Four-Star Power: From ROTC to the Pentagon, the High-Flying Career of Gen. Ellen Pawlikowski
At a ceremony last June at the Women in Military Service Memorial, Ellen M. Pawlikowski '78, was promoted to the rank of four-star general in the U.S. Air Force. Just the third woman in the branch’s history to receive a fourth star, Pawlikowski directs the 80,000-person Air Force Materiel Command, whose stated mission is to “equip the Air Force for world-dominant airpower.” As she puts it, “We make sure everybody’s got food, but we’re also deciding on the look of the jet my granddaughter’s going to fly when she’s 25 years old.” Did Pawlikowski, a chemical engineer urged by NJIT professors to pursue thermodynamics research at Berkeley, ever imagine she would become a four-star general? “Absolutely not!” she replies. In the interview that follows, she touches on her unusual path to the Air Force, the highlights of a fast-moving career that led to work on nuclear weapon monitors, airborne lasers and chemical and biological weapons defense, what it’s like to manage town-sized Air Force bases and the experiences of women in the military.
How did you choose a career in the Air Force?
I had no military background whatsoever before I got into college. My only real exposure was living through the Vietnam War as a child. So I joined Air Force ROTC when I got to NJIT, more out of curiosity, and ended up staying for two reasons: I liked the atmosphere and I liked the camaraderie. When I got to NJIT in 1974 it was a total commuter school, and there were fraternities, but no sororities. There was very little of that collegiate social environment, particularly available to women. It wasn’t that we were excluded – it just wasn’t there. So my affinity for ROTC came from knowing that it was a place to go and socialize. We loved the lounge. It was a single room in the basement of Eberhardt Hall, and it served as our office for conducting ROTC activities, but also as a place to relax and study between classes. Since NJIT was at that time a commuter school, a place to hang your hat on campus was a precious commodity.
I did not join ROTC for the money. In fact, I was not a scholarship recipient in my first year, because ROTC scholarships were not available for freshman women. You could only get a scholarship if you were a pilot, and women couldn’t be pilots then. At that time, during what I call ‘the last great energy crisis,’ I was a chemical engineer and I had three different scholarships my sophomore year from chemical companies. After working during the summer and then part-time for a private company – which I really enjoyed – I nevertheless decided I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life making money for somebody else. I liked being part of something connected to a cause, and I wanted to use those talents for other greater purposes. I didn't have any grand ambitions for Air Force service. I wanted to be a development engineer and learn as much as I could. I didn't look past the first four years. That’s why I signed an ROTC contract my sophomore year, and I received a scholarship the next year.
Did you ever imagine yourself rising to the level of four-star general?
Absolutely not! You have to remember the circumstances back then. Women couldn’t be in operational career fields, and the environment was not conducive to women staying in the military long-term. It was a time when women in uniform could be discharged from service if they became pregnant or even adopted a child. However, I kept getting opportunities. The Air Force just kept connecting me with opportunities that offered me something new and interesting to do.
My early assignments were driven by the Air Force’s needs for B-52 radar navigators. So my assignments more or less followed my husband’s (Paul Pawlikowski '76) assignments. My first job was in a laboratory that analyzed samples of materials from around the world monitoring for nuclear weapon materials. I started designing equipment for gas separations. But before long, the laboratory director promoted me to be in charge of the mass spectrometers and microbeam instruments. I didn't have a lot of technical depth in these areas, but the director recognized my ability to learn quickly and to lead people. It was a real challenge to get up to speed on the technology while also leading young Airmen who were our technicians. It was in this job that I realized how much I enjoyed the combination of challenging technical problems and leading people at the same time. Opportunities like these are what kept me in the Air Force.
Can you describe a typical day on the job?
For me, it’s been very eye-opening to understand the full scope of the command to ultimately make sure our Air Force is ready when we need it. I’ve been a part of Air Force Materiel Command, off and on, for about a third of my career. Every time I see and notice different pieces of it. The other thing that’s amazed me is the talent and capability of the command’s personnel. They are so smart and so dedicated, and it’s very heartwarming to me. One of the things you’ve got to realize is when there are 80,000 people in your command, you have to entrust a few jobs to others. You can’t do it all yourself. On a typical day, there are meetings where I’m collecting data – the information I need to fit into my strategic thinking or get things done. At another set of meetings, I’m asked to make a decision to go in direction A or direction B.
I spend a third of my time on the road. For example, during the week after Thanksgiving last year I went down to Eglin Air Force Base, Fla. This is a base within our command, which means that we own the little city on it, if you will. We’re responsible for all of the roads and even the commodes there. But the Air Force Research Lab is there, too. That’s where they’re doing research on new weapons and flying test aircraft at our center there. So I met with leadership, took facility tours, and did a commander’s call, meaning I go out and talk to the Airmen about what’s happening in the Air Force and where the command is headed. You might say a good portion of my day is framing information and making decisions based on it. The other portion of my day is spent communicating to the workforce what those strategic decisions are.
We are in the process right now, for example, of improving the way we manage the workforce. I recently decided to transition the command from one type of civilian personnel management system to a new one, and we’re in a kind of demonstration phase. Building up to that decision we had a lot of discussion about the challenges, because we believe we need to better develop and mature our civilian workforce to ensure they have the right skills in the future. This system provides more flexibility with personnel processes, so that people are in assignments that are the right fit and can be compensated accordingly for those contributions. Like most things, there were folks not in favor of it and folks who were, so I had to be the one to make the decision. It’s a big decision because it impacts roughly 60,000 people – about 20,000 of us in AFMC are military personnel and the rest are civilians.
Another kind of decision I make is how to provide the support for a new aircraft, like the F-35A (Lightning II), for example. The F-35 is the Air Force’s fifth-generation fighter aircraft, and it’s supposed to replace other aging fighter aircraft we’ve been using for more than 20 years or so. We need to figure out, for instance, where to do the repairs and provide other logistical support.
What future technologies are we investing in now?
We have what we call game-changer technologies. One of these is hypersonics – the ability to travel at extremely fast speeds of Mach 5 or 6. This will enable us to get a weapon on a target very quickly from a long distance. Right now, if we had a threat in Syria, we would have to have airplanes close enough to be able to launch an attack. With hypersonics, we would be able to launch from the United States and get there in a matter of minutes.
Another game-changing technology is directed energy. This is lasers and high-powered microwaves. For those of us who grew up with Star Wars and Star Trek – it’s not quite the hand-held thing you saw – but a technology that again allows us to get power, if you will, on a target from a very long distance. Autonomy is a third game-changer. This allows us to have devices like robots that can not only operate on their own and think, but also interact as a human. So, you might have a jet with a drone, and that drone flies like a wingman would in the plane. I’ve talked about using swarming drones as a weapon. But to swarm, you still need some level of autonomy. Those are the three big areas we consider the game-changers that we’re investing in right now.
There is one other area I see as a game-changer: additive manufacturing. It relates directly to how we support our installations and weapons systems. If you look at what I have to do as part of this command, it’s getting supplies all over the world and making sure we have the right things in the right place and at the right time. I wouldn’t have to be shipping parts if I could just manufacture them in place where they’re needed. Say I have a bunch of aircraft, like C-130s, at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, and there are parts I need to replace on a periodic basis. Instead of buying them and stockpiling them, I could just have a 3-D printer and all the materials on-site to make the parts I need.
Can you name a couple of peak experiences in the military?
The one I highlight the most is when I spent five years as laser program director of the airborne laser, which I know sounds like something out of science fiction. It was a 747 model that had a chemical laser in the back, and it fired the laser through a set of very sophisticated optics via a special nose on the airplane. We were going to use it to blow up missiles like Scuds, which were used against the U.S. in Desert Storm. The airborne laser allows you to go long distances with a very high-energy laser. It was an extremely challenging program and also extremely challenging from a political perspective. The political challenges stemmed from differing opinions between the President and Congress on how to approach missile defense. As that debate continued, we would often find the program budget cut or funds added, depending on whose opinion carried the votes. I was no longer on the program when we were finally able to shoot down the missile, but I was there when we fired the big laser test at that first target. So after four-and-half years of daily work on the project, it was very rewarding to see that happen.
The other career highlight was when I spent three years in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. In that role, I was responsible for chemical and biological defense after Desert Storm broke out. We were trying to figure out what we needed to do to protect against biological agents, and one of the answers was to vaccinate people. This was a very difficult decision for the military to make because there were concerns about the vaccine’s side effects. My job was to make sure we had the right technical information to guide the decision. I was with the Undersecretary of the Navy at the time we made the decision – ‘we’ being the Department of Defense, as the decision was made at the highest level with the Secretary of Defense involved – and we were able to lay out a strategy that enabled us to vaccinate people to ensure their safety. So, when I think about contributions, there were literally thousands of lives potentially saved by providing a solution to protect against a biological weapon.
Can you describe your experiences as a woman in the military?
To a degree, some of my experiences as a woman in the military are hard to distinguish from those of being an engineer. When I started at NJIT, I was part of the largest women’s class to ever come in, but even then – throughout most of my ROTC career, as well as my career at NJIT – I was the only woman or one of only two women in any class. Many of the attitudes that made it challenging were as much prevalent in society as they were in the military. In the military, there were more direct institutional barriers concerning, say, becoming a pilot, a navigator or a missileer. On the engineering school side, it was less spoken but more understood that there were certain obstacles. We lived with, for example, one physics professor who started every class with, ‘Gentleman, this is what we’re going to do today.’ For the most part, even though we like to say engineering is a male-dominated field, I can tell you that I’ve met very few engineers who cared whether you were a man or a woman. They just cared about your capabilities. People asked if I had a hard time in class. I will tell you, whether it was at graduate or undergraduate school, I never had trouble finding a lab partner.
I will also tell you from my professional experience that I believe the military is more open, more ready than other environments to acknowledge and recognize the value of providing opportunities to 100 percent of the population, rather than only 50 percent. Initially there were barriers, because there were limited places, and the attitudinal and cultural barriers that went along with that. When I was a young officer, for example, one of my instructors was giving us feedback and he said to me, ‘You did really, really well, far better than I ever thought any woman would do in this group.’ He then proceeded to tell me, ‘but I’m not going to make you a distinguished graduate because these other male officers need it more. They’re going to go off to be generals.’ Those institutional restrictions are essentially gone now. Over the years we have gradually eliminated most of those.
For more on Gen. Pawlikowski's high-flying career, read on!
Click here to read the entire, 15-question interview in which Gen. Pawlikowski explains how a chemical engineer evolved into an acquisitions executive, opines on the importance of technical skills, reflects on women’s impact on military culture and describes how her forthright and determined mother’s early experience with health challenges shaped her own and the general’s lives.
By Tracey Regan