On Leadership Why We Serve

By RADM Wayne “Mouse” Baze, USN

I was recently the guest speaker for a Winging Ceremony in Florida, where my wife and I were privileged to share a truly special day with a bunch of very young officers, their families, and friends. We made a week of the journey so we could take a trip down memory lane, visiting favorite spots around Pensacola from our earlier Aviation Officer Candidate School and flight training days. The experience provided much perspective and felt like coming full circle. At one point, I was helping families wing Aviators on the very spot, on the very same stage where my parents pinned on my wings over 32 years ago. How cool is that?

The time in Pensacola was the perfect backdrop to reflect on the theme of this edition of Rotor Review, “Why We Fight.” It is a topic that encompasses a lot—why people join the military, why people like us stay in for decades while others leave sooner, and why military service today is more important than ever. Here are some things I gleaned. Hopefully the themes will resonate with readers and encourage a wider discussion on service in your own families.

Why Do People Join?

When I told my mom I was writing this article, she pulled out a letter she saved that I wrote to her 34 years ago. In the letter a younger me was explaining to my worried mom why I was changing life course and joining the military (prior to that I was tracking to be a musician or doctor…don’t ask). That young guy was a lot more gung-ho and naïve than me today, but I still believe the things I said back then.

I explained to mom that she and dad had instilled in me the values of serving and helping others. That encouraged me to want to do something like the military. There are lots of ways to serve others - doctors, teachers, government, law enforcement, firemen, pastor, and raising a healthy family. But for me the military always represented a special form of citizenship, where you put it all on the line for your fellow Americans. I also had lots of relatives who served as examples for me. I liked leading and being on teams. I wanted adventure and thrills. And I was fascinated with science fiction, space and flying. The Navy recruiters had me at hello.

That was my story, but in my seat at Navy Personnel Command I hear the whole gamut of reasons people sign up. Some join like me because they were just drawn to it. Some join to leave bad situations. Some join as patriots responding to world crises like 9/11. Some join for adventure. Some join because they want a job, respect, or an improved station in life.

I do not know who first said it, but you hear often that people join the military to either run away from or run towards something. That sounds right to me, and I would add most who join are also driven by the natural human desire to be part of something bigger than themselves, to find meaning and purpose.

The military is a perfect place to find purpose and be a part of something greater than oneself. Service provides a foundation for right living and behavior (honor, courage, commitment); it welcomes you into a winning team, a family, and a network of friends for life; it provides unmatched growth opportunities, job security, and respect; and it is one of the more meaningful ways to give back to society and support our way of life.

Why Do People Serve?

Meaning and Purpose: My mom challenged me when I joined to remember that being in the military is not about me. It is not about any one of us because being in the military means engaging in a life of service to others. It’s about duty and honor, about subordinating personal needs and desires to higher purposes and ideals enshrined in our Constitution.

We in the military get a lot of good out of the experience. But it is service nonetheless—24/7, seven days a week. It requires personal sacrifices our civilian friends cannot fully comprehend. You give up a lot of freedoms in the military so that others may lead safer, freer lives. Ultimately you sign up to kill and die if needed for the larger good. Our nation depends on that level of commitment from us.

That intense commitment gives special meaning and purpose to our lives and, I think, is a powerful reason many are called to serve.

Be Part of a Winning Team: Humans thrive in teams. We are hard-wired for it. Good reads like Tribe, on Homecoming and Belonging by Sebastian Junger explore this. The military is an amazing place to find connection, and be part of a purposedriven team one can take pride in.

When someone asks me who I am, the first words that always come out of my mouth are I am a Naval Aviator. I say that first because it defines how I see myself and the culture and team with which I most want to associate. This is what drives our warfighting culture in Aviation.

We are always thinking about the mission, practicing and improving our craft. We never shy away from criticism and group feedback. No group is more thick-skinned than Aviators, because we know that the key to success in combat is brutally honest self-assessment.

We win. Good is never good enough. Aviators are always the ones on the running trail who speed up when someone else tries to overtake them. Where other communities are satisfied with a mere qualification passed, we are horribly bent out of shape if we are seconds late for an overhead time or miss a precise aim point by a few yards.

Aviators lean forward. We don’t ask what we are allowed to do. We just do it until someone tells us we can’t. We are agile, independent in spirit, flexible thinkers who exemplify mission command. This comes from how we are shaped by the realities of flying and deploying, our expeditionary mindsets honed by all the times we are out there with only the shipmates in your aircraft or section to rely upon.

We stand on the shoulders of giants who came before us that now become part of our own life stories, our legacies. We get to be a part of continuing and shaping that tradition moving forward.

Aviators have fun together. When my Skippers told the Wardroom they would be hanging out at the I-Bar for any interested folks, all the junior officers showed up. Not because we were ordered to, but because we wanted to be there. The best sea stories always fall into one of two categories: a. some stupid thing we did together on liberty, or b. a time we all suffered through something ridiculous or extreme yet overcame together. They are always stories about us, our fellowship.

It is not just Aviators who find such connections. Each community has their own story and culture. It speaks to something essential about why many gravitate towards service in the first place. Humans like being part of something bigger than themselves, like being part of winning teams with shared values. The military offers that better than most life paths.

Growth, Fun, Adventure: The military gives you a lifetime of learning and fun. It is emotionally, psychologically, and physically demanding in ways few professions are. That forging helps us become better versions of ourselves.

Nothing builds confidence more than training, practice, and preparation. Olympian Jesse Owens once said, “a lifetime of training for just ten seconds.” That is life in the military.

You never reach the point where you know enough. And just when you start getting bored, we rotate you to a new billet or mission and the learning starts anew.

The military offers many paths for personal and professional development. Within your warfare specialty, the government actually pays you a salary to receive the best training in the world. The military gives you world-class learning and broadening opportunities in education and skills. The military teaches you how to work effectively with people from every walk of life under any condition. You learn how to build and lead diverse teams. You learn how to overcome challenges and navigate failures.

And along the way, there is unmatched fun and adventure. In just my first squadron tour alone, I deployed twice, with port visits in places like Hawaii, Australia, Hong Kong, South Korea, Thailand, Singapore, Jebal Ali, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. We interdicted pirates, helped with boardings on ships, saw oil platforms on fire, got lost flying into the wrong country on a medical evacuation that nearly caused an international incident. We protected infrastructure. I got as close to death as I ever have in an aircraft during one scary night. My friends and I got lost for hours trying to find the Singapore zoo on foot. A monkey took my beer. That would become a theme in my life as another monkey drank from my cup in Brazil years later when I was not looking. We stayed in fine hotels. And we flew a lot…in all sorts of weather, day and night. And that was just one tour. Since then, Navy jobs have enabled my wife and me to make friends and have experiences throughout the world far beyond my childhood imaginings.

My history is not at all unique—all my friends had similarly transformative experiences in their careers. That is just what military life offers anyone who sticks around long enough.

Why Does Our Service Matter?

Our naval team has always been a lynchpin for our nation’s security and prosperity, but our relevance and demand are skyrocketing nowadays.

My peers came in as the Cold War was hitting our rearview mirror. We had over 570 warships then. Today we have about 280. We had over 600,000 active Sailors in 1990 as compared with around 332,000 today. Our force shrank a lot during most of my career mainly because it could. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, for many years we could operate virtually unopposed and free in our movements and missions anywhere within the rules-based order. Times have sure changed a lot.

We all understand the shifting geo-strategic environment today. A resurgent and aggressive Russia, coupled with the major, long-term pacing threat China poses create real and urgent opportunities and challenges for our naval forces. The fact is the post-Cold War peace dividend that allowed us to downsize has been over for many years. Real competitors who can harm us are trying to undo the rules-based order that has been beneficial to all nations since the end of WWII. And that competition is playing out primarily in the maritime domain.

That is why our naval services are more critical and relevant today than most of us have experienced in our entire careers. And yet, we find ourselves struggling to recruit and retain the talented people we need for this emerging competition.

Recruiting and Retaining Talent

If your Navy experience has been like mine, the things that stress you out most have not been the missions, operations, or people with whom you work. You probably love all of that. I suspect it has rather been the things that adversely impact your homefront (stability and predictability in assignments; compatibility of duty stations with family needs; transparency and fairness in evaluations and promotions; entitlement and pay problems) that take your focus off the mission at hand and cause you to think of leaving the military. Those sentiments are echoed repeatedly in surveys and feedback we receive from Sailors making stay or go decisions.

Navy Personnel Command (NPC) plays a driving role in strengthening our people foundation. This is my third time at NPC. Many challenges we faced during my first tour in 2009 continue, such as gapped billets at sea and ashore due to inventory shortfalls. We have also known for a long time that many of our HR processes and services needed to be brought into the current century to be more useful and relevant to Sailors. The good news is we are now in the midst of a much needed transformation in all we do in talent management. Change in a large organization is hard, but we are improving.

The difference today is that for the first time in my career all the services face recruiting challenges. When I joined we were downsizing due to reduced threats. Today we have the opposite challenge. In response to rising threats we must transform the way we do business while building the force back up. Yet Americans’ propensity to serve in the military is the lowest it has been in decades. The great news is that the Navy turned a corner on the recruiting front recently, and we are on a much healthier glidepath coming into 2025. Still, the recruiting shortfalls of the past two years will stress Fleet manning for quite a while as the inventory is restored.

Why has recruiting been challenged? I think factors like the economy, the world coming through COVID, not as many citizens have natural connections to the military today as my generation did, fierce competition for talent with industry, and perhaps changing generational demographics and expectations all play a part. It is an area that requires a national conversation and call to service if we want to sustain the all-volunteer force moving forward. It takes action and advocacy by all of us, support from our civilian leaders, and focus on educating our younger citizens and their parents about service. Everyone thanks us for our service—and means it—but they often don’t know what that service entails. We collectively must do a better job shrinking that civil-military divide in understanding.

Despite the challenges, though, I am very optimistic about the future of our naval services and our ability to stay ahead of the competition and win. Our naval history is rich with stories of coming back from initial setbacks to overcome incredible odds. If you read books like Six Frigates, by Ian Toll, or Neptune’s Inferno and The Last of the Tin Can Sailors, by James D. Hornfischer, you will see that all the things we bemoan today have happened repeatedly in our naval history. It has been a series of ups and down in readiness of people and stuff between major periods of conflict. But what has made us able to overcome those peaks and valleys in readiness is us. Not what we fight with but how we fight, how we think. Unlike our competitors, we value and reward independent thought, creativity, initiative, and mission command. We are scrappy, and a bit nuts. We know what it takes to win from our forefathers back to the days of sail. Victory is not just about mass and technology; it is about boldness, training, courage, and esprit-de-corps. Our naval forces carry on that legacy better than anyone else in the world.

The young folks joining today are up to the task. Last year I participated in a graduation at Great Lakes, I was surrounded by young, energetic, talented folks new to our Navy. They are as committed to service, duty, and love of country as I was at their age. The current generation is different from mine, but those differences bring new, needed strengths, and ideas in this evolving strategic environment.

It is a great time to serve in our military. The military offers a life of meaning and purpose, a family, and unmatched personal and professional opportunities. And perhaps most critically, our Nation needs us. That is why I serve. What about you?