Good and Other:

Raise the Bar

November 8th, 2026

I was reading an item in the news about how certain folks had approached a certain issue and the word that occurred to me - as it often does when I read such articles - was “mediocre.”

I’ll contrast that with some folks I found myself among just the other day. I was at the funeral of VADM Tony Less. If you ever had the chance to meet him, you are better for it and you will not have forgotten him. An A-4 and A-7 pilot over Vietnam, the first squadron commander of the Blue Angels, an Air Wing commander, captain of USS Ranger, Commander of a Battle Group, etc, etc, etc. Always calm and easy going, yet at the same time, for 34 years in uniform, he personified excellence and the idea that we can do “that” (whatever that might be) better.

And at the funeral Mass were a host of folks who had served with him, all of them practitioners of that pursuit of excellence: pilots with hundreds and hundreds of combat missions, MiG kills, and all those various marks of fighter excellence.

And there is a lesson there, a lesson about how to get better. 

Someplace else you might find that is at Tuskegee. If you have a few minutes, after you find VADM Less’s bio, search online for MG Mark Brown, who is now President of Tuskegee University. Read some of his interviews, he’s clearly on the right track, we need more of him.

In my mind, the phrase “Good and Other” serves to encompass the entire idea. The first time I saw the phrase “Good and Other” it was written on a white board in the squadron ready room with a vertical line between the two words. What followed was a debrief of a flight of 2 x F-14s that had just spent about an hour out over the ocean off San Diego, engaged in “ACM” (Air Combat Maneuvering) with 2 x A-4s from a squadron on base whose major function was to provide “aggressor aircraft” (bad guys) for the F-14 squadrons to fight, and thereby hone their skills.

I was a new guy in the squadron and was still in quiet awe of virtually everyone in the squadron. What followed was eye-opening. The briefer - who had been flight lead for the 2 x F-14s - proceeded to rip into tiny shreds nearly everything that the two crews had done. As I recall, there were 2 or 3 bullets on the “Good” side, and the rest of the board was filled with “other” - stuff they had either gotten wrong, or really wrong or totally messed up.

I was stunned. How could these guys - who were the creme de la creme, get so much so wrong?

And while there was some arguing, for the most part, they noted and took notes and when they did argue, they argued over fine points, not ego.

Then I started to notice something as the debrief continued. The “conversation” wasn’t simply “you did this wrong,” the debrief included Why this or that maneuver was wrong, and what they had missed in the moments prior to the maneuver that led them to doing the wrong thing, and then how to fix that problem, not simply what is a better maneuver, but how to assess a situation and make the right choice to drive the developing situation into one that you can control and the other guy can’t. 

And then, assuming we had the flight hours (fuel money), they would try to do it again, either that afternoon or the next day.

I saw this again when working with some folks who were retired SEALs, the task being to train SEAL teams in preparation for deployment; it was the same story: an element of the SEAL team would conduct some specific action and there were observers (all retired SEALs from one of those units that doesn’t exist) watching every step, and then, when the SEAL element returned to the post, they would, just as with the fighter aircrew, go through very detailed debriefs of everything they had done. 

Always there were a few things that went well, as with the fighter aircraft.

And there was a long list of things that could be done better.

And always there followed a discussion on how to fix this, how to get better, how to avoid this or that mistake, why you should do “B” rather “A,” how to exploit this or that mistake by the other guy, how to drive the problem and the enemy into the solution you want.

And then they would go off and practice and the next night’s exercise would be modified to force these same SEALs to walk through the same sort of problems and address them.

What struck me about both these situations, and I was fortunate to run into others as I wandered through a Navy career, was that it was the very best pilots, SEALs, submariners, etc., the real cream of the crop, (and the Army and Air Force have similar “Pros” who are as demanding) who were the ones who were most critical of the day’s training - including their own.

Always the focus was on outcomes, always they were forced to “leave egos at the door,” (and rank - which cannot make a “good” out of an “other”), always they were expected to learn, always they were expected to go out the next time and get it better.

MG Brown (President Brown) has reduced this to a simple phrase you - that everyone - can use to address every day when you get up, no matter what you do. He is an Air Force guy but as some friends of mine would say, we’ll forgive him that. His statement is in league with US Navy and Air Force and Marine fighter pilots, with SEALs and Army Special Operations, with those elements in each of the services that simply do not accept the current performance, no matter how good it might look from the outside. President Brown simply asks, and I suspect VADM Less would echo his thoughts: “Why don’t we raise the bar?”