From CO to CEO: A Practical Guide for Transitioning from Military to Industry Leadership
Captain William Toti, U.S. Navy (Retired). New York: Simon & Schuster, 2022. 272 pp. $27.
Reviewed by Lieutenant Colonel Dillon Fishman, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve
Every year, about 200,000 men and women transition from military service to civilian life. Many aspire to enter the corporate workforce and even attain a coveted corner office. But how well does military achievement translate to business success? The short answer, according to retired Navy Captain William Toti, is that even the military’s best and brightest should not bet the ranch on attaining private-sector stardom—and especially not without a lot of grit and work.
Toti has the chops to know. After commanding a nuclear-powered submarine, he held leadership positions at large companies before he became chief executive officer (CEO) of Sparton Corporation. With a physics degree from the U.S. Naval Academy, a master’s in spacecraft systems engineering, and a predoctoral electrical engineering degree from the Naval Postgraduate School, his academic bona fides put him on par with industry’s brightest. Accordingly, Toti is uniquely positioned to coach transitioning military members. Given his background, his top advice is telling: Maintain an eager student’s mind-set.
In other words, foremost Toti recommends a healthy dose of humility and a willingness to learn. He also addresses common misconceptions that may fuel overconfidence and breed contempt toward industry. Some believe, for instance, that the military is a pure meritocracy. Yet, if that were the case, where are the four-star officers in their mid-forties? In truth, the Defense Officer Personnel Management Act leveled the playing field, creating a statutory moving walkway with artificial career progression. In contrast, private industry requires quarterly bottom-line results and imposes fiduciary responsibilities. And, in business, your annual performance evaluation truly affects your earnings.
As a career military officer before becoming a CEO, Toti aptly guides readers unfamiliar with the reality of the private sector, with emphasis on the defense industry. His stories reveal that uninformed officers still harbor harmful prejudices. He disabuses readers of the myths that profit is evil and that companies are all driven by naked venality. Absent sufficient payoff, why should companies risk millions of dollars to pursue innovations that may fail? With cutthroat competition and uncertain markets, the reward must be worth the risk. Further, while it is true that businesses can benefit from the government’s deep pockets, the creaky wheels of federal bureaucracy cannot match the speed of innovation. Uncle Sam needs businesses, and industry is vital to U.S. defense.
The two longest chapters cover career options and mastering new skills. In the former, Toti explains 20 key occupational areas—from logistics to strategy to IT—highlighting fields in which military experience most readily transfers and what is likely an uphill climb. In the latter, he mentors readers in hard-earned skills from basic finance to C-suite nomenclature. The 72 pages in these two chapters alone make the entire book worth reading.
But beyond that, the book is packed with nuts-and-bolts material. It includes job hunting tips and strategies, personal finance recommendations, and suggestions about timing transitions when you leave the military and throughout your business career. For example, he explains that if you hope for a particular job and compensation level, your best bet is to remain flexible about location. And once you secure job offers, rank them in a values matrix—included in the text.
Anyone interested in pursuing a private-sector job after the military would benefit from the book’s pragmatic insider insights. But in today’s technology-driven era, in which industry partnership is paramount, it should also be on the reading list of every O-4, especially those without a business degree. It concisely introduces the acquisition process and offers a boardroom perspective valuable for staff officers and commanders alike.
Lieutenant Colonel Fishman, a Marine Corps judge advocate, is completing a PhD in leadership studies. He deployed twice to Afghanistan and once on board the USS Tortuga (LSD-46). All views are personal and do not represent the position of any government agency.
With Honor and Integrity: Transgender Troops in Their Own Words
Dr. Máel Embser-Herbert and Lieutenant Colonel Bree Fram, U.S. Space Force. New York: NYU Press, 2021. 225 pp. Glossary. Notes. Biblio. $28.
Reviewed by Jo Unruh
“A lot of the issues around transgender service have come from people not having the facts,” Air Force Senior Airman Sterling Crutcher writes in With Honor and Integrity: Transgender Troops in Their Own Words. In this collection of personal essays, editors Dr. Máel Embser-Herbert and U.S. Space Force Lieutenant Colonel Bree Fram present a portrait of service from 26 current and former service members with gender identities who, until recently, were banned from openly serving in the U.S. armed forces. That is, service members who identify as transgender, nonbinary, genderqueer, or any other means of signifying that their gender identity does not align with their sex assigned at birth.
With a foundation of expertly curated research on gender, sex, sexuality, and the flip-flopping policies on transgender service—from the lifting of the transgender ban in 2016 by the Obama administration, to the subsequent administration’s swift move toward reinstatement of anti-transgender policies, to the current administration’s lifting of the ban in early 2021—readers are sufficiently prepared to digest the personal essays.
The collection spans five decades of service and a variety of military ranks and occupations, and while it represents a small sample of accounts in recognizing the estimated 15,500 transgender troops and 134,300 transgender veterans, its shared message remains: Transgender troops serve with integrity, commitment, and pride. As Fram says, “We don’t want special status; we don’t want to be a different class of citizens. We want to serve.”
For those serving openly and pursuing in-service gender transition amid shifting policies and ongoing, often violent transphobia on a national scale, it meant having the courage to come out and pioneer a process most knew nothing about. In other words, as the essays illustrate, transgender service members were charged with teaching superiors, peers, and even entire commands about what being transgender means, all while coming out and undergoing major life changes. Such tasks could be particularly difficult for those serving in communities dominated by stereotypical masculinity. As Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel Miranda Jones’ essay illustrates: “Any expression of sensitivity or appreciation for beauty was always met with deriding comment as to ‘her’ unmanliness. ‘Don’t be a bitch’ or ‘Nice work, Sally, were common verbal weapons.”
With Honor and Integrity includes positive moments of comradery and outspoken support for transgender individuals from peers and leaders, including a “Hell yeah” from the back of the room when Army Sergeant Zaneford Alvarez came out as a transman to an entire female barracks at a NATO military competition. However, the narratives also depict the negative sides of the transgender military experience, often stemming from policy inconsistencies that left transgender military personnel feeling isolated, hopeless, and discriminated against. One of the darkest sides of the transgender military experience, as several of the essays depict, is that many transgender troops remain closeted, serving at the expense of living their truths.
The book ends with a call to action. Service should not be a matter of one’s gender, but, as Navy Petty Officer Natalie Seidel notes, of “What is this person capable of doing for the country?” With Honor and Integrity is a must read for those seeking greater understanding of the transgender experience in military service.
Jo Unruh is a writer, parent, educator, and former Navy explosive ordnance disposal officer living in the San Francisco Bay area. She holds a bachelor’s degree in English from the U.S. Naval Academy, a master of business administration from Arizona State University (W. P. Carey), and is currently pursuing an master of fine arts in creative writing at Saint Mary’s College of California.
The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do
Erik J. Larson. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2021. 281 pp. Notes. Index. $30.
Reviewed by Captain Bill Bray, U.S. Navy (Retired)
Trot ten naval officers into a room and ask them what comes to mind when they hear the words “artificial intelligence.” Unlike the words “submarine warfare,” for example, which would likely conjure similar conceptual images in all ten minds, the mental images of artificial intelligence (AI) would probably vary widely, lack coherence, and include the doomsday scenario of superintelligent machines running roughshod over humanity.
Many futurists have predicted that one day, perhaps relatively soon, cutting-edge deep-learning AI research (driven by big data, but still fundamentally task-oriented) will achieve the critical breakthrough necessary for superintelligent, human-like machines—programmable artificial general intelligence (AGI), or the kind humans enjoy every waking moment of life. Machines that “think” as humans do. Yet, there is no scientific basis for this prediction. It is the product of decades of mythology masquerading as science, a persistent plague for serious AI researchers.
Reminding readers that real science deals in testable propositions, not articles of faith, Erik Larson makes a compelling case that progress in narrow AI (the only kind that currently exists), no matter how impressive and sophisticated, will never “lead” to AGI. Believing otherwise indulges in the myth to which he refers. There is not a single workable theory that bridges narrow AI and AGI, nor a single AI researcher who has a clue how to program intuition or abductive inference into a machine.
A computer scientist himself and the founder of two Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency-funded AI startup companies, Larson is exceptionally credible on this subject and brings an arsenal of facts, history, clear-eyed explanations, and eloquent storytelling skills to battle in this terrific book.
For example, in the book’s first part, he explains the genesis of AI’s original sin: equating human intelligence to step-by-step problem solving (thank you, Alan Turing), when it is much more than that. This “intelligence problem” is a mistake, made repeatedly to this very day, and a convenient equivalence necessary to even imagine that AGI (or human-like consciousness) would eventually emerge from narrow AI research, as the atom bomb did from subatomic particle research.
The problem with comparing predictions of an AGI breakthrough from narrow AI research with the creation of the bomb from subatomic chain-reaction research is that the latter was based on falsifiable scientific propositions that could be tested. Predictions of AGI are not falsifiable and cannot be tested. They are nothing more than fantastical imaginings dressed up as scientific inevitabilities and fed by the irrational exuberance of a tech press doing what all media outlets need to do—sell copy. Navy technologists, ethicists, and leaders should read this book. Keeping myth and scientific fact separate is important not only for unmanned system developers, but also for those envisioning unmanned system utility and operational application.
Larson brings the lay reader back down to planet Earth on the state of AI research. Believing a computer could one day be more human than a human requires one to adopt a technocentric worldview, in which humans are nothing more than technology builders (homo faber, according to Hannah Arendt). But the problem with this view is that it requires a diminished definition of human intelligence, not an expansive one. At a minimum, such an approach would be inconsistent with the service’s mantra that people are its most important asset.
Captain Bray is a retired naval intelligence officer and the deputy editor-in-chief of Proceedings.
War in the Villages: The U.S. Marine Corps Combined Action Platoons in the Vietnam War
Ted N. Easterling. University of North Texas Press, 2021. 242 pp. Notes. Biblio. Index. $29.95.
Reviewed by Captain Walker D. Mills, U.S. Marine Corps
Most Marines are familiar with the story of the combined action platoons, or CAPs, from the Vietnam War. The platoons were Marine infantry squads integrated with platoons of Vietnamese Popular Forces, or PFs, who were a
kind of local militia. The combined platoons were based in small villages and hamlets in which they integrated into village life while providing security from the Vietcong, training to the PFs, and supporting the community in other ways. In his new book, Ted N. Easterling, who taught history at the University of Akron and is himself a Marine veteran of Vietnam, presents an analysis of the Marine CAP program using a counterinsurgency framework. Easterling’s book is a welcome addition to the literature on the CAPs in Vietnam, which is mostly made up of accounts from a single perspective or written about a single platoon or village. Bing West’s The Village is probably the best-known example.
Easterling starts the book with an introduction not only to the theory behind CAPs, but also basic counterinsurgency theory. From there he proceeds chronologically, spending roughly equal time on his analysis of the CAP performance and recounting the evolution of the program. Ultimately, Easterling argues that the CAPs were an “effective counterinsurgency concept” but they suffered from a lack of investment and buy-in from Army leaders, the Secretary of Defense, and the President.
One of the key characters in the narrative is Marine Lieutenant General Victor H. Krulak, who as the commander of Fleet Marine Force, Pacific, aggressively argued for an expansion of the CAP program and what is known as the “enclave strategy.” The enclave strategy was intended to cut off the Vietcong guerrillas from logistical support by forcing them out of the Mekong Delta and narrow coastal strip where two-thirds of the population lived and as much as three-fourths of South Vietnam’s rice was grown, according to contemporary estimates. Interestingly, the primary target was the rice crop, and Krulak believed that without rice from South Vietnamese villages and hamlets the guerrillas would have to withdraw into the highlands or back into North Vietnam.
But the enclave strategy had a critical second piece that often goes unmentioned—Krulak argued for an expansion of the CAP program and heavy bombing of North Vietnam and mining of Haiphong Harbor. Easterling believes that it was Krulak’s support for bombing North Vietnam that ultimately turned off President Lyndon Johnson to his strategy. Other key leaders thought that an enclave strategy, while promising, would take too long and require too many troops. This is the type of larger context that War in the Villages provides and is often missed in more up-close accounts of the CAPs.
The analysis in War in the Villages is qualitative and relies heavily on secondary sources and well-known first-hand accounts. The lack of new sources is a weakness. An opportunity to have combined a counterinsurgency analysis framework with a more data-driven or quantitative analysis appears to have been missed. However, the book is still valuable as an introduction and in providing context to the CAPs, even though it could use more rigorous methods of analysis.
Ultimately, Easterling’s War in the Villages is a good analysis of the CAP program as a whole, and in this it fulfills the goal of providing a history and analysis of the whole program rather than of a single village or hamlet, as others have done. The work also has a valuable bibliography and would be an excellent point of departure for a more quantitative analysis of the program. But perhaps, most interestingly, War in the Villages provides an explanation of the enclave strategy, a road not taken by U.S. forces in Vietnam at large scale that could have left a very different legacy, and is particularly timely as U.S. forces continue to consider what other counterinsurgency concepts might have been employed more successfully in Afghanistan.
Captain Mills is a Marine infantry officer serving as an instructor at the Colombian Naval Academy in Cartagena, Colombia. He is also a nonresident WSD-Handa fellow at Pacific Forum and a fellow at the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation and Future War.
