Faculty Profile
John Otte
Interview by Tess Black

Retired Lt. Col. John Otte is a tough man to pin down; no one in the office had seen him since early January. He was traveling on two assignments at opposite ends of the world: in the Philippines providing briefings on peace operations to the incoming force commander for the UN Transitional Administration for East Timor; and conducting briefings and educational sessions for participants at Shanti Prayas, a United Nations international peace operations training event high in Nepal's Himalayan mountains.

In early February, immediately following the Honolulu CHART course, Otte was back in the Islands, but only for a week before leaving again, this time for the nation’s capitol to speak with the Assistant Secretary of Defense. Then I learned his trip had been once again rescheduled.

And so it went. I decided to “deal with it,” as that is what Otte himself would have suggested. To organize my thoughts, I started a list of facts gathered from random conversations:

Some favorite books: Machiavelli’s The Prince; Thucydides’ The History of the Peloponnesian Wars; Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff; anything by Ayn Rand.
Abiding inspiration: His family.
Ideal weekend sport: Golf.
Best office pick-me-up food: Rollos candy.

The picture forming in my mind was of an intelligent, funny, down-to-earth, broadly-read and -experienced American male enormously gifted with energy and enthusiasm. Otte grew up in one of the last suburbs on the edge of Columbus, Ohio, but attended a “farm” school whose local gang members were mostly former FFA’ers. As a teenager, he professes not to have been interested in much more than baseball and obtaining the keys to the family car.

Behind his friendly, low-key demeanor, is an individual possessing clearly defined principles and keenly focused objectives. In his 25-year military career, Otte served in a variety of command and staff positions in the United States, Germany, Japan, and Australia. He is a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, the Australian Joint Services Staff College and the UN Staff Officer Course (Sodertalje, Sweden). Otte has also had experience as a U.S. Army Exchange Instructor in Australia.

During the four years prior to joining the Center, Otte served as a training advisor in the Department of Peacekeeping Operations at the United Nations Headquarters in New York under the direction of Peter Leentjes, currently the Peace Operations Training Advisor at the Center of Excellence. Otte conducted training on behalf of the UN in 40 countries, for over 15,000 civilians and military personnel. He also developed new instructional materials and instituted an exercise program for the UN that provided improved training standards for civilian and military organizations whose personnel are assigned to complex humanitarian emergencies.

Tess Black: Where and when were you born?

John Otte: Springfield, Ohio, Mercy Hospital, it was a Thursday, July 24, 1952. It was the hottest day on record in the state of Ohio.

TB: Your father was involved in journalism—a newspaper reporter, or publisher?

JO: Yes, he started out as a sports reporter, and went on to be the managing editor of the Columbus Dispatch—Ohio’s greatest home newspaper, according to the masthead. Actually, my first job was at the newspaper.

TB: How did that influence you in your later career choice?

JO: Curiosity—I had the desire to see and experience many different things. And then there were other motivations that caused me to see the military, specifically, as a career—country, purpose, service, and all those.

TB: When did you first enter the military?

JO: In 1970, when I was 17. I graduated from high school and entered the United States Military Academy at West Point. I was very interested in history when I was young, and a large part of history is military—the bottom line is that military history is pretty prominent in the development of humanity. War seems to follow us wherever we go. In 1960, [the country was] gearing up for the centennial celebration of the [American] Civil War. [I saw the war as] moments or events in time that [were like a] crucible out of which the national character of the American public was formed.

TB: You mentioned in a previous conversation that you received your best education because of the military.

JO: When you’re young, you learn because it's a requirement. In some cases, you’re more the recipient of education. I was [only] mildly into learning and was a severe under-achiever at West Point. [The material] wasn’t difficult, I just chose not to apply myself. But, whether it’s through a structured course or through the sum of all of your daily experiences and exposure to people and ideas, how you view the information becomes more and more important.

Once you’ve acquired enough experience in the culture to actually have something to contribute, then it’s your turn to start giving the information back, either in a formalized [educational] setting, or as the manager of a small section in the unit. [A leader] uses his vision, wisdom and experience in order to pass these things on to people, to make them part of the team.

TB: Teaching the whole person.

JO: With the passage of time and the mercy of very understanding bosses my role and responsibilities dawned on me. Teaching someone to take your job is important, because what if you get killed? They’re gonna get it [the instruction] anyway, [laughs] might as well be prepared!

TB: When you graduated from West Point you had a degree in…

JO: Civil Engineering.

TB: Then throughout your Army career you attended several more institutes of higher learning. What did you study?

JO: Political science, other engineering studies, some philosophy, and history, of course. At [General] Staff College I learned to think in a conceptual manner. They taught me all the different components that confront organizational management: how best to manage activities from a group perspective; to understand that it requires teams of people with different skills to work together. We looked at process improvement, at leadership—which is very separate from management—and policy development. It was a liberal arts environment.

TB: Was there a point where you felt you became really engaged in the educational process?

JO: Absolutely, although it had been dawning on me over the 16 years since I left West Point. I had acquired lots of other specific information and experience, served overseas, even gone back to school, but it was at General Staff College in 1990 that I became what I call “self-aware,” and learned that the most important thing for an officer to do is to teach.

Staff College is where they prepare people for senior management in the military. The goal is for the students to understand organizational dynamics. The next organization you command, you’ll be responsible for highly complex, multiple parts and numerous specialties. My assignment after Staff College, for example, was as the operations officer of an aviation brigade, which had 120 vehicles, probably 100 aircraft and 1,000 people in it with maybe 70 different job specialties. [In that kind of situation] you’re responsible to the boss for the proper execution of all its assigned tasks. You can’t control every bit but you have to know how to gather information—that’s another thing I learned.

TB: So it was a cumulative process, culminating in being given the opportunity, or being forced to take it, to sit back and reflect.

JO: It was a great opportunity.

TB: Given your first preference for action, how does a guy who loves the smell of cordite really get into the education game?

JO: The answer is, because they made me—many of the things you do in the military are not necessarily your choice. But the real reason is, my secondary occupational specialty in the military had been research and development. They wanted to spin that off into a separate career field but I chose not to because during my three-year break from the service, that’s [the kind of work] I did. I worked in the private sector for an aerospace company, then called Midland Ross Corporation, but I stayed in the National Guard as a weekend soldier. For a variety of personal reasons, I chose to come back on active duty. If I had wanted to stay in research and development I would have done it on the outside, for more money and without the government bureaucracy attached to it.

TB: Why did you take that three-year break, from ’80-’82?

JO: Personal reasons, namely personal conflict. It wasn’t a pleasant army to serve in at the time, particularly when I was in Germany—because of drugs, racial tension. It caused me to rethink why I wanted to be in the service in the first place. [After a] 14 percent pay-raise caught up [service personnel] to the civil sector, I considered re-entry, on my own terms.

When I came back into active duty I picked “operations” as my new secondary skill because I liked it. Operations involve not only the functions of current and future operations, but also training, and managing all the resources that go with it. The way that it happened was that I was chosen to be an instructor at Staff College in Australia, overseeing all the teaching and training programs. I was not only watching individuals, but groups, train together to get better.

TB: What do they learn?

JO: To build teams—to accomplish difficult tasks under complex and sometimes dangerous conditions.

TB: How did you end up at the UN?

JO: I was finishing that tour as the U.S. Army exchange instructor at the Australian Staff College I just mentioned. I was asleep and the phone rang. It was four in the morning—no one in Washington understands the concept of time zones—and I was told, ‘Well, you’re going to the UN.’ I went to the UN, and that was it.

TB: That was when you first met Peter [Leentjes]?

JO: Yes, October 1995, working in the training unit of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations. Peter was my boss. I was one of about 120 military officers working in the UN at the time—all but 15 were on loan—from maybe 25 nations, and 13 of which were American officers.

TB: What is the biggest part of the experience you took away? What changed you the most—or what changed the most for you?

JO: Good question. What changed? I’m [now] an internationalist and that’s a big shift. Although I’m still an American.

TB: Wouldn’t mistake you for anything else.

JO: Well, some have. What changed? For one thing, I became much more astute politically. To survive in the UN, you have to become politically savvy or you don't survive—because it’s not all military people. I learned so much about peace operations, first, but also about humanitarian operations. I learned that regardless of how much and which side of the simple [humanitarian response] equation the military wishes to put itself, the bottom line is that all responders—the military and all the other agencies—are partners. There is no clear [dividing] line. They have to work together.

Spreading that message—that we all need to work together—became a purpose in life for me. It’s one that was enabled for me by working for someone as marvelous as Peter, and for a variety of reasons—his wisdom, his experience—he enabled me to grow and create my own conditions for success. I already had many specific gifts in terms of instructional skills when I arrived at the UN. But because people like Peter and Ulf Jershed, who had even more experience than Peter, shared their knowledge with me, I have not only improved both my perspective and skills, but discovered what I wanted to be. It was immensely rewarding—awesome, I can’t even begin to tell you.

TB: So that’s basically why you’re here at the Center.

JO: Yeah, I found a purpose for life after the Army. When I went to the UN, I carried with me the full knowledge that it might be my last assignment. You see, in terms of a military career, at age 45 I was already a senior citizen. It’s not like a normal career. It has a very accelerated, short life span. Ultimately I would have to surrender my purpose and find a new one.

TB: From the perspective you gained at the UN, why do you think it’s important that the military understand the civilian point of view?

JO: They’re partners. The military has roles that it can sometimes fill more efficiently than civilians, but the opposite is true, too. And because our governmental system demands civilian control of the military anyway, ultimately the military is going to have to deal with civilians. Not even full-scale war can be executed independent of civilian intervention, whether it be from the state or executive or judicial level.

The increase in complex emergencies makes the issue even more compelling because there’s a larger requirement for interaction. Restraints on conflicts were released at the end of the Cold War, and nations that wanted to pursue their historic and ethnic hatreds with a gun—to take advantage of whatever group didn't look or smell like their group—were free to do that without intervention by the super powers. The civilian capacity that was developed to deal with these situations weren't ideally suited to that sort of conflict-driven environment. And so their paradigm changed—the civilian view of the world has changed, too, not just the military’s view. And therefore it’s our responsibility at the Center to deal with both civilians and the military.

Actually, people our age have a harder time with that [idea of civilians and the military interacting], because we were brought up in the time when the military wasn’t looked kindly upon—our generation went through the Vietnam War, Woodstock. The generation under 35 doesn’t carry that same baggage. They’re actually more pragmatic.
Without the draft, people don’t [voluntarily] go into the services. For the size of our nation, we have a very small military. But people only see the military where it’s most active—training takes a lot of space, for example, and dollars, so the public sees that and thinks that’s all there is to the military. They don’t see its other activities—political, humanitarian, etc.

The concept of national service—whether military or social—has gotten lost and I believe we need it. I think we need to consider some form of national service besides the military. Two-year terms, like some of the Scandinavian countries have. It would build some of those bridges. On the civilian side, you’d get a professional educational structure, [and then] put in a joint military-civilian educational structure where you're ensured that civilians are going to have training, because, sad to say, in complex humanitarian emergencies they all learn in the field. There are very few places you can go to get an education in disaster management. At least militaries are used to creating disasters, and so we understand them. [laughs]

TB: Regarding roles at the Center…you and Peter [Leentjes] work very well as a team, how do you divide up the work to be done? You almost operate as one mind.

JO: That’s scary. [laughs] Our relationship isn’t, in some ways, any different now than it was while we were at the United Nations [Department of Peacekeeping]. There is some form of authority [that I hold], but fundamentally, we each pursue what we each do best.

TB: You’re setting up the peacekeeping portion of the Education and Training program and you’re re-examining the basic courses like CHART and HELP.. Do you have anything else long term in mind?

JO: Yes, absolutely. As with anything else, it’s based on resources. That means funding, people and time. Raising money is always an issue, but there’s actually plenty of money out there—it requires that various members of the team go out and meet with people face to face. But basically, it’s a question of finding qualified people, and then, does a project fit within the mandate and the desires of the management of the Center?

Qualified people—there aren’t a lot out there. Talking heads are a dime a dozen, but a talking head who can mix with the political, military, and humanitarian disciplines, that’s a generalist. There aren’t 30 people like that in the world. If you can get one, two, or three of these highly skilled people, you’re hitting a pretty high percentage. The process we are engaged in right now is finding people with the potential—people with excellent specialty skills in their disciplines—and developing them into generalists. This is a specific goal now, to increase the number of generalists.
The future of Education and Training is training the trainers, to build a pool of generalists who in turn can call on a number of specialists in their areas to support them. Will the future include proponents of peace operations? Yeah. Consequence management? Yes. Medical issues? All this and numerous others because of what our congressional language says.

TB: Can you sum up your vision for the program for the next year and how will you measure your success?

JO: To be better integrated into the organization, with the other programs, the people in the Center, to understand more clearly what the Center’s real vision is, so I can tailor the programs. Because of events in this part of the world [Pacific Region], I believe that peace operations and humanitarian assistance are important, because there is no good training package. I’d like to work with Jeff [Lewis] to try to find a way to develop and deliver it. I want to get into distance education—distributive learning—because it broadens the audience, but that doesn’t mean I want to give up on traditional educational mechanisms. I want to build a bigger and better database of instructors and trainers. I want to find better content, take what we have and upgrade it, and then find a way to link these groups of instructors around the world and send our [training] material to them.

These efforts support our partnership with the University of Hawai‘i, and other academic institutions like the Army Staff Colleges and the War College, and spring directly from one of the Center’s root causes stated in our mandate. These goals are all important, too, because making them part of both the civilian and military educational structures is critical to successfully crossing their cultural boundaries.

We’re here to facilitate, through education, training and research, civil-military integration in humanitarian assistance, disaster relief and other operations that involve the U.S. Department of Defense and the interagency process. That’s our requirement. And if we don’t do that, we should all be fired.

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