Office Life at the Pentagon Is Disconcertingly Retrograde

> In my senior-level meetings, roughly 95 percent of the participants were white, 90 percent men. If you believe diversity of experience and perspective improves decision making, this should worry you.

At my last startup, the local "accelerator" sent in a diversity consultant. Because the CEO didn't want to deal with it, I was stuck with him.

After 10 minutes of me describing how our team of six represented 3 continents including 13 citizenships; we spoke 13 languages; ranged in age from 24 to 48; ranged in education from 3 days of college to dual PhDs; included Christians, a devout Hindu, an atheist, and agnostics; single, married, and even arranged marriage; and our company dinners consisted of us bringing our families together (along with our angel investors and their families) and sharing traditional dishes, the consultant complained that we "weren't diverse" and complained for 20+ minutes on two things:

- our team only had one woman

- our team didn't have any LGBT representation

I threw him out.

If you're so closed-minded and ignorant, I don't want you around my team.

The author points to three reasons they can’t hire civilians: bureaucratic hiring process, preference for those with security clearance, and no dedicated recruiting pipeline. They also mention the issue of salaries.

To me, this does not even scratch the surface. I’m a manager and I regularly wear a t-shirt to work. At no point has anyone called me or have I called anyone “sir”. In fact, everyone just refers to everyone else by their first name, including interns addressing the CEO. Levels are hidden, and good ideas can come from anywhere. There’s no way the Pentagon is making that kind of cultural shift in my lifetime.

Well, when it’s only robots doing the killing and getting killed, we can let IT managers run the wars.

On meetings, it sounds like a traditional hierarchical mgmt structure. Briefers are a subset of the staff. If members of the staff are unable to get their material or point of view into the powerpoint then they aren’t effective at their jobs or their minority view is not of interest to the majority. That’s where politics and persuasion become important and if you aren’t any good at it you shouldn’t be there.

What makes large acquisitions unmanageable is probably feature creep, and software people should certainly be able to relate to that. Imagine every minority view getting their say on every program. We can’t afford ($) that.

IMO, the military is not heirarchical enough. The Navy has ~230 Admirals and only some 490 active/reserve ships.

As a Navy brat who's spent much of his life on the periphery of the culture described in this article, I find it utterly familiar and darkly amusing. I don't envy the people who will eventually be tasked with changing that culture; there are real security concerns with opening up as the writer describes is necessary. Yet, it is necessary, and the effort will face powerful headwinds from officials who are in no way prepared to separate legitimate concerns from their own obstinacy and bias (e.g., in my brief stint as a contractor [again, admittedly on the periphery], I saw at least two egregious examples of wholly qualified individuals being passed over for promotions, robbing the service of their expertise). The military demands so much from servicepeople, one's center has to be "set", which often means a disconnect between current leaders (who are not to be questioned) and would-be future leaders (who must know when to question anyway), and that's before "politics" come into play.

> We also need to tackle the Pentagon’s hermetic closure to civilian talent.

It will be hard to convince them after Edward Snowden, a civilian talent, fled with his entire agency’s data ;)

More seriously, that may exactly be why they’d need to open up: Civilian talent would see red where there is red, and it would upgrade their security processes.

Apart from this, I’m having difficulty imagining an agency without the hurdles quoted by the article: Yes a security clearance is heavy friction in the recruitment/promotion, but it’s hard to do it any other way. However, like Agile after Waterfall, there may be a revolutionary way to do this, which gains so many orders of efficiency that it would make the CIA unbeatable, for much less money.

Unfortunately, CIA is in need of neither. Only small countries with limited means and influence (=nothing to lose) can afford to innovate here.

Other points raised in the article: - Absence of mobile phone connectivity, wifi, etc, - Top-down management with no brainstorming and no whiteboards (even physically, because they could be spied), - Only traditional army people, fee engineers/new generation kind of jobs.

Disclosure: I’m a French national (maybe you’d like to only discuss the Pentagon security between Americans;) ).

> Three barriers prevent greater flow of talent to the Pentagon from the private sector: an intensely bureaucratic hiring process that usually takes many months, causing interested talent to take jobs elsewhere before the government makes an offer; the strong (in most cases, insurmountable) preference for hiring people who already have security clearances, which virtually guarantees that jobs go to people who are already “in the system” and not from outside; and the lack of a dedicated private-sector talent-recruiting effort. Changing these could make an enormous difference in bringing new ideas and different perspectives to the Pentagon. Making pay more competitive would be great, too, but that is not the primary problem. Many will exchange a certain amount of compensation for a chance to work on vitally important matters and to serve their country, if only the system encouraged their recruitment.

The clearance process takes so long that hiring someone without a clearance usually results in a months-long (could be over a year) wait before they can actually start their job. Given that the nature of the job is a key attraction, and the pay is often mediocre compared to private-sector alternatives, this is a losing proposition for many people.

It's even worse if the clearance doesn't come through. For many first- or second-generation Americans with family living abroad, this is a distinct possibility. The clearance process is opaque enough, as well, that people who experimented with recreational drugs in college can't be sure if they'll qualify or not. If your clearance doesn't come through, your resume now has a long "hole," and you have to explain to future potential employers that you had to leave your last job because e.g. you have grandparents and cousins in Indonesia or you tried cocaine twice when you were 19.

Those risks simply aren't worth it for many people.

Pentagon culture is a subculture of the military, an influential one, but hardly as dominant as portrayed.

Wifi, cell service and laptops are mostly distractions in an acquisition environment. Being on a source selection is like being on a jury- you're not allowed to do your own research, you have to choose based on the evidence presented. These are rules Congress passes to make sure everything is 'fair', if you want to reform the acquisition process you have to go higher than the poor military stuck implementing the system.

The rest of the article is spot on, though the diversity argument is flimsy.

Several references to “my office”. Give me that kind of retrograde, please.

Realy " To access the internet, I had to jack my computer into the wall." yes well even in a declassified space id expect that and have mac filtering.

And the death by PowerPoint meme is very widespread in the US military

I am sure that one cell tower that reaches his office is under full surveillance. This all makes sense to me.

All those hundreds of billions of dollars and they apparently haven’t used any of it to update their IT infrastructure. As a taxpayer, my first thought is: well where did all that money go? The pockets of unaccountable defense industry executives with nothing to show for it?

I don't really find any of this surprising in light of history. A standing army that hasn't fought a real war in a long time just naturally seems to break out in office politics, as the more ordinary paths to promotion and power are unavailable, and the nature of the work shifts over time to mostly what we today call "bullshit jobs". And our standing army hasn't fought a real war in going on eighty years.

I agree that it's a problem, and I respect that the intent behind the article is to disclose the problem in a popular forum - or, the choice of forum being Wired, I suppose popular-ish - rather than to analyze and seek solutions. But I'm not sure I see where simple disclosure devoid of context is likely to elicit any useful result.

edit, 10:24 EDT: I might have better said "major war" than "real war", but "total war" isn't that far off in the modern period - but the comparison, with periods prior to the modern codification of the total-war concept, I think still holds merit. In any case, asymmetrical actions explicitly do not qualify; the primary historical example I have in mind is that of how the British imperial military behaved during, as opposed to outside, periods of declared warfare against a comparable state adversary.

Its like watching a replay of the decline of the British Empires War and Colonial Office.

>With no connectivity and little diversity, the military's hub may soon be a threat to national security.

I guess you have to work in diversity issues to get clicks these days. Shame, could have been an interesting article.

Maybe this is part of the reason why the Pentagon has a dispensation to continue buying Huawei 5G kit - sounds like they need it!

Does the added technology really increase productivity that much? Powerpoint slides on a screen aren't really any better than printed. Is having wifi in the office really that much of a productivity gain over a wired connection? I guess you can't move around the office like in SV, but you already can't in most places anyway. Not having cell service in the office is probably a productivity gain.

Also, I'm sure the Chinese military is absolutely terrified of our insurmountable diversity advantage.