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Jim and I go all the way back to 1990. He was in the Strategic Policy and Analysis Group (SPAG) that I joined just as it was being absorbed into the Center for Naval Analyses. Jim was one of my first mentors--a really great guy. Jim was also the first guy to say to me, "You're going to ruin this military!" I remember it well. I was standing at the Xerox. He said it jokingly, but he also meant it, even as he agreed with the logic behind wanting to "ruin the military."
Jim was also the guy to bring me to speak with Kerry's Pentagon people in the summer of 2004. An interesting, well-connected guy.
Rob Holzer is the co-author. He wrote for Defense News for years, being the first journalist to profile me as director of the NewRuleSets.Project (the one with Cantor Fitzgerald. He later went on to become public affairs guy for the Office of Force Transformation. Very smart, very good guy, who helped me a lot over my time in OFT--and beyond.
They write a nice piece here in C4ISR Journal:
Disruptive voice
Cebrowski understood the value — and inevitability — of revolutionary change
By James Blaker and Robert Holzer
January 09, 2006
Retired U.S. Navy Vice Adm. Arthur Cebrowski, who died Nov. 12, joins George S. Patton, Billy Mitchell, Hyman Rickover and others in that great brotherhood of military innovators who revolutionized national security affairs.
It is a heroic cadre, because changing things and pushing into new frontiers in military affairs inevitably means challenging convention and hierarchy in the most inherently conservative of American institutions.
Like Patton’s insights into the promise of armor, Mitchell’s unerring faith in the potential of aircraft and Rickover’s advocacy of nuclear-powered submarines, Cebrowski’s keen appreciation of the power of information technology opened new passages of military strategy. But he searched for much more than just how to adjust military functions to emerging technology. He drove the debate from the eternal military question of how to use the wisdom of experience to the far more disruptive question of how to change past wisdom to meet the new challenges of the time. And he understood that to do so meant shifting from the military focus on questions of “how” to the more profound questions of “why" ...
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