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As you may have noticed, ND has produced a great many
high-ranking military officers. Retired Admiral Bill Owens celebrated
his 65th birthday yesterday. Last fall, while speaking at a Capitol Hill
policy luncheon, Owens explained, “(T)he reason why Bismarck turns
out a lot of admirals is that we didn’t know how far away the sea
was.”
Owens graduated from Bismarck High in 1958, then went to work for a farmer
that summer. In an interview for the Carnegie Reporter, he said, “I
came from a very poor family... and I was imagining my life if I stayed
there. North Dakota is a great place, but the opportunities available
to me there, at that time, were not ones that I could imagine myself pursuing
for the rest of my life. In those days,” he continued, “there
was a television show called The Men of Annapolis, and those guys wore
white uniforms and carried swords; that sure looked a lot different from
anything I was contemplating. So I went to Quentin Burdick, my Congressman,
and asked, could I get into the Naval Academy? He said, ‘Nobody’s
ever asked me that question before.’ About four weeks later, I was
actually at the Naval Academy. It was a lot easier then than it is today.”
Owens got his bachelors in math and became a nuclear submariner. He served
on four strategic nuclear powered submarines and three nuclear attack
submarines, including tours as Commanding Officer aboard the USS Sam Houston
and USS City of Corpus Christi. Owens spent a total of 4,000 days (more
than 10 years) aboard submarines, including duty in Vietnam, and he was
commander of the U.S. Sixth Fleet, from which the first attacks of Desert
Storm were launched.
“I spent many, many days underwater,” he says, “some of
them under the North Pole, some of them on strategic missile submarine
patrols for months at a time... I found it important to stay in the Navy,
although it is very difficult for families. It wasn’t always fun
but it was always challenging and interesting...”
Owens also earned masters degrees in politics, philosophy and economics
from Oxford and a masters in management from George Washington University.
The military put his knowledge to good use by making him responsible for
reorganizing the armed forces at the end of the Cold War. He’s become
widely recognized for bringing high-tech military applications into the
Department of Defense and as the mind behind the Revolution in Military
Affairs (RMA). Under his watch, the four armed forces underwent the most
significant changes since World War II.
In March 1994, President Clinton appointed Adm. Owens Vice Chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the country’s second highest-ranking military
officer. People in the Pentagon referred to him as “the futurist”,
because he felt the military got bogged down by old technology from former
wars rather than planning for new types of warfare like terrorism, bio-weapons
and dirty nukes. Long before 9-11, Owens pressed for a higher level of
cooperation between government and military factions, including the shared
use of intelligence. It was this type of forward-thinking that has Special
Forces now using night vision goggles and other high-tech equipment in
Afghanistan and Iraq.
Since retiring, Admiral Owens continues to make good use of his experience,
now serving as president and CEO of Nortel Networks, a company interested
in homeland security.
Last fall Owens revealed one other achievement. “I sing the North
Dakotan state song especially well in many languages...” he said.
“(I)t’s really good in Hebrew, and Bulgarian, and I can even
do it in Swedish...”
Sources: transcript of Capitol Hill policy luncheon, 9-16, 2004, “Convergence
in a Network Centric Warfare Environment”; Susan Robinson King, Carnegie
Reporter,Vol. 1/No. 4, Spring 2002
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prior permission from North Dakota Public Radio.
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