The Pressure of Command: RADM Michael Smith

Ken Harbaugh:

I’m Ken Harbaugh, host of Warriors In Their Own Words. In partnership with the Honor Project, we’ve brought this podcast back at a time when our nation needs these stories more than ever.

Warriors in Their Own Words is our attempt to present an unvarnished, unsanitized truth of what we have asked of those who defend this nation. Thank you for listening, and by doing so, honoring those who have served.

Today, we’ll hear from Rear Admiral Michael Smith. Smith first served as a nuclear engineer, and went on to gain command of multiple different ships.

RADM Michael Smith:

My name's Michael Smith. I'm a retired Navy Rear Admiral. I was a ship driver, surface warfare officer. I commissioned from the Naval Academy in 1983, and I ended up retiring in 2015.

My father was in the Navy, so we actually were... lived in Hawaii for all of my... most of my elementary school, and he had commanded ships there, and it was back-to-back tours in Vietnam type thing. So I would say by the time I was 10, I was sending away... website, then you got a little pamphlet, so I was sending away for the Naval Academy pamphlet. So that's pretty much where I always wanted to go.

Actually, after my first deployment, we had just gotten back, and it was the summer and they sent... I have to be on a nuclear-powered cruiser. So you didn't have to be refueled at sea, and you didn't have to get supplies. So they sent us up the West Coast to Alaska and then over to Russia, and we were darting all the satellites. We knew when they were flying over so we turned off all of our missions, and we arrived off the Soviet coast in the middle of their main fleet exercise of the year. And it was just like suddenly you just had a swarm of hornets around you because we just came over the horizon, then turned on all of our radars, and right in the middle... and it was just this huge competition. And here were the Soviet fleet coming and circling us, and their plains were buzzing us. But I think also, at the time, they were the 10-foot giants or whatever you say. You just assumed that every ship you were looking at was equal to yours. It wasn't until later when we realized that it was all... much of that was show, but my whole world as a naval officer was about US versus Soviet Union at that point.

So it was the USS Texas CGN-39. So it was a Virginia-class Cruiser. At the time, it was the cutting-edge cruise ship in the Navy. They hadn't come out with Aegis ships yet. They were just starting to deliver them and build them. So we were the top of line in a Pacific fleet, and honestly, we didn't know what we were doing. We ended up... We knew that we were down in San Diego. Again, we just came back from deployment. We knew that we were eventually going to go up into overhaul in Bremerton, so we were told we were just going up, do some exercises, and then go do a port visit and see Bremerton before we moved up later in the year. So he didn't tell, certainly not me. I was just a young officer. I was a nuclear engineer, so I was down in the plant. But we didn't know until literally we came over the horizon because even to the crew, it was not that anybody had a cell phone back then, but it was all pretty well classified until we disrupted their formation. And then it was just everybody's out on the rails looking at the Soviet fleet and just amazed that we were where we were.

I know that in the beginning, it was all hands stay inside because they want... they didn't know what the reaction would be, but then, eventually, it was like, "Okay, all they're doing is circling us," and then we got to go outside. And you went outside and here's as a young officer just learning about what I do in my ship... on my ship, you had studied the Soviet battle force. So you already had memorized for your different exams and stuff like that their cruisers and their frigates and all of that and here they were. I didn't need a flash card. They were a hundred yards away from us, trying to intimidate us as they circled us. When we realized that we tricked the Soviet Navy, it was... you were pretty proud that we were able to do that.

Well, I think you wanted to see if, even though there were satellites up, and even though they had patrol planes out there if we needed to, could we in fact send a formation that just shows up off their coast. So even at the time when they had their most heightened readiness, and they had all their planes and ships out, we showed we could. So certainly, I would assume, having later become an admiral, that gave the admirals in Hawaii the knowledge that, "Okay, if suddenly we need to send a signal to the Soviet Union, we can put them off the coast without them knowing." And we just sent that signal to their leadership too. That, okay, I mean, somebody somewhere in the Soviet Navy was fired, I'm sure, when they had to explain how the US Navy's top-of-the-line cruiser suddenly was in the middle of their major formation, and none of you knew it. So that made you feel good too.

So I actually put in my papers to get out after my first tour only because I wanted that as an option, and I went home for Christmas break, and I came back, and all I had done is given it to the people in the main office to say, "Hey, can you put this in the right format?" And then I was gone. And while I was gone, they're like, "Oh, Mike's a great guy. Let's help him out." And they put it in the right format, and then they sent it to the captain, and the captain's like, "Oh, okay. Oh, I didn't... All right. Well, Mike's a great guy. I want to support him." And so they had submitted my paperwork.

So when I came back from Christmas break, the paperwork was there, and I was approved to get out of the Navy. So it really was interesting because it flipped the script for me. It was like, "All right, why would I stay in?" And now I had... So suddenly I had the personnel guy in charge of me, we call them detailers in the Navy, calling me and saying, "Hey, I saw your letter to get out. What would it take to keep you in?" So it actually was very... I would recommend that for most people because it gave me a little bit of power. So, actually, I told the guy, "All right, I'm a nuclear engineer. I always loved political science and strategy." When I was at the Naval Academy, I was going to change from being an engineer to a political science major and my dad's like, "You know where political science majors are?" And I'm like, "No, they're..." He goes, "They're on the unemployment line." So I stayed. So what I told my detailer was, "Hey, send me to a graduate program that has no equations, and I'll stay in." And sure enough, he did. He sent me to grad school in strategy, and then I was in for a while. I mean, you owe time for there. So by the time I had served the commitment I had for the free graduate education, I was pretty much halfway there. And after that, it was... they kept giving me... every job was just that much more amazing to me. I never got a job that I didn't want. I certainly got jobs that were harder than I thought they would be or not as pleasant, but certainly, everything I ever asked for I got after that. So there was really... it was never a point where, "Okay, this isn't working out, or this is really not what I thought it would be." They always gave me increasing responsibility. And so that sort of kept me in.

As a nuclear engineer, you spend so much time in engineering that you really don't have time to also fit in a command at the lieutenant level, for example, because you need to use that time to go learn what real ships do type of thing. So I was always in cruisers and destroyers. So my first command wasn't until your traditional when I was a... '05 I was a commander and I had command of a destroyer. That was my first command.

The selection, it's very much a pyramid. So they just keep cutting people out. So even to be a department head on a ship, there's the captain and what we call the XO, the executive officer and department head. So the department heads are your first weeding out. You really have to have done something pretty egregious not to be a department head, but then also, it's the assignment, right. So yes, you're going to be a department head, but then the best gets sent to the best types of ships or in positions where we know that person can then go become an executive officer. And then, for executive officer, you get another screening. When I was there, there was a separate screening, and that was like 75%. So 25% of the people who had made it that far were out. And then you go, and you get screened to... for command, and you get what we call three looks.

So after so many years, at a certain point in your career, that's when your record goes in front of a group of senior officers, and they have a whole bunch of records to look at, and they talk about each individual one, and then they all vote on it. It's a secret vote, just 25... It's confidence, 25%, 50, 75, 100. And then, they vote on each record after they've briefed them. So some... one of the senior people takes my record and reviews it all, takes notes, and then when it's his turn, he'll say, "Okay, this is Mike Smith. This is what he's done. This is what his first captain said about him. This is what his second captain said. This is what happened when he was an XO." And I had been one of those personnel people before I went to my executive officer assignment, right at the time... just before I was going to go up to my commander review. So I was one of the people in the back providing the records to the senior officers who then do the review, and I'll remember. And so you were there, so you listened to the briefs. It wasn't my year yet, but it was people a year ahead of me or two years ahead of me. And you just watched the process. And I remember coming in after the first day and talking to my friend, and they're like, "Oh my god, I'm never going to screen." Because it was just so demanding and they went down to the most... But to your point, at the end of the day, you really have had three different people look at you. So three different people who themselves have already had command and probably they're senior enough, they've had not... they've had two commands and three different people have looked at you. So it's probably the fairest process where politics isn't part of the system. It could be if it was just one person. But when I was there, they were trying to really accelerate a small group of people. So they put in this process. They don't have it now where they were going to do a... look at really young people, and they were going to pick 10 or something like that.

And one of my friends, I saw him go through, and he got picked, and no one knew him. He was a guy that there wasn't a single person on that board that had seen him before that nobody had evaluated him who was famous. It was just purely based on his record and what he had done and the comments that were made and the collective view. Because as you say, at the end of the day, we really do believe that that one person is going to be responsible for taking a ship at sea with hundreds of sailors on board, and that person's fully accountable. And if they're not able to handle that pressure or make the right decision in a split second, which we all end up being in that situation at some point, then you're going to have a collision and you're going to have fire and all that stuff.

So my first command was USS Porter. It's a DDG-78, so it's an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer. At the time, I was the second commanding officer. So there was a commanding officer that was responsible for being there as they built the ship and bringing the crew together and training the crew up. And unfortunately, that's a very long process. Unfortunately for him I mean. Because, at the end of the day, that officer doesn't then take it on deployment. So I was very fortunate. Like I said, I've been very lucky in my career. I had some great opportunities. So I was the officer that came in and basically said," Hey, thanks for doing all the hard work. I'm going to go take it on deployment."

So I came in, and literally right before all of the training, you go through three months of major exercises, and then you deploy. So I took that ship on its maiden deployment, and I knew as we went on deployment that this was the newest ship in our Navy, and therefore, this was the most powerful ship in the world. And it was just amazing. It's more like, "Wow, how did I ever get here, and how is it that little Mike Smith that was going to the pier and watching my dad now had my own ship." So it was humbling, but it was an amazing experience for sure.

So I took it on deployment to the Mediterranean, and ended up... I stayed in the Mediterranean the whole time that... You usually deploy with an aircraft carrier and a strike group. They all went to the Middle East. This was just after the USS Cole had been attacked by... when they were in Yemen by terrorists that blew a hole in the side of the ship. So everything was changing. Matter of fact, the fleet commander back when I was at personnel assignment had been my boss. So he now is in charge of the fleet. He was Vice-Admiral Mullen, who later became chairman, but he came on board my ship when... as we were deploying, and he said, he said, "Mike, the whole world has changed, but what you're going to find is that probably the folks in the Mediterranean haven't figured that out yet." It's called Sixth Fleet.

And sure enough, I came in, I went on deployment, and my first port call was in Spain. And so I have this talk that this three- admiral just given me, warning me about the new threat warning me that we... you really need to be aware that that one ship was attacked, that others can too. And I'm getting ready to pull in the day before, and I'm like, "Okay, where am I staying? Where are you putting the ship? How are you protecting me?" And as he had warned, nothing changed. I was right smack dab in the most... at the most visible port place or pier at the base right where everybody comes in, and there was no extra security, and I refused to go in. I'm like, "I'm sorry, I'm not going in. I'm not going to stay there. You have to find a different port." So I actually anchored out and made them change where we would go in just because we need... because of the advice I had been given. I didn't make a lot of friends, but at the time, I was like, "Hey. I mean, people died, and I wasn't going to have that happen." So it was just the beginning of that period.

You're largely dependent upon the port security itself. That's why, overseas, we go to military bases, but you definitely rely upon the host government. Our people are there. Our people come down, and they assess it, and they look at it. But that's why I wanted to move to a different part of that, of the port, because I knew, in another area, there would be more security. People couldn't just come right up to the ship if they wanted to. There was... Later on, as that was taken more seriously, there'd be more boats in the water. So I put my own boats in the water, and I had people patrolling outside the ship towards the sea just to make sure no one came in from that side either. So it's a combination of the two.

The most impactful thing I've seen to civilians is bringing them on board this ship when we're doing things. So you bring them onto this ship, and to your point, they see how this teenager or this 20-something-year-old is in charge of amazing things. So, on a ship, you have the command center is where everything happens. You have up on the bridge where they drive the ship, where if you look at a ship, there's all these windows, that's where they're driving the ship. But down in combat is where we call it Combat Information Centers is the heart of the ship.

Again, it's not a large ship, so you've got maybe 300 people. But what happens is down in Combat Information Center, that's where you have these, especially on a Arleigh Burke destroyer, they have these large displays that cover the walls, and they're showing your radar, and they're showing where you're going. Excuse me. So these displays are where you fight. So an Arleigh Burke destroyer's primary mission is air defense. So you'll put... Aegis is the name of the radar. These ships with these radars that just are constantly looking out. They're not the old-fashioned ones that turn. They're just constantly looking because they're just basically plates that are on four sides of the ship. And you can see everything all at once.

So the responsibility of Arleigh Burke is to be put around an aircraft carrier to see planes and missiles that are coming at the aircraft carrier and to shoot them down as soon as possible. You get on a cruiser, which is the same thing, a little bit bigger, and then that person actually is telling all the planes where to go to intercept as well. So my ship, the people that are responsible for assessing the radars or for preparing the missiles or for identifying tracks and confirming that that particular track is in fact an enemy, that's the 22-year-old that has been through school, did all this training, but at the end of the day, they're the expert.

I remember doing... In preparation, we were doing as part of our preps to deploy our workups, you go, and you shoot down targets that are out there, and you have... and you use real missiles. Oh, we had a problem with one of the systems, and I remember sitting there and going over to where the console, we call it, where that young man... At the time, it was an all-male ship where the young man was sitting, and he was like, "Okay, captain, here's this and there's this. This is what's going on. We're not getting this signal but..." And they just learned just amazing details. So the level of responsibility they're given and the authority and the respect that everyone has for each of these people, it's probably the first time in their life that they've had that type of role. And just no matter who they are, we don't care what gender you are, what color your skin is, and what... we just care, "Hey, do you know how that system works, and can you launch that? When I say fire, is that missile going to launch, and are you ready?" And when you come in as a civilian in the middle of one of these exercises, for example, and you see the 30 people, the 30 really young kids that are at these consoles and are intense, and it's just magic because they were three years ago in high school, they were three years ago trying to figure out what they're going to do with their life and getting in trouble and doing great and playing football. And now here they are on a warship that's responsible for... prepared to go to war if they need to, and they all are just excelling. And it's always wonderful to see.

So you're on deployment, you're... In my case, I'm in the Mediterranean. You're surrounded by ships. People are going all over the place, and at the end of the day, I have to go to bed, but I know the team up in combat is taking a look at what's going on. I know the folks up on the bridge. I've certified it. Now, it's really, really, really hard when you first take command, right, because the other guy said these people were good enough. You really don't know yet. So you spent a lot of time, in the beginning, getting to know those key people that are going to be responsible when you're in bed and judging them to make sure that, "Okay, the last guy knew what he was doing." Again, because of our vetting process, that's usually okay, and I certainly didn't have any problems. But yeah, it's always an issue, and people try their best.

But I remember one night we were... I was down during that same workup where we had a problem. I was in combat at night, and we were doing another exercise. We were going in line with a bunch of ships, and then they were going to do some stuff. So I'm... it seemed fine. I'd only been on board a few weeks, and I'm down in combat, and they're briefing me on the repairs. The next morning, we were going to have the missile shooting, and one of our key systems was down. So I'm sitting there hearing the brief, trying to talk to them, and periodically, I look up and to see what everybody's doing. And I just happened to look up, and that made absolutely no sense what I saw. I left and went right up to the bridge, so it's dark, it's at night, and you walk in there, and you just can immediately sense that something's not right. And it's like, "Okay, what's going on, Officer Deck?" That's the guy that's in charge. "Sir, they got this message." And well, what had happened was basically you're just playing follow the leader. And they went up, and they were going to make a U-turn, and all come back down, but my officer had misread and it's all in codes, right, the signal that said, "Go do this." And my guy misread that, and instead of following him up and turn, he thought he was supposed to turn right away. So what ends up happening is he was turning just as the other guy was coming back down on him, and I get up on the bridge just as I realized this is what's happened. I don't know how we got here. I knew we got here. So I'm immediately like all stop, back full, back emergency. And we were fine at the end of the day. But it was like if I had just not happened to look up at that one second... So that one-second look is always in the back of your mind the rest of the time because it's like, "Oh my gosh, when am I not going to look up? When am I not going to see it?"

But that's why, like I said, when you're a junior officer, and you're studying all those cards and all those things, you go through murder boards, you go through… first you have the chiefs or something put you on a table... a panel, asks you a bunch of questions, and then if you get their confidence, you're sent up to see the captain. And I definitely had a couple of officers I just never allowed to take that job. I'm like, "I'm sorry, you're absolutely a wonderful individual, but I'm not going to put you up there. I don't trust that you have the judgment at the end of the day to make the right decision."

Well, yeah, I think it's your experience, right. So I mean, you'd spend so many hours with... having training, so you bring all the officers together for whatever the training is, but every day, there's going to be some sort of training. But that message just constantly repeated, "Guys, call me. If you at all are not comfortable, call me. I don't care. My job is not to sleep. My job is... So please never hesitate to call." And you just...

That's why I think we certainly learned from experience first when you're the junior officer, but certainly later that the whole idea of shooting the messenger. I mean, people talk about that, and you see that, and I think that's a leadership skill that isn't taught in other places, but you can't shoot the messenger, or nobody will call you when they really needed to.

And I told them, "Look, I would rather be told to wake up and come up those three flights of stairs to the bridge where we're driving and find out there's nothing wrong. I'll do that 10 times if one of those times I was supposed to be up there." So they just have to be comfortable like you were saying with your experience. And I think the Navy's good at teaching the captains to be that way, but really by the time you're the captain, you've just seen others so much that you're trying to emulate that you know that that's how you have to be. In most cases. There's always the exception, obviously.

There was one where actually there's absolutely nothing I could do about it. Of all things, we were in Barcelona, and we were tied to a pier, so we're not even moving, obviously. It's the middle of the night, and all of a sudden, the collision alarm goes off. So there's... you have alarms that go... that sound, and they each have particular sequences. So you know, okay, this one's general quarters. That means you're about to fight, and you need to go to your fighting positions. And other is collision alarm, which means, "Okay, you're about to collide, so people have to hold on to something and make sure you're ready." Well, you're sleeping in Barcelona, and the guy on watch sounds the collision alarm, and you wake up, and you're really confused because how could I be colliding if I'm tied to the pier? But I don't question. I immediately run up there. And sure enough, there's this cruise ship that had lost power, sort of like that... the ship that hit the bridge in Baltimore. This guy lost power, and he is drifting right at us. And I'm like... In my mind, I'm like, "Okay." Because as a captain, if your ship collides, don't worry about excuses. Those can come later. You're already fired. I mean, you can't have a collision. There's no excuse. So I'm like... in the back of my mind, I'm looking at this thing coming, I'm like, "Am I going to be accountable for this?" Because it's a collision, and I'm in command. And I mean, I could almost reach out and touch it by the time it got power and was able to just drift away. But again, and I'm sure that that young officer that sounded the collision alarm was like, "Oh my God, what's the captain going to say?" But I'm glad it was there because I certainly could have said what happened. But anyways…

So a captain, one of the prerequisites, I guess, is on where you do drive the ship you're inside, so if it's raining and all that stuff, but there's also outside sections where you go, and that's where you stand as you come in next to a pier. So there's places you can go outside. And in those outside areas, they have chairs, and it's just for the captains. It's called the captain's chair. So you'd be sitting in the captain's chair and you'd be looking at the sunset as you're driving, and everything's peaceful, and you're just like... You just have to pinch yourself that, "I can't believe that I had the honor to be here and that I'm commanding this ship and that I have just an amazing crew and isn’t this sunset great" type of thing.

Well, mine was just sort of unique. So you have command of a ship as a commander, and then if you're promoted in the Navy, a commander's like a lieutenant colonel. If you're promoted to the rank of captain, you either have command of a large ship, or you have a command of a group of ships. And that's what I had. Therefore, I was on the aircraft carrier itself, and my job was to manage all of those ships. So collectively, they were providing defense to an aircraft carrier. We were in the Persian Gulf in the Arabian Gulf during OIF and OEF. And so there wasn't this threat to the aircraft carrier. Instead, I was... it ended up being that the Persian Gulf is divided. There's a... and the military divides into the northern section, and then all the rest. And all the rest is the US admiral who has the aircraft carrier, strike group, and everything else. And at the time, the northern part right next to Iraq and was commanded by a coalition admiral and it was... been an Australian admiral. Well, the Australian admiral was leaving, and the new admiral wasn't going to arrive for four months so that position was left empty. So it wasn't really a traditional Navy job from respect of an aircraft carrier. So my admiral said, "Okay, I'm going to be responsible for everything, but really I want to send you up as my deputy, and you run what that Australian admiral did."

And so, at the time, that was my role. Iraq has two oil platforms out that really brought in all of their money at the time, and it had already been attacked by insurgents, and some Coast Guard folks who were defending it died. Our job really was to defend that area from attacks and to work with the British training people on land that are training the Marines to then come eventually take over that job. So mine was a little bit different from that perspective.

When I was in command, as a younger officer, I was part of Desert Shield, Desert Storm. So I had actually been on one of the ships. It was in the northern part of the Gulf when we first went to war with Iraq. And so I was involved, and at that level of, I called in an airstrike, and we sunk the first Iraqi ship, and we had sealed detachments on board, so we used them to take back some of the Kuwaiti oil platform, so it was a... but it was at a lieutenant level, not at a command level.

That was USS Lefwich. So basically Desert Storm, so this is after Saddam invaded Kuwait, and now coalition's put together to push him back out. They had modeled it all, what that would look like, and based on what they thought Iraq's air defenses were, they assumed that we would be... that he would be shooting down 10 to 20 airplanes a day. So they brought the aircraft carriers close to Iraq but far enough down that they were safe. And then they had cruisers in front of them to sort of defend them. But they decided they would send three ships way up north and hide in the oil field and basically be there... We had a MASH unit on board, and be there to pick up all these downed pilots they assumed would be shot down. So we were sent way up north. I mean, it was only two or three weeks, but it was pretty intense. I mean, it was... then it kicked off. We had Tomahawks. We shot all of them the first night so they wouldn't... nobody... they wouldn't be on board to be shot at. And then, we just hid up there and then come to find out they put us in the minefield. So there were constantly these old World War II floating mines would pop up and then float down at you. So we were... you were always moving the ship not to hit a mine type of thing. And later, when we went to get new Tomahawks reloaded, two ships did hit mines up there. So we were one of the three ships that USS left, which was a destroyer. So we were in charge.

The commodore was on our ship, and we had... like I said, we had the medical detachment, and we had a special helicopter to go search and rescue that they anticipated would go into Iraq and pick up the downed pilots and bring them back as well. So it was very intense three weeks, I guess. It certainly wasn't an endless war, but it also completely changed my approach to preparing a ship for combat because we had been up there waiting for this to happen.

And then, in combat, everybody's not intense all the time as you want them to be. So the day before the war started, you would sit there, and some people you'd... as the young lieutenant, you'd have to say, "Hey, chief, please turn around and look at your instruments or whatever it is, and put your headset back on. You launched the Tomahawks. We're now at war." You didn't have to tell anybody anything. They were so intense, and they were so... And so for the rest of my career, whenever we trained, I wanted them to have that intensity. And I said, "No, this is what you're going to be because this what it'll be like."

So from that, it was a great experience from that perspective. I mean, even as an admiral going to... flying onto one of my cruisers and then the captain's taking me into his combat, and I'm like, the lights are on, people are talking. I'm like, "No, this is not how you prepare a ship. Turn the lights off. Everybody focus. There shouldn't be... You want to talk to... Well, captain." They’re like “Captain, hey, let me tell you what's going on." [inaudible 00:49:15], "No, if you want to talk to me, let's go outside and talk. These guys should be getting ready for the exercise they're doing."

At the end of the day, you have to empower your people, you have to trust them, and you have to always be looking for ways to promote them. That is to put them in positions where they can excel, especially in the Navy. But I'm sure in all the armed forces. We're recruiting from America. These are folks, young men and women who, like I was saying, they're just out playing football, or they don't know exactly what they're going to do. They're just as smart as the officers. I was a nuclear engineer, so we had... from the beginning, we had... my enlisted folks were nuclear engineers themselves and trained in this stuff. And you learn from the very beginning, there's no difference between you and that other person other than maybe that person's life experiences. For whatever reason, they couldn't afford to go to college, or for whatever reason, that wasn't the time to go to college. Other than that, you're all equal. You're all competent. You're all capable. And so you have to remember that, and you have to have to promote people and give them opportunities to excel at. I don't know how many awards ceremonies. So every three months, you'll get your crew together, and maybe four people did something really well, and you want to give them an award, give them a medal. And how many of those 20-somethings you're giving them an award, and they're crying because I'm emotional because the first time in their life that somebody has said, "You're amazing." And that's the beauty of what you try and promote. And it just keeps you going. Certainly, as a leader, to be able to see that and the impact. And then that person has forever changed. They have self-confidence that who cares if they stay in the Navy. They're going to take that with them to their next job or to [inaudible 00:51:57] their next experience. And I think that's what I loved about being in the Navy.

Ken Harbaugh:

That was Rear Admiral Michael Smith.

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