You heard it first here: The Community has solved the problem regarding generalist or specialist!!During the years leading up to world war two, promotions were slow and difficult for the officers and men who were assigned to the growing cryptologic organization known as OP-20-G.
Officers were expected to serve at sea in billets which would reflect well rounded backgrounds. Unfortunately, years of duty at sea, performing functions completely alien to the needs of a cryptanalyst did not bode well for the OP-20-G. When officers returned to the OP-20-G organization they were often out of date with the encryption techniques the Japanese were using and had to spend time getting up to speed. Eventually, sometime after the war the navy decided to identify officers to specialize in cryptology and established the restricted line/special duty officer (cryptology). The problem was solved – at least for the time being.
The same limitations applied for the enlisted personnel. They were required to compete for advancement in rate against the fleet sailors, taking examinations which were designed to test the men in U.S. Navy communication procedures; all the while they were trained to intercept and analyze Japanese Fleet communications and study Japanese command and control and organization. And for those new cryptographic clerks, they came out of the fleet yeomen structure and were now far removed from such duties. Now they were working on encrypted radio traffic, a far cry from typing letters and handling personnel records. In mid-1936 this changed; for the first time those radiomen and yeomen that were engaged in radio intelligence were given examinations written by OP-20-G. This method of giving advancement examination continued until 1942 when examinations became a war-time command function.
Ironically, over eighties years later, the U. S. Navy cryptologic community is wrestling with similar issues among the cryptologic warfare officers. Today, the cryptologic warfare community has three areas of disciplines: signals intelligence, electronic warfare and cyber operations. Although the view for specialization is beginning to soften, there are still many in the community that believes there is a need to be a generalist across the three disciplines.
Generalist or specialist: Regardless of where you stand in this argument you can bet others are specializing in these core areas.
What’s your thought?
Sincerely,
Mario Vulcano
Station HYPO 
22 August 2018 at 14:19
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
— ROBERT HEINLEIN
“If only Robert Heinlein was still above ground. If anyone would have appreciated Elon Musk’s cherry-red convertible cruising through the solar system, it’s got to be him. Heinlein’s sci-fi stories crackle with the frontier spirit of self-reliance and competence – the sort of unbridled moxie you need in spades… “
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23 August 2018 at 01:23
In my opinion, women are generally better (or even much better) at multi-tasking than men are. While I have known a few men over the years who can multi-task as well as the best of their female counterparts can, the average male, in my opinion, is outclassed at multi-taking when compared to the average woman. (I’ll admit that at the very basis of learning, my attention span has always suffered when I’m not interested in a subject, vs. when a subject greatly interests me. Thus I commence any given skill or skill set with a great disadvantage compared not only to the vast majority of women, but the most men as well. Few men I know of are as bad at multi-tasking as I am. I don’t know of any healthy women, ages 25 to 70 (or more) who cannot out multi-task me. What I’m saying here is that I’ll never make a good generalist. On the other hand, I believe I make an above average specialist when the subject I’m engaged in is of interest to me. The more a subject interests me, the more I can specialize in it.
I can see why everyone involved in the three specialties in question, i.e. Signals Intelligence, Electronic Warfare and Cyber Operations should—at least to some degree—have the ability to have well developed general skill sets in all three of these areas. I don’t have the knowledge (including in the historical context of these fields, and definitely not in the current day) to make an intelligent analysis of how well most individuals selected for working in any of these three professions can also succeed in being able generalists in all three at the same time.
If budgets, personnel availability, quarters and various other factors are sufficient, it would probably work best for most commands to have personnel who are specialists in each of these three areas. For an historical example, we need look no further than Laurance F. Safford or Thomas H. Dyer for two individuals who were gifted specialists in communications intelligence. How gifted, however, were either of these two men in navigation or ship handling? How gifted were either of these men in administrative matters? Joseph J. Rochefort was a Japanese linguist, a cryptanalyst and a skilled radio expert. Rochefort has also been said to have been skilled as the administrative head of Station HYPO on Oahu in for the year or so he was officer in charge there (mid-1941 to app. June 1942). Edwin T. Layton was a highly skilled intelligence officer (including a Japanese linguist), but he was not a highly skilled cryptanalyst.
I’ve a hunch that cryptanalysis is a skill that requires specialists rather than generalists. I suspect that even Agnes Meyer Driscoll, as great a cryptanalyst as she is said to have been, was probably nowhere near as skilled in certain other areas.
I’ll admit that with my lack of interest and lack of skill in the vast majority of areas, given my choice, I’d choose a specialist over a generalist when considering personnel for Signals Intelligence, Electronic Warfare, or Cyber Operations. (At my age, 70, I’d be extremely lacking in the skill sets necessary to make a good cyber operations specialist. This is an area where age, young folks who started working with computers by the time they were in first or second grade, would probably have far greater abilities to master the art than someone who was 45 or so years old before getting involved with computers, cell phones, satellite communications, etc.)
To paraphrase something Frederick D. Parker once wrote: “`There is plenty of room for everyone,’ as long as everyone applies him or herself to trying to master his or her profession” in the age of technological innovation.
Great question, Mario! Thanks!
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25 August 2018 at 01:57
Generalist vs. Specialist
In my humble opinion, the decision whether to become a generalist or specialist involves are fundamental concept of how we view a “leader” in todays Navy.
Our promotion model inhibits the ability to become a specialist and thus we have communicated across the Navy to our junior enlisted personnel that if you want to get promoted you have to “Lead” and become “well rounded”. What does “leadership” and becoming “well rounded” mean?
It means different things to different people. It may mean to some, that you need to strive to be the Leading Petty Officer of a division or a department. You need to strive to get qualified as early as possible (do you have a deep understanding of your job?) to allow yourself to have the ability to dedicate time to a high level collateral duty and education which may give you visibility in front of department or command leadership resulting in an greater opportunity for ranking well within the command that may effect your promotion.
Our Officers and Enlisted are smart people; they are going to do what is going to get them promoted. If becoming “well rounded” is going to get them promoted, that is what they will do, which fits the generalist concept. If we desire to shift the mind set of our force to focus on subject matter expertise with a greater emphasis on rating/designator knowledge, than perhaps we need to look at our evaluation/fitness reports and how much emphasis is given to rating vice the other performance traits as well as changing the enlisted advancement exams focusing on less questions concerning professional military knowledge and more questions on their specific rating.
Everyone is not meant to be a leader, a Leading Petty Officer, a Chief Petty Officer, a Command Master Chief, a Department Head, a Commanding Officer, and or the Chief of Naval Operations. In our current model of promote or separate, we have made becoming a “leader” via general military training and professional military knowledge more important than becoming a SME that leads their Sailors.
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10 September 2018 at 20:30
Response by Bill Hickey:
A recent blog on Station Hypo made a rather “bold” statement:
“You heard it first here: The Community has solved the problem regarding
generalist or specialist!!”
I suspect this might be just a little misleading.
“During the years leading up to world war two, promotions were slow and
difficult for the officers and men who were assigned to the growing cryptologic
organization known as OP-20-G.”
The second CO on my ship (pre-NSG days) was a submariner from WWII.
He was an Ensign for THREE YEARS! And, he was an academy graduate as
well. Back then, not only were promotions prioritized for the fighting folks (as
they should have been), but even with them they had to have an open slot to
fill. When OP-20-G was stood up, the rank and file in the officer community
didn’t really understand what they did (wonder why?) and because they were
not personally “on the front lines” (aboard ship) their promotions would
logically have been delayed or simply not made at all. After all, naval officers
were SUPPOSED to be ship drivers, not pencil-pushing cryptologists ashore.
“Unfortunately, years of duty at sea, performing functions completely alien to
the needs of a cryptanalyst did not bode well for the OP-20-G. When officers
returned to the OP-20-G organization they were often out of date with the
encryption techniques the Japanese were using and had to spend time getting
up to speed.”
Back in the early 1980’s, I was in charge of a “Tiger Team” charged with
investigating WHY BULLSEYE’s Net Control system was crashing 60+ times
a day – and with a warm start needing 10 minutes, that says our HFDF
network was DOWN for at least 600 minutes a day – you can imagine the fleet
CINCs were not overjoyed with that. Back then, NSG sent literally a handful
of mostly CTR’s and CTM’s to computer programming school to learn a rather
arcane language (NELIAC) which was based on the ALGOL programming
language. In fact, there were only 4 computers in the whole world that used
NELIAC – and NSG owned them all (PAC NCO, LANT NCO, MED NCO, and
the CPF at Skaggs) – and they were vintage 1958 technology. Now, normally
a tour for a programmer was 3 years (“out of rate” – because they certainly
were not chasing ditties as R-branchers and handling screwdrivers and
soldering irons like Mat-Men). All that time out of rate they were losing ground
against their peers, and if they ended up being REALLY good programmers,
we tried to keep them for another 3 year tour – so by the time they got back
into the swing of their branch rate duties, they were WAY behind and
needless to say, rather “uncompetitive” for promotion against their peers
because of the way the tests were constructed. Despite my attempts to
persuade our leadership that we needed a seventh branch “P” for
“Programmer” – I was told there simply wasn’t enough “demand” for another
branch, but no one stepped up and tried to fix the promotion problem for those
who were performing an essential function for fleet support. If a programming
R-brancher went back after one tour and got promoted, the next time s/he was
up for transfer, they tried to persuade them to come back and have a second
tour as a programmer (pretty much a “kiss of death” for promotion
opportunity).
Let’s talk about the officers back then (pre-SWO pins). Some of our JO’s
would qualify for Air Crew wings or Submariner dolphins, and a couple
actually qualified for both, but back then, there was no SWO pin – you were
either a qualified OOD underway, or you weren’t. But, remember, the JOB of
a 161x officer was CRYPTOLOGY, not standing watches driving a ship or
working for these other pins. Still, that was considered evidence that they
were “broadening” their careers to better understand the needs of the “big
navy” … so they tended to get preference in promotion opportunities over
some of the folks that stayed simply in the shore-duty world of NSG at the
time.
“Eventually, sometime after the war the navy decided to identify officers to
specialize in cryptology and established the restricted line/special duty officer
(cryptology). The problem was solved – at least for the time being.”
Well, it was “solved” in the sense that our community got promotion
opportunities based on the percentages of promotions in the URL community.
If they got 75% because of low retention, we got 75% in the same eligibility
pool of our community, regardless of whether we needed more of that rank or
not. That contributed to an eventual glut of O5 and O6 folks on active duty for
a longer than normal time, and when DOPMA came in, they said you had to
have a vacant BILLET before you could promote. So, even if you had been
selected for promotion, it might not come for a while until the logjam opened
up the opportunities to fill a vacant billet. Oh, we had “FROCKING” whereby if
you were selected, you could put on the rank (but you wouldn’t be paid for it)
and have the title and administrative authority, BUT … you also got ranked in
your fitness reports against “real” occupants of that higher rank, meaning
more often than not, you were ranked lower than you would have been
against the peers of your lower rank before being frocked – and that didn’t
always look good for future promotion consideration. Eventually, even
DOPMA changed that, and you couldn’t be frocked unless you were IN a billet
that warranted the promotion – but you still didn’t get paid until the official
promotion authority came through.
“In mid-1936 this changed; for the first time those radiomen and yeomen that
were engaged in radio intelligence were given examinations written by OP-20-
G.”
Remember what I said above about those “out of rate” computer
programmers? Same thing in the 1980’s that were talked about in the blog
from the pre-WWII and WWII days. Not much changed, EXCEPT we had a
community of 6 branches – each competing separately for their promotions –
but those exams didn’t really include any computer programmer skills.
“Ironically, over eighty years later, the U. S. Navy cryptologic community is
wrestling with similar issues among the cryptologic warfare officers.”
As the old saying goes, “the more things change, the more they stay the
same.”
“Today, the cryptologic warfare community has three areas of disciplines:
signals intelligence, electronic warfare and cyber operations. Although the
view for specialization is beginning to soften, there are still many in the
community that believe there is a need to be a generalist across the three
disciplines.”
As I was once told by a mentor of mine when I was promoted from LT to
LCDR, he said “OK, up to now, we’ve let you play with a screwdriver and have
a bit of fun doing it. Now, we’re taking that screwdriver away from you and
giving you a pencil to push.” The comment he made was meant to let me
know that my job expectations were changing. Instead of being that technical
person in the know about everything my people were doing, I was now
expected to have a GENERAL knowledge about a lot of things, as well as
being an administrator.
When I finally retired and moved into the contractor world, I found the same
thing. You have people with screwdrivers that are the ones that know the 1’s
and 0’s inside and out; then you have the middle managers who used to do
that job, but now are managing at the first level and beginning to wean
themselves off of the highly technical parts of the job and into management.
Then you have the managers who look at the BIG PICTURE of the program,
not just the details of each sub-system (we call them “SYSTEM
ENGINEERS”) because you had to have an appreciation for the entire
program, not just your piece of the pie.
“Generalist or specialist: Regardless of where you stand in this argument you
can bet others are specializing in these core areas.”
Whether you like it or not, you HAVE to have both. You need the specialists
who know the ins and outs of the specific problems associated with your
specialty. But, likewise, at some point, you have to have the generalist who
can speak the language of all the specialties, understand the problem from a
more global perspective, and communicate it to higher management. The
problem is, WHEN and HOW do our technical specialists get that appreciation
for the bigger picture? And, when we put them into a job that lets them get
that experience, by definition we are removing them from the highly specific
technical area that brought them to our attention in the first place.
In the civilian world, there are often what we call TWO TRACKS of promotion.
One track is the “executive” or “management” track. The other track is the
“technical” track. In THEORY, when you join the company at the lowest level
of either track, you progress in your career up that track – and pretty much
both tracks have similar steps to the “top” of the track. The only difference is,
for the most part, the “management” track has that last ultimate step of being
the BOSS of the whole company, where it is rare indeed that anyone from a
technical track gets that job (unless, of course, they might have gone back to
school after work for that MBA). The analogy here is that no matter how good
one of our Cryptologic/Cyber flag officers is, they will NEVER be CNO. And,
yes, I know “never” is a very long time.
My thoughts? Well, I’ve been “out of the game” for a long time now, even
though I’m still technically savvy in many respects. I see some problems on
the horizon – one of them being bringing in civilian contractors with
experience directly at the O5/O6 level. That will take up a billet that could
have been used to promote someone that had put in many years of active
duty getting similar experience – so I see this as a “temporary” approach, not
really a “solution.” But, WHAT IF these newly minted O5/O6 folks (who are
being paid at “UNDER 2 Years” of seniority in service, not just in grade). Let’s
just say you have a number of them decide they really like being in the service
doing this job – they’re going to possibly occupy that rank for 20 years or more
to get to retirement eligibility, and the chances are, they won’t be taking over a
lot of the flag officer slots in the process because that’s where you need the
generalists. Yes, they are also allowing selective retention at lower ranks for
critical skills. Hmmm. Let me see, industry is paying VERY good wages for
the same background and skills (which is why you’re having trouble getting
them into the service at the lower ranks in the first place), suddenly these
lower rank experts you have will be leaving for those jobs (maybe they’re
eligible to retire, maybe not). I saw a number of GS-12’s leave NSA back in
the 80’s because promotions to GS13 were stalled. They went into industry
for 3-5 years. Then, they came back and were hired in as SCE’s (flag
equivalents) because they had “experience” – so they bypassed the GS13,
14, and 15 steps in their career progression and went straight to flag
equivalent rank in five years instead of being stalled out in the traditional
promotion system. Will that happen here? Will some people leave the
service as a lower ranking individual, do a tour or two in the commercial world
and get highly desirable qualifications, then come back in – and bypass all the
steps between the rank they left at and try to come in as an O5/O6? Good
luck with that.
So, the original problem statement hasn’t REALLY been solved. It’s been
addressed, and a band-aid put into place, but band-aids are, by definition,
short-term measures but not final solutions.
I’m absolutely sure that someone out there will be able to refute every
conclusion and prediction I’ve made here. The good news for me? I’m fully
retired and I don’t have to worry about it anymore. I just continue to watch the
community with genuine interest and curiosity as to how they are going to
approach solving these very difficult and challenging problems – and the
problems aren’t JUST technical, they’re managerial as well which usually
requires a different approach in solving them.
I always tell folks if a problem is difficult to describe and understand, there are
literally hundreds or thousands of simple and easy-to-understand answers
that are just plain wrong. If it’s hard to describe, you can bet it will be hard to
solve.
Bill Hickey joined the naval reserves in 1965 while at the University of Tulsa and was commissioned an Ensign (1105) in the Reserve Officer Candidate Program in 1969. His first assignment was to the USS RANKIN (LKA-103) followed by duty as the OIC COMSEC 203 where he changed designators to 1615 and augmented to 1610. He was the first military integree and Chief Systems Engineer for the Special Project Office (R43) and later was a Principal Systems Engineer in the defense and space contractor community upon retirement from the navy in 1989.
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