By Major John McRae

In a recent discussion with some fellow mid-grade officers on how to command large organizations such as brigades, divisions, or squadrons, I invoked what has become a “third rail” in these discussions: The notion that the military might do well to learn from the private sector. This generated the now-familiar response listing the many differences familiar to those on both sides of the divide: The lack of profit motive in the military, the application of violence as a unique facet of military culture, and the relative frequency of turnover among military personnel within organizational units. While acknowledging the very legitimate concerns raised by these differences, it’s important that military professionals not entirely write off the positive potential of “looking outside” for role models.

The U.S. military is the most effective, professional, and efficient in the world. With such a reputation and track record comes a commensurate confidence in its abilities as an organization to react to threats and changes in the operating environment. This organizational confidence is reinforced at the unit and individual level in various ways, from success in battle, to the heraldic lineage of its battalions, to the decorations it bestows on its members. This is the kind of confidence that Colin Powell spoke of when he observed that, “Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.” As history has demonstrated, however, what the military must not do, whether at the organizational or individual level, is to allow its well-deserved confidence to foster the belief that its best ideas and sources of innovation come entirely from within. In fact, the sources of external strength available to the military have enabled success in battle many times over, with partners from academia, engineering, technology, business, and beyond helping the military bridge gaps and foresee alternative futures that it otherwise could not.

At the outset of World War II, the U.S. Army Air Corps was facing a crippling gap in its quest for domination of the air. A case in point was its inability to reliably predict and destroy enemy elements in contested skies. What it needed was a reliable, mass-produced system capable of providing real-time awareness for its pilots. The now legendary “Radiation Laboratory” of civilian scientists at MIT was able, in remarkably efficient fashion, to build upon nascent radar technology and supply U.S. aviators with a product far superior to its adversaries, thus helping tip the scales to the Allies in a subtle but important way. The godfather of the Radiation Laboratory was Alfred Lee Loomis, an exceptionally rare combination of scientist and millionaire who foresaw the need for a technological brain trust to assist in the war effort, and even assisted in funding the operation in its early stages. No doubt the urgency of global war helped expedite the marriage between the nation’s foremost scientists and its military, though the historical lesson of innovation through necessity endures.

Armies as diverse as Hannibal’s to George Washington’s have been forced to innovate, improvise, overcome, and adapt in order to remain viable.

Partnership with outside entities also saw advances in aerodynamics, explosive yield, industrialization, and most notably the atomic bomb. Of course the security environment today is radically different, but the principle endures. The military’s partnerships with leading minds in key spaces like Area Access/Area Denial (A2/AD) constitute a promising new era of civil-military cooperation. On the whole, however, crossover has been principally part of the equipment and capabilities procurement process. Although a critical element of the military’s ability to fight, procurement should not be the sole venue for discussion and joint cooperation on areas of mutual interest.

Board Rooms and Ivory Towers

Despite the legitimate areas of difference between military and civilian leadership, it’s naïve to assume that the two disciplines must be compartmentalized. One significant enticement is the volume of research, knowledge, and experience that has been devoted to organizational leadership in the private sector. Despite the military’s similarly devoted and longstanding study of the leadership domain - for example, retired U.S. Army General Stanley McChrystal teaches a course on leadership at Yale — perspectives from sources like Fast Company, The Harvard Business Review, or Forbes can be a refreshing new perspective for leaders to study and hone their craft. After all, leadership is not a “dead” discipline, and staying abreast of current trends and practices can help enhance leader perspective.

One commonly cited point of comparison between the military and private industry is the lack of a profit motive for military organizations. But the key is to understand why private businesses stick around long enough to be profitable and therefore studied by business columnists and academics: Efficiency.

By drawing this analogy, one begins to see how our capitalist system, which demands efficiency, is in some ways comparable to the spectrum of threats that face the U.S. military and others, now and in history, resulting in success or ruin. The marketplace of violence is unforgiving. Indeed, armies as diverse as Hannibal’s to George Washington’s have been forced to innovate, improvise, overcome, and adapt in order to remain viable. With this appreciation for cross-disciplinary insight, we can look at opportunities, partnerships, threats, and, most importantly, lessons already learned through a completely different lens.

Academia is fertile ground for understanding the benefits of interdisciplinary study and can be a radically productive way of operating. Take the case of Cal Tech. In a 2014 profile of the world’s top university, chair of the Division of Engineering and Applied Science at Cal Tech, Ares Rosakis, attributed the university’s success in large part to its lean organizational structure and the “forced” interdisciplinary collaborations and exchanges of ideas that this structure creates, saying “We have to have engineers interact with all of the sciences and vice versa – it is a matter of survival. We don’t have the breadth to do things in a big way unless they interact.” Another Cal Tech professor described how ingrained and even effortless this exchange of perspectives among colleagues has become, noting “You run into them at the coffee shop and start a conversation, and it turns out you are both thinking about some similar technology – and so this cross-fertilization is natural to the culture, to the fabric of the place.”

Breaking Good

In contrast, military professionals can fall victim to the trappings of working in any vast organization, specifically the tendency to rely on scale as an enabler of success that can encourage an environment of insularity and stasis. Put another way, for military leaders, fresh thinking and the cross-pollination of ideas across channels must be consciously and routinely undertaken. The current environment does not foster it on its own.

As leaders progress to positions of higher responsibility, the risk associated with experimentation and looking outward increases. Further challenges exist given the seemingly widening civilian-military gap. It is precisely for these reasons that the habit of exposing oneself to fresh perspectives from across the societal berm must be ingrained early on. This habit does not have to be a time-consuming, difficult, or unpleasant one, and of course military leaders in all areas have a wide array of professional responsibilities that must come first. That said, simple practices like delving into the biographies of effective governmental, academic, athletic, technological, and business figures can be tremendously helpful in developing a nuanced view of the world, and in approaching military challenges in a new way. The occasional auditing of a university course is another way to supplement learning and traverse the civil-military divide.

The benefits of cross-disciplinary learning or taking lessons from outside of the military are beneficial to more than just officer professional education. Unit-level professional development programs provide an excellent way for leaders to develop their subordinates in fulfilling ways. Above all, they are a positive step in overcoming the harmful perception that there is little to be gleaned from other elements of society outside the military. Indeed, whether in the grand context of WWII or the personal development of individual leaders today, a willingness to look outward can be a powerful tool for continued success.

[Photo: Flickr CC: Army Corps of Engineers, Los Angeles District Public Affairs]

MAJ John McRae is a student at the Naval War College’s College of Naval Command and Staff and a founding member of the Military Writers Guild. His previous assignment was as the Executive Officer to the Army National Guard G-3. Prior to that he was the Engineer Force Manager for the Army National Guard’s total Engineer force and the Aide de Camp to the First Army Deputy Commanding General. The views expressed are his and do not reflect DoD policy.