NOTE: I encourage you to listen to the audio version of this post via the Substack app or website where you can hear the actual audio recording of my retirement remarks.
On the 24th of July, I retired from the US Air Force. In the intervening weeks, I’ve grown a beard, traveled the UK and Iceland with my family, and worked through the first several stages of the identity crisis the retirement has imposed.
As the dust settles, I want to share with you my remarks from that ceremony. The ballroom at the Army and Navy Club was full of extended family, old friends, colleagues, and mentors. It did not go as planned, but it did go perfectly.
My presiding official wasn’t able to make it to the ceremony. We were already about ten minutes past the planned start time. My little team (me, my emcee, and the two Airmen who volunteered to help with thankless tasks like ushering and proffering) huddled in the hallway. What were we going to do?
We needed someone who knows me well enough, who is comfortable enough in front of a microphone and a crowd, and who understand the Air Force well enough to handle the gravity of the event, to make it special for the friends and family involved, and, somehow, to rescue it from its current condition.
Within a matter of seconds, we all agreed that the only person capable of performing such a feat was Hammer. Our little team asked him to join us in the hallway. Without missing a beat, he said, “I’m officiating this thing, aren’t I?”
Hammer’s last minute substitution took all the pressure off the event and brought a sense of levity it would have lacked otherwise. In Hammer’s own words, he may not have been my first choice, but he was my best choice.
The event was personal and I’ll not share the whole thing, but I do want to share with you my own remarks which were, among other things, reflections on what it means to be shaped by an institution but also to try to shape it. Without further delay, here are my reflections on 20 years of service in the United States Air Force.
Remarks:
As you can tell, I’m rushing a little bit. I’m a little worried about the time. We’ve gone long. We started late. And so, 20 years is a lot to recap and I’m a little reluctant to go back to the beginning; but I feel like there are some things you need to know.
When I was six years old, I was in a Sunday school class in Southern California at church. And whoever was teaching that class asked us to raise our hand and say what we want to be when we grow up. And I raised my hand and said, I want to be an artist. And after church, Debbie Tucker teased me about that, and I did not like that.
So at some point shortly thereafter, I decided I don’t want to be an artist. I want to be an Air Force pilot. And nobody ever teased me about that.
And at about that same time, we have earthquakes in Southern California. There was an earthquake. My dad and I used to make those model airplanes that you glue together, except instead of putting them on a shelf, we’d hang them from the ceiling so it looked like a P-51 and an A-10 in a dogfight or whatever.
And I was asleep on the top bunk. There was an earthquake. And my dad woke me up standing in the door frame. It was the safest part of the house during an earthquake. And he said, Joey, Joey, wake up. There’s an earthquake.And I looked at my dad and said, how do you know there’s an earthquake?And he said, look at the models. And sure enough, the models were swinging from the ceiling. And I thought, that is sufficient evidence.
And so at that moment, I just assumed that my dad knew that I was destined for a life in philosophy. From the moment I asked him, how do you know there’s an earthquake?
And so there, at six or seven years old, I wanted to be an Air Force officer, pilot, philosopher.
And we did it!
And, you know, bureaucracies don’t do that on their own. That was only through the influence of good leaders who were willing to take a risk on me, and certainly Flare is one of them. General Hinote was one of them. There are others in the room, and I’m very grateful.
So I want to kind of tell you how we got there. How did I come to the Interforce Pilot Philosopher? And I want to do it through the lens of a few bits of wisdom that I’ve picked up over the years.
So the first one’s from my dad. When I was in high school, I was getting ready to go to ROTC at Boston University. And because we were living in Bedford, Mass., so I knew people from my high school who had already matriculated to that detachment. I started to hear about some things that were going on that didn’t sound right. And I’m not going to tell that story here. You can ask me over dreams if you want to. But I was faced with this question, what is my role here? What am I supposed to do given that I can see that something is happening and it’s not right?
And I asked the Airman that I trusted, Master Sergeant Pete Roland, a retired first sergeant who ran the junior ROTC detachment at my high school. I asked my Aunt Gail, late Aunt Gail, who was a JAG officer in the Air Force, turned Article II judge. And then I asked my dad. And they all gave me versions of the same answer.
I’ll give you the wording my dad gave me. He said, whose Air Force is it? And it was rhetorical, but I knew the answer.
The answer is it’s my Air Force.
If I’m going to sit back and watch this thing happen, then I might as well be accepting it. I might as well be applauding it because I’m allowing that to happen in my Air Force.
One way you can tell the story of these last 20 years is over and over and over again being faced with that question. What is my role here given that this is my Air Force?
The second bit of wisdom came indirectly through my dad. When I was in high school, again, he gave me the Robert Coram book on John Boyd. It’s a biography on John Boyd.
If you don’t know John Boyd, he was an Air Force officer who had a fundamental impact on not just fighter tactics, but then how he designed fighter airplanes to perform those tactics. And then later in life, he had an influence on the operational strategic level of war, and the United States Marine Corps adopted that more enthusiastically even than the Air Force did. So he’s more of a hero in the Marine Corps than he is in the Air Force.
And in that book, Boyd, he gives this speech. John Boyd gives a speech to people that work for him, and it’s called the To Be or To Do Speech. And he’s a pretty extreme guy. I don’t buy the full extreme version of it. I think it’s possible to be successful in the Air Force without selling your soul.
But here’s how He says, at some point you’re going to face a fork in the road and you’re going to have to decide, do you want to be somebody or do you want to do something? And if you decide to be somebody, you’re going to have to sacrifice your integrity and you’re going to have to step on your friends, but you’ll get promoted. But if you want to do something, you may not get promoted, you may not get recognition, but you’ll be able to do something great for your country and for your Air Force and for yourself.
And I remember many times in that weird career of sitting back and having to ask myself, do I want Do I want to put myself on a path to beat somebody, or do I want to put myself on a path to be able to do something?
And the story that comes most immediately to mind is when I tried to do this Air Force Academy thing, go study philosophy and teach youth ethics at the Air Force Academy, Flair said, Flair Bernard-Webett said, I’m willing to push you for this Academy thing, but only if you look me in the eye first and tell me you never want to be a squadron commuter. Because if you go do this, it’s going to be very hard for you to come back and be successful as a squadron commuter.
And to this day, I’m grateful that he put me through that, right? Because he forced me to ask the question, Is there a milestone that I want to meet? If there is, I probably need to stay on the path. If I go off the path, I need to do it with a high spot. And I think he was right about that. I’m grateful. And in that moment, I chose to do something rather than be something. I wanted to go study philosophy, teach ethics to future officers. And that’s what I did.
Sort of interlaced with this void thing about to be or to do, there’s also ancient wisdom. You’ve heard a lot about my faith today. I did not expect that. But one of the things that we have tried to do, Megan and I, is In Ephesians, Paul tells the church in Ephesus that “we’re God’s workmanship and we’re created in Christ Jesus to do the good works that God has prepared in advance for us to do.”
And so, when Megan and I have showed up in a new place, whether it’s Knob Noster Missouri or Enid Oklahoma or Las Vegas or The United Kingdom, we’ve tried to look around at the school or the church or the unit or the neighborhood and say, what are the good works that God has prepared for us to do in this environment? And I think that that’s worked out pretty well. I’m not saying we’ve always gotten it right, but I’m saying it’s sort of a guiding light for how we do Air Force. I think we’ve done well.
This is the last one. This is from a philosopher. So if you had philosophy quotes on your bingo card, here comes. There’s a political hpilosopher named Yuval Levin and he distinguishes between two different functions of institutions. He says that institutions are not meant to be platforms on which to perform. They’re meant to be molds that shape us. And he thinks part of the reason that there’s so little trust in our institutions these days is too many people are using them as platforms to perform rather than as molds that should shape us.
And the United States Air Force, the United States military to my sister service brethren, is an institution. And I think to some degree it’s supposed to mold who we are. And it certainly has shaped who I am.
But I think there’s a nuanced question that we need to ask when we’re within the institution. And for us in uniforms that look like this, I think structurally, specifically for officers, we have to ask this question: Under what circumstances should I let myself be shaped by the institution? And under what circumstances do I owe it to the institution to help it maintain its shape?
I’m going to say it again because that was a lot. Under what circumstances, when do I need to be shaped by the institution? And when do I need to help the institution keep its shape?
And I think one of the things that I have tried to do over the last 20 years is try to recognize when I can help the institution keep its shape. And to my surprise, I did not expect this to happen. But they ended up creating a job for me where the purpose of the job was to do ethics of artificial intelligence. To help the institution maintain its shape against this onslaught of new technology, which was pretty scary and people didn’t know how to implement it. And I am incredibly proud of this institution. Our Air Force, your United States Air Force, for having the foresight to recognize that was important.
And so my small story that goes with that is after I was named to this chief AI ethics officer job, I met Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. Two days later I was in a briefing. I wasn’t giving the briefing. I was sitting in the cheap seats along the side of the room, and the Secretary’s conference room was this big U-shaped table. And people sitting at the table were people like General Hinote. They’re all three stars, members of the Senior Executive Service.
And my boss at the time was briefing Secretary Kendall on AI, and he got to the ethics slide. And Secretary Kendall pointed at me in the side of the room and said, “Joe, you should sit up here. You might be able to help with some of this conversation.”
And I, of course, thought he was joking. Why would a lieutenant colonel be seating at that table with those three stars. And so I hesitated a bit too long, feeling pretty awkward. Q Hinote was in fact sitting right in front of me with the back to me, and he kind of half swiveled in his chair and said, “you better get up there.”
I very awkwardly gathered all my things and waddled up to me. Then I got to help leave a discussion about how we should think about ethics in the age of AI with the Secretary of the Air Force.
That doesn’t happen by accident. That happens only because key leaders at the right times were willing to take a risk on me and put me in a place where I could help the institution keep its shape.
Philosophers are supposed to be gadflies. We have a long history of poking the bear and saying, hey, something doesn’t look right here. That goes all the way back to Socrates. Socrates’ institution killed him for it.
Instead, in my career, every time I tried to do the right thing, I feel like the institution turned around and rewarded me for it. Not just rank, but with opportunity, and with additional influence, and putting me in front of audiences to shape the way that people think about what is the right thing to do, given the difficult task we have in professional arms.
So I leave you grateful that I worked with an institution that was able to value the same things that I value, and it’s been an utter privilege. And what I’ll share with the rest of you is I don’t know what’s next for the chapters yet, but I know that we’re going to continue to try to figure out one of the good works that God prepared in advance for us to do.
And for those of you who are still wearing this uniform, I will tell you the same thing my dad told me 25 years ago: It’s your Air Force.
Credit where it’s due
The Views Expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the US Air Force, the Department of Defense, or any other part of the US government.
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