No Way Out
Welcome to the No Way Out podcast where we examine the variety of domains and disciplines behind John R. Boyd’s OODA sketch and why, today, more than ever, it is an imperative to understand Boyd’s axiomatic sketch of how organisms, individuals, teams, corporations, and governments comprehend, shape, and adapt in our VUCA world.
No Way Out
Transformative Leadership in Challenging Times with the Honorable Thomas Modly
Ready for a masterclass in leadership and innovation? Join us as we welcome the Honorable Thomas Modly, the esteemed author of "Vectors," who is about to share exclusive insights from his remarkable journey from the Naval Academy to the Pentagon. Mobley unravels the unique cultural nuances of the Navy and the strategic challenges leaders face today. By the end of this episode, you’ll grasp how Modly's pivotal experiences parallel the evolution of the flow system, a revolutionary framework for building high-performing teams in complex adaptive environments.
Modly's narrative fascinatingly explores his diverse roles, from shaping minds at the Air Force Academy to championing efficiency reforms within the Pentagon. We tackle the delicate balance of civilian authority in military operations, a theme underscored by the controversial events aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt during the COVID-19 crisis. Explore with us the significance of agile thinking in leadership and the vital lessons learned during tumultuous times that demanded the toughest decisions in the face of public scrutiny.
We also highlight Modly's dedication to supporting Navy and Marine Corps veterans, with profits from his book going directly to related charities. This commitment, combined with our discussion on transcending traditional systems and fostering innovation, encapsulates the essence of transformative leadership. Tune in for an episode brimming with deep insights, from the power of questioning established norms to the personal impacts of leading through change. Whether you're a military enthusiast or a leadership aficionado, this episode promises a treasure trove of wisdom and inspiration.
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So, ponch, even though we're not academy grads, we certainly are Navy football fans and you never know who you're going to run into at a Navy football game. And I had the honor of being introduced, from one of my mentors and close friends to one of his mentors and close friends that was two years ahead of him at the academy and that's the Honorable Tom Mobley that's joining us and he's got a phenomenal book, as you and I have both read through it, called Vectors, which we highly recommend, and it's an interesting look into a culture that you and I are very familiar with, from a perspective that we're not necessarily familiar with, because this perspective comes right from the top and we want to talk about that and culture and learn from Tom and tell everybody to get this book, because the concepts and the ideas that Tom talks about in the book are so pertinent to any industry, any domain, and there's a lot of great stuff to take out of it. Anything you want to add, ponch, as we jump in here, I do want to add something.
Ponch Rivera:The timeline for which this book was written, for the most part during this period, lines up well with how we created the flow system. So the CR, the SRR which we may talk about, the USS McCain, uss Fitzgerald, the work that I was doing at the Safety Center, the work we were trying to do on culture, building high-performing teams, all that became what is now known today as the flow system evolution of lean and agile thinking in the age of complexity. You'll see that a lot of things that are written in Tom's book are about complex adaptive systems and that type of thinking. Very fired up to be here. Thanks for being here, tom. Can I call you Tom, by the way? Sure.
Mark McGrath:Well, Tom, why don't you start us off by just how did you get to that position in the first place?
Thomas Modly:Oh, that's it.
Mark McGrath:You're in the Pentagon one day, you're a midshipman at the Academy one day and you're at the Pentagon the next day and you have an amazing career. Tell us your story a little bit so we can give the listeners some context.
Thomas Modly:Well, first of all, thanks, thanks, guys, for having me on. I really enjoy the opportunities to talk about the book and some of the things that I learned, uh, during my time there at the at the Pentagon this recent time. But, um, it really wasn't something that like one day I was in one place and the next day I was in the Pentagon. So you know, there's about 30 years in between, uh, between that. But, um, it's an interesting story because I had sort of had a career that went in between government and private sector. I was on active duty in the Navy for seven years and had the advantage of, back in the day, when I was at the Naval Academy, they offered the opportunity for guys and gals who had finished their undergraduate work early to pursue a graduate degree. So it's now formally called VJEP, the Volunteer Graduate Education Program. But when I was there it was sort of an experimental thing and there were seven of us six or seven of us who finished our undergrad work early, and so they allowed us to drive into DC and take graduate courses and get work on master's degree. So there's a reason for me explaining this, because I finished up my my master's right before I started flight school just after graduation from the Naval Academy, in in in politics American politics, international relations, and and so because of that I had the subspecialty coding in Palm Hill affairs that when I rolled out of my first C-Tour it made me eligible for certain P-coded billets. One that was open was at the Air Force Academy to teach in their poli-sci department. There I was drafted into that job and went out there, sort of drafted into that job, and went out there and left because of that tour, which was really a fantastic tour, because you can't really underestimate the value of standing in front of people five times a day and speaking to them about things and learning as you go, and learning how to talk to people and interact with them and question them and, you know, develop your Socratic methods for teaching.
Thomas Modly:But despite that, with respect to my career in the Navy, it put a big limiter on it and I was being told I'd have to transition to a new aircraft which was going to be a one and a half year process, because the helicopter that I flew was being phased out of the Navy. You know I did have the opportunity to go to fixed wing, which I flirted with a little bit, but I just didn't really want to take that amount of time and it's interesting when you're young how you think about a year and a half and it seems like such a long time and it really isn't. But in that frame of mind it was for me. And then they told me I'd be looking at back-to-back-to-back sea tours to get competitive again and I just decided that that's not something that I wanted. I really wanted to do and so I decided to get out and go to business school and I got an MBA, which is where I met probably someone we'll talk about later in the podcast, a guy named Don Saul who ended up becoming a professor at MIT. Talks a lot about agility and I did corporate strategy in M&A for about 10 years in the DC area. Mostly started out in aerospace and defense um, aviation type businesses then moved into high tech and, uh, after nine, 11, um.
Thomas Modly:The secretary of defense at the time, secretary Rumsfeld, has put together this thing called the defense business board where he had invited 20 or so senior executive CEOs from around the country to come in and advise him on business transformation in the Pentagon and this was sort of the first big attempt at trying to. You know, rumsfeld came out of government, went to business, came back into the Pentagon and said, oh my God, this place is just, you know, arcane with respect to its business processes and its supply chain and financial management. You know, we hadn't had an audit. We still haven't had an audit. We can talk about that too, a successful one anyway. And so he wanted to get some advice from private sector CEOs. So they didn't have anyone to run that board and they didn't want to have a career civil servant do it. They didn't want to have a military person do it.
Thomas Modly:So you know, my resume showed up through a connection that I had and I was sort of the nice mix of all those different things, you know academic experience and government, as well as teaching it, as well as active duty, military plus time in business. So I was a nice fit for that position and I was there for about a year and a half and then President Bush got reelected and I was asked to step up and become the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Financial Management. And then I inherited the entire business transformation portfolio between me and a guy in AT&L and we came together and created a new defense agency called the Business Transformation Agency to try and drive that change and it's interesting, we can talk about this a little bit thing. We can talk about this a little bit. I actually have an op-ed that's coming out in american thinker tomorrow about this thing called doge, which is the concept that elon musk and vivek ramoswamy are trying to create, this department of government efficiency, and I'm advising them not to do that, but but uh, anyway, you can read about that tomorrow, um, or we can talk about a little bit today, but at any rate, um, I left after about five years and then went to thrice waterhouse coopers where I was working.
Thomas Modly:I was their um, I was their senior defense uh network leader for the firm, and so I got to work with our defense businesses all around the world as they dealt with smaller defense agencies and it was really. That was very enlightening too, because, um, coming from the U S defense department, which is the largest, most complex, you know, industrial organization in the world in my opinion, and then going to these smaller countries with their smaller defenses, I was seeing they were doing a lot of innovative things that we weren't doing um here in the U S because, you know, we were fat with budget and and uh and, uh, there was a war going on and so, um it, it tended to stifle a little bit of innovation on our side. So, um, I did that and um, I actually wasn't really seeking an opportunity to serve in the Trump administration was during the election and how everyone was sort of predicting this is going to be this, you know, very horrible four years and so on. And I there was a guy that I knew who became the head of the defense transition team in the Pentagon. I'd worked with him before when I was there previously, and they were having a really hard time finding qualified people because at that time in the 2016 campaign, there were a lot of very senior and experienced national security people who signed this never Trump letter actually multiple never Trump letters. Well, once you got your name on one of those letters, there was no way you were going to get into the Trump administration and, frankly, a lot of those people were the ones that would have been most aggressive to try and get jobs, but they were basically locked out. So they were looking for people and I basically and I was pretty candid I said, look, I think I understand a couple of these jobs pretty well and I think I could do them pretty well and I could get the ground running. And one of them was Secretary of the Navy or Undersecretary of the Navy, and they'd already selected Richard Spencer for the second half position. And they said well, the under is open, are you interested in interviewing with Secretary Mattis for it? And I said sure.
Thomas Modly:So I went, drove to the Pentagon and this is a very long answer to your question but I went and drove to the Pentagon. I was sitting in the Pentagon parking lot and about to go in for my interview and I got this text from a friend of mine saying that another good friend of ours from the academy, an F-18 guy, had just died of some kind of a bacterial or some kind of infection. This guy was like one of the healthiest guys I knew once in life. And so if I'm offered it, despite all you know the disruptions that it could cause in your life, which is, you know, you know, walking away from a really decent salary and having to rent an extra apartment in DC out of your own pocket, and the long hours and everything else um, it was worth. It would be worth it.
Thomas Modly:Um, if the country cause, I felt I could do something, you know, if I didn't feel like I could do something, if I didn't feel like I was well equipped or I didn't have some ideas, I wouldn't have done it. But so I walked into the interview with secretary Madison. I realized that, you know, if they were going to offer the job to me, I was going to accept. And, um, it wasn't even an interview. He just said when can you start? And uh.
Thomas Modly:So then it took about six months to get through Senate confirmation, not because I was controversial or anything, it's just that's the process. I mean, talk about something that needs a major reform. The entire process for getting a nominee through Senate confirmation is just ridiculous, and it basically burns through 25 of an administration, and if you take the back half of the administration off, which is basically a campaign, you really have like two and a half years to try and do anything, and you know, and that's just not acceptable. But that is what we, that's what our system has produced. Um, so, anyway, I got, I made it through confirmation in november of 2017, and then I was on the job the next week and I went as the under.
Thomas Modly:The under is the chief management officer for the department of the Navy, and so I took it very seriously. I took over control of the CIO function. I said it was going to be mine because I recognized how important that was to the business mission particularly. And then I also decided I would chair the audit committee, the financial audit committee, because these functions needed to be elevated so that the organization recognized that it was important to senior leadership and they really hadn't been before. And then there was a whole series of other things I did with education and so on that we can talk about in greater detail, so that's how I ended up there.
Ponch Rivera:Now I'm familiar with your E4S and a lot of work you've done. I want to hit the juicy stuff first and that is Doge. Um, I want to know uh, you've had plenty of experience trying to create agility, adaptability, innovation inside of the uh department of the Navy. Uh, the Navy and the DOD. You brought in business thinkers. You saw that early with Donald Rumsfeld. In fact, one of the things you brought up in your book was known, knowns and unknown unknowns. We know that was borrowed from Dave Snowden into Admiral Poindexter. That got that into Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld's head, and that was early on in my career as well. So you have a fantastic outsider view on how to change or not to change the government. So can you explain why, or explain your position on Doge? I'm curious about that.
Thomas Modly:Well, the title of my article is Elon and Vivek Don't Doze, just do. And the the idea of creating a new federal agency to cut waste and efficiency out of the federal government to me is an oxymoron and they shouldn't do it. And I think that both of these guys realized that the most effective way to go after these types of things is you got to go after it quickly and you got to have a very small, dedicated team of really smart people who are motivated. Um that you can, that you can provide the intellectual guidance to um once it starts getting disseminated. And I use an example in there and I know it's a bit of a hyperbolic example, but I open up the. I opened it up talking about in 2006, I was in Baghdad at the embassy in the Green Zone, because the agency that I had created in the Department of Defense with Paul Brinkley had taken on a task of trying to help with some of the business processes in Baghdad, contracting things like that that were really really not very efficient, like that that were really really not very efficient.
Thomas Modly:And so I was in the embassy green zone and basically this is an old Saddam Hussein palace right in the center of Baghdad. And in 2006, the war was going very, very poorly for us. There were a lot of service people getting killed every day from IEDs. The insurgency was really raging at the time. There were civilian aid workers getting killed and kidnapped and beheaded and it was a really, really rough time. And I remember walking through the embassy building there which is the old Saddam building, you know big, wide corridors, very, very ornate and walking down the hall and there was a picture, a photograph of somebody you know, official State Department photograph of somebody and I don't remember this person's name and I don't mean to impugn his integrity or anybody's, but it was just symbolic to me. The picture was posted on the wall and it said welcome to US Embassy Baghdad, iraq, our new State Department diversity officer. And the incongruence between that and what was going on outside the green zone to me was very depressing and enlightening at the same time, because I realized that we may not win this war but we're going to be really successful at planting our bureaucracy right in the center of Baghdad bureaucracy right in the center of Baghdad. It just didn't seem right that at that particular time, all these things that were required of a department or a consulate were being put in place that had nothing to do with winning, and so to me it was just an example, and I know it's a bit hyperbolic, but to me the idea of creating a government agency or a new defense department or a new government department, federal department, to create more effective government, to me is just not right.
Thomas Modly:This has got to be a very small team and what I say in the article is like, look, it's going to take. You know everyone's like, oh, we need somebody to go scrub the numbers. I'm like you know it'll take you guys about 24 hours, including coffee breaks, to like figure out where the waste is. That is not the hard part. The hard part is figuring out how to get it out of there, and that's where I don't know if, um, if, uh, boyd talks about rocks, about you know, but really like the goal of a CEO, the real objective of a CEO, other than setting a vision, in my opinion is getting those big rocks out of the way so that people that work for you are empowered to get stuff done and they don't focus their effort on getting those rocks out of the way.
Thomas Modly:This is not going to happen. This is not going to happen. This is not going to work, because this is not a, this is not a two-year process. This is a 10-year evolution to transform something as big as this. So if you're going to embark on it, you better be really, really clear about what those rocks are and how you're going to get them out of there. That's where you should be spending almost 90 percent of your effort. If you're elon musk and vivek ramaswamy, that's what they should be doing.
Thomas Modly:And so I talk about in the article. I talk about what I think the five biggest rocks are, and they're humongous and they're going to be really, really difficult to overcome. So, anyway, that's my opinion on that. But, like I say in my book often, and I say it often in other circumstances I don't know if you guys have seen the big lebowski, but there's a great scene in the big lebowski where, uh where, jeff lebowski's in the bowling alley and some guys you know the guy next to him, jesus cantana, who was this very outgoing bowler and he's like screaming and cursing at him about how he's gonna they're gonna wipe them out in their next match. Lebowski looks at him and says Well, you know, that's just like your opinion, man. So this article, it's just like my opinion. It is my opinion, but I've got some scars, having tried to do this before. I want this effort to be really successful, so I just hope that they can focus on the right things.
Mark McGrath:Well, kudos for quoting, I think, the greatest movie of all time.
Thomas Modly:One of them, for sure, yeah.
Mark McGrath:I mean, there's so many valuable life lessons in that book. Oddly enough, the small sidebar but the congruence of that movie to the theories of John Boyd, specifically with some of the Eastern influence. There's a lot of. We just have our next episode with you, tom.
Thomas Modly:There you go.
Mark McGrath:So not long after the Trump administration kicks off and we're moving through 2017, there was a first of. It seemed like a series of collisions in the Pacific. Like a series of collisions in the Pacific and, from the outsider looking in, that knows enough about the Department of the Navy and what goes on to be dangerous and command and leadership and things like that you started to wonder about what were the reasons, what were the cultural reasons? What is the warfighting culture like that? We're not building resourceful leaders and people are looking to pass the buck, or are we too over reliance on technology? And those sorts of questions emerge when those ships hit. But from your vantage point, what was it that you were seeing and the things that you thought about when the Fitzgerald and McCain and others were occurring?
Thomas Modly:So those happened within weeks of each other in the summer, while I was waiting for confirmation so I wasn't in the seat yet this sort of landed on Richard Spencer's lap and unfortunately for him he didn't have a full team yet I wasn't there.
Thomas Modly:I'm not sure if Fonda Gertz was there yet. No, he wasn't, because he got confirmed with me. He got confirmed with me, so he didn't have a full team really to sort of help him set a vision, and that stuff hit almost immediately. So I think obviously in most of these instances there aren't just one reason why it happened, but there clearly were some cultural issues, I think out there in pack fleet, with the way that decisions were being made and the pace at which people were being required to operate and the lack of an ability to say, you know, to basically call a um, taking on the toughest missions and doing it and sucking it up and going and going and going forward, um. But there comes a point where I think that the pace of operations out there became so um, intense, um and so relentless that there was a lot of fatigue involved. There was a lot of um also complacency. Complacency is one of the villains that I cite in my book. Sorry, that's not a person's name, but it's a villain that I cite in my book. I think there was a bit of that. I think that it's interesting. I remember sitting up in Newport and watching. You guys may have had the opportunity to do this too, um Ponch, you may have had an opportunity to do this, but we were you were they actually, they re simulated being on the bridge of the Fitzgerald and you could basically watch everything that they were watching at the time. And you know, this is like a 45 minute or so evolution, uh, of of the things that happened. And I remember and they pointed this out to me that about 45 minutes before the collision, another container ship goes right by the starboard side of the Fitzgerald and no one on the bridge said anything, like there was just like there was no communication. No one said anything, the captain wasn't called nothing. So I don't know. I mean, it's just one of those strange, you know, one of the strange things, but it was an accumulation and clearly there were a lot of different things that were identified that could be corrected, because I believe both of those reports that came out in response to that had well over 110 recommendations. Obviously there was overlap between the two but a lot of things that could be done and be fixed and be done differently.
Thomas Modly:But there is also, I think and I think this speaks to sort of the some of the stuff that happened at the um, at the at the end of my tenure in my book that I described the, the, the attitude of command and in the military, in the navy, particularly this idea that the captain is the captain of the ship and this and he's out there and he's out there alone and he or she and that's their job and and um, they're ultimately responsible for everything. Uh, so there's there's good and bad to that Um. I think that served the Navy particularly well in an era when we didn't have instantaneous communications and you sort of had to trust these folks to go out and do the job. But that's not the world we live in anymore, and so I think that needs to be rethought quite a bit, me having been in the navy during the cold war for a very short amount of time, leaving and coming back 30 years later, and most of the people that uh were my contemporaries and peers of the naval academy were out now.
Thomas Modly:Three and four star admirals in the navy. These were all class of 80 to 85 87 type people. Um, they grew up in it and there were certain things that I I learned in my time in private sector that it didn't seem that they learned um within the culture of, within the culture of the Navy. So, um, I, I I found that, uh, there there weren't. I didn't find any nefarious intentions um from any of the people that I had disagreements with or problems with. I just didn't think about things the way I did, and so I think that ended up causing some of the issues, particularly at the end.
Ponch Rivera:So on the SRR and the CR I can't remember which one it was, but that's how I came back onto active duty was to work on the culture team and kind of like what you did previously, which is bringing that outside perspective back into the military. What we did is we were able to engage with just about any CEO, any academic that we wanted to, and we identified some amazing recommendations, recommendations from things like I hate to say this, but Scrum Not that I'm a proponent of using Scrum everywhere, but understanding that that's borrowed from John Boyd's observable intersite act loop in the Toyota production system. We talked to Toyota executives we looked at I didn't reach out to Don Soule, but we did talk to Steve Spear. I think you're familiar with his work and his work on the USS Ford a little bit later on, and he and I did some work together on naval safety a few years after that. My point behind this is to change the system. You had to go outside to bring the stuff in and here's the key thing that I discovered the very tools and techniques and methods that are working so well in business are actually borrowed from the military, and this includes things like the Kenevan framework which emerged from DARPA. It includes things like red teaming, which comes from UFMCS. We had that school and I believe it's shut down now.
Ponch Rivera:If you look at tactical decision making under stress, going back to the USS Vincennes shoot down I believe that was 90, I can't remember the year on that they had task saturation, new technology, a lot of information coming at them and one of the things that they discovered is people need to learn how to work together in teams with technology that didn't survive in the SWO community. That moved on to aviation crew resource management, which you may have been a part of, and I think that started in the early 90s. I believe it did. Yeah, that's when we finally made it.
Ponch Rivera:No-transcript phrase psychological safety in here. It just won't work and I'm like well, that's what it's actually called and it came from aviation resource management taught to surgical teams, and Amy Edmondson picked up on this and again, she's not the one that discovered this, but really brought it to the forefront. So what's and I guess my point is, if we're talking about do and doge, there are very good lessons inside the military that can be adopted right now to find efficiency, effectiveness, agility, resilience, safety. In fact, I'll argue that the best lessons in the Navy the US Navy are borrowed from the safety center. If you take those lessons right now and you apply them to innovation, you're absolutely going to destroy everybody. And again, this is my view of the world. This is how we got the flow system. I just want to take that moment to share that with you, because I think what you set up with the you call it E4S is that right.
Thomas Modly:Yeah.
Ponch Rivera:I believe that was your intent. Right Was to get that gray matter working again.
Thomas Modly:Yes, I mean so there were institutional motivations behind that, but also, broadly speaking, it was about creating agile thinkers. Creating agile thinkers, the the idea that you can have all the you know agility in the systems that you want with respect to the weapon systems and or the you know great example, like the aircraft carrier, that the um, the move to create electromagnetics there for launching and recovering aircraft, and and uh, I had this you know discussion, heated discussion with President Trump about this, about the value of electromagnetics and what that can do for us with respect to agility and ability to shift to different payloads and more quickly and generate sororities more quickly, and so on and so forth. He clearly had somebody in his ear talking about how steam was better and you know I didn't have time, you know, to sort of disabuse him of that idea. But, um, it's great if you have all these things that can do that, but it's much more important to have people that are agile minded as well, um, adaptable, because I always said that the most important, the most predictable thing we can say about the future is that it's going to be unpredictable. And so how do we bring people into the? Or how do we take people into the military and prepare them to handle unpredictable events, because to me, that's what they're going to have to deal with. The predictable stuff is easy to be prepared for. It's the unpredictable stuff that's not, and it requires agile minds.
Thomas Modly:And so what I really wanted to do with E4S was come up with a way to sort of unify the Navy education system so that we could be ensured that we were developing that and it'd been it just like every other thing in the Navy. It had become a completely siloed thing. You know everything. You had the war college over there doing its thing. You had the postgraduate school doing something else. No real relationship with the Naval Academy, which is sort of our flagship institution, no real coordination with Marine Corps University, and then nothing really for the enlisted people. So we created the naval community college, um, just to continue to create this culture of continuous learning, with the purpose of creating people that were more adept at dealing with unpredictability. And you know for, for for two and a half years, I talked about unpredictable events, unpredictable events, be prepared for them, and the big unpredictable event happens in the spring of 2020, which is COVID, and some Navy CEOs and organizations and installations performed magnificently and others didn't.
Mark McGrath:And I think a lot of that had to do with how prepared they were to be able to deal with something unpredictable like this is training the mind of the individual warfighter first, such that there's a cultural unity across the force where everyone is a Marine first. Everyone has very high expectations of how they're going to perform in asymmetric, nonlinear environments, aka chaos. But starting from a philosophical standpoint, you know, warfighting is a book for the mind.
Mark McGrath:It's not a book about, it's not a how-to manual. Why has that never been able to cross-pollinate over to our other side of the department of the Navy, where maybe we'll find it in pockets, we might find it in squadrons, or we might find it in the SEALs, where they have a focus on sort of building the warfighter, if you will. Why has that never taken hold in the Navy?
Ponch Rivera:Mark, I want to answer that. So my experience was explaining the OODA loop to former fighter pilots. My friends, they have no clue what it is, they think it's just Observe Orient, decide, act right. And then you introduce them back to EM theory, so energy maneuverability theory that John Boyd created to get us the F-16, f-18, a-10, and so forth, and how we use that to understand, you know, rate and radius fights and all that in the cockpit. You make that connection next and they're like wait a minute, he did both of those. Yeah, but the way you use the OODA loop is not the way it was intended. It's. You know there's a lot more behind it than you think, and so I'll argue that I think our military JPME, joint Professional Military Education is pretty phenomenal, and that's because I was able to go through Air Command Staff College and go on and get a JQO call through JPME too as well, and plus I did the Paul Mill stuff with the foreign area officer background.
Ponch Rivera:My point behind this is I don't know if people actually listen to what's being taught to them inside of. You know wicked problems understanding wicked problems, exactly what Tom's bringing up there with, with unpredictability in the future. How do we deal with that. We learned a lot about how do you lead like a gardener, leadership in operations, leadership at the tactical level, leadership at the strategic level, understanding the importance of running rock drills, rehearsal of concepts, which I'll argue now. If you take that concept and apply it like a worldly map to an organization, they're going to crush everybody because you're understanding the landscape right. So, again, I'm just sharing my view with you, mark, and that is I thought we were well prepared. However, what people take out of it, what officers take out of it, matters, and I think that's where our military leadership is failing. They're not connecting the dots from what they're being taught in some of our education systems in the military to what they need to do as leaders. So I just want to throw that out there, tom, see if you have any thoughts on that.
Thomas Modly:Yeah, I think there's a couple problems there that are inhibiting that. One is, I think, that there is a lack of continuity in leadership. I think the turnover, the rapid turn, the massive turnover, all the time that you see Someone just wrote an article about this, criticizing the last four CNOs and how they put out strategic guidance that was not really coordinated, it's not continuous, it sort of shifts one or the other. And I'll tell you this, when I was there, the CNO's strategic guidance, I was never coordinated on it. I mean, no one ever showed it to me as the under or the SECNAF prior to it being published. So I mean, who is setting the direction? Who's responsible for setting the direction?
Thomas Modly:I think the gap, um, this is a bigger question, but I think the gap is that, um, that, uh, I think that the service chiefs, particularly like in the Navy and the Marines, they've taken on the responsibility for determining what the strategy should be for both organizations and that's really Congress's responsibility and the president's, and we don't have that strong sort of leadership from Congress that says this is our maritime strategy, this is what we're going to fund, this is what you guys need to go execute, and then you guys have the title 10, responsibility for man training and equipping and making it happen. Um, obviously there should be input, but um, it's, it's otherwise. You know, every four years, like it's, it's a sine wave, you know, from one thing to the next, to the next. And that's why I talk a lot about this whole 355 ship thing in the book, because it became pretty obvious to me that it was just a meaningless number. No one, really, unless you got the money for it. It was just a meaningless number. And I actually had a four-star, who will remain nameless, who told me yeah, I just tattooed 355 on my forehead every time I go over to Congress, but none of us really believe that can happen.
Thomas Modly:So that is to me emblematic of a problem that the higher you get, the more risk averse you are. No one's willing to take a risk, no one's willing to throw their stars on the table. I mean, look, we haven't had great performance from the military in the last 10 years or so. I mean there's been a lot of major failures, particularly Afghanistan. No one resigned or no one threw their stars on the table and said I can't support this. I think there's just a level of risk aversion now and I think that you know legal there's I talk about that in the book sort of the legal precedents that have been set, um, that make people more and more risk averse and so people are afraid of getting in trouble, um, or afraid of being, uh, scandalized in the media or criticized in the media or whatever.
Thomas Modly:Um, you know, so you've got a lot of public affairs people around there running, you know messaging and things like that, and you know they do a fine job. But I don't think we had that many public affairs people and lawyers driving decision-making when we were fighting World War II or even the Cold War. But there's a lot more of it now and I and I assume you know that's part of living in a media-driven world and you know our elected officials look at that stuff and that's how they they make decisions so well and I, I guess that's a good seg to.
Mark McGrath:I mean sort of the, the, the end part of the book about the, uh, the situation on the theater roosevelt during, during, during, during COVID. There was a media effect to it, right or wrong. It was an effect that had a massive influence on the course of events and we could discuss about how well. It had nothing to do with war fighting, I mean your standpoint, it's clear in the book. I mean that's your charge as the Secretary of the Navy is to make sure that everything's operational and we're ready to fight our nation's wars at a moment's notice. And some of these things you know culturally occur and they slip out of the cracks. And the next thing, all the moms, groups on Facebooks of sailors and everything else is going crazy. Yet you're trying to keep everybody focused back on the mission. That had to have been a. You know, tell us about that.
Thomas Modly:Well, you know it evolved pretty quickly and, you know, devolved pretty quickly. So, yeah, I think that if you look at the vectors and people who haven't read the book, the vectors are the things that I wrote to the fleet every week. I wrote a message to everybody you know, a million people in the organization every friday about what was on my mind, what should be on their minds, etc. Um and uh, if you look at the two or three weeks leading up to that, I was talking about unpredictability and how this could be the time that is going to define your time in the Navy and how are you going to react? And and um, because no one would have ever predicted this, but this is how this is likely going to be the time that defines your time in the Navy, and um, so just to run quickly through the story, that when we found out that the ship had a COVID outbreak on it, the decision was made. We thought about Okinawa. That wasn't going to work. They didn't have enough beds and things like that in case we needed to evacuate a lot of sailors. So the decision was made to go to Guam. The ship gets into Guam, I believe, on a Friday, and on that Sunday I reached out to my chief of staff, bob Love, and I said, bob, would you please call the captain and tell him that I want to come out, meet with the crew, make sure they're getting all the support they need from the governor of Guam, who I just literally had been in my office like a week before. So I had a pretty good relationship with her and she's a former registered nurse and understood a lot of the health challenges and so on and a really good person. So I offered to come out there and make sure that they had everything they needed. And he waved me off, said no, it would be too much of a distraction. And so Bob told me this and he said the only frustration that he had was he wanted to get the sailors off the ship quicker. So Bob called the director of the Navy staff, a guy named Andy Heipley who used to be my chief of staff and another great Ohio guy, marine 06. And Andy was like yeah, we're all over this and they were getting the hotel rooms. They had mobilized 900 people on the island of Guam to get the sailors off, get them meals three times a day. They had a whole command center set up. I mean it was a pretty remarkable movement that had been done fairly quickly.
Thomas Modly:Sometime in the first couple days they told the captain that they could move the sailors off out of their berthing and put them in tents. They had a bunch of tents set up and he decided he didn't want to do that. He said it would be uncomfortable for the crew to do that. So that was his decision. He didn't discuss it with the strike group commander, he just said no, um.
Thomas Modly:So about two hours after the conversation with or the exchange with, bob, uh, the captain sent out this letter. Uh, that was a very much of a hair on fire kind of letter that uh, um, that uh basically was saying that we needed to get the sailors off quickly. He didn't feel like he was getting enough help. He was reaching out to people to see how they could get um more rooms from different areas and so on and so forth. And unfortunately for him, had it been sent over a secure network or directly to me, it wouldn't have been a problem, but somehow or another it got leaked. It got leaked to the San Francisco Chronicle. They wrote this big article about how this pleas for help from the captain were not being answered, and so on and so forth, and of course that got the interest of the president and the secretary of defense and the media and people in Congress, and so, you know, I started doing my own investigation.
Thomas Modly:I had been asking the CNO to reach out to the captain as well and he had just sort of rebuffed me multiple times to do that. But what ended up happening was I received a call from Secretary of Defense saying that the president wasn't happy and I said well, he's not the only one, I'm not happy either. And so he asked me if he should handle it for me and I said no. I said this is a Navy problem and it's kind of my job to keep the president not worried about what's happening in the Navy, so he doesn't need to worry about it, the Navy will handle this. So I guess that message got back to him and there were some schemes that were cooked up by the second half I mean SecDef and others to just suspend this guy for the captain for until we did a full investigation.
Thomas Modly:And I said I don't really. I said I know how investigations work in the Navy. They take months and I've got a ship in a crisis right now. That's in the spotlight of the media. And, frankly, to me this is like the ninth inning when your closer is not, you know, struggling and it's time to you know, go to the bullpen and pull somebody else in. And I just felt like I needed to steady your hand on the ship.
Thomas Modly:And it was confirmed after talking to the captain himself and I asked him you know how things were going. So two days later I said how things are going and he said that. He said that things were fine, they were getting the people in the hotel rooms and you know. So, on, on and so forth. I asked him why did he send out the letter? He said that they had just gotten back 50 positive tests and he felt like it was just time to send up a signal there. I said, okay, I understand why you did that, but you have to understand what's happening here in response to that. But you know, you have to understand what's happening here in response to that. And he did. And then I talked to the strike group commander the next morning and I asked him what happened. And the key to me was that the strike group commander told me that he confronted the captain as well, because he never had a chance to talk to him about this letter, either before it went off the ship and the strike group commander told me.
Mark McGrath:And, to clarify, he was the first person in the skipper's chain of command right and he's there co-located on the ship.
Thomas Modly:Yeah, they're right next to each other on the ship yeah and so he asked the captain why he didn't talk to him about it before he sent it. And the captain and captain kroger actually wrote about this in his book too he made the intentional decision not to talk to him about it because he knew that the strike group commander would not have let him send it. And the strike group commander told me that I would have not let him send it. There were other ways that we could have gotten the message out, but he did it intentionally because he quote unquote didn't want to be disobeying a direct order if he was told not to do it because he knew he was going to send it anyway. He had made the decision he was going to send it, and so it was kind of a manipulation from my view. But also it was premeditated, you know, insubordination of his strike group commander, who was an aviator like him. I mean, I've learned later that they didn't have the greatest working relationship, but that's on them, you know, that's on them to worry about. So I made the decision to relieve him, and it was met with just a flurry of, you know, incredible reaction, both from the Hill, from the media, obviously, mostly from the blue side of Congress. I actually reached out and spoke to several senior members on the armed services committees before I formally made the decision, to inform them that this is what I was doing, and most of the Republicans were like, well, sir, it's up to you, it's your call. And it was actually a Democratic senator who said I don't get involved in personnel decisions, that's why you're there, and so I appreciated that. Several others were, you know, didn't think it was the right thing to do, but, um, but once it became, once the media sort of decided to choose sides in it, um, there was a massive pile on and then that manifested itself in all kinds of online, uh, social media hatred, you know, towards me, towards my family. I don't have a very common last name, but people were able to go out on the internet and find my kids and and say nasty things to them and um and so, uh, it became pretty ugly and I decided that I needed to go to Guam and meet with the crew, talk to them, explain to them why I made the decision, because it was obvious he was very popular. He'd only been the CO for about four or five months, but still a very popular guy. I've said this before. I think he's probably a really great guy, but that's not what was working in my calculation at the time.
Thomas Modly:I think he was spooked. I think the ship's doctors had written this letter as well, which, in my opinion, he should have fired them for that for threatening him, but he didn't. But they wrote a letter basically saying that if we didn't evacuate the ship immediately, that 50 people were going to be dead within 10 days. 50 sailors would be dead within 10 days of that point in time, which was like the second day into the crisis. And you know, obviously, as time has gone on, we've realized that none of that is true or possible. I think what I've heard is that the Navy only lost one active duty sailor to COVID. What I've heard is that the Navy only lost one active duty sailor to COVID. So that's among 335,000 sailors and outbreaks on several different ships. But I think they spooked him.
Thomas Modly:And the final line of their letter? Well, the first line of their letter is telling it basically says that the battle against COVID on the USS Teddy Roosevelt has been lost. That was their first thing. And then the last line was it is our intention to make all this information available to the public so the world knows what's happening here on Earth, and they said they were going to release it and they all signed it. None of these doctors was an epidemiologist or an immunologist or an infectious disease specialist, but they've been reading what was getting promulgated on the Internet about how deadly this virus was and, frankly, it could have been.
Thomas Modly:But we were doing the best we can to get the sailors off and make sure that they were free of the virus, clean of the virus and get them back on the ship. So we fly to Guam, we pick up the new CEO, who had been the previous CEO for two and a half years, and met him in Hawaii, flew over. Of course, that became a new story too, in terms of how much it costs to do that. It's funny, the guy who wrote that article I haven't seen him write any other article in the last four years about how much it costs for any government official to do anything um, but that was the topic of the day. I know that's a snarky thing to say, but I mean it's just one of those things that that the environment created, um and so, um.
Thomas Modly:So, anyway, we, uh, we went over there. I got there first thing in the morning. Um, I told them, you know, like 2 o'clock in the morning or something, and I stayed up. I called my wife. I asked her to reach out to the captain's wife in California and talk to her and tell her that we support them as a Navy family. And she wouldn't take my wife's call, which I don't blame her, but I thought it was our responsibility to do that at the time.
Thomas Modly:And then we went and toured the facilities. What was going on? I saw the command center. I saw all these people and I kept hearing over and over again from the sailors and stuff that were working on the ground that the captain's letter really took the wind out of their sails because they had been working 15, 16-hour days getting this command center up and his letter made it sound like no one was doing anything, which obviously wasn't true. And then I met with the governor of Guam who had to reopen her hotels to accommodate the sailors. They had sent everybody home from COVID. Everything was shut down so they had to bring the hotel workers back and now they're afraid that 3,000 infected sailors are coming into their hotels and they're going to infect the whole island and everyone's going to get sick and die. And she told me that the captain's letter cost her about three days and getting the hotels ready because of the panic that set in because of that. And she was very strong about you know, look, the Navy's part of our family here and we're going to take care of them, which was a very, very courageous thing to do in the moment. But she was upset about how this letter had caused these issues.
Thomas Modly:So we go down to, we drive down to the ship and I had told the, I told the team and I only went over there with my chief of staff and and um and my military aid. I told the team that I was going on a ship and I was going to talk to the crew and I didn't want to do a speech, I just wanted to go around the ship and talk to them. And, uh, sometime in the morning they said, sir, you can't do that, we're response, ncis, protective services and the medical communities said we can't let the secretary of the Navy go on a COVID infected ship. You know we're responsible for your safety. I said, well, there's 3000 people on there, so I'm going and so you guys have to figure out a way to get me on the ship. And so they said, oh, so we'll, we'll work something out. And so they decided that they were going to put me in this room on the quarter deck with the one MC and talk to the crew that way. And I said that's fine, but submit, have them submit questions so that I can answer all their questions, because I won't have an opportunity to have interaction.
Thomas Modly:So, as we're heading down to the pier to meet with the senior officers on the ship, I ship Bob Love. My chief of staff says, sir, I got all the questions here, but I don't think you should read them right now. And I said, why is that? He said, well, you're just not going to like them. And so there were about 33 questions. They were all typed up.
Thomas Modly:Someone had clearly packaged these together and reviewed them all, and some of them were, you know, some of them were very basic, sort of logistic questions how long do you think before we can go back to sea? Where will we be staying? What's the processes? But some of them had more of a tone that were, I would say, a little bit disrespectful. One was like sir, how many dead sailors would be acceptable to you before you got us any help? Um, we're not at war. Why should anyone die? You know, those types of things that were had been parroted in the media and and also the captain's letter said some of those types of things, and so I get it. They were, you know, they were distressed, they weren't getting good information and and um, so I went down and I met with the senior officers of the ship first and we sat sat down at a picnic table but all of us had masks on and gloves and so it was really hard to gauge people's expressions.
Thomas Modly:But I sort of told them what was happening back at home and how the nation was really having a hard time with the virus and they really expected the Navy not to be having a hard time with the virus. And it was our responsibility to show that we can work through this, we can fight through this and we can come out the other end and be stronger, and that the captain's letter had created this sense that A the senior leadership wasn't doing anything. This was a dire situation for the sailors. Here it's spooled up all the family members. That's a dynamic I didn't have to deal with when I was on active duty, but all these sailors walk on board with their own phones and their ability to communicate wherever. So a lot of that messaging was going back and forth and so I said, look, I'm going to go talk to the crew now. Does anyone have anything to say to me in terms of what I should tell them? And not a single one of them said anything. They just sort of stared at me.
Mark McGrath:And just to clarify, these are all the department heads and all the squadron commanders and things like that.
Thomas Modly:Yeah, yeah, xo strike group commander was there. Xo was sitting right next to me. I'll never forget. I looked over at him and these poor guys, I mean, they were obviously fatigued, and I I said um, I said uh, exo anything? And he just kind of looked at me and shook his head and I was like, okay. So you know, that's one of the one of the things I talk about. One of my lessons learned in the book is about unmasking yourself, and it's a metaphor, obviously, but um, it's really important, like to unmask yourself when you're talking to people, um, and not don't hide behind your rank or your privilege or whatever, because you don't you, you can't really get to the heart of anything if you're covered um and so, um, that was just a classic sort of metaphorical example of that. I mean, I really couldn't sense other than the fact that they were all tired and frustrated with everything and probably not too happy with me, because I think they all like their CEO.
Mark McGrath:You had mentioned too in the book that the CEO was basically given a pep rally and exited the ship as a martyred.
Thomas Modly:Yeah, I don't think that was his fault. Um, he, that was. That happened on Friday. This, this is what sort of started to escalate all of the vitriol against me, because that Friday, um, he was, he was leaving the ship and somehow they found out he was leaving the ship and they decided to have a big pep rally for him and no one's wearing a mask and everyone's cheering and slapping each other on the back, you know, and that also got leaked to the media, of course, and um, and then later that day we got the word that he had covid also. So not only was he, you know, the hero that was taken from command, but now he was sick and you know, it sort of did create this martyr, uh, impression for him of him in the media. Um, so that that really helped to drive my decision to go out there. I just felt I needed to go and I had been.
Thomas Modly:There's a whole series of discussions in the book about my interactions with admiral gilday on this and how I asked him to intervene and call and everything, and he just refused to do it. Um, I mean, literally refused to do it. Um, and this is sort of the thing. You know, this is not how we do things in the Navy type of speech that I got from him. Um, and I, I was like you know, you know this is not 1895 anymore. You know you can pick up the phone and call this guy and you're you know, if Admiral Aquilino or Admiral Mears out there like have a problem with you jumping the chain of command to talk to this captain who's in a crisis, that's their problem, that's not your problem. So, but he just he wouldn't do it so and I think he was. You know, that's what, that's not your problem, so, but he just he wouldn't do it so and I think he was. You know, that's what I'm saying. I think they were just raised in a different culture and they just didn't feel it was a responsibility. But I, I can think of you know, I, I checked myself on this because I had a conversation with admiral fogo, who was out here at the time, and I asked him the same question like would you ever hesitate to like pick up the phone and call a CEO of a ship? And he goes, no, because I do it all the time, it's just that some guys don't. And I said OK, so, so, anyway.
Thomas Modly:So I ended up going on the ship and as I'm walking to the ship, the command master chief came up to me and said that you know, he heard what I was saying and that the crew was going to be fine and they were going to get them in line. And I had set up I actually set up an email account right when COVID started where anyone could send emails about improvements they think the Navy needs to happen. And I think it was called stemdisterncom because we were we were doing a whole stem to stern review and a sailor from the tr had sent me an email early on in the crisis saying sir, don't worry about what's going on here, it's not as bad as they're making it sound, and so on and so forth. So anyway, I get up, as I'm walking up the gangplank to to go up to the quarter deck, I just kind of see these sailors on the flight deck, their masks, they're looking down at me and I could tell like I'm like the least popular guy, uh, in that area at that moment.
Thomas Modly:Um, but I just kind of kept thinking about Guam and you know there was 25,000 marines who died on Guam to defend it. You know, 60, 70 years ago, and I'd met some of them who had been there and, um, I just, you know, I just had this perspective that I'm not sure these guys understand how important it is what they're doing out here, and so I got up on the quarterdeck and I was given a microphone and just started talking extemporaneously and mangled some of my comments and that's totally on me and the media took some of those words and manipulated them to say that I said something that I didn't really say, which is that I called the captain naive and stupid, which I didn't say. I said he was either naive or stupid or he did it on purpose, and I knew at that point he did it on purpose. So the point was that, by doing it on purpose, he had really violated his chain of command and done something that he shouldn't be doing as a CO. So, and then I went on to talk and you know I ended my talk basically quoting a speech that I gave at the Naval Academy graduation in 2018 about what their responsibility was, and their responsibility was not to love their CEO. It was to love the people that they're responsible for and the Constitution and the nation they've pledged to defend. And let those people worry about themselves. Your job is to worry about the people that work for you, and that's sort of how I ended it.
Thomas Modly:I think I said beat army, and then I walked off and I was kind of like, had this feeling like, well, that's probably the last thing I'm ever going to say is, as the secretary of navy, I just I just didn't have a good feeling and, uh, by the time we got home, um, after it, sort of admonishing them for using the media as part of their chain of command, they had been recording, someone had recorded my remarks, sent it to NBC News and then it was all over the news by the time I got home, and the president, when I landed at Andrews, the president had made a statement that when he was asked about this you know he was very good at solving arguments between people and so he'll just have me and the captain in and we'll solve this argument and I was like I'm not in an argument with anybody, um, and I don't want to put the president in a position to like mediate. Something that I don't think is is an argument. Um, it's not really so. At that moment I realized my job of trying to keep the president focused on big picture stuff and not Navy minutiae. I kind of failed at that, and so I realized that I really probably couldn't go on effectively, as the second half, the blue side of Congress, would have been, you know, just very, very difficult to overcome and it would have just been investigations, and you know, which is fine. And the Navy did an investigation of the whole thing, and um found that the captain and both the captain and strike commander had not performed well and had done a bunch of other things that had caused COVID to actually spread more quickly on the ship, and so he was not given his command back, which is unfortunate because, oh, and I left out a very important part.
Thomas Modly:Before I left Guam, I went up and met with the captain and I sat down with him and I said look, I you know we had to sit across this long table up at Admiral Nimitz's house. Have you guys been there before on Guam, up on the top of the hill? No, so he's sitting at one end of the table and I'm on the other. And I said look, I just want you to know, since I didn't get a chance to talk to you, why I relieved you and he said, sir, you don't have to say another word. I put you in a tough position as the Secretary of the Navy and if I had been in your shoes I would have relieved me too.
Thomas Modly:But I did it for the crew and I said that's very noble and I understand, but you have to, and I've already talked to the Naval Air Commander, bullet Miller, in San Diego and he's got a job for you to come back to. But once you get home and you get healthy and if you want to, if you want to come to Washington and work for me directly, I said this COVID thing is going to go on for at least another year and I've been calling every CEO of every ship and installation in the Navy that has COVID. But I can't do that every day. I said, but I need someone to do that every day and I'd like to set up a cell to sort of manage that from the secretariat position. If you want to come and run that for me, you know I would love to have you and he sort of nodded and, you know, appreciated it. I think he probably knew that that wasn't something he'd want to do necessarily, but I was serious about it. I had mentioned it to my staff on the Thursday before we even went to Guam that I wanted to do it. They all thought it was a horrible idea. But I didn't think it was a horrible idea.
Thomas Modly:But when I became Secretary of the Navy I had two artifacts placed in my office. One was a fitness report of a young ensign from 1917 who had run his ship aground and it's basically sort of a poor fitness report for poor judgment or whatever for judgment whatever. And then next to that, just a few feet away, I had a massive, probably six by 10 foot oil painting of Admiral Nimitz signing the surrender documents on the deck of the USS Missouri in Tokyo Harbor and the fit rep was his fit rep as an ensign in 1917. And I had those in my office to just show to people that you know, mistakes happen all the time, people make mistakes all the time, but they can't. They don't have to be fatal and there's ways to recover from them, and so you just have to be able to learn from them, and I think you become better when you learn from them. So that was my sense with him is that I really wanted to.
Thomas Modly:I think this was an unusual circumstance. I don't think he made the right decision in the moment. But, more importantly, I just felt like I needed to have the steadier hand at that moment in charge of the ship, and I didn't feel like that. I felt he could have had an opportunity to continue his career. I didn't know what the report was going to find and, frankly it's interesting Of all the people in the entire crisis that spoke to Captain Crozier during the crisis from Washington, it was just me and Bob Love, my chief of staff.
Thomas Modly:Neither one of us were interviewed for that report, for that investigation. So I don't know what the Navy was thinking about when they did that, but I didn't, you know, I didn't. People were. You know. I got a lot of emails that day like oh, you're vindicated, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I was like you know what? If the Navy had decided that the Navy had decided that he should be reinstated, I would have supported that too. This was a decision I made in the moment, because I needed someone to get that ship back to sea and I just didn't feel like the environment as it had been created by him was right to keep him there. So that was my decision. That was my call. Sorry, that's a long one.
Ponch Rivera:I have a feeling if you ran that scenario again with different you know, secretary of the Navy and CEO of an aircraft carrier you ran that a hundred times you're going to see this exact result over again, right? Just because the novelty of that situation and the information flow and the different orientations that were happening then. So thank you for sharing that story. It's very, very important that people understand civilian authority, how that works in the military, right? I mean, that's you brought that up earlier and you know we are here to support and defend the Constitution of the United States and the civilians that are appointed in those positions that we have to listen up to or we have to. You know you are the authority on this. That's, that's your position anyway. So if those in your command are not doing what you're asking them to do, then maybe we do have a problem in the Navy, right?
Thomas Modly:Well, the hard thing is Ponch. I think this is the problem. A big problem is that I think these guys, they do the best. The senior officers, they do the best they can. So, for example, I left in May of 2020. No, april of 2020.
Thomas Modly:There have been six people either acting or a secretary of the Navy since then. So I mean, the lack of continuity in senior leadership makes it very, very difficult to establish that. And so, for example, richard Spencer came in at second half. He had John Richardson as his CNO and General Neller as his commandant. He didn't pick those guys. Those are people that were picked by the previous administration and so they have to pivot to now a new, different type of leader who's being given orders by a different type of leader and a different type of leader, and that's a very tough thing. So that's why my view is like these guys should be focused on executing the man, train and equip mission, and I also sort of have this feeling that, because of the time that it takes to impact this type of you know, long-term change whatever that's going to be, that's mandated by the Congress you need a secretary of the Navy or any of the services to be there for almost like an FBI director for like 10 years, so they can build a team of people that they trust and there isn't this turnover based on politics turn.
Thomas Modly:There isn't this turnover based on politics, um, because otherwise, then then that I think it's that relationship between the military and the civilian leadership becomes a formality and not a reality. You know what I'm saying. It's more, it's more formal, it's more like, uh, deferential, but it's not. It's not. Yeah, that's my boss and this is what we're doing, because he's got the vision and he's executing the vision. So I feel sorry, I have some empathy for these senior military guys having to deal with that.
Thomas Modly:I mean, think about this particular change over the last five years. Now, right, we're going from a President Trump to a President Biden, to a President Trump again. The types of people that they're bringing, they will have brought in, are going to be very, very different. You know, philosophically, managerially, just, you know, experience-wise, it's just going to be so, you know, for Admiral Frank Heddy and General Smith. I mean, you know I pray for them because it's it's going to be tough dealing with somebody new again. So we'll see, we'll see. I think you know they're very skilled. They're very skilled people, they're smart people.
Ponch Rivera:But I think the department as a whole, the Department of the Navy as a whole, requires a little bit more continuity at the very, very top. Based on your experiences, all your experiences, what lessons could you impart on them about how to transform their organization, as the external landscape is changing so rapidly right now, how can they do that?
Thomas Modly:Well for those that need to. I mean a lot of them. I think a lot of private sector organizations have done an exceptional job at creating all those agile characteristics that I've talked about. At creating all those agile characteristics that I've talked about. There's a lot of elements to that, you know, with respect to creating transparent organizations, collaborative, I think I have eight specific elements that I talk about and I would say look at those elements and not just think about how important they are, but figure out a way to measure how your organization is actually doing on those parameters and I think you'll see a difference.
Thomas Modly:So it's really all about I mean, I'll go to my grave saying this is all about the agile mind, how you create organizations that can learn and can quickly adapt to unpredictability. That's that's going to be the key to success in everything, including government, government agencies, military, et cetera. So there's lots of different paths to that. I know like Dr Saul Don has written extensively on this and has great case examples of how to do that and who's good at and who's not good at it.
Ponch Rivera:But you know the ones that aren't good at it…. I want to pause on. I want to put a pin in that for a second. So on Donald Soule's book, you look at him. He references the military, or leadership lessons from the military for surviving in turbulent environments, which is kind of ironic, don't you think? I mean, I think it's in his book the Age of Turbulence where he writes about that.
Thomas Modly:Yeah, I think well, okay, so the military you got to. I think you sort of have to divorce the military from the bureaucracy that supports the military. So at the unit level, I think you see a lot of this, I think you see a lot of this innovation and so on. You know, I know this is maybe anecdotal, but I think it is true the really innovative, innovative folks they get out, they leave at 06 because they see what happens as you get higher up in terms of how that gets stymied. And yet and they were excited and energized when it was happening at the 0405 level um, down at the, you know, down at those levels and you see it happening there, um, but it gets it. It gets stymied as you get higher. So you know that that's one of the things I don't know how you fix.
Thomas Modly:Fix that problem because, frankly, for a lot of these 06s these are, you know, 05, 06 people who are super talented, the opportunities for them outside of the military are, you know, they're tremendous. And they're even more tremendous now from a financial reward perspective than they were 70 years ago, you know, in the 60s and 70s, where people were transitioning from the military to private sector. It was nice, it was a nice bump, but now it's, you know, it can be a significant life, changing generational, changing type of financial reward, changing generational, changing type of financial reward. And so people get, you know, people get allured by that, and that just doesn't exist in the military.
Thomas Modly:I mean, I tell people all the time that don't really understand the government, um, that I was running ostensibly a million person organization with a 250 billion dollar a year budget, with billions of dollars of weapons, nuclear plants, nuclear power plants, nuclear weapons, and my salary was 168 000 a year. And they there are a lot of people like who, donors? They're like that's, that's impossible, that, what do you mean? That's it. That's the top level of the SES scale right now for political appointments. I'm not saying money is the draw for everybody, but if you're a 40-year-old, 05, 06, and you're looking at taking care of your family, the opportunities outside are just, you know, tremendously different. Um, and so I can see why, why they may take, take a path, take that, take a path about you know we talk a lot of us did it for duty reasons and for uh, defending our nation.
Mark McGrath:you give one of your vectors was about bob feller, the uh cleveland indians pitcher that I believe was aboard the USS North Carolina. I've taken my boys on that ship and there's a birth, like the chief's country or whatever. There's a monument to him. But he had no regrets of doing that and he said that's what you do and he could have had a lot more wins than he had and a much more successful career than he had, but he felt duty-bound and obligated to serve.
Thomas Modly:Well, it's interesting you mentioned that because I'm on the board of the Bob Feller Active Valor Foundation and one of the missions of that foundation is to teach young people that story and stories of other. There are a lot of major league baseball players who left, uh their their baseball careers to go serve in world war ii. Uh, yogi barrow is another real famous example of that ted williams. And so what we're trying to do, the foundation, is get into, particularly into the inner city, in a partnership with boys and girls club to teach these kids these lessons about service and sacrifice and how you create a legacy for yourself and for your country. They're not getting those lessons taught, they're just not. And so I think the society and I won't get too much into sort of culture issues, but I think the society has shifted uh significantly towards um image and and money and um celebrity and all those things and these little devices have not helped with that. You know these things that people carry around with them, and so kids aren't getting exposed to that as much and so um.
Thomas Modly:But also, I would wonder I, I mean I I can't question bob feller because he's a hero of mine. I grew up in cleveland, so he's a. He played for the indians. Um, these baseball players, back then they were hype. They were, they were making decent money, but they're not making the kind of money these guys are making. So would Garrett Cole walk away from $50 million a year to go fight in the Navy? I kind of doubt it. So you haven't seen a lot of examples of it, other than the guy for the Cardinals, the Arizona Cardinals, who did that, but not a whole lot of examples of that.
Mark McGrath:You mentioned everybody having a device. What was the compounded effect? Back to the TR issue incident what was the compounded effect of sailors having their own smartphones and access to Twitter and Facebook and everything while they're gone? And then all the moms' groups or the spouse groups or whatever, amplifying the story through social networking. What effect did that have on the situation?
Thomas Modly:It had a significant impact on it because it did the way the stories were being promulgated. It made it look like we didn't care that the Pentagon wasn't engaged. The President didn't care. He was mismanaging the crisis already. Here's just another example. So all that stuff just accelerated it.
Thomas Modly:And you know, there were sailors on the ship who you know it was uncomfortable for the sailors on the ship clearly Because but eventually you know, they all got off. They had a command center. They were monitoring, you know, their sailors. They had an command center, they were monitoring their sailors. They had an app for the sailors that they were monitoring their temperatures. They knew exactly when they were given meals. They had a whole transportation system set up to take them to various places and so on, and it was pretty remarkable, the ship went back to sea within a couple of weeks. I mean, really that was a really amazing logistics effort. And those folks on Guam who managed that whole thing, or the Unsung Heroes of the whole thing, I mean they did a phenomenal job and they just sort of no one ever said anything about it.
Mark McGrath:Doesn't get clicks or likes, except for me, and my book.
Thomas Modly:They were the heroes in my book but, yeah, they did a phenomenal job. So, yeah, I think that you know, but that it does accelerate and it becomes dangerous. I can tell you, you know, we had, we had protection for three months after I left.
Mark McGrath:Yeah.
Thomas Modly:Because of the some of the threats that we had and things like that.
Mark McGrath:Well, we talk a lot about, you know, the medium being the message, and we talk a lot about, you know, asymmetric information environments, and that's something that leaders have to contend with. That it's not just the balance sheet or the stock price or whatever. Not just the balance sheet or the stock price or whatever. There's other elements in the complexity of things, especially the social networking. The customer gets a vote, but also people that aren't customers get a vote, as long as they're communicating and they're passing information, whether it's accurate or not, via these things. It's another thing that you had a real first world example there of how a leader has to deal with that, and it's not unusual for our own clients and others to deal with those sorts of things too, and you can't always see that threat as readily as others.
Thomas Modly:Yeah, I would say that there's no question that I underestimated what the impact of that, but it didn't really. It wasn't something I really thought about when I made the decision. It was, you know, my view was I have to make the best decision for the Navy in this moment and that's what I'm going to do. So but I was a little bit, I can tell you I was taken back by the response. So it's, you know, it's humbling when it happens, for sure.
Ponch Rivera:I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about something you brought up in your book and that has to do with suicide. You saw increasing numbers of suicide on active duty and we know that estimates are between 22 and 44 veterans take their lives each day. I just want to get your thoughts on what you were trying to do when you were secretary of the Navy and under secretary, and what should be happening now.
Thomas Modly:Boy. This is a. This is one of those problems that is a much broader societal problem. It is exacerbated in the military, I think, and I think the statistics do show that. But the statistics also skew towards the demographic in the military also, where it's young, you know, largely young males that's, you know that's a high demographic for suicide. We did a lot, we had a lot of programs, a lot of suicide prevention type programs. Um, ultimately, what I tried to do and I think I did a whole vector, I did a whole vector on this one week Um, it also ultimately came down, comes down to sailors and Marines looking out for each other and not detaching from each other and really understanding what's going on and talking to people and um, but even then, um, suicide is is a big mystery and you know, I just met a couple the other day who lost a nephew and uh, and there were no signs.
Thomas Modly:You know they just it's decision that someone makes and then they take it. So you know we can get philosophical about why that's happening. Um, I think that there is a lot of, there's a lot of general despair. I think there's a lot of uh stuff that's exacerbated by social media and uh that drives to depression and um, and I think that you know lack of hope, lack of faith, lack of religion, that all contributes to it as well.
Thomas Modly:Just the waning influence of those things in the culture are part of it to scare people about things, and so there's um, because that sells, and um, so there's a lot of uh, hysteria, there's a lot of um, doom and gloom talk, and I think people are depressed, get depressed about that and don't see their role, don't see their purpose and um, so they end up taking their lives and it's uh, and you know, I think that's probably the case more often than some of the post-traumatic things that we're seeing from people that were in theater. It's just sort of the, the despair that people have just in existence, and I think our demographic in the military is sort of right there in the prime spot of of people that are doing this these days. It's much heavily, it's very heavily skewed towards men, young men, in a certain age bracket, and that's our demographic.
Mark McGrath:Not long ago we had Tom Wright on, who runs Project Brazen to talk about. Yeah, I listened to his.
Thomas Modly:I listened to it you listened to the episode.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, I wanted to get your thoughts on what we discussed. We'd be remiss if we didn't ask about the Fat Leonard scandal from your vantage point at the Department of the Navy at the top.
Thomas Modly:Yeah, boy, that's emblematic of a larger cultural problem I think we had in the PAC fleet and that probably existed even know, even before fat leonard came around, and it's just one of those. I think it's just one of those. You know, when you talk about um boyd's definition of, of um, what is it of evil and of corruption? Evil and corruption, yeah, yeah, I mean there, those are pretty, uh, pretty good, apt descriptions about what happened in those situations. Um, people just accept things as they are. Um, there's also, you know, there's also a little bit of that. You know, this is how we do things in the navy, this is how things are done, this is how we do things in asia, this is how we do things here, and you know, until someone says, well, wait a minute, why is that?
Thomas Modly:You know, I use that example in my book about I think it's in the last vector, vector 19 um, another great musical movie reference from um, from uh, one of my favorite films um, where, where, um, the uh it's about. It's a, it's a, it's a. It's a film about a rock band, a fake rock band spinal tap, spinal tap yeah I'm sorry.
Thomas Modly:Yeah, it's in your moment.
Mark McGrath:There it's it's in the vector, I read it.
Thomas Modly:Yeah, so when he's talking about how his amplifiers go to 11 yeah, and they're like, well, why don't you just make each one louder instead of just taking make one a little louder and two a little louder and two a little louder? And the guy just looks at him and is like, well, at least go to 11. You know, that's kind of the answer.
Thomas Modly:People ask like, well, why are we doing that in the Navy? You know, this is how we do things. Well, why are we doing that in the Navy? And the answer is well, because this is how we do it in the Navy. You know there's no well, why don't we just do it like this way, which is probably better? And the answer is well, because this is the way we do it in the Navy, you know. And so I sort of my my final message to the department was you know, next time someone says that to you, just sort of smile and say these, go to 11. And then, you know, try and think of a better way to do it than the way they're telling you to do it. So I don't know, it's culture, it's deep and ingrained in the culture and it's hard to break.
Thomas Modly:And it's kind of ironic in a way, because I talked before about how the entire senior levels in the military have become very risk-averse averse, I think and very caught up in legalities and things like that, and yet they allowed that somehow to happen at the same time, which is very incongruent for me. So either they just didn't know, or they looked the other way, or, um, they felt like, well, this is just the kind of way we do things here and it's no one's ever gotten in trouble before and and so there's nothing wrong with it. So I think that's part of it. It's just sort of that complacency and acceptance and so on and so forth.
Ponch Rivera:You know we talk a lot about systems drive behaviors, the way the system is driven and you know complex adaptive systems, things emerge out of that. As a young I think it was a Lieutenant JG at the time for squadron ordered up hey, go take these aircraft and go dump gas over the you know whiskey area and come back refuel, go do it. I'm like what? And it's well, that's how we get money, right, because we have to spend it to get it. And that was. You know, that's a system driving a behavior. Again, To my mind, it's wrong. I'm like well, if we don't have to fly, we don't have to fly, but why are we going to dump gas, right? So systems are always driving behaviors.
Ponch Rivera:In my view, of my experience in the Navy the last four years in the Navy which were not that fun, by the way I couldn't wait to get out. I snuck out the fastest I could. I was like I'm out of here. You're telling me that if I have differing extremist, I'm done. You know, I'm out of here. The system is driving behaviors again. So my point behind that is uh, it's not bad people there aren't I mean every.
Mark McGrath:You might get a few in there, but it's a bad system that's driving these behaviors and and I just want to get your ideas on that, or if that's what you can add one thing to that, because so the the defense fiscal year is October 1 to 930 next year and, as you both know, so our listeners don't know, but I always thought that in the Marine Corps, september was one of the more fun months, because we had to go out and shoot and expend everything we could get our hands on that, everybody, by the way, the 11 months prior to that, hey don't waste ammo, hey don't go so fast. The 11 months prior to that, hey don't waste ammo, hey don't go so fast. And then, at the end of the year, you have this stockpile that you had to dump or else you wouldn't get it the next fiscal year.
Thomas Modly:So to Potts' point, I mean that's yeah, that's the whole. You know that's one of the issues with the whole budget process I talk about in the book and that no one goes into that budget price process thinking about that. No one goes into that budget price process thinking about, wow, what shouldn't I do next year that I did this year? You know it's all about how can I do what I did last year and then do some more stuff next year. No one goes into it thinking the other way around, and the federal budget doesn't look at it that way either. So it's, you're right. I mean, that's the system that's been created and so it does create those behaviors. And then, unfortunately, some of the financial problems that we have the lack of transparency that our IT systems are unable to provide or unable to provide for us in terms of where's the money and who's spending it and where was it and who spent it on what, like that, and the inability to audit. That just reinforces the behavior for people to hide. They hide, they hide money, they hide parts, they hide all kinds of things, um, because there's no incentive otherwise, uh, to do so. There's never been a, you know, the closest thing I've seen in my time there where a commander at the very, very top of the organization said we're going to get an audit and made it part of we're going to get a clean financial audit and made it part of his objective, and everyone understood was the commandant of the Marine Corpsic smith, and they actually did it this year in the marine corps, the first military service ever to get a clean audit opinion on their financial audit states. And you know, I, no one else has ever done it and I, frankly, it would be impossible to do it right now, given the systems, environment and that's a whole other discussion we can have, but no one's made it that big a priority. But what comes with making it that priority is then the system and environment underneath it has to be created to allow that to happen and then that gives you visibility and frankly, that's what people don't want. They don't want to have that transparency and that visibility because they can't make it. They don't want. I don't want to have that transparency, that visibility, because they can't make.
Thomas Modly:I went through this um when I was trying to get five to seven billion dollars from secretary esper to keep us going on the path towards 355 ships in 2019, early 2020, and he was, like you know where am I going to get the money from? And I said, well, like you're not really asking me that question because I can tell you how, about taking it from the Army? Because they wouldn't want to hear that Everyone's got their piece of the pie. And I said, okay, fine, I'll go back. I said, if I can find it five to seven, will you give me another five to seven? He said okay. So I went back to the Navy and said we're going to find five to $7 billion in our $250 billion a year budget 220 at the time, their budget and it was like I was asking them to kill their firstborn.
Thomas Modly:There was a writer who writes for Forbes online who called it Secretary Mowdley's St Valentine's Day Massacre. It was $5 to $7 billion from a $220 billion a year budget. Uh, secretary modley, saint valentine's day massacre. It was five to seven billion dollars from a 220 billion dollar year budget. That that's like less than you know three percent or something like that, and I've been in businesses that cut 30 percent. Like like that, we, our ability. I mean it was. It was like there's no way we can find that. I said, no, we're gonna find it was like there's no way we're going to find that. I said no, we're going to find it because it's there. I guarantee you it's there. Finding it's not the hard part, it's getting rid of it or shifting it. That makes it difficult Because there's a constituency tied to every single ballot.
Mark McGrath:And it makes it really tough to move it around. There's two interesting things I guess as we wind down I think of as it relates directly to Boyd. In his biography by Robert Quorum. There's a story where Pierre Spray, who was instrumental with the A-10 and other things, who was a reformer, came to the office and he heard Boyd shouting on the phone I'm happy to give your boss the brief. It's six hours. And he says well, whoever's on the other line said I don't have six hours, I have one. He goes the brief is six hours. And then he says hey, since your boss is so pressed on time, I'm going to save him a ton of time. Zero, you're not getting the brief. And he hung up and he told Spray. He goes yeah, that was the exec for the CNO and that's how the Navy never got to hear Boyd or patterns of conflict, at least, not to say that. That's the reason that a lot of these things that we're talking about, these cultural manifestations, not to say. But it is interesting how someone like Boyd that offered that kind of an insight of a Reformation idea, a lot of those things could have been avoided if people understood that better.
Mark McGrath:And I think the other Boyd tie-in is his very famous speech to be or to do that. Every person, certainly in the military you come to a crossroads and we've kind of hit on a few of these things where you can go one path and you'll be. You know, you'll get all the stars and have all the club memberships and you're a team player and everybody loves you. You're not going to rock the boat, you're not going to do anything to upset the apple cart. On the other side there's the doers, there's the. We're going to do rather than be, and we're going to be wildly unpopular and we're going to be radical, but we're the ones that are actually going to affect change. And that was his admonition to young officers was at some point you come to that crossroads and there's no turning back. You go down the one lane. You can't reverse yourself and go back on the other lane.
Thomas Modly:More often than not, yeah, I talk about that a lot in my book too. Not going to Washington to be something, but go there to do something.
Mark McGrath:Now the synergies of the book. For anybody that follows our work and works with us professionally, they definitely want to pick this up, because this is a really phenomenal vantage point of really a side of things that we don't often see. I mean, most people out there they see the blue angels or they can turn on the news and see when there's a conflict going on or something like that, but what's actually going on behind the system and the decisions that are made that have a pretty profound effect on things? This is a really great insight.
Thomas Modly:Well, I appreciate you guys both taking the time to read it. It's not short, I know, but I tried to make it interesting and I try to make it a little bit different. And, um, like I said, there's I I do reference a lot of song lyrics at the beginning of the chapters. And, um, I, my kids, asked me why I did that and I said, well, because I wanted it to be relatable to younger people. And they said, dad, like these songs are like 35 years old. So I was like, well, hey, you know, it's my frame of reference. What can I say?
Ponch Rivera:Yeah, your Linkin Park reference. I'm like I know this song.
Thomas Modly:Yeah Well, I commend to your listeners if they want to hear, just learn all about Vector as a book. If they listen to the Vector Songs podcast on Spotify, I go through all 25 songs chronologically in the book and you get a really good sense for what the book's about in terms of why I chose the songs and the tone that they set and like, for example, we were talking about Pieces of the Pie, I use that song by Pink Floyd Money in their discussion of everyone wants their piece of the pie, and that that's the whole chapter about the budget process and so on.
Thomas Modly:So it's an interesting way to take a sort of a journey through the book without having to pour through 500 pages. And then I was able to thankfully find an illustrator who had done some work for Marvell comics and he did all the illustrations in the book. Yeah, they are cool yeah.
Mark McGrath:I think also to the hero and villain aspect too. I mean, it's a very readable book. Tell us the type of things that you're doing these days.
Thomas Modly:Well, I'm working on another book right now, but it's very different from this one, although thematically I'm hoping it'll be relevant to cultural issues that are going on. But it's a historical novel about some things that happened in hungary and yugoslavia when my parents were growing up, and so that's that's been kind of a fun little project. Then I'm I'm also um doing some consulting um and I'm on a couple of boards. I'm on a board of a small drone manufacturer called Dragonfly that we're hoping will reap the benefits of this pending legislation that's going to keep DGI from selling drones to law enforcement and military and public safety here in the US.
Thomas Modly:For those who don't know, that's the largest drone manufacturer in the world. They're chinese-based and they they pretty much dominate the market here in the. They dominate the global market. I think they have 70 market share um, but there there was a move to start using them in law enforcement and public safety and I think there's a lot of risks to that and and I think the Congress is recognizing that, so North American manufacturers like Dragonfly. I think we're going to have a good opportunity to penetrate that market. Also, doing just some speaking engagements around the book itself, and I'm going to be starting up my own little blog spot as well on Substack, which will probably do a weekly opinion piece type thing, just like my opinion man every week for people who are interested. But I'll probably hit on a bunch of topics from politics, culture, defense, music you know that type of stuff?
Mark McGrath:Well, we'll certainly recommend it on our sub stack when uh when it gets, when it gets up and running.
Ponch Rivera:Yeah, and if you ever want to go live on X with us, we'll start doing that here soon.
Thomas Modly:I'll be uh, what are you guys going to be doing?
Ponch Rivera:We have our own X channel. We'll be going live on any just about any time we want to. So I think the shift from podcast to that near-term engagement or real-time engagement is going to be a real great way to build networks.
Thomas Modly:Yeah, cool.
Ponch Rivera:That sounds great.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, so well, tom, for the purpose of the podcast we're going to say thanks. We're going to highly recommend that everybody that listens to us pick up a copy of Vectors, uh take a lot of notes. It's laid out very well. There's uh great margins on it to take, uh to take notes, as I found as I went through it.
Thomas Modly:And uh, we appreciate you coming on and uh, can I say one more thing about the book absolutely, um, just so 100 of the proceeds that I make from this book I'm donating, and I have donated to charities that support navy and Marine Corps veterans and their families. So if your listeners want to help me with that mission, I'd appreciate that. I'm not making any money on this at all. I'm losing a lot, but it's a mission for me to use whatever proceeds and so I've been doing that and will continue to do that to use whatever proceeds, and so I've been doing that and we'll continue to do that.
Mark McGrath:Well, as a Marine in a in a, in a Navy flyer here, I think, as a Marine with two Navy flyers here on this podcast, I think we can all, we can all relate to that. So Semper Fidelis anchors away and beat army.
Thomas Modly:Yeah, exactly, it's not looking good this year, but we'll see.
Mark McGrath:We'll see.
Thomas Modly:All right, stay with us. Great to meet you guys and thanks for your time. Thanks so much. Okay, see ya.
Mark McGrath:Bye, okay.
