The Odyssey, Not the Career

I have never had a career. I want to say that plainly, at the start, because it is the truest thing I know about my own life, and because it took me the better part of four decades to be able to say it without apology.

What I have had instead is something closer to what the Greeks meant by an odyssey: not a road but a voyage, undertaken because the winds and the gods and one's own stubbornness kept redirecting the journey, with no guarantee of the shape it would take until long after it had already taken it. You only see the shore you were making for once you have, half by accident, arrived.

This is where the phrase "thinking outside the box" has always struck me as strange, almost as if it were describing a foreign country whose customs I'd heard about but never visited. The phrase presumes a box. It presumes that most people, most of the time, are working inside some agreed structure, a discipline, a bureaucracy, a set of categories that everyone tacitly accepts and that every so often, as a special act of creativity or courage, someone steps outside it.

But I have never experienced the box as a default condition to be escaped. I have never quite known how to think inside one. When I was studying under Brzezinski at Columbia, the box would have been to treat Soviet nuclear policy as a self-contained technical subject, insulated from French politics, from the sociology of European elites, from the psychology of alliance management.

Nobody who actually wanted to understand the Cold War could afford that box. The subject itself refused to sit still inside a discipline. If you wanted to understand why French nuclear policy looked the way it did, you had to understand de Gaulle's wounded pride about 1940, the peculiar independence of the French officer corps, the way Soviet planners thought about escalation, and the raw fact that nuclear weapons had made certain older categories of strategic thought simply obsolete. There was no box that contained all of that. There still isn't.

So, when people later called this kind of work "interdisciplinary" or praised it for its "outside the box thinking," I always felt a small, private confusion, because from the inside it never felt like an achievement. It felt like the only way to actually see the thing I was looking at. Calling it outside-the-box thinking is a bit like calling a fish "outside the desert." The fish isn't achieving anything remarkable by living in water. It would be remarkable, and probably fatal, for the fish to try living in the desert because someone insisted that's where the career path was.

I think this is worth saying honestly because so much of professional life, especially in policy and defense circles, is organized around box-shaped incentives even when the problems themselves are not box-shaped. Institutions like boxes. They fund boxes, promote people who stay inside their box, they build career ladders that only make sense if the discipline holds still. A defense analyst who works on air power is expected to stay in air power. A person trained in Soviet studies is expected to remain a Soviet-studies person even after the Soviet Union no longer exists, or to gracefully retire once the box itself is dissolved.

I watched a great many capable people get trapped this way, not because they lacked the wit to see connections across categories, but because the categories were what their institutions paid them to defend. My own path, not having gone through those institutions in the expected way, never gave me a box worth defending.

What it gave me instead was a network — collaborators like Ed Timperlake, with whom the "kill web" idea took shape not as a single insight but as years of conversation that kept refusing to stay inside the older categories of platform-centric warfare; like Kenneth Maxwell, with whom the connections between eighteenth-century Atlantic history and twenty-first-century Indo-Pacific strategy turned out, disconcertingly, not to be a stretch at all, but a continuation of the same old questions about chokepoints, empire, and the fragility of maritime order. like my wife Murielle, whose French vantage point on European defense has spent thirty years reminding me that there is no "American" box either, only a set of American assumptions that look, from Paris, exactly as parochial as anyone else's.

An odyssey, unlike a career, has no natural retirement age, because it was never organized around institutional time in the first place. Careers end when the institution stops needing you, or when your rung is filled, or when the pension math works out. Odysseys end when the voyage is over, and you often don't know that in advance either.

I am, by the calendar, well past the age at which a career would have concluded. And yet the work has not concluded, because it was never a career to begin with, it is still the same voyage, now touching Guam and the Luzon Corridor and the Netherlands and Canada as connective nodes in a trans-Atlantic tiltrotor architecture, now returning to Australia for the Williams Foundation seminars, now circling back, as odysseys do, to older questions about allied cohesion that I first encountered as a young man trying to understand why France would not simply do what Washington wanted.

Odysseus, after all, did not sail in a straight line either. He kept getting blown off course toward islands that turned out, afterward, to have taught him something he needed for Ithaca. I have been blown toward MISR officers and drone wars and Marine Corps transformation and CH-53K lift requirements, and each time it has felt less like a detour and more like the sea doing what the sea does, carrying you toward the next necessary thing whether or not it was on your itinerary.

There is a cost to this, and I don't want to romanticize it away. An odyssey does not offer the reassurances a career offers. There is no professional society that fully claims you because you belong to several at once and fully to none. There is no single credentialing body that can certify what you do, because what you do keeps changing its shape. When you meet someone at a conference and they ask, "What do you do?", there is no clean one-line answer, because the honest answer requires either five minutes or an evasion.

I have mostly stopped trying to compress it. I say I am a defense analyst, which is true, and then I let the actual texture of the work — kill webs, allied architecture, maritime autonomy, the history of Portuguese chokepoints, Marine Corps combat readiness — reveal itself only if the conversation goes on long enough to deserve it.

But there is also a freedom in it that I would not trade for the reassurances. Nobody can take away my box, because I never had one to lose. When institutions decide a subject is no longer fashionable, when "great power competition" replaces "counterinsurgency" as the phrase of the moment, or when a service branch's budget priorities shift and strand an entire cohort of specialists, the people who built their careers around the old box are stranded with it. I have simply never been stranded in that way because I was never standing on a single piece of ground.

When the Cold War ended and an entire generation of Soviet specialists found themselves professionally orphaned, the questions I had actually been pursuing, how do alliances hold together under strain, how does technology reorganize the categories of warfare, how do maritime chokepoints structure great-power behavior, turned out to still be exactly the right questions, just pointed at new geography. The box collapsed. The voyage did not, because it was never contained by the box in the first place.

I think what I am really trying to say is that "thinking outside the box" flatters an achievement that, for some of us, was never an achievement at all for it was simply the absence of an alternative.

I did not choose to think this way as a strategy. I have never been able to think any other way, and I suspect that if I had tried to force myself into a single box for the sake of a tidier career, I would have done second-rate work in it, because my mind does not naturally stay where it's put.

The people who do their best work inside well-defined boxes are not lesser thinkers than I am. They are simply built differently, and disciplines need them, because depth within a box is its own kind of rigor that breadth across boxes cannot replace. But I was not built that way, and pretending otherwise for the sake of a conventional career would have been its own kind of failure, a fish insisting it could learn to love the desert, if only it tried hard enough.

So, when I look back now, at four decades that a résumé would struggle to summarize and a career counselor would have found alarming, I don't see a lack of focus. I see a single sustained question, restated across geographies and technologies and eras: how do serious actors — nations, alliances, services, individuals — organize themselves to act coherently under conditions of danger and uncertainty?

That question does not respect academic departments. It does not respect service branch boundaries. It does not respect the line between history and current events, or between an analyst's desk and a defense company's engineering floor. It has taken me from Brzezinski's seminar room to the flight line at Decimomannu, from French nuclear doctrine to Ghost Shark unmanned vessels off the Australian coast, from eighteenth-century Atlantic trade routes to the Luzon Economic Corridor, because that is where the question kept leading.

An odyssey does not end with a gold watch. It ends, if it ends at all, with the traveler recognizing the shore he has been making for all along and even then, I suspect, only provisionally, because the next question is usually already visible on the horizon.

I am content with that. I was never going to be the kind of person who thought inside a box, because I never quite understood what the box was for. I only ever understood the voyage, and the peculiar, unglamorous discipline of following a real question wherever it actually leads, institutional convenience be damned.

That is not a career. It is, I think, something better. messier, less secure, but truer to the actual shape of the problems I have spent my life trying to understand.

Robbin Laird, Ph.D. has been a foreign policy and defense analyst for 49 years. His most recent book is Lessons in Military Transformation.