 Okay, we're back, we're live, not too long after July 4th, actually, and Captain James and I were talking about, you know, the importance of defending our nation, which I always think about around July 4th and Memorial Day, and for that matter a lot, anyway. Welcome to your show. Thanks for having me back. It's nice to be on the other side of the table. How's it feel? Good, good. We did this before. Yeah, that's fine. So we're going to talk, we decided we would talk today about jobs, jobs in, out, around the military to show the connection that goes on for. The connection, you know, my rough perception of it is that we've been in an economic engagement with the military here since, I think probably before 1850, and so there's been an exchange of jobs and economic benefits and obligations for, what does that make it, 150, 166 years, actually. Yep, long time. Yeah. And you made a chart, which I think is really great. So we should talk first about the jobs that are available in the military that can be and often are useful when people in the military who have those skills come out. Can you talk about that? Sure. Well, let's talk about what it takes to get into the military, okay? You know, there are some basic requirements and there's kind of two ways to go in. You can be kind of an entry level person and go in as an enlisted sailor or airman or marine or soldier, or you can go in as an officer. So we'll start at the beginning, we'll start where I started in the military, which was enlisting. I had a college, or excuse me, a high school diploma, got a college diploma now, but I started with a high school diploma. So you do have to have, there is a basic education requirement today. If you reverse time and went back 50 or 60 years, that wasn't necessarily the case, but because it's now an all-volunteer force, there is no draft, there is no conscription, there is no judge forcing people into the military or jail, you know, we're past that. So the military is a lot more selective today because they can be so, you know, there are educational requirements. The bare minimum is a GED. Now I think most of the services today, when I was in the personnel side of the Navy, you know, I think we let in maybe 2% could have a GED, and then the rest had to have at least a high school diploma. So you do have to meet that. And then there's age requirements as well. So the standard cutoff is 18, but you can come in at 17 if you have your parents' permission. And then on the back end of that, you know, what's the oldest you can come in? It varies by service. I think if you're coming in active duty, the Marine Corps, you can't be more than 29. I think the Air Force is the laxist. You can be like up to 39 to enlist. The rest of them are in the late 20s or early 30s, something like that. So you've got an education component, an age component. I mean, the last piece, well, there's two more pieces. You've got to have kind of the moral compass so you can't be a convicted felon or, you know, a whole bunch of things like that. And then you have to be able to pass a physical test. And the different services have got different requirements. But by and large, if you're in that age group, you could probably pass the test. I don't know, today, if everybody can. But when I was a kid, everybody could pass the test. I remember, you know, back in World War II, if you had flat feet, you were, what do they call it? 4F, 2F, 4F. 4F, I think. And you couldn't come in. Is that still the case? I don't know a flat feet prevention from coming in. I know, like, asthma, you can't come in. But you can have medical deficits. I mean, you can be colorblind. There's certain things you can't do. You can, you know, I don't know. I don't know all the medical things. But it's probably changed. It's probably changed. I think it has a little bit. Because the government is able to handle some of these things where before it might have been a problem for the individual. So once you meet all those requirements, you can come in and then you've got a huge palette of options within the military career fields, okay? We could take the, we'll just use a Navy as an example, because I'm most familiar with that. You know, and it's everything from A to Z, literally. If you can do it in the civilian world, you can probably do it in the Navy. We have musicians. We've got nuclear, you know, engineers. We've got aviation technicians, electronics, welding. I mean, just, it runs the spectrum. If you wanted to be in the merchant arena as an able-bodied seamen, you can essentially do the same thing on the ship. If you want to paint, you can paint. Okay, not artistic painting, you know, painting the side of the ship. But, you know, so there's a gazillion different things you can do. And this is assuming you didn't know anything on day one. True. You can role in there. The government will train you to do all these specific things. Yeah, if you've got the GED or the high school diploma and you take the ASVAP test, which is kind of, it figures out whether or not you've got aptitude, you know, towards engineering or maybe you're more of an operational type person. Maybe you're more administrative. And there are cutoffs based upon how well you do on that test. But you don't have to have any background in it. You just have to have the raw capability to learn and to be trained. And the Navy does a really good job at that. You know, some of the schools, I think the hardest and most technical is probably nuclear engineering. So you can come in, fresh out of high school, graduate on a Friday being boot camp on a Monday. You know, two months later, you graduate boot camp and you're now at nuclear power pipeline. And I think that pipeline is like a year and a half to two years. And when you come out of that, you'll have gone through, you know, very in-depth chemistry, chemistry, math, physics, you know, science, a lot of engineering before you even get to your first command, before you even get to your first ship. So the training component to the military is huge, depending on what you go into. And then you could be a guy that graduates boot camp on a Friday and you just get sent to your ship on a Monday, with just what you have in, you know, a guy in boot camp. But it's your call. You can ask for jobs. You can make a request, a wish list and maybe get what you want. Well, that's what you got. I mean, that's the thing that's kind of on the person. You know, you need to do a little bit of research and everybody's got access to the Internet. So, you know, I would say you need to research where you have interests and make sure that your interests align with the needs of the Navy or the military, whatever, you know, service you want to go into. And then when you go to the recruiter, you know, you have to advocate for yourself. You're your best, first best advocate. And it's a negotiation. It's not, you know, this is all we have. I don't know. Maybe that's the case sometimes. Occasionally, you know, you can get a commitment, though. Yeah, you can get a commitment. I mean, you can get a piece of paper signed saying, this is what you're going to do. And that's a commitment that you make to the government and the government makes to you. And, you know, as long as you honor your commitment, they honor their commitment. Yeah. Well, I think two elements that fall after that, it seems to me, is that, OK, if you're in the pipeline to get trained, then you do it. You actually have experience in the field doing it. And while you're doing it, I mean, I'm selling, I'm selling something, but no, it's all true. It's beautiful. While you're doing it, you're getting trained further. You have continuing education. You have to. And so the result is you have the original training in the field you want. You have the experience in that field and you have training in that field. By the time you get out, by the time you finish your, whatever period it is, you're really skilled in that area, which is great. Yeah, I think you get what you get when you go in the military that you probably don't typically get in the private sector or outside of the military is all the other stuff. So you could probably parallel the technical piece of the training, but you can't parallel the discipline, the leadership training and kind of the pressure to perform because you're amongst a bunch of colleagues, everybody is professional. You're in the coat of arms, you're in the arm service where the regrets of not doing your job well can have an impact life and death on your shipmates or your battle buddy. So it's important to do well. And that's just kind of the way that, I won't say it's pure pressure, but there is a certain amount of pressure to perform and perform well. And so when you have all of that together, the total package while, I'll say my first few years in the Navy, I didn't realize until after the fact that when you look back, you've got a lot more than somebody, one of your contemporaries out in the private sector because, hey, you've probably been in very stressful situations where there was life or death things that are occurring. You've got the technical training, you've been groomed to lead, which a lot of people don't get that. You just don't get taught how to lead in the private sector. They don't do my observation, I could be wrong, but you don't get necessarily that same level of leadership training. Absolutely true. In Hawaii, you find, and I'll give you a real example, you find employers don't really want to train people. They don't want to do it. And the contrast is huge and the military has to do it. It's part of the program. Always want to be sure you have people to train. But in the civilian world here anyway, probably elsewhere also, is the employer says, you learn on the job, go read a book. I'm not going to spend any money, I'm not going to organize anything for training. Some corporations are exceptions to that, to their credit. We had a program here in Hawaii called the Education and Training Fund, back in the late 90s. And the idea is that everybody could have a lifetime, some of money to draw from, to go out and train himself, especially in things like computer courses and the like. Government would give you your lifetime, $5,000 it was. And it was great, my law firm used that, everybody got trained up and it was in a time where the internet had just started, it was a time when it was really valuable to train. Well, in a few years there was no more money and the 5,000 was cut to something else and a few years more the program was finished. Why? Because there were some people out there politically who said, when I got to spend money on training, why are we going to do that? Let's spend the money on something else. It was not a priority then, there was no constituent group that called for it. So politically it died. And a lot of employers were happy to see that. They didn't want to be taxed essentially. There are some political politicians that called it a tax. But the reality is that nobody wanted to fund training people. So there's a huge difference. Yeah, so I would view it more like nobody wanted to make that investment because that's what the government does when you join the military. I mean, they're investing, you're getting paid way more on day one than the value you're bringing on day one, but by day 1,000 the expectation is that you're delivering on that investment. And that's an investment in national security, but it's also an investment in the individual. And so you do your tour and maybe you decide this isn't for me or I've got other aspirations. So what is there after that? Well, you've got the skills and the training that you've got, but maybe you decide you want to do something different. The military still has the GI bill, which is one of the best things they've ever done, I think. And so you've got the opportunity to use the GI bill to go on to, you don't have to go to college, it can be any kind of formalized training. So you can become a master diver if you want using the GI bill. And if you serve long enough in the military, you can actually transfer that GI benefit to your kids or your spouse. Really? Yeah. And so that's a relatively- Great program. Yeah, it's really awesome. So when you think about the investment the government makes in you, they're investing in you because they're investing in the future and the security of our nation, but you still get to carry that investment with you. It's your personal, it's your treasure to use as you want further on down the line. And you also get a lot of the stuff out of the military, besides just the job, travel, adventure, the opportunity to experience other cultures, a sense of camaraderie that you often don't get in the private sector. I mean, I don't know what people call, there's no such, in the Navy you've got shipmates in the army, I think they're called battle buddies, things like that. I don't think there's a parallel term in the private sector. I don't think so either. It's just some dude I work with or a colleague, it doesn't have the same meaning, so. What's the difference between officer and enlisted in this program you've been describing? Is it the same? And I remember things like, for example, the war college, that free valuable experience and learning a language, very valuable experience. Does everybody get that? Some people get that. What's the difference between officer and enlisted? Well, the principal difference is that the officer corps is, I mean, it's the senior leadership piece. The enlisted force, up to a certain level, are the technicians and they're doing more of the, I'd say the labor related activities. The officer corps is doing more of the leadership and some of the tactical thought, the strategic thinking and kinda setting the direction for the service and the unit that they're in. So there's a ratio between officers and enlisted. The enlisted force is the largest piece or component of the military. And I think the ratio, I could be wrong, maybe it's like 70% enlisted, 30% officer, maybe it's 80, 20, something like that. But that's sort of the executive management piece. And the cut off the entry level into the officer corps, by and large, is you have to have a college degree. Now there are ways to become an officer without having a college degree. But at the entry level, if you wanna come in as an officer, you typically have to have a four year bachelor's degree. So it's OCS. Yeah, OCS or you can go through Navy ROTC or one of the ROTC programs or you can go to one of the service academies. You know, I mean, that's just a university. And at the end of it, you get a degree and a commission as an officer. Yeah, I remember the Naval Justice School, which is in Connecticut. So Navy base there. That was really fabulous program. I went there, I really had a good time. I thought they were really teaching me and everybody around us in a very constructive way. And it helped me through my time in the service, at that school. Anyway, so let's come back after this break and talk about how all this flows. Because some of it flows to the civilian community within the military. And some of it flows to the civilian community, not in the military. We'll take this break and I'll probably answer this call. We'll be right back. Hi, I'm Chris Letham with Think Tech Hawaii and I'd like to ask you to come watch my show, The Economy and You, each Wednesday at 3 p.m. Aloha, I'm Kirsten Baumgart Turner and I'm fortunate to be able to host Sustainable Hawaii at ThinkTechHawaii.com. I hope you'll join in with us every Tuesday from 12 noon to 1 p.m. to see the interesting people we have to share with you their information. Aloha. Hey, Stan, the energy man here. I know you're bored this summer. You're just sitting at home, figuring out what to do, go to the beach, spend some time with ThinkTech Hawaii, spend the time thinking about how you can contribute to Hawaii and making it a better place to live and start watching some of the programs on ThinkTech, including Stan the Energy Man. Well, you'll learn all about everything energy, especially hydrogen and transportation. So we'll see you every Friday at 12 o'clock noon, Stan the Energy Man here on ThinkTech Hawaii. Shops for them when they get out. We're back, we're live. We're here with Captain Jeffrey James who was the, until he retired a couple of years ago, he was the commander of the Joint Base here in Honolulu, which is wow. That's a wow, you know what I mean? He's also the host of the military in Hawaii, which is one of our favorite shows, and it's very important that we understand the relationship for long and nutritious relationship between the military and everyone else in Hawaii. So coming back to these, you got all these people with all this great training and you know, it makes the military a pretty interesting nourishing place to be for a career. Still, in all the trouble in the world today, still. But the civilians also have jobs within militaries. In fact, one of our members of our board of directors works at Pearl Harbor as a nuclear engineer, which is really terrific. And she's a lucky person, she loves what she does. And so the question I would ask you is, what's the parallel then in the civilian side of things? Certainly it's a shipyard, it's a big employer, but elsewhere, and do we have a lot of outsourcing going on of things that might have been done by active duty people before that are now being done by civilians? Yeah, good question. So there is another component to the federal government, people that serve the federal government, but not necessarily in uniform, and that's the GS, the government service, government servant, whatever it is. GSs, so these are the people that do government work, but they don't do it in uniform, they do it as government civilians. So I think that's what you're talking about, your colleague that's at the shipyard. So if you look at any of the military installations, you'll have the people in uniform, which are doing principally the operational mission, some of the support stuff, and then kind of backing them up and supporting them in all of that is the civilians. And there's a lot of things that are really good about the civilian workforce in the government, the GS workforce, and the first of which is they're stable. So you've got kind of corporate memory because most of the GSs, they get to a location and they get into the GS services and they stay there. And so you've got some corporate memory. With the military, you know, typically every couple of years, a new commander rolls in, a sailor, an airman, a soldier, you know, are rolling in, they're doing a couple of years and they're getting transferred to another job, typically in a different physical location. So, you know, it's constant throughput, but the civilian workforce provides that continuity to kind of, once an initiative started, it stays moving forward. They've got the corporate memories so they know where all the skeletons are in the closet and they've seen the mistakes get made and they can provide very wise counsel and advice to prevent it from happening again. Continuity. Yeah, continuity, exactly. And, you know, they span from entry level all the way up through senior executive service, which are kind of like Admiral General level. So you've got the full spectrum in between and, you know, from clerical to technical engineering and everything in between. So a huge option of, you know, pallet of options for employment and career. Now, you know, I was going to ask you, it was hard to get those shops, but I want to preface that question telling you that two years ago, so I got a call and a contact from a recruiting firm in the East Coast in Virginia. And they had sent some brass out here from their firm because they had so much trouble recruiting skilled labor for civilian military jobs, civilian employee jobs. And they wanted to really beat the bushes in Hawaii because they much prefer a local higher than bringing somebody out, I guess, for economic reasons, but also for cultural reasons. Sure. And I'm not sure they ever succeeded. They were really beating the bushes to find skilled labor for these jobs. And so, I mean, it offers a huge possibility for local applicants to get jobs. Is it still like that or is the tide turned? Well, I'll tell you, I mean, there is, you know, you've heard the brain drain from Hawaii. I think actually your show had a, snippet on it, maybe it was yesterday. You know, so there's been a real big push to keep local people here and have skilled educated people taking jobs here in Hawaii rather than going back to the mainland. A lot of times they'll go back to the mainland for college with the intention to come back here and they just kind of never make it back. So a big push to keep the skilled intelligent workforce here on the islands for the reasons you just discussed. Economically, it's expensive to move somebody back here and then the cultural piece because it is different here. And so if you assimilate to the culture and you understand it, it just kind of makes things a little bit easier. So there's a push, but there's tons of jobs here. I'll tell people, just go on to USAjobs.com or .gov. And you can, I mean, you can set up a parsing way to look at jobs, you can just look at everything, but I mean, there's literally like thousands of jobs. Maybe there's hundreds here in Hawaii, you know, from the senior levels all the way down to entry level. And you just, it's all an online application. Why aren't they skilled? We have people that are unemployed, don't we? Why aren't they all filled? Well, I'll tell you, in my case, you know, when I retired, I thought just for the heck of it, I'm just going to experiment around. I wasn't all that enthralled with going back into the government, but I thought I would apply for some positions that I knew I was way overqualified for. Maybe one reason is because the application's hard. I mean, it's actually a hard- You're ridden application. You do the whole thing online, but by the time you figure out what to do, the website's timed out. And so everything you put in is gone. Oh no. It can be difficult. If you're looking for work, you figure it out, and you can kind of get past that hump. I couldn't get past that hump, which is why I'm a contractor now. Okay. Well, somebody ought to fix that. You know, I mean, I can tell you too that we applied here, I think that applied for a federal grant one time with one of those interminable, you know, online forms. And gee, it was very hard to deal with it. And passwords, I must have had 20 passwords. I needed to, you know, and they always change, they said, oh, 60 days has gone, your password has expired, you can't get in anymore. I mean, there was no need for any of that. It should be really easy. Somebody, that's a suggestion box thing. Well, probably like the millennials can do it. I just wasn't raised on the computer. I mean, I can operate it, but I don't know. I'll attribute that to just being me. Okay. So the last part of our discussion, I think is really the part that affects a lot of people. And that is you have all these skilled active duty people. And for that matter, civilian employees too. I mean, the military here is a huge source of talent, so talented in my law firm. We hired people, you know, not only civilian, military and civilians when they were available, but also their spouses. Oh yeah. They were always good. And let me say that I think that should be a rule of thumb for any employer to make sure that at least he considers, you know, the talent in the military or getting out of the military, both active duty and civilian. And so what is the deal? I mean, those people seem to me to be very well trained and skilled. And I think it's more like there aren't enough employers here to take them, to hire them. It's the same kind of thing. We don't have the jobs for them. What is it? For former military staying here a while? Yeah, yeah. They're great employees. Yeah, I think there's a couple of components. So the first is the cost of living, you know, versus the sunshine tax. So the wage scale here relative to the mainland actually is a little bit less, but the cost of living is a lot higher. So you've got that piece of it. It's not a huge, you know, there's not a big technology market here, although I know the state's trying to develop a technology sector and to grow that. So a lot of the technical skills really speak more to jobs on the mainland. And the last piece is folks that haven't, that don't have their roots here, feel like they're far away and want to go back to the mainland. It's hard to plant. It's hard now. My family, my extended family, and all that stuff is on the West Coast. So it's no different than being on the East Coast. For me, it's a five hour flight. I haven't had a flight. So it was easy for me to keep my roots here because I'm not a big fan of Seattle, which is where my family lives. I mean, my extended family, my real family's here, wife and all. So yeah, so those are a couple of the pieces that I think make it difficult for people to stay here in Hawaii. And so I think it's just, you know, it's incumbent on continuing to grow kind of the technology market and to reconcile kind of the wages versus the cost of living. I think those are the biggest obstacles to a lot of folks wanting to stay here. Well, you know, there are this huge body of retired military here. There is. I mean, I think they retire relatively young in life these days. If you add 20 years on, let's say 20 when you came in roughly, that's your 40 years old. You're ready to go. You got a whole life in front of you. You've got at least another career in front of you. Well-trained, you know, you've been trained in not only in substantive areas, but in discipline and organizing yourself. You're a valuable employee. And yet I think it comes back to there running up jobs. I think every local employee would want to consider military people. But here's the ultimate upshot of it. There was an article today in Civil Beat by Bert Lum who is, you know, the HPR talk show host along with, you know, Ryan Ozawa. And he's also a director, another director of Think Tech. And he wrote that there's a lot of process going on in the schools to build tech qualified kids. And it runs in parallel. He said, you know, you're not gonna see the benefit right now today, but over time, you will see we have a lot of competent tech graduates. Just as the military has a lot of competent tech graduates. And we need to keep them. They're the most valuable resource of all that we have people skilled in technology, which is a huge area, gonna define our century. But we don't have the companies. We have to build the companies. And entrepreneurial technology's not that easy and a lot of them are either they come from somewhere else or we lose them to somewhere else. And in the end, at the end of the day, if we were to take advantage of this huge resource, we're gonna have to build the companies, real companies. We have to get capital to come in here. And capital is hesitant to come here because of some of the controversies we've had here. And so in my dream, I'd be interested in your thought about this, the community benefit going forward. In my dream, we get the capital, we build the companies, they're tech companies. For a successful tech company, all you have to have is broadband. You can live on the top of a mountain as long as you had broadband. And we can employ these people and they're very valuable people and they make successful companies. This is my dream. Yeah, I think it's a good dream. I think that there's a lot of programs in place to help enable that. I think there's kind of a multi-disciplinary approach. I mean, it can't just be companies come here because you got to have somebody to feed the company. So the STEM program, the robotics programs that are in place right now, I think are really gaining kind of a head of steam. And so getting people behind that to participate in those programs, and then just a constant dialogue. And it'll take a little bit of somebody having kind of the intestinal fortitude to take the leap of faith and make the investment because there is certainly risk in it, but somebody has to recognize a long-term reward and be willing to risk to get a couple of companies here, watch them be successful. And I think it would become kind of a self-sustaining engine, but it's gonna take time and maybe not in our lifetime, will it be a broad-reaching initiative that sees success, but it's just gonna take time, I think. One of those, one element in my dream is that these battle-buddy guys, shipmates, as you will, come out of the service. They know each other for years. Hither, Jan, they know each other. And they say, gee, we know about tech. We've been working on code. We've been working on hardware. Why don't we form a company? We have a common point of reference, a common experience. And we'll find the money. We'll do whatever we have to do to find the capital. And we will form a company here in Honolulu and we will deal on a global basis through broadband. This should happen, don't you think? That's a great idea. That's actually a great idea, Anna. You just got me thinking. I got him thinking, see? That's Jeff James. He's the host of the show, The Military in Hawaii. And he's gonna be back next week and we're gonna continue the parade, if you will. Awesome. Thank you so much. Thanks, Jay. Bye-bye.