Category Archives: Military

ASPJ Article Available

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My short article, “The Mission Matters Most,” is out in the latest issue of Air & Space Power Journal. It’s a short critique of a short critique of my 2006 article, “How the Air Force Embraced ‘Partial Quality.'”

Link

The main point I wanted to make was that industrial and commercial quality improvement methods didn’t work well in the military setting because they were usually applied to support functions instead of warfighting functions.

Obviously I did not make that point clear enough in my original article, so let me reiterate that, in order for members of the rank and file to see Lean or any other improvement effort as vital to their service’s continued success, these efforts must be adapted to the core military mission as much as (if not more than) they are adapted to ancillary functions.

Statistical techniques designed to ensure that repetitive processes produce uniform results; continuous quality-improvement efforts that seek to improve “form, fit, and function” and customer satisfaction; and Lean initiatives that eliminate non-value-added effort and other waste are all highly effective, time-proven ways to make organizations better. But all too often they do not touch the military mission, and therefore they do not reach the military mind.

We’ll see if the point gets across any better this time.

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LOLcats Repudiated

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I’m not a LOLcat fan, although I admit some of them are funny. And if you’re not familiar with the LOLcat phenomenon, the great anti-LOLcat on the Fabianspace Blog won’t make any sense to you. But I liked it. 😀

Fabianspace is run by Karina Fabian, a talented writer whose husband Rob was a speechwriter with me on the Air Staff and is now a Squadron Commander at Minot Air Force Base, North Dakota. Karina agreed to be the Anti-Running-Mate in the Anti-Campaign, and posted a fake news story about the Anti-Candidate on the same “Labor Day Funnies” page of her blog. I suspect Rob had a hand in producing that segment.

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Oh, To Be At Thule Today

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I look back with fondness at the year I spent at Thule Air Base, Greenland — in fact, today I wore my “Thule Tracking Station” hat* — but it looks as if the path of this morning’s total solar eclipse went very close to Thule. I hope the weather was clear enough for the folks to get a (safe) glimpse of the event.

This Wikipedia link has a neat animation of the eclipse path. The little black spot is the area of totality; the larger grey area would see a partial eclipse.

Ultra cool for Ultima Thule. (And no, if you pronounce it correctly that doesn’t rhyme.)

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*Our tracking station had an awesome logo: a polar bear coming out of a radome. I need to get a new hat and a couple new shirts, because mine are getting worn out.

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US Air Force Memorial

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Visited the Air Force Memorial yesterday, just before getting ready to attend a wedding in Springfield, VA. I remember when some of my office mates on the Air Staff were helping to plan the opening ceremonies for the memorial, and I remember seeing the spires under construction, so it was good to see it now that it’s done.

The three spires really draw the eye upward, which is the whole point, and even as a non-flyer I found it inspiring. The Medal of Honor wall was a good touch; I found the name of the recipient (William Lawley) who swore me in as a Regular officer back when I was at Squadron Officer School. And the view of the Pentagon and across the river into DC was also very nice.

In many ways it made me miss the service and regret that my attempts to go to Kuwait and Iraq never came to fruition. And in other, morbid ways I don’t fully understand it made me somewhat sad that I missed my opportunity to be memorialized — though if I had been, I wouldn’t be typing this. C’est la vie … literally.

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Happy Independence Day

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I hope you have a splendid 4th of July, wherever you are and whatever you’re doing.

A special “thank you” to our Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines, and Coastguardsmen who keep us safe, secure, and free every day. I salute you all.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident ….” Yes, we do.

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USAF Shake-Up

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Wow — I was shocked this morning to see that both the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, General “Buzz” Moseley, and the Secretary of the Air Force, Michael Wynne, resigned yesterday. (Story here.) Had I seen the news yesterday, I just would’ve been shocked a few hours earlier.

I consider it a great shame that General Moseley was forced to resign — I didn’t have many dealings with him when I was on the Air Staff,* but he always struck me as a straight-up guy. My fondest memory is of chatting with him in the little connecting hallway between the D and E rings of the Pentagon, where he urged me to insert some random Mandarin Chinese characters into a speech I’d written for Mr. Peter Teets — the Under Secretary at the time — just to see how Mr. Teets would react.

Mr. Wynne, on the other hand, I never understood. I had even fewer dealings with him than with Gen Moseley, but my observations from afar showed me a man who was possibly too smart for the practical realities of the job. I got that impression when, as one of his first initiatives as Secretary, he decided to update (or revamp, or otherwise tinker with) the Air Force Mission and focus less on the traditional elements of flying, fighting, and winning the nation’s wars than on delivering “sovereign options.” I still scratch my head over that one.

Of course, this difficult situation is made even worse by the fact that the Air Force has been without an Under Secretary for months now. (It’s similar to when I was there, and they tapped Mr. Michael Dominguez to be the Acting Secretary. I enjoyed writing for him; some of us thought he would make a good SecAF.) I saw this afternoon that the SecDef was going to recommend a new nominee to President Bush, but it will be exceedingly strange for someone to be nominated and confirmed for the last few months of the Presidential term. I suspect there will be another Acting SecAF for awhile; I wish them luck.

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*Full disclosure: I worked in the Secretary & Chief of Staff’s Executive Action Group from 2004 until my retirement in 2006.

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Memorial Day Tribute

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For Memorial Day, here’s a link to a great rendition of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” forwarded to us by a former boss (and supporter of the “Anti-Campaign”). As the oft-forwarded message said,

If you missed hearing the US Army Band and Chorus welcome Pope Benedict XVI at the White House Rose Garden ceremony on 15 April, get a load of these high school kids. At the conclusion listen to the high notes on the trumpet … played by a high school kid! One of the fathers recorded it, added some graphic enhancements to the recording, and posted it on the web…. Be prepared … it will definitely send a few chills down your spine.

Here’s the link. Enjoy, and remember the ultimate sacrifices that paid for our freedoms.

God Bless.

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New, just for fun, on the SWF: Space Strategists

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One of the folks on Baen’s Bar posted a link to a list of the “Greatest Space Strategists In Military History,” featuring characters from some famous science fiction print and film franchises. So of course I cross-posted it in the “Space Warfare Strategy” portion of the Space Warfare Forum.

It fit right in, even though it’s 😉 just for fun.

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Space Strategy, Policy, Missiles

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New in the Space Warfare Forum: Senator Wayne Allard of Colorado recently called for a new space strategy and space policy, as well as development of “a layer of space-based interceptors.” He made the statements last week at the National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs.

For more, see the New Call for Strategy & Space-Based Weapons thread in the Space Strategy section of the forum.

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Upcoming ASPJ Article

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Sometimes I think I should stick with non-fiction. I received word that my brief article, “The Mission Matters Most” is scheduled to appear in the Fall issue of Air & Space Power Journal (the USAF’s professional journal).

A couple of years ago, ASPJ published my article, “How the Air Force Embraced ‘Partial Quality,'” which generated some discussion and eventually a review/rebuttal in the Fall 2007 issue. This new article is something of a rebuttal to the rebuttal, which is what “The Merge” section of the journal intends:

In air combat, “the merge” occurs when opposing aircraft meet and pass each other. Then they usually “mix it up.” In a similar spirit, Air and Space Power Journal’s “Merge” articles present contending ideas.

Anyway, here’s an excerpt:

I read with interest Randall Schwalbe’s critique …. [which] is well thought out but somewhat misses the point.

… Mr. Schwalbe made the statement [that] the “fundamental flaw” (p. 16) of my article was that I had confused “quality with process improvement.” That my article dealt with the way the USAF implemented quality improvement ideas in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and attempted to show that the ideas themselves were sound but the execution flawed, did not seem to come through: my execution, apparently, was itself flawed.

… more salient to this discussion, the commercial success of Toyota, Ford, or Motorola, etc., is not the best argument for convincing the military that these new tools and techniques are germane to their mission. Obviously I did not make that point clear enough in my original article, so let me reiterate: for the rank-and-file to see Lean or any other improvement effort as vital to their service’s continued success, these efforts must be adapted to the core military mission as much as (if not more than) they are adapted to ancillary functions.

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