Military Intelligence has one of the highest percentages of women of any Army branch. But although we often think of child care as solely related to women, the issue concerns the majority of our men soldiers as well because a higher percentage of soldiers are married than ever before, and most men soldiers' wives work. So addressing child care problems is a priority for any commander, not for just me. But in the early 1990s, the Army as a whole was completely preoccupied with post–Cold War downsizing and would only later make a concerted effort to improve the quality-of-life issues of child care and housing that we all now recognize play such a critical role in the retention of trained soldiers.
Another issue we dealt with in the brigade concerned our mess halls. Originally, there had been a mess hall in the facility, serving four meals within a twenty-four-hour period to the soldiers on shift work. But in 1990, during one of the post–Cold War cost-cutting efforts, a decision was made to eliminate one of our two mess halls, which were located in the tunnel and at Schofield Barracks.
This had been an ill-advised decision. Most of the soldiers working in the tunnel only got a twenty-minute lunch break. When there had been a mess hall, that was adequate time to go through the serving line, and sit down to a meal. But once the mess hall was removed, the only options were packing a bag lunch, buying a cold sandwich or junk food from a vending machine, or facing the unappetizing prospect of the greasy fare offered at a small, rather unsanitary on-site snack bar run by a private concessionaire.
When I took command of the brigade, I found this situation unacceptable. The Army had removed the mess hall at the height of the effort to keep soldiers fit and healthy. So vending machine Twinkies or greasy snack bar hot dogs were hardly the answer. And the single soldiers living in barracks did not have kitchens in which to prepare a bag lunch. The mess hall at Schofield Barracks—across the post from the quaint old
From Here to Eternity
buildings—was modern and offered appetizing food. But it was just too far away for the shift workers to reach on their short lunch breaks.
It was obvious to me that putting an Army mess hall back in the tunnel was the best solution to the problem. But this remedy would have to come in the 1992 budget year, which saw the greatest drawdown in Army history. The Cold War was over; we won the Gulf War. Entire divisions were rolling up their flags and being deactivated. Cost-cutting was the live-or-die byword. A mess hall open twenty-four hours a day was an expensive proposition, requiring three shifts of civilian cooks.
I knew that this effort might be viewed by some as tilting at windmills, but it was my job as a commander to support my soldiers as energetically as possible. However, the first reply to my request to reopen the mess hall was predictable: “You've got the snack bar.”
This called for a “tactical” response. As commander of the entire facility, I was able to influence the frequency and thoroughness of the health inspections to which the snack bar was subjected. To no one's surprise, the health inspectors found rotten spaghetti sauce, tainted hamburgers, and unacceptable quantities of grease, which supported a thriving population of roaches and rats. The snack bar regularly failed health inspections, went through halfhearted efforts to improve, and failed again. Whenever the 2,000 annual visitors passed through Kunia—Hawaii just happening to be a “required” stop for many official travelers—I raised the issue of reopening the mess hall.
Eventually we prevailed. The mess hall in the tunnel was renovated and reopened. The young soldiers on shift work received three free nutritious, well-balanced meals a day.
Treating team members with respect and dignity, and helping make their lives easier, extends far beyond the purview of the Army. Many of the most forward-thinking and successful private sector companies invest heavily in their employees' morale and welfare.
The innovative software corporation SAS, with its headquarters in Cary, North Carolina, is one of the most eminent in this area. Having grown from a small entrepreneurial venture in 1976 to one of the world's ten largest independent software vendors and the largest privately held software company today, SAS has over 3 million users worldwide. SAS has consistently ranked among the very best employers in surveys taken by
Working Mother
magazine,
Fortune,
and
Business Week.
The company provides inexpensive on-site child care that begins early in the day and extends late into the evening for those employees working long hours on a deadline project. Other SAS perks include a company pool, gym, and athletic fields on the headquarters campus.
This attention to employees' needs has paid invaluable dividends to the company. For example, software programmer Doug Teasly brings his preschool son, Philip, with him to work most days and leaves him in the nearby child care center. This perk costs him $250 a month, but he is happy to pay in order to have the chance to visit his son during the day. Teasly is so satisfied with his conditions at SAS that he has declined job offers for more than $30,000 a year more than he is currently making.
To me, such examples clearly indicate that mutual respect and loyalty within an organization—what has often been called the cohesiveness of an effective team—is a goal to which we should all aspire.
In September 1992, I was on Temporary Duty in Washington when I received yet another unexpected phone call. It was from Major General Chuck Scanlon, commander of INSCOM, with whom I had briefly discussed my controversial slating in 1985, when my assignment to command an MI battalion in Korea had been inappropriately handled.
“Claudia, how are you doing?”
“Fine, sir.”
“I'm calling you with some good news.”
Was he calling about some professional issue we'd discussed at Kunia?
“You have been selected for promotion to brigadier general. Congratulations.”
I felt almost numb. What a great honor.
As soon as I hung up the phone, I called my father. “Daddy, guess what?”
“What?”
“I've been selected to be promoted to brigadier general.”
There was a slight pause, then he whooped with exuberance.
He had pinned on my second lieutenant's bars twenty-three years earlier.
Pentagon Hardball
A
s my Army assignments increased in responsibility, I found myself confronted with challenges more complex than any I had faced as a younger officer. Staff positions and previous battalion command had prepared me for brigade command, which in turn honed the leadership and management skills I would later call upon as a general in the Pentagon. But the test I faced as commander of the 703rd Military Intelligence Brigade was unique by any standard. In what became known in Intelligence circles as the “Kunia Mutiny,” I had to confront defiance of good order and discipline while simultaneously conducting a demanding organizational transformation.
The situation began in 1992 when the National Security Agency decided to reduce the number of strategic Military Intelligence facilities worldwide to just three major joint stations, each under the command of a separate armed service. Shifting to joint command at each station would streamline staff and provide more centralized operational control—a move that was made possible by advances in technology and changes in philosophy about service roles and operational styles. This became a priority during the belt-tightening after the Cold War and would allow the services at the stations to combine their staffs and share the responsibility for a single, integrated operation.
Kunia was scheduled to be one of these three joint stations, the other two being at the Air Force Intelligence Center near San Antonio, Texas, and the INSCOM facility at Fort Gordon, Georgia.
Eventually, a Navy captain would command the joint operation at Kunia. But since the 703rd Military Intelligence Brigade was host organization in 1992 and the other armed services' units were “tenants,” the NSA and its military leaders decided that the Army would retain command of Kunia for a few more years after joint operations began on January 1, 1993.
None of us liked this change ordered from Washington, especially because we preferred service autonomy. For years, the Army, Navy, and Air Force had existed in “co-located” status, working side by side in the vast subterranean building but retaining their separate chains of command. The task of ironing out the complex details of the transformation had to be completed within a year. Now, struggling against our own cultural resistance, we had to mesh those operations into a single joint station, of which I, an Army colonel, would be the senior officer and commander. Getting the armed services to move beyond the ingrained aspects of operational control is never easy. In fact, “going joint” invariably involves considerable angst and negotiation over the details. But my colleagues and I were professional officers; we didn't choose our orders, we obeyed them. At least that was what I thought in 1992.
As our preparations for the details of the shift to a joint station progressed over a six-month period, however, my Navy colleague Captain Hugh Doherty and I noticed a distinctly unusual pattern of behavior on the part of the commander of the Air Force contingent at Kunia, Lieutenant Colonel Larry Strang. At first, he had appeared cooperative, attending meetings with Captain Doherty and me to work on the bureaucratic nuts and bolts of the transformation. Then, after many of the details had been hammered out, Larry Strang became harder to contact, just when his cooperation was most needed. Ostensibly, he was still cooperative and would even call Captain Doherty and me to schedule planning sessions. But Strang would then either find some excuse to cancel the meeting, send a junior officer, or even an NCO as his representative to discussions where a commander's decision was required. Once, when I asked Strang's representative what his instructions were, the man replied, “I'm only here to take notes, ma'am.”
Then Larry Strang would go through the charade of scheduling a makeup meeting, which Captain Doherty and I would fit into our calendars, and no one from the Air Force would appear.
I called Strang to ask for an explanation.
“Why didn't you show up at the meeting, Colonel?”
“I was too busy, ma'am,” he said.
“Please check your calendar and let me know when you are free.”
“Yes, ma'am. I'll do that today.”
He failed to do so. But what I found most unusual were official memoranda that Lieutenant Colonel Strang had signed and distributed to his staff, which they passed on to mine, declaring unequivocally that the pending station operations at Kunia would be a “consolidated,” not a joint, command. In the military, there is a world of difference between the two. A joint operation has a single commander under whom the separate service contingents coordinate their efforts. This is what the NSA and the three strategic intelligence commands had ordered us to accomplish. But Strang seemed to have either misunderstood or decided to defy those orders.
Just to make sure
I
wasn't the officer misinterpreting the Major Commands' intentions, I had my staff consult closely with INSCOM headquarters to verify that our proposed plan was consistent with the U.S. Air Force Intelligence Center interpretation of the new directives. Word came back from INSCOM: There were no “crossed wires.” Still, I had to be certain that Strang's resistance represented foot-dragging at the local level and not quasi-official United States Air Force policy. Among Army officers, the Air Force had a reputation for publicly proclaiming one policy at the higher command level and allowing more junior local commanders latitude to defy that policy when it suited their service's purpose.
So I called the Air Force Intelligence Center directly. They verified what INSCOM had told me: The Kunia facility would be integrated into a joint command in the first quarter of 1993.
During this time, Captain Doherty and I managed to discuss this issue directly with Lieutenant Colonel Strang. His first argument was that the proposed shift to joint operations was not yet official policy. We presented ample documentary evidence to the contrary. Then Strang persisted that even if a joint command were in the offing, the change did not have to be implemented as quickly as we proposed. Again, we produced directives to prove him wrong. But Strang remained uncooperative.
When Strang had left that meeting, I told Captain Doherty, “We need to think through exactly what steps he has to comply with after January first. I just can't imagine him remaining openly defiant beyond that date. But we must have some observable benchmarks.”
Captain Doherty agreed and our two staffs examined the integration plan for the most important elements of Air Force cooperation. If Strang and his people decided to disobey NSA and Major Command orders, I wanted to know what the legal tripwires were in the event this situation escalated. By now, I was aware that I might have unexpectedly entered an interservice turf battle in which the Air Force, for reasons of its own, had decided to use Kunia as a test case to push its claim for a different definition of the new joint centers. This was murky stuff. I was a colonel who had just been selected for promotion to brigadier general, still a relatively junior officer by the standards of Pentagon Hardball this looming confrontation might represent. One thing was clear, however: I would have to plan my actions very carefully in my dealings with Lieutenant Colonel Strang and the Air Force.
And those dealings had become openly strained. My action officers dreaded discussing the transformation with Strang because he had become so verbally abusive. Although he was polite with me, all of my attempts to have him face reality and change his approach to the transformation failed. When I tried to elicit Strang's specific concerns about the process we were undergoing, he avoided discussing either the substance of the transition or his objections to it.
Just before the January 1 deadline, Strang's immediate senior, Colonel Cassidy, entered the picture. He called me at my quarters and requested that the negotiations begin all over again. I considered his suggestion to be just another stalling tactic. Obviously, there were real differences in the three services' commitment to this change. Here at Kunia, the Army and the Navy had worked diligently to hammer out the many details, some complex, some mundane, while the Air Force had first dragged its feet and now was more openly attempting to derail the entire process.