Q1. What prompted your interest in Osmond Ritland?
I mention in the acknowledgments to the book that he’s been staring at me from the wall in my home for years as part of the Space and Missile Pioneers print. But like many book-length projects, this project started as an article about a little-known space pioneer and the deeper I got into his biography, the more amazing it became and the more the words started to pile up. He learned to fly in open-cockpit biplanes, was among the first pilots to fly airliners and later trained pilots to fly, and was a test pilot during World War II when he flew hundreds of different makes and models of everything from small training aircraft and single-seat fighters to the B-29. He was the first of two pilots to fly the XP-51. After the war, he went back to test piloting and worked on the ejection seat for the new jets and on readying American aircraft to drop the atomic bomb. He stayed in the test and development business when he worked as the Air Force project officer for the U-2 and the Corona reconnaissance satellite. For a time, Ritland led all the development of USAF space and missile programs, some of which were contributors to NASA’s space milestones. He also led human spaceflight programs for the military. How can you NOT want to know more about this officer?
Q2. What did you find most interesting or challenging as you conducted your research?
Interesting? I could go on for days about what I found interesting while researching. I went down so many historical rabbit holes! For example, the history of aviation in San Diego in the 1920s and 30s is amazing. So many innovators were working in Southern California in those days. Engineers and pilots constantly pushed the limits of aircraft and aircrews in those days. Long duration flights included the first aerial refueling and Charles Lindbergh’s training missions in The Spirit of St. Louis. In the 1920s, pilots constantly broke records, set new milestones, and then smashed many of those milestones, many over San Diego, where Ritland grew up. He worked for a time as a laborer down on Coronado Island, attended San Diego State College, and was in the California National Guard as a radioman. See? Rabbit holes!
The most challenging part of the process was figuring out why Ritland went on the trip to Egypt to pick up General Arnold (no relation to me) and bring him back to the United States. I speculate a little in the book but there could be a reason I missed. Ritland was a B-17 test pilot. He was a member of the March Field and Air Mail teams, which Arnold had also led. He had just been awarded a DFC. All of those are reasons I’d want to talk to him if I were Gen. Arnold. Was that enough? I just don’t know. I am grateful, though, to the archivists, librarians, and historians who helped me along the way with the entire project.
Q3. How could today's US Air Force leaders apply examples from Ritland's career to their own?
I know from my own career that it takes 25 years to get 25 years of experience, but I think Ritland’s own words are significant here:
“I know of many, many technical people, scientists who are extremely competent and capable in their technical way, but who have absolutely no interest in management. To me management is people; but they have no interest in people or managing. All they want to do is look at the end product. So that isn’t the kind of guy you want running an organization. On the other hand, you don’t want someone who is simply a manager that is managing people and looking at the ledger and the dollar value without knowing what he is building. So to me it has to be a combination of both.
“I think the combination of both has to be gained through experience, time, coming up the ladder, and being assigned a task as a young officer or a young engineer and given the responsibility to produce this on schedule within cost and to meet the specifications that it was designed for. But then if you get in there and try to tell him [the young officer] how to run it, you’re messing up your whole ground rules. People will grow in time, and they will have more and more responsibilities and then become, you might say, essentially a technical expert.” (cited in Engineering the Future, 267)
Q4. Is the US Space Force more at the stage that the USAF was in Ritland's day, so that the lessons of Engineering the Future might be even more apt for them?
I think the beauty of Ritland’s story and this book is that the lessons are applicable to whatever stage you think the military is in. Carl von Clausewitz pointed out to us that the character of war is constantly changing—who fights, how they fight, and why they fight—but the essence of leadership really doesn’t. He wanted leaders to have the ability to make quick decisions when necessary but to have the ability to navigate the fog and friction of war while still being of good character. Ritland was constantly adapting to the changing character of war, particularly when it came to the technology used to fight and—he believed—prevent wars. The Space Force today is dealing with the changing character of war and the implications it has for the space domain, but the essence of military leadership has not changed even as the military has grown more technical. Leaders still need to take care of their people.
Q5. What do you want readers to take from Engineering the Future: Maj Gen Osmond Ritland, Problem Solving, and the Challenge of Technical Leadership?
I want readers to take away a little more of the behind the scenes story both in WW2 and the early Cold War. We know a lot of the stories about the great combat leaders of WW2, but behind them were thousands of men and women risking their lives nearly every day to help win the war. Similarly, we know a lot of the stories about the early astronauts but, again, behind these brave men were legions of engineers making sure the astronauts were safe and could reach into space.
But even more than that, I want people to think about who they are as a leader in our technological age. What does it mean to be a good leader? I don’t think it’s really all that different from what makes General Ritland a great example.