Wayne Hall Interview Published on: 10, Oct 2023

My life in the Army and personal predilections have led me to author books. The books are non-fiction, and the involve challenging subjects and cognitive effort to read and understand. My work in 30 years in the US Army always involved trying to outthink enemies because I was an intelligence officer at all levels of organization.

Not so much as a child. I started seriously reading in junior high and high school. The inclination to read became a passion when I was in college and has continued over the next 55 years. I read a wide variety of books, and just finished The Oppermanns and now I am reading The Pity of it All and The Poems of Heine. My genre is different as I listen to action books as I walk every day. I just finished Fall of Giants and The Armor of Light by Ken Follett, and I am now listening to Damascus Station by David McCloskey.

I had to overcome my fear of heights to become an airborne ranger. I was the G2 of the 82d Airborne Division and deployed to Honduras during Operation Golden Pheasant in March 1988. As the battalion commander for the 313th MI Battalion in the 82d Airborne Division, I made the combat jump into Panama December 1989. Then, while still in the 82d Airborne Division. I led my battalion into Saudi Arabia during Desert Shield in August 1990, and into Iraq in 1991. As a full colonel, I commanded the 501st MI Brigade in Korea from 1994-1996. As a brigadier general, I was the J2 for US Forces in Korea from 1996-1998. All these jobs were wonderful experiences, and I was blessed to command and lead many talented and dedicated people. We all experienced some tense times.

I learned to overcome fear during jump school in November of 1972 and for the first time, from jumping out of the back ramp of a Chinook helicopter in 1973). I learned to climb mountains. I learned to lead and make decisions in demanding situations. I learned to overcome hunger and fatigue and continue to function and thus earn the famed Ranger Tab as an intelligence officer.

The principles in the book remain the same. The means of conducting information warfare have expanded with the advent of smart data, artificial intelligence, holograms, and the coming age of cyborgs and miniature swarms and masses of drones and sensors. Also, people must understand that maneuver will now include: 1) drones, 2) sensors, 3) computers, 4) minds, 5) data, 6) data conduits, 7) organizations, 8) Virtual Knowledge Environments, and 9) knowledge, along with traditional maneuver of tanks, APCs, artillery, and helicopters. Improving our ‘how to think’ capabilities is imperative to outthink our enemies and to keep up with the thinking of AI like ChatGPT-4.

‘Will’ is the most important aspect of conflict. Willpower is a subset of ‘will.’ The ‘will’ I write about is much more encompassing and cerebrally intensive. In short, the book involves one side or person wanting something another side or person possesses but does not want to give up. One side attacks and the other side fights to resist or capitulates. The recent war in Ukraine is a good current example. My book on ‘will’ provides a definition for ‘will’ and many thought templates for helping people understand what ‘will’ means per se and to delve in and exploit its intricacies. Here is an example of a thought model, that is ‘will’ has 14 unstable, changing essential elements to include: 1) life force, 2) purpose, 3) capabilities, 4) strength of motive, 5) perseverance, 6) determination, 7) advantage, 8) disadvantage, 9) passion, 10) sacrifice, 11) imposition, 12) act, 13) assess, and 14) adapt. Adapting faster and better than one’s foe is critical. Thus, recursive activities (e.g., intelligence collection), brings assessment data back to the ‘brain’ to process and to turn into data, information, and knowledge with which to make decisions to act faster and better than the enemy.

Whispers From the Arrow of Time is an anthology. It has essays that I have written over the past 33 years. The book provides unique ideas about differentiating among data, information, and knowledge; thinking and planning in the Information Age; the criticality of mastering synthesis; the appearance of knowledge as a new 21st century weapon system; how one can instill quality in complicated decision making; learning ‘how to think’ and win in complex operations; learning the basics of the concept of ‘will;’ discovering praxis in actually learning how to think like Sun Tzu and implement the theory into practice via six maxims; and my presentation of a simplified, quicker primer of The Power of Will In International Conflict.

This seminar helped people learn ‘how to think’ at high levels. It was a seminar that helped people learn ‘how to think,’ in an education sense but it did not train people ‘what to think.’ The seminar did subtly introduce to people why it is important to think and the relationships and differences among ‘how to think,’ ‘what to think, and ‘why think.’ The students had a textbook (Intelligence Analysis How To Think in Complex Environments), plenary sessions, small groups, practical exercises, supplementary reading, and experienced, retired Colonel’s leading the small groups. The methods worked amazingly well, and during my six years of leading these seminars, we helped ~ 1250 analysts and collection specialists learn ‘how to think’ better and differently than their current training had ever given them.

I found that with the right environment and adult learning that people can learn ‘how to think’ and they feel good about such learning and thinking once they ’survive’ over the first say three days. The ingredients of adult seminars thought must be crafted and the originator must be willing to change if necessary; I certainly made changes to the curriculum that I developed for the seminar. While difficult to do, I listened to the students sand small group leaders and made necessary adjustments. Furthermore, I learned to fear that Americans do not read difficult books, e.g., classics, Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, Galula, Trinquier, Kitson, Slim, Waldrop, and so on, anymore, if ever. The Army’s system of learning back then was always about ‘what to learn,’ when there should be an emphasis on the triad, ‘how to think, ‘what to think, and ‘why think. For certain, captains and warrant officers and senior NCOs need to learn ‘how to think,’ as they are responsible for helping leaders make decisions. If they make decisions with data, risk goes up. If they wait for perfect knowledge odds are the situation will have changed because of the half-life of knowledge worth. There is a distinct danger of one’s intellects to be on the downward trend line while artificial intelligence is on a sharp rising upward. 

I continued to learn and think throughout my military career. I learned from my mistakes and the mistakes of others. I thought up new ways to help people learn ‘how to think,’ e.g., mystery programs, professional development, vision enactment, combining ‘how to think’ with ‘what to think’ situational learning exercises as G2 and battalion commander in the 82d Airborne Division and as an intelligence brigade commander and J2 of a theater. I would purposefully devote entire days to help my analysts and senior warrant officers, captains, majors, and lieutenant colonels. What I learned rolled over into the world of consulting, particularly for Joint Forces Command experimentation and irregular warfare.

Learn ‘how to think.’ I discuss this capability in my new book, Whispers From the Arrow of Time, Essay Five, 303-391. People must learn, think about, and enact mental and organizational processes to pursue and find quality in thinking, planning, wargaming, and outthinking the adversary’s thinking, and providing high-quality thinking to help commanders make decisions. Analysts and collection people must work as a team. The military must define ‘will’ and put it and its explanation of intricacies in doctrine. One must have definitions and conceptual and historical underpinning in doctrine. Otherwise, thinking and organizational design and new ways of thinking become neglected, indeed squeezed out in favor of ‘what to think’ and technology. Institutional thinking tends to rely on technology to do its thinking. This is the wrong tack. That is, while our people learn ‘how to think’ such learning must adapt and change to keep up with and tame artificial intelligence.

One must have a vision, have methods to enact the vision, become in people’s life-long learning programs, and constantly engage in introspection (personal and organizational) to find the omnipresent logic and bias errors that plague humankind. Thinking people must constantly examine their assumptions and their organizations’  and they must always be able to be agile enough to change one’s thinking and organizational planning and execution if assumptions are wrong. One must think like the adversary thinks about themselves and how they think about you and how they think you think they think. This kind of thinking can be done, but one must have the intellectual development, the organizational design, and the technology to support such wargaming efforts.

Human beings can and must learn throughout their lives. This cannot occur without recognizing one’s short-falls, indeed as Socrates and Plato would say, one’s own ignorance to set conditions for learning via thinking. Human beings have wonderful minds, but one can become overly enamored by social media, Internet games, and the speed of change that champions the use of data to make decisions (that usually turn out wrong).

People can expect a plethora of innovative ideas and way points for learning ‘how to think’ at a sufficiently elevated level to outthink our many enemies and to stay at least even with the quickly advancing phenomenon of artificial intelligence. As such, I’m writing a new anthology now. The title is—The Moral Imperative of Our Time—Purposeful Intellectual Growth. Essay One is—1985—A Visit to Verdun—A Young Army Officer’s Impressions. Essay Two is—Implications for Intelligence Collection—Irregular and Asymmetric Warfare. Essay Three is—A ‘Journey’ To the Edges of Advanced Intelligence Analysis—2007-2014. Essay Four—A Vortex of High-level Thinking—Q&A With a Young Intelligence Analyst. Essay Five—Desert One: The Hostage Rescue Mission. Essay Six is—A Discourse Between A Master and Apprentice—About War Per Se.

I’ve appreciated the visual opportunities and the tweets into X. I do wish that AllAuthor would send inputs to Linked In, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook. I could use the exposure.