Q&A: Lieutenant General William B. Caldwell IV
Written by Ted McKenna
MAE 2009 Volume: 4 Issue: 5 (September/October)
Lieutenant General
William B. Caldwell IV
Commanding General, U.S. Army
Combined Arms Center and
Fort Leavenworth
His prior deployments and assignments include serving as deputy chief of staff for strategic effects and spokesperson for the Multi-National Force–Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom, commanding general of the 82nd Airborne Division; senior military assistant to the deputy secretary of defense; deputy director for operations for the U.S. Pacific Command; assistant division commander of the 25th Infantry Division; executive assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; commander of the 1st Brigade of the 10th Mountain Division; a White House fellow; politico-military officer in Haiti during Operation Restore/Uphold Democracy; brigade operations officer of the 3rd Brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm; and chief of plans for the 82nd Airborne Division during Operation Just Cause in Panama.
Caldwell’s decorations include the Distinguished Service Medal, the Defense Superior Service Medal (with two Oak Leaf Clusters), the Legion of Merit (with two Oak Leaf Clusters), the Bronze Star (with one Oak Leaf Cluster) Humanitarian Service Medal (with 3 Oak Leaf Clusters), Military Outstanding Volunteer Service Medal, Presidential Service Identification Badge, Office of the Secretary of Defense Identification Badge, Joint Chiefs of Staff Identification Badge, the Louisiana Cross of Merit and the 2008 Honorary Rock of the year.
Caldwell graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1976. He earned master’s degrees from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School and the School for Advanced Military Studies at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. Caldwell also attended Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government as a senior service college fellow.
Caldwell was interviewed by MAE Editor Ted McKenna.
Q: How do you think higher education benefits servicemembers?
A: I’d start first of all by saying learning is a lifelong process. It never stops. When I was a brand new officer in the Army, my first boss really encouraged us to always read. He said: “I appreciate that you all just finished four years of college, you went through your basic officer training and you think that now all you’ve got to do is execute, and everything you do from now will just be about experiences.” But he said, “Without education, you’re experience is for naught, because you can’t put it into the context of what is really important, nor does it prepare you for the future.” It prepares you for the present and how you’re operating today, but it doesn’t really help you think through the challenges of the future.
For someone who wants to contribute on a much broader scale later in life, they need to be able to continually expand their horizons and explore new ideas and challenge old assumptions. To do that, education really helps you develop that kind of mindset.
Q: Do you feel that the Army or DoD in general does enough to encourage folks to take advantage of education benefits?
A: Where we’ve made our greatest stride in the Army during my 33 years of service has been in our noncommissioned officer corps. When I joined the Army, about 30 percent of our NCO corps had an associate or bachelor’s degree. It just was not something you expected them to have. The Army wanted them to be a high school graduate, and then what was most important was their experiences and the different jobs and positions they held and positions they served in. That’s what was most important for the development of our noncommissioned officer corps. Today we need our noncommissioned officers to be more thinkers, because the world has changed so much, and everything is so complex, and we have pushed decision authority and responsibility to a much lower level than at any time in my career.
Compared to 33 years ago, today about 70 percent of our noncommissioned officer corps has at a minimum an associate or bachelor’s degree. The number of NCOs who have master’s desgrees and Ph.D.s is on the increase. The Combined Arms Center [CAC] has oversight for the sergeant major academy, and in the past year we have changed the philosophy of education there. What was a functional training course has now become an educational experience. We did that just in the last 12 months, because we’ve recognized that when we bring those senior noncommissioned officers in, we want to educate them, not just train them.
Q: It’s helping the individuals themselves, but maybe it’s also beneficial to the Army or military in general, for example, if the nature of operations is no longer the conventional warfare of the Cold War but more often what can be a mix of peacekeeping, combat, community outreach and so on.
A: That’s true. The world has become more uncertain and unpredictable than ever before. When I came into the Army there was just the predominantly conventional threat of the Soviet Bloc, whereas today the threats we face, we call them hybrid threats. That’s what we’re going to see for the next, at least, 10 or 15 years. That’s not only conventional, but unconventional, criminal and terrorist threats. Here at CAC and within Training and Doctrine Command, we have a responsibility for education, so we have to teach our young soldiers how to be adaptable in that type of environment, to become innovative in finding solutions to problems.
We cannot even begin together to predict what the world will look like 10 years from now, but we do our best. We chart it out and we’ll always continue to add as much clarity and definition as we possibly can. However, we also recognize that no matter how good we might think we are, or how much effort we put behind it, we’ll never be totally accurate. History proves that. So the best way we can prepare ourselves for that uncertainty is through education. Through education we teach our officers to be very agile and adaptive. We teach them to be innovative in their approach to problems they’ve never encountered before. Probably more than ever before, education takes on an even greater importance.
Q: Education benefits also seem to be a key aspect to not only recruitment, but retention.
A: I’ve got a lot of friends in the civilian world. What they have found as their careers developed is that there’s not a systematic developmental process that they go through throughout their career working for some large corporation; rather, it’s very sporadic and focused only on a handful of people who are going to advance. In the Army, we take an entirely different approach. We’re going to educate and train all of our leaders as long as they continue to serve, because we want to continually prepare them for greater responsibility in the future than they currently have today. When I entered the force, education was touted as a real benefit in the Army. Today I would tell you that education is paramount to the success of our Army. A little different twist.
We still have some that believe the most important thing you have to do is have experiences. So if in fact you go to Iraq or Afghanistan for a year, come back for a year, go again for another year, that’s going to prepare you to be a future Army officer more than anything else. What I would tell you is that the Army has come to recognize that it may have been necessary for the first couple of years [of the current conflicts], but we’re going to be in this kind of sustained engagement for a long time, and therefore we have to get a balance in how we educate, train and provide experiences for our leaders. To do that, it’s really education that gives you the understanding and appreciation for what you’ve been through and puts it in context for how you can apply it for the future.
So, although experience is critical, and it’s essential to your basic skill set, it’s never going to fully prepare you for what the future holds. That is best complemented by education.
Q: We’ve been covering the new GI Bill a lot. Have you been seeing much increased interest in education as a result of it?
A: I’ve been shocked at the amount of discussion among senior noncommissed officers and officers about the GI Bill, and now that you have the transferability of it to your family members.
Q: The transferability is something people talk about in particular?
A: They do, because a lot of people who’ve been in the service and are at the 18- to 24-year point are starting to have kids about ready to go to college. What an incredible benefit they never thought they’d have to transfer to their children or spouse. This is the first year to be able to do it, and people are still working out all the procedures. But there’s an enormous amount of discussion taking place among senior people who are eligible for the GI Bill, saying, “I want to help my daughter or son go to college.” I’ve heard a couple people talk about sending their spouse back. Before, they really couldn’t afford it on their military salary, but now they have the unique ability to provide that, and so they’re really excited and want to take advantage of that new gift the U.S. Congress has given to the armed forces.
Q: Any initiatives you’ve been working on or heard about to get people to take advantage of the new benefits?
A: Nothing per se that we in an institutional manner from this command are doing, but I can tell you by just shear word of mouth, everybody I run into that has a college-aged kid is deeply looking into, reading about, trying to understand and applying for benefits that are now afforded by the GI Bill to pass on to their children.
Q: Are you seeing any trends in how people study or take classes? Distance learning is increasingly a big thing.
A: I go back first and foremost to our noncommissioned officers. What really helps is we’ve now set up the ability for our noncommissioned officers to carry their credits from one college to another college through this NCO education plan. Years ago, if an NCO was stationed at Fort Bragg and went to a local college for a year, and then got stationed at Fort Hood and went back to local college to continue his or her education, most of the time those credits weren’t transferable, and they’d literally have to start over. You’d find NCOs working to get an associate degree [even though they] had enough credits already for their bachelor’s degree.
We’ve finally corrected that. Many different colleges and universities have come online and partnered with us and now readily accept the accreditations of courses that soldiers take between each other. So as they move they can still continue working toward their associate and bachelor’s degrees. My command sergeant major entered the Army with a high school degree and is right now working on his master’s degree. He finished his bachelor’s degree around six or eight months ago, and literally as he finished he said: “You know, sir, I’ve got to keep going. I recognize the importance of education, and I also recognize the importance of having the degree for when I do retire and look for civilian employment.”
He, while working for me, in an environment where he’s not deploying every year, is doing that. This is a man who has already spent 42 months in Iraq. Almost four full years deployed to Iraq, since 9/11.
Q: And if he’s said he felt too tired to do schoolwork, who would blame him?
A: Right. He shocks me. But he’s driven. He wants to take advantage of this opportunity. He’s not deployed right now so he’s spending this time to get his civilian education.
Q: Transferability of credits comes up a lot with servicemembers as an issue. It seems like schools are working to be more accommodating.
A: They are. It’s been very helpful for the U.S. military. The first benefit is this transferability of credits, especially within our noncommissioned officer corps. The second we’ve been finding is that states have been passing bills recently that allow servicemembers to get in-state residence status for tuition. Even though my state of residence may be New York, now that I’m stationed in Kansas and I want to send my kids to the University of Kansas or Kansas State or elsewhere in the state, I can take advantage of the statute/ regulation. In the past until I established my residency here, I was unable to do that. Or if I left the state after I established residency, my children were no longer entitled to it. Now, if you leave, and your child has been at a university or college in the state, your child can still continue to get that same rate as long as they continue at the same institution and don’t take a break from school.
Q: Could you talk a little bit about how education has benefited you personally and professionally?
A: Sure. The way you develop leaders is that there are three pillars. There’s training, experiences and education. I started out as an undergraduate at West Point. Came out of there, and went through some training courses—my basic officer training courses, my captain career course. And then in about my ninth year of service, I applied for graduate school at the Naval Post Graduate School and was accepted into a program there for a Master of Science in systems technology, with a focus on joint command, control and communications.
I went out there for 18 months and took that course. A great example of where education can be so important: Up to this time, I had been with all Army units. I’d never left a tactical unit. I’d never been required to think about or really give any consideration to how you would operate in a joint environment or command and control forces in a joint environment. So for 18 months, while I was at the Naval Post Graduate School, I was able to take a deep look at that and at the same time have a lot of discussions and interactions and travel around and look at some of the joint commands. It tremendously broadened my horizons about what was in the realm of the possible, what currently existed, and more important, where we as a U.S. military needed to go in the future.
It happened to be about the same time as Goldwater-Nichols. The first article I ever published occurred during those 18 months.
Q: What was the article about?
A: I wrote about the need for Goldwater-Nichols. Eventually it came about. But what that education had done was reinforce just how critical it was for our armed forces. I looked at things like Grenada, the USS Mayaguez, the USS Liberty, the USS Pueblo and some other incidents that had happened where, because of our lack of jointness and compatibility of systems and procedures and language, we actually put U.S. military members in harm’s way that didn’t need to be. But it was a great 18 months being able to look and study and talk to a lot of intellectual people associated with that kind of thing.
I came out of that experience, went to school at the Army Command and General Staff College, which was a great education during that year. I stayed an additional year and did the School for Advanced Military Studies [SAMS]. So I had almost four continuous years of education. Very unusual thing. After SAMS, I went to an operational unit—the 82nd Airborne Division. With the educational background that I had gone through, and the training in joint command and control, looking at those kinds of issues, 18 months later we executed Operation Just Cause in Panama. It prepared me to be the planner for the 82nd Airborne Division.
Q: As you were saying, you’d previously only worked at tactical commands.
A: Right, the education helped broaden my exposure; it made me think out of the box. It helped introduce me to new possibilities of the way things could be. I came back to the 82nd Airborne Division with a great educational experience. About eight months after being there, I was told we were going to rewrite the plan to invade Panama in case it was ever executed, to make it more of a joint nature and take down multiple targets simultaneously. That was a much different approach to the plan that was on the shelf.
Q: That relates to what you were saying about people deploying to Iraq or Afghanistan. We’ll be there for a long, long time, so that’s why education is important, to get a new perspective.
A: Yes. What was interesting was I came back from Panama, and seven months later, I was deployed to Desert Shield. So for the next nine months I was in Saudi Arabia and Iraq, as part of Desert Shield and Desert Storm. Then I became an operations officer for a brigade of about 3,800 soldiers. I was responsible for all the plans and operations for the combat operations, first in Saudi Arabia and then in Iraq. I came back from that and then I had an experience: I went and served as a White House fellow.
Again, if the three pillars of leader development are education, training and then also experiences, this was an incredibly broadening experience that I went through as a White House fellow for a year, serving in Washington. Afterward I did my next command at the lieutenant colonel level. I was then sent into Haiti, so I had another incredible experience. For six months I worked for the American ambassador as his political military adviser for U.S. forces. When I came out of there and they sent me to Harvard.
Q: Sometimes military folks in a more civilian center feel different or comfortable. What was your experience like at Harvard?
A: I went to the Kennedy School of Government, in their national security program. I will tell you, in the classes I was in during that year, I was hard pressed to find one other military person who was there. Of course we wore civilian clothes and blended in. But I’m an enormous advocate now of military fellowships in civilian institutions because of that very experience. I was challenged the entire year. People would find out I was in the military and they would immediately start asking me questions about everything from our policies of things like Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, to “Why did you invade Panama when they hadn’t done anything wrong?”
Q: How did you feel? Did you feel you had to defend the policies? Did the questions seem accusatory or just curious?
A: I was just surprised at how little they knew of the U.S. military. I found it an incredible opportunity—and I call it that, it was an “opportunity”—that year to educate others about their military.
Q: So military folks who go into the civilian education world can be sort of advocates or ambassadors for the military.
A: They really can. There is a kind of selection process you want to go through. To me, you’d want to have somebody who has some good experiences, who’s well rounded, who is articulate and comfortable being around other people. Almost an extrovert, not an introvert. Because if you’re going to send somebody out into a civilian institution, the idea for them is not only to benefit from the experience, but help others benefit from them being there too. So you do want to send someone who is a little bit of an extrovert, who has the intellectual capacity to assimilate and process data and is also willing to engage.
I got involved in the [Harvard] Institute of Politics, the IOP, and found it absolutely fascinating going to their different seminars and programs and dinners and listening to the various speakers and engaging in discussions. I learned so much about our political process and how it works and why people get engaged in it and what people are trying to do by it. From my White House experiences and being involved with folks in IOP, I saw that we’ve got many people out there that truly have a love for America that are doing the exact same thing I’m doing, except in civilian clothes, and their weapon is passing bills and legislation and taking care of those who need assistance. I gained a healthy respect for our political leadership, especially at the governor level and below in the states, that I’d just never really been exposed to before.
Q: Schools often say they value military students for their perspective. I can see what they mean from how you describe your experiences.
A: What was really great for me—let’s take Harvard, where we had free rein in what classes we took—was that I [got to apply a lot of my] experiences in Haiti, where I [came to understand] that we didn’t have a good integration between us, the U.S. government and private organizations. When I watched what was going on in Haiti, I became so disillusioned about the fact that we had all these private organizations in there trying to do good, [but] their trucks were getting robbed, their warehouses were getting vandalized, and yet they wouldn’t come to the military for assistance and protection. They didn’t have money to hire protection, and [if they did] the protection they hired was corrupt and would participate in the looting itself. The aid that was supposed to go to the people wasn’t getting there. Then I watched people like the alcohol, drug, tobacco and firearm folks and the Drug Enforcement Agency folks and others trying to stop the interdiction of drugs through Haiti, and again not [communicating] well with us in the military.
I saw it in spades because I was in the U.S. embassy where all these different organizations would tie into or at least go through, and yet the integration function did not work very well. We tried. We did the best we could, but it still wasn’t done as effectively as it could be. So at Harvard, and every time I found someone who had worked at a nongovernmental or governmental organization, I immediately would sit down and ask how could we do it better, what did we not understand about each other, what are the limitations that exist for us working in closer harmony with each other. It was a wonderful year to have time to engage in a lot of discussions on issues that I’d seen from previous operational experiences.
Q: Maybe that points to another reason for having military folks in civilian schools; it could help over time lead to better integration of different organizations in future operations.
A: It absolutely does. Out here at the Command General Staff College, we have about 1,500 students on a one-year program. When I got here two years ago, the interagency was nonexistent in our program. We had plenty of Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine students, which is good. We understood the importance of joint education. But what we did not have was the interagency [presence]. This year we’ve got 18 full-time interagency students in our classrooms. We’ve brought in four Army civilians. Again, we didn’t have that before. What we’re trying to do is increase interagency participation. Our goal is to go to about 96, if we can. We have people today from the U.S. Treasury, Homeland Security, several from the Department of State, the U.S. Agency for International Development, Justice—they’re all here as students because we’ve gone out and solicited and encouraged them to come and be a part of our classrooms. We get that interagency perspective and that engagement throughout the year, and hopefully also build long-term relationships so that once they do graduate, they continue to maintain a dialog and connection for the next 10 to 15 years while they’re serving whatever department or agency they come from.
Q: Any final points you’d note?
A: We’ve been challenged over the last eight years with our Army committed like it has been, to put the balance back into the development of our leaders so they get the education they all need. I think we’ve come to that recognition and are putting a lot more emphasis to bring our officers and our noncommissioned officers back into the educational system for whatever period of time it is, and then back into the force again. I’m very encouraged watching what the Army’s doing right now in refocusing itself back on the strength of what’s always been there for us. What’s been the strength for many, many years, throughout the history of the Army, if you look at it, is the fact that we’ve done a great job of educating our force. We just need to continue doing that. It is this complex, unpredictable, uncertain future that we are going to continue operating in, with these hybrid threats. If the men and women in uniform aren’t taught to be innovative, creative critical thinkers, we will be unable to prevail as we have in the past.