The U.S. Navy has perhaps the toughest problem among the U.S. armed services for planning long-term force structure. Navy ships and submarines are much more expensive and require far longer times to procure compared to the military equipment of the other services. As a result, Navy force planners must consider long-term time horizons to create the force structure the nation needs given the projected threat environment and operational conditions.
Due to large capital expenditures over many budget cycles, the Navy provides to Congress a 30-year shipbuilding plan usually once a year.1 But anticipating the future warfighting environment over the next 30 years is a difficult task involving considerable uncertainty. While force structure assessments (FSA) can mitigate uncertainty through a variety of techniques, significant risk remains. A candid discussion of uncertainty and how we can adjust as unexpected conditions evolve would boost the value of the FSA, and set the stage for how measures could be instituted to ensure the FSA remains resilient and adaptive.
Three sources of uncertainty comprise the most significant risk over the long-term time horizon. Uncertainty of how potential adversaries will increase and modernize their forces is perhaps the most challenging aspect. In a world of great power competition as acknowledged by the U.S. National Security Strategy and the National Defense Strategy, how great power competitors expand their capacity and capabilities is of paramount importance. Specifically, how the leadership of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) chooses to expand the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is of upmost importance to the U.S. joint force. Accordingly, predictions of how the PLA Navy expands and modernizes is a chief factor for the U.S. Navy’s FSA.
The opaque nature of PLA budgeting and planning and the long-time horizon limits the confidence of force structure projections attempting to peer far into the future. Should the PLAN build and employ considerably more advanced platforms such as ballistic missile submarines and long-range strike cruisers over the next 30 years than the relatively low confidence level projections today suggest, the FSA will quickly be invalidated.
Another substantial source of uncertainty is understanding how a modern naval war between great powers will play out. Neither the U.S. Navy nor the PLAN have experienced the rigors of modern naval combat between highly capable systems and platforms. Our comprehension of how the conflict expands to include rivalry in the space and cyber domains and how the warfare environment is affected can best be described as educated speculation. The ability of each side to degrade or deny the other’s sensing and communication capabilities is highly uncertain in the face of determined resistance. Has the fundamental nature of warfare changed with the advent of increased firepower and other lethal capabilities, bestowing advantage to the defensive position, or have modern capabilities enhanced the ability of naval forces to offensively maneuver? How the fleet will fight will largely determine how the fleet is built, but myriad tactical dynamics of future warfighting remain unknown.
A third source of uncertainty relates to how evolving technology will affect naval force capabilities and the warfighting environment. Will proliferation of unmanned platforms and advancing artificial intelligence render the maritime environment transparent so that even U.S. submarines will find it difficult to hide? To the contrary, perhaps swarming drone decoys and sophisticated algorithms could distract and degrade sensors so to enable extended freedom of maneuver for naval forces. Will swarms of unmanned platforms become a lethal and persistent aspect during a war, or will they face extensive early attrition due to counter drone technologies so that their impact is initially significant but acute? How will developing advanced firepower such as hypersonic weapons and directed energy alter the vulnerability or protection of forces?
While the questions above do not have simple answers or may not be answerable at this time, there are steps analysts can employ to mitigate the risks of the unknown.
Acknowledge uncertainty. Confidence levels should be thoroughly discussed, and low levels of confidence should be clearly acknowledged. A thorough discussion of the uncertainty and unknowable factors we face will help later as adjustments are necessary.
Define adjustment triggers. The FSA should have established criterion and triggers that describe when and how its findings should be adjusted as uncertainty changes over time. For example, if today’s best prediction of the number of Chinese SSBNs becomes inaccurate in a few years as unanticipated construction occurs, the FSA could identify this as a trigger point to reassess force structure with respect to U.S. ASW and missile defense capabilities.
Advocate. After the next FSA there will be disagreement about the suitability of the shipbuilding goal, which currently stands at 355. Some will advocate for a greater number, but consensus can be found for the factors clearly calling for an adjustment. Continued, dedicated expansion of the PLAN in ways that are not predicted now, but are flagged by adjustment triggers, would provide justification for an increase in U.S. Navy investment and procurement. Audiences such as the U.S. Congress and the American public at large can be prepared for the implications as information is revealed over time. Then demonstration of facts can best advocate for necessary FSA adjustments.
Hedge. As the nature of warfighting evolves as well as the potential for new and developing technologies to make an impact, U.S. defense expenditures should aim to avoid missing a crucial development or dramatically misjudging the nature of future warfighting. This requires the continued development of expensive technologies to maintain an edge, even those that have not been as fruitful as anticipated, such as directed energy. In addition, material necessary for warfighting such as ammunition and fuel should be stockpiled in larger quantities and prepositioned forward as a relatively inexpensive means to compensate for an FSA that underestimates the opposing force and capabilities.
Expand to the Joint Force. The best FSA would account for the capabilities and forces of the Army and Air Force in addition to the Navy and Marine Corps. Navy and Marine Corps-only analysis is prone to myopically overlook the ability of other services to compensate for weaknesses or bolster strengths. A comprehensive assessment for the required capability and capacity of the entire Joint Force will result in the most efficient solution and avoid gaps or excess in key functions.
Through these measures the U.S. Navy and the Joint Force writ large could better align and adjust its force structure, and minimize the disruptive and deadly surprise that comes from when outdated force structure is finally thrust into war.
Jack McKechnie is a commander in the U.S. Navy and a graduate student at American University, School of International Service. The views expressed in this article are his own.
1. While the Navy also has plans for other platforms such as aircraft and unmanned vehicles or vessels, the shipbuilding plan receives the most focus due to considerable higher cost per platform and longer time to build
Featured Image: SAN DIEGO (Oct. 15, 2019) Coastal Riverine Squadron (CRS) 3 Mark VI patrol boats provide escort protection to the landing platform dock ship USS New Orleans (LPD 18) during its outbound transit in San Diego Bay as part of unit level training provided by Coastal Riverine Group (CRG) 1 Training and Evaluation Unit. (U.S. Navy photo by Chief Boatswain’s Mate Nelson Doromal Jr./Released)
In his November 1997 Proceedings article, Admiral Jay Johnson, the Chief of Naval Operations, reflected on the landmark white papers …From the Sea, Forward…From the Sea, and the Navy Operating Concept and opined, “…the purpose of the United States Navy is to influence, directly and decisively, events ashore…from the sea, anywhere, and anytime.”1 Scratch nearly any thoughtful naval officer and one finds an intuitive belief that naval forces, particularly forward present naval forces, possess the capability to affect events ashore, indeed even to deter actions by other nations. But how does the ability to influence events ashore really work? What is the theoretical underpinning? Such questions normally leave us mumbling platitudes and surveying the dust on our shoes. This paper is intended to begin to build a theoretical understanding of influence, particularly how forward present naval forces influence events and actors ashore.
Why a Theory of Influence
Before considering “how” forward present naval forces support and foster U.S. influence, first, let us briefly consider why a theory of influence is necessary in the first place. Who needs it?
First, a theory helps us understand patterns of behavior. It helps us explain why events occurred in the past in a particular way, and a theory also serves as an aid in predicting future events. This does not mean that a theory will enable us to predict with perfect clairvoyance events of the future. What theory can do, however, is to allow us to “…trace the different tendencies which are inherent in the situation and to point out the different conditions which make it more likely for one tendency to prevail than for another, and, finally, assess the probabilities for the different conditions and tendencies to prevail in actuality.”2 The role of theory, then, is not just to account for the past or to explain the present but to provide a preview of what is to come. A theory of influence may be beneficial in helping us understand how nations have influenced each other in the past and to predict how influence may be accomplished in the future. Lastly, understanding how nations influence each other may help us deal with the issue of forward naval presence and how carrier strike groups and amphibious ready groups affect influence.
A Definition of Influence
In the foreign policy arena, influence is an index of state power. Regarding power, it is often said that power is to foreign policy experts and practitioners what money is to economists: the medium via which transactions between states are measured and observed.3 Power, however, is a useful concept only in its relative sense. That is, absolute measures of military strength, gross domestic product, technological advancement, and others are helpful, but provide an incomplete gauge of power. Power cannot be adequately assessed until it is employed, and it is employed by nations engaged in the process of attempting to influence each other. Until one state attempts to influence another, we have no useful measure of power. Accordingly, the following definition is offered: influence is the ability of one state to secure a decision and/or an action or inaction by another state consistent with the former’s desires.4
Characteristics of Influence
Although not all inclusive, there are some important characteristics of influence.
All influence attempts are future-oriented. It is impossible to influence the past. Nor is it possible to influence the present unless a decision was made in the past to do so. Accordingly, all influence attempts are made to affect the anticipated future behavior of another state.
Influence does not necessarily imply a modification of another state’s behavior. There are situations in which one state (the influencee) is currently behaving and/or is predicted to behave as desired by another state (the influencer), but in which the influencer nevertheless attempts to increase the probability of continued favorable behavior. This type of influence activity on the part of the influencer is called reinforcement.5
Inter-nation influence is notdyadic in nature. For analytical or planning purposes, it is convenient to think only of the reciprocal influence of one pair of nations on each other, but clearly the international system is not a dyad. Many nations simultaneously influence many others, either directly or indirectly, intentionally or unintentionally. Intentional or deliberate influence is called direct influence.6 Not only is the system characterized by reciprocity, but by multiple reciprocity.
Purposes of Influence
Having defined influence and reviewed some salient characteristics, let us now consider the purposes for which influence is used. Remembering that all influence is future-oriented, the following proposition is offered: Nations attempt to influence other nations for one of two purposes7 including to modify the anticipated behavior of another nation, and/or to assure or increase the probability of the anticipated behavior of another nation.
One normally thinks of attempts to influence behavior within the context of behavioral modification. That is, one nation predicts that the behavior of another nation will be unfavorable and via various means and with various tools attempts to influence the nation in question to modify the anticipated unfavorable behavior. But as posited above, nations also attempt to influence other nations to assure or to increase the probability that the nation in question will continue to behave favorably.
Influence Objectives
Let us now examine the objectives for which states attempt to modify or maintain/assure the behavior of other states. The following proposition is offered: the objectives for which states attempt to modify or to maintain the behavior of other states are based on the acceptability of the influencee’s predicted behavior. If the predicted behavior is favorable, the influencer will use means to promote or to reinforce the predicted behavior. On the other hand, if the predicted behavior is unfavorable, the influencer’s objective will be to employ means to deter or to compel the other nation. This taxonomy is presented in Table One.
If a nation predicts that another nation will behave favorably, clearly there would be no reason to attempt to modify that behavior. Similarly, if a nation predicts that another nation will behave unfavorably, there would be no reason to attempt to assure that behavior. On the other hand, if another nation’s predicted behavior is unfavorable, the influencer may elect to attempt to modify that behavior by attempting to deter the subject nation from taking a predicted unfavorable course of action. It should be noted that deterrence assumes that the influencee has not yet taken the unfavorable course of action. Compellence, conversely, assumes that the influencee has already taken an unfavorable course of action and must be influenced to rescind or withdraw from its unfavorable action.
If nations could predict with complete accuracy the behavior of other nations, efforts to promote or reinforce predicted favorable behavior would not be necessary. Because of the complexity of the international system and the poverty of intellectual disciplines involved, however, such predictability is not feasible. Accordingly, states attempt to increase the probability of anticipated favorable behavior by promoting behavior which is seen to be proceeding in a favorable direction and attempt to reinforce established favorable behavior.
Some examples of influence efforts to deter, compel, reinforce, and promote may be helpful:
Deterrence. The role of U.S. and Allied forces in Europe from 1945-1991 was to deter an attack by Soviet/Warsaw Pact forces. Similarly, Sixth Fleet forces in the Mediterranean were present to deter an attack on NATO’s southern flank.
Compellence. As Desert Shield/Storm coalition forces were mustered in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf from August 1990 through January 1991, threats were made to Saddam Hussein to compel him to withdraw from Kuwait. Because these threats (attempts to influence) were unsuccessful, actual use of force (armed conflict) was required to compel withdrawal.
Reinforcement. Among other objectives, the presence of U.S. forces in western Europe in the post-Cold War era also serves principally to reassure European allies of continued U.S. interest in European matters and reinforces current European policies favorable to the U.S. The Navy and Marine Corps conduct manifold exercises every year with friends and allies around the world to reinforce positive relations.
Promotion. In addition to stemming the flow of illegal drugs into the U.S., U.S. engagement in Latin America today serves to promote the evolving change to democratic governments and market driven economies. The presence of the U.S. Seventh Fleet in the Western Pacific promotes and reinforces peaceful relations among the nations of Northeastern and Southeastern Asia.
Techniques of Influence
Relations between nations range from complete consensus on almost all issues (U.S.-U.K.) to total discord on nearly all issues (U.S.-Iran). The amount and type of influence required for the influencer to achieve desired behavior on the part of the influencee varies with the nature of the relationship between two nations and their level of shared interests.
For example, when dealing with the U.K., in many if not most instances, very little if any influence is required for the U.S. to achieve its desires. This is because of the high level of shared interests between the two English-speaking nations. The situation between the U.S. and U.K. is rather like a family situation when a brother approaches his sister to enlist her support in making arrangements to obtain medical care for an ill parent. Because both siblings share a common interest in the health and well-being of the parent, normally no influence is required by the brother to gain the sister’s cooperation – a simple request may be sufficient.
On the other hand, since the 1979 revolution, the U.S. and Iran have shared so few common interests that extraordinary leverage has been required for the U.S. to achieve its desires vis-a-vis Iran and vice versa. These have ranged from crippling economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation to the use of force against Iranian military assets during the Tanker Wars of the 1980s.
Most relations between nations lie somewhere between the U.S.-U.K. and the U.S.-Iran extremes. On those occasions when influence is required, two broad categories of techniques are available to the influencer.
Techniques of Influence
A threat is a communication to the influencee by the influencer that unless the influencee complies with the influencer’s desires, the influencer will act to punish the influencee. A promise is a communication to the influencee by the influencer that if the influencee complies with the influencer’s desires, the influencer will act to reward the influencee. Although not necessarily always the case, in most instances threats are used to deter and to compel and promises are used to reinforce and promote.
Tools of Influence
With respect to the tools of influence, states may use diplomatic, economic, military, and informational tools to punish and to reward targets of influence.
Military tools of influence may be used to achieve military goals as well as political and economic objectives. Similarly, political and economic tools may sometimes be useful in gaining military objectives. For example, a trade embargo or conversely promising most favored nation trade status could be effective in deterring a nation from the sale of weapons of mass destruction. However, as relations between nations worsen, as they share fewer common interests, objectives can become more militarily dominated and defined, thereby causing the effectiveness of military tools of influence to increase.
Consider, for example, ensuring Iran compliance with UN sanctions. Although diplomatic demarches (political tool) and trade sanctions (economic tool) had been employed as threats to influence Iranian behavior, arguably the most effective tool to condition Iran’s actions is the presence of military forces (military tool) on the ground in allied states and naval forces on station in the Arabian Gulf and Red Sea. Moreover, because the predominant concern of U.S. allies and friends in Middle East is one of military security (against an assertive Iran) military tools take on disproportionate influence for the U.S. in region.
The Effectiveness of Influence
Having derived a definition of influence, examined its characteristics, the purposes and objectives for which it is used, the techniques employed to achieve it, and the effect of shared interests on the requirements for the use of those techniques, let us now consider what makes influence effective.
Here we must examine the influencee’s decision calculus, and how the influencee weighs a range of outcomes of an influence situation. Two dimensions come into play: utility and probability.8 The degree to which the influencee likes or dislikes the prospect is called utility or disutility. The likelihood that the influencee assigns to the outcomes ever occurring is called probability. The influencee’s combined assessments of these two dimensions determines expectations and thus the influencee’s response to the influence attempt.
Each nation has, either explicitly or implicitly, a continuum from good to bad along which it assesses outcomes of an influence attempt. The continuum is based on values systems and although values systems certainly are not uniform from nation to nation, there is some degree of similarity. Outcomes which tend to restrict a nation’s freedom of action are normally placed low on the utility scale (or high on the disutility scale). Conversely, outcomes which do not restrict freedom of action are placed high on the utility scale (low disutility score).
Nations do not, however, make decisions based solely on the attractiveness or unattractiveness of various potential outcomes. Nations also compare outcomes not only in terms of desirability, but also in terms of estimated likelihood. While some nations are more risk-prone than others, most nations are fairly conservative in foreign policy. They seldom commit resources and prestige to the pursuit of an outcome which seems improbable, regardless of how attractive the outcome may be.
Despite idiosyncrasies along one or the other dimension (utility/probability), nations combine both sets of considerations in responding to an influence attempt. The decision of how to respond to an influence attempt is the result of a utility and probability calculation.
Thus, for an influence attempt to be successful, the influencer must address something that the influencee considers valuable (high utility) and the influencer must persuade the influencee that the influencer will take action as threatened or promised (i.e., the influencer must be perceived as credible). Thus, the utility-probability calculus determines influencee response both to threats (deterrence/compellence) and promises (reinforcement/promotion).
Recent studies suggest that there is another important dimension to credibility, one not based solely on military capability or political will to use military force, but the speed with which military power (influence) can be employed.9 That is, the influencee’s knowledge that the influencer possesses the capability to act without delay seems to be a key component in the influencee’s decision calculus. This, of course, bolsters and helps to explain the argument advanced by the Navy and Marine Corps regarding the special “shaping” (influencing) role of forward present Navy and Marine Corps forces. Their nearly constant presence in the Mediterranean, Indian Ocean/Arabian Gulf, and western Pacific is a visible reminder to friend and foe alike of U. S. intent, capability, and perhaps more importantly, the ability to act swiftly.
Conclusion
So, what does all this discussion of a theory of influence add up to? Hopefully, it will help naval officers better understand what we tend to understand intuitively already: forward present naval forces play a special role in influencing (shaping) other nations.
These forces are able to fulfill both purposes of influence: Assure the continuation of anticipated positive behavior and modify anticipated negative behavior. They are able to achieve both objectives of influence: Promote/reinforce positive behavior, and deter anticipated negative behavior/compel reversal of negative faits accompli. They are able to convey both techniques of influence: promises of rewards for positive behavior and threats of punishment for negative behavior. They are able to affect the influencee’s decision calculus of utility and probability. Their diversity and breadth (from F-35s and F/A-18s, from LRASMs to Tomahawks, and to a Marine rifle company squad) and reach (to a thousand miles) permits them to reach out and touch something that matters (high utility) and their combat readiness gives them high credibility/probability of successful employment.
Being there counts. The ability to act without delay during the early days of a crisis or a potential crisis affects the influencee’s initial decision calculus in a special way. It precludes an opponent an early and easy fait accompli. It forces a rational opponent (influencee) to carefully evaluate carefully their courses of action. It tends to preclude impulsive behavior. It forces the influencee to conduct a utility/probability calculation. It buys us time to augment U. S. forces, if necessary. It gives us timely influence. And, at the end of the day, if the influence attempt is not timely, it is far less effective. Here in their forward presence lies the unique influence advantage of naval forces.
Captain Harris commanded USS Conolly (DD-979) and Destroyer Squadron 32. Ashore he served as Executive Director of the CNO Executive Panel. He was a CNO Fellow in CNO Strategic Studies Group XII. It was during his stint as a CNO SSG Fellow that this article was first begun. Captain Harris is indebted to Mr. Dmitry Filipoff for his efforts in updating the draft, sharping the arguments, and greatly improving the readability.
References
1. Proceedings, U. S. Naval Institute, Annapolis, Maryland, November, 1997.
2. Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York, Knopf, 1948), pp. 6-7.
3. This discussion of power is drawn from J. David Singer, “Inter-Nation Influence: A Formal Model,” American Political Science Review, 17, 1963.
4. This papers examines the use of forward presence as an instrument of US influence and, therefore, focuses on those actions taken prior to the actual use of force, i.e., armed conflict.
5. The term “reinforcement” is taken from Singer, Ibid.
6. Intentional or deliberate influence is called DIRECT influence. Unintentional influence is here labeled INDIRECT influence.
7. See Barry Blechman and Stephen Kaplan, Force Without War, Brookings, 1978, pp. 70-78.
8. The utility-probability concept is drawn from Singer, op. cit., pp. 424-426.
9. See, for example, Dr. Edward Rhodes, “Conventional Deterrence: Reivew of Empirical Literature unpublished paper for the Department of the Navy (N3/5) 1997.
Featured Image: Off the coast of Hawaii on 20 June 2000, the Abraham Lincoln Battle Group steams alongside one another for a Battle Group Photo during RIMPAC 2000. Ships involved are Tucson (SSN-770) & Cheyenne (SSN-773), Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72), Shiloh (CG-67), Bunker Hill (CG-52), Fletcher (DD-992), Paul Hamilton (DDG-60), Cromlin (FFG-37) and Camden (AOE-2). (USN photo by PH2 Gabriel Wilson)
ByMie Augier, Sean F. X. Barrett, and Nicholas Dew1
“Communication skills and the ability to work well with different types of people are very important too. A lot of people assume that creating software is purely a solitary activity where you sit in an office with the door closed all day and write lots of code. This isn’t true at all. Software innovation, like almost every other kind of innovation, requires the ability to collaborate and share ideas with other people, and to sit down and talk with customers and get their feedback and understand their needs. I also place a high value on having a passion for ongoing learning.” –Bill Gates2
“The cognitive skills and abilities of naval leaders must be viewed as a strategic national asset.”–Education for Seapower3
Introduction
While the Department of the Navy’s recently published Education for Seapower (E4S) study is designed specifically to respond to the highly competitive security environment of today, it is no coincidence that it emphasizes the need for officer skills that are consistent with larger trends in education and employment. In this paper, we dig into the emphasis E4S puts on the development of both STEM skills and leadership skills among future naval officers. Based on our word count, leader is among the most frequently mentioned terms in the E4S study, implying a set of skills that is not purely technical. At the same time, the Navy and Marine Corps are calling for officers with strong STEM skills, with the implication being that both STEM and leadership skills are needed for success in the “Cognitive Age.” According to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, there is abundant evidence suggesting that this combination of hard and soft skills is in high demand outside the Navy as well as within it.4
Given the centrality of a combination of hard and soft skills to the Navy and Marine Corps warfighting philosophy, it is worth asking how the Department might improve the way it develops these skills and makes them more abundant across the naval force. It is a particularly opportune time to think carefully about this question because the Navy is currently writing its very first Naval Education Strategy to deliver on the promise of E4S. This strategy will likely influence the path of naval education for many years to come. Hence, it is incredibly important that the strategy be based on sound education principles – rather than reflecting the flavor of the moment, or the Department’s needs of the moment, or the Department’s entrenched, parochial interests. This will not be an easy feat, yet E4S has already recognized that getting the Naval Education Strategy right is much more than just a little important: it may be one of the most consequential initiatives the Department will undertake in the foreseeable future. Its education plans therefore ought to be based on very well-researched and carefully thought out principles designed to serve it well over the long run.
We argue that it is vital to keep in mind this combination of hard and soft skills as the Department moves forward with its plans for investing in the education of its leaders of the future.5 The National Academies highlight a baseline skillset that includes communication, teamwork and interpersonal skills, critical thinking, and problem-solving capability in complex, multidisciplinary situations. These skills are highly generalizable, leaders rely on them more heavily than their technical skills, they are more important to an individual’s success, and employers place the greatest value on them when making hiring decisions.6
Unfortunately, there is an unjustified tendency to either implicitly or explicitly assume soft skills are innate, or are only learned via job experience, or are simply some kind of mystery. Nothing is further from the truth. Instead, we should be educating future Navy leaders for a combination of both soft and hard skills that the empirical data suggests are needed together for high performance across a naval career. General David Berger, USMC, in his Commandant’s Planning Guidance (CPG), also captures the importance of this skill mix when he talks about identifying “those with a special aptitude as instructors, educators, commanders, staff officers, mentors, or with special technical skills,” which he reinforces by identifying the need to change how the Marine Corps attracts and retains the talent necessary to win on today’s new battlefield.7
Hard and Soft Evidence of Increasing Demand for Hard and Soft Skills
Both anecdotal and systematic data indicate that job growth and rewards are increasingly flowing to jobs that require high social skills. Anecdotally, the 2018 Financial Times Skills Gap survey reveals that top employers identify “soft skills” as the most important skills in MBA graduates.8 “Soft skills” include the ability to work on a team, to work with a wide variety of people, and to solve complex problems. However, this result is tempered by the observation that “unless [MBA graduates] have technical skill requirements, they are not even getting through the door.”9 This highlights that both soft skills and hard skills are important in today’s labor market. Similar results have been found for college graduates, for whom problem-solving skills and the ability to work on a team are the two most desired attributes employers are seeking.10
Systematic evidence shows that soft skills explain an important part of workplace performance.11 Recent research by Harvard economist David Deming finds that the workplace has particularly rewarded jobs requiring both high cognitive and high social skills:
“Between 1980 and 2012, jobs requiring high levels of social interaction grew by nearly 12 percentage points as a share of the U.S. labor force. Math-intensive but less social jobs – including many STEM occupations – shrank by 3.3 percentage points over the same period. Employment and wage growth were particularly strong for jobs requiring high levels of both math skill and social skills.”12
Figure 113
Another way of expressing these results is that social skills coupled with STEM skills are a much stronger predictor of employment for today’s young adults than they were a generation ago. It is especially important for senior naval leadership to recognize that workplace changes have altered the balance of skills needed for today’s rising leaders compared to a generation ago.
Why Soft – as Well as Hard – Skills are Important in Organizations
In today’s highly technical work environments, it is easy to understand why great engineering skills or computer programming skills are highly valuable to organizations such as the Navy. These skills clearly have an important role in making the Navy and Marine Corps competitive against our adversaries. But what do soft skills do for an organization? Why is it an advantage to have leaders that also have excellent soft skills?
One answer is that soft skills decrease the cost of coordinating work in organizations. As work gets more highly skilled, it becomes more specialized, thus putting more demands on skills and flexibility in organizing work. This is a reason why the ability to lead teams effectively has become so important in today’s workplace. As the complexity of the work increases, so do the demands on those who organize it. Hard skills may be prized among leaders for understanding complex technology, but the organizational demands of these complex workplaces can only be met by those who have elevated levels of soft skills as well.
A recent Harvard Business Review article emphasizes this point. Casciaro, Edmondson, and Jang asked companies around the world which relationships are most important to creating value for their customers. Their responses indicate, “Today the vast majority of innovation and business-development opportunities lie in the interfaces between functions, offices, or organizations.”14 Operating effectively at these interfaces requires “learning about people on the other side and relating to them.”15 Brokering those relationships requires strong interpersonal skills to bring together the knowledge needed to create valuable new solutions.16 Deming similarly notes the importance of these interpersonal skills.17
The importance of soft skills to our warfighting capabilities should come as no surprise to today’s naval forces, who embrace the maneuver warfare philosophy, which decentralizes control and decision making through the use of mission tactics, or “assigning a subordinate a mission without specifying how the mission must be accomplished . . . thereby allowing him the freedom—and establishing the duty—to take whatever steps he deems necessary based on the situation.”18 Soft skills that nurture familiarity and trust are central to the philosophy of command on which maneuver warfare is based: “We believe that implicit communication—to communicate through mutual understanding, using a minimum of key, well-understood phrases or even anticipating each other’s thoughts—is a faster, more effective way to communicate than through the use of detailed, explicit instructions. We develop this ability through familiarity and trust.”19
What Might the Navy Do?
“We should use money like a focused weapon, and aim it at the exact individual we need. Currently, we target people via a mass fires approach, instead of more selective targeting. While we hope this results in the retention of the most talented, our antiquated models may also retain poor performers.” –General David Berger, USMC20
“Over the next few months, I will share some thoughts on two of our highest priorities: the creation of the new Naval Community College for enlisted Sailors and Marines as well as the writing of the first Naval Education Strategy to guide our reform efforts.” –John Kroger, Chief Learning Officer, Department of the Navy21
Since the demands of an increasingly complex security environment are not likely to relent anytime soon, it is likely that more will be asked of individual sailors and Marines. Given scarce resources, the Department will have to make judgments about where to invest in education to get the best bang for its buck in order to obtain broader and deeper skillsets. In particular, the Department’s manpower system is intrinsically linked to its ability to deliver on its education strategy. The current DoD manpower system, however, is neither equipped to identify, incentivize, or develop specialized skills (hard or soft) nor accurately register the demand for such skills or match servicemembers that possess them with billets that require them. The development of these skills in the naval officer corps thus depends on fundamental changes to the manpower system in order to properly unleash the talent potential of the Navy and Marine Corps. In order to invest in developing soft (and hard) skills among our officer corps, we need to change our manpower management system to embrace the maneuver philosophy not just in how we fight our forces, but also in how we administer them. Doing so requires a fundamental change in how the DoN (and larger DoD) identifies, educates, trains, and unleashes its talent.22
The current DoD manpower system is based on cutting edge management science—from the turn of the 20th century. In 1899, President McKinley appointed Elihu Root as Secretary of War “to bring ‘modern business practices’ to the ‘backward’ War Department.”23 Based on the Taylorism concept of breaking down complex production into simple, sequenced, standardized tasks, this system was created to maximize efficiencies in a stable, predictable environment. People were trained to be interchangeable parts in an organizational structure emphasizing hierarchical, centralized control. This system, firmly rooted in industrial-era thinking and practices, continues today, manifesting itself in cookie-cutter career paths; the devaluation of specialized skills; and information asymmetries between unit commanders, individual officers, and manpower managers that result in mismatches between officers and the billets they hold. Our manpower bureaucracy’s ability to accurately capture specialized skills is currently quite limited. It is challenging to capture individual experience, skills, and knowledge using combinations of designators in the Navy and primary military occupational specialty (MOS), additional MOS, free MOS, and necessary MOS codes in the Marine Corps. A given bureaucratic code may capture a baseline level of training or experience, but it does not enable differentiation therein.
One model for fixing these problems entails pushing manpower decisions down to the commanders and individual officers themselves, affording officers more opportunity to take responsibility for their own career decisions. Deming notes that workers with higher social skills tend to self-select into occupations where they might better employ them – and be monetarily rewarded for them.24 This self-selection process can be leveraged to create a “matching” system similar to ZipRecruiter and LinkedIn (or dating apps) that incentivize individuals to reveal (and “sell”) their skills to commanders who are empowered to select who joins their unit. The DoN may be able to learn from the U.S. Air Force’s development of a web-based “talent marketplace” for the assignment of its officers from the rank of lieutenant colonel and below.25 The Air Force will use its platform to “publish and manage the Vulnerable-to-Move List, submit and prioritize fill actions (requisitions) and submit assignment preferences.” This increases the transparency of the assignment process and enables officers and commanders to better communicate their preferences to each other. The Army also has ambitions to build a similar technological capability.26 The Navy’s own pilot project, however, continues to languish in bureaucracy, while the Marine Corps does not even have one yet.27
These pilots, however, still operate within the confines of the current manpower model and other established procedures. More radical proposals might include scrapping standardized tables of organization and equipment, mission essential task lists that reward achieving a bare minimum in lieu of contested force-on-force exercises designed to differentiate among commanders, and pay charts based on grade and time in service instead of actual talent and performance. Doing so would provide commanders more flexibility in how they organize their respective units and more opportunity to make tradeoff decisions that would signal to the Department the skills more readily valued and in which the Department should invest.28 Individuals would be similarly incentivized to invest in developing more valued skills, and they would have more opportunities to visibly distinguish themselves.
Significant changes are needed to develop a fundamentally better manpower system.29 Changes are also needed to the Defense Officer Personnel Management Act (DOPMA) and Goldwater-Nichols in order to allow for more variance from the cookie-cutter career paths currently established in our naval services. Additionally, there is opportunity for a bigger dose of informal training. Leaders at the unit level can develop the soft skills of their teams by encouraging them to take on new challenges (while also eschewing the “zero defect” mentality), teaching them how to ask good questions, encouraging them to learn from the perspectives of others, and bringing together cross-functional teams that expose members to more diverse viewpoints and professional networks.30
The Naval Education Strategy needs to recognize that current manpower systems can limit the potential for progress and hold the Department’s educational investments hostage. It is very important for the strategy to be clear-eyed about this issue. Systems and processes rooted in the industrial age risk trapping the Department in industrial-era thinking while the rest of the world has moved well beyond that. Because these systems and processes will influence the implementation of E4S, the Naval Education Strategy must incorporate plans that address these critical complementary elements.
Conclusion
Given the siren song of rapid developments in technology, there is a natural assumption that the Navy should emphasize STEM skills rather than soft skills. However, abundant evidence shows that it is the combination of soft and hard skills that is vital to giving us warfighting capabilities that create and maintain an edge over our adversaries. The job now at hand is to sharpen the Navy’s manpower bureaucracy into a tool that can deliver the right combinations of soft and hard skills that are needed across the service.31 In the spirit of the innovative and critical thinking the Naval Education Strategy hopes to foster, the strategy must not simply take certain constraints as a given, but rather challenge these constraints and all of the assumptions, systems, and processes on which the Department operates. Failure to do so will result in continuing to operate within the same industrial-era box and making only very marginal improvements, rather than fundamentally changing the manner in which the Department operates to prepare it for the challenges of today and of the future.
Dr. Mie Augier is a professor at the Graduate School of Defense Management at the Naval Postgraduate School. She is interested in strategy, organizations, innovation, leadership, and how to educate strategic and innovative thinkers.
Major Sean F. X. Barrett is an active duty Marine Corps intelligence officer. He is currently the operations officer for the Headquarters Marine Corps Directorate of Analytics & Performance Optimization.
Dr. Nick Dew is a professor at the Graduate School of Defense Management at the Naval Postgraduate School. His research is focused on entrepreneurial thinking and innovation in defense organizations.
Endnotes
[1] We are grateful to William Gates and Chris Nelson for comments on earlier drafts. Any remaining errors were produced without help.
[2] Bill Gates, “Bill Gates: The Skills You Need to Succeed,” BBC News, December 14, 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7142073.stm.
[3] Department of the Navy, Education for Seapower (Washington, DC: 2019), 12.
[4] National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, The Integration of the Humanities and Arts with Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Higher Education: Branches from the Same Tree (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2018).
[5] We focus on skills in the context of education and not concerning the related and equally important aspect of the need for interdisciplinary research in our institutions.
[6] National Academies, Integration. Epstein documents how even in highly technical fields, curious outsiders can merge seemingly disparate but widely available information to make cutting edge contributions. Narrow technical specialists can be blinded by their own expertise. David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World (New York: Riverhead Books, 2019), 171-213.
[7] Commandant’s Planning Guidance: 38th Commandant of the Marine Corps, (Washington, DC: Headquarters Marine Corps, 2019), 7-8, https://www.hqmc.marines.mil/Portals/142/Docs/%2038th%20Commandant%27s%20Planning%20Guidance_2019.pdf?ver=2019-07-16-200152-700.
[8] Patricia Nilsson, “What Top Employers Want from MBA Graduates: The FT’s 2018 Skills Gap Survey Reveals What Lies Ahead in the Jobs Market,” Financial Times, September 3, 2018, https://www.ft.com/content/64b19e8e-aaa5-11e8-89a1-e5de165fa619.
[9] Nilsson, “What Top Employers Want.” Nilsson quotes Susan Sandler Brennan, assistant dean at the career development office of MIT’s Sloan School of Management.
[10] Kevin Gray and Andrea Koncz, “The Key Attributes Employers Seek on Students’ Resumes,” National Association of Colleges and Employers, November 30, 2017, https://www.naceweb.org/about-us/press/2017/the-key-attributes-employers-seek-on-students-resumes/. Gray and Koncz summarize the results of NACE’s Job Outlook 2018 survey.
[11] James J. Heckman and Tim Kautz, “Hard Evidence on Soft Skills,” Labour Economics 19, no. 4 (Aug. 2012): 451-464.
[12] David J. Deming, “The Growing Importance of Social Skills in the Labor Market,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 132, no. 4 (2017): 1593-1640. Quote from the Abstract.
[13] Deming, 1627 (see Figure IV).
[14] Tiziana Casciaro, Amy C. Edmondson, and Sujin Jang, “Cross-Silo Leadership: How to Create More Value by Connecting Experts from Inside and Outside the Organization,” Harvard Business Review (May-June 2019): 132.
[15] Casciaro, Edmondson, and Jang, 132. Emphasis in original.
[16] “Cultural brokers” can serve as both bridges and adhesives. Bridges serve as a go-between for one-off projects, facilitating collaboration with minimal disruption to normal operations, whereas adhesives help build mutual understanding and more long-lasting relationships. Casciaro, Edmondson, and Jang, 133.
[17] Deming, “Growing Importance,” 1595.
[18] U.S. Marine Corps, FMFM1 Warfighting (Washington, DC: Department of the Navy, 1989), 70.
[19] Warfighting, 62-63.
[20] CPG, 2
[21] John Kroger, “Chief Learning Officer: Reporting Aboard,” Marine Corps Gazette (Oct. 2019), WE1-WE2, https://mca-marines.org/wp-content/uploads/Chief-Learning-Officer.pdf.
[22] We specifically refrain from using the now almost trite term “talent management” since this term is oftentimes confused with a need for more bureaucratic mechanisms to centrally plan and manage officers’ careers rather than the removal of obstacles preventing a more optimal matching of officer skillsets to billets requiring them.
[23] Don Vandergriff, Personnel Reform and Military Effectiveness (Washington, DC: Center for Defense Information, 2015), 7.
[24] Deming, “Growing Importance,” 1598.
[25] Kat Bailey, “Talent Marketplace Assignment System Expands to All Officer Specialty Codes,” Air Force’s Personnel Center, January 31, 2019, https://www.afpc.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/1744891/talent-marketplace-assignment-system-expands-to-all-officer-specialty-codes/.
[26] Scott Maucione, “Army Begins Study to Change Its Talent Management System to Fit the Future,” Federal News Network, February 19, 2019, https://federalnewsnetwork.com/army/2019/02/army-begins-study-to-change-its-talent-management-system-to-fit-the-future/.
[27] Nicholas Stoner and Alex Campbell, “Promising Talent Management Initiatives,” U.S. Naval Institute Blog, August 20, 2019, https://blog.usni.org/posts/2019/08/20/the-navy-is-strangling-its-most-promising-talent-management-initiatives. In his CPG, Gen Berger introduces the possibility of developing one. See CPG, 7-8.
[28] See, for example, Tim Kane, Bleeding Talent: How the US Military Mismanages Great Leaders and Why It’s Time for a Revolution (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
[29] Some significant work has already been done in this regard. See, for example, Peter J. Coughlan and William R. Gates, “Auction Mechanisms for Force Management,” in Attitudes Aren’t Free: Thinking Deeply About Diversity in the US Armed Forces, ed. James E. Parco and David A. Levy (Maxwell AFB, AL: Air University Press), 505-540, https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Portals/10/AUPress/Books/B_0120_PARCO_LEVY_ATTITUDES_ARENT_FREE.PDF#page=516.
[30] Casciaro, Edmondson, and Jang, “Cross-Silo Leadership,” 134-139.
[31] A parallel argument supporting the cultivation of such skills in our students relates to the importance interdisciplinary research and institutions that facilitate it (e.g., RAND in the 1950s). We hope to elaborate on this, and how one could capture synergies between interdisciplinary research and education, in another paper.
Featured Image: NAVAL STATION EVERETT, Wash. (Sept. 13, 2012) Aviation Administrationman 3rd Class Travis Clay, assigned to the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz (CVN 68), takes the Navy-wide advancement exam at the Commons at Naval Station Everett, Wash. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Robert Winn/Released)
Join CIMSEC’s DC Chapter Tuesday, November 12th, at Franklin Hall’s Roosevelt Room. This is your chance to provide a brief, informal 3-5 minute update on something you’re working on or just interested in related to maritime security. Or, just stop by for a drink and discussion on the latest maritime security developments and meet some interesting people – all are welcome! RSVPs not necessary but appreciated at [email protected]. Please indicate whether you are interested in participating in the lightning rounds.
Time: Tuesday, 12 Nov, 5:30-7:30pm; 6pm Start
Place: Franklin Hall, (Roosevelt Room) 1348 Florida Ave NW, Washington, DC (U Street/African-American Civil War/Cardozo stop on the Green/Yellow Line). Photo Credit: Rey Lopez, Franklinhall.com
