We Have the Watch
It's worse than it looks and it's also not.
The headline is that Secretary of Defense (still his name until the NDAA is passed) Pete Hegseth is firing and stalling the promotions of “woke” (read: women and minority) admirals and generals. Lately people keep asking me a version of the same question. They know I spent two years running culture and force resiliency for the Department of the Navy, and they know I’ve had a long military career, so they lean in and ask it quietly, the way you ask about a sick relative: Is the military being destroyed?
Paul Krugman seems to have just noticed like he was born yesterday. Where was he when Admiral Linda Fagan, the first woman to lead a U.S. military service, was fired?
The answer is, in many ways, yes. But Krugman only noticed things like admirals being fired and people getting sick because of eliminated vaccine mandates, not the really bad things that are much worse and will be much harder to fix, that it seems like nobody is paying attention to, like the wholesale gutting of the JAG corps and the massive undermining of the way harassment cases are handled that effectively creates a roster of “serial complainers” and makes them the problem (note: if you are someone filing a harassment complaint, you are most likely from a population that is more likely to experience harassment, therefore it’s likely that you might experience it at multiple commands and file complaints multiple times).
And the conventional wisdom agrees with the headlines. We are taught that culture flows from the top down: leaders set the tone and it trickles to everyone else. If that were the whole truth, then cutting off the head would kill the body. The culture would rot from the top. I have given the speech that leaders set the tone, I’ve written it into source materials distributed to the fleet.
What surprises me is the places where the culture of resilience and empathy is quietly holding, and it is so strong that I feel comfortable writing it in public. Mid level leaders are still getting promoted and taking command, and when I show up to work every day it largely still feels like the same Navy it’s been since 2011 (notably, I joined the Navy in 2009. Why 2011? That’s when Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell was repealed, and that actually marked the greatest cultural shift in the Navy and Marine Corps. I can’t speak to the other services).
Consider what the mission that the Navy and Marine Corps requires. A force that must be everywhere, every day, for decades cannot depend on who happens to be in charge this year. The job itself (relentless, global, unending) forced the Navy over two and a half centuries to learn something most organizations never do: how to build a culture that outlasts its own leaders. For us that was never a nice-to-have. It is the only way the watch gets stood.
The Secretary is doing the most aggressive thing you can do to a culture: he is removing the leaders at the top. He can fire the admirals. He is firing the admirals. People below look up and worry.
But they don’t leave because of that, in fact many stay because of spite.
We can even measure whether the culture held.
When I arrived at the Pentagon in 2021, like most large institutions, the Navy and Marine Corps treated their people problems as separate boxes. Sexual assault lived in one office. Suicide was a different conversation entirely. Harassment, hazing, bullying: different people, different budgets, meetings that never touched. And nearly all of it was response: wait for something terrible, then investigate, punish, issue a statement, move on. The work of addressing integrated prevention started during the first Trump administration, but really became a priority during the Biden administration with the creation of the Office of Force Resiliency, of which I was the first acting director when the office was renamed (I was not the first director of Force Resiliency, but the office at the time was still SAPRO, the Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office).
So we stopped treating them as separate problems, because they aren’t. The conditions that let harassment flourish are the same conditions that isolate the sailor heading toward a crisis. We rebuilt a narrow, response-focused office into something three times its size, organized around prevention: the public-health idea that you don’t wait for the disease, you change the conditions that cause it. And we backed it the way you have to back anything you actually mean: with roughly three billion dollars and more than two thousand new positions across a multi-year plan, to build a prevention workforce that hadn’t existed before. Because you cannot assign “fix the culture” as a side duty to people who already have a full-time job. If your culture initiative has no budget and no people, your team already knows it isn’t real. They can read a slide.
My favorite thing we did sounds small and is not. The military runs a climate survey; every commander is required to survey their own unit. For years it mostly asked one question: is anything broken? We changed what it measured. We rebuilt it to ask whether leaders were actually doing the things that predict a healthy unit: whether they led with empathy, whether they showed what the research calls transformational leadership and what the Navy calls deckplate leadership, getting down where the work happens, with your people, instead of leading from a chair. The day you put empathy on the instrument every commander is graded on, you have told the whole force what the institution truly values. You get empathy by measuring it.
I was still evaluated as an Executive Officer on this new command climate survey last year.
Notice what every one of those changes has in common. Not one of them lives in a single charismatic leader. They live in law, in budgets, in a trained workforce, in a required survey, in the Chiefs. We wrote the culture into the institution instead of into the people at the top. At the time, that was just good practice. It turns out it was also insurance.
