Meet the (O.R.) Press: Interview with Adm. Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

During the course of his lengthy career as a naval officer and now as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen has been bombarded with military intelligence and information – some of it good, some of it useless– but perhaps the worst advice he ever received came more than 25 years ago when he was anxious to pursue a master’s degree in operations research at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif.

At the time, Mullen had already achieved the rank of commander, and his assignment officer “specifically advised against taking the tour in Monterey because it would end my career. Well, he didn’t quite have that right,” Mullen tells Peter Horner, editor of OR/MS Today and Analytics, and Barry List, director of communications for INFORMS, during an exclusive July 13 interview held in the Joint Staff Flag Room adjacent to the Chairman’s Office at the Pentagon.

Armed with the O.R. degree, Mullen continued to move all the way up the ranks to admiral, received a host of choice assignments such as Chief of Naval Operations and eventually was nominated by President Bush and confirmed by the Senate as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2007. President Obama nominated Mullen for a second term as Chairman in 2009, a move that was unanimously approved by the Senate.

While it’s difficult to determine what role Mullen’s O.R. degree played in his rise to the highest ranking officer in the United States armed forces, he leaves little doubt that his O.R. education and training continues to serve him well today as he faces myriad complex problems as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“One of the great things that the graduate education in O.R. taught me was how to think much more critically than I had before, and really, to frame a problem,” he says in the exclusive interview. “And where that really helps me in this job is being able to still frame a problem in my mind and to look at it differently than many people who bring those problems to me.

“And then I have an opportunity to ask the right questions. … It’s become a pretty natural part of how I do business: … the ability to frame a problem … and then ask hard questions that push the system in a direction of an answer that clearly wasn’t forthcoming by the time it got to me.”

The 30-minute interview covers a range of topics linking Mullen’s career, the military and operations research, starting from his grad school days at NPS to his current issues with military intelligence coming out of Afghanistan.

“I don’t need information,” he states in regards to Afghanistan. “I’ve got tons of it. I need knowledge at the right time.”

To see a podcast of the entire interview, visit www.scienceofbetter.org. Excerpts of the interview will appear in the August issue of OR/MS Today.