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Brigadier General Sara Dudley · 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 class of 1974 recording studio and the five questions for a General podcast. I am Cadet Orion Van Buskirk, your host for today, and it is my pleasure to be here today with Brigadier General Sarah Dudley. General Dudley currently serves as the Commanding General of the U.S. army Recruiting Command. She also has extensive special operations experience, having served in JSOC, the Special Warfare center and School, and U.S. army Special Operations Command, where she served as Chief of Staff. She is a West Point graduate and was also an instructor here in the Department of Social Sciences. Go soc. General Dudley, welcome to the show.
• 1:02
  Speaker A: Thank you so much for being here. This is like a little reunion getting to come back around the academy. I just visited with some of my SOC brethren and it's, it's a pleasure to be here to talk to you today. Orion.
• 1:13
  Speaker C: Awesome. It is a pleasure. And SOC is the best department at West Point, I have to say. General Dudley, can we please start with your origin story? Why did you initially decide to join the Army? And why did you decide to go to West Point specifically?
• 1:25
  Speaker A: All right, so I love this question because it's one that normally sets people back on their heels a little bit. I actually ended up at West Point to spite my father who said he would pay for me to go to a few other state schools, which I did not want to go to. And so otherwise I had to figure out how to pay for college myself. And so I heard about this military academy thing and the Naval Academy and Air Force Academy, and I came home so proud of myself and boy did I show him. I said, hey, I found a school that's going to pay me to go there. And it was good at academics and it was good, had engineering. And so once that ball started rolling and I found out that it was hard to get into that sort of. The rest is history. Then I ended up in the army and I was going to get out in five years, but I loved it. I loved everything about leading formations and being in a people based organization. And now 27 years later, I'm. I'm still in the Army.
• 2:20
  Speaker C: Fantastic. And I understand what you mean. It feels like in high school, West Point's like too good of an opportunity. To pass up a little bit. And so I totally sympathize with that. You now lead the army's recruiting effort. What do you like most about that job and what are its biggest challenges? In an age of recruiting, things are changing. And just tell us a little bit about that, please.
• 2:40
  Speaker A: Yeah. So it was a big surprise that I got the call that I was going to go to be the D.C. g. O operations for the recruiting command. At the time, I didn't necessarily understand how I fit, but getting into the job and understanding the technicality and systems engineering background of what it takes to find the right person to get into the army and get through the human capital pipeline, I did have a lot of background that lent itself well to understanding how to problem solve and to help the organization best understand that its real mission was to find the best individuals that America had to offer to build the army of 2040 like we are the start point. We find the raw ingredients to actually fuel the army's transformation that needs to happen so that we can be a more technically advanced army and we're putting in the right people. And it's not just a numbers game, which is a lot of the times what I think recruiting gets credit for is you just have this number of people you have to find, and that's really the very basic level of what this command needs to do. We had to find the right people for the right jobs and marry them up so they have a good experience in the army and will stay longer than their first term of enlistment. Because every person that doesn't make it to their end of their first term just comes back on my. My mission the next year as basically not meeting what the army formation of the future needs.
• 4:05
  Speaker C: Interesting. You recently assumed command of the U.S. army Recruiting Command, leading efforts to build the army of 2040. Like you just talked about what key leadership lessons from your operational and staff career are the most crit going forward as you're tackling this recruiting transformation.
• 4:21
  Speaker A: Yeah. So taking on the command job and coming from being the operations, the DCG for operations, it really gave me an entire year trying to understand the underlying problem and the culture of the organization that really needed a jumpstart to be able to transform with the army. Because if we didn't transform first, the army wasn't going to have the right pieces to be able to enable its transformation. So I think the big leadership lessons that I brought is less is more. You have to have like a very crystal clear bumper sticker. Normally they say you get three things. One really, for an organization this size, one thing our tagline is we're responsible. We are responsible to build the army of 2040. And that means we have to try to find the best individuals to put into the army and make it more precision based and a deliberate effort to find the people we want in the army and not just have people come to us to see if they are interested in that.
• 5:18
  Speaker C: And not just a numbers base like you just, just touched on.
• 5:20
  Speaker A: Can't be a numbers based course. The other piece is the same thing that I'd found across my career is you have to connect with the people of your formation, figure out where they're at in terms of their understanding of the army, the broader investment that I need to give to them and make into them so that they can build their own sense of urgency to know why our command has to change. And so it's not a top driven, forced thing. They realize that if the command doesn't adapt and become more relevant to reaching the American population, we will become irrelevant. The army needs us to find the best people. And so I had to spend a good amount of time trying to figure out where all of the pieces of my formation were, including an organization that is almost 50% civilian in the structure that actually runs the day to day business of the army recruiting division.
• 6:16
  Speaker C: Sure.
• 6:17
  Speaker A: And so not generating fear like you're going to lose your job, but generating the urgency in them to know, hey, I do have a gap in my understanding, but the commander is investing in me and teaching me what the army needs and then allowing them to move into understanding how they can then contribute to what the recruiting division has to provide to the Army. The piece to that is the team has to do it. Everybody talks about when I came to this command about it had this frozen middle. The frozen middle is this mythical beast that every army formation suffers from. You hear everybody say there's top down guidance or there's bottom up, you know, ideas. And that always leaves this weird middle. And this command had called it the frozen middle. And so sort of from day one I said I don't want to hear about a frozen middle. There's no frozen middle. We have an inability to communicate at Echelon. We have challenges with mission command.
• 7:14
  Speaker C: Sure.
• 7:15
  Speaker A: We have challenges with engaged leadership at Echelon or we have challenges with understanding how to communicate at a lower echelon. So how to explain it? Taking a strategic concept and relating it down to, I have a formation that's completely consistent of non commissioned officers. So I'm really only talking to the lowest Echelon is like a staff sergeant, right. But it's a staff sergeant that's directly from the army primarily, that hasn't been exposed to lots of the senior level things. And so the frozen middle really I've tried to strike from our nomenclature to say that everybody just needs to know how they fit. Everybody doesn't have the same responsibility from the top of the formation to the bottom, but you have to know where you fit so you know which part of solving the problem you own, of course. And as soon as you own it, it's not giving you tasks, it's just you have ownership of this part of the puzzle. And when you put your piece in, everything will line up and then we will start to produce the numbers and produce the quality of individuals that the army formations need. And that's really what I tackled at the very front of the year that I took command. And then now it's just a matter of the same thing that you've probably heard from a lot of other people. It's model the behavior. And my number one job is to remove friction. Remove friction from my formation, change policies that I have control over, align the incentives for the formation to understand what's important, measure the things that I want to reinforce, don't measure things that are unimportant, or only measure the things that are things I want to enforce in the formation. And then relentlessly remove the friction so that I can protect all of the early adopters of that process. That's my number one job, remove friction, protect early adopters, and then reward the behaviors that I, that I want the formation to understand are the way that we can progress into the future. And so I think this job in taking command has really culminated on every staff job I've ever had, every command job I've ever had, really uniting the technical aspects of very system generated job as a finance officer to command elements at the highest echelons of how do you run super complex multi nodal systems across the world? All dialing in to get a back brief every day at 8am to run battlefield operations and then relate that to a formation that has been kept wholly separate from both of those worlds in this whole separate pipeline of recruiting. And so the transformation really has been more about helping the formation have pride again in itself. We made the mission last year, we're making the mission this year, we're going to make the reserve mission for the first time in a decade this year. And giving them ownership of their individual growth and a meaningful mission as to how they're Contributing to the army of 2040 because we start the fourth generation pipeline and we can't point to anybody else like we're the ones they're picking the people to give to our friends and other leaders in those army formations. And if we're not holding up our part of the bargain, then we're not actually helping the army.
• 10:37
  Speaker C: Of course, that's a great answer and some really good insights there. And I can imagine it'd be pretty fulfilling. Of course, in the spirit of a all volunteer force, you know, it's a bust, bottom up, bottom up thing. So the way you describe that definitely sounds like it'd be a fulfilling thing to be able to align. Just like you said, aligning all those, the incentives. Gonna shift gears a little bit here. Looking back at your time in operations in the Middle east, including budget and resource management roles during combat operations, what unexpected leadership challenges or maybe one specific challenge that comes to the top of your mind, did you encounter and how did those experiences or that experience shape your approach to decision making?
• 11:13
  Speaker A: Yeah, so I think I had the benefit and it was hindsight. 2020. Amazing opportunity. My first duty assignment was in Korea. So I was in a foreign country. I had dispersing operations as a lieutenant. I got to take command early, but I had US dollars and Korean won. I had a foreign bank account that I had to manage with a foreign partner nation. I had Katusas that were in my formation, Korean augmentees to the US Army. Okay, so they're Korean in their required service time. The Koreans will assign some of their soldiers to the US army units.
• 11:51
  Speaker C: Yes, ma'.
• 11:51
  Speaker A: Am. To serve along with us.
• 11:52
  Speaker C: Good to know.
• 11:53
  Speaker A: So I had a foreign. Foreign entity inside of my element when I was a lieutenant and then taking command early in Korea. My first assignment out of the academy. So when I found myself, I ended up at the 101st in 2001. One September 11th happened. I. I arrived August of 2001.
• 12:13
  Speaker C: Wow.
• 12:14
  Speaker A: First. Wow. 2000. You know, September 11th happened. And then myself and one other individual in that formation had cash dispersing experience. And I ended up being the most senior and ended up leading the effort to go downrange with the Rakasans right out of the gate with the first of conventional forces into Kandahar.
• 12:35
  Speaker B: Wow.
• 12:35
  Speaker A: With a backpack of a million dollars in cash to rebuild the airfield so the 101st could flow on. So amazing opportunity, timing, all of those things lining up. But the immediate thing that happened was the leadership challenge was again, it wasn't just being responsible for our money. All of those actions from that point forward were heavily involved with partner nations, of course, and coalition partners and the Afghanis, the. The Koreans originally the Iraqis for both round one and two when I spent time in Iraq and then all of our coalition partners that also needed cash and or financial agreements within between the two countries that had strategic implications of what each country was offering the other to have military formations that were participating with the United States in the global war on terror. So never did I think erasing to my officer basic course or even my time at the academy as a cadet that my army experience was going to be so influenced by coalition partners and foreign partner nations in an effort right
• 13:44
  Speaker C: from the jump, right from.
• 13:46
  Speaker A: Right from the start. Right. So I think that was the whole picture of what money meant to a commander. Took on a whole new context. Because it's not just our money.
• 13:56
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 13:56
  Speaker A: It's the foreign partner money. Like how were we applying money then I ended up in Iraq with General Petraeus in the 101st with money as a weapon system as a major concept that was all captured US currency from Saddam Hussein that was validated by the Treasury. So all of that initial seed corn was from the Saddam Hussein captured currency that eventually SERP became a appropriated fund. But all of the initial was money that we collected across, across Iraq, had it certified by the treasury, it was valid and turned it back over into kind of be the initial fuel for money as a system.
• 14:35
  Speaker C: Wow. That's definitely some, some firsthand experience that you don't necessarily hear about that side of it all the time, you know, so that's. It's good to hear, you know, from someone who's been there from the jump. And speaking of finance, you know, I kind of want to move into that space. You've publicly shared views on digital assets and national security informs such as the FinTech Beat podcast and the Georgetown Law events. What do you see as the biggest opportunities and risks for the army and the Department of Defense in the digital asset space?
• 15:03
  Speaker A: Yeah. So digital assets kind of in line with all of the technological advances and the underpinnings of how they can make us more effective in means of reducing overhead and having crystal clear certainty on purity, the underlying code that validates exactly who has the ability to use that money or not, I think are very useful when you understand them. And that's the key piece is the military and all of the special operations community in particular. But the broader Army I think needs to be more aware of what's possible with those assets, understand how they work. Because at A minimum. We need to be able to understand them so we can determine if our adversaries are using them against us, let alone be able to pull out how they could be valuable for us to use.
• 16:02
  Speaker C: Interesting. And so for someone who might not necessarily have a comprehensive understanding of digital assets, what's a. Maybe a practical real world example of that that could be easily communicated.
• 16:14
  Speaker A: So I think the most broadly understood asset that you could see being utilized in day to day is Bitcoin. So digital assets are a little bit of a misnomer in that a lot of the underlying principles of that concept mean that Bitcoin has a value like you would treat a currency. But it also has a tense of being like an investment. Some individuals. So people don't normally invest in the US Dollar. You do a little bit like in terms of a bond that you know will have value and you'll earn a little bit off of it. But traditionally currencies don't have like an investment potential for a large gain. So when you've mixed those two, the bitcoin sort of realm, it's a network driven acceptance. So it's becoming more and more a currency that's being used to buy things like in value transfer.
• 17:12
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 17:12
  Speaker A: But you still have this side market that's driving prices up. Even though it will just change the amount of Bitcoin that's required to get any number of things. But it wholly relies on the validation of a blockchain that's spread across multiple different computers that are solving the validation that you're not trying to spend the same Bitcoin nomenclature that somebody else is trying to spend at the very same time. So the double spending has been solved in all of those algorithms. But it's really the same as a US dollar between my hand and handing it to you in terms of what the underlying math is doing. The challenge with that is the security that's wrapped around it. To say if you leave your dollar bill on this table, somebody else can come in and pick it up.
• 17:59
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 18:00
  Speaker A: And you don't have any claim on it unless you've written down the serial number of that dollar bill. The same thing happens when you don't have. You haven't properly secured where you're storing that digital key. Somebody can come and take it from you and you don't have the ability to claim it at any point in time. So it really becomes that architecture around a digital asset becoming developed.
• 18:21
  Speaker C: Right.
• 18:21
  Speaker A: So that the common person can use it. And that's starting to happen. There are credit cards that Function like a credit card that you're charging. But it's, it has a digital asset behind it is what is being traded to give it some value at any given time.
• 18:36
  Speaker C: Just kind of a. This is obviously, you know, you could spend, I'm sure hours talking about this and it's, it's a whole topic in itself. But just a quick follow up to that. Did you see digital currency or digital assets being a currency of the future in terms of that being the base of, of currency? Do you see a digital currency as something that's even possible?
• 18:56
  Speaker A: It is definitely possible. I think it's probable. It's just a matter of how long it takes the architecture to catch up to be able to support it. So it makes business sense. It costs less money, you have less overhead to transact and make secure payments to other individuals. But it is not common practice from all of the other infrastructure we have set up for cash, cash for contracts, for the way we do business, for businesses, whole businesses that revolve around a brick and mortar tech facility. So the bridging solution I think is what we're seeing now that's helping at least the US and Western populations move towards that is there are very few places across Europe and a lot of the United States and any of the large cities around the coastlines where stores will actually take cash anymore. It's digital, but it's digital using the old architecture that we had. Right.
• 19:58
  Speaker C: Of credit.
• 19:58
  Speaker A: And PayPal is supporting credit card payments or Venmo is supporting payments between our older architecture between banks.
• 20:07
  Speaker C: Yeah. And Venmo sure is popular. Zelle.
• 20:10
  Speaker A: Zelle is working between banks as soon as the banking industry starts to do that. And they are already using digital assets. They use Tether and some other XRP to transact back and forth between banks to reduce the overhead of actually moving cash back and forth. They use ledger balancing between the major banks utilizing some of these, these types of assets so they don't have to move actual money. I think as soon as the overarching architecture is supportive of going fully digital and then the natural next progression is to make it more secure, which then means you have to have cryptology that's base behind why you're validating. That's a good Zillow payment. That's not a good. Because right now the banks are still doing that right behind your, your screen on your phone. But ultimately you could do that between two digital wallets because the math behind it says you're not trying to give me money that you don't have.
• 21:08
  Speaker C: Interesting That's a very, very complicated topic. But thank you for those. Those insights. For the last question, I want to kind of move back to recruiting. Recruiting in today's environment, you know, as we talked about, is not just numbers, but nar. How do you think the army should communicate its relevance to the next generation, especially in an era of rapid social and technological change?
• 21:29
  Speaker A: Yeah, it is a challenge. Right? Everybody sees all these old war movies, and the public has a view of the army that is hard for us to break from. But I think the army itself is getting more technologically advanced. The Army's trying to develop mechanisms at which a technology or a robotic or unmanned system will be the first thing that hits the enemy and not a human. The human is still in the loop. The human is helping with decision making and making ethics and judgment calls. But I think the most important thing I think that we can relay is that hands down, the army is still the nation's premier leadership factory. So whatever your job is in the army, whatever MOS you have, there's 150 plus different Moses. Those jobs teach you how to do a skill, but then they teach you how to be part of a team and then how to lead that team. So the nation depends on us to do those, have those building blocks, and to develop the leaders of the future that are going to serve. Just like the Academy says, you're going to serve the nation as leaders in the service and then out of the service, depending on whatever time horizon that is, of course. But the army trains leaders, trains people how to be leaders in enlistment through non commissioned officer or through officer pipelines. There's no other thing in the entire United States that trains leaders like the army does.
• 22:57
  Speaker C: That's great to hear. First of all, those are some good insights. I think it's a really important thing to take away. General Dudley, thank you so much for your time today and for this great conversation about building the next generation of army leaders. And then a valuable discussion on digital assets as well. On behalf of Colonel Pat Sullivan, the director of the Modern war Institute, and Dr. Charlie Feint, the director of this podcast series, it is my pleasure to present you with this rare and coveted Modern War Institute coin. Thank you, ma'. Am.
• 23:26
  Speaker A: Fantastic. Thank you so much. This is going on a special spot on my wall.
• 23:30
  Speaker C: Fantastic. Glad to hear it. All right. I am Orion Van Buskirk. And that concludes our episode. Have a good day.
• 23:39
  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 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.