What do you do? You don’t have to tell me your job title, but what’s your job?
I work for a center under Army Futures Command. We work on developing what the Army of the Future needs to look like, based on our best assessment of likely threats, the theaters we’d face them in, the capabilities we’d have to have to counter those capabilities we expect an adversary to have, etc., and then figuring out what research, development, and engineering need to be done to bring that concept into reality in the necessary time frame. My work is a small part of that whole thing, but is in kind of a nexus point trying to marry up the concept and the science to make sure they’re pointing in the same direction.
How did you find your way into federal service? Did you always want to join up?
I had always imagined myself as a teacher, but I taught for a year after college and it wasn’t for me. Then I pictured myself as a professor, and I entered a PhD program for a year, and it wasn’t for me. Some friends from college had gotten jobs working for the Army, and I was kind of adrift after leaving grad school, so I applied and, all these years later, here I am. It wasn’t a calling, it was an opportunity that presented itself, and I only really came to appreciate the service aspect of it gradually.
What does this work mean to you? Why is it important to you, personally?
I am not a militaristic person, so I’ve kind of had to grapple with this question for myself over time. It seems cliche, if you know the army, but I have really come to think of it in terms of Soldiers. Helping to supply those people who have signed up to serve to have what they need to do to perform their mission with the greatest likelihood of coming home safely.
A lot of times the work is just the work — I go in and do it, and I’m not filled with a huge sense of duty and purpose. My previous job was much more nitty gritty, and it was easier to lose myself in details, and lose sight of the connection to the mission. My position now has a lot more direct connection to mission, to the hard trades that have to be made to put equipment in people’s hands who are putting themselves in harm’s way, and it feels much more important and immediate to get it right.
What should be important about this work to Americans? Why does it matter?
A lot of why it matters to me personally is, I think, why it should matter to Americans more generally; but also, I think there are some rising powers in the world that are much more malevolent than the US has been in the world, looking to project military strength, and countering them is a good and necessary thing.
What does all of this chaos and dysfunction mean to you? Do you have a sense of how it’s all going to impact your work and your mission?
The broad answer to this question flows from the last one. We seem to be abdicating our military role to counter some of those powers, and are, in fact, allying with them, or at least signaling that we’ll leave them alone. That’s awful, and it leaves me wondering what we’re doing this for anymore. In the much more narrow sense, all of this chaos has led to a massive drop in morale and productivity. Removing telework has meant much less work is getting done, because people are having to take leave to manage family situations, or they’re not logging on in the evening to think about a question they’d had during the day, etc.
The people I work with are smart and committed, and just the return to office alone has sapped probably 25% of their productivity. Another 25% has gone into endless meetings figuring out the impact of Executive Orders, drafting and revising bullet points to protect our jobs every week, etc. I have never seen anything even remotely like this in two decades as a federal worker. It is absolutely unprecedented for our leadership to be providing us mental health services to deal with the stress of a new incoming administration.
GOLIKEHELLMACHINE 