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H. Wyman Howard
241 Plays1 year ago
This is Move The Needle with Rob Kaplan, where we talk to people who lead, innovate, and inspire. Today on Move The Needle, Rob talks with retired Navy Admiral Wyman Howard, who led the Navy SEALS through an amazing year of growth and change. But perhaps his biggest challenge was public awareness of the SEALS post 9/11.
Wyman Howard is a transformational leader with extensive combat mission experience and a proven 32 year record of unparalleled change leadership, creativity and risk mitigation for outcomes of strategic consequence to the security of the United States of America. He is a fourth generation Naval Officer and a 1990 graduate of the United States Naval Academy where he was a member of the Navy crew team.
Wyman is a thought leader in sustainability; disruptive technologies; leadership & human capital assessment; performance; retention; inclusivity; and diversity – with relationships and linkages to global business and foreign government military and intelligence service liaison partners. He is deeply experienced and briefed in geo-political risk and opportunities across disruptive technologies– including multi-domain autonomous systems; electronic warfare; cyber threats and risk mitigations; and commercial, civil, and military & intelligence space sector applications.
A retired U.S. Navy Rear Admiral (Upper Half) with over 32 years in the SEAL Teams and joint special operations, Wyman commanded at all levels of Special Operations, including service as Commander Naval Special Warfare Command, Special Operations Command Central, and Naval Special Warfare Development Group. He has distinctive leadership experience at the strategic, operational and tactical levels of joint, intelligence, interagency and foreign partner operations.
He holds a Master of Business Administration from the TRIUM consortium of the London School of Economics, HEC Paris School of Management, and New York University’s Stern School of Business; a Master of Science in National Security and Resource Strategy with a focus on space from the Eisenhower School, where he earned three Commandant’s awards for excellence in writing; and a Professional Certificate in Artificial Intelligence and Business Strategy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. His professional military education also includes the Naval War College, Joint Special Operations University, and the Defense Language Institute.
He is a senior advisor principally focused on climate and sustainability solutions. He is an active volunteer within the community, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and an Eagle Scout.
#wymanhoward #londonschoolofeconomics #newyorkuniversity #unitedstatesnavalacademy #retirednavyseal #USnavy #commander #geopoliticalrisk #disruptivetechnologies #electronicwarfare #climate #artificialintelligence #sustainability #eaglescout #presidentialunitcitation #jointmeritoriousunitawards #movetheneedlewithwymanhoward #movetheneedlewithrobkaplan #samzeff #robkaplan #scottrichardson #ronelgolden
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Transcript
Introduction to Move the Needle
00:00:06
Speaker
This is Move the Needle with Rob Kaplan, where we talk to people who lead, innovate and inspire. So what was the cost of more notoriety, higher profile? The cost is, you know, it puts pressure on the culture at those standards, the
Impact of 9/11 on Navy SEALs
00:00:25
Speaker
why we serve.
00:00:25
Speaker
Today on Move the Needle, Rob talks with retired Navy Admiral Wyman Howard, who led the Navy SEALs through an amazing era of growth and change. But perhaps his biggest challenge was public awareness of the SEALs post-9-11.
00:00:47
Speaker
I was a professor at Harvard Business School. He was particularly interested in leadership lessons that I had learned while being a professor and in my business career. And over the years I got to know him, he had me come and speak at Fort Bragg and regularly talk to me about some of the leadership challenges he was facing. Wyman is
00:01:14
Speaker
is one of the great military leaders and unsung heroes in our military that we've had over the last few decades. Wyman, I'm very glad to have you with us today. Thank you, Rob.
Howard's Journey to the SEALs
00:01:26
Speaker
In 1990, you joined the Navy. And I know you did it with a view that you were going to be in the Navy Seals and in the Special Forces. Well, I don't recall choosing the Navy. The first song I remember
00:01:43
Speaker
Hearing and learning was the Navy, the Naval Academy fight song, the goat is old and gnarly that my father would sing to me as a young boy. Everything that I did as a young man in high school was boresighted on the Naval Academy.
00:02:02
Speaker
joining the SEAL teams. From Boy Scouts to competitive rowing, that was the trajectory. I applied to one school with no Plan B, and my family had served in the Navy really without a break in service since the 1800s.
Evolution of SEAL Operations
00:02:18
Speaker
Once in the Navy, I did choose to stay at several inflection points, and that was driven by three factors, the deeply steeped in purpose,
00:02:29
Speaker
mission of the SEAL teams, of Naval Special Warfare, of serving with my joint teammates, the standard that we chose to serve, and the opportunity to solve the hardest problems.
00:02:41
Speaker
The arc of my career is an interesting one because it began in what I term as the third modern era of special operations. And this is 80s into the 90s. And it was an era of very low combat employment operational tempo. And it's an era when I taught a class in naval special warfare I anchored on because we were raised by a generation of stewards.
00:03:06
Speaker
humble stewards that in many cases they were employed not on even one combat operation over an entire career. They left the fighting position better because of their service, their leadership, and they raised our generation and got us ready for what happened after 9-11.
00:03:26
Speaker
And just to stop on that for a moment, so the non-combat period would have been at the close of the Vietnam War until the Gulf War? Yeah, really through the 90s. You had the Gulf War before that. You had contingency missions in the Western Hemisphere, Grenada, Panama. The operational tempo did not match what was to come. That's the point. Right. Right. And the level of
00:03:54
Speaker
Penetration of combat experience in the force was very, very low. But you had a generation that stayed on the account. They left the fighting position better. They raised us. And they were the bridge of the lessons in terms of tactics, techniques, and procedures, culture standard from Vietnam that was built before that of World War II in Korea with the Frogmen, underwater demolition teams. They were that bridge that put us in position after 9-11. The last 20 years have been that fourth era.
00:04:24
Speaker
high operational tempo that in many cases was not distinctive to us, but required scale given the policy choices that were made by our civilian leadership.
Focus on Irregular Deterrence
00:04:36
Speaker
And just to be clear, what marked that was the second, for lack of a better term, the second Gulf War where we went into first Afghanistan, then went into Iraq,
00:04:49
Speaker
And for the 20 years plus or minus after that, that was this high intensity period you're referring to. That's right. That's this fourth era and we're entering the fifth era, the fifth modern era. I say modern is these irregular approaches, irregular warfare. It's not new to mankind.
00:05:07
Speaker
So we don't want to stand on that like we're inventing something. But this fifth era is what I led through my last tour, to be ready for what's ahead with urgency because we don't know how much time we have. And it's a focus on
00:05:23
Speaker
Nuclear peer adversaries, it's a focus on irregular deterrence options that increase leverage for our national leadership, put more chess pieces on the board from the president to deter irregularly our adversaries and de-escalate the crisis. This is the distinctive opportunity for naval special warfare. And this is the, again, the private sector term, the addressable market that we pointed towards. We oriented our entire enterprise for the last two years.
00:05:51
Speaker
And to be clear about this, this is more about deterrence and very quiet operations, not active combat operations, but it's deterrence around the world that may not be part of a formal combat operation. It's deterrence of conflict.
00:06:11
Speaker
And if you think about deterrence, we conventionally deter our adversaries with conventional military capability. I mean, deterrence is whole of government. It's economic, informational, diplomatic, national power. Now, the military contribution to that is important, but I would argue not decisive. There's an emerging third pillar of deterrence that I've seen clearly. I've termed it irregular deterrence. It gets into cognitive influence of your adversaries.
00:06:39
Speaker
to undermine their confidence, that they can achieve their political objectives through military violence that could be very destabilizing. And it also includes the ability to credibly hold your adversary systems at risk. This is where I pointed Naval Special Warfare, our team, where we enrolled on the opportunity
00:07:03
Speaker
and then we went to work across assessment selection, capabilities, task organization, and new command and control concepts.
Training and Technology for Modern Warfare
00:07:13
Speaker
to, as I said, put more chess pieces on the board for the president to credibly deter our adversaries. And systems means computer systems, other operational systems, so a lot more technology intervention? Really, there's four principal systems, transportation, communications, space, and energy. Those are the systems. And it's an imperative that our country
00:07:40
Speaker
to credibly deter attacks on our systems that we hold at risk our adversary systems. That's my point of view. That's what we oriented on as an opportunity that's distinctive to naval special warfare. And that may be more intellectual combat than physical combat. Certainly on the cognitive side, and I think Joint Special Operations Command, with all of its capabilities,
00:08:05
Speaker
and their distinctive capabilities within our army, special operations, teammates. That is absolutely an area of focus, focus within the government in support of the state department and other elements of the government. But I assume therefore that training, processes, recruiting, development of your talent is dramatically different than it might've been 20, 25 years ago?
00:08:30
Speaker
Well, it's starting to shift. The standard for our assessment selection, the cognitive character and leadership attributes that we assess and select for, there's a consistency to those standards.
Assessment and Leadership Development
00:08:41
Speaker
But your assessment and selection must always evolve. And over the last two years, to your point, at a whole cloth, we built a new assessment command. Which you're describing and your role sounds more like, to me, a CEO.
00:08:56
Speaker
that's trying to decide how to develop a strategy, what you do that's distinctive, developing priorities, aligning your priorities to every aspect of what you're doing. This is a very broad job that you're talking about in your final
00:09:13
Speaker
assignments over the last several years. Naval Special Warfare is a multi-billion dollar CapEx OpEx entity. You know the returns are the national security outcome. You started in 1990 when you got when you joined the SEAL team. How long was your training and then what was the first team you joined and what was the nature just generally the nature of the assignments for the next several years. My first command was SEAL Team 8 and then I had the opportunity to go to SEAL Team 1 which is
00:09:40
Speaker
really important geographically in the Pacific. We have three SEAL delivery vehicle teams for undersea missions, two special reconnaissance teams, and three special boat teams for surface mobility. The aggregate of that is the failings of the enterprise. It's the operational capability. Equally critical are the teammates who support war fighting functions. That includes intelligence, communications, logistics, sustainment, cyber.
00:10:09
Speaker
Electronic Warfare and it's that part of the enterprise that distinguishes Naval Special Warfare and it's a place we've invested heavily over the last 20 years and where we culturally affirmed the mission criticality of inclusive teams to solve hard problems and I'd say where we don't confuse your value with how close you get to the objective.
00:10:31
Speaker
Tell us what the physical test is and what the dropout rate is and how much physical ability, strength, endurance, swimming capability do I need to have? There are standards across all the things you mentioned, minimum standards, and those standards have been validated by
00:10:54
Speaker
by the Navy and by a third party. And when we opened Naval Special Warfare to women candidates many years ago, it was important to be precise in what those standards are indexed against real missions. And so that work has been done. But I want to emphasize the grit, the resilience, the problem solving, the creativity, the fluidity, integrity, judgment. Are you a good follower, teammate?
00:11:23
Speaker
mentor, those are the, those are the attributes that we are assessing. How many SEAL team applicants are you getting every year and how many, what percentage of them make it to become a SEAL team, SEAL team member? You know, we bring in, uh, let's say, uh, uh, you know, a few, uh, thousand candidates, you know, it's, it's a big funnel that walks down to, uh, a number that,
00:11:52
Speaker
can sustain the force. And I think where we saw opportunity with the assessment command in 2020 and invested in this command with our best seals, our objective there was to deliver
00:12:10
Speaker
smaller cohorts with higher instructor cadre to candidate ratio and have lower attrition. Harvard Business School, where as you know, I was a professor, let's take it one out of every 12 applicants gets in. The SEAL team, are the odds better than that, worse than that? That sounds about, no, it's a bit better than that, but those that don't make it.
00:12:39
Speaker
Yeah, one of the things we did while I was the commander is rebrand reimagine how we transition those teammates to to the Navy. Right. We don't want to lose them. Well, they're they're incredible. It's incredible talent. And right. And then the first thing I directed is that we we really celebrate the attribute that they have demonstrated. And it's the risk of failure. Right. That's the trial.
00:13:09
Speaker
Because that attribute alone will carry them to success. And what I'm most proud of is how our team, our families, how we together led through a mass casualty and a very tragic loss.
00:13:37
Speaker
on 6th August 2011, where we suffered a very significant combat loss. Deborah, at this point, the U.S. military is absolutely reeling at the news. Several U.S. government officials now tell CNN that the majority of those killed in this incident are believed to be U.S. Navy SEALs, that's U.S. Navy Special Forces, the very types of troops that of course
00:14:06
Speaker
conducted that raid against Osama bin Laden, one official saying, this is a big loss for the US Navy. And I remember meeting President Obama in Dover, and I was introduced to him as the next commander of
Leadership Challenges and Recovery
00:14:22
Speaker
this unit. It's this long handshake. And the president looked at me and he said, be ready, I'm going to call on you again.
00:14:30
Speaker
were still shaking hands. And the only thing that came to mind, the only thing I've ever said directly to the president of the United States, I looked at him and I said, of course, Mr. President. And he let go of my hand and walked off. He nodded and walked off. And five months later, six months later, the call came for a mission that only the president has the authorities, approvals and permissions. They reside with him alone.
00:14:59
Speaker
I was at my son's basketball game and we were called into work with the team, a team that has trust and confidence and grit. And part of the story is we had failed a similar mission and the failure was a result of our unit's own actions on the objective.
00:15:25
Speaker
And that was maybe a year before this. And there was unit and individual accountability, learn fast and always forward. This is now five months after this very tragic loss, and he did call. And so we came in the work, made a plan, briefed our senior civilian and military leadership, launched from the United States,
00:15:54
Speaker
And this is the joint story. I mean, there are Marine capabilities, Army capabilities, Air Force capabilities, Navy capabilities, space capabilities. And from the time we left the United States to mission complete was less than 72 hours. And we executed the mission, we conducted the mission on the State of the Union. So think political, strategic risk.
00:16:19
Speaker
And then we were home Friday night and I was at my son's basketball game the very next Saturday, which was an unbelievable bookend on the other side of the earth. It's like a 16,000 mile round trip.
00:16:59
Speaker
So, as a Navy commander, Wyman had to deal with a whole range of
00:17:12
Speaker
what I would call alignment issues. And in particular, he had to focus on what the Navy SEALs did and special forces did that was distinctive. So in the military, as in business, the leader plays a key role, but the leader needs to work through either hundreds or thousands of other people.
00:17:39
Speaker
And because of that, the leaders got to think very much about clear expectations, about having the right people in the right seats. So there's a lot of analogies between business and the military, and Wyman was very interested in trying to understand those analogies.
Enhancements in Command and Resources
00:17:59
Speaker
So we spent two years
00:18:01
Speaker
running at that hard and we were successful. We changed everything. Task organization, command and control, assessment selection. We were very successful in gaining more resources. We had a significant budget growth to develop the manned and unmanned capabilities that extend reach, proximity reach to our adversaries.
00:18:24
Speaker
And in that role as CEO, as you said before, as commander, it's a quest for perfect knowledge of your enterprise. It's the fingertip feel. And I trained for a few months. I hadn't done a lock-in lockout. That's where you insert and then extract from and back to a nuclear submarine. And I hadn't experienced that myself since I was Ensign Howard off
00:18:54
Speaker
Puerto Rico on a Sturgid class summary, which we don't even have anymore in 1991. Lead by example, fingertip feel, understand risk, understand complexity, flat team to solve hard problems. So I trained for a few months to experience that myself in this role.
00:19:15
Speaker
It was an incredible opportunity to just see the complexities and risks that our team takes on for the most strategic missions that the nation has of us. Wyman, tell me a little bit about who your role models and heroes were, the people that helped motivate you.
Personal Influences and Heroes
00:19:35
Speaker
Well, my father, absolutely. He was a 30-year Naval officer. His impact on my leadership,
00:19:41
Speaker
Inability to lead change was profound. My mother, you know, grace and respect coaches, my English teacher, Pat Welsh, he wrote for the Washington post in the outlook section, absolutely phenomenal servant, taught at TC Williams for 30 plus years, the impact over multiple generations of so significant critical thinking, love of literature.
00:20:10
Speaker
Ultimately, my heroes are my fallen teammates and the Gold Star families. It's our Gold Star families that inspire our force. It's their grace and commitment and sacrifice. Their leadership is important to our team, to our mission. All those that seek the rock quarry, that do the work and serve in some way, it's not necessarily in government.
00:20:37
Speaker
in their local communities, it's volunteering, do the hard work and with humility and stewardship.
00:20:45
Speaker
What do you think of leaders who take credit but don't give credit? One of the things we emphasize in our force is to deflect the credit. Anything we're doing, there's some critical piece that lays outside of our enterprise. Remember I said, don't confuse your value, don't correlate value with proximity to the objective. It's communications, intelligence, logistics. To set the table like that culturally,
00:21:12
Speaker
on a team is very, very powerful. That's what we strive to do. It's not perfect. You got to take a steady strain on that one. When you're asked to take on missions of the complexity and risks that we often do, the critical pieces lay in so many different places. But then when you fail, that's different than you own that one. What do you do with people who make mistakes?
00:21:39
Speaker
We develop them. We have a great example of that. When I was the commander of development group, we had a group of teammates that made a mistake. They were held accountable, but they were also developed. And you can go across each one of those teammates and trace the arc of their contributions after. And it's an incredible story, Rob, of accountability, but development. Humility sharpened for us in loss, combat loss. We touched on
00:22:08
Speaker
The missions that you're not successful. And then I think imperfection, right? Human imperfection. Let's learn fast. Turn the page always forward. You'll find ways to develop teammates that make a mistake. I mean, that's, that's, that's got to be your first, you know, your first move. You know, when I reflect on, on a mistake, I think about not seeing clearly, you know, around the corner.
00:22:36
Speaker
to identify the accumulation of exposure to see the threshold of fame that we would cross in 2011 and the market that would create the challenges we would face to our culture or ethos. 2011 being Bin Laden. 2011 is a very active year. There's a number of things that happen. Right. Got it.
00:23:00
Speaker
We stepped across a threshold there. I don't think we didn't see it clearly. So what was the cost of more notoriety, higher profile?
Cultural Shifts Post-2011
00:23:10
Speaker
The cost is, it puts pressure on the culture at those standards, the why we serve. And those challenges that we faced after that were really amplified by decisions
00:23:28
Speaker
in the mid to late 2000s, as the community, as Naval Special Warfare was seeking to grow to meet counterterrorism demand, there were some decisions to reach more candidates and increase the visibility of the command. Those were leadership decisions.
00:23:48
Speaker
You know, that undermined the foundation, I won't say, it weakened the foundation of our ethos. And so fast forward to 2011, you know, I think we have worked very hard to, and advanced in the ways, you know, how we've adapted through professional development, education, enforcing standards, correcting deviations that are in our control. I talked about in 2020, the new assessment command, and part of that is setting expectations.
00:24:17
Speaker
The expectation of serving in SEAL team is to take on the hardest problems, solve the hardest problems. And I gather what's implicit in that is taking risk. If it's hard, it means there's risk. Right. Imperfection. Absolutely. 10 margins. The highest complexity, highest risk missions, the hardest problems, that's the main thing.
00:24:40
Speaker
What do you do with someone who for whatever reason has a blind spot, doesn't have an accurate self-perception, you just can't get through to? Well, it's the candid feedback for self-improvement, self-correction, right? Reflection, self-correction, self-improvement.
00:24:59
Speaker
And we have a significant investment in essentially a 360 tool at all the friction points in assessment selection and in an operational readiness cycle, a way of providing superior peer and subordinate
00:25:17
Speaker
Candid anonymous assessments of your tactical competence leadership and character. It's an incredible platform That's effective. It's it is and tell you correct for variance in any organization Yeah, it's a place that we're really leading and have worked with the Navy to expose the Navy to to this approach You know that that's scalable. Yeah, I like it
00:25:42
Speaker
This week, Rob spoke with retired Navy Rear Admiral Wyman Howard, who commanded the Navy's Special Warfare Command for two years. Next time on Move the Needle with Rob Kaplan. I've been more focused on trying to work on the whole system versus to create more and more lifeboats, if you will, because that's what vouchers are. That's what charters are. And that may be great for those kids. But at the end of the day, you still have a mass amount of kids left back in the system.
00:26:14
Speaker
Move the Needle with Rob Kaplan is produced and edited by Sam Zeff and Scott Richardson, and I'm executive producer Ronell Golden. We want to thank Michelle Brown, as well as Zorik and his team from Hello Studios for logistical and technical support. Make sure not to miss an episode by subscribing to Move the Needle on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and the Robert Stephen Kaplan YouTube channel.