LW: Because you know we saved over a thousand lives when the number of sixteen year olds dropped, we saved about over a thousand sixteen year old lives, but that came at the cost of over a thousand eighteen year olds that were killed because we had eighteen year olds getting their drivers license who had never been trained to drive.
Rob: Are you talking about in the military?
LW: No, I'm talking about society. Yeah, look at Journal of Medical Association, they did a study in saying, wow, the number of sixteen year olds dropped who had a drivers license, that probably saved a lot of sixteen year olds. Yeah it did, but then they discovered, oh, number of eighteen year olds skyrocketed by about the same amount because what do you need to get a drivers license as an eighteen year old?
Rob: Are there generational differences in terms of the lying?
LW: You know, I don't know. I didn't look at that, that's a good question. That's a good question.
Rob: How about the - how are these different generations affecting the way the military operates?
LW: The military needs to develop, what we call, adaptive leaders, leaders that can think on their feet. Leaders that can get on a plane and get the mission in route to a location to task organize in route, to land and operate unsupervised in an ambiguous environment, that's the type of leader the army needs. Our society is -
Rob: Are they doing anything to create those kinds of leaders?
LW: Well that's - the war did it. The war made it so that we were putting people in environments that -- okay, look I can't tell you what's going to happen, you get out there, you have to be the mayor of this small town, you have to worry about the sewer, the water, the education, the transportation here, and the security and everything like that, you were never trained for that so take care of it, I'll be back in a week. The wars did that, the wars are coming down now so now the military, the army has to pick it up and say we have to inculcate in our culture this way of thinking because we can't rely on the wars to develop our junior leaders anymore.
Rob: Who does that? Who comes up with the strategies to build these adaptive leaders?
LW: Well, that's what the army is; the army's about leader development and so who does it? Well every leader at every level does it. They should be looking at their people and not saying, you know what? I've got two things going on here, I've got to get the job done, but I also have to develop you because in the army we don't have any lateral entry; in other words, when Dell computer, HP has a problem, they fire their CEO and get some young guy in to shake up the company. In the army, we grow our own leaders and so we know what type of leaders we need for the future and the only way we're going to get them is we grow them today.
Rob: Yet you're saying that this idea of adaptive leadership is different so it would seem to me that something would have to change. You can't just do what you were doing -
LW: Oh, that's it, right. What you see now, is you see a - we have this thing out at Fort Erwin, California, it's a national training center, it's a national training area the size of Rhode Island and it used to be that they would go out there and you would have - the opposing force would be all Soviet style tanks rolling across the plains, the desert out there and then you'd have another force attacking them. Well we've replaced that and now we have a lot of ambiguous scenarios where people are inserted into not a templated scenario, but now it's a lot of never thought this would happen or you know, here's too much information now what's going to happen and so you put people into environments where they're stressed beyond what they've been trained, that's the way you develop adaptive leaders.
Rob: And where do the upper echelons of command come in in developing adaptive leaders?
LW: What is their role? Their role in developing adaptive leaders?
Rob: Yes.
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