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Major General Wolfe Davidson · Five Questions for a General

• 0:00
  Speaker A: Foreign.
• 0:03
  Speaker B: You're listening to Five Questions for a General, a production of the Modern War Institute at West point. I am Dr. Charles 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.
• 0:25
  Speaker C: Welcome back to Five Questions for a General. I'm Cadet Zach Olson, your host and today's guest is Major General Wolf Davidson, the commander of 2nd Air Force Course. Welcome to West Point, sir. How have you been here before?
• 0:34
  Speaker A: I have.
• 0:35
  Speaker C: Okay.
• 0:35
  Speaker A: This is my third trip. Yeah. So.
• 0:37
  Speaker C: Oh, very nice. Very nice at, like, kind of spaced
• 0:39
  Speaker A: out or more recent here. So I've been to Sandhurst the last three years. This is my third time in a row to Sanders. My son is at the Air Force Academy and he's eating in the Sanders. He's on the Air Force team, so. Good deal.
• 0:49
  Speaker C: And what went into your decision to go through ROTC and why serve in the Air Force?
• 0:53
  Speaker A: Yeah, my dad was a Marine and enlisted Marine, and he always kind of raised me to believe I had an obligation to serve without ever telling me that I had to serve. So when I got my thing my freshman year in high school school, he looked at me and he said, son, you got pretty good grades. He's like, you're pretty smart. He's like, I think you have the opportunity to go to college. Yeah. I'm like, yeah, okay. And he said, you better start making sure you do well in your grades now, because I got no money. So if you're going to go to college, you need to get a scholarship. And I said, okay, all right. Air Force gave me a scholarship to go to ROTC and paid for my college. My plan was to, you know, do four years, pay the bill and. And walk away, be a physicist in the Air Force or for four years and then get out. And here I am at 32 and a half as a special Tactics officer, so imagine that.
• 1:33
  Speaker C: Yeah. So what's. Is there a. Is there something of an army equivalent to Special tactics, or is it narrowly focused on the Air Force?
• 1:40
  Speaker A: There's not an exact equivalent. Air Force Special Tactics is the ground special operations element of the Air Force. And it's comprised of combat Control, Pararescue, Special Reconnaissance and Tactical Air Control party. And then, you know, Special Tactics officers and combat rescue officers are the officers. So a Special Tactics officer is a combat control officer for the most part. So what they do is they do air ground interface part. So small teams in all All Special Tactics are in soft. They're all SOCOM based resources, but they execute just like the seals do. A maritime based special operations element, the Special Tactics is an air based special operations element. So finding targets, striking targets, airfields, things maybe we've recently seen around the, around the globe are the exact things that, that Special Tactics units do. Very small. So if you think about the numbers, we are less than a tenth of what you would see for seals, probably less than a twentieth of what Special Forces has. So very small, you know, very elite teams. The positive things of that is because there's so few of us, we usually are involved in everything. So, so if somebody's looking to figure out how to get in the action, Special Operations, Special Tactics is the place to go and, and combat control, probably the first at the foremost of those. So we see a lot of kids of Special Forces folks coming into our community just because they grew up with our folks and they're like, hey, you should try that because, well, in the Air Force treats people pretty well and pretty well. And you still.
• 3:01
  Speaker C: I've heard the rumors. I've heard the rumors and you still
• 3:03
  Speaker A: get to serve in the same, you know, same. You get to serve all the same operational environments, but you get to go into an Air Force base.
• 3:09
  Speaker C: So dad's a Marine, you go into the Air Force. What was the decision like to go from whatever you were doing in the Air Force to go to Special Tactics? That seems like a big move.
• 3:19
  Speaker A: Yeah. So I actually made the decision when I was in college and went through the assessment selection process there. And I was there on a physics scholarship. My plan was to be a physicist. Just kind of changed in life and things that were going on. And I decided I enjoyed jumping out airplanes more than I just, you know, studying long equations for days on end. So I decided to, I heard about this from my actual friend of my dad was a Special Forces in Vietnam and he goes, hey, you should go check out those air commando guys. And I hadn't. Air Force didn't really. I didn't know we even had a small, you know, lease off unit in the Air Force. So I started asking around, heard about it and you know, just kind of was fortunate enough to make it into the, into the career field. And it's been, been awesome.
• 3:57
  Speaker C: So what does it look like? You're a Special tactics officer. Why leave to go do other stuff you've done? We've worked at DITRA, which we have a center here at West Point. 4 US Space Command. What went into those decisions? Whether you're for your career or for the Air Force.
• 4:10
  Speaker A: Yeah. I mean the beauty of them they call motors. Right. They don't ask you where you want to go sometimes. So probably only been two assignments in my career that I actually was interested in. The rest of them are just what the Air Force told me to do. And I wouldn't have traded a one. Right. It just kind of works out the right way. But you know, I tell you the, the opportunity as you get more senior and you kind of. You mentioned this earlier. As you get more senior in your career, your responsibilities change. And as they they go, you get. I would offer you do less fun things as you get more senior, but you get to do more rewarding things. And with that comes greater responsibility and the opportunity to bring more perspective to, to your unit, to your organization or to whatever mission that you're serving. So folks like Defense Threat Reduction Agency was a, was an interesting assignment. I was the deputy director there. Now I was as a general officer. And as a general officer you are expected to be a generalist. Frankly, I, I probably represent that as much as anyone in the Air Force. If you look at the span of my general officer assignments, they were very, very vast. But I think what it gives you the opportunity to realize is that when you put somebody back in their specialty, they like to micromanage because that's what they know. When you take them out of their specialty, you spend a lot of. It's hard work, but you find value. How do you bring value to the organization? Not being an expert. So my assignments to space, I'm not an expert on space domain or space vehicles, space warfare, but I know operational warfare. I know how to fight, I know how to train folks. And that's what they needed and that's what they brought me there for, was to say, hey, the space is making this transition from a peaceful domain into a war fighting domain. And we need war fighters to come teach our folks how to do that. So I had the great opportunity to go do that for a couple years. Incredible. Incredibly rewarding because it's amazing when you spend all those times over those years, there's just something about understanding operations and warfare that applies to all of warfare. And then the same thing at Defense Threat Reductions Agency. So weapons of mass destruction, missile, nuclear technology capabilities. You know, I think we get stuck in our stove pipes sometimes and we like to think of war like, well, this is an irregular warfare, this is a, this is a counterinsurgency or this is a traditional war, or this is nuclear war. Frankly, if we find ourselves in a war, in the war in the sense of what it's been throughout its nature. Right. It will be total and all those things have to come together. And unfortunately we don't put those together as often as we should. So the opportunity to go see space, to go see the nuclear side, to go see the weapons of mass destruction destruction side allows you to see kind of the totality of warfare and kind of help you put the pieces together on where we may have gaps and scenes in our force to be able to bring those together because we absolutely have the world's greatest force to be able to crush all these folks that want to, want to pay a fight. But the reality is sometimes our stove pipes make it a little harder for us than we, than we need to. So that, that's frankly real value of general officers that get this breadth of experience in doing things is that they, they actually can put pieces together that everybody sitting in their own little stovepipes not going to see. Right. We're not worried about nuclear weapons because we're focused on traditional war. Well, somebody's got to be thinking about how these two come together because war is war.
• 7:08
  Speaker C: So as you've been around and you've been able to be in so many different positions and be a generalist, are there trends that you've noticed? Here's something that the U.S. air Force does incredibly well at every post I've been at. And what's, you know, maybe an area of improvement that you've noticed at almost every post?
• 7:23
  Speaker A: Yeah, no, I think specifically if we talk about the Air Force. The Air Force is full of innovators, Right. So it's, it's in the, it's in the culture and identity of, of Air Force. So we are not big on tradition, legacy.
• 7:34
  Speaker C: Right.
• 7:34
  Speaker A: We are big on constant change and adaptation. Right. So over, not through was the basis of where the Air Force came from. So we have incredibly innovative folks that can think involve new solutions that are out there. I'd say that's one of the greatest strengths that the Air Force brings to the Joint Force and we come to that. I think one of the challenges is because of that and we're a young force. We're not as young as a space force, obviously, but we're young force relatively speaking. So some of the more traditional military approaches and of the structure of the military decision making processes are not as ingrained in our communities kind of counterculture sometimes to innovators. So sometimes the ability to take that innovative approach and put it into the military you know, kind of decision making process struggles a little bit at first because it's a little awkward until, you know, our folks are brick smart until they kind of adapt and get there. So I'd say that's one of the things that we in the Air Force got to work on a little bit better is understanding the, how we fit better into the joint nature of the fight.
• 8:31
  Speaker C: So you're heading up Air Force training right now. I mean, that's in charge of an incredible number of airmen and their development and their expertise. Do you work across the services at all? Are you working with the tradoct commander? And you call them, you say, hey, sir, you know, is this working? Is that working? How can we make this better? Or is it fairly stovepiped between each branch?
• 8:50
  Speaker A: We all talk. So, for example, if you just take basic training, there's a thing called Council on Recruit and basic training. So I'm the commander for Air Force basic training, the first general officer in the Air Force basic training side. And we have similar for the other services. And we meet quarterly and have conversations, we share, you know, experiences. And right now we're in the, we are actually in the most significant transformation of Air Force basic training since 1950, since the Korean War. And so I lean on those and we seek and kind of get lessons learned from areas that I'm trying to improve on the Air Force side and where they may have some experience to get us to. And we share those back and forth across the board. So then after basic training for us, all of our technical training, and frankly a lot of those, we do joint training. So, you know, intelligence training. We have, we have army, we have Navy, we have Marine Corps and our intelligence schools. We run the DOD fire academy, we run the, we go to the Navy's EOD courses. So in all of those, we have joint instructors and those relationships are really tight down into the organization. So although each of our services, you know, have responsibilities, my job is to produce airmen and you know, in the army tradition, responsible produce soldiers. And, but we, we all know together we're going to fight on the battlefield. So we absolutely lean on one another to kind of under that, understand that training.
• 10:05
  Speaker C: So if I'm a young lieutenant in any of the services, what would you say is a great path or a great process you can work on to understand the joint force better? We fight as a joint force so much more than we used to even. And while at West Point, I think I've gotten decent exposure to other branches, but not near as much as maybe I Should, what does it look like? I'm a lieutenant. How do I, how do I learn?
• 10:27
  Speaker A: Yeah, no, that's a great question. I'll tell you as a lieutenant coming in or any, regardless what service that you're in, there's no question that the battles. Now it used to be that wars were joint, but today every battle is joint. I mean, if you especially. And it doesn't matter the type of warfare that we look at, right? So you can talk high intensity, low intensity, nuclear, you name it, whether it's, you know, the role of cyber, the role of air, the role of the sea. And I think as we develop officers, the important thing is to acknowledge that joint war fighting is not just a joint thing. It has got to be a unit level thing. So the first step at that lieutenant level is understanding the importance of the domains and how they come together in battle. Right? And you'll learn that. Okay, so I clearly, as a soldier, you want air superiority, right? Because you want air support. Do you want, you know, resupply, you want all. You don't want to be getting attacked by the enemy. You're not going to have any role in air superiority. For the most part, you rely on the Air Force to get that right. In that construct, you've got to start to acknowledge first the importance of these domains and then you start to think about what's the importance of the services that provide those because they are ingrained in each and everything we do. So you're like, hey, I just need close air support. And you know, the Air Force is like, hey, I, I, I'm not pushing you any close air support until I actually gain air superiority. And, and this is how we're going to get this, because I'm not going to get things shot down and I'm not going to get you attacked. So I think it starts at that first level of understanding the importance of all the domains and how warfare comes together in a way that we, you know, 20, 30 years ago, we didn't need to train in the leaders, tactical leaders at that level. And then that expands back to understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the services as you get more senior in rank to kind of understand how they come together. What's the trick? Leave the parochialism behind. It ain't about the army, it ain't about the Air Force, it ain't about the Navy, right. It's about the, it's about the country, right. It's about the mission, and it's about the folks who are going to die if we get it wrong. So that's the most important thing is, you know, it's easy to have, you know, beat Navy signs and beat Air Force signs. That's all great. We're playing on the football field, but you got to leave that behind behind when you're going to the battlefield, because the reality is it's a joint force, and that's what makes us strong. And not even a joint force, the combined force with our coalition partners. Too often we want to look at what's the United States versus somebody else, and it's really the wrong question, what's the coalition of those that are on the way of the United States side versus the rest of the. Versus the opposition. So that's what I'd offer. Starts early. Leave the parochialism behind. Figure out first at your tactical level, whether you're a logistician or an infantryman or a, um, you know, you name it. That you think about the nature of the jointness of the domains and then start learning from them how the services can provide. Thank you.
• 13:11
  Speaker C: As a general officer at that strategic level, how do you build trust in these massive organizations? Maybe in. Within these training environments, but within a conventional unit. I'm a lieutenant and I'm working with another country, working with other services. Maybe it's, you know, I'm new to it. How do I know I can trust, you know, the leaders ahead of me? And what do you do as a leader to reinforce that?
• 13:34
  Speaker A: Yeah. So first, for those that wear this uniform, we got to start with the basis of trust, and. And then you've got to build that relationship. And you try not to do that in more time. Right. You try to build that. As many operational environments as you can. So. So where does trust come from? Trust comes from people working together and actually gaining one, you know, gaining respect for and. And demonstrating your competence. Right. Hey, I did what I told you I was going to do. I did it effectively. You did what you told me we're going to do. We start to build trust associated with that. That starts by starting together. Right. You don't build trust by staying in your own corners and saying, you know, those guys, they don't need this and that, and we need this thing and that thing. So that is the key. And I do want to comment on this one. You know, trust is. Is an incredible. So I would offer that, you know, for a young officer, when you're coming in, that trust and accountability is the oxygen of a military unit. Right. So why do I say oxygen? Because when you have it, you don't ever think about it. And when you don't have it, it is all you think about, right? And that trust and accountability. Trust in the leaders that are going up, that they. They believe in and care for the. Their soldiers and airmen, sailors, Marines and guardians. And accountability. Everybody's accountable for their actions. The discipline is. Is central to that. So when you have trust and accountability in any organization, it can adapt quickly. It can change on mission. Everybody will execute what is expected to, and everybody. It has that trust to do it. In the absence of that, that's all you're trying to figure out, is how do we get trust and accountability back? Your ability to adapt to the end, the adversary and everything else is gone. When we talk about trust, I would just. That's how I train any young lieutenant that goes. Trust and accountability is the oxygen of a unit. And your main mission is to make sure your unit's got oxygen, right?
• 15:12
  Speaker C: Yeah. I'm curious about decision making at these high levels. So you were the executive officer for the chief of staff of the Air Force. How were the decisions made at that level that even maybe the lieutenant colonel, the battalion commander in the army, you know, doesn't understand? Was it positive? Was it challenging? What were your opinions on that?
• 15:32
  Speaker A: Yeah, so I was very fortunate to work for General Dave Goldfein, who's an incredible human being. And it was an awesome two years being executive officer, and kind of see the opportunity and challenges that face the service chief. And first and foremost is that those service chiefs were tight, right in trust amongst one another and built those relationships. But, you know, when you see decision make that level, you're like, all right, I'm going to understand how these decisions are. It's, It's. It's actually not much different than decision making at every other level. It's there. So the, the questions, you know, when you get to that level, if you've been in the Air Force for 35 years or the army for 38 years, and you're the chief of a service, you've learned a whole lot about that service at that point. More importantly, though, you've established your baselines of how you understand things, and you're going to make decisions based on your experiences that have come up. What is changing, of course, is the organization you're responsible for, right? And whether you're moving from, you know, platoon to company or company to battalion at every echelon, you learn that. You learn that, hey, I'm not looking out for my company anymore. I'm actually the battalion xo, and I'm here Looking out for these responsibilities. So I think the most important part of those challenges, when you see is that you would like to think that there's this machine that just delivers precise information and all they have to do is go here and it's not the case. Right. You see the same type of leadership that's done at the tactical level. You get about 80% of the intelligence that you think you need. You know, 30% of that is, you know, sketchy. And, and there's just really high stakes. And you re. You rely on your instincts, the relationships you've built, and the ability to go back to those things that you think are important. And the thing that I would offer that you. That senior leaders that I've seen that have had the greatest, that I've appreciated the most, have built that basis around what they learned in the unit. Oh, right. Because, you know, for the, for the most part, you know, the men and women are going to fight and die are going to be in the units. Right. They're going to be battalions, they're going to be in squadrons. If you bring that perspective to a leader, right, you'll always, you'll always be thinking what this means at that level. Because at each echelon as you go up, that gets further away from the information you're being fed. You're not talking to battalion commanders, you're not talking to brigade commanders. Now you're talking at higher levels. So the further you get away from that individual soldier, airman down there, the harder it is to keep that perspective. So if you have built that as the center of your core of understanding what happens at the tactical level, because the rest of the strategic level, that's where your injects are coming from. Right. You're going to see clearly this is what Congress thinks that you ought to do. This is what, you know, the Chairman thinks you ought to do. This is what the combatant commander is expecting. Those are going to be in your face, Airman. You know, Rodriguez is not going to be in your face. Right. So he's got to be ingrained in your kind of mind after your time to kind of think through that.
• 18:24
  Speaker C: You've had quite a lot of education, whether formal or even really informal, but lots of formal education throughout your career. Why do you think that is an important area of focus for officers? Why do you think the army and the rest of the services, the Air Force places importance on formal education?
• 18:41
  Speaker A: Yeah, I think it is a critical opportunity. Have you ever heard the stop and sharpen the saw? There's an old Story where there's a young man and old man, they're going out to saw down a tree. Big tree, old. You know, old saws, not chainsaws kind of thing. So they go out there, and the young man, he's just crushing away on this thing. And the old man, he stops about every 45 minutes and sharpens his blade a little bit. And then also, they're cutting all day. Big, huge tree. And at the end of the day, who you think wins? Right? It's the old man, right? The old man, as he walked, there's this tree fell, and he walks by. The young man says, young man, sometimes you gotta stop sharpenso. All right, so you find yourself in command positions or different, you know, staff positions, and you're learning all these things are coming at you, and you're learning it from that organizational level. How do you then stop? Take the pressure of the mission, take the pressure of executing today or supporting a set of troops that need you and need those actions and be able to reflect in a more holistic perspective. Then take all these opportunities that education offers to apply them, to say, okay, how can I get done better? How do I reflect on these things? How do I think about this problem? To me, that's the true advantage of it, because it doesn't then doesn't come out in the paper that you wrote at the end of the school. Frankly, I don't think that's relevant. A lot of people love that, and that's awesome. It comes out in the development of those leaders as they continue to go and how they continue to lead and go through others. So going back to my comment earlier about getting somebody out of their career field, what you want your boss to do is not be an expert at your job. You want your boss to actually bring perspective to you that you don't have. Well, how do you get that perspective? You go work for the chief of staff of the Air Force, or you go work. You go get to study other elements where you can say, okay, this is how other people see this problem. This is how other people are solving it. Then you can offer that to your formations when you have the opportunity to command them and you're adding value to them as opposed to just trying to micromanage.
• 20:27
  Speaker C: So how closely do you work with maybe the Air Force Academy? I'm curious. That relationship where we're training the officers over here and we're training the enlisted over here. How. How do those two merge together?
• 20:37
  Speaker A: Yeah. So, you know, for the Air Force accessions approach, we train officers in three locations, we have the Air Force Academy, we have the officer training course, and we have rotc, ROTC and ots are within Air Education and Training Command, which, so my boss, I have a counterpart that is responsible for those training. And we stay very much synced up on the. For example, the transformation that I'm doing basic training right now, they are starting to take on an officer train, which is, is more focused on what we call the air mindedness of giving airmen the basic skills of defending, operating, generating, sustaining air power. Right. So we've gotten used to flying from airfields that are protected and the enemy doesn't threaten us at. That's not the wars that we have to prepare for. Right. And my job as a training guy is not to train the airmen that are coming through for the, for the wars. I fought my job to train them for the wars they're going to fight. And you have to think, and we don't know exactly what those are, right? But we've got to give them the best opportunity to be successful because their lives depend on it. And as I mentioned, my son's one of them, so I'm pretty interested in that. And then with Air Force Academy, they're under a different. All the military academies are obviously a little bit different, but we stay synced up. Joe Barn Find and I synced. In fact, one of my former vice commanders went up to run the military training at the Air Force Academy. So we are continuing to kind of grow this together because what's, you know, my point to the, to the officer, you know, sessions programs is, hey, I'm going to tell you, these are what the airmen that they're going to command know, and your officers probably ought to know that. And so it's been exciting, but we are, we are synced up. It's not a formal process, but it's, it's, it's through relationships, through general officer relationships.
• 22:17
  Speaker C: So, sir, you're here today for Sandhurst, which is West Point's international military skills competition. And Air Force has a great team competing out there, getting after it. Why do you think Sandhurst is important for the Air Force Academy to participate in and for the military at large?
• 22:31
  Speaker A: Yeah, So I, I, Sandhurst is just an incredible opportunity. Just you go out here and you see all the, you know, our foreign partners that are here because, you know, there's this. My first trip to, my first trip to Israel when I was a captain and we were working with an Israeli special operations unit, my special ops unit. We were working together and, you know, we're all doing our training and there's these formalities of these, you know, two countries and then we, we took them all out to the bar and as I watched what happened in front of me was these were the same young men that just grew up in different parts of the world. And so when you come together like this, you get to see that these are the same young men and women that just happen to be getting trained or educated in a little bit differently. And they're all going to find themselves on the battlefield and they're all incredible, you know, opportunities. And nothing, you know, nothing's better than the compet mission to make you better. Right. To, to get after it. So for the Air Force Academy, you know, we don't do a lot of the military training that our Sandhurst team does here, right. So they're at a big disadvantage on the skills because they. Air Force Academy is focused on aviation programs. You want to go fly airplanes, you want to fly, you know, you know, gliders, you want to jump, go to the Air Force Academy, be a cadet. You can do those things as a cadet. Right? But you want to do weapons assembly and throw grenades and, you know, that's not typically what they do. So taking those Air Force cadets experience them in, you know, some basic military skills and then let them come out and, and show that, hey, they can, they can play in the game too. It's, it's a, it's an awesome opportunity. And for my community, as I'm a Special Tactics officer and for the soft community we call Air Force Special Warfare, Sandhurst has produced more for our community than any other place in the Air Force. So these folks, they kind of love that and love, you know, being in the woods with a ruck on their back and, and being challenged to do really hard things. So we've got that commute, we got that covered for them if they come to Special Tactics.
• 24:25
  Speaker C: What does that personality look like? So maybe a little bit of a feeder kind of going on there. Why? Not necessarily why actually. But like, what is it? What does the personality look like? What's the kind of person that's going into Air Force Special Tactics?
• 24:37
  Speaker A: Yeah. So hungry, right? So always, always looking for, you know, always willing to push themselves, fight through the pain to achieve more. Right. Very competitive, wants to make an impact, wants to be around high performing people, right? Wants to, you know, people that challenge them every day. Not afraid, not afraid of conflict, not afraid of getting beaten. Don't like it, but not afraid of it. And so you're looking for the tough races you're looking for, the tough fights, and when you lose, you go lick your wounds and figure out how to get better the next day. And then people just can persevere, right? I mean, perseverance is a critical attribute in all the special operations. So it's been awesome. People that, you know that get the opportunity to do the Sandhurst have been very successful in our, in our pipelines because this is a great competition that does just that, right? It's, it's, you know, hard physical training for a couple days at your highest levels. And, you know, you lay it on the line and get beat today, you go to the next station and see if you can beat them on the next side. So, yeah, it's been awesome.
• 25:36
  Speaker C: So the army, we've talked about how the Ranger regiments and Special Forces have kind of trickled down a lot of standards and discipline and different tactics and methods. And we have the Ranger handbook and all this great stuff has kind of trickled down from these elite units. What do you see is a push up from this kind of enlisted and officer level training? What is a push that's pushing up towards special tactics? And what, what's kind of. Is there any change that's resulting from.
• 26:05
  Speaker A: Yeah, you know, when I, when I talk to, I'll talk to squadron, battalion commander level folks often, and I'll ask them. Usually I'll ask them this question, is yours, is your squadron battalion as innovative as you think it should be? And often the answer is no, right? No, we're stuck. And my next question is, okay, you think that's because of the young people or the old people, right? And then they kind of stop and reflect. I'm like, who's the old people? Because they are. All right? And, and so it's. Your lack of innovation is not because of the young people, and that's what they bring. So new folks that come in, right. Doing things differently is actually a huge advantage to new folks, right? Because they're on a, they're on a level playing field. Like, if you've been doing this for 20 years and I've never done it before, and we go to do something completely different, I feel like I got a fair shot. We're going to play the same thing you've been doing for 20 years, I feel like I'm at a disadvantage. So young people will find creative ways and bringing that approach in that says, hey, think about things differently, right? This generation Z generation, their ability to adapt, take information in and suck it, and make different, you know, you know, is way different than the generation that I grew up in, the generations between me and them. And we've got to capitalize on that opportunity. There's. There's weaknesses, too, but we got to capitalize on their strengths. And then we go. We solidify their weaknesses. You know, every week I get to, you know, we864 airmen come out of the Air Force 50 weeks a year in basic training. And, you know, you watch TV and some of these other places, and you read the stories about what's going on in the world, and you get a little, okay, maybe a little disappointed with the future. This disincentivized with the future of America. But just go see all these young folks that are raising their hand to join this country. Like your teammates here at West Point, Our America's in great hands when you get to see the people that we get to see, and they are the ones who are going to defend our country and hopefully set the standard so that they go up. But I'd say this generation brings an opportunity to see the world that's changing faster than our military institution relations or military institutions tend to like. And this Z generation can adapt faster than our animals, and we got to figure out how to leverage that into our communities.
• 28:12
  Speaker C: What advice do you have for that generation, knowing what you know now after your long career? Like, what would advice do you have for those people who are innovative? They want to get after it, but they're young, and they. They don't know how to play that game.
• 28:22
  Speaker A: Yeah. So first, you know, you got to roll in and learn the mission, right? You got to be part of the team you're part of, right? Nobody wants. Nobody who wears a uniform wants individuals, right? We want teammate. Strength is our uni. Unity is our strength, and we've got that. So first thing is, you got to commit to the team. And so the first step, when you do commit to the team, the second thing you got to do is you got to know your job, right? Everybody has a role. Competence is the coin of the realm. You got to know your job, and that's where you start to build your trust and everything. So if you come in, you join the team, you learn your job, then you start looking for, how can I help, right? And in there, just so you got to be cautious and low folks, right? You can't. You know somebody. You got a master sergeant who's been doing this a long time. You don't roll in and go, hey, sergeant, this is all screwed up. I don't know what you're Doing that ain't going to go very well, right? But again, if you start with those first part of the team and I know my job, then people are going to ask you, hey, what do you think? And how does this come about? Were there better ways to do this? And then the other part that is so, so critically important for anybody who's trying to innovate, you got to know the why, right? Because if. If you don't know the why, it's nearly impossible to innovate because you're process oriented. When you know the why, you're effect oriented. So in that why in our military is simple. Why do we exist? We exist to fight and win wars, right? And our why is an enemy. And it doesn't matter if we do something better than we did a year ago or three years ago. It only matters if we do it better than the enemy is going to do it on the battlefield we find them. So with that, knowing the why and being able to connect the things you do to the why allows you to find very creative ways to get there. If we keep people separated from the why, and they're just in the process, they're going to underwhelm us with the renovation.
• 29:59
  Speaker C: Well, General, thank you for your time today. It's a great conversation about special tactics, the Air Force Academy, and training young soldiers. On behalf of Colonel Sullivan, the director of Modern War Institute, and Dr. Charlie Faint, the director of this podcast series, thank you for your time today and please accept this rare and coveted MWI challenge coincident.
• 30:16
  Speaker A: All right, I appreciate it. Thank you.
• 30:22
  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.