October 26, 2025 • 28 mins
Newt talks with former Acting Secretary of the Navy, Thomas Modly about his book, “Vectors: Heroes, Villains, and Heartbreak on the Bridge of the U.S. Navy.” Modly discusses his tenure as Acting Secretary and insights into the challenges facing the U.S. Navy. The son of Eastern European immigrants, he shares how his parents' experiences helped shape his views on America and his decision to serve in the U.S. Navy. He reflects on the transformation of Hungary post-Iron Curtain and the importance of a strong U.S. military. Modly highlights the need for a national maritime strategy and addresses the Navy's current challenges, including shipbuilding and financial audits. He emphasizes the importance of effective leadership, communication, and agility in military operations. Modly also offers advice to Naval Academy graduates, urging them to focus on their commitment to the Constitution and the people they lead.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
On this episode of nech World My guest Today. Served
as the thirty third Undersecretary of the Navy from twenty
seventeen to twenty nineteen, and for five months as the
Acting Secretary of the Navy. Throughout his tenure, Secretary Thomas
Moldley focused on increasing agility and accountability throughout the department's
workforce and in its vital business operations, including information management
(00:29):
that supported the war fighting pattern for both sailors and marines.
Secretary Model is the son of Eastern European immigrants who
escaped from behind the uncurtain after World War II. He
was raised in Cleveland, Ohio, before entering the Navy Academy,
where he graduated with distinction. He is the author of Vectors, Heroes, Villains,
(00:49):
and Heartbreak On the Bridge of the US Navy. Tom,
(01:12):
Welcome and thank you for joining me on New World.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Thank you, mister speaker, My pleasure to be here. Thanks.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
Your parents both fled oppression after World War Two. Your
father from Hungary, your mother from Yugoslavia. How did their
experiences shape your own view of America and ultimately your
decision to serve in the Navy.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
Well, I think that's a great question, and it's fundamental too,
I think who I am in my perspectives about this country.
My father escaped from Hungary in nineteen forty eight when
Aaron Curtain was really establishing itself in Hungary specifically, and
obviously he experienced a lot of the horrors, particularly in
Budapest in the nineteen forty four forty five timeframe, he
(01:51):
was being forced to enter the Communist Party. He was
a law student at the time, and he was being
forced to enter the Communist Party, and he made the
decision that that was not something that he wanted wanted
to do, so he left his entire family at the
age of nineteen and escaped through the borders at Austria
and sort of made a deal with the United States
that he would come to the US, but he had
come here for a year learn how to speak English,
(02:13):
and then go back into the US Army where he
was an interpreter in Germany interrogating people that were escaping
from behind the Iron Curtain. And so it had a
very profound impact on me as a young person growing
up in a neighborhood in Cleveland and Cleveland Heights, part
of Cleveland where the entire neighborhood was mixed. I mean
we had Jewish neighbors and Irish Catholic neighbors, and Polish
(02:34):
immigrants and Hungarian immigrants. And it just gave me a
huge appreciation for the greatness of the country and what
he was able to do to create this place of freedom.
From my father and from my mother as well. My
mother left Yugoslavia as she grew up in Novi Sad
and there was horrible massacres there and in the early
part of the war, and she also escaped those types
(02:54):
of things, and so they were able to come to
this country basically with nothing. My father would always tell
the story that he got off the boat in New
York City and all they gave him a dollar bill
and a pack of Lucky Strikes, which became his brand.
You know. He always smoked the Lucky Strikes until he
stopped smoking. But from there he was on his own,
and he became a very successful research chemist in Cleveland.
My mother became a professor of nursing at Case Western Reserve.
(03:18):
And it's just a great American story for them. That's
basically the primary influence.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
How did their attitude towards America towards the American military.
How did that influence you in you desire to go
to the Naval Academy.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
My father's family several people had served in the military.
His uncle, his godfather, was the tenant general in the
Hungarian military in the army. My mother's uncle was also
the same. Ironically, they served together at the same time,
which they didn't realize until they met in the United
States in the nineteen fifties in Cleveland. My father was
just He didn't push me to go into the military.
(03:54):
But I looked at the various options that I had
coming out of high school, and looked at several liberal arts,
and also took a look at the Naval Academy. And
when I went to the Naval Academy, it just seems
so unique and so different and giving me the opportunity
to serve back, it was sort of a no brainer.
When I was accepted, I decided to go.
Speaker 1 (04:12):
In terms of your parents, you've visited Hungary a number
of times and you wrote about the dramatic transformation from
your experience how to Budapest change.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
The first time I was able to go back was
the first time my father was allowed to go back
into the country, which was in nineteen seventy. He left
in forty eight, but it took that long before he
could get approvals to come back into the country because
even in the sixties and seventies, the Communist Party was
still interrogating people, imprisoning people for political beliefs and so on.
So I, frankly don't even know how he's able to
(04:45):
pull that off. He's like my sister and I back
there in nineteen seventy for the first time, and you
could just sense it was different. You could sense it
was kind of an oppressive type of place, and my
father had to check in, I think once every couple
days with the police stations so that they could tell
you what he was up to, visiting his mother and
brothers and sisters who were still there in Hungary. I
went back again in seventy eight. It seemed very far
(05:09):
behind where we were in the United States, just with
respect to basic progress, economics and so on and so forth,
and then again in two thousand. But when I went
in twenty sixteen, it was striking to me how different
it had become after the Iron Curtain had come down.
And I remember the first time I went to Hungary
on top of this beautiful parliament building, which I think
a lot of people have seen this Parliament building but
(05:30):
don't recognize that it's in Budapest. But on top of
that top spire there was a red Communist star on it.
And now when you walk the streets just a block
or so away from that beautiful parliament building, the star
is gone, but there's a larger than life bronze sculpture
of Ronald Reagan standing there. When you think about that
in the nineteen seventies, that's something that no one could
(05:51):
have ever imagined happening. And so to me, it was
just a stark reminder of how important it was for
the United States to stand strong in the Cold Old War,
and we really did that on the back of the
strength of the strong military that we had that kept
the balance of power.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
They have as a museum now the headquarters of the
Secret Police, and you can go and see whether the
people were tortured and shot in the basement, and it's
really a reminder of what these tutilitarian states were like.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
Yeah, it's striking. As you mentioned that, I'm actually writing
my second book about that right now, called The House
of Terror. It's on Andrashy Street in Budapest and the basement.
You're right, it was a torture chamber basically set up
by the Aarol Cross Party, which was the right wing
party which even the Nazis felt were too crazy to
take control of the government Hungary. But at the end
they gave them control. And it's very interesting because they
(06:41):
used that as a political headquarters and then ultimately as
a torture chamber in prison. But when the Communists came
in after the war, they just basically took over the
lease and started doing the exact same thing, and they
did it until the seventies. They actually recruited some of
the same torturers that had been used by the the
Aarrow Cross to be the torturers there in the House
(07:03):
of Terror. So yeah, it's an interesting museum. I was
just there in February and I thought it was fascinating.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
You've named both John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan as
political heroes. To you, why is them?
Speaker 2 (07:16):
Well, I think that both of them captured a spirit
of America. I think that they both believed in the country,
in the greatness of the country, and I think both
of them clearly believed that in order to sustain that,
we needed a strong military and a strong ethical military.
Both of them had, which I think is absolutely critical,
very unique communications skills that in this era visual era
(07:40):
that we live in, I think is just very very important,
and they were sort of pioneers in that space, and
so I've just always admired them. I used to read
a lot about when I was a midshipman. I used
to in my spirit sime I used to spend a
lot of time in the library reading about Kennedy and
learning about his positions and his family, and so always
was a big admirer of him from Apolo perspective. And
(08:00):
then Reagan got elected when I was a plead with
the Naval Academy, actually my sophomore year at the Naval Academy,
and Jimmy Carter was a Naval Academy graduate. So when
I went to the Naval Academy, I thought, Wow, this
guy's a great guy. And I did admire Carter for
a lot of reasons. But Reagan came in and really
just changed the game for us in the military. I
mean the military build up that he really pushed in
(08:22):
with John Layman and the six hundred ship Navy. That
accreued huge benefits to us in the Navy for my
time in active duty, which was basically from nineteen eighty
three until nineteen ninety.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
You've also mentioned somebody who probably almost none of our
listeners will know about as another hero of yours, and
that's former Representative Larry Hogan Senior. Why did that get
to you?
Speaker 2 (08:45):
There's a personal reason for that. Larry Logans seen was
a congressman in Maryland and a part of my extended
Hungarian family lived in the Silver Spring area. And the
oldest daughter of that family, the woman named Alona, She
worked for Larry in Congress and Larry was divorced and
she ended up marrying him, and she married him right
around the time of the Nixon impeachment trial, and Larry
(09:08):
was on the Judiciary Committee that was chaired by Rabino
at the time, and Larry was the first Republican on
the impeachment committee to vote to impeach Nixon. And it
was an act of I think of political courage by
Larry at the time. It pretty much ruined his political career,
I think in national politics because the Republican Party was
(09:30):
not happy with that vote. But I think he voted
his conscience. I think he looked at the evidence and
he felt that the president was involved in the cover
up and felt that that wasn't appropriate, and so he
voted his conscience. So this all happened when I was
a young boy. I was twelve or thirteen years old,
and it was just interesting because it was on television
and there weren't that many television stations, and there was
my cousin's husband on TV, and so it just impacted me,
(09:52):
and I just was very much impressed with how important
it is to be courageous and to vote your conscious
and not worry so much about about party affiliation. So
to me, that's one of the reasons why.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
By the way, I think that's a pretty good standard,
and the whole notion that you want to know who
you are and what you believe in, you ought to
have the courage to live it out. You owe that
to the country as an example of your commitment. You
(10:31):
served as Deputy under Secretary Defense during the George W.
Bush administration and you created the Business Transformation Agency and
record time. Why did it matter and how did you
do it? Well?
Speaker 2 (10:43):
This was an interesting story. I think this is when
I actually met you. First, mister Speaker was working with
a gentleman named Paul Brinkley, and he and now were
both Deputy and Her secretaries at the time, and the
broad business transformation effort that Secretary Rooms felt started around
financial management reform and the audit and basically trying to
consolidate these thousands of IT systems that we had across
the department was being run by the finance organization in
(11:06):
the DoD, which was the Comptrollers organization. That's where I
was seated. But I realized very quickly that responsibility became
mine in around two thousand and four, and I realized
really quickly that this was not just a financially driven
problem or solution, that it was an enterprise level solution.
And the most important elements of the enterprise that impacted
(11:27):
this was basically the supply chain and the acquisition processes.
So Paul was a deputy under in the basically the
AT and L organization, which doesn't exist anymore. But they
had the acquisition, they had the supply chain, they had
all that stuff as their responsibility. So I went to
Paul and I said, Hey, Paul, why don't we join
(11:48):
together and do this together? And make sure that we
are at the same rank in the department, because the
way the department works, and you know this well, depending
upon your title, your people will line up and take
on the people of another organization, carrying your title with them.
And I said, no matter what happens, we can't allow
our people to use our ranks against each other. So
(12:08):
let's maintain ourselves. He was actually a special assistant at
the time. We went to the White House and asked
that he'd be promoted to my level so that we
could work this thing cooperatively and collaboratively. And we decided
after a short amount of time, what the Department really
needed was a separate agency that could sustain itself, pass
through administrations, and drive this change because this change is
(12:30):
not the type of thing that happens in a couple
of years. And frankly, that's one of my big concerns
about where we are right now, is that a lot
of the challenges facing the Navy, particularly these are forty
year problems that aren't going to be solved in two years.
So I'm very concerned about the lack of continuity. So
we said, let's create this agency that can create that
continuity and let's recruit in people from the private sector
to help us drive this transformation. And we had a
(12:54):
fantastic boss that was a Secretary of Gordon, England. He
was a Deputy Secretary of Defense, and he gave us
a lot of air which is necessary in that building,
and we made a lot of progress in a couple
of years.
Speaker 1 (13:04):
You mentioned the Navy. Can you help us understand how
did the Navy slide into the situations in right now
where it doesn't have enough ships, It doesn't seem to
be able to build enough ships, and it's I think
a real crisis of whether or not we can sustain
our global reach, which has been dominant since nineteen forty two.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
I think, as you know, it's almost like these airplane
crashes where they say it's never just one thing, it's
a variety of different things that combine to create the problem.
I believe this problem started when we decided to have
a global war on terrorism that was going to take
twenty years, and I think a lot of resources were
shifted over to the army into the war fighting effort,
(13:46):
and the Navy took the hit on that. That was
then compounded by the continuing resolution situation, which I'm sure
you're extremely familiar with having served in that body. The
fact that the CRS and the innabuild to get a
budget or a strategy and just sort of managing from
budget cycle to budget cycle, a lot of things could compromise,
(14:07):
and I think that's really what happened. But also I
think what's been lacking is and I mentioned this to
the new Secretary of the Navy. I said, you know,
you can try and plug all these leaks. There's lots
of leaks here, and you can try and plug them all,
but the biggest problem is we don't have a national
maritime strategy. We don't have a vision. So you can say, yeah,
we need to fix shipbuilding, but my response to that
(14:29):
would be, I agree, but shipbuilding for what, Like what
exactly do you want the Navy to be able to
do and where do you want them to be able
to do it? And how much are you wanting to
pay for it? And those are very sort of fundamental,
high level questions that I don't think have been answered
by anybody, and they're certainly not being advocated for by
anybody senior enough in the government to drive it. So
(14:51):
I think that's part of the problem. That we have,
and so I was just looking at this list. I
talk about this in the book. I used to give
these speeches called thunder Talks, where I go out and
talk about all the things that were on my mind
that concern me. And they're like ten or twelve different
things on this list. And I'm just looking at him
this morning, like and I was in twenty seventeen, it's
now twenty twenty five. That is single one of these
things has gotten better in eight years, in my opinion,
(15:14):
And so I am very concerned about that. And I
think that even the entire shipbuilding strategy, I still don't
think we have one. We know we have a problem,
but I don't know what the strategy is.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
The whole process you mentioned in passing here trying to
get the Pentagon auditable, because I think that's a perfect
symbol of what you're talking about. We today, I think,
have never had a successful auditor the Pentagon, despite congressional mandates.
Everybody sort of knows it, but somehow nothing happens. I mean,
(15:48):
how do you explain that?
Speaker 2 (15:49):
So I take issue with your second point, which is
that nothing happens. A lot of stuff has happened, a
lot of money has been spent, but we haven't achieved
the result that we want. I believe you were in
Congress in nineteen ninety one when the CFO Act was passed.
This is when it was mandated. And there's been a
lot of activity and a lot of spending, and a
lot of businesses have made a lot of money, and
a lot of people are retiring on that money that
(16:11):
was made to do this. I think the basic problem
with the financial audit and I will also correct you
that there has been only one military service so far
that's received a clean audit opinion, and that is the
Marine Corps. And they've done it for two consecutive years.
And when I was there, I made the Marine Corps
a priority because I wanted to prove that it was possible.
And if you take a smaller service where sort of
(16:34):
the command and control is a little tighter, and if
you can get the commandant and the senior generals in
the Marine Corps a buy off on it and push
the organization to do it, it's totally possible to do this.
The problem is that the way that the financial systems
that were created in the various departments, they sort of
grew organically they didn't grow out of a big plan,
(16:55):
and so there are so many various interfaces to these
financial systems and supply chain systems that they end up breaking.
And so I give the example in the book. We
started to focus primarily on inventory just to show like, guess,
we do know what we have and we know where
it is. And in that process we found a warehouse
down in Florida. They had like two hundred and fifty
(17:17):
million dollars worth of aircraft parts in it. Before that,
we didn't know we had owned the warehouse. We didn't
know we had owned the parts that were in the warehouse,
and we had aircraft that were down because they were
looking for parts that were in this warehouse that we
didn't even know we owned. And this is what happens
in an organization that's that big, where the access to
capital is not restricted because you can't audit it. Every
(17:41):
other business in the world, public company, private company, if
you can't have audible financial statements, you don't get access
to capital. In the Department of the Navy, they don't
get a financial opinion, whether it's a clean opinion or
an unclean opinion, they don't get one. But it doesn't
impact the amount of money that's coming to Congress for
them by a cent. It's all the same. So I
don't know that I advocate for turning off the spickett,
(18:03):
but I think the organization knows that, and if you
know that, then they don't prioritize it. And so we
go up every year, we get beat up by Congress.
We're not being able to do it, and then we
spend a lot of money on it. But it's very,
very difficult to do it unless it's made an absolute
priority by everybody. Chief and Naval Operation Secretary of the Navy.
Because I had been there before and I knew this.
(18:25):
When I became under secretary, I looked at the Audit
committee and it was being chaired by the comptroller, and
I said, not anymore. It's going to be chaired by
me because I own more of the enterprise than the
comptroller does, and every part of the organization needs to
be there. And it's not just the pragmatics of that,
it's the symbolism of that, the fact that the Undersecretary
(18:45):
is taking ownership over that. And over that few years
we made decent progress on the financial audit. But it's
a very very difficult problem.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
One of the things you did to try to get
the machine moving is every Friday you wrote a personal
message to the entire department, regardless of rank, which were
called sec MAAV vectors. What was a second MAV vector?
What were you trying to accomplish?
Speaker 2 (19:28):
My boss, Secretary Spencer, was basically fired by a Secretary
Esper in the wake of this Pettiopster Gallagher seal trial,
which I won't go into detail, but you can read
about it in my book. I had no expectation at
all that this is going to happen. And the next
thing I know, on the acting secretary and I got
a phone call from somebody, a guy named Jerry Hendrix,
who you may know, who writes a lot about naval matters,
(19:50):
and he said, Tom, the average tenure of an acting
Secretary of the Navy is one hundred and ten days.
So I said, okay, Well, so I went home and
I came up with eleven top ten lists that I
was going to try and accomplish in one hundred and
ten days. And one of those things was I wanted
to be able to communicate with the entire organization on
a regular basis, And so I told my team. I said,
(20:12):
every Friday, I'm sending out this thing called the vector,
and I'm like, well, sir, you know, we're not sure
the IT systems can handle that. I said, well, you
guys figure out how the IT systems can handle that,
because I'm going to be writing this thing. They said, well,
it's got to be ready by Wednesday. I said, okay,
and that just put the pressure on me, but I
didn't really care because I really wanted to get that out,
so I would write them by Wednesday. But the idea
(20:33):
of the vector was really to communicate to the entire
organization what me as the senior leader, albeit temporarily, was
thinking about what I thought their priority should be, and
they would be a mix of different things. It would
be priority based, or be talking about things that happened
that week that they should be aware of, or funny
(20:53):
stories about movies, or that I would relate to what
they're dealing with with their lives. Had a lot more
interesting obviously when COVID started happening, and I started using
more anecdotal stories about how this was their time to
demonstrate how they're going to respond in a crisis, and
no one expected that this crisis was going to be COVID,
but here it is, and so I would write a
(21:14):
lot about that.
Speaker 1 (21:15):
I'm curious, So, when you look at your experiences, which
have been pretty wide ranging, how would you summarize the
lessons you've learned about effective leadership?
Speaker 2 (21:25):
Well, I think that for me, the thing I learned
the most over the course of my career, and I've
been in private sector and military government, is that the
leaders that communicate the most are to me the most effective.
And you have to be consistent, and you have to
be honest, and you have to be transparent with people,
and that includes, you know, taking the mask off. I'd
(21:48):
use that as an analogy of, you know, take off
the mask of your rank and everything else and just
get to know people in the organization. There was a
very common sort of consultant speak about leaning in that
we've heard a largely had to do with women in
the workforce, and I sort of turned that differently in
terms of my approach to that, which is leaning down,
leaned down into the organization, get to know the people
(22:10):
at the most lowest levels of the organization, make them
understand that you're accessible and that you're listening to them.
To me, that's probably the most important thing. I think
from a government perspective, I use this phrase acting and
not pretending, and that meant that I wasn't pretending to
do this job. This is a job I'm in, this
is a seat I'm in, and so I'm going to
do something here. And I think a lot of people,
(22:30):
for whatever reason, they go into government to be somebody
and not to do something. I'm not trying to cast dispersions,
but you know, they're looking for their next job, or
they're looking to see how this is going to impact them.
And when you're in public service, I think it's completely
the opposite. You're there to serve people, to serve the nation,
and what happens to you is almost doesn't matter. And
(22:51):
my view is always you know, I'm the last person
on my priority list. When I came to work in
that job, I thought about the Navy, I thought about
the people in the Navy, about the country, and so
to me, I think that's the only way I can
do it. So maybe other people have different approaches, but
to me, that was probably the biggest lessons I learned.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
You clearly have thought a lot about this, and you've
been deeply involved in defending the nation virstus of your
whole lifetime. When you look ahead, what do you think
are the biggest challenges the Navy and the Marine Corps
face in the next thirty to fifty years.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
Well, I think it's all really the same things that
I talked about in twenty seventeen. But it also relates
to this issue of lack of strategy. I think we
need to have a much better defined strategy of what
we want our naval forces to accomplish because the challenges
they're facing are much more diverse and unpredictable. That's one
of the reasons why I tried to push this concept
(23:48):
of agility. You know, what does it mean to be
an agile organization? What does it mean to be an
agile person? Because I'm listening to a hot of podcasts
now about the Navy and the challenges the Navy's facing,
and basically everything they're talking about is China, and I
agree that is a big challenge that we need to address.
But I suspect that the next big conflict we have
is not going to be China. It's going to be
(24:09):
something that we don't expect right now. And so that's
why I believe we have to build forces that are
agile and flexible to respond to a variety of different things,
and that means changing everything about how we do things.
I used to talk about how business development life cycles,
product development life cycles. In the private sector, for the
last twenty thirty years, they've been contracting. They've just been
(24:30):
contracting and contracting. But if you look at government, if
you look at the Navy particularly, they've been expanding and
expanding and expanding. That's a recipe for disaster. It's just
impossible to succeed in an environment like that. So the
biggest challenges I think that we're seeing is as these
multiple challenges come at us, our lack of ability to
respond to them quickly. And so to me, that's impacting
(24:53):
the Navy, it's impacting all the other forces as well.
There is this paradigm in the Pentagon where all the
different services get their fair share of the pie. They
all get their cut of the pie. I don't know
if that makes any sense. Why does it necessarily make
sense anymore? You're measuring this on dollars and not on
sort of what capabilities we need. From my view, and
clearly it's a biased view. I think space and maritime,
(25:15):
both under sea and on the water, are where we
should be throwing our money, in addition to things like
AI and autonomous vehicles. But all that autonomy, I think
is going to operate in those domains. That means somebody's
going to have to take a hit. I'm not sure
that the way the systems are set up, the structures
are set up, the committees are set up, that they're
ready to make a big shift like that. So I
have a lot of concerns.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
How much of that hit should be made by the
sheer bureaucracy. They built the Pentagon in nineteen forty three,
so the twenty six thousand people could manage World War
two using manual typewriters, the carbon paper and filing cabinets.
We now have smartphones, iPads, computers and twenty six thousand people.
(25:56):
It can't make sense.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
This is the type of thing I'm talking at. One
of those slices of the pie is that Pentagon bureaucracy.
And it's sacrisanc to the people in the Pentagon bureocracy,
and they'll fight for every dollar. We don't go into
our budget processes saying what did I do last year
that I really don't need to do anymore. It's like,
what did I do last year that I can keep doing?
And what more can I do so I can get
more money to do it. So this is sort of
(26:20):
at the crux of the problem.
Speaker 1 (26:22):
Having come out of the Naval Academy with your perspective
of your experience, if you could give one piece of
advice to this year's graduating class, what would you say
to them?
Speaker 2 (26:34):
Oh, well, I had the great fortune of being able
to speak at the Naval Academy graduation with President Trump
on the thirty fifth anniversary of my own graduation, and
I don't think that my message would be any different
now than it was then, which was basically for them
to really not worry about loving the people that they
(26:56):
work for, but to focus their love on the Constitute,
the thing that they have pledged their lives, and to
understand what that constitution is and what it means, and
the country itself and the people that work for them.
If you spend your time focusing on them and ensuring
that they have everything that they need and that they
can do their mission, then all that other stuff, promotion,
(27:18):
all that other stuff, it takes care of itself. But
at the end of the day, You're going to be
just more effective as a leader, and your organization is
going to be more effective as a war fighting mission.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
That's terrific. I want to thank you for joining me here.
Book Vectors, Heroes, Villains and Heartbreak on the Bridge of
the US Navy is available now on Amazon and in
bookstarts everywhere. You clearly have a very dedicated, patriotic life,
and I appreciate time you're sharing it with us.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
Thank you so much, mister speaker. I appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (27:52):
Thank you. To my guest Thomas Moudley. You can get
a link to buy his book, Vectors, Heroes, Villains and
Heartbreak on the Bridge of the US Navy on our
show page at newsworld dot com. Newsworld is produced by
Ginglish three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guarnsey
Sloan and our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for
(28:12):
the show was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to
the team at ginguishtree sixty. If you've been enjoying Newsworld,
I hope you'll go to Apple Podcast and both rate
us with five stars and give us a review so
others can learn what it's all about. Right now, Listeners
of Newsworld can sign up for my three freeweekly columns
at ginglishtree sixty dot com slash newsletter. I'm Newt Gingrich.
(28:36):
This is Newsworld
On this episode of nech World My guest Today. Served
as the thirty third Undersecretary of the Navy from twenty
seventeen to twenty nineteen, and for five months as the
Acting Secretary of the Navy. Throughout his tenure, Secretary Thomas
Moldley focused on increasing agility and accountability throughout the department's
workforce and in its vital business operations, including information management
(00:29):
that supported the war fighting pattern for both sailors and marines.
Secretary Model is the son of Eastern European immigrants who
escaped from behind the uncurtain after World War II. He
was raised in Cleveland, Ohio, before entering the Navy Academy,
where he graduated with distinction. He is the author of Vectors, Heroes, Villains,
(00:49):
and Heartbreak On the Bridge of the US Navy. Tom,
(01:12):
Welcome and thank you for joining me on New World.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Thank you, mister speaker, My pleasure to be here. Thanks.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
Your parents both fled oppression after World War Two. Your
father from Hungary, your mother from Yugoslavia. How did their
experiences shape your own view of America and ultimately your
decision to serve in the Navy.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
Well, I think that's a great question, and it's fundamental too,
I think who I am in my perspectives about this country.
My father escaped from Hungary in nineteen forty eight when
Aaron Curtain was really establishing itself in Hungary specifically, and
obviously he experienced a lot of the horrors, particularly in
Budapest in the nineteen forty four forty five timeframe, he
(01:51):
was being forced to enter the Communist Party. He was
a law student at the time, and he was being
forced to enter the Communist Party, and he made the
decision that that was not something that he wanted wanted
to do, so he left his entire family at the
age of nineteen and escaped through the borders at Austria
and sort of made a deal with the United States
that he would come to the US, but he had
come here for a year learn how to speak English,
(02:13):
and then go back into the US Army where he
was an interpreter in Germany interrogating people that were escaping
from behind the Iron Curtain. And so it had a
very profound impact on me as a young person growing
up in a neighborhood in Cleveland and Cleveland Heights, part
of Cleveland where the entire neighborhood was mixed. I mean
we had Jewish neighbors and Irish Catholic neighbors, and Polish
(02:34):
immigrants and Hungarian immigrants. And it just gave me a
huge appreciation for the greatness of the country and what
he was able to do to create this place of freedom.
From my father and from my mother as well. My
mother left Yugoslavia as she grew up in Novi Sad
and there was horrible massacres there and in the early
part of the war, and she also escaped those types
(02:54):
of things, and so they were able to come to
this country basically with nothing. My father would always tell
the story that he got off the boat in New
York City and all they gave him a dollar bill
and a pack of Lucky Strikes, which became his brand.
You know. He always smoked the Lucky Strikes until he
stopped smoking. But from there he was on his own,
and he became a very successful research chemist in Cleveland.
My mother became a professor of nursing at Case Western Reserve.
(03:18):
And it's just a great American story for them. That's
basically the primary influence.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
How did their attitude towards America towards the American military.
How did that influence you in you desire to go
to the Naval Academy.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
My father's family several people had served in the military.
His uncle, his godfather, was the tenant general in the
Hungarian military in the army. My mother's uncle was also
the same. Ironically, they served together at the same time,
which they didn't realize until they met in the United
States in the nineteen fifties in Cleveland. My father was
just He didn't push me to go into the military.
(03:54):
But I looked at the various options that I had
coming out of high school, and looked at several liberal arts,
and also took a look at the Naval Academy. And
when I went to the Naval Academy, it just seems
so unique and so different and giving me the opportunity
to serve back, it was sort of a no brainer.
When I was accepted, I decided to go.
Speaker 1 (04:12):
In terms of your parents, you've visited Hungary a number
of times and you wrote about the dramatic transformation from
your experience how to Budapest change.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
The first time I was able to go back was
the first time my father was allowed to go back
into the country, which was in nineteen seventy. He left
in forty eight, but it took that long before he
could get approvals to come back into the country because
even in the sixties and seventies, the Communist Party was
still interrogating people, imprisoning people for political beliefs and so on.
So I, frankly don't even know how he's able to
(04:45):
pull that off. He's like my sister and I back
there in nineteen seventy for the first time, and you
could just sense it was different. You could sense it
was kind of an oppressive type of place, and my
father had to check in, I think once every couple
days with the police stations so that they could tell
you what he was up to, visiting his mother and
brothers and sisters who were still there in Hungary. I
went back again in seventy eight. It seemed very far
(05:09):
behind where we were in the United States, just with
respect to basic progress, economics and so on and so forth,
and then again in two thousand. But when I went
in twenty sixteen, it was striking to me how different
it had become after the Iron Curtain had come down.
And I remember the first time I went to Hungary
on top of this beautiful parliament building, which I think
a lot of people have seen this Parliament building but
(05:30):
don't recognize that it's in Budapest. But on top of
that top spire there was a red Communist star on it.
And now when you walk the streets just a block
or so away from that beautiful parliament building, the star
is gone, but there's a larger than life bronze sculpture
of Ronald Reagan standing there. When you think about that
in the nineteen seventies, that's something that no one could
(05:51):
have ever imagined happening. And so to me, it was
just a stark reminder of how important it was for
the United States to stand strong in the Cold Old War,
and we really did that on the back of the
strength of the strong military that we had that kept
the balance of power.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
They have as a museum now the headquarters of the
Secret Police, and you can go and see whether the
people were tortured and shot in the basement, and it's
really a reminder of what these tutilitarian states were like.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
Yeah, it's striking. As you mentioned that, I'm actually writing
my second book about that right now, called The House
of Terror. It's on Andrashy Street in Budapest and the basement.
You're right, it was a torture chamber basically set up
by the Aarol Cross Party, which was the right wing
party which even the Nazis felt were too crazy to
take control of the government Hungary. But at the end
they gave them control. And it's very interesting because they
(06:41):
used that as a political headquarters and then ultimately as
a torture chamber in prison. But when the Communists came
in after the war, they just basically took over the
lease and started doing the exact same thing, and they
did it until the seventies. They actually recruited some of
the same torturers that had been used by the the
Aarrow Cross to be the torturers there in the House
(07:03):
of Terror. So yeah, it's an interesting museum. I was
just there in February and I thought it was fascinating.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
You've named both John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan as
political heroes. To you, why is them?
Speaker 2 (07:16):
Well, I think that both of them captured a spirit
of America. I think that they both believed in the country,
in the greatness of the country, and I think both
of them clearly believed that in order to sustain that,
we needed a strong military and a strong ethical military.
Both of them had, which I think is absolutely critical,
very unique communications skills that in this era visual era
(07:40):
that we live in, I think is just very very important,
and they were sort of pioneers in that space, and
so I've just always admired them. I used to read
a lot about when I was a midshipman. I used
to in my spirit sime I used to spend a
lot of time in the library reading about Kennedy and
learning about his positions and his family, and so always
was a big admirer of him from Apolo perspective. And
(08:00):
then Reagan got elected when I was a plead with
the Naval Academy, actually my sophomore year at the Naval Academy,
and Jimmy Carter was a Naval Academy graduate. So when
I went to the Naval Academy, I thought, Wow, this
guy's a great guy. And I did admire Carter for
a lot of reasons. But Reagan came in and really
just changed the game for us in the military. I
mean the military build up that he really pushed in
(08:22):
with John Layman and the six hundred ship Navy. That
accreued huge benefits to us in the Navy for my
time in active duty, which was basically from nineteen eighty
three until nineteen ninety.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
You've also mentioned somebody who probably almost none of our
listeners will know about as another hero of yours, and
that's former Representative Larry Hogan Senior. Why did that get
to you?
Speaker 2 (08:45):
There's a personal reason for that. Larry Logans seen was
a congressman in Maryland and a part of my extended
Hungarian family lived in the Silver Spring area. And the
oldest daughter of that family, the woman named Alona, She
worked for Larry in Congress and Larry was divorced and
she ended up marrying him, and she married him right
around the time of the Nixon impeachment trial, and Larry
(09:08):
was on the Judiciary Committee that was chaired by Rabino
at the time, and Larry was the first Republican on
the impeachment committee to vote to impeach Nixon. And it
was an act of I think of political courage by
Larry at the time. It pretty much ruined his political career,
I think in national politics because the Republican Party was
(09:30):
not happy with that vote. But I think he voted
his conscience. I think he looked at the evidence and
he felt that the president was involved in the cover
up and felt that that wasn't appropriate, and so he
voted his conscience. So this all happened when I was
a young boy. I was twelve or thirteen years old,
and it was just interesting because it was on television
and there weren't that many television stations, and there was
my cousin's husband on TV, and so it just impacted me,
(09:52):
and I just was very much impressed with how important
it is to be courageous and to vote your conscious
and not worry so much about about party affiliation. So
to me, that's one of the reasons why.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
By the way, I think that's a pretty good standard,
and the whole notion that you want to know who
you are and what you believe in, you ought to
have the courage to live it out. You owe that
to the country as an example of your commitment. You
(10:31):
served as Deputy under Secretary Defense during the George W.
Bush administration and you created the Business Transformation Agency and
record time. Why did it matter and how did you
do it? Well?
Speaker 2 (10:43):
This was an interesting story. I think this is when
I actually met you. First, mister Speaker was working with
a gentleman named Paul Brinkley, and he and now were
both Deputy and Her secretaries at the time, and the
broad business transformation effort that Secretary Rooms felt started around
financial management reform and the audit and basically trying to
consolidate these thousands of IT systems that we had across
the department was being run by the finance organization in
(11:06):
the DoD, which was the Comptrollers organization. That's where I
was seated. But I realized very quickly that responsibility became
mine in around two thousand and four, and I realized
really quickly that this was not just a financially driven
problem or solution, that it was an enterprise level solution.
And the most important elements of the enterprise that impacted
(11:27):
this was basically the supply chain and the acquisition processes.
So Paul was a deputy under in the basically the
AT and L organization, which doesn't exist anymore. But they
had the acquisition, they had the supply chain, they had
all that stuff as their responsibility. So I went to
Paul and I said, Hey, Paul, why don't we join
(11:48):
together and do this together? And make sure that we
are at the same rank in the department, because the
way the department works, and you know this well, depending
upon your title, your people will line up and take
on the people of another organization, carrying your title with them.
And I said, no matter what happens, we can't allow
our people to use our ranks against each other. So
(12:08):
let's maintain ourselves. He was actually a special assistant at
the time. We went to the White House and asked
that he'd be promoted to my level so that we
could work this thing cooperatively and collaboratively. And we decided
after a short amount of time, what the Department really
needed was a separate agency that could sustain itself, pass
through administrations, and drive this change because this change is
(12:30):
not the type of thing that happens in a couple
of years. And frankly, that's one of my big concerns
about where we are right now, is that a lot
of the challenges facing the Navy, particularly these are forty
year problems that aren't going to be solved in two years.
So I'm very concerned about the lack of continuity. So
we said, let's create this agency that can create that
continuity and let's recruit in people from the private sector
to help us drive this transformation. And we had a
(12:54):
fantastic boss that was a Secretary of Gordon, England. He
was a Deputy Secretary of Defense, and he gave us
a lot of air which is necessary in that building,
and we made a lot of progress in a couple
of years.
Speaker 1 (13:04):
You mentioned the Navy. Can you help us understand how
did the Navy slide into the situations in right now
where it doesn't have enough ships, It doesn't seem to
be able to build enough ships, and it's I think
a real crisis of whether or not we can sustain
our global reach, which has been dominant since nineteen forty two.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
I think, as you know, it's almost like these airplane
crashes where they say it's never just one thing, it's
a variety of different things that combine to create the problem.
I believe this problem started when we decided to have
a global war on terrorism that was going to take
twenty years, and I think a lot of resources were
shifted over to the army into the war fighting effort,
(13:46):
and the Navy took the hit on that. That was
then compounded by the continuing resolution situation, which I'm sure
you're extremely familiar with having served in that body. The
fact that the CRS and the innabuild to get a
budget or a strategy and just sort of managing from
budget cycle to budget cycle, a lot of things could compromise,
(14:07):
and I think that's really what happened. But also I
think what's been lacking is and I mentioned this to
the new Secretary of the Navy. I said, you know,
you can try and plug all these leaks. There's lots
of leaks here, and you can try and plug them all,
but the biggest problem is we don't have a national
maritime strategy. We don't have a vision. So you can say, yeah,
we need to fix shipbuilding, but my response to that
(14:29):
would be, I agree, but shipbuilding for what, Like what
exactly do you want the Navy to be able to
do and where do you want them to be able
to do it? And how much are you wanting to
pay for it? And those are very sort of fundamental,
high level questions that I don't think have been answered
by anybody, and they're certainly not being advocated for by
anybody senior enough in the government to drive it. So
(14:51):
I think that's part of the problem. That we have,
and so I was just looking at this list. I
talk about this in the book. I used to give
these speeches called thunder Talks, where I go out and
talk about all the things that were on my mind
that concern me. And they're like ten or twelve different
things on this list. And I'm just looking at him
this morning, like and I was in twenty seventeen, it's
now twenty twenty five. That is single one of these
things has gotten better in eight years, in my opinion,
(15:14):
And so I am very concerned about that. And I
think that even the entire shipbuilding strategy, I still don't
think we have one. We know we have a problem,
but I don't know what the strategy is.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
The whole process you mentioned in passing here trying to
get the Pentagon auditable, because I think that's a perfect
symbol of what you're talking about. We today, I think,
have never had a successful auditor the Pentagon, despite congressional mandates.
Everybody sort of knows it, but somehow nothing happens. I mean,
(15:48):
how do you explain that?
Speaker 2 (15:49):
So I take issue with your second point, which is
that nothing happens. A lot of stuff has happened, a
lot of money has been spent, but we haven't achieved
the result that we want. I believe you were in
Congress in nineteen ninety one when the CFO Act was passed.
This is when it was mandated. And there's been a
lot of activity and a lot of spending, and a
lot of businesses have made a lot of money, and
a lot of people are retiring on that money that
(16:11):
was made to do this. I think the basic problem
with the financial audit and I will also correct you
that there has been only one military service so far
that's received a clean audit opinion, and that is the
Marine Corps. And they've done it for two consecutive years.
And when I was there, I made the Marine Corps
a priority because I wanted to prove that it was possible.
And if you take a smaller service where sort of
(16:34):
the command and control is a little tighter, and if
you can get the commandant and the senior generals in
the Marine Corps a buy off on it and push
the organization to do it, it's totally possible to do this.
The problem is that the way that the financial systems
that were created in the various departments, they sort of
grew organically they didn't grow out of a big plan,
(16:55):
and so there are so many various interfaces to these
financial systems and supply chain systems that they end up breaking.
And so I give the example in the book. We
started to focus primarily on inventory just to show like, guess,
we do know what we have and we know where
it is. And in that process we found a warehouse
down in Florida. They had like two hundred and fifty
(17:17):
million dollars worth of aircraft parts in it. Before that,
we didn't know we had owned the warehouse. We didn't
know we had owned the parts that were in the warehouse,
and we had aircraft that were down because they were
looking for parts that were in this warehouse that we
didn't even know we owned. And this is what happens
in an organization that's that big, where the access to
capital is not restricted because you can't audit it. Every
(17:41):
other business in the world, public company, private company, if
you can't have audible financial statements, you don't get access
to capital. In the Department of the Navy, they don't
get a financial opinion, whether it's a clean opinion or
an unclean opinion, they don't get one. But it doesn't
impact the amount of money that's coming to Congress for
them by a cent. It's all the same. So I
don't know that I advocate for turning off the spickett,
(18:03):
but I think the organization knows that, and if you
know that, then they don't prioritize it. And so we
go up every year, we get beat up by Congress.
We're not being able to do it, and then we
spend a lot of money on it. But it's very,
very difficult to do it unless it's made an absolute
priority by everybody. Chief and Naval Operation Secretary of the Navy.
Because I had been there before and I knew this.
(18:25):
When I became under secretary, I looked at the Audit
committee and it was being chaired by the comptroller, and
I said, not anymore. It's going to be chaired by
me because I own more of the enterprise than the
comptroller does, and every part of the organization needs to
be there. And it's not just the pragmatics of that,
it's the symbolism of that, the fact that the Undersecretary
(18:45):
is taking ownership over that. And over that few years
we made decent progress on the financial audit. But it's
a very very difficult problem.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
One of the things you did to try to get
the machine moving is every Friday you wrote a personal
message to the entire department, regardless of rank, which were
called sec MAAV vectors. What was a second MAV vector?
What were you trying to accomplish?
Speaker 2 (19:28):
My boss, Secretary Spencer, was basically fired by a Secretary
Esper in the wake of this Pettiopster Gallagher seal trial,
which I won't go into detail, but you can read
about it in my book. I had no expectation at
all that this is going to happen. And the next
thing I know, on the acting secretary and I got
a phone call from somebody, a guy named Jerry Hendrix,
who you may know, who writes a lot about naval matters,
(19:50):
and he said, Tom, the average tenure of an acting
Secretary of the Navy is one hundred and ten days.
So I said, okay, Well, so I went home and
I came up with eleven top ten lists that I
was going to try and accomplish in one hundred and
ten days. And one of those things was I wanted
to be able to communicate with the entire organization on
a regular basis, And so I told my team. I said,
(20:12):
every Friday, I'm sending out this thing called the vector,
and I'm like, well, sir, you know, we're not sure
the IT systems can handle that. I said, well, you
guys figure out how the IT systems can handle that,
because I'm going to be writing this thing. They said, well,
it's got to be ready by Wednesday. I said, okay,
and that just put the pressure on me, but I
didn't really care because I really wanted to get that out,
so I would write them by Wednesday. But the idea
(20:33):
of the vector was really to communicate to the entire
organization what me as the senior leader, albeit temporarily, was
thinking about what I thought their priority should be, and
they would be a mix of different things. It would
be priority based, or be talking about things that happened
that week that they should be aware of, or funny
(20:53):
stories about movies, or that I would relate to what
they're dealing with with their lives. Had a lot more
interesting obviously when COVID started happening, and I started using
more anecdotal stories about how this was their time to
demonstrate how they're going to respond in a crisis, and
no one expected that this crisis was going to be COVID,
but here it is, and so I would write a
(21:14):
lot about that.
Speaker 1 (21:15):
I'm curious, So, when you look at your experiences, which
have been pretty wide ranging, how would you summarize the
lessons you've learned about effective leadership?
Speaker 2 (21:25):
Well, I think that for me, the thing I learned
the most over the course of my career, and I've
been in private sector and military government, is that the
leaders that communicate the most are to me the most effective.
And you have to be consistent, and you have to
be honest, and you have to be transparent with people,
and that includes, you know, taking the mask off. I'd
(21:48):
use that as an analogy of, you know, take off
the mask of your rank and everything else and just
get to know people in the organization. There was a
very common sort of consultant speak about leaning in that
we've heard a largely had to do with women in
the workforce, and I sort of turned that differently in
terms of my approach to that, which is leaning down,
leaned down into the organization, get to know the people
(22:10):
at the most lowest levels of the organization, make them
understand that you're accessible and that you're listening to them.
To me, that's probably the most important thing. I think
from a government perspective, I use this phrase acting and
not pretending, and that meant that I wasn't pretending to
do this job. This is a job I'm in, this
is a seat I'm in, and so I'm going to
do something here. And I think a lot of people,
(22:30):
for whatever reason, they go into government to be somebody
and not to do something. I'm not trying to cast dispersions,
but you know, they're looking for their next job, or
they're looking to see how this is going to impact them.
And when you're in public service, I think it's completely
the opposite. You're there to serve people, to serve the nation,
and what happens to you is almost doesn't matter. And
(22:51):
my view is always you know, I'm the last person
on my priority list. When I came to work in
that job, I thought about the Navy, I thought about
the people in the Navy, about the country, and so
to me, I think that's the only way I can
do it. So maybe other people have different approaches, but
to me, that was probably the biggest lessons I learned.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
You clearly have thought a lot about this, and you've
been deeply involved in defending the nation virstus of your
whole lifetime. When you look ahead, what do you think
are the biggest challenges the Navy and the Marine Corps
face in the next thirty to fifty years.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
Well, I think it's all really the same things that
I talked about in twenty seventeen. But it also relates
to this issue of lack of strategy. I think we
need to have a much better defined strategy of what
we want our naval forces to accomplish because the challenges
they're facing are much more diverse and unpredictable. That's one
of the reasons why I tried to push this concept
(23:48):
of agility. You know, what does it mean to be
an agile organization? What does it mean to be an
agile person? Because I'm listening to a hot of podcasts
now about the Navy and the challenges the Navy's facing,
and basically everything they're talking about is China, and I
agree that is a big challenge that we need to address.
But I suspect that the next big conflict we have
is not going to be China. It's going to be
(24:09):
something that we don't expect right now. And so that's
why I believe we have to build forces that are
agile and flexible to respond to a variety of different things,
and that means changing everything about how we do things.
I used to talk about how business development life cycles,
product development life cycles. In the private sector, for the
last twenty thirty years, they've been contracting. They've just been
(24:30):
contracting and contracting. But if you look at government, if
you look at the Navy particularly, they've been expanding and
expanding and expanding. That's a recipe for disaster. It's just
impossible to succeed in an environment like that. So the
biggest challenges I think that we're seeing is as these
multiple challenges come at us, our lack of ability to
respond to them quickly. And so to me, that's impacting
(24:53):
the Navy, it's impacting all the other forces as well.
There is this paradigm in the Pentagon where all the
different services get their fair share of the pie. They
all get their cut of the pie. I don't know
if that makes any sense. Why does it necessarily make
sense anymore? You're measuring this on dollars and not on
sort of what capabilities we need. From my view, and
clearly it's a biased view. I think space and maritime,
(25:15):
both under sea and on the water, are where we
should be throwing our money, in addition to things like
AI and autonomous vehicles. But all that autonomy, I think
is going to operate in those domains. That means somebody's
going to have to take a hit. I'm not sure
that the way the systems are set up, the structures
are set up, the committees are set up, that they're
ready to make a big shift like that. So I
have a lot of concerns.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
How much of that hit should be made by the
sheer bureaucracy. They built the Pentagon in nineteen forty three,
so the twenty six thousand people could manage World War
two using manual typewriters, the carbon paper and filing cabinets.
We now have smartphones, iPads, computers and twenty six thousand people.
(25:56):
It can't make sense.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
This is the type of thing I'm talking at. One
of those slices of the pie is that Pentagon bureaucracy.
And it's sacrisanc to the people in the Pentagon bureocracy,
and they'll fight for every dollar. We don't go into
our budget processes saying what did I do last year
that I really don't need to do anymore. It's like,
what did I do last year that I can keep doing?
And what more can I do so I can get
more money to do it. So this is sort of
(26:20):
at the crux of the problem.
Speaker 1 (26:22):
Having come out of the Naval Academy with your perspective
of your experience, if you could give one piece of
advice to this year's graduating class, what would you say
to them?
Speaker 2 (26:34):
Oh, well, I had the great fortune of being able
to speak at the Naval Academy graduation with President Trump
on the thirty fifth anniversary of my own graduation, and
I don't think that my message would be any different
now than it was then, which was basically for them
to really not worry about loving the people that they
(26:56):
work for, but to focus their love on the Constitute,
the thing that they have pledged their lives, and to
understand what that constitution is and what it means, and
the country itself and the people that work for them.
If you spend your time focusing on them and ensuring
that they have everything that they need and that they
can do their mission, then all that other stuff, promotion,
(27:18):
all that other stuff, it takes care of itself. But
at the end of the day, You're going to be
just more effective as a leader, and your organization is
going to be more effective as a war fighting mission.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
That's terrific. I want to thank you for joining me here.
Book Vectors, Heroes, Villains and Heartbreak on the Bridge of
the US Navy is available now on Amazon and in
bookstarts everywhere. You clearly have a very dedicated, patriotic life,
and I appreciate time you're sharing it with us.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
Thank you so much, mister speaker. I appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (27:52):
Thank you. To my guest Thomas Moudley. You can get
a link to buy his book, Vectors, Heroes, Villains and
Heartbreak on the Bridge of the US Navy on our
show page at newsworld dot com. Newsworld is produced by
Ginglish three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guarnsey
Sloan and our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for
(28:12):
the show was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to
the team at ginguishtree sixty. If you've been enjoying Newsworld,
I hope you'll go to Apple Podcast and both rate
us with five stars and give us a review so
others can learn what it's all about. Right now, Listeners
of Newsworld can sign up for my three freeweekly columns
at ginglishtree sixty dot com slash newsletter. I'm Newt Gingrich.
(28:36):
This is Newsworld
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