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Chapter
1: Millennials from the Trenchicles
"Each generation wants new symbols, new people,
new names"
-Jim Morrison, Singer/Songwriter
"What
do you think of our UFG...unmanned foos-scope goalie?"
One night I had a dream that I installed a foosball table
in my lab at our US Navy facility, an idea that was laughed
about frequently among our millennial team members as
a nod to what they perceived as our antithetical Silicon
Valley environment. If we did have a foosball table, it
would have certainly been the first at our naval base,
if not illegal by our voluminous strict regulations, or
at minimum, heavily frowned upon by our management. In
my dream, some of my millennial team members had connected
a small motor to the goalie and a control circuit that
moved the goalie across the table based on a proximity
sensor that detected the ball and trajectory, and live
streamed the match from a camera mounted on the goalie
to a Periscope stream. Honestly, I had some serious reservations
about the vulnerabilities of this strategy, putting non-sentient
beings in charge of your defensive foos line and sharing
point-of-view video of the battlefield were likely not
variables that the famous war strategist Carl Von Clausewitz
considered when he developed his military theories on
attack and defense, but the concept was very millennial,
adopting technology to automate a traditional human task
and making a very near field moment for a few into a highly
distributed social media event broadcast to the planet.
I myself am not a millennial, but a Gen Xer, and a Defense
Industry employee since I left college twenty years ago.
Over the past few years, the defense and intelligence
programs I managed for the US Navy were becoming increasingly
staffed and dependent upon millennials, introducing behaviors,
trends, and characteristics that upset our non-millennial
personnel and derail the "official guidance"
processes of our programs at a daily frequency. It seemed
everything that millennials did not "kill" or
cancel per the popular meme, they at least disrupted,
and our defense programs were not spared. Specific friction
points will be covered in the following chapters, but
jumping ahead to the solutions-in May 2016 I read a Wall
Street Journal article titled "Helping Bosses Decode
Millennials." The article referenced the consulting
fees large Fortune 500 companies were paying for "decoding"
this emerging workforce: "$20,000 an Hour!"
I laughed out loud imagining the US government (and taxpayer)
coughing up $20K an hour of our national budget to understand
what motivates their young millennial workforce and how
the government could endear themselves to this young generation,
as if a good paycheck signed by the world's democratic
superpower was not sufficient.
In lieu of such help I was resigned to watch passionate
and intelligent millennial engineers enter the Defense
Industry to work on bureaucratically constrained challenges,
building and integrating equipment that was obsolete by
the time it left the facility, while working in multi-generational
teams that had not benefited from any millennial job coaching.
In fact, the only coaching conducted on the programs consisted
of older team members providing history lessons to the
millennials, explaining everything from cathode ray tubes,
to tape drives, to Fortran, to Windows 2000. Soon thereafter
I would watch that millennial passion and intensity give
way to soul-sucking despair. The only silver lining was
that my limited social calendar filled up with departure
parties. But day by day I felt increasingly helpless;
the might of the Department of Defense, the largest employer
within the US government, within the USA for that matter,
was unable to keep these promising engineers from making
a career in a field that I had come to love, a career
for me that was full of wondrous experiences.
Ultimately I did not have any other explanation as to
what I was witnessing from the cubicles in the trenches
of our typically mid-century government facilities (also
known as the "trenchicles," and also not a selling
point to millennials). So despite my laughter at the Wall
Street Journal article, I came to realize that if companies
were spending such outlandish amounts of money on understanding
them, there must be something to the millennials that
required significant consideration for the way the Defense
Industry went about its business. Was the Defense Industry
really as bureaucratic and stodgy as some of my millennial
team members thought? Were we witnessing the great millennial
diaspora from the Defense Industry to shiny new commercial
Silicon Valley startups? Would millennials ever take ownership
of the Defense Industry and sustain it?
The thing is that unlike newspapers, payphones, movie
rental stores, fossil fuels, or cable TV, the Defense
Industry can't be yet another item demoded by the millennial
generation. The Defense Industry is a proud and historic
industry; a source of great technological discoveries,
iconic leaders, and there's that sort of important part
where the Defense Industry maintains the national security
and economy of our democratic nations! A few years ago
there was a trend in the Defense Industry of re-labeling
engineering positions as "Mission Engineers"
to drive home the relationship of the work with the military
mission, but I like to think of Defense Industry engineers
as "Freedom Engineers," contributing to the
protection of our democratic rights in this era of increasing
threats. But with an increasing number of unfilled jobs
in the Defense Industry, we need millennials to change
their opinions of the Defense Industry, we need to muster
millions of new millennial Freedom Engineers, and then
we then need those millennials to build their own Defense
Millendustry.
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