In this episode of  Inside West Point: Ideas that Impact, Retired General Vincent Brooks, currently serving as the Department of Behavioral Science and Leadership's Class of 51 Chair for the Study of Leadership at West Point, shares his extensive experiences and thoughts on leadership, innovation, and solving complex problems.  

The discussion covers highlights of Brooks' distinguished military career, which spanned over 38 years, including his command roles in the U.S. Army and his involvement in key historical events such as the reduction of forces in Iraq, the increase of troops in Afghanistan, and addressing the Arab Spring. Brooks offers insights into the importance of the information domain in modern warfare, the value of empathy and understanding different cultural perspectives in building international relationships, and strategies for fostering innovation within large organizations like the U.S. Army. The episode concludes with rapid-fire questions, touching on his inspirations, memorable moments, and advice for future leaders considering West Point. 

00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome 

00:28 Brooks' Distinguished Military Career 

03:32 The Role of Information in Modern Warfare 

12:11 Challenges of Leading Complex Military Operations 

22:56 The Importance of Global Internships for Cadets 

23:38 Cadets' Reflections on International Experiences 

24:21 Challenges and Benefits of Overseas Deployments 

25:09 Defining Innovation in National Defense 

26:03 Innovation vs. Initiative: Key Differences 

26:44 Real-World Examples of Military Innovation 

29:45 Encouraging Innovation in Large Organizations 

34:26 Teaching Innovation and Leadership at West Point 

40:35 Reflections on West Point's Evolution 

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Credits:     

• Guest: General (retired) Vincent "Vince" Brooks: (https://www.westpoint.edu/research/centers-and-institutes/west-point-leadership-center/the-class-of-1951-distinguished-chair) 
•  Host: Brigadier General Shane Reeves: (http://linkedin.com/in/shane-reeves-7950a31b3)    
• Recording: West Point Public Affairs-Visual Information    
• Production: Growth Network Podcasts: (https://growthnetworkpodcasts.com)  
• Publisher: West Point Press (https://westpointpress.com)    

This episode does not imply Federal endorsement.  

He also served at the Pentagon with both the Army Headquarters as well as with the Joint Staff overseeing all the U. S. military operations around the world. Widely respected as a speaker and leader of cohesive, innovative organizations within and beyond the military, his areas of expertise include leadership in complex organizations, crisis leadership, and building cohesive trust based teams, national security, policy, , strategy, and so much more. He's a combat veteran and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

During that assignment, you were often called the face of the United States military. I am oftentimes known as the face of the United States Military Academy. That's not true. That's not true at all. That sounds like, that's my career goal though. I want to be the face of the US Army. How do I go about doing that? How did you get that job?

I feel terrible about this. And the old adage of be careful what you ask for, you might get it. That was the role that came out of it. I was honored to do it, really. I really, I was, but it was a surprise when it came.

Yeah, I remember Baghdad Bob.

He wasn't there at the beginning. So that came after we started doing our updates on a daily basis and were commanding quite a bit of international attention.

So Saddam Hussein produced his own person to come out there to tell a completely different story. Most of it false. And it was very interesting to see how that manifests itself into news discourse where people say, well, you know, the U. S. forces say they've advanced, but Baghdad Bob, General Muhammad Al Sahaf says, they're nowhere close to Baghdad.

We've routed them in the outer lands. And in fact, we were about to drive through Baghdad International Airport. So seeing this competition between truth and falsehood in the public eye was the opening of a new domain that I think is still with us to the present time and probably will be for eons to come.

But if you've lost the information campaign, you may lose the war.

The image it shows is the destruction of a hospital and almost drives you beyond technology where you might be able to attack through that hospital, penetrate down beneath the ground, detonate an explosive with a single munition. But you don't have an image of anything except for destroyed hospital, right?

And so that then drives you into having to go to put boots on the ground and cameras in hand with the boots on the ground. It's a completely different approach to warfare.

And so I think this is something that you would, you'll see more and more as an important aspect of warfare. Do you think that when you were involved in this space as the face of the American armed forces did you recognize that you were in engage in an information conflict? Or did you not know that?

We had almost an industrial process in the daily cycle, the battle rhythm, if you will, on how we decide what was going to be communicated on a given day and what was going to substantiate it. So we weren't going to talk about anything that didn't have some substantiation behind it, lest we'd be accused of engaging in falsehood or propaganda.

And so everything had to be researched, cleared, because in many cases something like me pointing to a map or showing a before and after of a Ba'ath Party headquarters building that had been attacked the night before with seven different joint direct attack munitions and flattened it by marking the impact points in that sense that was viewed as annotated imagery and had to declassification process.

So we had to engage the Defense Intelligence Agency. We had to engage the Central Intelligence Agency. It had to engage public communications and public affairs structures. Had to engage the White House. Had to engage the Agency for International Development. All these became part of a working group as we discussed what we were going to, produce on a given day's basis.

It was essentially, it was a newsroom for all intents and purposes. I didn't expect that was going to be the case, but it was.

I mean, is it possible that you could build this comprehensive deliberate sell to clear information and then disseminate it. Or would you lose, the narrative too quickly if you do that?

The narrative power comes from what you choose to communicate. Okay. And if that's reactive to something that someone else has said, then you're going to be on the defensive. But if you choose to highlight where you're going, what indicates what the success looks like, then it's your adversary who will be in the reactive mode.

Now, is it possible to do that, or should we expect to do that in combat operations? Now, my view is yes. At the theater level, that has to be done. And if it's not, especially for the good team, the Americans and their allies, you'll be facing lies. There's a smaller machine that's needed to generate lies.

And it could be an image that's adapted and released very quickly with a story that says the Americans just attacked I remember going through a few of these, for example. An errant missile, an air defense missile, from the Iraqi side had been fired and landed inside of a market in downtown Baghdad.

Okay? News reports. We're highlighting this market that had been destroyed because images were immediately released by the Ba'ath regime. And the questions in the briefing ended up going straight into, Did you attack this? Can you account for this? How do you know it wasn't yours? And so it's constantly responding to that.

The truth telling team is always at a disadvantage. That's a sad, sad truth, but it is truth nevertheless. And the only way to defeat that Is by being consistently accurate and true. And acknowledging when there's misinformation. Now, you know, there's different categories of information. But, sometimes we hear juxtaposed disinformation and misinformation.

And those really shouldn't be. They're separate approaches. Misinformation is, I said it was Tuesday, but I didn't realize that it was Wednesday. Okay, so I'm correcting my misinformation. It is Wednesday. That's a misstatement. It's saying something incorrect, not creating a falsehood. Disinformation is a deliberately purposeful method of deceiving.

And so we see our adversaries or those who are certainly on the adversarial side of the equation now, North Korea, Iran to the extent China, Russia some terrorist organizations and groups, they will engage in disinformation, deliberately putting information into the information space that is false.

And then leaving you on the other side to have to work back against it. It's an interesting dynamic. It will continue to be there and yes, we must organize for it.

Mm-Hmm. And how Khrushchev is in the UN saying, UN Security Council saying there aren't missiles. And you know, the Secretary of State's like, here's pictures all the way up till today where there's generative AI that can produce pictures that are very real and lifelike and it gets more and more difficult to corroborate the truth and more and more difficult to explain what is fact and what isn't.

And I think your point is great, which is the best way to have people believe you is to be credible and to be transparent. And if you make a mistake, admit you made a mistake. But you have to build the trust and that is one way that you gain an advantage in this information space. Okay, so let me switch gears.

So you have been, I mean, you have been in charge of some of the most complex organizations that our country has. And and you've been able to lead those. So let me talk about Central Command.

Then certainly as I was that operations spokesperson that was in the CENTCOM headquarters staff itself. Then being the coordinator for the war on terrorism when we had most of that war being prosecuted in the central command area, more interface with them. Then becoming a forward deployed assistant division commander, then division commander in combat in the central command area underneath of a central command structure.

So the United States is the only country that divides up the world and assigns a four star level commander with a multi service staff, a joint staff, responsible for a given geography of the world. And the Central Command geography essentially goes from Israel and Lebanon in the northwest corner along the waters associated therewith through the Red Sea, throughout all of the Middle East and Central Asia, down to the corner that includes Egypt, the corner of Africa that includes Egypt.

Over as far as the Stan Brothers. So , all the stands except Pakistan. So Pakistan is on the Pacific command side of the border, although there's quite a bit of interaction that happens there. So Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, the Stan Brothers. So it's a very large area geographically that has a lot of natural resources that flow through it.

Some strategic choke points that move through it. Huge concentration of Islamic nations inside of it. Countries that are emerging democracies inside of it. It's a very complex area. And a very important area. And I've served in others as well.

What would be some of those things?

So understand that there's a perspective that's on the other side of the table or sitting adjacent to you in a given reception room. Not every country is the same. So if you view that Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, while close neighbors, are the same, you're probably going to make a big mistake in how you engage with them.

So each one of them is distinct, unique, has its own culture, has its own issues, its own baggage, if you will, including baggage with the United States. And so each one of them must be addressed individually. And in a way that's consistent with who they are. And from that you can begin to weld together relationships across a region.

But if you try to approach everyone the same way, you're doomed for failure.

That's the ambassador and the various other agencies that might be committed there at that given country. Then I usually go visit with senior officials from that country. And, as a senior commander, as an Army Component Commander, or as the Combatant Commander for CENTCOM, or Pacific Command, or European Command, or one of the others, you enter at a pretty high level.

And so it's usually with Minister of Defense, Chief of Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chief Equivalent. Sometimes it can be at Presidential level, at Head of State Head of State, Head of Nation levels. And, you listen. as well as communicate. So there's often, there's a purpose for your visit, and so you must communicate the perspective of the United States, but you also need to be listening.

What is it that's on their mind? What are they concerned about? Maybe with regard to U. S. troops presence, or with regard to what's happening in the region around them, with regard to their certainty or lack of certainty about what the U. S. is or is not going to do. So you'll get that kind of input that comes into you, and you build a relationship by doing that on a repetitive basis.

Did you ever have to eat anything on behalf of the United States that you didn't want to? Oh yeah, lots of times. What was the worst thing you had to eat?

Well, in a physical sense

fermented mare's milk to wash down horse meat that was wrapped in sheep intestines.

And on top of it was some sort of unidentifiable quadruped. Now what I discovered after a while, it was a baby camel.

You know, position, I've had to eat some things that I didn't want to eat either. Yeah. And so I, I'll give you an example. I was commanding the U. S. Army forces in the Pacific. And one of my first stops was to Japan. And I get to Japan on the same day that the U. S. Air Force had a hard landing of one of their HH 60 helicopters, okay, in Okinawa.

And anything that happens in Okinawa with U. S. military forces becomes an immediate threat. you know, cudgel to, for the provincial government to beat on the national government. Okay, so the U. S. gets in the mix of a battle that's ongoing from provincial to federal levels. And so the federal government then has to react to that.

So I'm the first senior U. S. government official through the door for a completely different purpose. And I'm meeting with the Minister of Defense. And I'm in his waiting room. And finally the door opens and I walk in and It's the paparazzi So I can't count how many cameras are in there doing this snap as I'm walking to sit down with them and meet and shake Hands with the Minister of Defense.

It's my first meeting with the minister and we sit down and He begins to berate me on what had happened with the Air Force helicopter I'm kind of going I'm the Army component commander. My headquarters is in Hawaii What are you talking to me for? But I knew what was going on and Accepted that And then before we got to the dialogue, all the media was dismissed.

So the only part of that was media worthwhile for their purposes was the berating. Sometimes you have to eat things that you don't want to eat, whether it's something on a platter or whether it's something inside of a policy room.

It's great. Like basically his facade.

And what I saw behind his de behind his chair, and we were sitting in a sitting area adjacent to his desk, was a picture of the Japanese archipelago.

And it was not the way we orient it. So we tend to orient it where the archipelago's from northeast to southwest. You know, from starting with the Kuril Islands all the way down to nearly Taiwan.

Alright? And it orients northeast to southwest. That's how we look at it. That's not how the Japanese look at it. I've seen it two ways. In his case, it was essentially on a horizontal plane and sitting above it was the Asian continent. Behind it was nothing but the Nankai trough. And so the point that he was communicating to me and anyone else who walks into his office and the way he views defense of Japan is we've got all of Asia sitting on our chest.

That's it. You've got to help us. Yeah. Okay, and is America on the other side of this Nankai Trough ready to come assist us, or is it not? It was a very interesting message, and I've taught that at the War College since then. I'll go and talk to students and just put up a picture of the globe, then I change orientation and ask, what are you looking at?

And invariably it's some hotspot area, but it takes a while for people going, I'm not sure what I'm looking at here. And that's the point.

Similarly, we are very, as you know, committed to cadets spending a semester abroad to build those, some of those relationships. And that is one of the things that is consistently brief to us when they come back and you ask them a question. What did you learn? is, oh boy, I didn't realize how big the world is and how different it can be, and what are some of the perspectives that others have and how they view the United States.

And it's such a good foundation for them to walk into their Army career with having some of those understandings. It's an amazing

And you can't recover from it immediately. It takes a while. And your human inter interrelationships and your international relationships to undo an offense that you didn't intend to communicate. But when you send cadets out to do that they are fundamentally thinking differently on arrival. Now, how they translate that back into the life of a second lieutenant can be challenging.

But more often than not, they're going to find themselves deployed abroad somewhere, even if they're based in the continental United States. Right. And if that's the case, they will come with an advantage as they talk to their troops about how to interact with the military of a given country, or the citizenry of a given country, or with the region, and how not to presume certain things.

And they can be very helpful in that.

And to me, that's where the intersection between innovation and technology comes together. Because often technology can create new means, Or cause you to think of new ways and technology can therefore serve innovation to accomplish ends. But technology can also create completely new ends. We're after something completely different than we've been after before because of the technology that emerges.

Often they get commingled. And so my counsel is to try to separate those in terms of how technology relates to both innovation and initiative, and separate innovation and initiative most importantly.

That worked.

And in fact, the unaddressed problems in the Middle East, where we were concentrated specifically in Afghanistan, Iraq. And our presence is in Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia required us to think differently as we had the Islamic Brotherhood moving into political positions in places like Egypt and elsewhere.

We suddenly saw things like the Arab Spring beginning to emerge from that new morphings of terrorist groups that had been largely defeated but were not eradicated and now they came back in a new, more virulent strain, if you will. Yeah. All these things were happening at the same time, and how we viewed our relationship with Iran, which was pursuing nuclear weapons at the time.

So do you need to be in the same place with the few forces you have to deter Iran that you would to sustain Iraq? And the answer is no. You don't have to be in the same place. But the natural tendency is, well, we are not going to sustain Iraq the same way. So therefore let's draw down the total footprint.

And you forfeit then the ability to deter Iran by changing your position. So the innovation became using things that already existed. A deployment rotation schedule, a series of exercise programs, access to bases in other countries, and we changed where forces were located and what kind of forces went there.

Called it Operation Spartan Shield when it was all said and done. That was not asked for by the Army. It wasn't asked for by CENTCOM. And so trying to generate this idea by anticipating what is needed, what's coming next, is where the heart of innovation comes in. Okay, so the ends are still the same.

Creating deterrents, maintaining a presence in the region that shows national commitment, in an area that is important to our interests. Alright, that end is the same. How you do it, the ways are where you make the variations. Do the same thing in the Pacific. But there, there have been examples like that I've seen through the years that, small things.

How do you maintain information about your squad? And I've seen the ways change many times. I've seen some technology infusions that make it easier for a squad leader to know what's happening in the lives of his or her squad members. These are innovations. They may be small innovations.

They may not be a patent associated with them. Sometimes there are inside the U. S. Army. But it's the practice of looking for new ways to accomplish the same ends that I think is important.

But really, just it's easier to keep going in the same way we have. If you had a if you had to give a recommendation about forcing innovation inside of a large organization that sometimes can get quite calcified. How do you, how would you, what would be the recommendation you'd make? And particularly, how do you think the United States Army can better innovate?

And I see that happening as we're talking to cadets in my Class 51 chair role. The kinds of things we're teaching cadets is to cause them to listen for alternatives, to seek alternatives. But if you have leaders who are doing that deliberately and making room for the unheard voices and in trying things and then insulating them, underwriting when it works or doesn't work, and then actively committing it when it does, then those leaders can create change from within.

And there will be resistance. There will always be institutional resistance to any kind of change like that. Hey, let's not get out in front of our skis. Didn't you hear we're getting a budget cut this year? Who's going to pay the bill? I mean, all these are the natural reactions that come from the institution trying to preserve and protect itself, which is the institution's job to do that.

But within the institution, there can be players who cause change. And then the institution will follow that. So if you can do things, for example, that use the means in a more efficient way, then it, and including adding some additional means, like other people's money, on generating readiness, as an example, then you'll find that it's not as much of a bill.

It's not a tax to something that's already strained in the Department of the Army. Very simple example. As the Commander of Army Forces in the Pacific, I had the Big Pacific I had to get across in order to get Army Forces west of the International Date Line and either near or on the Asian continent or in Southeast Asia.

That's a big logistics challenge. And while we do have ships and boats and drive them better than the Navy does they're generally not big enough and we don't have enough of them to do that on a continuous and sustained basis. So I need someone else's ships to do that. Well, we went and looked for someone who also needs to generate readiness.

What do you know? It's the Military Sealift Command that has all kinds of shipping and contracts for shipping. So everything from commercial ships to merchant ships to military ships. They own all of those things for surface movement. And they have to generate readiness by sailing a certain number of miles with their crews each year.

Well, our suggestion was why sail multiple miles around the Northern Marianas? Which is what they were doing at the time to maintain just the minimum level of readiness. When if I take that circular distance and stretch it out into a line, see I was taught this stuff at West Point. Stretch it out into a line, where does it take me?

With the same number of miles you're required to drive. Or sail. And it would take me into parts of Southeast Asia. And so we began to contract with them so they could plan their cycles. Get the crews up and ready for their mission and instead of doing circles around Guam and Saipan and Tinian they would go into Kuala Lumpur.

And obviously what underlies that is a rich intellectual foundation. And that intellectual foundation is is so critical to creating that type of young officer. That has the ability to think their way through some problems or look for creative solutions, as you just described. What are the things that you think that we at West Point should be teaching these young officers to make sure they have that creative and entrepreneurial and innovative Component to them when they get into the army.

They're from a culture of configuration. They've had the ability through technology, through education, through other things, through natural inclination, to, why can't I make it this way if it works better for me? So what West Point now has to do is not teach how to do it, West Point now has to teach how to constrain it, how to focus it.

In a way that causes the collective outcome. As opposed to individual entrepreneurial behaviors and skills. Where I can do this on my own. I got a better way to, to make me a smart West Point graduate than you have, Dean. I have a better way to do it. Why don't you just take my way? And why can't I configure the academic program to myself?

And you give a lot of latitude already. With selecting majors, and the number of majors that are present now is completely different than my experience. And I think much better because of that. But within that structure of choice and configuration, how do you cause people to realize how to harness their entrepreneurial spirit and skills in a way that creates a collective outcome that makes a difference for an institution or organization?

It's a different teaching now.

Yeah. If they know there's a better way to do it, why should they wait to represent a better way of doing it? But I think that you build bona fides when you demonstrate I can do this the way that it is being done, but allow me to show you another way. Allow me to show my troops a different way to accomplish the same end.

Let me have room to innovate. And if they can do that, they'll have a baseline from which to adapt and to innovate. If they don't, they're likely to run into someone like me. who wants to create room for innovation, but is also trying to hold on configuration controls.

So my suggestion is demonstrate, you know how to do it first. Then show me a new way to do it sometimes. Then I'll follow you. I'll go with it. I'll underwrite you.

And sometimes that experience can't be replicated until you've had it. Now, you've had, 38 years of service in the military and you continue to serve now, as we stated. You're our Class of 51 Chair of Leadership within the great Department of Behavioral Science and Leadership. And again, I would have to say thank you.

Thank you for doing that. I know that there is a lot of other things you could be doing through time. There's a lot of other opportunities and plugging back into West Point is very much appreciated. And we're always humbled to have you here. And this, but really, you know, this podcast and this episode, I think, is just a small window into some of the incredible insights that you bring by being that chair to both our staff and our cadets and our faculty.

So I'm curious as to what inspired you to serve in this particular role. As I stated, I know that there's an array of opportunities for a retired four star with your background. What made you decide to come back and say, I want to, work at West Point?

And it took me to become a retired four star before they did. That probably says something about the papers you have. It's a hard cut. It's a hard cut to make faculty. It is. I mean, the faculty is extraordinary here, and there's no doubt about that. I remember telling Colonel Spain, the head of the Department of Behavioral Sciences Leadership, that, I said, I have to really, you know, discipline myself here because you're touching something that's addictive to me and that's coming and interacting with young people who are going to be future leaders.

I love being a part of that. And so, and I know the whole faculty is like that as well that you lead. And so I to try to narrow it down to a few visits and have meaningful contact. was really the design and he had a great design for it. I was excited by it. I thought it would balance me from becoming overly addicted and yet still be in a position to try to give back.

What a great privilege it's been. I mean, I've really enjoyed it. It's nearly two years now.

I talked about majors and all that kind of thing. And so there's more choice that's available now. Some things that were emphasized in my day are not emphasized as much now, particularly in some of the discipline matters. But there is still discipline here, without doubt. There is still character here, and people are being developed in it every single day.

There is still a spirit of duty on our country in every single person I run into at this place. Faculty, supporting staff, Department of of Engineering Services. I mean, it doesn't matter if there's a spirit that's here, that lives through everybody, and that every graduate can be proud of. This is an amazing place.

If you want to lead, you come to West Point. This is where you learn how to do it. And then when you leave, you can go out and do it in any number of areas. We were talking about the entrepreneurial spirit a few moments ago. One of the things I do is, I serve as a consultant for a particular company.

And the company has a partnership with some start up companies private equity start up companies. So they provide funding to other start ups, but it's a start up private equity firm itself. Three of the four leaders are West Point graduates. And they're decades behind me. So they're achieving things now that I would never have thought of achieving in my thirties.

It's all over the place. That's what you're producing. You're producing people who can make an impact in any aspect of society they touch. And given the international composition here, in any country that has been here. It's absolutely remarkable.

This has been a lot of fun. I'm honored to have had you on this episode. Very grateful that you took the time to talk with me and, and for you to share some of your thoughts and wisdom to those that are listening. And so thanks for doing that.

I like to end episodes with rapid fire questions. And so here we go. The key is brevity. That's the key. So you only get a few seconds and a few words. You can't think about it very long. Okay, here you go. Who's the most inspiring leader that you know?

What was the hardest class you ever took?

Space mechanics.

Was that here?

Yes.

Good, I'm proud of that.

So you have 30 seconds to give a sales pitch to a future leader who's considering coming to West Point. What would be the pitch?

If you're all about leadership, if you want to be a leader, and every discipline in life requires leadership, whether you're leading yourself or leading a group of people, come to the place where leadership is as strong as the bedrock, as the physical foundation of this place, West Point.

This is it.

That's a great summary. Thanks again, sir, and please be sure to tune in to the Inside West Point Ideas that Impact podcast next month. Remember, you can find this podcast as well as the other podcasts, journals, and books hosted or published by the West Point Press at westpointpress. com. Until next time.