Rocio Bauer’s profile over at WashingtonExec is worth your time if you’re thinking about what leadership looks like when you’re serving the Army through a technology lens. She’s spent her career at the intersection of mission and modernization, and the through-line is clear: deep technical credibility married to an understanding of how the institution actually works.
I see this combination far less often than you’d think. Plenty of technologists can talk cloud or zero trust. Fewer can translate that into something an Army program executive or a brigade commander can act on. The best hires—the ones who last and grow—bring both. They’ve done the work, they know the customer, and they don’t need six months to figure out who sits where or why a requirement reads the way it does.
If you’re building or leading a team that touches federal modernization, ask whether your senior technical leaders can operate in that space. Not just brief it. Operate in it. That’s the standard.