The Blue Guidon The Newsletter of Andover and the Military
Spring 2021
Escaping the Inky Blackness By Lt. Cmdr. Ali Ghaffari ’98, USN
The inky blackness of the Arabian Gulf was punctuated by brilliant yellow fires emitted by oil platforms in the distance. They were my only indicator of a horizon, though to be honest, they made me feel like I had entered the gateway to hell. I was low on fuel. In and out of the clouds above the USS Ronald Reagan, I had about 10 minutes to figure it out before I’d be forced to eject—with little chance of being found in a dark, churning sea. Beads of sweat formed on my brow as I gripped the stick of the F/A-18 Hornet and pondered the consequences of not getting “plugged in” to the Super Hornet tanker. I had to get into that refueling basket—the problem was, I was new at this and had only just done it for the first time about 30 minutes before that, when there was far less pressure to succeed. That’s when it happened. My body began to feel like it was in a turn when my eyes were
Ghaffari at Naval Air Station Key West in 2013
telling me I was straight and level. I had to battle the urge to follow what my body was telling me. It would mean certain death, as we were only about a thousand feet over the water, mere seconds away from impact when you’re flying 170 miles per hour. The combination of the inky blackness, being in and out of the clouds, and the bright green information on my head-up display tricked my senses, giving me a disoriented condition called “the leans.” While everything in my immediate environment seemed to be spinning out of control, I could hear the voice of my flight instructors: “Trust your instruments.” In flight school, pilots are taught the fundamentals, to trust certain primary rules upon which flying a fighter jet is based. It was time to hold fast to first things. Escaping the Inky Blackness continued on page 2
Data Science and the Modernization of the Army By Capt. Alexandra Bell Farr ’13, U.S. Army
When I reported for my first day of summer training at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in July 2013, the importance of data science to the Army mission was the last thing on my mind. With all the emphasis I had seen on traditional combat arms branches—like infantry, armor, and field artillery—I certainly did not expect my career to take a turn toward using data science in support of real-world intelligence operations. Nearly eight years later, however, my atypical Army experience has me thinking not only about the current operations, but also about how the Army has to make some dramatic changes and investments so that the Army of tomorrow can meet the demands of warfare in the Information Age. Since 2018, the Army has been undertaking a massive modernization effort to ensure it can conduct multi-domain operations (MDO)—consisting of operations in land, air, maritime, space, cyberspace, and other electromagnetic spectrum environments—against near-peer geopolitical rivals like Russia and China. In great power competition, the Army knows its relative technological dominance is not guaranteed. Data science is a tool that can help enable all of these domains, and senior leaders have a real appetite to leverage data science as much as possible. Perhaps the Army’s most significant manifestation of the enthusiasm for all things technology, data science, and computing is the establishment of the Artificial Intelligence Task Force (AITF), which supports research and development in autonomous platforms, artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), data visualization and synthetic
environments, sensing, computation, internet of things, and more. The Army is even beginning to make the personnel and educational investments necessary to support these efforts—as evidenced by the partnership with Carnegie Mellon University to increase data science skills and AI expertise within its formation. I have seen the need for data science in my own unit. After studying math at West Point, I earned a master’s degree in data science from the University of Edinburgh and went to a military intelligence brigade that conducts real-world intelligence production and dissemination for much of the Middle East. With a long list of requirements and a limited pool of supporting personnel, it was clear that machinelearning algorithms to help prioritize the massive number of reports coming to the analysts every day would greatly benefit our organization. When my battalion commander learned of my background, he pulled me from my old job and inserted me directly into our All-Source intelligence cell, where I develop and maintain algorithms that support our current mission priorities.
Escaping the Inky Blackness continued from page 1
civilization in the world. We are ignoring them in favor of other lesser goods, lesser philosophies. There is a haze of moral relativism that now makes it difficult to get to the truth of anything anymore as we grip ever more tightly to our own “truths,” fight others’ “truths,” and together ignore Truth itself. Civil discussion and mutual understanding have nearly evaporated as the “cancel culture” has seeped into nearly everything. As civil discussion based upon objective truth disappears, hostility inevitably follows and the result is that we find ourselves, as a nation, in the pitch black, in a steep angle of bank turn, nose down, hurtling toward the water. The end depends upon the beginning. I’ve found our school motto to be true, particularly with regard to education and formation of young adults. I know from my own life that education was a driving force that propelled me out of the poverty my parents were stuck in. I’d posit education—or rather, the failure of education—to be the source of many of the problems we face in our society, as we seem to have forgotten the importance of character and moral development. A morally upstanding individual is just, courageous, and generous. If you have two morally upstanding individuals, they will treat each other with respect and dignity—far better than two individuals who have little moral development. According to Aristotle, a virtuous human being does the right thing at the right time for the right reasons. But this type of thinking, which was taught for more than two millennia, has been discarded in the past century in favor of fads and ideologies. It’s no coincidence then that we find our civilization failing. As our education goes, so goes our civilization. Three years ago, I decided to do something about this. I gathered a group of others who felt similarly, and we started a school
In the midst of this desperate struggle, my mind flashed to another Andover alum, John F. Kennedy Jr. [’79], who had become disoriented in his airplane on a dark and hazy night, flying himself and two family members into the water about a year after I graduated. I then thought of my family—how I would rather be with them at this moment than here. My mother, despite her prior struggles with drugs and alcohol, loved me unconditionally. Her victory in that battle when I was 8 years old helped give me a chance to have a good life. My stepfather, who came into our lives shortly after she cleaned up her life, held me to a high standard of excellence in school and sports, insisting that I give it my all, every time, no excuses. It was their influence that helped prepare me for success at Andover, where their support and guidance was supplemented by fantastic teachers who challenged me to grow and gave me opportunities rarely found for students at that age and poverty level. This education prepared me in a way that made college relatively easy for me and set me up for success in the Navy when I joined right out of college. While I was more than intellectually prepared, my character was not developed in the same way, and it took some amazing mentors and a great deal of personal study of the ancient Greeks and the great books of Western civilization to understand what it is to live a life of human flourishing. As I look around our great nation and see and hear its diverse voices, what occurs to me is that we are disoriented. We have lost our way. We are not trusting our instruments, those steady references that have enabled us to be the most successful 2
Data Science continued on page 4
Dear Andover and the Military Community, As a decade of our Executive Committee’s existence approached, we partnered with the Office of Alumni Engagement to review a set of committee guidelines that had been drafted in the early years but never formalized. We spent several weeks refreshing these guidelines, updating them with the committee’s current functions and aligning them with the bylaws of the Alumni Council. These guidelines now provide the framework for our mission, operations, and succession planning. When Andover and the Military first began, several supporters were asked to join an executive subcommittee and provide advice and advocacy. Over the years, members of this subcommittee have served admirably and the group as a whole has been instrumental in a decade of success and growth. However, the subcommittee gradually expanded to a size of 12 to 14 members and, in review, we discovered that many of the volunteers who filled those seats were not being utilized in a thoughtful manner. One result of our guidelines review was to tighten the Executive Committee to include four tenured posts: • Chair—currently Jim Donnelly ’82 • Vice Chair—currently Lt. Col. Kenny Weiner ’96 • Communications Lead and Editor of The Blue Guidon—currently Robert Tuller ’82, P’22, ’23 • Lead Fundraiser—currently Don Way ’63 These roles will come in line to serve on the AATM Executive Committee with a term of up to four years, which will then allow for the succession to bring in other volunteers to the differing committee roles. In that spirit, I would like to invite each of you to consider volunteering with Andover by serving on the AATM Executive Committee—and you may be called to serve in the next few years. Please email me to learn more. Each of you should have recently received an AATM email survey with the opportunity to update your personal contact and military information and to indicate your interest in joining our Executive Committee. For a full copy of AATM’s updated guidelines, please email Mary Corcoran, our partner at Andover, at mcorcoran@andover.edu. Thank you,
Capt. Jim Donnelly ’82, USN (ret.) Chair, Andover and the Military Executive Committee jim.donnelly707@gmail.com
that returned to our Western educational heritage. Our K–8 students are delighting in the True, the Good, and the Beautiful—the great books of Western civilization. They savor the timeless stories of The Illiad and The Odyssey, in the tales of Robin Hood and King Arthur, and they understand the place of God at the center of all this. These Western classics are baked in with moral absolutes, so the children are inspired to understand and emulate the best way to live through the greatest works ever written. At Divine Mercy Academy, kids aren’t bored with school. When history, math, and science are taught truthfully in the spirit of those great teachers who came before us, the response is not indifference. It’s enthusiasm. It’s energy. And curiosity. When the day is done our students don’t stop learning. They don’t stop being curious. Our teachers, energized by our classical curriculum, reenter the classroom daily as if for the first time. For the teacher who is learning while they are teaching is the best kind of teacher. This environment is infectious. The result is simple—kids who love coming to school, who are genuinely joy-filled, parents who are amazed at the changes they’ve seen in the character of their children, and teachers who love to teach the material in the curriculum. Our little school has grown from an idea to 45 students and 10 teachers in three years. Our parents recently rated us 9.8 out of 10 in answering the question “How likely are you to recommend our school to another family?” What is the secret of happiness and joy? Living a life of virtue—living a life of great habits, which form our character. Theodore Roosevelt once wrote, “Alike for the nation and the individual, the one indispensable requisite is character—character that does and dares as well as endures.” Virtues that form one’s
character must be taught and lived, and it begins with us as the exemplars for our children and children’s children. We cannot cancel our way to a better culture, but we can educate and practice our way to a better one. While we are still a small school, imagine now how many people each of these children is going to impact in their lives— the multiplication of the impact of our (currently) little school is exponential. The future of education is classical. The new is prefigured in the old. The end depends upon the beginning. There are many other schools like ours popping up around the country. We are on the leading edge of a movement that seeks to rediscover our instruments and “pull up on the stick.” Do you want to make the world a better place? Read the Great Books, then give them to someone else. Better yet, teach some young people the classics or put your kids in a classical school. In doing this, we are giving them all the reliable “instruments” needed for conducting a life of excellence and human flourishing. And you know how I got out of that life-threatening situation with the tanker? I trusted my instruments. Ali Ghaffari ’98 graduated from Colby College and immediately joined the Navy. He wraps up a 20-year career this August, which included two tours flying F/A-18’s, working as an admiral’s aide and an instructor pilot, and teaching leadership and ethics at the U.S. Naval Academy. He will soon begin a second career as an executive coach and leadership consultant. In his spare time, Ghaffari started a K–8 classical school in the Catholic tradition named Divine Mercy Academy, which is rapidly becoming a national leader in Classical education. He lives in Maryland with his wife, three daughters, and two (also female) dogs. Hat tip to Harry Flynn ’75, who initiated this story. 3
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While the task itself was straightforward, I lacked many of the everyday tools I would normally use because I was working on classified Army networks that require much greater levels of security. On top of that, data science is still a relatively new addition to the Army’s repertoire, so unlike the doctrine on how to run a dismounted patrol, there was no guide for how best to implement and validate algorithms on Army networks. The data science community in the Army is small and dispersed, so I had little hope of learning industry standards from the other data science professionals around me. In other words, there was no pre-baked solution. I had a lot of learning to do on my own, and as they say, I “built the plane in flight.” I first remember confronting this kind of creative problemsolving at Andover. Probably the most painful and transformative class I took was Dr. Tanner’s Biology 560. I spent the first two weeks of upper fall trying to solve what I thought was a near-impossible problem set—little did I know that, indeed, several
of the problems had no existing solution. I (barely) persevered, and I am so glad I did. That class and many others I took frustrated me, intrigued me, and pushed me to grow academically in ways I doubt I would have experienced anywhere else. Although I would not have thought of Andover as the place that would especially prepare me for a career in the Army, Andover once again has proven its value across a range of professions and pursuits. I have been challenged many times since leaving Andover, but those early trials laid the foundation for persistent, creative problem-solving, which is exactly what the Army needs right now with its budding requirement of data science and other informationenabled technologies. Alexi (Bell) Farr ’13 graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 2017 with a BS in mathematics. She earned an MS in data science from the University of Edinburgh in 2018. First lieutenant promotable at press time, Farr will pin captain in May 2021. She is currently the Military Intelligence Officer assigned to Fort Gordon, Georgia, and will be transitioning to the Army’s cyber branch in October 2021.
CURRENTLY SERVING IN THE ACTIVE AND RESERVE FORCES Mackenzie Lucas ’20 Joseph Kacergis ’19 Jack O’Neil ’19 Neil Thorley ’19 Nicholas Isenhower ’18 Joseph Simourian ’18 Larson Tolo ’18 David Tsai ’18 Annette Bell ’16 Benjamin Bolduc ’16 AnnaMaria Dear ’16 Anirudh Murali ’16 Nicholas Forti ’15 Eden Livingston ’15 Renee LaMarche ’14 Thomas Mullen ’14 Alexandra Bell Farr ’13 William O’Donnell ’13 Taylor Perkins ’12 Christopher Kent ’11 Lyra Silverwolf ’11 Adrian Lehnen ’10 Ansley White ’10 Jake Bean ’08
Letter to the Editor
Hanson Causbie ’08
Leadership, Team, Sacrifice
Anna Nettleship ’07
As our country cries out for leadership, three dates stand out.
Brendan de Brun ’06
Jess Choi ’08 Lauren Johnson ’07
6/28/05—Operation Red Wings, 19 Navy SEALS and Army Night Stalkers perished in Afghanistan. Lt. Michael Murphy’s four-man team was ambushed. Mortally wounded as he called for backup, Michael’s last words were “Thank you.” Lt. Cmdr. Erik Kristensen ’91, Michael’s CO and acting base commander, raced to a helicopter that was headed to assist the team. The helicopter was shot down in the doomed rescue effort. 5/7/11—The destroyer USS Michael Murphy (DDG-112) was christened at Bath Iron Works (BIW) in honor of the Medal of Honor recipient. 10/6/12—At the destroyer’s commissioning in New York, distinguished speakers often repeated “leadership” and “team” as they recounted Michael’s life story. The names of all 19 who died in Operation Red Wings were welded to a plate in her hull. Jeffrey Geiger, president of General Dynamics BIW, spoke of the 5,200 dedicated workers who built the Michael Murphy. As they completed the ship on May 7, Michael’s birthday, their cry was “Do it for Murph!”
Helal Syed ’07 Connor Flynn ’06 Jenn Bales ’04 Livy Coe ’04 Steve Draheim ’04 Matt Fram ’04 Nick Ksiazek ’03 Cat Reppert ’02 Eric Chase ’01 Gil Barndollar ’00 Charles Fuller ’00 Jarreau Jones ’00 Matthew Sullivan ’00 Hunter Washburn ’00 Grancis Santana ’99 Ali Ghaffari ’98
“Teammates live together, fight together, and sometimes die together,” said Adm. William McRaven, commander of Joint Special Operations Command, stressing the deep bond formed. Adm. Jonathan Greenert, chief of Naval Operations, repeated Michael’s motto, “Lead the Fight.” Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus quoted Ecclesiastes, “To everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under heaven,” adding “Michael’s time was way too short, but this is about how well he used the time given him.” Reflecting on Michael and Erik’s lives and the tributes paid to them gives hope that the best is yet to come. It’s up to each of us to make it happen! —George S.K. Rider ’51, P’86, GP’22
Luis Gonzalez ’97 Michelle Kalas ’97 Jesse Ehrenfeld ’96 Rush Taylor ’96 Kenny Weiner ’96 Randy Allen ’95 Rebecca Calder ‘94 Matthew Macarah ’93 Ryan Shann ’93 Craig Der Ananian ’91 Kenneth Jambor ’91
THE BLUE GUIDON
The Newsletter of Andover and the Military Vol. 9, No. 2 Published biannually by the Office of Academy Resources, Phillips Academy
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EDITOR
Robert Tuller ’82, P’22, ’23
ASSOCIATE EDITOR
George Rider ’51, P’86, GP’22
HISTORIAN
David Chase, Faculty Emeritus
EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE James Donnelly ’82, Chair Robert Tuller ’82, P’22, ’23 Don Way ’63 Kenny Weiner ’96
Eric Hawn ’89 Graeme Henderson ’83, P’14 Kazimierz Kotlow ’83 Douglas Creedon ’79
This list, based on data we receive from alumni, may be incomplete. If you know of someone who should be added, please email Mary Corcoran at mcorcoran@andover.edu.