The Academy Insider Podcast - Your Guide to The Naval Academy Experience
The mission of Academy Insider is to guide, serve, and support Midshipmen, future Midshipmen, and their families. Through the perspective of a community of former graduates and Naval Academy insiders, this podcast will help you learn about life at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis. Through our shared experiences, Academy Insider guides families through the anxiety and frustration caused by lack of understanding, misinformation, and confusion. This platform is designed to better relationships between midshipmen and their loved ones. This podcast is not affiliated with the United States Naval Academy, the United States Navy or Department of Defense. The thoughts and opinions are exclusively those of your host and his guests.
The Academy Insider Podcast - Your Guide to The Naval Academy Experience
#065 Commanding the Best Damn Ship in the Navy: Reflections on a Combat Deployment
Ever wondered what it's like to command one of the most powerful warships in the world? Join us as Captain Hill, callsign Chowdah, takes us on a gripping journey from his days in the ROTC program at Tufts University to leading the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower. Captain Hill shares his riveting experiences from a recent combat deployment in the Red Sea, engaging Houthi rebels, and the rigorous preparation that naval aviators undergo to become commanders. His stories offer invaluable insights for Naval Academy parents, prospective students, and anyone fascinated by naval service.
The October 7th Hamas invasion of Israel threw an unexpected twist into what was supposed to be a morale-boosting European cruise for Captain Hill and his crew. Instead, their mission transformed into a seven-month deployment in the Eastern Mediterranean and Red Sea. Listen as Captain Hill recounts the challenges of sudden mission changes, the importance of clear communication, and the relentless efforts to keep crew morale high amidst continuous conflict. From lifesaving operations to crucial support from higher command, this episode uncovers the significant trials and triumphs during an intense deployment.
Building a culture of excellence on a naval ship isn't just a strategy—it's an art. Discover how Captain Hill uses innovative programs like the Warrior Sailor Academy and the power of social media to foster leadership and maintain close ties with families. Learn the nuances of balancing leadership sensitivity with the need for personal wellness, and hear about the critical importance of rest and self-care in maintaining a motivated and cohesive team. Through thoughtful stories and practical advice, Captain Hill's reflections underscore the continuous journey of improving leadership and the essence of military service.
The mission of Academy Insider is to guide, serve, and support Midshipmen, future Midshipmen, and their families.
Grant Vermeer your host is the person who started it all. He is the founder of Academy Insider and the host of The Academy Insider podcast and the USNA Property Network Podcast. He was a recruited athlete which brought him to Annapolis where he was a four year member of the varsity basketball team. He was a cyber operations major and commissioned into the Cryptologic Warfare Community. He was stationed at Fort Meade and supported the Subsurface Direct Support mission.
He separated from the Navy in 2023 and now owns The Vermeer Group, a boutique residential real estate company that specializes in serving the United States Naval Academy community PCSing to California & Texas.
We are here to be your guide through the USNA experience.
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Welcome to Season 2 of the Academy Insider Podcast. Academy Insider is a 501c3 nonprofit organization that serves midshipmen, future midshipmen and their families. At its core, this podcast is designed to bring together a community of Naval Academy graduates and those affiliated with the United States Naval Academy in order to tell stories and provide a little bit of insight into what life at the Naval Academy is really like. I hope you enjoy it. Thank you so much for listening and reach out if you ever have any questions. Hey everyone, and welcome back to the Academy Insider Podcast. In this episode we are joined by the CO, the commanding officer of the best dang ship in the Navy, the USS Eisenhower, or the Ike. So we're here with Chowda that's his call sign Captain Hill, and in this episode it's going to be a really cool reflection on a combat deployment that just went out. The Ike was out in the Red Sea for a while, constantly in contact with Houthi rebels and doing the Lord's work out there, and so if you're interested to learn about what life is like out sea, what things are really cool, exciting, giving a sense of mission and purpose, but also sensing the reality of the seriousness of it and some of the difficulties of being out sea for that extended period of time, then check out this episode. For all of my Naval Academy parents, I think you'll get a good insight into all of the incredible work, all of the true purpose of what your sons and daughters are doing, and for all of the prospective students out there who may be interested in the Naval Academy, this is a sense of what you could really be getting into. This career field is one of service. This career field is one that could potentially be dangerous, but it's based in the fact that you're making the world a better and safer place. So if you're interested in hearing these reflections from a combat deployment from Captain Hill, aka Chowda, then check out this episode. If there's ever anything I can do for you, please let me know. Otherwise, I hope you enjoy it. Thank you so much. Have a great day.
Speaker 1:The Academy Insider Podcast is sponsored by the Vermeer Group, a residential real estate company that serves the United States Naval Academy community and other select clientele in both California and Texas. If I can ever answer a real estate related question for you or connect you with a trusted Academy affiliated agent in the market which you're in, please reach out to me directly at grant at the Vermeer groupcom. You can also reach out to me on my LinkedIn page, grant Vermeer, and I'd be happy to respond to you there. Thank you so much. Now let's get back to the episode. Hey, everyone, and welcome back to the Academy Insider Podcast, kevin Hill chowder. That's the call sign. I appreciate it. First off, do you like that call sign? Is it one that you hold pride in and love? And I'll turn that over to you in an introduction to yourself, if you don't mind telling us a little bit about what brought you into the Navy, how long you've been in your current role as the CEO of the Eisenhower, just a little bit of background of how you've arrived at this point.
Speaker 2:Okay, yeah, as for the call sign, chowder, it's just my name at this point because I've had it for probably 25 years at least. I've been in the Navy for 28 years, but it's kind of cool that it has like a regional twist to it, because I'm from Quincy, massachusetts, right next to Boston, and I think it came from a Simpsons episode that came out right at the time that they were giving out call signs and that one stuck, for whatever reason. There's no story behind it other than Simpsons so yeah.
Speaker 2:So I joined the Navy through the ROTC program. I applied to the Academy and to ROTC and to see which one would work out. I ended up wanting to stay near home and so I went to Tufts University. So I did the ROTC program there and I went from there. So I graduated in 96 and it's been forever and that's it. So I've been the CO of an aircraft carrier, the USS Dwight D Eisenhower, best damn ship in the Navy. Uh, for goodness. Uh, 15 months, I think hasn't been too long. It's going to be like a two year tour, I think. Uh, that's the latest. So, yep, so that's a kind of a quick bio on me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and can you uh everyone who's listening again as someone who is a naval aviator, to take command of a ship. Do you mind explaining the process of taking someone who's either a pilot or a naval flight officer and getting them ready to command a warship? Like what do you have to learn about one nuclear power as it relates to the actual carrier and then also driving ships?
Speaker 2:Right, right, so at the end of the day we get exposed to almost all warfare areas. I would say, not Navy SEALs. Well, maybe to an extent I can explain that. But yeah, so this process starts when you become the commanding officer of a squadron, right? So that's the first requirement, if you will, and you get selected from there at some point and you have to go to nuclear power school and that is quite an experience because you're in your 40s and you're right there in the classroom with all the 22-year-olds from the academy OCS and ROTC and they just stuff you in this room and for the first six months you take a test about once or twice a week and you're studying your butt off and of course we're at a disadvantage in our 40s. They said they were like sir, you know, algebra is going to come right back and I said algebra is gone from my brain. It's gone. So it was like relearning math from scratch.
Speaker 2:I know you do a little bit of math in aviation, I get it, but it's not at that level. So you know, you make it through that program. You go to prototype. You're crawling around, you know docked submarines and do standing watch, just like the rest of the students and your instructors at E5s and they're awesome, and so you know part of it, I enjoy, part of it I did not enjoy, but at the end of the day you learn a lot. And so these young folks come out of there and they're going to submarines and surface nuclear power, which is, you know, aircraft carriers. So once you've got all that done, so you've got aviation experience. Now you have some nuke experience. You have to qualify engineering officer of the watch, eo, and then you go become the XO of an aircraft carrier. So that's your first time where you're kind of learning the ship life, because it's so different than squadrons. It takes a good six, seven months to get adapted to the structure of the ship, the language of the ships. You do a little bit of ship driving as an XO as well. So you end up going through the surface warfare officer school two or three times. So once you finish the XO tour, now it's like serious business, because your next tour is going to be the CO of a deep draft. So that's going to be like an LPD, amphib or it's going to be an ESB, the expeditionary staging bases, which is a new kind of ship coming out. So they put you through SWAS. You have to do the same things every other CO of other ships has to go through. You have to pass the simulator tests, and the quality of the schools have gotten much better over the years, and this is stemming from 2017. We had a few accidents and so we've kind of revamped the whole Surface Warfare Officer School program, which I think is great, but it's tough and you know some some of the major commanders in those classes didn't make it through, but in any case, yeah, so you become.
Speaker 2:I was the CEO of an LPD LPD 24, uss Arlington also the best damn ship in the Navy and what an experience. I didn't know anything about amphibians and the amphibious life, but it is. They're busy and they're very proud of what they do. They work like like heck, and so you know, I learned a lot about the amphib world too. It's another part of the Navy. We brought Marines on board and that was quite an experience. You know they always talk about the Navy, you know, delivers Marines ashore. I had never actually done that on any ship, but we were doing it on the LPD. And then after that, then you can qualify to be the CO of an aircraft carrier and, of course, you have to be a Naval flight officer or a pilot to do it, and so we have a good mix in the CO Corps right now. Helicopter pilots, fighter pilots, Hawkeye NFOs like me, and even Hawkeye pilots have been through the program as well.
Speaker 1:I love it. And did you have any inclination that this was your path forward when you were, when you're a young JO? Are you thinking like, oh man, I want to command an aircraft carrier, or like, what led you down this path and what was your decision point of like, hey, I want to stay, kind of like, or like actually go for a command of an aircraft carrier versus kind of pursuing a different tangent in the career field?
Speaker 2:It's a. It's a weird thing, cause you know, when you're young none of us were planning to stay in like that's not your life goal. It's like you want to do your service and get out and do something else. I wanted to become a lawyer and I was even studying for the LSAT. But a good life lesson for me is in I can't remember the year now, it was like 2001 or 2002. But I got a call from Top Gun and they wanted me to be an instructor. So I abandoned the lawyer idea. I said I'm going to go to Top Gun. It was the first time that anybody had ever asked for me to go anywhere Like they wanted me Getting recruited.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've never been recruited before, so would be. So yeah, I was like I've never been recruited before, so I was all about it. So it's a good lesson learned there. If you want people to stay in the Navy, ask them to stay in and say, hey, I want you right, so that was a big deal, but anyways, still, even then you're not thinking, oh you know, 25 years from now I'm going to be the CEO of an aircraft carrier. It's not on your plate. But once you become the CEO of a squatter and you've really got to determine do I really love leading sailors, do I like making a difference on multiple sailors and changing their lives? And the answer for me was yes. And the best path for that, I think, is the carrier aviation path or aircraft carrier path. So I went ahead and went for it. I asked to do it. I wrote a letter to the board, said please pick me, and they did.
Speaker 1:I love that. And now, on the topic of carriers, is again the Ike, the best damn ship in the Navy just got back home from deployment and so for people who are listening and may not know, can you talk briefly of the accomplishments, for what you're allowed to talk about, of the Ike and the team on deployment and kind of what the biggest takeaways and things you're most proud of from the entire deployment?
Speaker 2:Oh man, I could talk about this all day, yeah. So we ended up. Well, it was October 7th and we were supposed to deploy on October 14th, normal scheduled seven month deployment. October 7th, hamas invades Israel and everything changed. Up until that point it was great for the crew. We were talking about six or seven different port calls. We're going to see the world and this was a big deal for the crew because their previous two deployments, which were back to back, were during COVID, so they didn't see anything. So we had, even for the JOs a lot of them had never seen a foreign port call, which was crazy. So very exciting there.
Speaker 2:But then you know, that happened on October 7th and so we were given orders to make best speed to the Eastern Med. So we went to the Eastern Med, we hooked up with the Gerald R Ford, we took some photos, did some presence ops, just to kind of let people know we were there photos, did some presence ops, just to kind of let people know we were there. And then we got sent into the Red Sea and Fifth Fleet and we were stuck there for goodness, six and a half, almost seven months. So we did not do the European pleasure cruise, we went right to it and ended up in the Red Sea for about a little over six months, uh, fighting with the Houthis. Uh, pretty much every day, every other day, yep, and yeah, and the takeaways from that is? You know? Well, I'll let you ask the question. There's a lot of takeaways from that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I the. The real question is again, you go from this massive shift in mindset right, which is hopefully playing, to people's desire to see the world continue to do their job in a great way, but it's it's a little less threatening right and you and you shift to immediately, quite literally, like you're saying, where you're facing aggression, literal aggression that is a danger to the ship and to the crew. Yeah, and you know, for anyone for if you want to google and see some of this stuff, I I mean multiple attacks, rocket launches, like things going on, attempts of raiding vessels in the Red Sea as well how do you, from your perspective of teaching, coaching and mentoring and directing everyone as a part of the carrier, what's your message to them and how do you get people on board and with this mindset shift and getting them ready to again?
Speaker 2:face literal danger.
Speaker 2:So I mean all throughout the workups we're practicing for something like this not identical, obviously and as a leader you have to kind of communicate what the mission is of the ship. And the mission of the ship is simply to launch and recover aircraft. We added a stipulation on there to say to launch and recover aircraft to stomp on bad guys, and it's a little bit of crass language, but at the same time it was a sailor that recommended adding it. I said, okay, I'll add it. This is what sailors want, this is what we'll do, because they wanted to be inspired to be warrior sailors. I always refer to sailors as warriors because that's what we do. We do war fighting. We talked about it a lot.
Speaker 2:Now the real challenge would be if we went on deployment and we didn't do war fighting right. So I'd have to kind of explain why we're doing a NATO exercise or doing presence operations all of which are important, working with allies. I love all that stuff and it's good to build those relationships. But at the same time it became so much easier to explain the mission when we were actually doing it, and so it was almost like a gift in that sense, because you know, within my command philosophy, I say that morale creates success. But to create morale, you need to be loved and valued and you need to have mission and purpose. Loved and valued and you need to have mission and purpose. And so it's the job of the leaders up and down the chain of command, including the JOs, to communicate. This is why we're doing what we're doing, right. Sometimes from above you don't get the why, right? You know, for instance, in the Red Sea, our mission was to degrade Houthi capability, right, and there were a bunch of caveats to that. And so when you're explaining that to people, it sounds like military jargon, right, and we're going to degrade and deny and all this other stuff. It's all important. But when you're talking to sailors, like, what's the core mission? The core mission is to save lives, right, we're also providing freedom of navigation. It's another military jargon term, but this is a core mission of the United States Navy going back to 1775, right, so it just became easy to explain the mission. So mission and purpose was not the problem.
Speaker 2:If anything, the problem is the amount of time you spend out at sea on months on end, which we did, and we didn't get to see a port call until you know, within the six to seven months in deployment. So I was able to get the crew two port calls, which is great, and I have to thank so many people for allowing that to happen, including CENTCOM Central Command and also the Chief of Naval Operations. I mean, she personally stepped in to make sure that we got those port calls. And it's also important to do some work on the ship when you're in port. But the sailors need to get off the ship. They're working seven days a week from months on end. There's only so much I can do to communicate pride and mission and to keep people inspired and motivated. Sometimes they need a break. It's kind of like a limit to morale, if you will, and so that was a challenge for me, but at the end of the day, we did save a lot of lives. It's hard to quantify. You can't quantify something that didn't happen because they lived. You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 2:So there was an instance towards the end of deployment where and you can read about this in the news, but the backstory is there was a merchant vessel, the motor vessel Tudor, had a crew of about 25 Filipinos and they got hit by a Houthi missile and they were basically left to sink. Fortunately, we had a ship nearby the USS Philippine Sea, kind of ironic right A cruiser, and so the admiral tasked the cruiser to pick up every one of those sailors via helicopter. And so they did, and keep in mind that the Philippine Sea was in a pretty serious high threat area because that's where the missiles were coming. And so they had to do this rather quickly, while, you know, constantly flying the helicopter back and forth to get all those mariners. So they got them all back onto the ship, then they brought them to the Ike, and so I was busy at the time, so I gave direction to my people. I said, hey, it's. You know, some of my junior officers are like can you take care of this group? Yes, sir, and someone mentioned they had a detainee bill. I'm like whoa, these are not detainees, these guys are mariners. And they just lost one of their own. They had to leave behind a guy that perished in that attack and I said please take care of them. And then I had to go about do something else and just trust that it would get done. And so later on I said you know, I'm going to go check on them Meanwhile, excuse me, we were working like diplomatic missions to get them to eventually to Bahrain.
Speaker 2:We were going to cod them off on the C2 and then get them home to the Philippines. So I went down lower decks where we have this open room, and I didn't know what to expect. I get down there and I can hear people singing. I'm like what is going on? They're singing in another language. They were singing in Tagalog because some of our young Filipino sailors sent out an email saying who speaks Tagalog? Let's get down and make these guys feel at home. And they did exactly that. There was a buffet lunch, my Catholic priest, who's also Filipino, he was there holding court and I was just so, so proud of the sailors that they kind of did this on their own with very little direction. And by the time those guys left, they all had Ike ball caps and I you know, I was giving them fist bumps as they're leaving the ship. They had a tough time. They lost their ship, they lost a shipmate, but we got them home safely.
Speaker 1:It's really special and, like you're saying, the culture that's been established to create sailors in a ship that wants to support and help every single person who steps foot on that ship is really special. And how was your focus directed in cultivating that? You mentioned that for you, it's all about investing and loving in your people and demonstrating that. What was your focus directed in cultivating that? You mentioned that for you, it's all about investing and loving in your people and demonstrating that. What was your focus actually, tangibly and tactically? Because, again, you're the mayor of a literal city. Right, there are like 5,000 people on board. You can't talk to every single sailor. So how do you go about, what's your philosophy, what's your focus in getting this word out, creating this culture? Knowing that you do you go about? What's your philosophy, what's your focus in getting this word out, creating this culture, knowing that you can't go to every single sailor individually?
Speaker 2:Right, so it would be literally impossible to do one-on-one with every new recruit that comes to the ship. We have about, I don't know, something like 60 per month, right, I would just be completely inundated. But I had a strategy, so it was this you have various ways to communicate and obviously email would be one. But I had a strategy, so it was this you have various ways to communicate and obviously email would be one, but I don't use that very much. We have the OneMC, which is our PA system. I use that almost every single day and I would give a similar message almost every day, right, kind of a little bit of brainwashing, maybe technique, but it was all positive, right, and you would focus on recognizing sailors, making them feel valued for the work that they did, by individual name. People love the sound of their own name, right? This is just me. So you know, within each of their departments and there's 20 departments on the ship they're checking in with their head of department, who's usually an O5. And so they're getting rolled into the system. But how do I get the ship aligned to a philosophy? And the only way is to talk about it a lot, which I did. So you meet with the officer's mess. You know 170 people. You talk about it frequently. You meet with the chief's mess. You talk about it frequently.
Speaker 2:I did CO's calls too. Normally a CO's call when you take over a command, you gather everybody up on a flight deck and if you've ever seen 3000 crew members on a flight deck, it fills the entire four and a half acres, right, and there's people in the back that can't really hear you. The message just doesn't get across. So I learned something on the LPD because I was on the LPD during COVID. So you couldn't have more than 10 people per room. So I would bring in 10 at a time and I had 400 sailors per room. So I would bring in 10 at a time and I had 400 sailors. So I had to do 40 COs calls in these small groups.
Speaker 2:I talk about my command philosophy, the way of the warrior sailor, and explain some of the rationale behind it, and I'd answer questions and we'd tell stories. We get to know each other and they would feel like they're part of the family, right, it doesn't always work, but it worked a lot, and so I've been doing that in the carrier since I took over 15 months ago and I've gotten almost 2,700 sailors through this process by doing it at least once a week. Sometimes I was doing it three times a week. Bring them into my office, talk about the way of the warrior sailor, tell stories, answer questions any question they have and just have a good time. It's all positive, right. So that was another communication strategy. So yeah, so that was kind of my thing.
Speaker 2:And then I encourage others to do the same thing and they started to. For instance, my training officer renamed the indoctrination program the Warrior Sailor Academy and he, you know, part of it was to talk about the way of the warrior sailor. We have a new program that's Navy-wide called Enlisted Leadership Development, and one of those days you have to kind of craft a philosophy and they use mine as an example to leverage. So by doing that they learn their own ship's philosophy, right. So I look at it as the way of the warrior sailor is. I want it to be our culture right Now.
Speaker 2:There's a dark side to this too, right. For instance, if people are not following the way of the warrior sailor, now I'm interested. If any single sailor has a morale issue, be it quality of life or something else, I'm interested. All COs are interested. We are legally bound by law to care about morale. We don't do a great job of teaching this to CEOs in our schools, right? At least when I went through in 2012, it was heavily focused on ethics, which is important, and doing the right thing, and personality tests, and that's all. That's good. But at the same time, I wanted to know exactly how I could inspire people. What are some techniques that I could steal from other people? So that's one of the things I teach on the side whenever I can.
Speaker 2:So anyways did that answer your question.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 100%. I think it's again when you're talking about morale and inspiring people. I think that's really important, and what was really interesting is hearing you again using the 1MC and calling people out by name, right, like recognition of the individual is something that's extremely powerful, and so I want to ask you about something that you were doing on LinkedIn that started to garner like a ton of support, which was recognizing an individual sailor, bringing them up to the captain's chair and allowing them to give a shout out. Where did the origination of that idea come from and what was your goal with that?
Speaker 2:So there were not really depicted on LinkedIn, but we had two programs running simultaneously.
Speaker 2:One was the warrior of the day program and I didn't always post a picture of them. The warrior of the day was picked by their own people, so it forced the chain of command to find those sailors who are standing out that are exemplifying the way of the warrior sailor and just do good work right. They're positive, they treat their brothers and sisters well, all that stuff, and they're usually fairly junior, like E5 and junior. Anyways. We would bring them up to the bridge, they'd get an entire box of cookies, a pat on the back, a couple coins and then they would get a pin called the warrior sailor pin. We'd put it like on their name tag or something, or the hat, and then I would read a poem out loud and kind of memorialize it. So that was one program and we did that almost every day on deployment. But there's only a limited amount of days on deployment, so I might have reached a couple hundred people. When I bring on the air wing on the carrier, there's 5,000 people. We have to include them as well. So 200 is just a small percentage of that right Less than 10% them as well. So, you know, 200 is a small percentage of that right, less than 10%. So then I started.
Speaker 2:I decided I was going to do social media. I was not really big into it prior to deployment and we had Wi-Fi on the ship game changer, you know the ability to connect with your external support network, your mom and dad, your spouse, almost throughout the entire day, right? So we tried to keep that open. It was not. The connectivity was terrible. You know, when you have 5,000 people, I think at any one time we could, at peak hours, it'd be like 2,000 people logged in and it's like the thing just crashed. But anyway, it was something right, something we'd never had before on ships and this, a lot of ships are starting to get it right now, and I totally support this program, anyways. So we had the Wi-Fi.
Speaker 2:I decided, you know what, let's do social media. I talked to my public affairs officer. She set up my ex-account and eventually I expanded to Instagrams and Facebook and all that other stuff. But as a parent, sometimes you get a newsletter from school and what do you do? You're looking at the pictures, trying to find your daughter and your kids, and you go through there, and so that was happening to some of the pictures I posted and a parent would write me and say, hey, can I see my son, can I see my daughter? I'm like, yeah, sure. So I'd bring them up to the bridge, I gave them a cookie, because it's a nice thing to do, and maybe a coin or something, and then I would post them.
Speaker 2:So that was the origin of the thing, but it was really guided by the families and I was just trying to keep the families close. I think it's important to have families involved, because when sailors are having a bad day, they could talk to their chain of command or they can talk to their mom or dad, right? So so, keeping that connectivity going, and sometimes the more I can bring the family in, the idea is I could. This is a theory that potentially we can improve re-enlistment. Sure, so maybe, cause I know spouses and families play a role in that process, cause they're affected too. So maybe they'll say you know what, honey? I know it's tough these deployments, I know that moving is tough, but I think we should do this. The benefits are good, you're making rank and making more money. I think we should stay with it. That's kind of what I want from the family. It doesn't always work that way, but at least we can try.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's funny At the.
Speaker 2:Naval Academy, especially during plebe year and plebe summer. Same thing Parents are always going through pictures, uh, that are posted on the website they call Waldo hunting, oh yeah.
Speaker 1:Where's Waldo? It's exactly it. It's exactly it. And again, what was interesting is I completely, completely agree with your philosophy, right, and and I think, a certain point, of incorporating families into everything.
Speaker 1:And that's kind of again the mission of Academy Insider, which is how do we educate and bridge the lack of knowledge gap between current midshipmen and going through the academy and their parents, so that way their parents understand what's going on, they can better love and support their child and it just makes them again allows them to pour into the experience more and more and the more you feel connected in the service and you feel like people are genuinely taking care of you and looking out for your best interests and trying to help and support you and help you win again, whatever winning means for you and your time in the service.
Speaker 1:Again, you're going to have a One, a positive feel like inside of you to either stay in or two. When you talk about your time in the Navy to other people, you're going to talk about it with a really positive spin, right, like you're going to talk to other people and be like, yes, no, this is an awesome thing to do, right, the organization is an organization that cares about people. They care about you. Right, they're going to help you get to where you want to go in life.
Speaker 2:You're saying all the right things, man. I couldn't have said it better than that, but you were right. Spot on, nice job.
Speaker 1:Thank you, I appreciate it and you know, again, with the focus of kind of my platform being about the Naval Academy really and then specifically into life after the Academy and being a junior officer, I do want to just pick your leadership approach as it relates to young junior officers. And again, like you mentioned, on an aircraft carrier, it's difficult because even the wardroom is massive and especially when you bring on the air wing and all the pilots.
Speaker 1:But, even your time as the captain of the LPD. What did you see through your time in command that causes some junior officers to really excel when they check on board and others to struggle? And what has always been your approach? To try and help identify people who may be struggling and give them the coaching, mentorship and just general loving they need to kind of flip the script.
Speaker 2:Right?
Speaker 2:Well, you know it's funny. Before I went to the LPD I got a lot of warnings. I said, bro, there's a lot of warnings. I said, bro, there's a lot of ensigns. Right, they're going to be crazy, you're going to have to keep an eye on them, you're going to be stressed out all the time. And that did not happen and I don't know why.
Speaker 2:I got that advice so I showed up there and I found a bunch of young men and women who were so eager to be warriors and do well, and so you want to just kind of capture that energy and use it, right? So when you were talking about warfighting I mean, I used to meet with my JOs monthly and do just a storytelling time. I talk about things that I'd seen in combat and things I've heard from other people in combat, exaggerate all the stories, obviously, and just get them excited about warfighting and expose them to other things. Right, they ate that stuff up. And so you know it's funny.
Speaker 2:The real test is about two in the morning what's going on on the bridge? When you're underway, you got maybe a Lieutenant JG, maybe an ensign as the OOD running the whole ship. And so you go, you go check on them and one time I checked on them and I heard giggling and laughing. I'm like what's going on in here? You know, deep down, I was actually happy that the wide awake you know they were doing stuff. They were still looking out at potential threats and doing their job, but they were also talking and that's okay.
Speaker 2:Right, were they focused. They probably could have focused a little bit more and that's okay, right, were they focused. They probably could have focused a little bit more, but they were engaged and I was so proud of them. I think I had 22 first well, probably about 20 first tour JOs and a handful of JGs on their second tour and, like I said, I was so impressed. Now, keep in mind, you come from squadron life. You've gone through flight school by the time you're a JO, you're a little bit more seasoned. You're not seasoned in terms of leadership. You haven't gotten exposed to that at all, right, but you're just a slightly more mature, right. So it's a little bit different environment, but it is not that different.
Speaker 2:I found that the JO's in the surface community were no different than the knuckleheads in the aviation community. Right, we're all the same. Everybody's eager to participate in the fight and it's great that the Navy like what we saw in the Red Sea this entire year in terms of the fighting and some of the brave acts done by multiple ships, and going back to 2016 with the USS Mason, the NHTSA involved in the Red Sea, again saving their ships, saving lives. There's a lot of stories to tell and people need that. Right, I think that you know. I'm just going to guess here. I think over the past several decades, we lost a little of that perspective. We became a little bit too parochial. Aviation was always involved in strike operations. I mean, almost every year I've been in the Navy there's been something, and the service community didn't have as much of that. But now they have their stories and they're great stories, so it has to be told. We need to inspire them. Did some sailors or junior officers have trouble?
Speaker 2:Yes right, you know they're young, I get it. The brain's not fully developed until you're 25, 26 years old. We totally get that, and so we kind of work with that, and we know that I can look at someone and say 80% of you is still going to be part of you. You know, in 20 years, when you're a CEO, that 20% is what we got to work on. Right, and I tell the JOs I'm like dude, your main mission right now is to master your tradecraft. Get into the pubs and be the master, because that knowledge is going to eventually fade to obscurity by the time you're in the Navy for 20 years or you're going to nuke school in your 40s.
Speaker 2:So number one master your tradecraft. Number two is listen to your chief. So right now we have chiefs initiation going on on the ship. We have 44 of them going through this process and this is a big part of their learning the responsibility to train the ensigns and JGs to be better officers right, and so the big emphasis on that. Where we fail is when there's a disconnect between the chief and the officer, and they're both to blame. Right, so you might just have graduated from the Naval Academy top of your class, right? But you have to listen to your chief, no matter what, and he might be telling you stuff you've already heard before, but guess what? Listen to it again, right? It's part of his training, it's part of his development to teach you right? So we're evaluating him on that. It's in his. You know his evals. So, anyway, does that answer your question?
Speaker 1:It does, and I think that's a really unique, interesting aspect is if you have a hyper awareness to the relationship you're supposed to have with your chief right, in an understanding of that, then you're going to be willing to listen again. It's not like, oh man, I know that, I don't need to hear it again. No, like the whole point of this relationship is to create that, that partnership of running a division Right and and there's so much that comes into the investment with that relationship that is so special Cause again, I I share a lot of stories that, again, the relationship I built with my chief was one of the closest relationships that I've ever had in the Navy Right, and when I was struggling personally, who I went to was my chief right. But that only comes if you take the time to actually build that relationship and understand that you're a team and that you're running this division and like, hey, everything that we have to do here is for the benefit of us as a combined unit in a team, right? Yeah, it's like a partnership.
Speaker 2:That's a good word, I'm going to use that. But yeah, you're developing a partnership. It's not fraternization, it is a friendship of sorts, but it's professional. You can turn the switch off and on. There may be a time where we'll ask the JO to correct the chief Not very frequent, right, and a lot of times we'll have the chief do the correction of the ensign. That's what we want. They're older typically and they have a little bit more experience and maturity there. But yeah, so we want that.
Speaker 2:Plus, if you take it from the sailor perspective, you're having a bad day. You got to talk to someone. Wi-fi doesn't work and the chief's not there. Well, now I got the officer, so I have two people that I can go to and one of the two has to be available. If you don't like what the chief's doing, there's got to be an outlet in your chain of command to go fix that problem and you go to your devo to work on that Right. Sometimes the devo can fix it, sometimes they can't, and vice versa. Your devo could be terrible. You go to the chief and say, chief, you've got to fix the ensign, and they'll do that Right, they're trained to do it, and if they're not, doing it.
Speaker 2:Let me know and I will talk to them.
Speaker 1:I love it just a little forceful backup there, it's my job you know well, we have the cmc as well.
Speaker 2:So I mean the cmc would take care of that for me, right?
Speaker 1:sure, no, absolutely. And um, now just a little bit of reflection in your opinion, especially your time again, aircraft carry life may be a little bit different, but, especially on the LPD, is like what things do you see that are the most like, the least glamorous aspects of being a young JO again We'll talk about again and I'll have you give a recruiting pitch of like why join, why be a part of this, and all the incredible things and I love the words that you use. It's something that I talk all the time about.
Speaker 1:The benefit of a service, academy education or a ROTC education, is joining the services, like you're going to have mission and you're going to have purpose right. Like you're going to have that feeling inside of you, this idea that service is not just what you do but it's who you are. Like you're driven by this idea that to help people, to help save lives, like you're talking about you're going to do things that really matter and help make the world a better and safer place and so, like that thing. That is beautiful, but we have to also be completely acknowledging the fact of like life is difficult out to see at times, and so what, in your opinion, are some of the most difficult things that you know junior officers and sailors face on the day to day. Is it the watch standing? Is it the um, the amount of work that they have, like? What kind of things do you see that cause a lot of people's strife, whether emotionally, physically, um, and what are some of the most difficult aspects of of life out to sea?
Speaker 2:So, um, you know, difficulty at life at sea. Um, there, there, there's a sleep problem, but this is something that we've worked on for many years. There are some ships that are on a three-section duty so you don't, oftentimes don't, get enough sleep and when you're not sleeping well, it affects your performance, your reaction time, it affects your ability to function. It also ruins your mood, so you become kind of a jerk and that can actually start to affect your relationship. So this is precipitous effect by not sleeping. But I think the Navy has done a much better job on that. On the LPD, we switched to four section duty. We made sure it was circadian friendly and that people would get an adequate amount. Now an adequate amount for me, or a normal human being, is seven to nine hours, right, so roughly eight hours. So sometimes we can't squeeze that in. The manning is the way it is, or not enough people are qualified to populate each of the watch sections. And then we run into this trouble where people start to get sleep deficits and it's terrible. I say it's terrible because this is something we actually do to the enemy to defeat them. We take away their sleep. So why would we do this to ourselves?
Speaker 2:Furthermore, there was a culture in the Navy for a long time and hopefully it's gone. I think it's sort of going away. There was like pride in not sleeping. I said, bro, you are not functioning, right, you're a jerk to your sailors. You can barely stand up and you're saying this is a good thing. And there's people who say you know what? I only need like four hours a night. No, you need more than that, right, you're not superhuman. So, anyways, that's one of the tough things we have to manage as leaders and it's a challenge.
Speaker 2:Like I said, I think we're getting better there. There's that. There's, you know the day-to-day grind. There is, you know, the fact that we have to clean the ship all the time, and so sometimes there's only so many times you can tell people the reason why we're cleaning is not just for health, and that's important, but not so. We look good, you know. But that's also important Reputation matters.
Speaker 2:But that cleanliness actually improves your morale too, in ways that I don't really understand. Right? So being in a clean space causes you to behave differently, right? So we don't. We want that, right? People feel more professional. They're more likely to pick up something off the ground that you know. So it's not contributing to the mess. But when something's already a mess, we'll start to see it kind of pile up. More people will add more stuff to it. You know, we'll find a space that hasn't been cleaned in a while and there's like empty Coke cans and all kinds of other you know, candy wrappers and bags of chips and everything. And XO is getting upset and he's trying to clean it up himself and he's yelling on his radio. But in any case, it's still important to do those things right.
Speaker 2:Or sometimes you don't like the people you work with, and that's hard right, and we'll try everything to mediate, try to get them to talk to each other, and it's just not working. So personality conflicts get in the way. Get them to talk to each other, and it's just not working. So personality conflicts get in the way. We can. If it gets untenable, we can move people to a different, you know, division or something like that. So we have options, but you don't always have that option on every ship.
Speaker 2:So in life as we know this is not me saying to suck it up, but in a way it is like we're going to be presented with people we don't like and we have to work with them. And so sometimes you just got to eat it and, you know, put a smile on your face and say yes sir, no sir, and just do it Right. And when it's time to fight you know the time we say you want to fall on your sword you craft a carefully skilled argument as to why this person should change this thing, whatever that thing is Right. So, anyways, this is no different than any other business company on the planet or classroom. We deal with people we don't like. So those are some of the tough things. And another thing is like we experienced this on deployment not knowing when you're going to come home. That's tough, right. So that creates a lot of anxiety. Or it could be you're ashore in, say, norfolk and you don't know when you're going to deploy and when you deploy, when you're going to come back. So all these things kind of add up and you lose that predictability.
Speaker 2:In life. It's hard to plan out things like hey, I want to have a wedding on a certain date. I remember I did my wedding on February 5th. So my wife asked so when can we get married? I said it can be February 5th or February 21st and no other date, because we had things going on Right and and and. Those dates could have changed too, and I would have thrown off the whole wedding. One thing we can do as leaders is be sensitive to that. If someone tried their very best to set a date, that would have otherwise been good, but now it's during and underway, guess what? Send them home, let them do the wedding and bring them back. You know they can do a 10 minute wedding. Get back out to the ship, I'm just kidding. But you know, give them a few days a week, whatever, right, like we'll suck it up and I'm sure you know the shipmates will back that person up with that gap. Right? This is what we do. We lose sailors all the time for family emergencies and that sort of thing, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think that just doubles down on exactly what you're talking about earlier, about keeping, keeping families involved and keeping the family life happy, because if any point the Navy for lack of a better term becomes extra, to a point where they feel like the command is not supporting them in supporting their family life, well then, like, like you're saying, instead of the spouse being like, oh, maybe we can stick it out Right, like you're saying, instead of the spouse being like, oh, maybe we can stick it out Right, you have them being like what are you doing? Like, get out of the Navy. Right, like I'm tired of this. Right, and so, you know, making the extra effort to support people in what they like, what supports their personal life as well. Not everything is going to work out, but if you have the opportunity to do it Right, we got to take advantage of it Right. And yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:It's funny you mentioned that, though, because my, my wife is a she's a Romeo pilot and is the same thing we were looking at. We got engaged earlier this summer and it was like all right, nevada, all the tactical schools and trainings to underways, to all this different stuff, and then my own personal work schedule, and we're looking, we're like, right, we're never going to be able to get married. What is going on? So like, like you're saying, we had like two dates. We're like, all right, we can either do it like this weekend or we can do it in like in 2026. What do you want to do, right?
Speaker 1:And so again, I think do it this weekend do it this weekend was the answer get it done, get it done right you don't know what's going to happen in 2026, right, and so, uh, um, no. And the second piece that I want to touch on is just as just a thank you and it was a. It was a lesson that that I learned. Really important is, I feel like sometimes we have a culture in the military, and especially at the naval academy, of like wanting to have the hardest life, like, oh, my life is harder than yours, my situation is harder than yours. Like I have all this stuff, like it's a sense of pride, like you're mentioning. And that comes with sleep, like, oh man, I only slept three hours last night and I'm still functioning Right.
Speaker 1:And I think that piece is really interesting because when I finally got out to the fleet, I'm a firm believer in the power of presence. Got out to the fleet, I'm a firm believer in the power of presence right, and in being out and being with your people and being present. But what I discovered very quickly is that the power of presence and being present is not just a physical presence, but it's a mental and emotional presence. It's actually being there, actually being connected, and if you're, if you're off, if you're exhausted, if you're not able to focus, like you've just attracted everything that you've tried to build right and having that the personal pride and desire to like actually take your health very seriously and get the sleep that you need to get is important and you know, like you're saying, with watch sections, with work, it might not always work, but you know, maximizing that and making it the most efficient and beneficial as possible is crucial, right, like we need people to be present.
Speaker 2:And so you know, on this deployment, you know, and in effect, to me personally, is when you have an opportunity to sleep, you've got to take it right, Especially if you're in a sleep deficit and so you're not a jerk. So there were multiple times we launched like more than 150 alerts, this deployment which is, you know, usually in the middle of the night, waking up everybody, right, Not everybody, but a lot of people, and so you know you'll have that. It could be this situation where I can do presence right now, or I can take that nap and be a better person. You've got to take the nap right, there's no other way around it. I know, for example, like, even if I get normal sleep anytime after like 20,00, I cannot give a speech. Like I don't, my brain doesn't function as fast as when I'm tired, Like I couldn't do this podcast at 20,00. So that's why I asked for, you know, 16,30, right, I think I'm still good at 1630.
Speaker 2:Now, 1400, I'm not good, right, Because of the circadian rhythm. You kind of get tired around that point. Then you kind of pep back up. So, anyways, understanding your physiology and it's not very different for all humans and kind of working around that right. So we should have siestas in the Navy like a mandatory siesta at about 1400. What do you think? In the Navy, like a mandatory siesta at about $1,400. What do you think?
Speaker 1:I love it. I think it'd be great With the amount of especially Spanish-speaking sailors as well that we have in the fleet. I'm just saying let's merge it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, let's just make it happen, let's bring the siesta into the lifestyle.
Speaker 1:I love it.
Speaker 2:Hablo espanol muy bien. Oh okay, estoy aprendiendo, es miyo con mi teléfono, con Duolingo app, oh, in video. So I'm using Duolingo, yeah.
Speaker 1:I'm very impressed.
Speaker 2:That's the only thing I can say.
Speaker 1:Well, you said it very well.
Speaker 2:You said it very well. Thank you, sir.
Speaker 1:It's a fun fact for me is that I took my underway time. Sometimes you need to find things to do while you're underway. You, for me, is that I took my underway time. Sometimes you need to find things to do while you're underway. I downloaded I was a submarine guy, though, so no, no connectivity whatsoever. I would download a bunch of podcasts and bring workbooks and I learned Spanish while I was like during my off time, in my downtime underway, and then ended up taking like a full 60 days of leave and going down and taking in-person classes in Columbia for a while.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow, that's great, that was fun. Cool little random side life adventure while in the Navy as well. That's another life lesson there.
Speaker 2:It's like everyone needs to have their thing. Some people got to work out. They have to Gyms closed, they're panicking. And I got like five gyms on the ship and sometimes you got to close them all, like during general quarters or whatever, during general quarters or whatever. But you need that thing.
Speaker 2:Um, you know, when I was CEO of the Arlington, I would draw pictures. I draw pictures of the ship. You know different things, um, and drawing and creativity became a thing on the ship, to the point where one of my sailors wanted to be a tattoo artist and she asked to you know, paint this mural on a wall. Um, I said, have at it. And you know, she showed it to me and had mermaids on it. I'm like, can you cover? You know, covering them up just a little bit, right, she's OK. And so she did. It was beautiful and I hopefully it's still there. And she wrote at the bottom best damn ship in the Navy. And I didn't ask her to do that, but the message was getting across, right, for whatever reason, when you hit send on an email, it would take several seconds to actually send. So I had a ukulele, so I'd pick it up and wait for the email to send and I'd learn different chords on that thing. It was so funny, but it's good for mental health.
Speaker 1:It's great for encompassing, right, like, you need to find your thing. You need to be able to have, not fully allow your identity to be what you are doing in the Navy, because it can become too much at times, right. And so finding those little things to be your thing, to find a little hobby, to find a little activity, is crucial, right, and it comes down to the whole leadership philosophy and everything that you're building, which I love, which is you just need to love people. You need to radically love people. You need to take care of them. You need to help them and encourage them and support them to do those things, to take care of themselves as well, right, and it's like I call it radically loving.
Speaker 2:I like that. It's like you have to be a fanatic about it and it takes some time every day where you sit down and say, okay, am I loving and valuing the sailors? Did I talk to them today? What can I do to recognize some sailors? And you have to think back. Oh, yesterday I gave them this assignment, they did it, they painted that space. It looks great. And I didn't even thank them. So you have to, like, put thought into it. It's got to be deliberate. And then you take that action and say, hey, by the way, thanks for painting the space, it looks great. Boom, you just got to win. It's so easy. It costs you nothing except a tiny bit of time, right, gosh.
Speaker 1:And that's a big part of the way of the warrior sailor, it's like you winning.
Speaker 2:People want to win and, as the leader, you're both the coach and the umpire at the same time. You invent the game, you tell them what to do and then you say we've won, we're the best damn ship in the Navy, cause I said so. Right, it feels good.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it does. And again, a big, a big piece of that, though, like you're saying. And again a big piece of that, though, like you're saying, because a lot of times I think people can see and sailors are smart, right, like this is the biggest thing in the world is sailors are smart. Oh, yeah, right. And so if it's not authentic, if it's not genuine, they're going to sniff that sucker out in a minute or two, Right, and so, like the consistency of it, the consistency that you actually mean what you say, and you're not just searching for an opportunity to be like hey, you know, but like no, this is like who we are, this is what we do. I want to see you win, and when you win, I'm going to recognize you and say thank you for what you did, right, right, like that builds.
Speaker 2:Oh, absolutely.
Speaker 1:That grows and it's, and it's really special so yeah.
Speaker 2:So I mean, what we really want to see at the end of the day is you know, leadership is all about getting people to do things they otherwise wouldn't do right. So if I can motivate them to do the right thing when nobody's looking, I've succeeded. So it's like instilling principles in people. That's a hard thing to do. The other way to lead is to simply just lord over people and micromanage the hell out of them. You'll get stuff done that way, but they're not going to do it on their own. So we're fighting to back off to delegate as much as we can. Mistakes get made. You don to back off to delegate as much as we can. Mistakes get made, you don't panic. Okay, guess what, bro? You made a mistake. Here's how you fix it. All right, go do a good job. And then, when they do the good job, you say thank you. You complete the cycle.
Speaker 2:It's so easy. I don't know, I don't know.
Speaker 1:I love it. It is easy, but again, this is my reality with the world and something I discovered. It still requires a lot of effort. And it just requires you to do the thing day in and day out and be consistent with it. That's where the failure happens is. There's not a consistency. And just even though it's not complex, it's not a crazy idea, it just requires consistency. It's brick by brick, it's day by day, and it's like it's constant that way and you'll have setbacks where you know.
Speaker 2:I've had a few days on deployment where I did not want to talk to anybody. I was way off and I knew that I would snap at them. I had my two cups of coffee, which are requisite every morning, but it still didn't work, for whatever reason. So I would go out of my way every now and then just to avoid people. It's like the opposite of leadership, but it was kind of recharging myself. So I go back out there and do the right thing, but uh, you know, just knowing yourself and what you need.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a huge level of self-awareness. Well, um, we've talked about some of the again. Some of the difficulties of life are going on. I do just want to talk about now, in your opinion, just again, what makes being a Navy sailor, what makes being an officer in the Navy, whether as an aviator, whether as a surface warfare officer, just everything that comprises the entire strike group, from your supply corps to your information warfare community, to staff officers, to pilots, to SWOs.
Speaker 2:Universal truths about being a Navy sailor officer enlisted right.
Speaker 1:That's right. What makes it so great? Why should people consider this and be intrigued and interested to learn more?
Speaker 2:Well, man, that is the question, and I'm no recruiter by any means, I'm just trying to retain the ones I've got right. But we all joined for different reasons. And I ask this all the time I said, okay, why'd you join? And your typical answer I dropped out of college, I didn't have direction, or I need money for college, or I couldn't afford college, or my life was going in a different direction. What you don't commonly hear because I don't think it's part of our language is that they wanted to serve.
Speaker 2:Now there's some who will say that, but most won't, because it's not cool to say well, I wanted to be a patriot, right? It's not part of the lingo, if you will, but it is part of their soul. Every one of us had this desire and I'm sure other people have it to be part of something greater than ourselves. To put on a uniform, to be proud, to make our families proud, to practice salutes in the mirror for the first time, which we all did and of course the sailors laugh at me when I say that, but you did right. So if we can get back to that, I think, at least for reenlisting, that's important for me, to bring back that soul, searching on why we matter to the mission. So, if you have that you're in high school or maybe you've completed college or whatever and you're thinking about a new direction in your life and you want to make a difference, I would say the US Navy, and one of the reasons is we're everywhere, 70% of the planet's ocean. This is one of our big sales. Know, 70% of the planet's ocean, this is one of our big sales points. 70% of the ocean. There's the Navy. We're there. We can go anywhere, right, and we can reach inland several hundred miles if we have to. You know, especially with carrier aviation, which that's my bias. But whenever there's a problem, they're going to say okay, the president's going to ask where are the carriers? Right, and they'll say, sir, there's one, he's two days away. Boom, Make it happen. And we'll just show up and we will have an influence on their media because of our presence. It's all it takes. Sometimes that can prevent a bad guy from doing a dumb thing. That's good. If that doesn't work, then we're prepared to fight. Or maybe they come at us and we'll fight back. That's fine, right?
Speaker 2:There was a time in 2014, when I was the CEO of Icaria, we were off the coast of Pakistan, supporting operations deep into Afghanistan. So we're flying all the way in there, coming back long missions, and in 2014, Afghanistan was already starting to die down a little bit, there wasn't a whole lot of work. We did strike a few targets and then all of a sudden, ISIS invaded all of northern Iraq and Syria and they were approaching Baghdad and we're watching it on the news on the ship and the ship did a turn and within 24 hours, we're already flying missions into Iraq. Of course, the air traffic control is. I was actually on the first flight. I was a CO, so I get to do the cool missions, right? So we fly in as the first aircraft and air traffic controls like what are you doing here? I'm like you're about to lose Baghdad, which they never did, but they stopped outside the gates. But that ability to pivot and make a difference had an influence on ISIS. Now ISIS continued to do horrible things and then we got involved and there is much less ISIS now than there was before. Right, no-transcript, hours per day.
Speaker 2:I have weapons magazines that I could probably fit two destroyers inside them. We can go indefinitely for months. Plus, we have nuclear power. We don't need to refuel the ship. We do need to refuel the jets, so that's a separate problem and we work through that. And we need to feed the sailors. That's important too. Food is morale Just ask Napoleon and so we'll go from there. But yeah, so am I excited about the Navy? Absolutely. There's people that say, well, nowadays, with all the threats that are out there, and these really extraordinary missiles carriers have become obsolete. I'm like what, Just missiles carriers have become obsolete? I'm like what, Just because of a missile, we become obsolete? If that's the case, the entire Navy is obsolete, and that's really not up for discussion, right? So anyway, I also think that the Navy has become increasingly more professional over the past several decades, and I'm not saying I have anything to do with that whatsoever. I've been a witness to it and I think it. It's amazing, and we're getting better every day. Does that answer your question?
Speaker 1:100%. Okay, I love it. Again, I think, like what you're saying, I love the piece that you're saying is like sometimes, even though people don't articulate it, and sometimes it's out of a factor of not wanting to sound uncool or just truly they don't believe it, they've told their self. Otherwise, every person who's in there, they love being a part of the best damn ship in the Navy right, and I think everyone at large loves being a part of a great organization and something that's bigger than themselves.
Speaker 1:And they realize it's something that's going to set their life in a positive trajectory, and so I think that's always been my thing. Right Is like again you get incredible. Um, that's always been my thing. Right Is like again you get incredible opportunities in life. You're going to live a life of mission, purpose and have genuine fulfillment as you're going out and doing all the incredible things that you're doing and making the world genuinely making the world a better and safer place.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And every person with their own role and their own contributions fills into that and makes like, makes it happen. Right, it happens. So, um, again, I always joke, you don't need to be again, it's great. And we do need the people who are like. It's been my dream to be a sailor, to be a Marine since day one. I love it and I want to serve. That's incredible, I think. The reality of the situation, like you're saying, on an aircraft carrier with 6,000 souls on board, that's 6,000 individuals with 6,000 individual reasons of why they decided to join.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Right, right, but, I think, all united by a common bond of just wanting to do something good and be a part of something.
Speaker 2:That's it, the thing that unites us Right, and I think we all have it, whether we can say it or not. Even for those who people, for the people that deny it, that's deep in their soul. They want it to serve and be part of something. I am just amazed by some of the risks that the Navy takes on young people. Someone fresh out of the Naval Academy and now you're in charge of a division of 30 people what? Why would we do that? It doesn't make sense. You would never do that in a company. Or I take a sailor who's just graduated high school. One year just went through nuke school. He's now almost 20 years old and he's qualifying to operate a reactor. Wait a second, I'm putting a 20-year-old to run a nuclear reactor. Why would you do that? Well, we do it in the Navy. We put so much trust in junior people and it works out for us.
Speaker 1:Indeed it does. Indeed, All right. Well, I just want to say thank you so much for the time that you've already taken to share your insight, wisdom and just general perspective on the Navy and the beautiful things that aircraft carriers go out and do in supporting freedom of democracy around the world and make sure we have that freedom of navigation. Yep, you have any final parting thoughts? Anything you want to leave with the audience, anyone, if there's a prospective high school student out there, or if you want to address potentially the parents of young junior officers and, you know, midshipmen at the Naval Academy any parting thoughts or words that you'd like to leave the audience?
Speaker 2:There are several of us and you among them, are participating in this that are trying to be better at leadership, and we're using terms like to love and value. These are not terms that are typically used in military context. I think it's amazing. I want more people to follow the way of the warrior sailor. I've seen it work in multiple commands. Now I have had sailors come up to me, you know more senior sailors to say sir, I don't know about this new school leadership.
Speaker 2:Right, I'm more old school. I'm like, OK, what is old school leadership? They said, well, you know, back in my day, if I told someone to do something, you just shut up and colored and they do it. I said, well, OK, that's interesting. I remember going through leadership school and they, we were learning about these millennials. Right, they don't like to work as much. They want to know why. And I said, bro, I wanted to know why and I didn't want to stay in the Navy for 20 years plus. And I did anyway. But so then I said to the sailor I said I went and did a Google search on USNI podcast.
Speaker 2:I typed in the word morale and I'm telling you, for more than 100 years there are articles on morale by commanders and other officers. You know, post-World War I, prior to World War II, post-World War II, during drawdown times after Korea, they're all saying the same thing as me. If you want to go further back, you want to talk about the importance of morale, just listen to General Eisenhower Morale is the greatest single factor in successful war. I mean, he understood it. You can go to Napoleon, you can go to Patton, you can go to Caesar for Pete's sakes, and they all say the same thing. So if you want to talk old school leadership, we're talking about it now and that's what I love about this. We're just getting better at it. I think Sort of like a relearning process, and if we go back to history, that's where we get our information.
Speaker 2:And also people talk about generations. It's a lot of fun. Different lingo with Gen Z, I don't care about that. Leadership has never changed. Why? Because the human brain has not changed in more than 100,000 years. It's the same. There are different preferences, I get it. There might be slight perturbations in generations, whatever, but what activates the soul of the human person? The spark of the divine? One definition of morale is something that is ancient, so we need to bring that back. So that's my last piece of advice Fanatically, love your people.
Speaker 1:Fanatic, bring back a little morale, hoo-yah.
Speaker 2:I agree.
Speaker 1:I love it. Last thing, your XO is a GOAT Naval Academy guy. Oh yeah, any banter out to sea regarding Naval Academy, not Naval Academy. Anything on the ship or in the wardroom with any Naval Academy related stuff. Have we been obnoxious out to sea?
Speaker 2:No, no, no with any Naval Academy related stuff. Have we been obnoxious out to sea? No, no, no. We have a lot of Academy grads and they, you know, they like to support videos for the Army Navy game. It's great, I support it. I don't jump in those videos, it would be inappropriate for me. But no, there really there is no rivalry because at the end of the day we're all working together, right, with a common cause and anything like that. It's just fun. So I, if people want to get parochial about it, have at it. You know, my, my experience is, you know, I.
Speaker 2:I remember meeting Academy guys for the first time in flight school in 1996. I'm like, why are these guys so crazy? It's like they must've been cooped up in that school for four years, right, the rest of us had we could go wherever we wanted. College was free. You know, for four years, right, the rest of us had we could go wherever we wanted. College was free. You know, go do whatever you want, sleep wherever you want, you know, um, but it's so funny. But the you know after a while that all kind of sort of meters out and you just become a good officer.
Speaker 1:Yep, a hundred percent. Yeah, sometimes that immediate time after leaving, uh, the Naval Academy, uh, it'll uh, yeah, you can, you can want to have a little fun down there as a student Naval Aviator.
Speaker 2:Yeah, have at it. They need to have fun too. You know, good thing I'm not running the Naval Academy, I'd mess it up.
Speaker 1:Oh man, all right. Well, genuinely thank you so much for taking this time out of your day to join us, and you know, talk leadership, talk your philosophy and talk reflections of, you know, a really important deployment that y'all just went on so yeah, thanks, grant.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much and really professional program and thanks for supporting my sailors as well and actually paying attention to the philosophy. I appreciate that, so good luck to you.
Speaker 1:Thank you very much All right.
Speaker 1:Everyone listening. I hope you enjoyed it. Feel free to reach out with any questions, and I hope you have a good day. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Academy Insider Podcast. I really hope you liked it, enjoyed it and learned something during this time. If you did, please feel free to like and subscribe or leave a comment about the episode. We really appreciate to hear your feedback about everything and continue to make Academy Insider an amazing service that guides, serves and supports midshipmen, future midshipmen and their families. Thank you.
