Generally Speaking

by Claudia J. Kennedy

  The innovative software corporation SAS, with its headquarters in Cary, North Carolina, is one of the most eminent in this area. Having grown from a small entrepreneurial venture in 1976 to one of the world's ten largest independent software vendors and the largest privately held software company today, SAS has over 3 million users worldwide. SAS has consistently ranked among the very best employers in surveys taken by Working Mother magazine, Fortune, and Business Week. The company provides inexpensive on-site child care that begins early in the day and extends late into the evening for those employees working long hours on a deadline project. Other SAS perks include a company pool, gym, and athletic fields on the headquarters campus.

  This attention to employees' needs has paid invaluable dividends to the company. For example, software programmer Doug Teasly brings his preschool son, Philip, with him to work most days and leaves him in the nearby child care center. This perk costs him $250 a month, but he is happy to pay in order to have the chance to visit his son during the day. Teasly is so satisfied with his conditions at SAS that he has declined job offers for more than $30,000 a year more than he is currently making.

  To me, such examples clearly indicate that mutual respect and loyalty within an organization—what has often been called the cohesiveness of an effective team—is a goal to which we should all aspire.

  In September 1992, I was on Temporary Duty in Washington when I received yet another unexpected phone call. It was from Major General Chuck Scanlon, commander of INSCOM, with whom I had briefly discussed my controversial slating in 1985, when my assignment to command an MI battalion in Korea had been inappropriately handled.

  “Claudia, how are you doing?”

  “Fine, sir.”

  “I'm calling you with some good news.”

  Was he calling about some professional issue we'd discussed at Kunia?

  “You have been selected for promotion to brigadier general. Congratulations.”

  I felt almost numb. What a great honor.

  As soon as I hung up the phone, I called my father. “Daddy, guess what?”

  “What?”

  “I've been selected to be promoted to brigadier general.”

  There was a slight pause, then he whooped with exuberance.

  He had pinned on my second lieutenant's bars twenty-three years earlier.

  10

  Pentagon Hardball

  As my Army assignments increased in responsibility, I found myself confronted with challenges more complex than any I had faced as a younger officer. Staff positions and previous battalion command had prepared me for brigade command, which in turn honed the leadership and management skills I would later call upon as a general in the Pentagon. But the test I faced as commander of the 703rd Military Intelligence Brigade was unique by any standard. In what became known in Intelligence circles as the “Kunia Mutiny,” I had to confront defiance of good order and discipline while simultaneously conducting a demanding organizational transformation.

  The situation began in 1992 when the National Security Agency decided to reduce the number of strategic Military Intelligence facilities worldwide to just three major joint stations, each under the command of a separate armed service. Shifting to joint command at each station would streamline staff and provide more centralized operational control—a move that was made possible by advances in technology and changes in philosophy about service roles and operational styles. This became a priority during the belt-tightening after the Cold War and would allow the services at the stations to combine their staffs and share the responsibility for a single, integrated operation.

  Kunia was scheduled to be one of these three joint stations, the other two being at the Air Force Intelligence Center near San Antonio, Texas, and the INSCOM facility at Fort Gordon, Georgia.

  Eventually, a Navy captain would command the joint operation at Kunia. But since the 703rd Military Intelligence Brigade was host organization in 1992 and the other armed services' units were “tenants,” the NSA and its military leaders decided that the Army would retain command of Kunia for a few more years after joint operations began on January 1, 1993.

  None of us liked this change ordered from Washington, especially because we preferred service autonomy. For years, the Army, Navy, and Air Force had existed in “co-located” status, working side by side in the vast subterranean building but retaining their separate chains of command. The task of ironing out the complex details of the transformation had to be completed within a year. Now, struggling against our own cultural resistance, we had to mesh those operations into a single joint station, of which I, an Army colonel, would be the senior officer and commander. Getting the armed services to move beyond the ingrained aspects of operational control is never easy. In fact, “going joint” invariably involves considerable angst and negotiation over the details. But my colleagues and I were professional officers; we didn't choose our orders, we obeyed them. At least that was what I thought in 1992.

  As our preparations for the details of the shift to a joint station progressed over a six-month period, however, my Navy colleague Captain Hugh Doherty and I noticed a distinctly unusual pattern of behavior on the part of the commander of the Air Force contingent at Kunia, Lieutenant Colonel Larry Strang. At first, he had appeared cooperative, attending meetings with Captain Doherty and me to work on the bureaucratic nuts and bolts of the transformation. Then, after many of the details had been hammered out, Larry Strang became harder to contact, just when his cooperation was most needed. Ostensibly, he was still cooperative and would even call Captain Doherty and me to schedule planning sessions. But Strang would then either find some excuse to cancel the meeting, send a junior officer, or even an NCO as his representative to discussions where a commander's decision was required. Once, when I asked Strang's representative what his instructions were, the man replied, “I'm only here to take notes, ma'am.”

  Then Larry Strang would go through the charade of scheduling a makeup meeting, which Captain Doherty and I would fit into our calendars, and no one from the Air Force would appear.

  I called Strang to ask for an explanation.

  “Why didn't you show up at the meeting, Colonel?”

  “I was too busy, ma'am,” he said.

  “Please check your calendar and let me know when you are free.”

  “Yes, ma'am. I'll do that today.”

  He failed to do so. But what I found most unusual were official memoranda that Lieutenant Colonel Strang had signed and distributed to his staff, which they passed on to mine, declaring unequivocally that the pending station operations at Kunia would be a “consolidated,” not a joint, command. In the military, there is a world of difference between the two. A joint operation has a single commander under whom the separate service contingents coordinate their efforts. This is what the NSA and the three strategic intelligence commands had ordered us to accomplish. But Strang seemed to have either misunderstood or decided to defy those orders.

  Just to make sure I wasn't the officer misinterpreting the Major Commands' intentions, I had my staff consult closely with INSCOM headquarters to verify that our proposed plan was consistent with the U.S. Air Force Intelligence Center interpretation of the new directives. Word came back from INSCOM: There were no “crossed wires.” Still, I had to be certain that Strang's resistance represented foot-dragging at the local level and not quasi-official United States Air Force policy. Among Army officers, the Air Force had a reputation for publicly proclaiming one policy at the higher command level and allowing more junior local commanders latitude to defy that policy when it suited their service's purpose.

  So I called the Air Force Intelligence Center directly. They verified what INSCOM had told me: The Kunia facility would be integrated into a joint command in the first quarter of 1993.

  During this time, Captain Doherty and I managed to discuss this issue directly with Lieutenant Colonel Strang. His first argument was that the proposed shift to joint operations was not yet official policy. W
e presented ample documentary evidence to the contrary. Then Strang persisted that even if a joint command were in the offing, the change did not have to be implemented as quickly as we proposed. Again, we produced directives to prove him wrong. But Strang remained uncooperative.

  When Strang had left that meeting, I told Captain Doherty, “We need to think through exactly what steps he has to comply with after January first. I just can't imagine him remaining openly defiant beyond that date. But we must have some observable benchmarks.”

  Captain Doherty agreed and our two staffs examined the integration plan for the most important elements of Air Force cooperation. If Strang and his people decided to disobey NSA and Major Command orders, I wanted to know what the legal tripwires were in the event this situation escalated. By now, I was aware that I might have unexpectedly entered an interservice turf battle in which the Air Force, for reasons of its own, had decided to use Kunia as a test case to push its claim for a different definition of the new joint centers. This was murky stuff. I was a colonel who had just been selected for promotion to brigadier general, still a relatively junior officer by the standards of Pentagon Hardball this looming confrontation might represent. One thing was clear, however: I would have to plan my actions very carefully in my dealings with Lieutenant Colonel Strang and the Air Force.

  And those dealings had become openly strained. My action officers dreaded discussing the transformation with Strang because he had become so verbally abusive. Although he was polite with me, all of my attempts to have him face reality and change his approach to the transformation failed. When I tried to elicit Strang's specific concerns about the process we were undergoing, he avoided discussing either the substance of the transition or his objections to it.

  Just before the January 1 deadline, Strang's immediate senior, Colonel Cassidy, entered the picture. He called me at my quarters and requested that the negotiations begin all over again. I considered his suggestion to be just another stalling tactic. Obviously, there were real differences in the three services' commitment to this change. Here at Kunia, the Army and the Navy had worked diligently to hammer out the many details, some complex, some mundane, while the Air Force had first dragged its feet and now was more openly attempting to derail the entire process.

  I clarified that Cassidy had been kept up to date throughout the preceding months and that he had never presented any objection (or support) during that time. He agreed that was the case.

  “Well, Colonel,” I told him, “we've gone well beyond the time for discussion. You have not participated in that discussion for months. Why would anything be different now?”

  Still, he persisted that deadlines were arbitrary and all parties involved should negotiate in good faith.

  “Colonel,” I reminded him, “the timeline for the transition was given to us, not created by us. We are proceeding with the transition.”

  New Year's Day 1993, the deadline to begin joint operations, fell at the start of a long weekend. The situation with the Air Force was still vague, although the Army and the Navy were implementing all of the administrative and technical procedures we had previously agreed on. The Air Force, however, continued to back and fill, on the one hand saying they wanted to cooperate but had no authority to go joint until directed to do so by their headquarters, and, on the other hand, protesting they did not agree with various aspects of the new organization's design.

  Even more troubling, throughout January and much of February, Lieutenant Colonel Strang issued orders to the Air Force contingent contradictory to mine. Finally, I told Strang's operations officer that the situation was unacceptable. There was no change. Then I met with Lieutenant Colonel Strang and informed him in a direct manner, “There can only be one commander at this station.”

  He chose not to respond openly. But his actions spoke for themselves.

  The Kunia station was a Special Compartmented Intelligence Facility (SCIF) that held some of our country's most highly classified secrets. Everyone inside the facility had to have a high security clearance badge or be escorted. All persons leaving the building had to present their briefcase, knapsack, or gym bag to the Military Police for inspection. This followed the old security adage, “In God we trust. All others we verify.” The security regulation had been enforced in Kunia and other similar installations for decades. We all took it for granted and kept the amount of gear we toted in and out of the tunnel to a minimum in order to speed up the line at the MP gate.

  Then one day in February, while the Air Force stalling tactics were still dragging on, Lieutenant Colonel Strang refused to have his briefcase opened for inspection at the MP checkpoint on leaving the facility. I received word from a major on the Operations staff that Strang had been very rude and arrogant to the junior NCO on duty at the gate and had basically bullied his way through.

  Now the situation had reached a serious new level. None of us could pick which security regulations we chose to obey on a particular day. All of us submitted to inspection on leaving the facility. I was always happy to do so because it set an example to the younger soldiers just beginning their Army careers: If the colonel can line up to have her briefcase inspected, I can stand in line at the end of the shift and open my gym bag for the MPs. But Strang was defying this practice.

  I called him early the next morning. “I understand you left the building without opening your briefcase. Why?”

  Strang was sullen, but not abrasive. “I'm a separate commander, Colonel. I don't have to follow that procedure.”

  This was a test of wills. I suddenly realized that he had mistaken the patience I had employed since New Year's for weakness. I intended to correct that misunderstanding.

  “Of course you do, Colonel,” I said in a flat, cool tone. “You have a badge that permits your entrance to this facility, and that badge is contingent on your complying with security regulations. From now on, you will either follow standard security procedures and have your briefcase inspected, or you will turn in your badge.”

  I wasn't sure if he believed that I intended to follow through on this. Its implications were serious: Without a security badge, he could not enter the building. What had begun as possibly local bureaucratic infighting at the level of colonels might quickly escalate to much higher echelons.

  That afternoon, I carefully reviewed all the issues surrounding the transition process to make sure that this current crisis was not just the explosive conclusion of a simmering personality clash. Clearly it was not—because Captain Doherty had been just as stymied and frustrated by Strang's actions as I had been. The next day, I asked Strang to my office. “Are you prepared to comply with station security regulations concerning inspection of your briefcase?”

  “No, ma'am. I can't do that. I'm not going to comply because I'm a separate commander.”

  I gave him a deadline of an additional week after which he was to either comply or turn in his badge. A week later he came to my office to tell me his decision. He was not going to comply.

  “Please give me your badge,” I said, reaching out for it. “I'll have the MPs walk you out of the facility.” If Strang felt any emotion over this unprecedented incident, his face did not betray it. A rather grim MP staff sergeant appeared in my office doorway to escort this Air Force lieutenant colonel from the building.

  Next, my Operations officer, Lieutenant Colonel George Gramer, reported that about a dozen of Strang's Air Force NCOs planned to stage a protest by putting down their own badges and refusing to comply with security regulations.

  “Colonel,” I said, considering this latest development, “if they do that, it's very serious.”

  I immediately called the Staff Judge Advocate General at Schofield Barracks to explain the situation. “The issue is not ambiguous, Colonel,” he told me. “You are the installation commander. You set and enforce the security rules. Your responsibility is to establish good order and discipline.”

  This was obvious. Discipline was the glue that bound all the military t
o our national civilian leadership. Without order and discipline, we would be a banana republic.

  I attended a previously scheduled meeting in our small auditorium where the Air Force NCOs planned to stage their walk-out. I got straight to the point. “You're sitting in this room with security badges that indicate your willingness to comply with the security rules of this station. You'll have to live up to those rules. But I understand that some of you intend to put down your badges. Do it now if you're going to do it at all.”

  I stared at the faces of the men and women seated before me. This was a Showdown at the O.K. Corral. Many of them were senior Air Force NCOs with years of service. About fifteen NCOs rose and walked down to the table to turn in their badges. The MPs collected them and escorted the NCOs from the building.

  I had not believed that Lieutenant Colonel Strang would carry the issue this far.

  Captain Doherty immediately called the Naval Security Command in Washington. And I telephoned INSCOM commander Major General Chuck Scanlon, who was on Temporary Duty in England, where it was the middle of the night.

  He agreed that the situation was serious and said he would immediately confer with his counterpart at the Air Force Intelligence Command, Major General Gary W. O'Shaughnessy.

  Meanwhile, I contacted the Staff JAG again, who reconfirmed that my actions had been legal and appropriate.

  Within two days, General Scanlon called me. “Okay, Claudia,” he said. “I've worked things out with the Air Force. Give Strang back his badge. He'll comply with security regs. But he will not be back in the tunnel very much.”

  That was the outcome of the situation at Kunia. We returned the security badges. When Strang did enter the facility, he usually had an enlisted airman carry his briefcase for him to be inspected by the MPs. The rest of the Air Force contingent complied with the security regulations as they always had. We got on with the business of integrating the command.