Sea Control - Sea Control 323 - Embrace the F-Word with CAPT (ret) Roger Herbert

Episode Date: March 3, 2022

Links1. “Embrace the F-Word”  by CAPT Robert Herbert, USN (ret.), USNI Proceedings, January 2022.2. Call Sign Chaos by Jim Mattis and Bing West, Random House, 2019.3. Military Ethics: An Introduction with Case Studies by Stephen Coleman, Oxford University Press, 2012.4. Online Courses by Dr. Deane-Peter Baker and Dr. David Whetham.

Hey folks, Jared here. Andrea Howard is back as host, and she's joined today by retired Captain Roger Herbert to discuss his article in Proceedings, Embrace the F-Word. This episode was edited and produced by Joshua Gruber. We are still looking for audio editors to add to our team, so if you're interested, go ahead and reach out. Our email address is ccontrol at simsec.org. Please send us your resume. I did want to highlight a couple of developments over at the website. In the last two months, we've launched the Flotilla, SimSec's warfighting society focused on tactics. and in the last couple weeks we launched our naval wargaming discord you can find more information at simsec.org 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 kimber's men you're listening to sea control hosted by the center for international America. Greetings Sea Warriors. Let's dive back into sea control. I'm Andrea Howard and today we're discussing an article titled Embrace the F Word. It's featured in the January 2022 edition of the U.S. Naval Institute's Proceedings Magazine and penned by retired Navy Captain Roger Herbert. Roger served for 26 years as a Naval Special Warfare Officer and commanded SDV Team 2, Naval Special Warfare Unit 3, and the Naval Special Warfare Center. He retired in 2021

from the U.S. Naval Academy faculty, where he served as the Robert T. Harry's Distinguished Military Professor of Ethics. As a reminder, all opinions expressed are personal opinions and are not representative of any institutions with which we are associated. Thank you so much for joining me today, Roger. Thank you for having me. This is a great opportunity and great honor. Thanks. It really is a treat to get to talk with somebody from your community who's delved into so many different ethical issues. The title of your article is so captivating in that it's Embrace the F-Word. You're obviously not talking about the cuss word, so let's start with a discussion about the motivation behind your piece, what F-word it is exactly that you're encountering,

and what experiences in your military and teaching career inspired this. well so again thanks uh so my motivation for writing this article doesn't come from from either my military or teaching career it comes from a wildly uh uninspiring talk I gave uh when I was at the University of Virginia uh the women's basketball coach invited me to speak to her players I was super excited about the invitation uh but I didn't really prepare I just thought I'd do my usual shtick and tell a few war stories and then take my bowels. Well, the ladies weren't impressed. They were elite athletes. If I could help them beat Duke or Notre Dame, awesome. And as soon as it was evident that I was not going to be very helpful in this regard, they were pretty

eager for me to move along. And the real evidence that my talk had bombed came at the end when I asked if there were any questions stylists crickets they were done with me and they just wanted to get to chow so finally the the team captain an awesome point guard by the way i she just sort of felt sorry for me so she threw me a bone and asked the question she said okay we get it seals are courageous but how does that help us um are seals naturally courageous people uh or do they learn courage? And if courage is a learned virtue, how can we learn to be courageous? What an awesome question. And I'm pretty sure I gave a crappy answer and I was never invited back for sure. But I've been thinking about that question ever since. And what I wish I had said

was, yes, courage can be learned and courage can be taught, but only, only, only in an environment that tolerates risk-taking, only an environment that tolerates exploration of the limits of our capabilities, only an environment that recognizes the value of graceful failure. The F word, failure. So that's where this came from. And again, this is something I've just been wrestling with ever since. You very much reflect on how this never fail leadership has pervaded military culture today. As an opposite example, on July 7th, 1908, then Ensign Chester Nimitz famously grounded the USS Decatur while counting the 420 ton destroyer. It was his first command. Rather than being forced out of the Navy, though, he obviously went on to become this key fleet

Admiral of the U.S. Pacific Fleet during World War II. So you look at that example, and then you compare that to today. What is the overall impact of embracing never-fail leadership in the military? For one thing, communities that embrace never-fail leadership don't produce very many Chester Nimitzes. They will produce cautious leaders who don't take chances. I wasn't aware of that story that Nimitz had run a ship aground, but I'm guessing that he learned more about conning a ship on that day than in all the navigation and seamanship classes he took at Luce Hall. I'm also guessing he felt pretty damn grateful that the Navy didn't send him packing after that, And because of that, he became the type of leader we know Nimitz was. He was the type of leader who fostered cultures in which well-managed risk-taking was rewarded. And that's the type of leader that went to wars.

You really try to confront as well this notion that failure just breeds failure, wherein if you do sort of measured failures like you talk about in your article, then instead there are these really wonderful results of growth. So can you talk to us about the engineering metaphor that you employ in your article that I think really beautifully captures this notion? It talks about graceful versus catastrophic failures. Yeah, I love that phrase, graceful failure. I'm not sure where I first heard it. It was in a completely different context, but in an engineering context. So every engineer knows that the ships and subs and planes that they design are going to fail someday. every every non-equilibrium system fails so so they designed them with uh with that failure in mind uh they designed them to fail gracefully uh rather than uh as you said catastrophically for example the engineers who designed my car knew that if i failed to to change the oil periodically eventually the engine is will seize up and and die a catastrophic failure I know well catastrophic failure when I was a teenager did exactly that so what they so the

engineers they designed a check oil light so I should see the light pull into a gas station and change the oil and that that's a graceful failure so similarly good leaders recognize that the human systems that they lead will ultimately fail and so they design them to fail gracefully and here's an example and i don't think i put this in my article but i think this example kind of nails it so during operation neptune neptune spear that's the that was the the jsoc operation that killed bin laden um one of the helos crashed in the compound uh and to all to everyone who was watching this unfold, you know, from the White House Situation Room, that famous picture, this looked like a catastrophic failure. It wasn't. The leaders

of the task force had planned for failure. They had rehearsed probably dozens of times down Hilo scenarios. So the SEALs just sort of got up, rushed themselves off, and got on with business. And then before they extract it, they blew the helo in place with explosives that were rigged for exactly that eventuality. The leaders had designed graceful failure into the operation and the result, of course, was a spectacular success. That is a really wonderful example of these iterations in decision-making that can happen, that can allow failures to still morph into successes by just changing the different options that these operators have. If a culture, however, gets really stuck in this failure is not an option leadership mentality, then you argue in

your article that the culture can suffer from three pathologies. Let's really dig into those. First, there is discouragement of innovation. How does this play out in the military? So for any problem, there's both the textbook solution and then there's the best solution. And in most cases, at least hopefully, these are these two things are the same thing. But often they're not because the authors of our textbooks, they can't anticipate every situation. And that's especially true in war when the enemy is trying to get inside our textbook and use those rote answers against us. But if I work for a failure is not an option leader, then I'm going to reach for that textbook solution every time, regardless of whether or not it's the best solution. I'm safe there. It's a matter of self-preservation.

I know that if I were to attempt an out-of-the-box solution, an innovative solution, and it doesn't work, I'm going to get hammered. So the textbook solution, even if it's suboptimal, will be the solution that everyone turns to. Innovation risks failure. And if failure is not tolerated, there's not change. going to be any innovation right and then as a second effect the second pathology when innovation is discouraged you sort of already hinted that intolerant leadership will then stifle ambition so how does that sort of play out as well yeah um again sort of an example that that's not in my article but i've been thinking about it um and that's the the james webb space telescope it's

amazing so so they shoot this delicate instrument a million miles into space um and you know it has to unfold like an origami swan or something uh and i i read somewhere that um as it it unfolds there were like three dozen single points of failure you know if if one explosive bolt fails to explode when it's supposed to it's all over and billions of dollars are on the drain you know would you sign up to serve on that mission if you knew that your career would end right there uh if any one of those three dozen single points of failure were fail away um my guess is that the leader of the James Webb Space Telescope program is not a failure, is not an option leader. A project that ambitious would never get off the ground under zero tolerance leadership. The bottom

line is this, people who work in organizations in which failure is intolerable will respond predictably and prudently by not trying anything hard. Right. So just walking down this logic thread. So those first two pathologies where an aversion to failure will lead to a lack of innovation and ambition ultimately then leads to this third pathology that you said that's almost counterintuitive, wherein there's actually going to be an increase in catastrophic failures instead of those graceful failures that you just you had described for us earlier so what what are catastrophic failures then in the context of the moral fiber of the military well and these catastrophic it is somewhat counterintuitive and the catastrophic failures i'm thinking about

that this could lead to is is failures of honor and integrity never never fail cultures incentivize weirdly dishonesty. So if I know my boss is going to eat my lunch every time I give her bad news, then she has inadvertently designed a system in which her people are not going to give her bad news. They will hide problems from her. They may even lie to her. They may try to cheat the system to prevent her from discovering their failure. And I mean, that's not a necessary result of these type of culture, but it is a possible result. And I think leaders need to know that they are creating that possibility. Certainly. As a really poignant example from the nuclear community, in 2014, there was this really large decertification of over 30 engineering

watch supervisors at the Naval Prototype Training Unit in Charleston, South Carolina. The senior supervisors there, and one of them was actually sort of my running mate through my own time at Prototype as he had gone through the State 21 program and become an officer. But the senior supervisors who were there cheated regularly on this required exam because of its difficulty and also their perceived impunity. There was this common practice of sharing the exam bank. and my running mate in turn he took a week of leave didn't look at the shared exam bank but then used his leave to study because the test was really just that hard so folks thought that they

could look at this exam bank they could avoid kind of doing that extreme type of studying that was requisite to be this system expert on that plant and in turn there was this huge disqualification in a public scandal. So what examples of kind of that type of cultural creep did you witness during your military and academic career? Yeah, so that's a great example of that. And, you know, for this third pathology, as I was writing this, I actually am thinking of my students at the Naval Academy. You know, you may remember from your time there. I mean, inside the yard, we beat them up pretty good but you know beyond that we we sort of tend to we americans these young people up on a pedestal we tell them how awesome they are uh tourists tourists stop them on this on main street

they thank them for their service even though they haven't done jack yet ask them for their autographs sometimes and to get their pictures taken with their parents back home brag you know brag to their friends about their wonderful, um, son or daughter who is attending the U S Naval Academy. Um, man, that's a lot of pressure. Um, and you know, the problem with being put up on a pedestal like this is, you know, it's a pretty high fall from there. And, you know, our students are wonderful, uh, most of them, but they also know deep down that they're not as awesome as everybody's telling them they are we all know that right and um and sometimes i'm afraid that they can become so desperate to keep this secret to hide the awful truth uh from you

know mom and the world that they're just you know above average maybe they're not these awesome people and and they they will do so much that they would even consider lying and cheating this becomes a real temptation. So, you know, when we see cheating scandals, you know, as we have from time to time at the service academies or in Ivy League schools, or in your example of the Naval Prototype Training Unit, I think it's appropriate to question the character of the cheaters, certainly. But I think it's also worth asking, you know, what's the price of a single failure at that institution? You know, is it appropriate for the cost to be that high? And maybe it is. But if so, we should understand the risks involved in a system that doesn't

tolerate failure. Certainly. I'm going to pose kind of a tough question to you here next. And you know, you mentioned that there's these questions of honor and integrity that creep into the midshipman's mentality when they're under this pressure cooker at usna and there is in turn an honor rectification system and an honor court that allows students to you know be tried for these lapses in integrity and depending on their severity be retained and then go through this rehabilitation out in the fleet though there is no real honor court a lot of the rectification of of those lapses in integrity comes on a command by command basis you specifically mentioned that i will not fail as a quote is sort of the final punctuation of the seal ethos but seal training

has established this culture of flirting with failure in order to obtain the valuable feedback that you've been discussing in our conversation do you think other communities and i of course for me the nuclear community and the house that admiral rickover built comes to mind do you think that these other communities can build this appetite to flirt with failure how can you rehabilitate and never fail culture yeah well i mean i i've been retired for a long time um i retired in 2010 from the navy um so my facts about these other cultures and even our cultures may be But, you know, my experience has been that Naval Special Warfare community and SOF in general has a healthy relationship with failure. I think that I will not fail is not the best way to end that wonderful ethos because we fail all the time.

We just end up winning because we fail all the time. The only way we're going to know where our limits, our physical and mental limits, actually lie is to push ourselves to failure. And that's essentially what SEAL training is all about, and not just BUDS. The best SEAL platoons are always pushing themselves, trying to discover the limits of their capabilities. As for other communities, that's the hard part of your question, I guess. So, I mean, I don't know. I do know that I've participated in some big high visibility fleet exercises when I was in, in which, you know, victory, you know, was more or less preordained. And all of the debrief items were essentially self-congratulatory. um there there really uh there really was no appetite for learning lessons from from honest

mistakes or miscalculations so i've seen that i don't know um if i'd say that by the way about the submarine community during my 05 command tour i spent a lot of time on submarines and what i observed well when it came to um to that nuclear reaction that was uh that y'all were managing in in the engine rooms there there was no tolerance for failure and as somebody riding on that submarine i was very grateful for that actually but um but tactically it seemed to me um that submariners are you know they're ready to take well-managed risk at least that was a like that was the case of the the skippers on dallas and philly the boats that i worked with back then I was routinely impressed by that. So I'm not sure. In terms of if you look at your command and you, you know, how do you rehabilitate a command that has that has embraced this never fail culture?

I think that the main thing is, is you have to recognize that, as I say in the article, leaders need to examine the corporate body language of their commands. they need to look at their instructions look at their standing orders uh listen to your exo talking to your department heads how many times do you read or hear you know we will not tolerate fill in the blank you know of course sometimes zero tolerance you know is appropriate again thinking about that nuclear reaction when you're hundreds of feet below the surface of the water But we just need to realize that this that this is the language of of a failure is not an option culture. So that may alert us. Leaders should also look at the drills and the tests that they use to evaluate a command's readiness. You always win and then probably report your victory up the chain of command.

If so, that's probably because, you know, your command fears failure and you're going to set up tests that are not going to be terribly difficult. And finally, I think leaders need to sort of look and see how frequently their folks are willing to work off script. Are they always just reaching for that textbook or are they sometimes willing to attempt new approaches? So innovative tactics, techniques, procedures that might fail, but might also result in unprecedented successes. So, you know, again, if they're always working from that textbook, then that's another good indicator that you might be in one of those failure is not an option type of organizations. And you may choose to fix that. That's a really great way of framing that. And I'll walk it back and give some love to my community because even in engineering, but also as well up forward with sort of the tactical piece, like you mentioned, we have standing orders, right?

The standing orders from the engineer, the standing orders from the commanding officer that guide you when you need to ask for permission to do certain things. but within the bounds of what is already signed off as these routine evolutions, you are able to flex within those to find better efficiencies and ways to improve the team organization and functionality. The great example that I like to use as well, where really the stakes are probably at its highest, where we're from the book Call Sign Chaos by General Mattis, one of his biographies in which he talks about the efficacy of using standing orders to promote good behavior on the ground for the Marines that he couldn't interact with on a day-to-day basis. And that proved successful in terms of the folks that were under his command, both in Afghanistan and in Iraq.

I'm curious though, if you've received any feedback thus far, you know, the piece was published this month in Proceedings, but are there any folks who have really given you some pushback to this notion that failure is this contributive organism that you should cultivate in your organization? I'll give you one historical counterpoint, and that comes from the British government when they executed Admiral John Bing on March 14th, 1757 aboard the Monarch after he was court-martialed for, and I quote, failing to do his utmost, unquote, during several naval engagements in the Seven Years' War, where this really became famous was when Voltaire then commented, quote, in this country, it is good to kill an admiral from time to time in order to

encourage the others, unquote. So what's your thought on that sentiment? And have you received anything sort of similar since publishing this piece? Well, my first thought is that's awesome that you're quoting from Candide. So kudos there. I haven't received any feedback yet. I know a couple of positive things from friends, but I imagine that there are, and I hope I do receive some feedback. And I imagine that there are some really exceptional leaders out there who fundamentally disagree with the premise of my article. Honestly, it's a risky approach to leadership. I've had a couple of bosses who I think were a little uncomfortable with my readiness to flirt with failure, although they usually gave me enough line to hang myself with.

You know, I mean, when you think about it, failure is not an option. Leadership is tried and true. You know, when you say, when a leader gets up there and says failure is not an option, it's supposed to be inspiring. But, you know, my hope in writing this article is that those leaders who do embrace this tried and true leadership style can also recognize some of these pathologies that I highlight and maybe do something to ensure that those pathologies don't take hold in their commands. You know, at the end of the day, never fail leaders are likely to earn passing marks, but it's also likely that they will be leading a relatively uninspired workforce that is going to, you know, they seek safety in mediocrity. So there's some serious trade-offs to that. Anyway, I do look forward to getting feedback. And I think that pushing back against what I'm saying is, I understand it, but I do hope that people will give it some consideration. Sure. And it's certainly a graduated scale to like we talked about, there needs to be, you know, less tolerance of failure with something as serious as doing a reactor startup and then running casualty drills on an engineering plant on a nuclear submarine vice flexing some new tactics with your unit out in the field, or like you said even driving a submarine and again even that's predicated on where you are, who are you working with, etc. So all really good thoughts. And I hope you are able to get some feedback, especially from the podcast. You are a Navy SEAL who is retired. And so I think it is appropriate, even though I already gave us the caveat that neither you nor me is the representative of our institutions. But I'd love to hear your thoughts on the cultural churn in the aftermath of the trial for Chief Eddie Gallagher, as well as this prospect of women completing the SEAL training pipeline in the future. How does your article relate to this evolutionary growing and flexing that the SEAL community is currently undergoing?

So, again, I retired in 2010. That's now over a decade ago. It doesn't seem like it, but time flies. uh so i i don't really feel that i'm qualified to to talk about the culture of our community i mean cultures evolve and should so i i'd like to maybe change your question a little bit and talk in more general terms and and maybe this backs up a little bit you know it's backed away a little bit from what I've been saying. And I'll say this, for some violations, I believe zero tolerance is exactly the right approach. Not talking about the Gallagher case in particular,

but I mean, I taught ethics at the Naval Academy, and I firmly believe, and I always did, that anyone who can, um, deliberately harm, um, a non-combatant or a prisoner who is also a non-combatant, someone who's out of the fight or to combat, um, someone who is utterly powerless, um, anyone who could harm someone who is utterly powerless, uh, has no business, uh, wearing the trident actually, you know, for that matter has no business wearing the cloth of our nation and and on that in that you know full stop um i i tend to talk in in shades of gray but in this one i i can't find a a great a shade of gray that i can be comfortable with you know as for women in the teams i suspect nobody's going to bat an eye you know at least

the culture that that was there when i was there you know a decade ago anyone uh who can make it your buds and sqt and proves every day that they can move and communicate and up to the standards that that we set uh they are both they are most definitely welcome and i think that's always been the case so again i don't think anybody's going to bat an eye at that and i look forward to that day that that happens i certainly appreciate that insight and anticipating the day when that happens as well and i i tell you i know i know plenty of women who if they had the desire to do that could crush it but you know it's that you know i so i ran buds and it's a very small when you start looking at the very small people a group of people who one can do this um and then want to do

this you know those things have to uh those those two two things the venn diagram has to overlap out there and it's actually pretty small. So I know that lots of women can do it, but now you got to find them that want to do it as well. Certainly. You know, just as a last question, we've had such a great conversation here, but I always like to end with the opportunity for you to give a little bit of advice and to have a forum to talk about what you are working on next. So with that, what advice would you give to service members who aspire to delve more into this realm of ethics and professional writing what projects can we see down the pipeline from you roger good i'm glad you asked that second one i've got something i've got to say about that

so um so there were two there are i think counting about three questions so first of all regarding ethics i can i came to military ethics because um i i made a mistake in my first time in combat that worked out well, but only because I was lucky and I could have caused some serious harm to non-combatants, not intentionally, but what I learned from that is that for millennia, great thinkers have been considering how we can fight and win wars honorably and come home as whole human beings and and actually more importantly than that how to bring the people we lead home as whole human beings um you know as warriors and leaders we have a we have a moral obligation uh to immerse ourselves in literature again i'm an ethics professor so maybe that's

that's what i should you know that's obvious that i think that uh but it's just true we should we should understand that literature. And okay, so you had mentioned before the interview that maybe I can throw some ways of doing that, other than going back to the Naval Academy and taking any two or three all over again. But one of the best sort of intro books I've read to military ethics was a book by Stephen Coleman. He's a philosopher, and I think he's at University of New South Wales in Australia. He wrote an excellent introduction to military ethics. And I think it's called Military Ethics and Introduction. It's behind me somewhere. I could grab it. But I think that's a great place to start. The other thing is an Australian philosopher,

Dean Peter Baker, and a British philosopher, David Wedham, they collaborated on one of these you know, massive online courses. And it's exceptional. I went through the entire course myself as a student, even though I was teaching it in 203 at the time. And it really is an exceptional MOOC, I think they call them. And I don't see those names, put them out there. I don't remember how you get on to that, that course, but I'd recommend it. Now regarding professional writing. I'm a bad example here. I never made the time for professional writing when I was on active duty, and I regret that. So now I kind of have to make up for those days by engaging from beyond the grave as a retired old fart. But the bottom line is this, and that is if you think

you've got something to say most especially junior officers and senior ncos they do have something to say you know if you think you got something to say you probably do so say it i i again i recommend getting out there regarding what i'm working on next so i am retired which means i finally have time to do some writing so i'm not really tired this sort of feels more like a sabbatical but sabbatical that i i don't plan on coming back to from but uh but right now i'm doing a lot of writing uh and i'm really excited uh to talk about what's next just so two days ago um i got an email from from the from cambridge university press um advising me that uh they will be publishing a book uh that i'm co-authoring with those two philosophers i just met um dean baker

and or that i just mentioned dean baker and david wedham the title is special operations ethics raids, recoveries, reconnaissance, and rebels. I'm not sure when it will be published, but our manuscript is due at the end of April. So I better get cracking. Awesome. Thanks so much for sharing that news. You know, with that, I'm going to certainly have to let you go so you can get moving along with the publication. And that's unfortunately all the time that we have for today. I'd again like to thank my guest, Captain Roger Herbert, for joining me. We'll see you next time on Sea Control. © BF-WATCH TV 2021