Pentagon for four years at the executive level of the army on the Joint Staff, and understanding really the dynamics in play, you're able to translate what's going on, the decisions that senior leaders are making, and give them the why behind it.
• 30:51
  Speaker C: Sir, this is my final question. Knowing what you know now, what advice would you give to your younger self if you were starting your career over today?
• 30:57
  Speaker A: Thanks for that question, because I, I just came from meeting with the army soccer team. They're having their pre game meal and it's time for them to come together as a team and meet with the coaches. And they extended an invitation for me to go talk to them ahead of time. So this is the advice that I gave to them because I was sitting in their shoes like 28 years ago and I was like, you know, I think the first thing that I'd say, and I've heard this from another great leader, is that leaders really never arrive. You are constantly trying to develop yourself, and you should continue to develop yourself personally and professionally. Be a lifelong learner, you know, know yourself, know what you can, you can accomplish, but know that you can push yourself that much further. This institution, you know, gave me that, they, it gave me the incredible, you know, desire to just continue to push myself to do something a little bit harder, to be a little bit and never be satisfied, I guess, with my accomplishments and just continue to drive that. And I think that's great because you're role modeling that, you're modeling that to your soldiers. The second thing I told them was you got to expand your network. You have to absolutely work to develop relationships outside your comfort zone. And, you know, and that's your personal and your professional relationships. You know, I found when I was a cadet here that I had a few acquaintances, or, excuse me, a few friends, but a lot of acquaintances. And I was kind of, I guess, insular in that approach. And I wasn't really open to a lot of other opportunities. I was a core squad athlete and that's why I came to the academy. But over time, what I saw is that these guys and gals that are doing other things, they're, they're pretty awesome. Plus they're helping me get A's in these different classes because, you know, I'm not just bringing the brown bottom with my name, they're actually helping me. But that changed over time. Because one of my tax pulled me aside and said, hey, man, you need to get out there. Like, people don't know you, and you need to know them. These are going to be your colleagues for the rest of your life. So I built my network at West Point, and I offered the same thing to the army soccer team not to be insular and continue to develop and expand your network. Number three, I think it's this institution instills in you to be a leader of character, to be able to set an example, to know what's right, to do it even when nobody's looking, and to instill discipline in formations. Competence is great, but character is really what army officers need to inculcate in their formations, and it needs to be on their sleeve. People need to know that they can trust you. I guess, number four, as a leader, you are charged with the climate of your organization. So if people like coming to work, then that's a good thing. If people don't like coming to work, then you need to fix it. And I think a lot of that is doing things that you learn as a young officer. You know, building effective teams is building trust. It's practicing mission command. It's being extremely uncomfortable because you've trained your people to the point that you don't know if they're going to fail. And then you catch them when they fail, and you underwrite their risk. And when you do these things, you know, you're developing a bond of trust inside the organization. But you. You must demand that the climate is healthy and that it is safe. It is. It is responsible. And if there's any immoral and ethical or other behaviors, you act because you don't get judged because a bad thing has happened in your formation. You get judged because you've allowed your climate, the workplace, to erode. And you get judged because you failed to act. You know, I talked about, you know, understanding your team and understanding the. The limitations of your team. So getting to know your people and really understand the sum of the small parts. You gotta know your people. You gotta know what they're capable of. That means you gotta train with them. You gotta push their limits. You gotta push your own limits. You gotta coach, mentor. You gotta invest in them. When you talk to them. You gotta understand what they want to do in their lives. And you gotta. You gotta make every effort to do that for them. And, you know, the credit to you is when four or five years goes by, and then Specialist Olson, now Sergeant First Class or Staff Sergeant Olson, calls you because he or she needs Something from you. That's when you know you've made your mark and the investment went two ways. And you're always trying to help that, that young leader. And then the last thing I'll tell you, and I told them as well, is that you got to take care of yourself as a leader in our army. This is a tough business, extremely difficult business. And, you know, I told them that the, you know, the crucible of combat, God forbid that any one of them went to it, but, you know, the odds are that they were and that the nature of war is brutal, chaotic, and. And absolutely the worst thing that you could possibly see. But you've got to be emotionally strong, you got to be physically strong, you got to be mentally alert, and all those things that makes up you. It's that, you know, the army triad, a physical, mental, emotional, and taking care of yourself is, you know, if you need help, you're willing to raise your hand and get that help. And then, you know, really just having. And investing in yourself, investing in yourself to take care of yourself. For me, it's reading. I like to read. I like to listen to those podcasts like this and, you know, have my earpods, and even when I'm doing PT on my own, always trying to drive myself and to think differently. You got to exercise. You know, you got to exercise to make sure that you're physically conditioned, because the best way to freaking win in a fight is to be a lot more fit than the enemy is. You got to get sleep. You got to have faith. If that's something that you. You believe in. You got to anchor yourself on your family and you got to give back, and that's taking care of yourself, too. And the last thing I tell you is that, you know, you got to be good to yourself because you need somebody to be able to turn to you and say, hey, are you being taken care of? So it's latching in with your network and folks that are looking out for you and asking them, you know, hey, man, I need some help. Or, hey, I haven't seen you in a long time, but just reaching out to you, having a hard time. I need to talk. So it's. There's no shame in that whatsoever. But I think that's what I would have told Second Lieutenant Raymond 28 years ago.
• 37:05
  Speaker C: Thanks, General Raymond, thank you for sharing your time with us today and for the great discussion on taking care of soldiers. On behalf of Colonel Pat Sullivan, the director of MWI, and Dr. Charlie Feint, the director of this podcast series, I'd like to present you with this rare and coveted MWI engraved ammo can as a token of our appreciation.
• 37:23
  Speaker A: Okay. That is awesome. Thanks so much. And I got a lot of ammo to put in this. Oh yeah, Great.
• 37:34
  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.