Group, the small think tank that Rear Adm. Joe Sestak had created immediately after 9/11. Our job at Deep Blue was to come up with new ideas, forging them in the intensity of what we felt at the time was a new era of warfare.
Some of our ideas failed; for example, a “sea swap” to keep ships forward deployed and fly their crews back and forth—although the concept is getting a new look in view of today’s more resource-constrained environment. We designed new types of combat groups (expeditionary strike groups) centered on large amphibious ships combined with destroyers and submarines, carrying drones and special operations forces. Another idea was to repackage communications using chat rooms, e-mail, and primitive versions of social networks to leverage lessons learned operationally. We looked at unmanned vehicles on the surface of the sea, below the ocean, and in the air. We created training simulators using off-the-shelf video games as bases. And Deep Blue also looked at the idea of the “expeditionary sailor,” reflecting the fact that tens of thousands of sailors would soon be serving far from the sea in the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan. How to train, equip, and prepare them for duty like that? Innovation!
Around this time I attended a conference at which all the Navy flag officers were present. I was a newly minted one-star admiral heading up Deep Blue. It was a memorable meeting for a couple of reasons. At one point a vastly senior four-star admiral approached me during a coffee break. He was a naval aviator, and he was very displeased with the emphasis we were placing on drones and other unmanned air vehicles. His comments, in a nutshell, were that I was “standing into danger,” as we say in the Navy, in a career sense. And being a typical aviator, he was not subtle. “Stavridis,” he said, “your career is over unless you learn how to stay in your lane.” That was fairly unsettling but not entirely unexpected. When I mentioned this to a senior surface officer, a three-star who was a mentor and leader in the community, his comment was, “You better trim your sails, Jim.” Hardly reassuring.
The other memorable revelation at the all–flag officer conference was delivered by the CNO. He talked at length about a study of flag officer traits that he had commissioned by a well-regarded consulting firm specializing in leadership training. The results of that study were compared with those of similar studies of very senior executives in private industry. The Navy admirals scored very high in almost every desirable trait: leadership, organization, dedication, energy, alignment, and peer review. But there was an exception to this parade of good news: Navy admirals scored the lowest in . . . willingness to take career risk—essentially the willingness to try new things, to champion innovation and change. I found it extremely ironic that this group of admirals—all of whom had demonstrated extreme reserves of physical courage in flying high-performance aircraft, spending months at sea, and conducting dangerous special operations—were simply afraid to take the bureaucratic risks that come with innovation.
Despite these obvious indications that I was perhaps not in the mainstream with my colleagues in this regard, I continued to try to build my innovation cell and hoped for the best. After all, I had never planned to make it past lieutenant, so I was playing with house money. Luckily for me, the CNO was a fan of what we were doing at Deep Blue, and my career did not come to a screeching halt. Shortly thereafter I was sent back to sea, perhaps before I could annoy the entire senior leadership of the Navy.
My new carrier strike group command in Florida was an ideal position for me: back in my home state; away from the two big fleet concentration areas of Norfolk and San Diego, where plenty of senior admirals would have been watching me a little too closely; and in the middle of the first few years of the post-9/11 era. I set up the innovation cell and turned them loose. By this time, a spirit of innovation was actually beginning to take hold in the Navy, pushed by a new generation of young commanders facing operational challenges of a different sort.
We sailed to the Arabian Gulf with a major load of innovative gear and ideas to try, including a midsized unmanned surface boat, the Spartan Scout; the phraselator translation devices mentioned earlier; several types of unmanned air surveillance vehicles of various sizes; simulator software to train our tactical watch officers “in stride”; and a group of young junior officers we called “innovation fellows” who came to the flag staff with a ton of good ideas. Not all of it worked out; in fact, we probably batted around .300 or a little less. But we learned a great deal, we failed fast, and our partnerships with other organizations tasked with innovation (e.g., the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA) were very productive.
By the time I got to my first four-star job at Southern Command in Miami a few years later I had a mini-network of bright, disruptive thinkers at my disposal. People such as Capt. Kevin Quarderer, call sign “Q,” brought a fusion of technical and tactical acumen to the idea of innovation. Kevin had been with me on several innovation cells earlier in my career, and he held several advanced technology degrees as well as a true bent for challenging the given orthodoxy. He brought other thinkers on board, and we set out to use innovation to tackle the challenges of drug smuggling and hostage taking through the jungles of South and Central America. Among many other ideas, Kevin developed new detection systems that could at least partially “see through” the thick triple-canopy jungle by fusing several different sensor inputs—radar, heat seeking, and biological. We used a high-tech high-speed surface ship, the Stiletto, to literally run down the drug boats. I gave this innovation to my two-star Army general, Keith Huber, and he proved to be a pretty good sailor, using the Stiletto in lots of creative ways in shallow water that would have made a more traditional ship handler blanch.
We used commercial satellites to map the region and find anomalies as well as to respond after disasters such as fire and flooding so that we could sharpen our reactions. The innovation cell turned to business leaders and asked a group of them to function as a mock drug cartel and model for us the business case and transportation/logistic concepts that the actual cartels might be using—after all, business is business. That enabled us to essentially reverse-engineer the trafficking routes and methods and apply our resources to killing them. Some of what we did is highly classified, but I can say that our innovation techniques and ideas had a powerful impact on stopping narco-trafficking: we took down the largest levels ever recorded in 2006–9 using these innovations.
When I took on the job as SACEUR in 2009, I found myself in the middle of one of the most conventional and conservative organizations in the world: the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Founded in the early 1950s, it remains steeped in tradition. The large and heavily bureaucratic structure at NATO headquarters in Brussels includes nearly four hundred standing committees ready to parse the smallest detail of any idea of change—and then usually block it. Every decision has to gain the approval of all twenty-eight NATO nations, a process described technically as consensus but more accurately depicted by picturing a steering wheel with twenty-eight pairs of hands on it. I knew that bringing innovation to NATO was going to be a supreme challenge.
Luckily, I quickly found a pair of very bright officers: Navy captain Jay Chesnut and Air Force colonel Pete Goldfein. Both were career aviators, but in smaller communities—Jay was an antisubmarine warfare expert flying the S-3 Viking, and Pete was a special forces aviator who flew a wide variety of very special small aircraft. They brought a sense of partnership with private sector entities as well as working closely with DARPA. Over the course of our time in NATO they were able to bring along several key innovations. The most interesting was a biological sensing system that could be used to detect humans moving through unmanned zones—highly useful in everything from counterterrorism to stopping human trafficking.
In the end, of course, innovation is not all about technology. Chesnut and Goldfein were also both instrumental, along with Cdr. Tesh Rao, an electronics warfare pilot, in redesigning the entire NATO command structure. I had been tasked by the secretary general to figure out how to reduce the size of the standing command structure—the many headquarters scattered around Europe and the world. It was big and unwieldy, including as it did more than 15,000 officers and enlisted staff members across 11 major headquarters. I wanted to reduce our size by at least 20 percent, and was willing to consider cuts up to about one-third. I turned to my innovation
