BTTF 5: Retaining Female Talent

This post is part of a series that will continue over the course of the next few months. The series will look at the future of the Marine Corps after the end of Operating Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. It was inspired by Robert Kosloski’s article in the Naval War College Review, “Marching Towards the Sweet Spot: Options for the Marine Corps in a Time of Austerity,” (Available Here) Mr. Kosloski has also written for this blog. It will include guest posts and posts by Gazette blog authors. This series is being organized by Capt Jonathan Rue, USMCR, who writes at Gunpowder and Lead and the Guardian, and Capt Brett Friedman, USMC, who writes here and at Grand Blog Tarkin.

Capt Lindsay L. Rodman, USMC is a judge advocate currently assigned to the Office of the Legal Advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  The opinions presented below are hers alone, and do not reflect those of the Marine Corps, the Joint Staff or the Department of Defense.

The Marine Corps is headed toward a time of fiscal austerity, and is therefore going through the task of force reshaping, considering new combinations of battalions, and even tinkering with the size and composition of squads and fire teams.  In separate rooms within the Pentagon, other officers and senior civilians are sitting together discussing better integration of women into the military, thinking about issues of sexual assault, combat integration, and physical requirements.  One concern pervades both of these conversations: how do we leverage the talent we have, through engaged leadership and other programs, to get the most out of the Marines who remain after the drawdowns?   

While the Marine Corps is likely to change dramatically as drawdown policies are finalized and begin to take place, the proportion of female representation within the Corps is likely to remain the same.  The Marine Corps has historically had the lowest representation of women among the services, recently reaching around 6%.  By contrast, the average military-wide has been between 14 and 15% for the past 15 years, and may even be headed slightly downward.  Neither number has changed significantly, despite dramatic changes in force structure due to war.  [For historical figures further back, see here.]  The lifting of the combat restriction might help recruit women, and perhaps media discussion of the military sexual assault problem will harm female recruitment.  In the end, it looks like a wash, especially because it does not appear that there is a movement within the manpower system to set recruitment quotas at different levels, and our recruiters are Marines – they will meet the standard wherever it is set.  

In light of the Marine Corps’s hard work on sexual assault issues and lifting the combat restriction on women, senior leaders should consider whether the gender composition of our Corps has struck the right balance.  It is a fair question: the mission of the Marine Corps does not appeal to many women, and the physical requirements exclude many others.  No one is interested in degrading capabilities or altering the mission of the Marine Corps.  Having more women is not an end to itself – it must actually improve the organization as a whole.

Fiscal austerity, drawdowns, budget cuts, and force-shaping will require the Marine Corps to “do more with less.”  The key to success in the long run will be retaining the most talented Marines.  Fewer Marines of the same talent level may perform at a lower level, but fewer of the most talented Marines will be able to maintain the readiness we require as a nation.  The Marine Corps’s primary manpower goal should be to calibrate the Service to retain the very best – not just to make numbers.   

Looking at the status quo, we should ask ourselves whether we are doing well in retention generally, but especially when it comes to women.  There are many relevant indicators, and many areas in which the Marine Corps and the military writ-large could do better at data collection, but the clearest indicator is that in both the enlisted and officer ranks, women have always been heavily concentrated toward the bottom – at the highest ranks of the Marine Corps only about 1-2% are female; at the lowest ranks the number is much closer to 10%.  There is a dramatic drop-off at the field grade ranks among officers.

There have only been about 40 female active duty lieutenant colonels at any given time in the entire active duty Marine Corps for at least the past 10 years.  The numbers have gotten worse: fifteen years ago the number was 58.  While women have increased slightly as a percentage of the overall Marine Corps population, more women are leaving or falling out as rank increases.  So why do women leave, while men stay?  For one reason or another, women are dissatisfied with the idea of continuing to serve.   As we face the impact of drawdowns and austerity, the Marine Corps should consider this a red flag.

There are many external societal reasons that women fall off of career ladders.  Many professions face similar problems.  However, Marine Corps women do not get stuck in middle management – they get out.  The Marine Corps is not entirely to blame for this phenomenon, but the Marine Corps does have control over its people, and therefore has control over potential solutions.  And, with a starting population of women that is so much smaller than those in general society, the numbers within the Marine Corps are that much more stark at the top when the Service fails to retain the best women.

The fact that there are few female leaders at the top really does affect the experience of the women coming up behind them.  There is one female general in the Marine Corps.  She is proportionally representative of the colonel’s pool the board was pulling from, but not the roughly 10% female class of Marine Corps second lieutenants each year (her class 27 years ago was probably closer to 5%).  Though the few who have made it to the top are all individually impressive, their sparse numbers actually make them seem like exceptions that prove the rule.  Seeing none at the top can motivate a woman to be a trailblazer.  Seeing one or two at the top, among dozens or even hundreds of men, when so many other women have obviously left, might make one wonder why she would want to be there.   

There is no single obvious solution – the problem stems from many interrelated factors.  This issue is intertwined with many of the other issues facing our military.  As the military continues to integrate gays and lesbians into the ranks, and to recognize their marriages and their families, the Services will also have to learn to accommodate the notion that not everyone’s spouse fits the paradigm of a traditional military wife.  As leaders continue to address the military sexual assault question, the discussion often devolves into consideration of the way women are treated within the military.  Especially with respect to lifting the combat restriction, the need for female leadership has been discussed and is apparent.  However, we do not have women represented in the leadership of most combat service support units, let alone new units previously not open to women.

The one obvious way forward is to put the onus on addressing this question where it belongs: on leadership as a whole, not the women at the top.  This idea is not novel – the best leaders I have personally encountered in the Marine Corps take this matter to heart.  However, I have also had more than one O-6 explain to me that women do not belong in the Marine Corps, including one who insisted on explaining this to me at length over lunch in Afghanistan.  I question the professionalism and propriety of colonels cornering company grades to explain to them that they do not belong.  In my own anecdotal experience, those officers tend to grow up in combat arms communities where they work with women so rarely that their opinions are theoretical.  However, I have also seen that those opinions have not hurt those leaders, and since the Marine Corps promotes at the top from the combat arms community in larger numbers, some of those colonels become generals.  

I have been extremely fortunate in my career to have had, for the most part, outstanding leadership.  I do not need female leadership to feel like I belong within a unit, or that I will be respected, and the onus is just as much on the male leadership as the female leadership to ensure that everyone works within a professional climate of respect.  The best leaders – male or female – are the ones who create a climate of earned trust: giving every Marine a fair shake and rewarding, commending, and advocating for promotion based on merit, achievement, and future potential.  

However, there is also an important symbolic significance to knowing that women are succeeding within the Marine Corps, and enjoying their service so much that they want to continue in their career, to the same degree as their male counterparts.  As women are deciding whether to stay or leave, they cannot help but look toward female leaders as they try to assess what their own futures might look like.  Unless the Marine Corps becomes a place where women succeed at a rate closer to their male counterparts, the Marine Corps will continue to lose talent, and stagnate in its integration of women in to the Service.

Q & A with Leftwich Trophy Recipient, Maj Benjamin Middendorf

The Marine Corps Association & Foundation's (MCA&F) Roxanne Baker sits down with Maj Benjamin Middendorf, this year's recipient of the Leftwich Trophy.

Middendorf accepted the award at MCA&F's 10th annual Ground Awards dinner in 2013.

"It's a huge honor to say the least and I hope to do it justice," he said. "Just to be a Marine by itself, that's enough for me. I don't need any other recognition or title other than 'United States Marine'."

---

Listen to the podcast.

---

MCA&F publishes the Marine Corps Gazette.

---

Innovation and Lean Startups in the World’s Largest Bureaucracy: DEF2013

In his 2011 work The Lean Startup, serial entrepreneur Eric Ries describes a method for successful entrepreneurship that stresses the importance of rapid iteration over extensive planning, adaptive learning over causal logic, and getting an idea into the hands of end users well before it is completely validated.  While this technique was considered innovative and ground breaking in the business world, Ries’s approach to problem solving should seem very familiar to Marine leaders. 

The oft quoted mantra “the 80% solution executed violently and on time is better than the 100% solution executed too late” is Reis’s theory in action.  The best planners and leaders understand that while a well thought out scheme of maneuver is the first step to any operation, no plan survives contact with the enemy.  The ability to adapt to a changing situation (or in business speak to “iterate and learn”) is just as important as the ability to create the “perfect plan”.  The business world and the Marine Corps are closer than both would like to admit, and we can certainly learn from each other.

It is with that in mind that we invite all interested Marines, Sailors, and like-minded individuals to the Defense Entrepreneurs Forum (www.DEF2013.com), a conference to be held at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business over Columbus Day Weekend. The conference will bring together individuals who want to explore and accelerate their ideas with the assistance of business school faculty, seasoned entrepreneurs, successful investors, and senior military officers.

While Ries’s methodology is just one example of the wave of entrepreneurial thought that the emerging generation of civilian private sector leaders has embraced, most Marines would agree that we have used this adaptive learning philosophy throughout our Corps’ history.  Examples of recent Marine innovations include the development of Female Engagement Team (FET), which became an official Marine Corps program and was adopted by the Army. The Harvest HAWK, a cargo plane with a payload of missiles bolted onto its wing, is an instance of developing an inexpensive close air support platform quickly to provide support to ground forces.  Another example would be squadron pilots inventing a system to use iPads to view the over 1000 paper map sheets covering the Helmand Valley, all for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars less than a contractor would charge.  These and hundreds of other innovations, both technical and non-technical in nature, are key to our success as an organization, especially considering that fiscal cutbacks are likely to eviscerate our operational budgets over the next decade.     

A member of a USMC Female Engagement Team (FET)

We are organizing DEF2013 with other junior and former military officers from across the services because we have seen the utility of innovation at the unit level and its outsized impact on our organization as a whole. Results such as FETs and the Harvest HAWK must become more of a standard than an exception. We are not seeking to disrupt the military, but rather trying to figure out how we can foster best practices, like the lean startup methodology, from the civilian sector to our military units. This is particularly critical as we shift away from twelve years of sustained combat operations into a peacetime setting with significant budget cuts and manpower drawdowns.  As Winston Churchill is alleged to have said, “Gentlemen we have run out of money; now we have to think.”

The weapons station on a KC-130J configured as a Harvest HAWK

As is tradition, the Marine Corps will likely be hit hardest by these cuts, and more agile thinking will be needed from the service that already does more with less. Lessons learned and ideas from the private sector and in academia have been used extensively throughout the military, to include the creation of the Counterinsurgency Manual. We believe that there is also opportunity to also bring in thoughts on innovation, and are creating a community to not only share ideas, but to ensure that we are applying those ideas in real time. 

So come join us from October 12-14th in Chicago to accelerate your ideas or learn how to accelerate them in the future.  Leaders who have already committed to supporting DEF include Brigadier General William Mullen, Kevin Willer, former CEO of the startup incubator 1871, and Chicago Booth Professor of Entrepreneurship Waverly Deutsch.  If you are interested in taking part in the discussion, we are already generating topics for our innovation sessions and discussing important ideas for entrepreneurship in the military on our forum at http://def2013.com/ideaforum .

Marine Corps Captains Michael “Squirrel” Christman, Tony “STORQ” Hatala, and Lindsay Rodman all currently serve on active duty. Former Marine Corps Captain Evan Johnson is now an MBA candidate at Chicago Booth. All serve on the board of the Defense Entrepreneurs Forum.

Back to the Future Part 4: On Strategy

 

For few years now, I have been harping on the Marine Corps for its poor strategic education program. (Sorry, CG 13, EWS Class 2012-2013, I know you’re tired of this.) By poor, I do not mean that the strategic education is bad. Command and Staff College, where Marine officers receive their first real dose of strategic theory, has a great curriculum and outstanding staff. Rather, this dose of strategic theory comes far too late in an officer’s career. No tactical action exists without strategic context, but we pretend that it is not necessary or possible for an officer to understand that context until he or she is a field grade officer. This is false.

The justification for teaching officers strategic theory so late is that lieutenants and captains are not strategic leaders, they are tactical leaders. Theirs is not to question why, theirs is but to do or die, if you will. The decisions that company grade officers make on the battlefield are tactical in nature and thus strategic theory is unnecessary. It only makes sense that tactical leaders do not need strategic sense in order to make good tactical decisions.

This is right. Company grade officers are tactical leaders. But that Prussian-accented voice at the back of my mind whispers a quiet, “Nein.”

Strategy thereby gains the end it had ascribed to the [tactical] engagement, the end that constitutes its real significance… The original means of strategy is victory- that is, tactical success… Strategy, in connecting these factors with the outcome of the engagement, confers a special significance on that outcome and thereby on the engagement: it assigns a particular aim to it… Successful engagements or victories in all stages of importance may therefore be considered as strategic means… Not only individual engagements with particular aims are to be classified as means: any greater unity formed in a combination of engagements by being directed toward a common aim can also be considered as a means. - On War (Howard/Paret trans.) Pages 142-143.

What he means is that strategy determines ends and that those ends can only be accomplished through tactics. Tactics are only effective when endowed with significance that serves the strategy. A tactician must choose tactics that have that significance. Tactics that do not serve the strategy are, at best, wasteful. At worst, they are detrimental. Sun Tzu agrees: “Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.

Yet, we send lieutenants out to make tactical decisions without arming them with even the rudimentary skills necessary to give those decisions meaning. We cannot expect effective tactical decision making without strategic insight.  In fact, our doctrine depends on it. Maneuver warfare theory preaches that decision-making must be delegated to the lowest levels, that junior leaders must make their own decisions in the absence of orders or if the situation demands, that Marines must have a bias for action. This vacuum can be filled by only a few basic strategic theory classes at TBS and EWS. These basic classes would not be intended to make experts, but only to guide the self-study of those interested. On War is a mainstay on the Commandant’s Reading List, but few can pick up that tome and understand it without guidance or explanation. The Marine Corps expects every officer to conduct this self study but has yet to provide a decent guide to that study. The strategic theory forest is dark and thickly wooded, but a few chemlights along an officer’s path can do a world of good. 

To be sure, the Marine Corps is not a strategy-making body. However, the Marine Corps has a responsibility to inform those that do on tactical and operational plans. The necessity to understand strategy is clear. The Marine Corps used to understand this precept, one needs only read the first few pages of the Small Wars Manual to see that. Unfortunately, one needs only read a few pages of today’s diluted doctrine to see that it has forgotten it. Fortunately the solution to this problem is inexpensive. Since the future of the Marine Corps is one of budget austerity that looks worse all the time, education might be one of the last areas that the institution can affect. Thinking is free, after all, and adding classes on strategic theory to TBS and EWS is far more cost effective than the next leap ahead weapon system. What we cannot afford is to continue to ignore this important aspect of our profession.

Why the West is the Best

This post is part of a series highlighting books on the Commandant’s Professional Reading List in an effort to promote the study of military history and other professional subjects. This month’s selection is “Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power.” Next month’s feature is “The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us and What We Can Do About It.”

Buy the book online.

For the last 2,500 years Western military forces have held the advantage when confronting non-Westerners in battle. From the Greco-Persian Wars of the 5^th Century B.C. to the modern era in which the industrialized nations of the West project military power into any corner of the world, Western military forces win far more than they lose. Some scholars, such as Jared Diamond in his landmark Guns, Germs, and Steel attribute Eurasian dominance to accidents of geography, others to technology or even morality, but in Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power, Victor Davis Hanson puts forth the premise that Western military dominance springs from the cultural traditions of the Greek city-states dating back to the 7^th Century B.C.

Hanson, a noted historian, begins his work by exploring the creation of the Western cultural tradition in the rugged hills and sparse valleys of ancient Greece. He examines the Greek concept of infantry-centric shock battle in which disciplined rows of hoplites fought shoulder-to-shoulder in the great battles of Xenophon’s 10,000 and Alexander’s conquest of the Persian Empire. How was it that men, often outnumbered and far from home, could keep in disciplined ranks and advance in unison when confronting fierce warriors charging from every angle? Hanson believes the answer lies in the concept of individual and political freedom coupled with rationalism; that free citizens in a constitutional government give the West its advantage on the battlefield. From this basis comes other qualities addressed throughout the book: democracy, property rights, free speech & markets, the rule of law, individualism, dissent; all of which provide the people of a political entity, be it a city-state or a modern nation, with the belief that they make the decision to go to war and willingly send their citizens to fight in it with inherent rights and norms agreed on and adhered to throughout the conflict.

It’s an abstract idea, but Hanson strives to show a correlation between an army of free citizens and success in war. He goes on throughout the book to link the Hellenic cultural tradition to other societies and battles throughout the ages. From the Battle of Tenochtitlan through Lepanto and Rorke’s Drift to the modern clashes at Midway and the Tet Offensive, Hanson attaches offshoots of the Greek tradition to each engagement: the discipline of professional soldiers, the effect of capitalism on fielding the great weapons of war, and the role of dissent on pressuring governments to change failing strategies. These concepts are contrasted well against losing armies who fought as slaves to an emperor or with weapons based on ritualistic form instead of rational science. It would seem easy to dismiss Hanson’s work as deterministic or even racist, but he strives to avoid leveling judgment, although he certainly leaves room for one to draw the misguided conclusion that all nations should embrace the Western cultural tradition and perhaps by extension that the U.S. should crusade for that end as a matter of policy.

While Western nations have a strong record of military dominance, it is not immune from disaster (the Anglo-Afghan War, the Russo Japanese War and of course Dien Bien Phu just to name a few). Nation-states and non-state actors across the world study and adapt not just the Western way of war, but many are moving towards the Western cultural tradition, or like China’s blend of socialism and capitalism, are displaying a hybrid of both Western and Eastern traditions. Hanson believes that these traits are both enduring and universal; therefore they can be used or discarded by any military force or society. Therein lies the reason that military professionals need to read and study this book. Marines should ask themselves if they are emulating the qualities that Hanson notes as decisive in enabling victory in battle. Is constructive dissent within your unit encouraged or viewed as a threat? Is discipline applied with room for individual initiative to be applied in the fog of war? These and other points raised in the book are worth considering for leaders of Marines. A study guide is posted at the MCU website and a debate between Victor Davis Hanson and Jared Diamond is on YouTube and will add to your understanding of the central ideas in their works. Please leave a comment if you do or do not recommend this book for others to read.

Back to the Future Part 3: Amphibious Raiding

This post is part of a series that will continue over the course of the next few months. The series will look at the future of the Marine Corps after the end of Operating Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. It was inspired by Robert Kosloski’s article in the Naval War College Review, “Marching Towards the Sweet Spot: Options for the Marine Corps in a Time of Austerity,” (Available Here) Mr. Kosloski has also written for this blog. It will include guest posts and posts by Gazette blog authors. This series is being organized by Capt Jonathan Rue, USMCR, who writes at Gunpowder and Lead and the Guardian, and Capt Brett Friedman, USMC, who writes here and at Grand Blog Tarkin.

A few years ago, when I was working on a two-star staff, I was told by a high-level GS employee and retired USMC field grade officer that "the Marine Corps doesn’t do raiding anymore.”

For a while there he was probably right. After the Mayaguez incident, it seemed like raids were destined to pass to into the realm of special operations despite the Marines' long history of maritime raids. The Marine Corps’ first amphibious assault was conducted as part of a raid to secure military supplies from the British on New Providence in the Bahamas. This raid also included sailors armed and sent ashore with the Marine contingents. With support from sailors, the Marine corps regularly conducted raids until World War I. They were so ingrained in the Corps that the Commandant, in an attempt to emulate British commandos, established the Marine Raiders during World War II. The Raiders were the first unit to conduct a maritime raid via submarine and won further laurels behind Japanese lines on Guadalcanal.

Raiding, however, appears to be on the horizon yet again. The Navy-Marine Corps team is looking at putting Marine detachments on a variety of platforms besides amphibious ships, a call that has also appeared in the print edition of the Marine Corps Gazette. Adding to the desire for Marines aboard more ships are those that appeal for more options in how those Marines are employed. In February 2012, LCDR BJ Armstrong called for Marine raiding forces on aircraft carriers:

Today’s Nimitz -class aircraft carriers are not being used for maximum efficiency. While the “fighter gap” is not projected to hit the Navy for another couple of years, the reality is that today’s carrier air wing is smaller than the Nimitz class was designed to deploy. The Gerald R. Ford class will have even more room. The power of today’s super carriers comes from the precision fires that can be delivered more than the sheer number of airframes on the flight deck. This leaves room available for a few more airframes and a few more people, and the potential to increase the capability of the modern carrier strike group.

LCDR Armstrong makes a great case that a contingent of Marines (like Company Landing Force as he mentions in the article) would vastly increase the flexibility of the Carrier Strike Group. Even if the Marines were focused on the simpler NEO (Noncombatant Evacuation Operation) and TRAP (Tactical Recovery of Aircraft and Personnel) missions, their presence would give combatant commanders more options.

Another possibility is to return Marines to the undersea realm.

If an ARG is too far off the coast to launch landing craft and the AA threat makes air operations too dangerous for non-stealth aircraft, how will the Joint Force, specifically the Marine Corps component, seize lodgments in support of other operations? The answer: through America’s principal 21st-century naval advantage­—submarines....… The (current) amphibious capability of both SSNs and SSGNs revolves around the dry deck shelter (DDS)—a 38-foot long, 30-ton, C-5–transportable sphere that attaches to a submarine. An SSN can accommodate one shelter; an SSGN can carry two. Marines enter the DDS while the submarine is submerged. The shelter is then flooded and the water pressure inside equalized to the outside environment. The DDS then opens and the Marines surface.

To be sure, the SEALs also utilize this capability. But for a time and place that requires more schlitz than stealth, it would be a good idea for Marines to have units ready to execute a raid via submarine. This capability may be especially important when facing an A2AD system.

Whether the raiders consist of Marines, special operations forces, or soldiers, the U.S. Navy is the single most capable raiding platform on the planet. A raid launched from US ships afloat requires less coordination with host nations, if it requires any at all, and is less of a burden on our partners. Without offshore Navy assets, raids must be facilitated by local airfields and other infrastructure. The Bin Laden raid, which may now be the most famous raid in history, was made possible by Coalition airfields and bases in neighboring Afghanistan, an aspect we may not always have in the future. Raids will also look more attractive to policymakers who want to avoid costly, long-term occupations like Iraq and Afghanistan. Far from being a lapsed capability from a distant past, the maritime raid may make a comeback.