Sea Control - Sea Control 311 - Developing the Naval Mind with BJ Armstrong and John Freymann

Episode Date: January 20, 2022

Links1. Developing the Naval Mind, by CDR BJ Armstrong and Capt. John Freymann, U.S. Naval Institute Press, 2021.2. “Cheer Up!! There Is No Naval War College,” by Capt. William Sims, USNI Proceedings, May, 1916.3. “Damn Exec,” by LCDR Stuart Landersman, 19654. “Military Conservatism,” by RADM William Sims, USNI Proceedings, March 1922.5. Sea Control 241 – The Future of Navy and Marine Corps Learning with John Kroger, by Andrea Howard, CIMSEC, April 15, 2021.

Hey folks, Sherrod here. Today we are welcoming one of our hosts home. Andrea Howard is back. And today she'll be speaking with authors Commander B.J. Armstrong and Captain John Fryman, discussing their new book, Developing the Naval Mind. This episode was edited and produced by Alexia Boualagi. Speaking of audio editors, we're looking to add to our team. And if you're interested, please email us at seacontrol at simsec.org with your resume. Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec Podcast Network, The Bilge Pumps. You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of iron brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. On that note, I'll turn it over to Kimbersman.

You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Greetings, sea warriors. Let's dive back into sea control. I'm Andrea Howard, and today we're discussing the book Developing the Naval Mind by Commander Benjamin B.J. Armstrong and Captain John Fryman. The link for the book will be provided in the episode footnotes. We are so lucky to be joined by the authors of this tremendous work. Commander Armstrong is a permanent military professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, where he is a Volgiano Fellow in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences. He earned his PhD in War Studies from King's College, London, where I was lucky to meet him. Captain Fryman is also a permanent military professor

at the U.S. Naval Academy, where he teaches in the history department. He earned his PhD in the history of Christianity from the University of Chicago. As a reminder, all opinions expressed are personal opinions and are not representative of any institutions with which we may be otherwise associated. Thank you so much for joining us. So gentlemen, both of you spent the first half of your careers in unrestricted line communities within the Navy. Commander Armstrong, can you describe how your experience in the aviation community inspired this book? Thank you so much for having us today, Andrea. It's great to be with you. So my path to this book is a circuitous one. When I graduated from the Naval Academy here in Annapolis, no one, none of my professors would have guessed that I would be back with a PhD teaching in the department again. I was not the academically strongest midshipman in the brigade let's just put it that way

and so my path to kind of a more intellectual engagement with our profession was kind of a long one and it really didn't take off for me until I completed my graduate studies which I did while I was a flight instructor in Pensacola on my first shore tour so you know mostly flying at night because i i flew a lot of night vision goggle instruction uh hops and stuff like that mostly flying at night so i studied days and weekends to get my master's in military history and kind of fell back in love with the study of history as an as an intellectual pursuit and that's kind of what led me to then follow that to a more a more intellectual engagement with our naval profession and after that you know i i think the fact that that is when i started to

re-engage in that way or to engage for the first time maybe even in that way I think is an indication of what life was like in the squadrons right it I was never prompted to think more about my profession it was a very tactical and very technical mental engagement with what I was as a helicopter pilot as a search and rescue pilot and I don't want to sound like that that's a bad thing that's a good thing there's a lot of tactical and technical challenges that you have to learn how to deal with as a JO and to master as a junior officer to become able to move up through the ranks in the Navy. But there was never really a hint from any of my mentors or skippers that there was something else that I ought to be thinking about.

When I did start to re-engage again, I finished that master's degree. I started doing things like writing articles for proceedings. And of course, I got good-natured teasing in the ready room about how I was wasting my time or how I was, um, you know, becoming a bit more of a nerd than I already was. And, but it was all, you know, it was good natured ready room kind of stuff. I had amazing mentors and teachers in some of my squadrons. And I also had plenty of poor examples, you know, for, for some good examples, uh, you know, an example would be my very first proceedings article I wrote right after I finished that master's degree. And my skipper at the time down in Pensacola had come to that command tour after being at the Naval War College and being a staff

officer with the Strategic Studies Group up in Newport. Really smart guy when it came to strategy and naval affairs. And he helped me edit that piece to get it published in Proceedings. And he was amazingly helpful. I also had a skipper at one point when I walked up to him with a Proceedings article I was going to send in, who forbade me to send it in. I was not allowed to submit it. And when I asked him why, his answer was, well, someone else might not like it. And that would reflect poorly on me, me being him, the skipper. So I had a mix, right, of experiences with our, with, with my leaders and what they thought. I had an XO at one point when I was trying to get a group of pilots together to, to work on a project. I had an XO at one point tell

me that was a complete waste of time and not worth our effort. But if we wanted to do it on our free time, that was, that was up to us. So, you know, I had my fair share of these things. And then as I grew more senior, as I made commander and my peers began to take command or became XOs and squadrons, and I would talk with them maybe over an adult beverage sometimes. And we would talk about this kind of thing. And many of them said that they wanted to have a more intellectual or more a deeper conversation in their ready rooms or in their ward rooms about what it meant to be a naval professional, about what the Navy was doing in the world today, strategy, operations, tactics, but also leadership and professionalism. But they didn't know how. You know, as professors,

John and I would talk about pedagogy, right? The methods of learning. They didn't know any pedagogy. They didn't know or really have time. Skippers and XOs are pretty busy. It might surprise you to hear. They didn't have time to figure it out. And so in essence, that's where the core insight came that helped John and I develop this book was, okay, we are professors by profession now. Like the Navy has sent us off to school and our job is to know the pedagogy and to understand how to learn and how to teach. Why don't we create a manual for those skippers, XOs, department heads, whomever that do want to try and pursue this so they don't have to go out and read the chronicle of higher education or inside higher ed or learn any of the tricks that we learn as professors

they've got a one-stop shop with both the pedagogy the methods of learning how to think about this stuff but also readings themselves to get you started on developing your naval mind and that's kind of where the project, the root of the project was for me. I can certainly echo the sentiment that there is a dichotomy between being a junior officer in qualifications, being told to get back to the box or maneuvering, as we call it on a submarine, and to focus on engineering qualifications or to own those ship driving skills. But then at the same time, if you're writing articles on the side or trying to put together the beginnings of a book, then there's really no audience for that within the wardroom, given the amount of time that you have for all the administrative and

operational taskers. So I certainly appreciate the sentiment of your book and the inspiration for it. Captain Freiman, John, would you echo that that is the experience that you had in the surface community? Absolutely. You know, BJ really came to me on fire. He's really the inspiration here. He was inspired. He had this brilliant idea. I was a little like, oh man, I've got all this stuff to even here you can find ways to fill your time but um i came on board really motivated by memories as a jo just in in many ways as bj is described there's no time there's no time you get into all this stuff and you're in the pace of life in the wardroom and then you know at sea there's the usual rhythms of life at sea and then ashore there's all kinds of inspections and maintenance

and all this. We all know the drill, right? And I came to, when I was at Ensign, I remember reporting a board and the wardroom was greatly missing the previous CEO who had spent quite a bit of time developing his wardroom. He actually spent time, carved it out of the work week and said, we're going to talk about how to fight this ship. And he left. I came in a couple months after he had gone and everyone was talking about this and i'm like well this sucks for me because i just got to miss that right and then it went into the usual round of activity on a destroyer out of norfolk and i remember thinking why don't we ever talk about fighting the ship or strategy or anything it was just this we're down in the weeds all the time down in the weeds all the time

it wasn't till later preparing for a cruise missile certification that I had what I would call a really enjoyable experience that I keep going back to and it it's kind of too bad it had to happen this way but my roommate who was the tomahawk guy the cruise missile officer strike officer said hey you're the ASW officer let's develop scenarios to train our teams because when they come aboard for this cert they're gonna you know do all kinds of tactical drills on us let's come up with stuff like i have no idea how we're going to do this you know and this is back in the days of five and a quarter inch floppies right um i think the program was called water bear or something like that anyway jack and i sat at the

kitchen table one morning with his massive copy of Jane's and we just made stuff up with Jane's and some mo boards just made it up and then started running it on our teams we're like this is awesome it was so much fun to just do pie in the sky stuff unsupervised left alone carved it out of a weekend morning we kicked butt on the inspection and then the inspecting team asked us for a copy of all the scenarios and they said who told you to do this uh nobody um where did you where did you come up with this stuff jane's and a lot of coffee you know and i keep going back to that going why can't it be more like that why do we have to have school why do we have to you know and then and then let alone what school is this is that our learning model is to learn you go to

school. And to do everything else, you go back to the ship or the boat or the squadron. So that's really what kept me going during this project and also drawing upon, you know, years of experience as a permanent military professor. That's really what I keep thinking about. That's a nice narrative because in your book's introduction, you cite then-Commander William Sims' proceedings article entitled, Cheer Up, There is No Naval War College. So BJ, how does this article mirror the ethos of your book? There's a really strong parallel here. For your listeners who are not familiar with William Sims, and how can you not be familiar with William Sims? But for your listeners who aren't, William Sims was the, he was the commander of all U.S.

naval forces in european waters during world war one um but before that he was he was kind of a troublemaker in the navy he he did a lot of varied and different things in the navy fascinating guy fascinating biography someone who really i think he probably took a lot of great joy in pissing off senior officers uh and in and rocking the boat a lot he helped fundamentally transform how battleships fought when he was a lieutenant. By introducing what was then called continuous aim fire, he changed the tactics and the methods of fire control. And he made significant contributions to the development of battleship design during that dreadnought era, that kind of fundamental transition that happened in the early part of the 20th century as the British introduced

dreadnought, but the Americans introduced South Carolina, which had many of the same innovations almost at the same time he was deeply involved in that effort so he had this kind of varied background and sims had gone to the naval war college as a commander and back in those days the faculty at the naval war college were primarily fleet officers so you would do the you would do the course of study at the naval war college and then the instructors who were there basically picked their relief from the group of students so they would look to the group of students and they say, okay, who are the strongest students? Okay, we're going to pick them. They're going to stay here for an extra year or two and take over as instructor before going back to the fleet.

And so Sims and two of his buddies from his class at the War College, guys named Dudley Knox and Earl Pete Ellis, who go on to being pretty significant intellectual figures in the Navy and Marine Corps themselves, got picked to stick around and be instructors. And so they kind of, not only did they experience the war college experience, but they taught it. And then they went back off to the fleet. And Simms' next set of orders after that was to command the Atlantic Torpedo Flotilla destroyers. Destroyers were brand new. The Navy hadn't really used them. And so they get sent down to the Caribbean to basically invent destroyer doctrine and tactics. Except Simms didn't have a staff. He was able to bring Dudley Knox with him as his chief of staff,

but he had no staff to be a chief of. So he said, how do I do this? And what he did in essence, and he actually gave a speech about it at the War College a couple of years later. And that speech got republished in Proceedings also. But he gave a speech and he talked about how he basically used the War College method. And what was the War College method? You take the officers, you have them read stuff, you put them in a room together, and you have them argue about it. And that was basically the method. He called it the conference method in a couple different places. But what did he do? He took the skippers of these destroyers that were in his flotilla, and he'd bring them onto the command ship, the flagship, which is really the tender.

And they would sit around the wardroom table, and they would invent the doctrine and tactics for destroyer usage. And these JOs were folks like then Lieutenant Commander Harold Stark, who would go on to become CNO. Then Lieutenant Bull Halsey, who we all know. Fletcher Pratt, who also would go on to be cno senior uh senior officers kind of senior officer jobs in the navy was was a part of that early on as well so these are officers go on to become foundational figures in world war ii in the preparation for world war ii and how did they learn how to be leaders well they learned sitting around this wardroom table on dixie which was the the tender doing this conference method, where basically they would just read stuff on their own, and then they would

come and they would argue about how to operate. And so Sims wrote this article, Cheer Up, There Is No Naval War College, because the reputation of the war college and the fleet was that it was this highfalutin place of words that you had to look up in the dictionary and intellectual ideas It really had no bearing on the practical side of being in the Navy. And so officers didn't want to go to the War College because they saw it as detracting from their time in the service. And he was, Sims was angry. He was really, he read an article by a lieutenant who, in proceedings, who was talking about

what the impressions of the War College were in his wardroom. And Sims just got fired up. He got angry. And he wrote this article for proceedings, basically telling him they were all ignorant. He used the word ignorant. And he laid out in the article the idea that the methods of sitting around the wardroom table and talking about our profession is actually fundamental to being a naval professional. You have to have the skills and ability to not just be ready for physical combat, but be ready for intellectual engagement and intellectual back and forth. And that's how we develop not only our own naval minds as an individual, but the collective

naval mind as well. And so that article really, it's in parallel to what John and I have tried to do with this book. The inspiration is very similar. Certainly. And we talked about the main audience for this book then being those wardrobes and officers who are struggling to bring a discussion of the naval profession into their day-to-day on board a boat or on board a surface ship or within the boardroom of the aviation community.

So, John, what was the intent then of structuring the book into two parts? Can you get a little bit into the details of how you structured your book in order to facilitate this? I'll start on the back end first and pull in something that BJ said earlier, the back end being the the readings you know how do we get how do we get started you know sometimes ceos or other leaders in on a in a unit will have this idea but they don't know how to get started even to the point of well what do we what do we read and what better resource um than what has already been written in the proceedings i mean we could have gone all over the place but it made sense to do this and so there's the material for it i don't want to get into why i think that's we'll talk

about that later but you know what readings and why but first the material and then the way we've laid it out was talk about how to talk about the material but without prescribing a certain approached it was just the stuff and then the path to engaging with the stuff and then provide really good stuff the readings but then provide a toolkit to help a group grapple with it use the readings to stimulate conversation that kind of thing and you know we've talked about wardrooms We've talked about these early thinkers, Sims and Stark, and, you know, and warriors, right? Thinkers and warriors, Sims, Stark, Halsey. And so, yes, we're thinking officers.

We are engaged in teaching midshipmen here, too. But, you know, I also had in mind the CPOMS. You know, a lot of the senior enlisted force have master's degrees, sometimes two or even three. I mean, they're engaged in this enterprise, too. you know they're a key part of all of these fighting units so we really pitched it to that to those two main groups but also with the idea of officers to be you know the midship i think something to kind of climb on with what john's talking about here we we are both officers we both come up through the ranks as officers in ward rooms in ready rooms so our own personal

lived experience so of course informs how we came to this book and worked on this project but as we worked on it as john pointed out you know we realized that the audience for this is broader than that kind of mirror of ourselves right so it's not just navy you know when we say naval officers we mean it with a lowercase n it's the navy and marine corps right so it's not just navy officers but it's also marine corps officers that we think would benefit a great deal from this i remember talking with general john allen at one point we were both serving on the education for sea power effort and he talked about how when he was the skipper at tbs all of the instructors were required to have and carry a book with them at all times and he would stop them and ask them

about that book in their arms to make sure that they were reading it right but but actually to engage with them about the ideas that were in that book um and so you know the marines in in some instances the marines in some ways are are a little bit ahead of the navy especially in the officer corps in this regard with things like their you know distance learning versions of expeditionary warfare school and stuff like that that they do in the fleet but marines are definitely part of the audience here, but also the enlisted sailors and Marines are absolutely part of the audience here. Now, John points out the chief's mess. I had the privilege, geez, I guess it was two summers ago now at the start of the pandemic. I had the privilege of running a virtual effort testing

these ideas out basically with HSC-22 down in Norfolk. The current skipper there, Tim Dracinos, Commander Dracinos was the XO at the time. And he is one of these officers, like I've run into in the past, who went to the War College and then immediately went to his command tour, his XO and then command tour. And while I've had a lot of officers who followed that path and were my skippers when I was a JO, I never heard about their time at the War College. I only knew it because it was in their bio. Whereas Commander Dracinos showed up and he said, I want to bring some of that goodness that I learned at the War College to my ready room, a la Sims, without realizing that he was mirroring Sims. And so he and his then skipper at the time, Matt Wright, they invited me to lead a discussion of Mahan. We did a three meeting session on Fridays at happy hour. And it was a couple of pilots from, it was voluntary, right? So only, only not the whole ward room showed up, not the whole ready room, but a couple of pilots from the ready room and a couple of a senior chief and a master chief from the mass came to learn about, talk about Alfred Thayer Mahan and his writings with me virtually on Google Meet. It was fantastic. And it was great to have those senior enlisted folks having that conversation with the junior officers, right, bringing their experiences and their knowledge, like John pointed out, the master's degrees, bachelor's degrees, they are as if not more educated in many cases than the JOs. And it was a fantastic conversation. I also, frankly, look at efforts like the Navy's standing up of the new Naval Community College. And I could envision, I would hope that as sailors and Marines go and study online with the Navy Community College and maybe work on that Naval Studies Certificate that they're launching this January, that in work centers, division officers or chiefs could engage with some of their sailors.

with a book like this who now will be interested in this sort of thing because they're doing this sort of thing in their community college classes so the audience here is you know it did admittedly it started mirroring john and i in our own experiences you know officers unrestricted line but as we worked on it we realized and we scoped it we tried to write it for a much broader audience most definitely and you know the chief's mess and the officers on board junior sailors who are wanting to delve into this enterprise are probably sitting here scratching their heads if they're listening to this, thinking, you know, this is so daunting, though. How do we break into the treasure chest full of content out there? So I'd actually like to direct us towards

that part of your book, and then we'll go back and bisect a little bit of the toolkit that you all provide. So how did you pick the readings that are included? You said you went to Proceedings as your main source, but you have Mahan's commentary on Nelson, Samuel Huntington on trans-oceanic policy, the great James Bond Stockdale and Stuart Landersman on moral leadership and the damn exec. Then we look a little bit forward with James Mattis and Frank Hoffman on hybrid warfare and the ultimate awesome piece that won the general prize essay and proceedings on how we lost the great Pacific war. So, you know, there's this treasure chest, like I said, of content. And And so I'd like to hear about the selection process and then what each of you found to be your favorite article that you included in your book.

So, John, we'll start with you first. BJ, was there a process? I think process is probably too strong a word. I think the process, as I recall it, was, hey, here are all the ones I really like, you know, and I looked at that. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, those are really good. I don't know about that one, though. And here's one that I really like. and another i really like that's kind of how i recall the process it really was we we did try

we tried to be chronological right we tried to have a a breadth of kind of historical context here right so we it starts with mahan talking about nelson at the centenary of trafalgar right so it starts at the beginning of the 20th century and it comes all the way up through the recent general prize you know essay like you were talking about about the kind of the fictional great pacific war and how the united states loses to china and so we wanted to kind of span that in a temporal way in a chronological way we wanted to make sure that some of the sort of goods and greats as we might call them got in there right like so my hands in there and sims is in there and james mattis is in there krulak is in there um so we wanted to make sure that we

wanted to make sure that it was naval with a lowercase n a lot of navy but plenty of marine corps in there as well because both the marine corps needs to know all the navy stuff and the navy needs to know all the marine corps stuff if we're going to be a genuine naval service there there was some as we threw the list together and then we went culling it kind of organizing it there were some principles that we wanted to make sure made it through to the final edition one of them being readability you know that was a key part of it how not necessarily oh this is a classic you know everyone lists Clausewitz right who reads that guy I didn't bother with that you know I mean you kidding me 50 pages is I'm like I'm done

probably should have had a guide but is it readable is it stimulating didn't really fixate on rank or celebrity status or anything like that. Didn't feel a need, for example, to include an old standby-like message to Garcia, right? It's assigned, you know, or we didn't feel constrained by any particular paradigm. It was really fairly informal, you know it's at least in terms of my approach and i think the the result of that is as we say in the book this is not a definitive list this is not a comprehensive effort this is not a book where you can read this and you'll be done the whole point here is to get started that this is the first couple of fixes and then you got to do the dead reckoning on your own if you and maybe you

know maybe maybe you know an online version of this would be like if you like this reading then you might like this you know kind of like amazon shopping but for reading uh naval articles and we do that a little bit one of the chapters right how do you develop your own syllabus where do you go from here what are the different sources that you can tap into where that's in that's in the kind of the first half of the book yeah well this might be a bit of a taboo challenge kind of like picking your favorite child, but can I have you guys commit to which article you both find to be your favorite? I'm smiling because BJ and I were talking about this before this interview, and he picked mine right away. He nailed it. Didn't hesitate, and that would be Damn Exec

by Stu Landersman. It's short. It's, you know, social. We paired it with the Stockdale reading, And it's a challenge for both senior and junior leaders, you know, in a giving orders culture, so to speak. But for the follower, for the junior leader, you know, the question is, do you do you give orders the lazy way? Well, the CEO said we had to do this. The engineer says we have to do this. The CNO says we have to do this. like, okay, so you're just nothing more than a conduit. You're just a mouthpiece. Why don't we just cut you out of the loop and go straight to the CO or whoever it is that you're saying

says we have to do this? The challenge for a junior leader is quite often to take ownership of an order and issue it as her or his own and say, well, why do we have to do this? Because i'm telling you or if you're more charitably disposed give reasons why we are doing this right it's not in the article but i'll just take a case in point here you know too often at the naval academy i hear midshipmen complain about the don't or the depth don't it's never that my dam's uh company officer and i almost never hear anyone complain about my damn battalion officer. The senior leaders need to also just pay attention to giving orders with due regard to how they are being received or how might you facilitate this being internalized or

help other people in your chain of command below you take ownership of it. It's a really good meditation on leadership. I was about to say deck plate citizenship, which is its immediate context but i think it would survey in anywhere to be honest it was certainly one of the most resounding pieces that i remember reading as a midshipman the damn exec and how you take ownership of the decisions that are being made at a higher level what about you bj can we get you to commit as well yeah i i will i'll commit i'll pick one but i i i'm hesitant to do so. I think the, you know, John and I were talking about this, the readings kind of fall out into two categories. One of them is kind of the leadership, the professionalism kind

of articles and essays. And the other one is, and I struggle for the right label here, maybe the naval art essays, strategy, operations, tactics, kind of that sort of thing. And I, the one I'm going to pick is the one out of all of them that I feel actually addresses both categories in the same article. And that is, and I'm going to sound like a broken record here, that is William Sims' article on military conservatism. Because Sims addresses both the cultural context of why military and naval cultures are conservative and how they've been conservative across history, but then he also addresses how that has an impact on our tactics, how that has an impact on our strategy. How saying things like, well, that's the way we do it, because that's the way we've

done it, has such a negative impact on the creativity necessary to adjust to a changing world. I teach American naval history here at the Naval Academy. And the thing that my students learn after a whole semester of studying, you know, 250 or so years of American naval history is american naval history is a history of constant adaptation and change there's never a time that's exactly like how it was before it's constantly changing you know and and you know john just john just was down on klauswitz so i'll pick klauswitz up for a minute and point out klauswitz's dichotomy between the nature of war and the character of war right that the nature of war is immutable it never changes it's about the human competition and interaction his trinity you know

that kind of stuff. But the character of war, according to Clausewitz, is in constant change. Weapons, technologies, tactics, constant change in the character of war. How do you keep up with that constant change in the character of war? And Sims' essay on military conservatism is getting at that same question, right? And the need to consider safety, as he calls it, not in terms of safety, meaning how to keep myself physically safe from an accident, but safety as in how to keep my Navy and my country safe by figuring out what the next new thing is and having the guts, often intellectually the guts, right? Not physically the guts, but intellectually the guts to try that new thing and to go out on that limb for that great innovation or that great change

that will give you operational tactical or strategic advantage so i think sims is sims's essay is is if i if i had to pick one probably my favorite but i do love them all they are they're all very complicated and context-driven and fascinating i like that article a lot too because you could generalize it so easily you know if you could call it institutional conservatism. I think back to medieval medicine or the scientific establishment at the time of Copernicus or at the time of Einstein and Planck and Bohr. I love Planck's oft paraphrased quotation about scientific change. He says, science advances one funeral at a time. It's not that new ideas instantly take hold, but the people who hold them have to die out.

You know, just getting at this idea of conservatism in the academy or in the scientific establishment, you know, I really resonate very much with Sim's article as well. Yes, and your book provides this treasure chest, like I said, of content for people to start delving into to start this process of engaging in conversation about the naval profession. You mentioned the Navy Community College, and I was in conversation with the Navy's first chief learning officer, John Kroger, prior to deployment, where he talked about some of these initiatives as well. And so we focused more on kind of the content thus far in our conversation. And much like my conversation with Mr. Kroger, which I'll include in the footnotes, I'd love to hear now as the closing part of our conversation, a little bit of insight into how each of you approaches reading and writing. So that toolkit that you mentioned. So your book has a three-part process for readers to engage with those intellectual writings. And then you mentioned an RTSW loop, a read, think, speak, and write loop for authors that are aspiring to engage in the conversation and put pen to paper. So John, I'll start with you first. Can you talk to me about your individual process for reading and writing? And then we'll flop over to BJ in here at ESSA. say? I'm going to really focus on reading. I'm much less sure as far as the writing goes, and

I defer to BJ's experience there, but reading as conversation is really where I want to camp out because it informs the technique of reading, but it always bothers me when I hear people talk about reading as a passive enterprise, and every time I read, try to remember that a human being wrote this thing and I deeply believe that all real learning happens in conversation you know we refer to Aristotle in the book in his politics you know he says that the thing that really sets human beings apart is the faculty of speech not making noise with your mouth but speech dialogue and using that dialogue to ascertain what is the good and the bad and that is how we exercise our facility of reason our reason itself is dialogical

it's easy to see that we're engaged in a conversation it's a little harder to see when you pick up a book that you're engaged in a conversation with say I'm looking at my shelf right now with Jill Lepore on If Then, right, or Alison, Destined for War, and you just, it helps so much if you can just sit down with them and go, another thinking being wrote this, and it's an odd conversation, but I'm going to read as if this person is sitting across from me. Now, they went through a lot of effort to write this, they, their publisher, the editors. it behooves me to make some effort to take this work seriously if I'm not seeking merely to be entertained which has its you know own use in reading but especially with people who are

writing difficult ideas difficult to understand meaning either complex or stuff that you just fundamentally don't agree with it takes time and you have to draw out and you know we have these three phases the skim you know do an overview get a sense of the structure of the book get a sense of the author and his or her context and what they're trying to say and then once you've done your background research and getting a sense of the structure and the thrust of the book then really get down into it, right? And the next step is close reading. And this is really where it becomes conversation because close reading is listening. And listening is hard, especially if the ideas are complex or off-putting or things that you just simply

don't agree with and that takes time and this is another challenge for the busy professional wherever they are in our audience is that you have to carve out the time and you have to carve out the mindfulness to to do the listening you know if you're going to take this other person seriously and then wrapping it up right doing your debrief summarizing it to yourself and it occurred to me is I was thinking about your question that a useful exercise in this summing up would be as in a conversation with someone else would be what I think it was Brian Kaplan, the economist who called it the ideological Turing test. Impose this test on yourself. Can you summarize what you have read or listened to, if you like, in such a way that the author

would say, yep, that is exactly what I'm saying. You understand me exactly, genau, as the Germans say. And you can do that to keep yourself honest as a reader, but you can certainly do that. Furthermore, in a seminar where you say, okay, this, and some other person in the seminar will go, dude, that's totally wrong. This is really what Sims is saying. This is really what Lepore is saying. It's so very hard, especially in a culture of echo chambers such as we now have, it is so very hard to arrive at true disagreement, to really understand why you might disagree vehemently with somebody on a certain policy. Let's say it involves vaccination in the military against COVID-19. I'm not sure there's a lot of listening going on. There's a lot of talking.

I'm not sure there's a lot of listening. Or what do we have a Navy for? What do we have a Marine Corps for? How should we deploy this Navy, this Marine Corps? And then the rest of the techniques that we put in the book you know read with a pencil I don't bother with highlighters right because I take notes constantly why do I take notes because I'm in conversation you know I take no I underline with a pencil I know it sounds really geeky I'm diming myself out now but um that's how I'm active that's how I encourage my students to be active any other person you know I write in the margins I just I fill my books with annotations and then if it's especially active in conversation, then I'll write on a notepad. And then maybe stitch them

all together and digest all those notes as part of the debrief. That's really how I come to this. And writing, I conceive of it as now you're speaking. And that's really where you have to clarify your own thoughts to yourself. And that's where precision of speech becomes especially important when you're writing because you get well you don't get so many do-overs you know well what i really meant to say was this no it's now it's in print and or in an email and you hit send and i hope you got it right i hope you meant what you said yeah those are certainly great pointers both for digesting as a reader and engaging in a more active reading and then putting pen to paper and understanding the consequences once you do hit send. BJ, what do

you have to add? So I think I'll just add really briefly to the reading conversation, then kind of move a little bit over to the writing conversation. So we cover both sides of the question you asked. Now, there's a neuroscientist named Marianne Wolfe, who wrote a book a couple of years ago called Reader Come Home, which is all about the neuroscience of how our brains function when we read. And it's a fascinating book. Admittedly, my wife and I don't have kids. And so the second half of the book, which is all about practical lessons of how to raise your kids based on this information, not as relevant to us. But the first half where she talked about how the digital world is actually rewiring our brains in terms of how we read and consume information in ways that

make it functionally more difficult for us to sit down and engage with long form writing in terms of as a reader. I see this with my students all the time. Frankly, I see it with myself as well, but I see it with my students constantly, right? You know, readings that I think are an absolutely manageable thing to get done in 30 to 45 minutes, they will sometimes come to me and say, well, sir, it took me an hour and a half, two hours to do this reading. Whoa, wait a minute. How are you reading? Let's talk about your methods. Let's talk about, oh, your phone is in your pocket and you're checking every notification that pops up while you're reading. Uh-uh, put the phone away. Put it in the cubby above your rack that you can't reach in your room in Bancroft Hall and don't touch it. Right. And stuff like that, you know, and Wolf talks about how you, because of the ideas of neuroplasticity that modern neuroscience has started to really embrace, we can train our brains to be better, to be able to engage with long form material. And so part of the book, you know, part of the readings in the book here is, yeah, they're a little bit on the long side. We tried to average somewhere in the neighborhood about 5,000 words or so, maybe a little bit longer in each set of readings, because we wanted you to have to sit down for half an hour or 45 minutes and take the time to, like John said, actively engage with that thinker that wrote that thing.

And I think that that active engagement, I think John's idea of approaching your reading as a conversation in an active way with that pencil in hand, right? I do the same thing, right? I'm constantly marking as I write. That helps us get over the brain wiring issues that we have that are expecting us to read something on our phone that's going to take us three minutes. If we're being active about it, it helps us overcome that wiring challenge that we have. So I just kind of want to point that out that admittedly, this is for in the modern world, this is something we need to work on and we need to overcome. As naval professionals, you know, I often will take my NATOPS manual down to class with me, right? My giant NATOPS manual for the H-60 Sierra, and I will drop it onto the desk from a certain height so it makes a very loud bang. and I say, if you want to tell me that you're not going to have to read as a naval officer, I'm here to correct you. Our tactical manuals, our technical manuals, our pubs, all kinds of stuff, you are going to have to consume written information. You're going to have to be able

to find that information. You have to be able to do research. All the tools that we're talking about here, these are the tools of a professional, not just an interesting intellectual exercise that these two crazy senior officers think you ought to do in your work all right so let's talk about writing a little bit yeah did you have you want to add something i just was gonna say yeah i remember a midshipman asking me say sir your coffee mug says rtfm what does that mean uh oh i forgot i brought it with me i'm like read the manual like really read it right yep all right so let's talk about writing a little bit um so as we were putting the as we were putting the book together it dawned on us that we were not thinking in the long term. It was a very short term idea. Hey,

we're going to get these seminars going in these reward rooms, these ready rooms, these work centers. We're going to develop the naval minds. Yeah, but what comes after that? Sure, maybe they pick more things to read and to talk about. Great. But what comes after that? Well, the hope would be that we as naval professionals decide that it's now our turn to contribute to that naval discussion. Our turn to produce something that helps develop others' naval minds. And that means writing. Now, it's not 100% writing, right? I think what we're doing right now, recording a podcast, is the kind of intellectual work that helps develop the naval mind. You know, I know folks out there that are shooting YouTube videos and trying to create interesting content that way.

I think that's fantastic, right? So me, I'm a historian. Primarily, my communication method is the written word. But I don't want people to think that I am a complete Luddite in that sense and that that's the only method of communication that we can talk about our naval profession. I think there are many others that we should use. But in terms of writing, how do you go about doing it? And over the years, I've talked to a lot of JOs who approached me after seeing that I was on the editorial board at proceedings or seeing the books that i've published who who asked me how do i do it and i start with these really kind of grandiose intellectual ideas of the importance of writing and thinking and yada yada and they they look at me with blank eyes i said but no

how sir how do i do it and so we tried to think about a process a procedure right we are very as naval professionals, we're procedurally driven for good or for ill, right? But we run the checklist, at least as our starting point. And so how do you create a checklist for someone who wants to get engaged with something like this? And a couple of years ago, actually, before we were working on this book, I was wrestling with the Naval Institute's mission. And based on a John Adams quote, right? John Adams was talking about how to function in a democracy, you need to read, think, speak, and write about the challenges of democracy, the great philosophical political ideas, right? So that's Adams' angle. But the Naval Institute adopted this mantra, read, think,

speak, and write, as part of their mission statement from Adams' writing back in the revolutionary era. And I thought, you know, it's almost in a way like the OODA loop, like John Boyd's OODA loop, right? Observe, orient, decide, act. Except this is the loop for writing a professional article. Read, think, speak, and write. So first, do your reading, do your homework. Has someone else written about this before? I remember a junior officer, a junior Pentagon John Stafford was very upset because they thought that they were the first ones to come up with the idea that we should think of fleet architecture and fleet design in the same way as Moneyball. And someone on social media was using this idea, not crediting that junior person with that great

insight they had. Except, you know, Jerry Hendricks wrote that article about four years earlier than that called More Bonds or More Henderson, Less Bonds, all about fleet architecture and fleet design and proceedings. It wasn't, it wasn't, it was a, it was both came to this insight independently, but if you don't do the reading, you don't know that someone else has come up with this idea before. So you need to do the reading. You need to, you need to know, you know, I'm going to sound like an academic here, but you need to know the literature, do your research, and you need to think about it. You need to stew on it. For me, I sometimes do my thinking when writing the first draft. So I am a firm believer in the Ernest Hemingway quote, and please forgive me for

the Hemingway language here, but I am a sailor. All first drafts are shit. And sometimes I write to think. I'm not really sure what I think yet. I just start banging on the keyboard and something is going to come out and it's not very good. My first drafts are terrible. I believe in the Hemingway line. But it helps me think. It helps me get through the hard part of like, what do I really mean here? And so you have to, after you do the reading, after you do the research, read the literature, you have to think about it. You have to come up with what's my core idea? What's my, heaven forbid we use another word we use here in the academy. What is my thesis? What is my argument that I want to make? What is my evidence? How am I going to marshal this, right? So that's

think, and then speak. And this is one that often we hesitate to do, because while we as naval professionals are very good at taking physical risk, we understand physical risk, we take it, it's part of our job, it's part of our profession, it's dangerous. We're not as good at taking intellectual risk. So that's where speak comes in. You need to talk about your crazy ideas with someone else. You need to test them out on somebody. Now, that speak might be that I wrote that crazy first draft, and I kind of polished it up a little bit, and then I hand it to John and say, hey, can you make any sense of this? Is this any good? Have I got something here? And then we can talk about it. We can engage with the ideas in it and refine them in dialogue, which is a big

theme of this book, that our thinking is done in dialogue. So that's the speak part. You want to talk about your ideas with someone else you want to test them as academics this is the peer review model right this is where we send our articles off and they get peer reviewed anonymously and someone gets to tear us a new one which happens plenty to me when i send work off for peer review and then we rewrite and then we re-engage so and then we so now we're to write Now we're to the W in RTSW. And we want to actually get that draft polished up into something that's good and that we can submit somewhere. And just like the OODA loop, right, where it's not just a loop, but you can always double back within the loop, RTSW is the same way, right? You can read, you can think, and then you can double back to your reading to double check on something. You can read, you can think, you can write, and then you can double back to your thinking and say, yeah, I was out in left field, I got to fix that, right? So there's, it's not just a loop, it's a scrum in a way. but if you follow that basic process or you start by following that basic process and then develop

your own right these are tools in a toolbox or clubs in a golf bag you're not good with all of the clubs in your golf bag i mean if you are you're a pro got it but but most of us are you're good with some of them figure out what those are right and so use these tools to get started and then figure out your method as an individual, and then you're really on to something. Wow. I hope that our listeners are encouraged and take the advice that both of you have generously provided to read a little bit more and to take really the leap of faith into the realm of writing and putting out individual and creative new ideas to engage in the exercises, like John said, in developing new tactics and putting pen to paper, and then thinking more

broadly and strategically about the future of the Navy and the force that all of us are trying to create, both you two at the Naval Academy and inspiring future leaders and those of us who are still out in the fleet and trying to cultivate these cultures that your book is inspiring and forging. So with that, unfortunately, that's all that we have time for today. I hope that your book Developing the Naval Mind can become sort of an intellectual supplement to the Watch Officer's guide that's a lofty statement and we'll let the readers you know make their own conclusions about the place of your literature and the great many works of of thinkers that have come before you and the thinkers that you both are so thank you both uh commander bj armstrong and captain john

fryman for joining us and we will make sure that our listeners can find you online We'll be right back. So help me, oh my bulimiali, when I am a bulimiali, help me, oh my bulimiali, bulimiali cemora.