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The Strategika Podcast: Bing West on the Military’s Culture of Excellence
If you’re not a regular listener to the Strategika podcast, this episode is a good place to start. It’s virtually impossible to get bored when our featured guest is Bing West, best-selling author and former Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan Administration. Our topic today: whether the U.S. military is prepared to adjust to the changes that modern technology has brought to warfare. Bing’s bullish on the matter. In fact, this episode is worth listening to for no other reason to hear his analysis of what makes the military institutionally different from every other part of the federal government. It’s one of my favorite interviews we’ve ever taped for this series. Listen in below or subscribe to Strategika through iTunes or your favorite podcast app.
Yeah, good luck on maintaining that culture with Private Caitlyn in the ranks.
There was a wealth of good advice in that podcast for Mr. Obama to ignore.
I was in the Army during the transition to an all volunteer force. The year before the change, I recall one of our drill sergeants opining that draftees made the best soldiers because they just wanted to get the job done and didn’t care how it affected the military career path they did not want anyway. He attributed both innovation and a can-do spirit to American non-career soldiers. Odd comment to be coming from someone who was making a career of it himself.
Another drill sergeant, an African-American combat veteran (I think a sniper) would sometimes take us aside after a training class and remind us that what we just heard was necessary to know in order to graduate from basic training but real war was different and he would enumerate what we should know about that. the contrast was enlightening.
The military can be more militantly bureaucratic than civilian agencies and it can be more innovative. I would like to believe that the latter tendency will remain vibrant but enough bad leadership can make the former the norm.