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Major General Peter Andrysiak · Five Questions for a General

0:03
Speaker A: You're listening to Five Questions for a General, a production of the Modern Morses 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.
0:26
Speaker B: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the class of 1974 recording studio and the five questions for general podcast. I'm Cadet Zach Olson, your host, and it's my pleasure to be here today with Major General Pete Andreziak, the Chief of Staff for United States European Command. General, welcome to the show, Zach.
0:41
Speaker C: Thanks for having me. I look forward to the discussion.
0:43
Speaker B: Thank you, sir. General Andreziak, before you were Chief of staff at U.S. european Command, you were a cadet at Yuzma. Before we get into the questions, can you please share what drove you to want to serve in the army and what path it was for you to becoming an officer?
0:54
Speaker C: Yeah. Thanks, Zach. My father was in the military. In fact, I was a military brat. And both of my parents are actually immigrants. Both of them were kids in World War II, endured some of the hardships that most. Most folks would endure during World War II. But more specifically on my father's side, you know, his dad died in a concentration camp. He was in an orphanage because the rest of his family was really put in prison for speaking out against the Nazi regime. So war was over. My dad came back to the States, would never finish high school, enlist in the army, and eventually go to Officer Candidate School. But while he was enlisted, his first assignment was in Germany. And my mom, who was actually born in Czechoslovakia, she was forced out of Czechoslovakia at the time by the Russians. When the Russians occupied Czechoslovakia, she wound up in Germany. So where I currently serve in Stuttgart, Germany, is where they met when my dad was an MP working at a gate. And so my dad served 20 years, and, you know, he was my inspiration, and I wanted to be like my father and serve. And so my parents both encouraged me to go to West Point, and I started at the prep school and worked my way here. So that's really my inspiration and how I wound up here.
2:00
Speaker B: So what moment in your career most shaped you as a leader today?
2:03
Speaker C: Yeah, that's a great question, because there is not a singular moment. And I think it was really what I would describe as my first deployment to Iraq when I joined the 1st Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division. The commander at that time, Colonel Abe Abrams, the youngest son of Creighton Abrams, was a very unique leader. And what I observed in his organization. When I joined it, the standards and expectations were clear. It was an organization of high character, which is obviously the thing that we focus on developing here at the Academy. Competence is one of those things that was expected of everyone. It had a fantastic training and certification process which prepared the organization for combat. There was a huge emphasis on leaders being present and enforcing standards and leading from the front. And then the leaders were held accountable if they didn't meet the standard. And then the other piece that I think is really important is systems and mechanisms were in place. So when bad things happened, the organization knew what to do. They were never caught by surprise. And so to me, that is what what right looked like. And this I'll be. This would be a long response to the question, because this is really what shaped how I. How I served as a battalion commander and beyond. So I took that as an example. And when I picked up battalion command in 2008 of the 20th Engineer Battalion, I modeled everything that was built there. That's the struggle, I think, of a battalion commander. When you lead, organizational change is what do you want the organizational culture to be? And then more importantly, a culture is more than just something that you say or put on paper. More importantly, it's the actions that you take to enforce that culture. Because I think culture in an organization is in competition every day. And if you and your leaders are not trying to drive that culture that you're trying to build, there are other influential people in your formation that could take your organization in a different way. And I say all of that because my last year in command, as I commanded three years, I deployed to Afghanistan. I was originally supposed to go to Iraq. I got extended for a third year to lead the battalion. And I would say that that most challenging period of my Life because on the 5th of November, 2009, there was a shooting at Fort Hood in a soldier processing site that as you get ready to deploy and you knock out all these administrative tasks, my soldiers were in the SRP site. And that's when the doctor that was there that was actually seeing and doing psych screenings for folks, opened fire in that facility. At the end of the day, I had four soldiers killed. At another, about 12 that were shot, but many others that were obviously impacted by being in there and seeing that and enduring it. So that was about 45 days before we deployed. And, you know, there were others impacted from other units. My unit took the. Took the most casualties and had to deploy. Right. So the first challenge was getting through that deployment and then that we were one of the first units in for the surge in Afghanistan. So literally when we arrived, all the equipment wasn't there. So every bit of equipment came out of Iraq and a lot of it was battle damage. So you had the mission requirement to get on the road and do route clearance, and all of Regional Command south, which also included Helmand Providence, where the Marines in the UK were. So I think the organization did a fantastic job getting us set, getting us into the fight. But because you're leading into the surge, it was a huge challenge with being almost the only unit on the road out there every day, going out, right, and trying to find IEDs before other units, as you bring them in, run into them. And I would say that, you know, I took a number of casualties during that deployment. There was one particularly hard period of time. One was a personal experience. My mom called me and she was dying of cancer. And literally the next day I went to do a change of command. So I'm dealing with that. At the same time I go up to do a change of command, I get handed a three by five card that I just had a patrol hidden IED and four soldiers were killed. And so I got through that process. Ten days later, same thing happening another four. I took casualties throughout that. And I say all this because that was a personally challenging period for myself. Right. But what I learned about combat leadership and being a good organizational leader got me personally through all that and all the work that I have done in character development. I think the other piece of that is all those preparations that we had made from that influential period that I described earlier is what got my unit through those hard times. And it was a. It was a fantastic unit. But there are a number of challenges that we had to overcome. But it was really that period of time, right, that made the difference of prepared. And that is what I've carried throughout my career to this point.
6:38
Speaker B: Zach, can you talk about something that you learned at West Point, something that cadets can focus on at West Point, or that prepared you for that, and how we can focus on that to prepare ourselves for challenging scenarios like that.
6:48
Speaker C: The classroom environment where you get to learn, right, how to lead is one thing. It's really the practical application. But I think this idea, when we talk about a lifelong learning, character development is one of those things that you don't do once you got to continue to. To look at your own, your character, and you got to continue to build it in your formations. To me, Zach, the most influential experience that I had here was I was a football player. I still remember going up in the stadium my first year. I came in as a highly recruited football player. And then when you find out that you know you're going to drop on a depth chart and you got to, you got to make the decision, do I want to stay and be on a scout teamer for my first year or many more years potentially and endure all the hardship that goes with it, or do I just want to go back down and be a cadet like everybody else? Of course I chose to stay. Right. So the, the hardship every day in practice, suiting up, right. And you know, going against one another, it's counterintuitive to, to run full speed at someone else and run into them and try to take them down because that's, that's the environment. It is, you know, competition and I think it's what you learn there. Because you're going to get hurt, you're going to have a lot of self doubt at some point in time. When you get beat, it is overcoming that, right. Quitting is one of those things that you got to be very careful about because it become contagious. And it's one of those things that if you do it, it is a hard rut to get yourself out of. So this continuous reflection, overcoming adversity, I think was probably the biggest impact. And I had phenomenal coaches did a great job of developing people and if you listen to them, they would help you improve and you can work your way through these things. And, and it's those things, those. Overcoming those challenges and adversity was probably the biggest piece that I think contributed to, I would say, my ability to get through the challenges that happen. So the deepest, darkest moments that I've had, I reflect back, it was the experience on the football field that got me through that.
8:45
Speaker B: Sir, shifting gears a little bit from the perspective of your current assignment, what excites you and what worries you when you think about the army of tomorrow?
8:52
Speaker C: Yeah, it's a great question, Zach. So as I, I'll start with the part that worries me and then I'll finish with the part that excites. That's U.S. european command. So we are the joint headquarters in all of Europe. So underneath our headquarters and General Cavoli is the commander. He's also the commander of all NATO forces as a dual headed commander. Today we have anywhere between 80 and 85,000 allocated or assigned forces and we're responsible for the mission set. That is the European Command. Obviously the big one that we have oversight on is everything all of the US efforts that support what's going on in the Ukraine right now. So I've been there since the beginning. I'm on my fourth year at U. S European command. And so from where I sit and everything that we're doing to equip, train and advise the Ukrainian military, the thing that worries me the most. As you look at the scope and scale of the conflict on any given day, you have this unique combination of World War I trench warfare, right? And then what you're layering on top of that is all the new technology and rapid innovation that's taking place. The Ukrainians have about 107 brigades in the fight, and the high 90s is what they have up on the front line of troops on a day to day basis. And if you take a look at it on a daily basis, 5,000 artillery barrages take place a day. There's 50 Russian attacks that take place on any given day. And then you have this mix of electronic warfare and this proliferation of drones. And they're doing it from trenches. And it's not maneuver warfare, it's attritional warfare that's taking place open source. The number of casualties that the Russians take on a daily basis is about 1,200 casualties a day. That's a mix between killed and wounded. And the Ukrainians take a significant number of casualties. So the scope of death and destruction and this combination of World War I trench warfare along with this high tech warfare that's evolving very rapidly. My concern is do we really understand that, right? Is that understanding what life is like on the front line every day and the challenges that soldiers have to endure, are we using that as the point of departure for everything that we think about as leaders on a daily basis? Does it drive the physical requirements in PT when you get up to PT every day, Are we looking at all the training that we're doing at the unit level with it being fully informed by those conditions on the battlefield and then organizationally, are we innovating and adapting quickly enough to be able to meet those requirements? You know, one of the benefits of, of being the best army in the world, and I'm convinced of that, right. It also comes with its own bureaucracy and are we breaking down the bureaucratic barriers to make sure that we can innovate and adapt in a manner that keeps up with with the fight? And what I described to you of 100 plus brigades that the Ukrainians have in the fight, the Russians have a two to one advantage, right? And they also have a manpower advantage. So they've proven the ability to adapt themselves and be able to regenerate the number of casualties that they're taking. And if the other part is the scope and scale of the casualties take eclipses what we took in 20 plus years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Right. From a societal standpoint, if we were to ever get into a fight of that scale, how would that be accepted by the American public or in our own formations? When you're. You're losing that that many soldiers on a. On a regular basis. That's what, that's what concerns me now the part that encourages me. One of the efforts I lead at usucom, we're converting to a war fighting headquarters because that's not where we were before February of 2022, is that we've had to rebuild and adapt the organization to become a war fighting headquarters.
12:37
Speaker B: Can you explain what the warfighting headquarters is?
12:39
Speaker C: Sure. So prior to that the big of United States European Command, you know, when the Cold war ended, you went from about 16 to now 32 allies. When you bring new allies into the alliance, one of the jobs that U S. European Command has what we call security cooperation. So a country gets accessed into the alliance we have. We work with the country team. Right. Is our, our military folks that work in the, in the embassy and that country was says hey, I want to build. They get capability targets from, from NATO that says you got to build out these capabilities. So we help bring them in, understand their equipping requirements and we work foreign military sales for them to buy the equipment. And then what we do is we help train them on that equipment to build out their capabilities. And that's what a lot of our exercises in the joint force are designed is to help our allies and partners get better. That doesn't move at a rapid pace as war fighting. Right. And then as you reorganize the headquarters. So post Cold War there was no war fighting requirement. So organizations adapt and change and so they divest of requirements in the headquarters and you move bodies elsewhere. And then we've taken a series of decrements over time to the staffing numbers in the headquarters. So when General Cavoli I was his deputy commander at US Army Europe, I came there in 21 and left in 22 when he became the EUCOM commander and the supreme ally commander of Europe. When he took command, I became the operations officer the J3 and, and the requirement was to convert the headquarters and get it war fighting capable. Which means you gotta be able to understand what's going on in the world out there. You know, they have a lot, everyone, everyone in the Joint force has a lot of capability and systems. Think of intelligence collection capabilities. But everything that happens on the battlefield, you gotta be able to pull all that in to be able to understand on a daily basis everything that's happening every day. We campaign and compete in Europe and you have units that are doing exercises and operations. We, we have a lot of capabilities that we can deliver on the battlefield to enable that. If you think about information operations, cyber warfare, all those things are what we employ on a daily basis. But you got to get that war fighting focus back into the headquarters. You go from administrative construct, right? To a part where you're, where you largely respond or react to things. You got to move it on a continuum to where you're becoming more proactive and you got to be able to see what's happening. You got to be able to anticipate decisions that the commander has to make. And the reality is, much of that was built out in more of a manual process. Somebody comes to work every day, they dip into a database, they pull stuff out, they put it into a spreadsheet or a PowerPoint presentation. And your ops and intel updates are driven by PowerPoint. So that's what it means, is to move from a more administrative, reactive construct to a proactive shaping construction to enable the commander to make decisions to get in front of things that your adversary is doing. And the way that. So when you change the mindset and how people think in the headquarters, there's a reorganization component that has to go. So where you move things, you got to move them in areas that now have higher demand. So you think of a joint operations center. It can't be one of those things where you collect information every day. You got to have all your systems up where you're seeing what's happening in the environment, right? So there's that aspect of it. The biggest leap that you have to make is a digital transformation. You have all of these service systems that services can pull up, right? So the army, the Air Force, the Marines, Special Operations, they build their own systems and they pull them up and then they can see what's happening in their domain. We are the integrators across domains. We need to be able to have access to all that data so we can see what's going on. So that's the digital transformation where we gotta be able to pull all these data sets from these authoritative data sources to be able to pull them up. Most people refer to this as your common operational picture. We call it the UConn decision advantage environment. So where we had three data sets that we pulled in when I got there in the last seven months, we went from three data sets that we pull in to 200 plus data sets. So now what that is are automated data feeds that you used to have to make phone calls for or you would go into something and put into a PowerPoint slide or an Excel spreadsheet. Those are all automated feeds. And what we're using from a system standpoint, when you look at the technology that goes along with that. So Palantir has Maven Smart system. So we pull everything in from this product in here, put it into a common data layer where anybody across the staff can now access the 200 plus data sets that are out there. So instead of coming to work, as I said, working in the Microsoft suite of war fighting tools, you're in Maven Smart system in the EUCOM Decision Advantage environment. And you can do any queries across the data sets that you need. Whatever your specialty is, you can use open source or publicly available information, or you can use classified information. You converge all this and now what you layer on top of that are the AI tools that are rapidly evolving on the battlefield today. So as an organization, you know, shared understanding is not something that we talk about anymore. It is something that is real time updates that feed into our Decision Advantage environment. And then where we're going with that is that we'll layer on these multi agent systems to automate planning processes to include gaming engines that do advanced war gaming. So instead of doing tabletop war gaming that the staff would do, because we have all these data sets now available to us, the next leap of this is that we're going to put it into this gaming system and that does advanced war gaming that runs your coas, your courses of action for you, where you can run multiple coas in a very short period of time, take the output of that and figure out what levers that you need to pull to make help the commander make better decisions. And that's the planning piece of it. You can take the same tools into the execution and say, hey, what am I going to do for the next three days? What is my plan for fires and the delivery of capabilities? And you can see how one plan versus another may play out and where you may have an advantage. And this is how you get after seeing before the adversary can see it and allows the commander to decide before the adversary does. That's where we get the name the UConn decision advantage environment.
18:58
Speaker B: That's powerful, sir.
19:00
Speaker C: It is, it's pretty amazing. But I also remind people that our adversaries have access to this technology as well. And if we're not first, we're going to be in a bad place. And I'm encouraged because across the headquarters, any organizational change is hard. You got to help people understand a need for change, then you got to communicate the change. And I would tell you that from a grassroots perspective, the older folks like myself become the challenge. It's the grassroots, the younger folks in the formation that have taken to this and are making it work. So data scientists and engineers working with an operator that make the connection to the authoritative data source that you need. And then they realize that as they come in every day and that becomes their workstation, right. That they can get after these problems really quickly.
19:46
Speaker B: This is interesting, sir. How does this maybe shift traditional leadership models that were taught here at the academy or at ROTC institutions? And what do these institutions need to do to shape their education to be prepared for leaders who are going to be making decisions this fast and this.
20:02
Speaker C: Well, I think leading organizational change as a framework, I don't know that that changes. Right, because you still have the typical challenge. You know, this is a, it's a human endeavor, right? So you're still dealing with people. So you gotta help them understand why change is necessary. You gotta help them see what is what you're trying to drive at in the future. And you gotta help them understand the value of it and then what's the glide path to get there. So I don't know that it really changes anything. I do think this idea of being innovative and adaptive and is not well understood. A lot of folks are unwilling to necessarily take on change requires work and in some cases it's a requirement of reprioritizing other resources. So potentially. Right. There's this idea that they may lose out on something, but the reality is there's nothing but gain on the back end for everyone.
20:52
Speaker B: That's very interesting, sir.
20:54
Speaker C: I think what's important about this, and maybe this answers a little bit more of the question that you asked before. Because I've been working on this so hard and I built a team of extremely intelligent people that one understood and understood the potential of this. And then there were a number of people across the staff that had equities in solving this problem. And it's called CJC2, right. It's command and control. It's just combined and joint all domain command and control. But there are a number of people across the headquarters that had equities but it was never brought together and integrated. So I built a team of really smart people on top of it. A couple of my guys, just Bobby Sickler and Brian Quinn just released another War on the Rocks article. Take another aspect of this to another level. So we brought it all together. The problem is when you look at command and control, there's a couple of aspects of it. There's a people piece of it and that includes training and your organizational structure and design. There's another piece of it that's process and procedures. And for us that's really well documented because we've had knowledge managers in our organization for a long time. And these are the guys that codified how you do things, right? And it's all your workflows because what you're doing in AI is you're just automating in many cases, workflows that allow it to be available for the analytical aspect or the artificial intelligence piece to use. There's another piece that is the networks and the data. So we have a chief data and AI officer, right? Really talented. But the networks that are owned by the J6, you know that's a continual investment requirement that you have, right? Because you have to upgrade your data centers. You got to have the pipes that are able to move the amount of data that you want to move. And then there's an infrastructure requirement because command and control requires facilities to be able to operate in there. So I brought all those guys together. The reason why we wrote the article is that much of the CJADC2 systems were developed by the services. They got money to develop an army system, the Air Force got money to develop an Air Force system. But the services are, they're man trained and equipped. That's their mission. Combatant commands have the war fighting mission. And so what happens is that we have to rely on the services to do their own development of systems. And I describe it as they come with a bias. You know, the army is land domain focused, right? But then they account for some aspect of the air domain. The maritime is going to focus on primarily the maritime piece. And the challenges are, and why we wrote the article is that there's a process that you can go to to be able to adjust the manning in your headquarters to get money to do tech refresh. You also need money to build data centers and networks for the future. If you look at artificial intelligence, the compute requirements, the data storage requirements, the power and cooling requirements are huge. We struggle right now to maintain the system of yesterday. When we need to invest in the system of tomorrow. Right. Much like, you know, all the facilities that you're renovating here is everybody's competing for a finite pot of money to build new structures. We're in the same place, but for us, UConn, the Army is the one that, where we get our money from. And so you go to this environment and you're competing against everybody, all right. For a one to end list of requirements. But when you look at war fighting systems that I just described to you, which you fight from, I got to hope that one of the services is going to deliver a system that's going to meet the needs of US European Command. So what we advocate for here is that give us our own money, right, to be able to do things that are unique to our fight. Ours is primarily a land domain fight with the other domains, you know, in support. That's not entirely true. All the time phasing of conflict. There's a piece where the Air Force would lead. But in this case we need to be able to have our own money to be able to do things, the work that we've done to be able to get the 200 plus data sets. I had to prioritize in the headquarters by taking a look at my budget and taking a piece off of my budget and allocating it to the priorities that we set to make this transformation happen. And so this whole thing is about, hey, maybe give us some of our own resources to do that. And oh, by the way, we need to help people understand that solving the CJADC2 problem requires investment in other areas. And when you go into this to the Joint Staff and the office of Sec. Def to fight for resources, a lot of times these things wind up at the bottom of the list, but it's a requirement for today.
25:16
Speaker B: You decided to write an article for this. Use professional military writing to try and present your argument in kind of a qualitative manner. And now you have some of your subordinates, some of the, some of the brains writing another article that was just recently released. Can you talk about professional military writing and its role in maybe not just combatant command, but in leadership and in the army in general?
25:36
Speaker C: Yeah, I think it's, I think it's really important to make sure that one, we want to get people thinking, you got to get them involved and I encourage them to put their argument in writing and go to various locations to publish. And the reason is other people need to understand. We got a lot of feedback on that article. It's an op ed and first of all, it's not the Organization's opinion, It's the writer's opinion. You know, for general officers, you go to a course and one of your tasks is to write an op ed and they encourage you to publish it. You're going to have people on both sides of the aisle that agree or disagree with you. But that's the intent of that writing is to one, inform people and generate a dialogue. That generation of dialogue is extremely important. And I think it needs to be open and frank discussion. And if someone puts an opinion piece out there, I don't think that they should be punished for because that's, that's the intent. But in general, we need to encourage people to write. That's a. That's a requirement to be, you know, competent staff officer and leaders to be able to articulate and communicate in writing and orally. I think that's important. But we also want people to think about bigger concepts and things. Right. Because this is about sharing with everybody else. There's a number of folks that are taking our work and now taking it to their organizations and employing it in their organizations. That's the other aspect is, is make the broader team better for that.
26:49
Speaker B: So shifting gears a little bit, what's a decision that you've made that you'd change if you could and why?
26:55
Speaker C: I kind of gave a lot of the context in the first question, right. The big challenge that I had in that period of time where my mom died, right. I lost four soldiers and I lost another four soldiers. I'm not a fan of how the engineer regiment went to a modular force structure. We created these modules. We just. And they're largely at the company level where they're very unique and niche in the route clearance encounter, IED fight, you would source all kinds of different units against it, right. So we had a route clearance company that was a force design. My battalion, as a. As a battalion commander, I only had one of those. But I had all kinds of different. Other companies that have different organizational structures. Okay. They're all very unique. My battalion, my battalion had National Guard. My battalion had reservists in it. And I also had companies from other organizations across forscom at the time. So this particular company that was operating out there was a light construction company from Fort Bragg. And all it brought with it was two companies. You're taking a construction company and reorganizing as route clearance. Very different mission set. Also had a rocket artillery battery that was reorganized to do route clearance. So when we took the first set of casualties, that company only had two platoons that operated. So I had to make a decision, because once that platoon takes losses, you got to get them time to get reset and refit. They got to get time to mourn and think about the losses that they made. I still have a mission requirement where I got to backfill that platoon to get on the road, because we got to make sure that the road is free of IEDs so that other units. So the decision I had to make was I had my route clearance. Company has four platoons, but it also had the busiest and toughest mission where they were operating. And I had relied on them over and over again because that was also a unit that I personally trained and certified at Fort Hood and brought to Afghanistan. It is also the unit that was most impacted by that shooting on the 5th of November. And they were really good. But I had continually gone to them over and over again to pick up other requirements elsewhere. And there was a huge demand that I put on them. So my choice was, do I do that again to those guys or do I go somewhere else? Right? So where I had this artillery battery that was operating, there was not a lot of activity. And so what I chose to do was I chose to pull a platoon from an area that wasn't very active at the time to be able to backfill the platoon that took the casualties. So I chose not to go to the one that I continued to lean on that was much better trained at this, because that's all they ever did. And then when I made it, had to make a decision. I chose what platoon from this artillery battery that I was going to put up there. And I chose the platoon that I put a platoon leader in. I. I had to take a former platoon leader that was up on my battalion staff that was a tremendous officer. And I thought, well, if I. If I take that particular platoon that has him in there, that would probably be the best choice between the two that I had available to me. The units that came in Zach were trained at very different levels. I had a couple of companies, when they trained up, they were told to never dismount out of their vehicles. They were told to do rock clearance patrols and always stay inside because they said that they would be better protected inside a vehicle if an IED went off. There were times I would always go out and ride with these patrols so I can get a sense of the training and the competency of the leaders. There were times where I was like, stop. You have to get out here. Because this is where they have deep buried IEDs and culverts and their command wire IEDs. And this is where you got to dismount before it and get out on the flanks and clear from the flanks and then remount on the backside of these culverts. This was something that some of these leaders struggled with because they had been trained to never do that. They were uncomfortable dismounting. So there'd be times when I would ride with them, is get out and walk the flanks with them. At times I don't think that they ever agree to how I approached it, but this is how I trained my other guys, and they were really good at it. So I felt that that platoon with my platoon leader that was trained to do it the way that we had studied it and trained it, that they would make the right decision. Well, what happened is they, they didn't get out and dismount and once again they rolled over a culvert that was packed with explosives. And I took another four casualties. So in hindsight, maybe I should have leaned on that other company again and maybe I would have saved four people. Right, that's, that's, that's one of those that, that I struggle with.
31:10
Speaker B: Thank you for the candor, sir. Knowing what you know now, what advice would you give to your younger self either as a prepster, as a cadet, or as a fresh lieutenant?
31:20
Speaker C: That's another one I had to think about. And I shared this with the cadet candidates over at the prep school yesterday. You know, when you come to West Point, I still remember sitting in an auditorium and I don't know if they do this anymore. Is that what they do is they start reading off a list of accomplishments, right. And you raise your hand if you've captain of a sports team or valedictorian. You quickly realize that this place is loaded with really talented people. And when we came through here, when you took tests, you were resectioned after every test. So if you were in section one, you knew that those were the smartest people, Right. If you were in section 16. Right. You knew that you were the rocks. Right. And. But it was very, very transparent. So is this constant understanding of where you always stood. I think when a lot of people leave here, because you're with so many talented people, you carry a lot of doubt of what's possible. Right. So you question, you know, you can, you can know, you know that you're not the best. Right. And you know that you're not in, in some cases, you may not even be in the top half of this. Football is no different. There's a depth chart that's posted every day. And you see where you sit on the depth chart, right? And, and you know where you stand. It's pretty powerful because you have a choice to make. You can choose to do something different. There were plenty of people that told me I couldn't get an engineering degree at the same time of playing football. I did both. Okay. But it took a lot of work. And so what I would share with my younger self in hindsight, as I, you know, finish up as, as a two star and go back to the story of my family where my dad was sitting in an orphanage, I doubt he ever thought about where he would wind up in life. My dad's still alive, almost 88, right. And I think, you know, as he looks back on being an immigrant trying to survive World War II. And he now has a son that's a two star general in the army after he retired only as a major. And he's my hero. What I tell my younger self is that it's the way that you look at the world, right? It's we don't experience life. It's that we experience the life that we focus on. And if you focus on your limitations, that's all you're ever going to accomplish. You're going to, you're going to put a left and right limit on yourself. And I think what you need to focus on is that you can do anything you want, but you got to make sure that that's what you focus on. And you got to focus on all those things that are positive. I tell cadets, man, you have all the help in the world. I always tell this to soldiers. There's plenty of people willing to help you. There are plenty of ways to get you to reach your highest potential. But in the end, you gotta take ownership of that and you gotta put in the work and what I describe it as. You know, there's this six inches. You're six inches from achieving everything that you want to be. And that six inches translates to what's in between your ears. And it's that focus of knowing that the sky's the limit. You're not going to be limited by kind of where you sit in any hierarchy of any organization. I've seen a lot of guys that were at the top of the class that didn't pan out to be great leaders. And I've seen a lot of folks on the bottom of it that would wind up serving at the highest levels. And so the sky is the limit. You just got to reframe how you see the world and then you got to focus on what's possible.
34:18
Speaker B: General Andreziak, thank you for sharing your time with us today and for the great discussion on the future of warfare. 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 coin as a token of our appreciation. Good luck with the rest of your trip to West Point and safe travels back to Europe.
34:38
Speaker C: Sir, thanks for everything. A fantastic interview and all the best to you and your future as well. Thanks. Thank you, sir.
34:46
Speaker A: 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.