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Admiral’s leadership lesson inspires UW-Madison Naval ROTC students

November 23, 2015 By Meredith McGlone

Adm. Michelle Howard

Admiral Michelle Howard, the U.S. Navy’s vice chief of naval operations, speaks to midshipmen in UW–Madison’s Naval Reserve Officers’ Training Corps Unit on Nov. 20.

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It’s not often that you get a lesson in leadership and military history from someone who’s made history herself.

So when the opportunity came to meet the Navy’s second highest ranking officer, members of UW–Madison’s Naval ROTC unit cleared their schedules.

Adm. Michelle Howard, the vice chief of naval operations, visited the unit on Nov. 20, speaking to 52 aspiring Navy and Marine Corps officers. Howard has blazed many trails in her Navy career – she’s the first African-American woman to command a ship and the first woman to earn four stars in the sea service.

In the classroom, though, she sounded like any professor warming up a group for discussion. When her first “Good morning!” drew a response that wasn’t quite strong enough, she didn’t miss a beat.

“All righty, it’s Friday. Good morning!”

“Good morning, ma’am!” the reply rang out.

Her topic for the day was the military’s newest front: cyberspace. To teach about 21st century warfare, she took the students back to 1905, the year a midshipman named Chester Nimitz graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy.

Midshipman Chester Nimitz

Midshipman Chester Nimitz

It’s hard to imagine how different the world was back then, Howard said. There was no color photography, no FM radio; women couldn’t vote and Jim Crow was the law of the land in many parts of America. The zipper hadn’t even been invented.

For the military, victory went to those with the biggest battleships and the longest guns, she said. But the invention of the airplane changed all that. And just a few decades later, when Japanese pilots attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, the question of how best to use air power was suddenly a matter of life and death.

Nimitz, who came of age not knowing what a zipper was, seized the potential of aircraft carriers and went on to lead the Navy to victory in the Pacific. He and his fellow leaders succeeded, Howard said, because “they embraced technology and embraced their own leadership to figure out how to fight something that had never been fought before.”

Cyberspace presents the same challenge to the next generation of military leaders, she said. Sailors spend more and more time online, whether they’re aboard ship, on shore or off duty, even as the risks of hacking, identity theft and cyberattack rise.

“It feels a lot like the wild, wild West and we’re kind of searching for Wyatt Earp to help us figure it out,” she said. “But here’s the thing – if you’re in charge, you’ve got to be Wyatt Earp.”

“As you come into the service, there’s going to be something new that’s going to change the way we do business,” she continued. Winning requires more than smart tactics, she said — it requires understanding the people you’re leading and making the most of their abilities.

 Howard’s visit is believed to be the first by a four-star to the unit. While in Wisconsin, she also attended the commissioning of the littoral combat ship Milwaukee in its namesake city on Saturday.

Friday’s meeting was a “very special opportunity for the midshipmen to hear directly from the highest leadership in the Navy,” said Capt. Christopher Murdoch, the unit’s commanding officer. “The Navy is a very big organization, but this makes it smaller.”

 “Everyone here was really extraordinarily grateful that she came here to talk to us,” said Midshipman Jumana Dahleh of Lexington, Mass. “The zipper analogy was what stuck with me the most – that everyone’s going to have their thing to learn.”