Originally Broadcast April 8, 2013

Arlington, VA

Michael Keegan: Welcome to The Business of Government Hour. I’m Michael Keegan, your host and managing editor of The Business of Government Magazine.  

The provision of health services is a critical and significant mission within each branch of the US military. The US Department of Navy’s, Bureau of Medicine and Surgery has a long and cherished tradition of serving and safeguarding the health of its service members and their families. In fact, the Foundation of Navy Medicine is force health protection and that is ensuring the availability of a medically ready, healthy, and fit force. It is what it does. It is why it exists.

Whether at sea or on the battlefield or at home, Navy Medicine also plays a central role in the most effective joint casualty care and management system in military history, a system that has saved thousands of lives that otherwise would have been lost on the battlefield.

What are Navy Medicine’s strategic priorities? What is force health protection? How is the continual care for military personnel being enhanced and strengthened and how is medical research and development helping Navy Medicine? We will explore these questions and so much more with our very special guest, Vice Admiral Matthew Nathan, Surgeon General of the US Navy.

So Admiral Nathan, thank you for joining us today. It’s great to have you.

Matthew Nathan: Thank you, Michael. It’s a pleasure to be here with both you and Gio.

Michael Keegan: Also joining our conversation from IBM is Gio Patterson. Gio, welcome as always.

Gio Patterson: Thank you.

Michael Keegan: So Admiral, many are familiar with the US Navy but may not be as familiar with the US Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery also known as Navy Medicine. Would you share some of the history with us and when was it established and how does it support DOD’s overall mission?

Matthew Nathan: Well, Navy Medicine formally came into line in the 1840’s as the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery to support the navy from a seagoing aspect and from those land elements. Some people aren’t aware that we also are responsible for the care of the marine corps. So the marines and the navy are under our charge for healthcare as well as their families. We were designed at first to basically coordinate the activities of healthcare at sea and throughout the century have migrated to being in care of the sailors, the marines, their families, those who have retired and left a legacy for us to follow, and now we are very much diversified into significant research areas.

And as I like to tell people, I’m a little parochial, I admit, but I like to tell people our medical service is really responsible for providing care above the ocean and aviation, on the ocean and our surface navy, below the ocean and our submarine force, and then on land as we support the marines and the special operators such as seal groups and EOD groups. So we have a pretty wide portfolio that has developed throughout the years and our job is really one of two missions and it is one to be ready.

And when people ask me what business I am in, I like to tell them I am in the readiness business. My job is to be ready for the next improvised explosive device that goes off in Afghanistan. My job is to be ready for the next mom who has gone into labor and needs her delivery at the threshold of one of our hospitals. I consider both to be paramount in readiness and so there is an expectation on the Navy Medical Department, both from my bosses, the Chief of Naval Operations and the Commandant of the Marine Corps to be there when they need us and to absolutely bring the best we have.

Michael Keegan: Admiral, with such a broad and critical mission, would you give us a sense of the scale of operation for Navy Medicine? How is your office organized? What is the size of your staff, and perhaps gives us a sense of the geographical disbursement of Navy Medicine?

Matthew Nathan: Sure, so we have a motto, Michael, in Navy Medicine, which says world-class care, anytime, anywhere. And because we are a maritime centric force and we support a maritime centric force, the navy and marine corps, we basically call ourselves the away team. Our job is to be away from home. Unlike, perhaps, the army and the air force which are more garrison based services, and when needed deploy en masse to a foreign shore or to a foreign area of conflict. The navy’s job is to be out and about most of the time, controlling the water ways and notarial (ph) areas and to be engaged in trying to put out small fires before they become big ones, be it somewhere in the Persian Gulf or the South China Sea or the Atlantic or the Pacific.

So Navy Medicine must be agile to be with them. So if somebody said to me where do you like to sort of stay in one place, our answer is we don’t like to stay in one place. We like to have bases from which we work but our job is to be out and about and be very responsive for any need that may come up. That said, we’re organized with regions at home. We have the Navy Medicine East Region headquartered out of Portsmouth, Virginia, a personal care facility there. Navy Medicine West Region out of San Diego, Navy Medical Center San Diego, and the National Capital Authority Region out of the Bethesda area. Those are our three regions that support and headquarter all of our military treatment facilities which include tertiary hospitals, family practice teaching hospitals, and smaller hospitals scattered throughout the world.

And then we are task organized through our support to the warfighter as we provide Navy Medicine, what we call surgeons, to the various fleets. So the fleet forces command and the pacific command have surgeons that represent their medical needs to them and we have surgeons for all of our numbered fleets; the fourth fleet, the fifth fleet, the sixth fleet, the seventh fleet. I had a job once as the seventh fleet surgeon.

We have a public health system which is headquartered in Virginia and that is responsible in large part for the preventive medicine efforts that go on to maintain a war fighting capability and it varies from protection for insect and infectious disease vectors to keep troops from becoming ill or injured, all the way to public safety, looking at vehicle mishaps, looking at any sort of foodborne type issues, and then we have our research units.

I think many people are surprised to see in Navy Medicine that we have had research units in Cairo for over sixty years with uninterrupted service there. They have a robust research department down in Lima, Peru. These facilities do amazing engagement with the local countries, the host nations, neighboring countries. Really, I think, as much as they find new science and team up with host nations to find new ways to combat illness and injury, they also, I think, show other nations American compassion and desire to participate and be a team. And so that is in large part how we are organized.

Gio Patterson: Admiral, now that you have given us a view of the global operation, maybe you could tell us more about your specific responsibilities as a US Navy Surgeon General and the Chief of the Navy BUMED? What are your specific responsibilities and duties?

Matthew Nathan: Well, my job is to be responsible to the Chief of Naval Operations and the Commandant of the Marine Corps and informally I would say that my job is to make sure that we have the best medical team available to both prepare the warfighter in the event that they need to go into harm’s way, to protect the warfighter in the event that they have something occur while in harm’s way or while in deployment, and then to maintain a confidence in the navy and marine corps that their families will be taken care of.

I think both Michael and Gio, you would agree that it’s very hard for you to keep your mind on the job if you were here or anywhere else, if you have a loved one who is suffering, who is ill, and you can’t be there. You would be very preoccupied by that. So we do everything we can to instill confidence in our troops and our crews that while they’re away from home or even at home, that we’re going to be there for their families. We’re going to be there to take care of them and they can concentrate on other things because the medical care is not going to be an issue.

Formally, my task is really to provide the manning and training and equipping of medical forces that lie resident in the United States Navy.

Michael Keegan: So Admiral, regarding your role and responsibility, what are your top challenges? What are the three top challenges you face and how have you sought to address them?

Matthew Nathan: Well, so Michael, that’s a great question because we’re coming now off of over ten years of war. This is unheralded. We have not seen this in our country’s history and it has done a couple things. One, it has lead us to some tremendous innovations in combat casualty care and deployment medicine but it has also been very taxing and it has created a cadre of service men and service women who have challenges that we hadn’t seen or hadn’t seen to this degree in such protracted warfare.

There is an expectation and I believe it is quite legitimate on me and on my Navy Medical Department that we be a marquee organization when it comes to peacetime healthcare. And what do I mean by that? If somebody walks into Bethesda Naval Hospital or into San Diego or Jacksonville, they should expect to have the kind of compassion, care, and professionalism that they would expect at any marquee organization, be it Georgetown, be it Hopkins, be it Stanford.

On the other hand, those organizations don’t go to war and we do, and so my other challenge is I have to maintain a vibrant readiness force that can deploy at a moment’s notice and that can be ready to operate in what could be an unfamiliar environment. So my challenge is to maintain the quality care that somebody seeks in one of our medical facilities and at the same time be able to deploy and maintain first class combat support care in a hostile or even simply an austere environment.

Like everything else, in healthcare, we’re not immune from the American healthcare system, it’s expensive, and the cost of healthcare to the Department of Defense among all of the services has been escalating at unprecedented rates. And so the Secretary of Defense and the secretaries of the services as well as the executive branch is depending on us to look for new and innovative ways to reduce the cost of healthcare in the Department of Defense.

Just as the leadership of this nation is looking for some sort of game changer to try to bring down the cost to the average American for healthcare and to increase access, we’re looking for innovative ways that we can give some resources back to the Department of Defense and without sacrificing any of the quality that people have become accustomed to in military healthcare.

Gio Patterson: Admiral, along with the challenges you have encountered leading Navy Medicine, can you also discuss your unanticipated or unexpected surprises? To that end, what has surprised you the most since taking over this role?

Matthew Nathan: Well Gio, it’s a great question because if you had asked me three years ago would I be looking at the normal budget challenges that occur in healthcare, I would say absolutely. If you’d say are we going to season that gingerly with sequestration and continuing resolutions and try to figure out what won’t be involved in those, we hadn’t really expected that.

When I used to speak to civic organizations over a year ago and they would say what do you think the impacts of sequestration are going to be, I ,like many leaders throughout the government, would say well, hopefully it won’t come to that. We think that maybe sequestration won’t be a big issue. But it has come to that and I will say that my leaders have been very supportive in trying to minimize the effects of sequestration when it comes to the provision of medical care and the ability to protect our fighting forces. We’re moving resources around and we’re shifting assets so that nobody who is deployed or nobody who is in an austere environment will feel any effect of this.

But none the less, depending on how long and how significant the budget situation goes on, my job is to work through that. My job is to give a coherent plan to my boss on how I am going to meet their mission and yet be faithful to some of the budget challenges that we have.

Michael Keegan: Well this environment, Admiral, requires a real sense of leadership and given your experience as a physician and a commander, what are the characteristics of an effective leader in your mind and has the model of leadership changed because of the complex challenges being faced today?

Matthew Nathan: There is no question that I think leaders are faced with a dynamic that goes up and down. In our case, we have an organization that has both been at war for ten years and in Navy Medicine, I use the term we’ve been all in. What do I mean by that? We’ve been one of the most heavily deployed aspects of the United States Navy in the war. For one reason, when you’re at war for that long, you’re going to have to cycle people back into theater (ph) and back into other deployed units fairly often.

The largest toll is taken on our surgical specialists and our combat trauma specialists and our mental health specialists. Most people don’t realize that of all of the navy forces that have been deployed in the last ten years to Iraq and Afghanistan, all navy, all navy ranks and rates and types, that over fifty percent of those wounded in action have been from Navy Medicine and over one third of those killed in action have been from Navy Medicine.

Now, most of those are a footprint with the marine corps who are side-by-side, organically assigned to the marine corps. But it speaks, I think, to the dedication and to the heroism and the commitment that the United States Navy corpsmen and the doctors and the nurses and the dentists and the medical service corps officers have accrued throughout history. The United States Navy corpsman is the most decorate rating in the military and it is simply because their job is when everything breaks loose and everybody is trying to either sort of hunker down or get back, their job is to run in. And so they are an amazing group of individuals.

One of the challenges I have as a leader now is maintaining buoyancy and maintaining optimism and encouragement for a force that sometimes can be fatigued, compassion fatigue. One of the interesting things about Navy Medicine is I may have a doctor, a nurse, or a corpsman who is assigned for months and months and months in Afghanistan or Iraq, taking care of some of the most critically injured people in history. And we can talk about some of the advances that have been made there but none the less, they’ll see things that maybe trauma surgeons or trauma teams or other hospital facilities won’t see in a lifetime. They’ll see that in the time they’re over there.

Then they come back, we give them a break, but then they come back and they work in a hospital and they’re taking care of these folks who have now been evacuated back to these hospitals. So some of them don’t really get a respite. So it’s up to me as a leader to make sure I create a culture that monitors and provides adequate relief and visibility for the caregiver. We call it care for the caregiver because it’s bad enough if somebody is injured. It’s compounded if the people who are supposed to take care of the injured are failing themselves. So we work very hard as leaders to make sure that we monitor our troops, monitor the health of them.

As you know, in this war, because of the advances in body armor, because of the tremendous advances in resuscitative care that really have changed the game completely compared to the first World War, second, Korea, Vietnam, your chance of surviving heinous wounds now is just incrementally so much bigger and so much better than it was in the past. Now that’s created a population of people now who have more amputations and do have more traumatic brain injury and, to some extent, more post-traumatic stress.

So my job is to figure out how to best approach those signature injuries, make sure that we create the best care in the world for the people who are afflicted by those, and at the same time monitor my own personnel and make sure that they’re not going to be consumed by this to the point of exhaustion or the point – because I will tell you Michael and I’ll tell you Gio that in one of my previous jobs I was the commander at Walter Reid Bethesda.  I was on deck when the National Naval Medical Center, the navy’s medical center, merged with Walter Reid to create one large, happy family. Not always happy but getting happier every day as you can imagine any cultural merger that occurs in the country.

And the good news was that they both have one thing very much in common and that is the un-abiding desire to see the best care for anybody of any service. But that said, I would walk around and I would see nurses that looked tired taking care of wounded warriors and I would say why don’t you take a break. Let me send you to another hospital for a while just to take care of more traditional kinds of illnesses and they would refuse. They would absolutely refuse because they felt like this was their family they were taking care of. And we learned the hard way that if we didn’t force them to leave, they would sometimes break on us and so that is the dedication and the compassion. These people won’t raise their hands themselves to take a time out. So we have learned to do that.

So I instill that premise and that is a little bit different than, let’s say, to the CEO of another civilian medical facility or system because although I’m very proud and respectful of the dedication of our civilian medical systems and the doctors and the nurses and the roles they 

play – oh, by the way, they don’t go to war at the same time. So I have to figure that into my dynamic of my leadership.

Michael Keegan: What are Navy Medicine’s strategic priorities? We will ask Vice Admiral Matthew Nathan, Surgeon General of the US Navy, when our conversation continues on The Business of Government Hour.

(Intermission)

Welcome back to The Business of Government Hour. I’m Michael Keegan, your host, and our guest today is Vice Admiral Matthew Nathan, Surgeon General of the US Navy. Also joining our conversation from IBM is Gio Patterson.

So Admiral Nathan, you had mentioned that Navy Medicine must perform from the sea to the land the toughest environments and across the spectrum of the military mission but to do it successfully requires a strategic vision and for you to chart a course for your folks, for the folks that support you. Would you outline the strategic vision and briefly describe your core priorities?

Matthew Nathan: Sure, so I think that we’ve tried to be as concise and succinct as possible with our strategic vision. I always worry about somebody who outlines a strategic vision of ten or twelve things and then people say well where do I start? And I wanted to keep it simple in the sense that if I could walk around any of my battalions, my hospitals, my ships and talk to my medical personnel, they could tell me what the three things were.

And it starts with readiness. Readiness is job one for us. As we have talked about before, that is the business I am in. I am expected to be able to answer the bell anywhere, anytime around the world. I like to think of us as part of the navy Marine Corps team as sort of the world’s 911. If there is a foreign land or an environment somewhere that gets into trouble either through a manmade disaster or through a natural disaster, we would like to believe that we can be on scene very soon.

Second is value. Value comes back to the point where we have to constantly be analyzing what we do, how we do it, and how much bang for the buck. I tell my people it’s really sort of a fraction described as quality times capability divided by cost and so what does that mean? That means if I am doing a certain procedure in a certain hospital and I do it fairly rarely but it costs me a pretty penny to do it, as much as I might like being able to have that procedure in my portfolio, does it make more sense to export that to a local hospital nearby? Or do I need that procedure to maintain a skills preservation for my doctors when they go overseas?

I have to constantly be analyzing that because in the past I would tell you when cost was not on the forefront of the military medical leaders, we simply put safety and we put readiness as job one and we didn’t worry too much about the cost. Now we have to evaluate everything we do and look at it from the standpoint of is it worth it. And whatever we do, we’re going to do first class and safely but let’s make sure our portfolio includes only those things that really bring value to our system.

Then the third is joint. I need my people to start thinking more and more joint. I am a believer because of my experience at Walter Reid Bethesda where we sort of built this, I call it a Reese’s peanut butter cup where one hospital brought the chocolate, the other brought the peanut butter. We put them together and we have this synergy of best practices that occurred. I have seen the utility and the value of doing things jointly.

In addition, it doesn’t make good business sense for the army, the air force, and the navy to have three different medical systems that use three different types of, for instance, MIT technologies, pharmaceutical systems, education training systems. Why not figure out a way to standardize those, create best practices, share those among the services, reduce redundancies, and create more jointness? Not going as far as the purple suit that some people talk about which is everybody will just simply wear one uniform and we’ll sort of homogenize the army and the navy and the air force.

I think it is critically important that we preserve the traditions and the cultural ethos of the services but we can certainly do that while creating much more alignment and much more joint care. When I run into resistant audiences at times, I remind them that the person who has been critically injured on the battlefield, neither that soldier or airman or marine or their family is worried one bit about what uniform the person is wearing who is going to save their life. And we’re operating jointly in the war where if are injured, you may be treated on the field by a navy corpsman. You may be medevac’d by an army helicopter. You may be medevac’d to an air force hospital, and then you may be shipped back to an army, navy medical center. So it just follows that we need to look at that more.

So when I go to my hospitals, my commanders already know if they want to get brownie points, they have prepped their crew so that when I walk up to the youngest most junior civilian or enlisted member there and say what is Navy Medicine’s strategic value? They better pop off readiness, value, joint sir. And then the commander of course is hoping that I won’t try to ask them questions about each one. But that is our vision.

Michael Keegan: So Admiral, what are the guiding principles that frame your command philosophy?

Matthew Nathan: Well I think throughout time what served me well is in addition to the – to the what I consider to be the mission and business metrics and the readiness and the value joint which I think gives people the priorities of what we need to be doing, as far as working together and as being a successful unit, be it a small unit or a large medical system, I tell my people I believe in ship, shipmate, and self.

And in the navy we say you’ve got to take care of the ship because if you don’t and you lose the ship, nothing else matters. You yourself are now lost and the mission is lost. Shipmate; we’ve got to look after each other. I think one of the reasons I have stayed in the military for a career, and I trained in an academic residency, a non-military residency, so I have maintained great friendships with people I trained with, you know, over thirty years ago. But one of the things I have enjoyed is the covenant relationship that we have with our people. The fact that our job is to monitor their health, monitor their welfare and to, and some would say intrude when necessary to help people through situations and take care of them when they’re not doing well. And that’s a shipmate taking care of a shipmate.

And then self, taking care of yourself, raising your hand when you need help, letting people know if you’re not doing well, letting people know if you need help either because of a personal issue or a professional one. You can’t handle what you have been asked to do and raise your hand and do it. So I have tried very hard to create non-stigma, guilt-free environment where somebody can raise their hand and say I need help, where somebody can be constantly vigilant about the people they work around and notice subtle or dramatic changes, and recognize that they have to take care of the mission around them, in this case the ship or that may be the marine unit you’re assigned to, or it might be the naval hospital you work for.

Gio Patterson: Admiral, Navy Medicine is in the business of force health protection. Would you elaborate on the key components of force health protection and how it relates to force readiness, ensuring your service stays sharp, lean, and ready anytime, anywhere?

Matthew Nathan: That’s a great question, Gio. If I were to ask you during, say, in the African conflicts in the desert, in North Africa, and in parts of the war in the Pacific and some of the jungles, what a commander feared the most that would impact the mission the most and would possibly cause them to lose capability to fight; the enemy would be high on the list but it wouldn’t be top. The top thing would be illness, dysentery, malaria, infectious disease, what is called jungle rot by allowing moisture and fungus and not being able to clean the feet and that sort of thing.

Those would bring a unit to its knees much faster than the enemy could and so our job is to make sure that when somebody goes into an austere environment, a hostile environment, all the way from a humanitarian disaster which may be an earthquake or a tsunami or a hurricane, to kinetic war, that they go in as protected as possible so that they can be at their peak, they can be on their game, they can concentrate all of their facilities on the job at hand. They will have the best equipment to protect the eyes, to protect the ears. They will have the best immunizations to ward off infections. They will have the best ready medical supplies near them to take care of small injuries before they worsen, and they will have the best major resuscitative equipment to take care of catastrophic injuries and catastrophic illness.

One of the great changes that has occurred in combat casualty care is that over the years, if you looked at World War I, II, Korea, Vietnam, if you were catastrophically injured in the field, from the time you were injured to the time you eventually made it back to the states to a tertiary care facility like Bethesda or a veteran’s hospital was forty-five to sixty days. So we provided care in theater and we believed in sort of stabilizing in theater before getting back to the states, so forty-five to sixty days.

In this war, from the time you are catastrophically injured until the time you arrive at the bed here at Bethesda is three to five days and that has mostly been facilitated by the on scene resuscitative care and by the great air force medical evacuation system which has these flying ICUs which can fly the most significantly injured and out people in the world safely across the ocean.

Gio Patterson: That’s great. Admiral, we heard you say one of the greatest honors of being in the Navy Medicine is the mission of supporting the marines on the battlefield. The continuum of care for combat wounded is unprecedented as you just shared with us. the survivability rate of nearly ninety-seven percent. Would you elaborate on your efforts to enhance and strengthen the continuum of care for military personnel from point of accession, through active service, to rehabilitation and transition?

Matthew Nathan: The continuum of care really encompasses what I guess could be described ironically as sort of a ballet or an orchestra of care that is facilitated across the join spectrum. So you are a warrior and you are significantly injured by an explosive device, by a gunshot wound, by a burn, and we’re seeing, you know, most of the changes now because we had a lot of vehicular accidents or injures and wounds in Iraq and we’re having mostly people on foot in Afghanistan because of the terrain differences.

And so you’re injured. Well, here is what has changed. So the corpsman or the medic who is here on scene now has updated tourniquet therapy, they have quit clotting substances they can give. They have body armor which protects. We have a medical evacuation system which is highly responsive and we’re very good at getting people within that first fifteen minutes to seventy-five minutes of what we call a platinum/golden hour of care to a resuscitative station where they can be resuscitated, reverse the shock.

That is a ballet of joint forces. For instance, if you look at Bastion in Afghanistan, that is some air force, navy, army, and British working that facility and then we have some joint forces in Bagram, and in Kandahar and other places. Then once you are stabilized, we get you out of there. The idea is not to hold onto you there. It’s not to do definitive care. It’s to package you up, get you stabilized, get you to Landstuhl Regional Army Medical Center where further stabilization is done, a little more sophisticated, but again not definitive therapy, just enough to get you stable for the flight back home.

Then the air force picks you up and flies you and gets you back to San Diego or Brooke Army Hospital or Walter Reid Bethesda and that is where really, I think the military excels from that point, and now we get you to a place where you need rehabilitation, prosthetic rehabilitation and also emotional rehabilitation. If you suffered TBI or post-traumatic stress, you know, how will we approach those injuries?

We work in concert with the VA because some of these injuries are going to be lifelong and they are going to require the VA to take off where the military left off. So we work with the VA poly trauma unit and the VA has some magnificent poly trauma units in Tampa, Florida and Richmond, Virginia, in Minneapolis, in Paulo Alto where they take some of the more devastating injuries that are going to require long-term therapy in those places.

But we work on the rehabilitation there and then we start to partner with our academic and private partners. One of those that was created through the Armed Forces Foundation was the NICoE on the campus at Bethesda, the National Intrepid Center of Excellence for Traumatic Brain Injury. It’s a very vexing injury.

We have had a number of amputations through this war. Sometimes people ask me why there are more amputations in this war than there were in others. There aren’t necessarily more but people are surviving them more and so you see more people come back rehabilitating from an amputation. But that number pales in comparison to the number of people who suffer traumatic brain injury and/or post-traumatic stress so we really also have to figure out how we’re going to create a collective across the country, partnering with civic organizations, with academic centers of excellence, the private sector, and the military and the VA sector to provide a soft landing for these folks all the way along.

One of the great lessons learned from Vietnam was that we just didn’t really recognize the role of post-traumatic stress and traumatic brain injury and how it could rob somebody if not aggressively treated and monitored. It could rob somebody of their ability to be productive and functional and have a goal oriented life, and a lot of these people ended up sort of driftless and that is morally wrong but it also, if you’re a civic organization or a city, you worry about the impact of that on your city.

So I go to civic organizations and I tell them let’s work together to figure out how to engage these folks, these veterans as they come back, and make sure that they don’t fall through the cracks and that we partner and learn things. And the good news is I think the country is turning too. The country gets this and we like to say if we can sort of steal the phrase, it takes a village to care for someone with traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress because it can’t be just one particular organization by themselves.

Michael Keegan: Well I’d like to go back, Admiral. You had mentioned earlier that the survivability rate, I think we said it was an upwards of ninety-seven percent and it takes folks three to five days to get to the states for care. But the greater rates are sort of a double-edged sword because it’s a positive but you’re also dealing with folks who, as you said, have severe injuries; amputations and what have you. These create new challenges and you touched on them but I would like for you to elaborate a little bit. What are you doing to address these challenges and what programs are available?

Matthew Nathan: There has been a tremendous impetus to try to address what I call a sort of good news problem, the good news meaning that, you know, we’ve had people return from the war. We’ve had a few soldiers and marines who have returned from the war who have been quadruple amputees. Now, you know, some people have said to me gosh, you’ve lost all of your limbs, is that, you know, is that worth it?

And my answer is these people – these heroes, they engage with their families. There are new technologies occurring. You may have seen recently there was a double arm transplant at Hopkins, so every day we’re learning something new about some of the physically devastating injuries with magnificent prosthetics and with regenerative medicine and with transplant medicine that I think is going to give people their lives back. But that is something that we hadn’t seen before because most times those kinds of injuries wouldn’t have survived.

Then you get into the traumatic brain injury which can vary from mild, just concussion, to the major, then open head injury, to the post-traumatic stress, and how do we approach that? And we’re looking very hard at innovative sciences. We have found now that complementary alternative medicine which, when I was in medical school if somebody had said we have an acupuncturist here and they want to put some needles in for your headache, I would say get out of here, you know. And now when I get a bad headache, where is that needle?

We’re finding that these kinds of things, bio-feedback mechanisms, hypnosis – I’m not saying that’s where the center of gravity of the care is, but I am just saying that we’ve opened the aperture to any and all possibilities now to find a way ahead for some of these folks.

The number one thing we have found, Michael, which has made a difference in our moderate to severe TBI patients and our post-traumatic stress patients, is a comprehensive multi-disciplinary approach to them, bringing them in at the same time, not only engaging them but engaging their families as well.

Here is what I like to say. If I could, I’ll illustrate by example. When I was the commander at Walter Reid Bethesda, I was seeing the new casualties that came in and we had a young marine who came in who had lost his leg pretty high up in the leg and part of his hand and his family had arrived. Because one of the things we do now in combat casualty care is we bring the families in right away. We fly them in the next day. Now that is good in that they can be there right away and it is bad because they haven’t really had time to adjust to what they have heard.

Remember in World War II, you had forty-five to sixty days to sort of adjust to the serious injuries that you heard about in your loved one. Now you may have two days to adjust and so you walk in the room and you see this catastrophically injured person and it takes a while to adjust. But none the less, the best chicken soup in the world for somebody who has been severely injured is to have their family or their loved ones or their friends nearby. It really makes a difference so we bring the family in.

So I walk in and this marine was fine. He had lost a leg and he was newly arrived and he was excited about going to the operating room and getting the touch-up changes and getting into the prosthetic rehabilitation. He had his young son with him. It looked like he was five or six and he had his wife with him and his son was saying in the course of the conversation, he was a little bit bewildered by all of this. I guess they had planned to go to Disney World at the end of the tour when he was coming home, but he came home early of course and now with an amputation. And his son said daddy, are we still going to Disney World?

And so the marine sort of saddened up and teared up a little bit and his wife teared up a little bit because they didn’t know what to say to the little boy looking at this missing leg and everything. I said well when are you going? He said well, we were supposed to go when I got back. That was about eight months from now. I said you’re going to go. I said eight or nine months? We’ll have you up, we’ll have you walking. Not only will your dad take you to Disney World, he’ll take you on every ride.

The little boy brightened up. The wife brightened up and the marine sort of beckoned me to him and I bent down. I said you know, I’m not making this up. He said, it’s not that sir. I didn’t like those rides to begin with.

So my point is that he will engage with his family again and I am not trivializing his injury, but he will be able to play catch with his son and laugh with his son and roll around on the floor with his son and carry his son on his back in a piggyback ride. If he had moderate to severe traumatic brain injury or post-traumatic stress, I couldn’t make that promise to him because that can take the whole family with it. The whole family can be consumed by the altered affect and personality and challenges of that and so we are really looking at ways to engage the family and the wounded warrior at the same time or the injured person at the same time through a lot of modalities; using more sophisticated sensors, more sophisticated therapies, using much more alternative therapies.

We used to reach for the prescription pad all of the time and we’re trying to do that as little as possible now. We’re trying to find finds to obviate pain using other systems, ways to obviate depression using other systems, using medication when we need to, absolutely, but trying to look for alternative methods that can be more holistic in approach the patient.

Michael Keegan: How is the continuum of care for military personnel being enhanced and strengthened? We will ask Vice Admiral Matthew Nathan, Surgeon General of the US Navy, when our conversation continues on The Business of Government Hour.

(Intermission)

Welcome back to The Business of Government Hour. I’m Michael Keegan, your host, and our guest today is Vice Admiral Matthew Nathan, Surgeon General of the US Navy. Also joining our conversation from IBM is Gio Patterson.

So, Admiral Nathan, Navy Medicine would not accomplish much of its mission without a robust research and development portfolio. Would you tell us a little bit about the research priorities for Navy Medicine and how it has impacted the delivery of care?

Matthew Nathan: Some of the most significant advances, I think, in peacetime care have come through the exploration and the research of issues, illnesses, and injuries that affect us in a wartime environment. We may be, in the near term, looking at a vaccine for malaria. Now malaria is the number one infectious disease killer in the world. We don’t think of it that much in the United States but it ravages other populations. Dengue fever, dysentery, certain encephalitis that are carried, west Nile, and others that are carried through mosquitos and through flies.

The origins of our research started in trying to protect our troops but this bleeds over into eventually protecting our peacetime. The model for trauma care in this country was based on our experiences in Vietnam. That’s where we learned about the golden hour and we learned about having an actual trauma support center such as shock trauma at Baltimore and other places.

We’re learning things now in this conflict through research and development of trauma care, be it clotting agents, be it artificial blood, body armor, tourniquet therapy, that will be on an ambulance today in a motor vehicle – a critical motor vehicle accident somewhere in the beltway. So we’re going to change lives just as a result of that research.

Most of our research is done, of course, to try to figure out how to be better force protectors and/or care responders for our troops and our crews, be they submarines and the environment of working in the submarine and the atmospheric and the pressure. When people go scuba diving for recreation in the Caribbean, the reason they know how far they can go and how much air they can breathe is because the US navy developed those tables years ago in trying to protect its divers from decompression illness. So these things carry over.

I think we get a two-for in our research, especially in our research overseas where we have places where we embed in overseas countries. First of all, the countries may be an environment where these illnesses are prevalent so we can really study them and secondly the engagement we get, the cooperation we get among the host nations is nothing but good. The partnerships that we have, sometimes in environments where they can be a little bit dicey and where the politics may be somewhat fragile, our relationships and the fact that our only agenda for being there is research and the advancement of science and the advancement of betterment of all people, including the host nation, really carries the day in many of these cases. So I am very proud of that part of it.

But we have researchers just down the road at Walter Reid Bethesda who are looking at new and innovative ways to treat cancer, all the way to somebody who is looking at a mosquito in Lima, Peru and determining how to create some sort of genetic variation so that the mosquito can no longer carry a certain disease. Yes, that is going to make a difference in the lives of our troops, but there is also going to be a young child born in the near future somewhere in the world who is not going to suffer something because of the navy research.

Michael Keegan: I hadn’t realized the R&D portfolio was another element of soft power. It’s interesting.

Matthew Nathan: Absolutely and again, and I think it’s because military medicine itself has always been a great soft power, you know, tool in the toolkit because the agenda is health and wellness and so often we can be a great ice breaker.

Michael Keegan: Admiral, Navy Medicine has a significant track record of engaging in humanitarian missions and responding to disasters. Could you elaborate for a moment on Navy Medicine’s involvement in some of the most recent relief efforts and to what extent does such engagements represent an extension of US soft power?

Matthew Nathan: When you look at Indonesia and how at one time that country had a pretty strong anti-American sentiment, they suffer a calamitous tsunami and we send the Lincoln battle group there, we send the hospital ship Mercy there. They see American troops helping rebuild, you know, infrastructure, schools. They see American troops taking care of children, looking at disease and injury, and the sentiment changes because of good will. The navy’s motto is not navy’s medicine’s motto. It’s the navy motto. It is a global force for good.

I think that appeals to young people. I think a young person today, in the generation today watching the ads on the TV or looking in a magazine or whatever, they’re patriotic and they want to be part of the national defense and they are willing to be part of the national security and they are certainly willing and able to step up and fight when they have to in a hostile environment to protect, you know, our nation’s interests. But they also like being part of something that leaves the world a little better place and they like being part of something where we have ships that can bring war power when necessary and we have ships that can bring tremendous compassion and healing if necessary. So I think that is one of our selling points.

But, yes, the research allows us to retain some very, very world-class scientists in the navy because we have some very, very world class and unique research environments.

Gio Patterson: Admiral, with the rising healthcare costs, the increased number of beneficiaries, and maintaining this long-term care responsibility for our medically retired warriors, your focus on the value is key in your decision making. To that end, would you tell us more about your efforts to realize sustained value and elaborate on your concept of value being quality multiplied by capability, all divided by cost?

Matthew Nathan: Great question and I think this is what keeps CEOs of any major healthcare system awake right now. Whether you are talking to the CEO at, you know, Hopkins or Geisinger or Cleveland Clinic, you know, how are we going to figure out how to improve access, improve health, and reduce costs? From the president on down, everybody is looking hard at how we can change the game, not only in military medicine but in our private sectors and academic sectors as well.

I believe that the answer lies in truly harnessing technology and creating more virtual care. What do I mean by that? If you look at history and you look at some of the things that really changed the way the masses either survived or got their care, we might start with the infectious theory of germs and antibiotics. All of the sudden, people who are dying of simple things stop dying. It changed the game.

The next might be anesthesia, the ability to operate on somebody at leisure so you could do intricate operations while they were asleep. That changed the game. Then I consider imaging, the ability to see into the body now, into the tiniest recesses, and actually even pinpoint radiation into the tiniest recesses using imaging has changed the game.

And I think we’re in the current great tectonic change in medicine which is genomics, diagnosing and treating illnesses using gene theory and gene manipulation, targeting tumors, the drama of a woman maybe deciding to have a mastectomy based on a blood test. These are dramatic things that are happening in medicine and I think we are heading to the next great change, the next great sea change we would say in the navy which would be virtual medicine, the ability to get more and more of your care done in a location away from a hospital, only going to the hospital for when you really need or have an illness or an injury that requires that.

Virtual medicine allows more health. What do I mean by that? We’ve become a nation that sort of has rewarded healthcare in the way we pay our system more than rewarding health. Most of our providers in this country get rewarded or paid by doing sort of more to a patient than less. It’s not bad; it’s just a system that’s not predicated on really keeping the patient healthy. I like to tease and say we should be more like the fifteenth century Chinese who used to pay their physicians while they were healthy and when they got sick, they stopped paying their doctors. So their doctors were vitally concerned with making sure they didn’t get ill.

We’re trying to harness that in our organization and trying to look at new and innovative ways to reward and recognize our providers based on how healthy they keep their populations. It’s not a novel concept because other organizations have been doing it where they have a capitated system where they say to a company give me this much money; I’ll take care of your people. And then the risk is really on the healthcare organization to keep those people healthy because if they don’t, they’re going to lose more money than make it.

So how can you do this? You need a few ingredients. One is you need an electronic medical record. We have that in the military. Two, you need a population that is insured and can come to your hospitals and get your healthcare when they need it. We have that in the military. Three, you need providers that are rewarded for health and not necessarily that interested in patients becoming ill. We have that in our system and I think all physicians, all providers want their patient to be as healthy as possible, but we’re trying to put the emphasis on health instead of healthcare.

If we are not able to push illnesses such as diabetes, certain cancers, heart disease, stroke, lung disease, pulmonary diseases, vascular complications; if we can’t push those out of people’s fifties and sixties, into their seventies, eighties, and nineties, we’re going to be in real trouble. We’re on a non-sustainable path in this country.

So I am an internist by training. I am an internal medicine specialist so I have two great reasons I worry about the trajectory of health in this country. Reason number one is as an internist, people are getting too much overweight, too diabetic, too much heart disease, the smoking, all of those things. So as an internist that bothers me because I know the complications. I am worried as a military leader because I want to have a reservoir of people in this country that can join the military that are not affected by these issues.

We have less people in our country now than we ever have who are able to join the military. We have many who are willing but less who are able simply because of health issues at young ages or fitness issues at young ages, a variety of other reasons as well. But the bottom line is strategically and medically, I need to alter people’s healthcare choices.

Michael Keegan: So, Admiral, the patient centered medical home represents a shift toward a more holistic approach to healthcare delivery and with virtual healthcare it’s a nice segway. Would you tell us more about your efforts to implement this kind of healthcare model in Navy Medicine? I believe it’s called the Medical Home Port Program; how is it revitalizing your primary care system?

Matthew Nathan: This is basically an environment where you can increase the continuity of care of a patient. What I mean by medical home, you feel like you’re at home when you’re there. They know you. If you were to talk to many of our beneficiaries in the military and in medicine over the last several years, many of them would say once I get in to see you, the care is great, but sometimes it’s hard to get in to see you. And secondly, sometimes when I get in to see you, there is a different person there and I have to start all over from square one. And I really would love to have my good old doc or that nurse who knows me since, you know, for four years, and we do too. We want that as well.

Now, we’re a rotational organization. Our people move and rotate and so how do we combat that? So we created patient center medical home which is a pod of providers centered around  physician and a nurse practitioner, a physician’s assistant, perhaps an advanced duty corpsman. All of them who know you. One of them is available to you. Where this is working, and we don’t have it everywhere yet but it’s growing. But where it is working, you can reach one of them at all times. In addition, you communicate to them a majority of the time, through either a web-based secure web-based system or through email or through an iPhone or whatever. You don’t have to come in for everything.

One of my favorite things to do as a Surgeon General is to walk around my hospitals around the world and go into a clinic, a primary care clinic, and count the number of patients who are being seen across the desk from each other and then tell the clinic how many of those were unnecessary. There was no reason that that patient had to come in for that visit.

The older patients are comfortable doing that. They like coming in. The older doctors like that, the system we grew up with. The younger patient would just as soon get over their diagnosis and everything else over their iPhone, the same way my daughter can text and talk to me and listen to music and watch TV at the same time. So this is how we have to skate to where the puck is going to be.

Here is where the puck is right now; big institutions, lots of brick and mortar, lots of offices, all of the x-ray equipment, the lab equipment, and everything else in a big building, parking decks, congestion getting in, walking in, waiting in line to be seen. That is where the puck is.

This is where the puck is going to be; it’s going to be where you can use your iPhone to make appointments, to converse with your doctor. You can go down to the local kiosk or store or satellite military clinic that will have lab equipment and maybe rudimentary x-ray equipment near you where you don’t have to drive to a big parking deck, and you’ll be able to take care of ninety percent of what you do.

When you get ill and you need an emergency department, you need a surgeon, you need sophisticated medical care, we’re there for you but on a more concise, smaller, less expensive, less overhead facility. Just as radiology now. You know, there are organizations, there are hospitals that have given up their radiology and do digital radiography and it is read somewhere overseas. In other words, at two in the morning, the radiologists read your film – this doesn’t happen in the navy yet – but the radiologist who reads your film isn’t in the hospital with you. They’re in Australia or Japan because for them, it’s two o’ clock in the afternoon.

Harnessing the power of digital and tele-medicine is critical and I would add pivotal to the United States navy because I need that more than any place else because I have so many medical facilities displaced all over the world. They’re called ships and if I have a doctor on a ship that is in the South China Sea and he has a patient who comes to him and he thinks they’re having a heart attack or a stroke or maybe some debilitating abdominal problem, I want to equip him with things where he can transmit the information back to a place like Bethesda or Portsmouth and I can have  a myriad of cardiologists, surgeons, OB/GYN doctors, neurologists, standing around, looking at the images he’s transmitting, looking at the electrocardiogram he’s transmitting, even looking at pictures he’s transmitting of the patient, and calling in information. That way I can provide the firepower, the medical firepower of a tertiary care hospital to a small little ship that is out in the middle of the ocean.

We’ve already experimented with putting CAT scanners on some of our larger ships, small CAT scanners that can do the head so that if someone has a severe concussion at sea, we can tell this captain of the ship right then and there, you know what, you don’t have to turn the ship around. He’s fine. Or captain, you better turn the ship around. This looks a little worrisome. So already we’re leveraging what I would call virtual medicine, tele-medicine. And I believe that a, that’s good for people in austere environments and b, that is going to be the game changer for cost.

Gio Patterson: Making headways on the cost or access to healthcare requires continued leveraging of information management or IT at all levels of care. Would you tell us more about how you are enhancing your use of healthcare informatics and also sharing electronic health data across DOD and VA?

Matthew Nathan: Thanks, Gio. It’s a great and very timely question. As we talked a little bit about before, we’ve had some separate stovepipes in the way each service runs its IMIT departments, both those that communicate the electronic medical record and those that also use digital systems for patient care, pharmacy dispensation systems, those kinds of things.

We’re going to create a defense health agency that will allow us to share all of those services in one place. I have told people before; I don’t really want to be in the IMIT business and have to own that in Navy Medicine. I need it as a service and I need it to be expeditious and available but I am happy to outsource that if I can have it reliably provided to me. The army and the air force feel the same way.

So we’re looking at how we can create one sort of system that integrates all of our care systems together to make one large system and then once we do that, the next question you may want to ask is how do you put that together with the next continuum in military care which is the VA, the VA system? So we’re working very hard with the VA to try to find integrated electronic health records, an IEHR is what it’s called.

So we’re working very hard with that because right now one of the laments of some of our service members is when I go to the VA, they are compassionate, they’re great, the care is great, but they can’t see what happened to me when I was on active duty. I have to bring my paper record with me and they have to flip through a paper record.

Well, I have to tell you, the paper records should be like the dinosaur. It should become extinct at some point and the fact that anybody has to carry around a paper record, I think, is an indictment on the system and of course that is still commonly the way care is given in this country, but I think the VA and the Department of Defense are looking very closely at integrating a health record electronically.

Again, we’re looking at anything that can be done to capture what I believe is the desire of the upcoming generations, to be connected more electronically. I am generalizing a little bit here but my eighty-year-old patient wants to drive forty miles and park in the parking deck and go to the pharmacy and actually see the pharmacist hand them the pills. My twenty-year-old patient would just as soon have it delivered on their door because they hit something on their iPhone. So we’re developing an iPhone app that allows you to fill your pharmacy.

So here you are. You’re somewhere, you’re stuck in traffic. You know your medicine is running out. You go on the iPhone app. It is secure and you all of a sudden punch in something. You get your pharmacy prescription number. It asks you refill? Yes? Where do you want it sent? Home? Yes? You’re done. And that saves money. It removes the middle man. It makes it expeditious and it is one less car that has to be in the parking lot.

Michael Keegan: What does the future hold for Navy Medicine? We will ask Vice Admiral Matthew Nathan, Surgeon General of the US navy, when our conversation continues on The Business of Government Hour.

(Intermission)

Welcome back to The Business of Government Hour. I’m Michael Keegan, your host, and our guest today is Vice Admiral Matthew Nathan, Surgeon General of the US navy. Also joining our conversation from IBM is Gio Patterson.

I talk to many of my guests about the use of collaboration and partnerships among agencies, branches of the government, and with the private sector to achieve mission results. How are you at Navy Medicine using partnerships and collaborating, and I think this dovetails with jointness as well, to improve operations and program outcomes?

Matthew Nathan: Clearly the more you can learn from, share, partner, team up, become joint with other marquee organizations, the more you’re going to accelerate the ability to provide care in a professional and in a cost effective way.

We want to leverage this country’s great patriotic desires. We want to leverage this, the academic institutions, the private sector who I have to say everywhere I go, be it any organization I talk to in the private or academic sector, all they want to know is how they can help. They really do. And many of these in the past have sort of been parochial and very protective of their research or protective of their grant money or protective of what they are doing because they don’t want somebody to steal their thunder. But when I come in, they say you know what, for you we want to be totally transparent. If there is something we’re doing which you think can help, please let us know.

They also enjoy the give and the take from the military because we have so many experiences that we can bring to them. It will probably be military based providers along with private sector, but it will probably be a center of gravity of military based providers who will discover the vaccine for malaria. And so again, I think that this kind of rising tide lifts everybody’s boats. We’re very interested in partner, in what we were talking about before, in traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress

There are some places who have been doing this in the private and academic sectors for years and years and years and are just outstanding at it. What they haven’t had is exposure to the kinds of injuries that we’re seeing in the military. So they’re desperately interested in getting engaged with us. What kind of injuries do they see? Motor vehicle accidents, gunshot wounds, somebody falling off of a ladder. They have not seen people standing twenty feet away from a massive explosion and receiving that kind of concussive blast.

So that is a whole new kind of head injury that we don’t get in America, we don’t get in the world because people are succumbing to motor vehicle injuries and gunshots and hitting their head at a fraternity party, but they are not being blown up, and so these organizations are vitally interested in seeing our results, our scans, partnering with us, sending some of their people to work in our hospitals and inviting some of our people to work in their hospitals so we can do this.

I am encouraged by the collaboration that is going on. I am not yet satisfied by it. It is still, in my opinion, still in its infancy and it can be much more robust but we are getting there. The fly wheel is starting to turn and I think that those kinds of cooperative agreements along with the jointness where the army and the air force and the navy all throw in together with the VA. Federal medicine, I think, is becoming more joint, more altruistic, and the cooperation we’re seeing with the private sector is significantly better than it’s ever been but it’s not where we need it yet.

Gio Patterson: Admiral, I’d like to transition now to the future. What are some of the major opportunities and challenges that Navy Medicine will encounter in the future and how do you envision your office will need to evolve over the next couple of years to meet those challenges?

Matthew Nathan: Thanks, Gio. It’s a question that I and my team wrestle with every day. Again, getting back to where do we think the puck is going to be so we can skate to it. There is more and more of an expectation because of our track record so far that Mr. and Mrs. America who has a son or a daughter or a brother or a sister or a husband or a wife who is somewhere in the armed services, there is more and more of an expectation that if something happens to them any place in the world, they’ll get the kind of care that if they had had that same thing happen on the steps at Hopkins or the steps at Bethesda. So I am vitally interested in figuring out how to translocate care and using virtual care, using technology, using tele-medicine to bring that expectation to truth.

I think that the other great challenge for us is the socioeconomic challenge of the cost of healthcare and how do we get that under control and at the same time not sacrifice some of the gains we’ve made. And so what I have told my people for the future is we need to do a complete sort of soup to nuts look at all of our infrastructure in Navy Medicine because it is built on – and antiquated is too strong a word – but it’s built on a premise, an existing premise that lots of buildings and brick and mortar is good and I’m not so sure it is anymore. And I think if you look at other marquee private sector healthcare systems, you’ll see more of them and more of them going to really concentrating the gravitas on ambulatory care facilities and virtual medicine, and we need to at least be even with that, if not, I think beyond.

So I have asked my folks to take a hard look at what is tomorrow’s sailor? What is tomorrow’s marine? What is their family going to need? And that is the other big issue; family care. World War I and II, most service members didn’t have families. These days most do. The family is a critical part of the care, not just for taking care of the family but for making sure that the service member feels comfortable and can do their job. So we’re looking at family programs.

I am often asked about – you have pediatricians and OB/GYN doctors in the navy or in the armed services. Do you really need them? I mean, would we lose a war if we didn’t have military pediatricians? Yes, we probably wouldn’t lose a war but my military staff brings something to the game, an understanding of the military family, of the ethos, of the challenges of the military and deployment, as well as, when necessary, we’re doing more and more humanitarian assistance and disaster relief.

And I don’t fault it but I recognize the fact that I can’t grab a civilian pediatrician who is in the middle of a practice and say I need you to be in Haiti in forty-eight hours because the country has just destroyed itself through an earthquake. They’ll say I’ll get there when I can but it may be weeks, whereas my people can be there. When the Haitian earthquake went down, we had the hospital ship Comfort underway within seventy-two hours with a crew that went down there and performed miraculous, miraculous resuscitative and crushing injury surgeries to sort of get things going.

So that is what I am looking at is how can I meet the head-on challenge of virtual care, access, and reward health more than trying to reward the healthcare. Provide the healthcare when necessary, but the goal should be let’s keep our patients healthy.

Michael Keegan: So, Admiral Nathan, what advice would you give someone who is thinking about a career in public service, whether it is military service or medicine?

Matthew Nathan: Well I think anybody who wants to go into medicine or the healthcare professions, be it dentistry or nursing or a corpsman or a medic, you know, already has sort of defined themselves as somebody who wants to make a difference.

When I talk to young people today, and I talk to large groups, they’re, as you can imagine, they’re a little mystified by the military. They think of us in terms of okay, you’re out there with the marines in the deserts, slugging it out in the combat zone or I heard you have a military hospital or maybe you’re on a submarine. Isn’t that kind of weird? And I was that kid years ago. I was on a military scholarship to pay for medical school. I had no plans what so ever to stay in the military one day longer than my obligation, to repay my school loans.

I got in and I realized that the people I was serving with, the people I was working with, were dedicated, altruistic, and I enjoyed the different venues of federal medicine. I enjoyed being sent occasionally to a place like Guam or Japan or Cuba or Europe. I enjoyed the aspect of, you know, when I first had to go with the marines, I didn’t know what to think. I didn’t know anything about the marines except I had watched Jack Web movies. I went there with great trepidation and it was a tour of a lifetime. I learned a respect for a unit of dedication and a group of men and women who personified professionalism and the unit above themselves. And then when I went to sea, great trepidation about that. Then I went to sea and realized what an amazing environment to practice in. What a challenging environment to try to bring great care in and what changes we can make.

And so I would tell any young person today, first of all I think the health professions are a noble occupation and profession because you’re putting service above self. And secondly, if you want to do it in the venue of the federal healthcare system, in my case the military healthcare system, I think you’d be very surprised at the numbers of opportunities and the dynamic range that you can practice in.

As I said, I often talk to my friends who I trained with in the civilian sector many, many years ago who are wonderful family citizens and physicians and have wonderful practices, but I noticed at the end of it Michael, when I talk to them, all they want to do is talk about me. It doesn’t take me long to catch up with what they’ve been doing and I am interested in what they are doing. But what I do has so much variety to it that they know there is a whole thing that has occurred in the year since we’ve talked and so I enjoy that aspect of it.

And so I would commend that to anybody, recognizing that for some people you may come in and do this for a little while and for others you may do it for quite a while. But I think it’s a way to give back. I think it’s a way to put service above self. I think it’s a way to feel, as you could in any profession, I don’t care what it is as long as you have given your all to and done it altruistically, that at the end of the day you have made a difference. That is what I tell young people.

Michael Keegan: Well, sir, I want to thank you for joining us today but more importantly, Gio and I would like to thank you for your dedicated service to the country.

Matthew Nathan: Thank you. Thank you very much, and Michael and Gio, it’s been a pleasure meeting with you.

Gio Patterson: Thank you.

Michael Keegan: This has been The Business of Government Hour, featuring a conversation with Vice Admiral Matthew Nathan, Surgeon General of the US Navy. My co-host from IBM has been Gio Patterson. Be sure to join us next week for another informative, insightful, and in-depth conversation on improving government effectiveness. For The Business of Government Hour, I’m Michael Keegan and thanks for joining us.

Announcer: This has been The Business of Government Hour. Be sure to join us every Saturday at 9:00 a.m., and visit us on the Web at businessofgovernment.org.

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Mr. Keegan: Welcome to another edition of the business of government hour.  I'm your host Michael Keegan and managing editor of the business of government magazine.  Combat differs significantly from just a decade ago.  Anticipating the future is key and the US armed forces continue to prepare for future conflicts evolving to meet emerging challenges.  It does this by engaging in rigorous science and technology research.  With us to discuss his efforts in this area is our very special guest Rear Admiral James Shannon, commander of the naval surface warfare center.  Admiral, welcome back to the show.

Adm. Shannon: Michael, it's great to be here.

Mr. Keegan: Also joining us is Kevin Green, IBM's defense industry leader.  Welcome, Kevin.

Mr. Green: Thank you, Michael.  Good to be here.

Mr. Keegan: Admiral, for those unfamiliar with the naval sea system command, would you briefly describe the mission and the evolution of the surface warfare center?

Adm. Shannon: Well, the surface warfare center first is not just one place.  It comprises 10 major commands geographically situated across the United States, and the warfare center does the full spectrum of research, development, test evaluation, engineering, whatever the fleet needs and also supports the Marine Corps.

Mr. Keegan: What can you tell us about your role as the commander?

Adm. Shannon: Well, my job is traditionally, I'm a echelon three commander, report to commander of naval sea systems command, vice admiral Kevin McCoy.  And, my job is to lead people.  I lead 14,000 people.  I'm responsible for the infrastructure for all these warfare centers.  And, I provide a supporting cast role, if you will, to the other admirals in the Navy that are responsible for product.

Mr. Keegan: I was wondering, could you give us a sense of the scale of the operation?  What does the command look like?  Where is it located?  What is the geographical footprint?

Adm. Shannon: Okay.  We are located principally very close here to Washington, DC.  We have five commands within this region.  And, that's right here in Carderock right off the beltway, Dahlgren, Virginia, which many people are familiar with, Indian Head, which was really one of the first proving grounds for the Navy.  There is a explosive warness disposal technology activity in Stump Neck, Maryland, very close Indian Head, and then up the road we go to Philadelphia for ship systems, all mechanical and electrical systems.  We go down the road to Dam Neck, Virginia, for combat direction support activity.  And, then we have a coastal warfare systems site in Panama City.  We do a lot of work in Crane, Indiana.  And, then,  out in California we have Port Hueneme where we do a lot of missile and radar testing.  And, then, also Corona, California, which is in Riverside County, we do a lot of operational analysis on the systems that we have.

Mr. Green: Admiral, that's a wide array of responsibilities.  With that in mind, what have been the top three challenges you face in your position and how have you begun to address those challenges?

Adm. Shannon: Well, I would say the top three really starts first with having a diverse workforce.  That's not just my priority but you hear the CNO talk about that, Admiral McCoy has made that clear that's a top priority in the naval sea systems command.  And, I'll get to back to diversity in a moment.  But, we are also very interested in maximizing total ownership cost.  That, again, is something that's being discussed a lot within the Navy to understand really what our costs are for our ships and to get the most return on investment in whatever we're doing.  And, then, the third thing that I'm certainly a large advocate for is transparency in our product and what we do and open architecture and things like that. 

With diversity really is the priority and  something that were building on right now.  There's a lot of congressional interest in what we're doing to hire our workforce to make sure that our acquisition workforce is robust.  And, that starts with making sure that we have a workforce that represents the people of the United States.  We have a very diverse young workforce, but we don't have a very diverse older workforce.  And, that's because of just the way we hired people over the years.  We really want to bring in more diversity, more cultures, and more innovation.

Mr. Green:.  Well, you have a wide array of responsibilities.  One of your roles is as the surface warfare chief technology officer.  What does that role entail?

Adm. Shannon: That's a great question.  Because, I'll tell you, a year ago, when something called me up and said, surprise, you're now the chief technology officer for the surface warfare enterprise, I had to Google chief technology officer and find out what it is.  Because, it's really nothing that, it's not a term that we typically use within the uniformed force in the military.  And, when I looked up what a CTO was, a chief technology officer, I was happy to learn that there is many different definitions. 

So, that gave me the ability to come up with my own definition of a chief technology officer.  And, what I'm primary responsible is to be the advocate for the surface warfare enterprises, surface warfare community, and work with the chief in naval research who has a large responsibility for science and technology across the entire Navy, not just the surface Navy.  Today, Rear Admiral Nevin Carr is the chief of naval research.  He is a surface warfare officer but he has to look at aviation, he has to look at sub-surface satellite communications - everything. 

So, I'm a fellow flag officer who advocates for the surface Navy, and my role is really to look out way into the future to see that the technologies that are there and try to be a bridge between the operators and the research analysts, the scientists, the technologists, and help a dialog happen about where do we want to take the Navy in the future.

Mr. Green: Sure.  Now, in that role, do you also work closely with folks in industry who might have the same title or have responsibilities in research?

Adm. Shannon: Well, we're not as far along as we should be, is the short answer to that question.  And, one of the things that I found out when I took this job is we did not have that kind of dialogue happening.  A year ago, I spent the first six months probably trying to understand what my role was going to be and making sure the senior leadership in the surface Navy agreed with that.  But, what I've been working on for the past several months is trying to understand where is the Navy putting their money internal to the Navy.  And, then, my plan is in a few months to have an industry day to really be transparent with industry and let industry know, hey, this is where the Navy's putting their money inside the Navy.  It would be a good idea if you were researching things in the same area.  And, then, sharing ideas and sharing technology to really be able to come up with the best solutions.

Mr. Keegan: Could you give us some background about yourself and how your career path led you to become the first chief technology officer for the surface warfare enterprise?

Adm. Shannon: Well, throughout my early career, I was a  below deck engineer who served primarily on destroyers.  Then, as I grew up in the surface warfare community, I got into anti-submarine warfare systems, missile defense systems.  I had the great opportunity to command a couple ships.  Following my command tours, I got into program management where I managed the evolved sea sparrow missile project and took it through its tests and evaluations.  I got involved into the naval integrated FiRe control project and then was lucky enough to be selected to be the program manager for future combat systems open architecture.  And, that all came together to the position I'm in today.

Mr. Keegan: Admiral, you have a robust portfolio, an  import mission.  Could you tell us what makes an effective leader?  And, how has your previous experience formed your leadership style and your management approach?

Adm. Shannon: The biggest thing that you have to do, I think, to lead is to listen.  You have to listen, not just to your people, your subordinates, but you have to listen to your superiors.  And, so, my job is to understand where, what our superiors want.  And, in the position I'm in today that's  primarily listens to the chief of naval operations, and to the secretary of the Navy, and to the Secretary of Defense, and, of course, my own immediate superior, Vice Admiral McCoy.  And, then, I have to go out and listen to the subordinates and understand what their knowledge is and to help focus them and  focus their energy and get them to move in the direction that the superiors told me to move. 

So, as a leader, your job is to lead somebody in a certain direction.  You have to understand the requirement, what is needed, listen to what that need is, and take all those good ideas and point them all in the same direction and get on a path to success.

Mr. Keegan: Is there any particular leaders out there that have informed you?

Adm. Shannon: Well, Vice Admiral McCoy is doing a great job right now of keeping me informed.  But, I would tell you, in this business, probably the person that we often refer back to is Admiral Wayne Meyer, who recently passed away.  He's often referred to as the father of Aegis.  And, it was his idea to build a little, test a little.  And, to really embrace system engineering and to discuss the different trades that you can make to get the best product.  And, to really integrate all your systems so that, that when one system trade is made, that you understood the repercussions to all the following systems.  Admiral Meyer is credited with making the Navy understand that concept, and we still try to build off of that.

Mr. Keegan: Terrific.  What about the Navy's approach to science and technology?  We will ask Rear Admiral James Shannon, commander of the naval surface warfare center, to share with us when our conversation continues on the business of government hour.

Part 2

Mr. Keegan: Welcome back to the business of government hour.  I'm your host Michael Keegan, and our conversation continues with Rear Admiral James Shannon, commander of the naval surface warfare center.  Also joining our conversation from IBM is Kevin Green.  Admiral, could you describe the Navy's approach to science and technology?

Adm. Shannon: Investments in science and technologies are wide ranging, but highly focused on ensuring that the people out there in the fight have the advantage over our enemies in any battle space against all threats.  You'll hear people talking about finding sometimes and saying the term we have to have a fair fight.  When you're really involved with fighting, you don't want a fair fight.  You want that asymmetrical advantage.  And our Navy's comparative advantage to any potential adversary  is our competitive will and our innovative drive.  And, that's where it comes in the science and technology piece.  We continuously operate.  We continuously listen to our operators,  and we try to apply the science and technology that we know well and apply it to whatever systems that we need to improve.

Mr. Keegan: Given the rapidly changing threat our nation faces today in conjunction with the pace of global technological innovation, what are some of the challenges the Navy faces in getting the right technology to our war fighters?

Adm. Shannon: The absolutely biggest challenge is affordability, and I'm sure that's not going to surprise any of the listeners out there.  We are constantly combating the affordability challenge.  And, affordability, though, gets often misunderstood, because sometimes the affordability is driven because the requirement is too great, and the engineers and scientists out there are always going to default to giving you the absolute best solution they can give.  It's not in their intellectual makeup to give you a system that isn't the absolute best.  So, it's imperative that the people that write the requirements and oversee the requirements manage that, such that we can expect exactly what we want.  And, then, at the same time make sure the affordability or the prices come down.  It's, it's a really tough calculus.

Mr. Keegan: Kevin mentioned, in your role as the CTO, collaborating with maybe somebody from industry.  What about collaborating with the other armed services in this regard?  In your approach to science and technology, could you tell us a little bit about that?

Adm. Shannon: We do collaborate with the other services.  And, I would tell you at the working level, it's done much better than at the more senior levels across the warfare centers.  At the deck plate level, as we say in the Navy, we do a very good job collaborating with other services, with academia, with industry.  The tough part gets when you get up to the more senior ranks when money gets involved and people are trying to determine who pays for what.  And, that's been something that I've often try to work on very closely in terms of architecture, and making sure that you have an open architecture and not to worry so much about the cost of it but just to come to agreement on what that architecture is. 

So, in my own role right now, I do a lot with the Kenner IED systems to build, that's to defend against the improvised explosive device threat that is in the current wars that we face today.  I work very closely with all the services, with the Department of Homeland Services, with the FBI, trying to collaborate on the best ideas to meet that threat.

Mr. Green: It's quite clear that the Navy is engaged and deployed globally in pursuit of missions in support of global  stability and the New World order.  What lessons have we learned from the multitude of missions the Navy is supporting today in Iraq, Afghanistan, and even off the coast of Somalia?

Adm. Shannon: Well, we've learned a lot, especially in this era of what we call irregular warfare with this IED threat, the improvised explosive device threat.  You know, that was a threat that was really based off of commercial technology.  And, it's a threat that, it was always out there.  It was right in front of us.  We recently, I think a year ago, celebrated 25 of the cell phone industry.  And, so, it wasn't anything new.  And, I'm sure many of our great scientists and engineers in our  warfare centers knew how that threat could be used against us.  But there was no forum, there was no way to bring that potential threat to our attention until it happened.  So, we were sort of surprised by that.  And, I think in the future, what we have to really learn from the Afghanistan war and from the Iraq war is that we have to understand the commercial technology is out there and how it can be applied. 

Historically, we've already learned these sorts of lessons many years ago.  I always like to refer back to over a hundred years ago the great white fleet was sailing in 1908.  At the same time, you had a couple brothers out there on this thing called a flying machine.  You know, nobody really thought of how to use that really in warfare.  But, by the end of World War I, ten years later, it was definitely clear that you could use it.  But, we never really even understood the power of airplanes until Pearl Harbor was attacked.  So, today, we have the IED.  Twenty years from now, what's the IED going to look like?  We've got to be ready for that.  And, we have to understand the power of that kind of threat and other technologies that are out there.

Mr. Green: Sure enough.  And, you've described the fact that the Navy operates with other services and other partners.  Are there any issues associated with interoperability that your office is engaged with, or your command is working on?

Adm. Shannon: Interoperability is always a very big challenge and we certainly are working on it.  In my specific role as the single manager, one of my additional duties is I am the single manager for the counter radio electronic warfare systems that we use to defeat radio-controlled improvised explosive devices.  I am responsible, regardless of the service  feeling the system, to look at the interoperability and compatibility of those systems with other systems that put out radio waves such as radios, and to make sure that they're compatible and interoperable.  So, we have a process in place to look at that.  And there's a lot of processes in government to make sure we have that sort of thing. 

Recently, the Navy has also reorganized the organization to bring a lot of our electronic systems all underneath one resource sponsor with the new N2N6 organization, which is going to be responsible largely to make sure that the interoperability challenges will be vetted very early in the process and resourced appropriately.

Mr. Green: That sounds like an awfully large endeavor to undertake.  You're describing very significant change across the Navy and, in fact, across the joint technical community.  Are they any other Navy organizations that will be standing up or taking a larger role going forward?

Adm. Shannon: We're still trying to understand what other organizations' responsibilities are going to be in terms of acquisition and requirements.  But, certainly in the new organizational setup, the CNO created something called the Tenth  Fleet.  And, they're going to play a large role in understanding this interoperability challenge.  The reason the Tenth Fleet was chosen, by the way, was back in World War II, we had the submarine threat out there that we were really not very familiar with in how to defeat that challenge.  So, the leadership in the Navy in those days created the Tenth Fleet just to focus on that one threat, and we obviously did well and were able to mature our anti-submarine capability through the decades.  Admiral Ruffet  is doing the same thing in the cyber world and creating the Tenth Fleet to help shape the discussion, shape the requirements, and make sure we require the right things with the new Tenth Fleet he's standing up.

Mr. Keegan: Admiral, you mentioned earlier one of your challenges is the cost calculus.  You also referenced the fact that, you know, anticipating the future.  I was wondering what changes in the acquisition process may be required to facilitate the deployment of advanced technologies in accelerated manner?

Adm. Shannon: Well, that's a really good question.  And, it's... I think this one is right down my alley to answer.  First, really need to cultivate a culture of innovation that's built on collaboration.  That was what the whole open architecture initiative was about.  It wasn't plug and play or getting the standards right, it's like getting people to talk with each other and collaborate on the best ideas.  And, the way we need to do that is to increase transparency in our science and technology investments.  A large portion of our fielded systems have traditionally come from the same DOD laboratories or the same large Department of Defense companies or universities. 

We need to broaden that to bring in many different industries together to make sure we get the right ideas.  We have to protect our investment in basic research.  The numbers I've been looking at show that in terms of research and development investments, basic research has actually gone down where some of our advanced research has gone well.  But, you need to get the basic research and the understanding of the science down for people to be able to mature it to the next level.  And, finally, we really need to develop a more efficient path for technology transition to the fleet.  Some of this acquisition takes way too long, and we don't have the stomach to be able to do that. 

One of the things that we did well, I would say heroically in this current war, is the way we rebounded from the IED threat.  We were able to recognize the threat and then form up very large, both operational communities as well as technical communities, and to be able to come up with systems and field those systems, put the logistics behind them, and really be able to take on that threat.  And, the results were just magnificent, and lots of lives were saved.  So, we were able to do it but it took a lot of commitment and it took some money and it took resources and talent to make that happen.

Mr. Keegan: Speaking of talent, the federal civilian sector of the government is also looking at this acquisition contracting, getting the right people in there, the actual human resources to do this is an issue.  Do you foresee that as a part of the problem in your area?  Do you have a plan to maybe bolster the acquisition workforce?

Adm. Shannon: I don't have a personal plan.  The Navy has a plan to build up that capability.  There's been a tremendous amount of hiring going on to bring in more people as contract specialists.  But, the one thing in contracting.  It takes time and experience, and you just can't come out of school and expect to be a great expert negotiator in contracts.  So, we have to build that force.  We have to maintain that force and not lose these people.  So, we have to make sure we keep them in the Navy and educate them along the way.

Mr. Keegan: How is the Navy fostering a culture of innovation?  We will ask Rear Admiral James Shannon, commander of the naval surface warfare center, to share with us when our conversation continues on the business of government hour.

Part 3

Mr. Keegan: Welcome back to the business of government hour.  I'm your host Michael Keegan, and our conversation continues with Rear Admiral James Shannon, commander of the naval surface warfare center.  Also joining our conversation from IBM is Kevin Green. 

Admiral, you mentioned one of the changes needed in the Navy's approach to science and technology is to build a culture of innovation based on collaboration.  What does the Navy need to do in order to forge this culture of innovation?

Adm. Shannon: Well, first, you know, I think what we always need to remember and remind ourselves every day that the Navy needs to remain flexible and adaptable to change.  Whenever you look at history and you look at navies that didn't succeed and are no longer maybe with us today, it's because they did not remain flexible and adaptable to change.  That's, the good news is that's part of our Navy.  We tend to always come up with innovative ways that are not written in the book, and I think we need to maintain that sort of thing.  But, yesterday's requirements were fairly stable and understood.  We understood the threat.  We knew how to deal with it.  It was a single threat, in many cases monolithic.  There was clear lines of control and accountability.  But, today, those kind of options are relatively few. 

And, I think what really need to understand is watch what's going on with the rest of society.  Because the Navy is a microcosm of society, and we need to, not be so rigid or shouldn't be rigid with our military view of things and really see how the society is working.  And, you see that with social networking.  You know, things like Facebook and blogs, and that type of communication is starting to creep into our workplace.  And, I think it's a very good thing because it's  sharing ideas.  It's a good opportunity to be innovative and to figure out things before you actually have to bring them up for a decision.

One of our commands out in Port Hueneme is actually creating their own internal Facebook kind of page just building off of a good idea.  But, I would tell you all of our warfare centers are trying to figure out the best ways to do that.

Mr. Keegan: If you don't mind me asking, we have  interviewed Admiral Allen, Thad Allen, of the Coast Guard, and he is really a champion of social networking and has the iCommandant blog.  Do you have anything similar to that?

Adm. Shannon: I'll tell you, I am sort of concerned about some of the things that I do, just like any parent that I see on Facebook.  And, before I start applying myself to that technology, I want to make sure I understand it fully.  What I do like, though, is the energy that I see on it.  And, I like the fact that it's fairly open and there's a way that you can control the information.  I would say that Admiral Allen is, you know, he is a great leader and he is leading the way, and guys like me need to follow him.  And I need to figure out how to do it better.

Mr. Keegan: Well, you mentioned earlier that sort of visionary role of a chief technology officer.  Would you tell us what role that part of your responsibility plays in building the  culture of innovation?

Adm. Shannon: As far as the chief technology officer, I think what my main role is to get people out of their comfort zone.  That has been one of the ways I've approached it recently.  We have some great scientists, some great engineers in the warfare center family of commands.  But, they've been fairly comfortable in how they've tried to solve problems.  And, they've always talked to the same people. 

What I'm trying to do is to stretch that a little bit, to get beyond their comfort zone, and to challenge them to share their ideas with other people than they may have, because, when they do that, their ideas are going to be challenged.  And, maybe the things that they think are a great idea are maybe not so great.  But, when you bring all the ideas together and you listen to what people have to say, I really think we will get a better product in the end.  So, I'm pushing that.  I'm pushing people beyond their comfort zone.

Mr. Green: Well, you're clearly very close to your customers who encompass the entire Navy and other partners within the Department of Defense as well.  So, how do you get an organization the size of the Navy, I mean, well beyond the technical community, to change the way that it thinks and behaves to forward or to improve innovation and innovative processes and approaches?

Adm. Shannon: One of the best ways we've been doing, and we've been doing this for a while, is education.  Is, get out there and make sure that we get the information out there that we want people to behave the way we want them to behave.  We have to reward people for doing a good job.  We have to reward  people when they are paving new ways of doing business.  And, those are the ways I think we need to get there. 

Mr. Green: It's often been said that innovation and technology need to move away from the silo model and toward a more collaborative and multiplatform model.  What forms of collaboration need to happen to drive this kind of innovation?

Adm. Shannon: Well, the silo model is a traditional top-down approach.  And, if you want innovation to work, I think  the way you need to do it is you need to work from the bottom up.  Diversity in our workforce is the way we need to do it.  Open architectural implementation is a big part of that.  And, all open architecture means is not being a closed architecture.  It means sharing ideas.  It means allowing people to see what's going on. 

One of the things that we have not done well in the Navy or in government is control the data, though.  We have to make sure that the data that we buy, we share throughout industry, throughout academia, with other services.  And, controlling that data is something we haven't done well.  So, we have to understand the data we have and figure out a way to make sure it's available to everybody out there.  We have to improve the government contractor relationship by making people be more accountable to each other.  So, it's not just a one-way street here.  The government has to be accountable to the industry as much as industry has to be accountable to government. 

When I speak to people in industry, they sometimes feel like it's only the government firing the questions at them and blaming them for whatever product is.  The government has to stand up and be accounted for as well.  I think we just need to share ideas and technologies that in the past were held as proprietary, because it was easy to say they were proprietary.  You know, some things we need to challenge as being whether really proprietary or not. 

Mr. Green: Well, as a defense technology leader, I think it's fair to say that you're one of our leading subject matter experts on open architecture.  In your view, how well has industry responded to your call for more of a technical approach that folds more into the open architecture model?

Adm. Shannon: I think that's a really great question.  And, how you answer it depends on where you sit in this play we call open architecture.  Small businesses have aggressively come out and addressed open architecture, because they are looking at this as an opportunity for them to be able to play without having a larger company suck them in and tell them how to do the business.  Small businesses, by their nature, really want to be independent.  Then, there's also companies that have not traditionally played in defense industry are looking at opportunities to compete and they're looking for fair competition.  The only way that can happen is if they can have the same access to that information that, in the past, may have been shut out to them.  And, then, there's the traditional partners that we have within industry.  I think, to a large measure, I give them credit for listening to us and trying to figure out really how to address this openness.  At the same time, they don't want to lose their proprietary goods because they have a lot of investment in those sorts of things. 

So, we're working really closely with them to try to understand, you know, how we can branch out, how  we can be more collaborative.  At the same time, it's very important, in my point of view, that everybody that's a player   has the ability to make a profit, to be able to stay in the game as long as they want to stay in the game. 

So, not everybody is equally addressing the open architecture initiative.  It depends on the business model for each industry that's involved.  The old way of, if you've got a niche product keep everybody out, still applies if that's your business model.  What we're most interested in in the Navy is getting the best ideas, getting the collaborative approach.  And, the other thing you've got to recognize the billions of dollars of taxpayers have invested in in the products that we buy.  We ought to own some of it.  We ought to be able to claim that we own those, that data because we're the ones putting the money behind it. 

So, that's one of the challenges I have in some of my conversations that I have with industry members.  That's one of the things I like to bring up is we ought to get something out of it.  Now, on the other hand, government has not done a good job controlling that data and controlling that information and making sure that we share it with all vendors who are qualified to do that kind of work.  There's a lot of responsibility to be shared but it takes a lot of energy and it takes everybody participating and not trying to go back to the old way of doing business.

Mr. Green: That's a very powerful statement, and you really seem to believe that collaboration is an important element of innovation.  Within the surface Navy, how is that community moving to address collaboration and innovation as a cultural issue?

Adm. Shannon: Well, we regularly meet on the issue and what my role as a chief technology officer in the surface warfare enterprise is, I'm really working with the resource sponsors, in this case Rear Admiral Frank Pandoff, who is responsible for resources in the surface Navy.  And, he leads what's called a future capabilities team.  And, we meet regularly to talk about the different things that we want to invest in and understand how we can link those investments to the strategy that he's trying to follow that the CNO is putting out.  So, facilitating discussion is really the main thing that we're looking at.  We're really trying to understand the total ownership cost; what's difference between readiness and the actual cost of the systems that were buying.  So, it just is a lot of discussion.

Mr. Keegan: Just stepping back a bit, we talked a lot about technology, science and research, and collaboration, but also innovation.  I was wondering, before you assumed command or as you anticipated assuming command, was there anything you did to kind of look at the idea of innovation and how, are there any lessons learned from different industries, the federal civilian space?  Did anything inform you as you took over your current role?

Adm. Shannon: I think we're living in a great age of innovation today just because of what we're all experiencing with the Internet.  You know, just 10 years ago we didn't have the same power of the Internet, and 15 years ago, a lot of people didn't even know what the Internet is.  So, we're still in the discovery phase, I think, in understanding this kind of innovative power that's out there.  And, if our head was in the sand and we didn't take advantage of it, then shame on us. 

So, what I've learned is what we have all learned is to be open-minded to different ideas.  Ideas that are not typical within your own organization.  Listen to what people's ideas are, and see that there's something behind there and see if you can use them.  What has changed from days gone past is we are more open-minded today.  We used to only have one way of doing business.  Tradition was one of our major core values.  I would tell you today tradition is not a core value.  Tradition is very important, but it's not a core value of our organization.  So, because we have to be adaptable and flexible to that kind of change.

Mr. Keegan: Well, most achievements in government, especially in the armed forces is not a solo act.  Would you elaborate on your approach to empowering your staff, the folks under your command?

Adm. Shannon: Yeah, it's again a great question.  My thing is to always delegate down to the lowest level.  And, just a short anecdote on that.  Recently, I had to go away for six weeks of training to what's called capstone training.  It's training required by law for flag officers and general officers to learn more about what's going on in the military organization.  So, for six weeks I was away.  And, when I came back, I realized nobody missed me.  Okay?  So, the fact is we have a very good organization in the warfare center and everybody knows how to do the job for the person one up and one down.  And, we empower people by trusting people.  And, that's the biggest thing you have to do in any organization is build trust.  We build trust internal to the warfare center, we build trust across the whole naval sea systems command.  And, whenever that trust breaks down, that's when you find we have other problems.  So, you have to always build trust.

Mr. Keegan: What does the future hold for the U.S. Navy science and technology research?  We will ask rear admiral James Shannon, commander of the naval surface warfare center, to share with us when our conversation continues on the business of government hour.

Part 4

Mr. Keegan: Welcome back to the business of government hour.  I'm your host Michael Keegan and our conversation continues with Rear Admiral James Shannon, commander of the naval surface warfare center.  Also joining our conversation from IBM is Kevin Green.

Admiral, let's transition to the future.  What new technologies or trends in information technology do you see the Navy adopting in national security systems to benefit the future?

Adm. Shannon: The trend in technology has a lot to do with computers and the computing base.  And, in terms of national security and defense, the term you're hearing a lot is called cyber war.  We really need to get our hands around that.  And, that was something I alluded to earlier in the radio show when we were talking about Tenth Fleet and what they're trying to do there.  But, we really know, I think, in the future that personal computers are going to become smaller, more people are going to have access to a computer, and then you hear that term cloud computing going on where computers will be less of a tool and that will be more of a portal to the information that's out there.  And, controlling that information and the volume of data and information is something that really nobody fully has their  hands around and being able to control that value will be really important. 

So, what technologies are going to be out there to power those sorts of things and how can we use that technology in warfare systems?  You have to look at power and electricity.  How are you going to make that system work?  Is it going to be used solely with batteries or are we tapped out on batteries and we have to look at other forms of energy, such as the sun, or heat, or just motion?  And, then, when you look at how you can use it to your advantage, how can a potential adversary use that against you?  Such as motion being used to power a system to defeat you.  It's passive all the time and all of a sudden your motion make something happen.  We're going to have to really get our hands around that type of thing. 

And, of course, we have to look at energy in the form of conserving energy.  That's a major initiative in today's Navy.  I referred earlier in the show about great white fleet.  I think we're going to hear something about the great green fleet in the future with Secretary Mabus.  He's really challenged us in our community to come up with ways to conserve fuel and energy, because the cost of fuel and energy is so great that it's hurting our ability to get underway and to train.  As anyone who's gone to sea knows, you have to be at sea to really become experienced at that business.  You can't be good at it if you're always tied up.  So, we have to figure out ways to be efficiently get our fleet underway to do the missions that we want to send them on. 

There's a lot of challenges there.  Autonomous systems.  You see that in today's fight with what's going on with unmanned aerial vehicles.  Other autonomous vehicles, robotic systems.  We're doing a lot in that now but we had to look at nanotechnology.  And those are all the areas that where I'm trying to shape the discussion.

Mr. Keegan: Can I pick up on the green aspect?  Are you folks adding that to your portfolio specifically or is it just something that's understood in the way you operate?  That you're going to go in that direction?

Adm. Shannon: On no, it's definitely in our portfolio.  The big thing going on today up in Philadelphia at our warfare center up there is the electric drive.  We're looking at how to apply electric drive on our ships.  We'll be doing that in the not-too-distant future and it's a way to cut down on fuel.

Mr. Keegan: The evolution of war fighting has undergone historic shifts within the last decade alone.  What other shifts you anticipate in the military in the next decade?  And how do you envision your role in office shifting to adapt?

Adm. Shannon: Well, I think we're in the right place in the warfare centers in adapting to this.  One of the things that we're really looking at is hypersonic technology and directed energy systems such as lasers.  Certainly, there's been a lot in the press over the past 10 years or so with regard to directed  energy and how to use that, but, we need to understand it better.  I think technology has really gone fast and far.  We're seeing where we can actually start applying directed energy in some of our systems.  But, it's all about speed in this business.  One of the acronyms I learned as a young officer was called MATES, and that stood for mission, asset, threat, environment, and speed.  And speed is life in our business.  So, how fast we can come up with this technology, how we can apply to do things faster is really the idea that we need to understand.

Mr. Green: With respect to the people in the Navy who conduct research and development, science and technology, the population has been shrinking since mid-1990s.  Do you see the trend reversing, and, if you do, why?  And, to that end, what steps are being taken to attract and maintain a high-quality technical and professional workforce?

Adm. Shannon: I don't know if the trend has yet reversed.  I think the trend is stabilized, though, in that perhaps we're at that tipping point.  Not quite tipped over yet.  And, I think a lot of it has changed just due to commercial technology and social networks.  More people seem to want to get into the game.  They want to get into the service.  The current young generation sees value in government service, they want to live a life of consequence, they understand that they have a voice in government, they see equal opportunity in our employment and working with us.  So, right now government we have a very aggressive hiring process going on.  Recently, we went up to Detroit to hire some of the engineers out there that were looking at losing work.  We're bringing in a lot of talent from Detroit and at the mid-level because you just can't bring everybody in at the younger level.  You've got to bring some people in at mid level who have experience in other areas that can be applied to our systems. 

We had a major hiring event out in Corona, California, where we brought in lots of people there, over 1000 people attended, and the talent is just simply amazing.  So, I think we're starting to see that tipping point and we're going, the trend's going to reverse itself.

Mr. Keegan: Admiral, for those young system engineers and architects just completing their education who have an interest in the military or in public service in general, what advice would you give them in pursuing a career in public service or the military in science and technology, or, ideally, all three?

Adm. Shannon: Well, first of all, service doesn't apply to the military, and I always like to remind people that you can serve in many different ways.  I've said this before publicly, but I do even tell my own kids this.  It's important to serve because you're giving back.  But, the great thing about government service is when you are in government service, you are living a life of consequence.  The decisions you make will not just only impact the organization that you're in, it will impact everybody in the nation and possibly the world.  And,  even the young people that are making decisions can make decisions that are very consequential and very important to what this nation has to offer. 

So, I always like to tell people that service is not about them.  It's about giving back, and it's being a part of something bigger and feeling or being on a winning team.  And, that's purely an American viewpoint.  But, that's one of the things I feel in the United States of America that we are a winning team and everybody wants to be a part of that.  When you serve in government, you're guaranteed some sense of purpose, some sense of duty, a real sense of honor.  And, you get to follow the path of other great Americans that we've studied in history.  It's a very much exhilarating and it's what Teddy Roosevelt spoke about when he spoke about the man in the arena.  You're in there, you're doing something, you win some battles, you lose some battles, but you're in there  doing the battle, you're not sitting on the sidelines watching what's going on.  So, that's what this kind of service offers you.

Mr. Keegan: That's wonderful advice.  I want to thank you for your time today, but, more importantly,  Kevin and I would like to thank you for your dedicated service to our country.

Adm. Shannon: Thank you very much.  You know, it's really a great opportunity for me to be able to speak to your listening audience and explain what the naval surface warfare center is all about.  We go back a long time.  A lot of people think the warfare center is just one location in Dahlgren, but, as I  mentioned in the earlier part of the broadcast, we're all over the country.  And, we are a legacy of the Navy from back in the 1850s and 1860s when we first created some of our proving grounds in Annapolis and Indian Head and Dahlgren, and then through the two great wars in the last century it kind of got a lot larger and created these laboratories to the early 1990s.  We actually created the warfare centers in 1992. 

And, we've created them to become more efficient and to reduce costs, to get our control around the total ownership cost.  Even back in 1992, that was talked about.  And, when you look at the indicators of what we've accomplished between 1992 and today, our overhead costs in the warfare centers have gone down by 30 percent.  Our productivity has increased by 30 percent.  We have close to 20 percent more scientists and engineers per capita in our work force.  The cost, the hourly cost of labor is less today than it was just a few years ago, because there's so many efficiencies in what we're doing.  We're getting more bang for the buck, or return on investment, less direct labor hours spent on overhead, more spent on actual labor.  And, that's because of the great ideas.

Whoever was leading the Navy in 1982 when they said let's create this warfare center enterprise, it was a good decision.  Because, the total ownership costs have come down as a result of them.  So, I like to be able to tell that story.  We've got a lot more work to do.  We have a lot more efficiencies to find, but we have a very spirited and innovative workforce who are really the intellectual capital of the Navy.  And, they're out there doing their best every day, not just for the Navy today, but building the Navy of tomorrow.

Mr. Keegan: An important mission.  This has been the business of government hour featuring a conversation with Rear Admiral James Shannon, commander of the naval surface warfare center.  My co-host has been Kevin Green, IBM's defense industry leader.  Be sure to join us next week for another informative, insightful, and in-depth conversation on improving government effectiveness.  For the business of government hour, I am Michael Keegan.  Thanks for joining us.

Originally Broadcast June 28, 2008

Washington, D.C.

Announcer: Welcome to The Business of Government Hour, a conversation about management with a government executive who is changing the way government does business. The Business of Government Hour is produced by The IBM Center for The Business of Government, which was created in 1998 to encourage discussion and research into new approaches to improving government effectiveness. You can find out more about The Center by visiting us on the web at businessofgovernment.org.

And now, The Business of Government Hour.

Mr. Morales: Good morning. I'm Albert Morales, your host, and managing partner of The IBM Center for The Business of Government

With us this morning to discuss efforts in this area is our special guest, Mr. Robert Carey, Chief Information Officer of the U.S. Department of the Navy.

Good morning, Rob.

Mr. Carey: Good morning.

Mr. Morales: Also joining us in our conversation is Bob Reeve, partner in IBM's defense practice.

Good morning, Bob.

Mr. Reeve: Good morning, Al.

Mr. Morales: Rob, before we get started, can you ground our listeners by taking a few moments to describe the mission of your office and how it supports the overall mission of the Navy and the DoD?

Mr. Carey: Al, we're a team that sits in the Secretariat, so we work for the Secretary of the Navy directly, and our job is to set the strategic direction and the policy for the IM/IT, that's information management/information technology that's used across the Department. So that spans both war fighting and business a.k.a ERP-type things and C2 systems. So it is a broad portfolio of opportunities to align across the Navy-Marine Corps team.

Mr. Morales: So I suppose both the back office and the front office?

Mr. Carey: Correct.

Mr. Morales: Great, great. Can you give us a sense of the scale of your office in terms of how it may be organized, your staff size, and kind of your overall footprint across the DoD?

Mr. Carey: Sure. We're a fairly small staff, about 30 civilians or so. We have a Deputy CIO for Policy and Integration, that's John Lussier, who works directly for me in my office. We have a Deputy CIO, Navy, that's Vice Admiral Mark Edwards, who is also double-headed as the OPNAV, chief of Naval Operations, N6, and we have a Deputy CIO Marine Corps, which is Brigadier General George Allen, and he is also headquarters Marine Corps C4. So that's sort of the leadership element.

The organizations that the Deputy CIO Navy-Marine Corps have are linked to us through a designation letter of responsibilities that they carry out, because information technology authorities sort of flow through the Secretary to me to them. And so that's how they actually get to play in the space. We sit in Crystal City right now, though we're headed to the Pentagon in 2010. And so we're a fairly small footprint right now. And we have a broader organization that we can rely upon in the Navy-Marine Corps team.

Mr. Reeve: Rob, to provide some greater detail and follow-up on that, can you describe your specific responsibilities and duties as the Department of the Navy Chief Information Officer, and particularly, could you give us a sense of how you coordinate or work with the Deputy CIOs for the Navy and the Marine Corps, and also the program executive officers, particularly PEO EIS, as well as the other DoD CIOs?

Mr. Carey: As we set policy and strategic direction for the Department, what that really means is to sort of chart that course to establish those tenets and boundary conditions of which the over 800,000 folks are going to live within, my simple term of "we make the rules," okay, but we also chart up the place where we want the Department to go. So the strategic plan and the strategic direction are the lofty places we want to go and aim all those building activities and transformational activities towards those points in space.

We work with our supporting elements in the PEOs and the ASN RD&A, the Research, Development, and Acquisition team, through the use of the Information Executive Council, or committee, the IEC that I chair. And that's a group that is made up of the deputies ASN (RD&A), ASN (FM), so that's the Research Development Acquisition team and the Financial Management team, as well as the PEOs as well as network com. So that body is fully capable of making decisions across the Department. And that's how we try to communicate formally.

And then we have very vast numbers of informal channels and working relationships with people on the team. So as we move particular projects downstream, whether it be security, whether it be something on NMCI, whether it be something on privacy, we reach out and touch the responsible parties and make the connections.

Mr. Reeve: So regarding those responsibilities and duties in the way your office operates, what are the top three challenges that you face in your position, and how have you addressed those challenges?

Mr. Carey: Today, the number one challenge for all of us is security, hands down. The world has changed dramatically in the last four or five years, where the threats are real, the threats are known. And so balancing the ability to get access to information while maintain a proper security paradigm is a huge challenge for us and is sort of the number one issue that I work.

We cannot cut off individuals' abilities to access information, to make decisions. That's what information is about; the ability to render proper facts in front of a decision that a leader must make. At the same time, the Internet was set up to be inherently open, not inherently secure. So balancing the ability to keep unwanted folks out of our networks and allow the right sets of accesses into information in the network and out of the network -- because not all our information is inside our firewalls, for example. That's the challenge that I face the most, and I spent a lot of my time on.

Another challenge that is taking up a lot of my time is privacy; you know, protecting the personally identifiable information, PII. So much of PII is available on the Internet, but now creating those processes within the Navy-Marine Corps team that will properly safeguard it. The last thing we want is a sailor or Marine down range worrying about his credit. He has to worry about what's right in front of him, not worrying about what's going on in the back office at home.

And then I think the last thing that I worry about most is managing change. All these things that become new, whether it is the next generation network, whether it is an MCI, whether it is smart cards and logging on to the machine with your PIN and not your password, are change. And the Department is a cross-section of the United States that doesn't like change. It likes to do things the way they've always done it.

And so generally in my world, it is never the technology. The technology generally always works. What doesn't work is -- and what takes time and takes a lot of effort is integrating the new process and displacing the old one. Integrating the new technology and displacing the old one, and moving into the culture zone, and how do I integrate across the curve. So those are sort of the top three things that I get my time, as well as -- and then effect my strategic planning, if you will.

Mr. Morales: So to clarify, the change that you talk about is not only the integration of the technology because technology obviously is continually changing, but it's really dealing with how the organization itself, how the people themselves absorb that change over time?

Mr. Carey: Exactly. So much of IT is consistent, or should be consistent in my view across the Department. And so when you find that IT has presented the opportunity to most commands and individuals to embrace it and deliver value to their boss and deliver a transaction or business result that was probably not optimized early on, then they act on it for 10 years, let's say. So now we want to create an enterprise way of doing business. Now I have to move the four or five people who worked a subordinate process to change into the new way. So that part gets to be hard, because you are trying to convince them that what they've been doing isn't wrong, it's just not the most efficient way to do business.

Mr. Morales: Rob, I understand you started your career in the Department of the Army. Could you describe your career path for our listeners?

Mr. Carey: I started testing weapons for the Army at Aberdeen Proving Ground, the most fun job I ever had in my life. I was blowing things up for a living. I moved to the Navy in 1985. I transferred, and I started working on sonar domes, those things that hang off the bows of ships and allow us to find submarines from surface ships, and then moved into a lot of undersea weapons and systems engineering and sonar projects within the Naval Sea Systems Command.

And then from there I moved into the IT space. A former CIO, Dan Porter, pulled me in and asked me to come over and start working on electronic business, which I did. And then I immediately got tasked with managing the smart card deployment in the Department of Navy, which was a huge change management initiative, rolling out the new ID card. And if you can imagine people not wanting to change that old green ID card that we were so familiar with, that we had for 20 years, showing them the new plastic ID card with a chip on it got me a lot of indoctrination to how people don't like to change.

And then, I think about five years ago, I was selected to be the Deputy CIO, fortunate enough to jump up behind Dave Wennergren, who was my predecessor, and work with him doing management of the office portfolio, if you will, across all the teams that we have in the office. And then while I was in the desert in Fallujah, I was selected to be the CIO. I actually met the Secretary of the Navy while I was there at Thanksgiving time and shook his hand and thanked him for picking me and told him I'd see him in April. So that's sort of it.

And then -- I have spent some time deploying for Desert Storm I, and now this one. I did go to Fallujah in 2006-2007, and spent some time with the Third Naval Construction Regiment doing construction planning, which was a very enjoyable experience, a little bit stressful, but very enjoyable.

Mr. Morales: Great. So as you sort of reflect back on your experiences at the Army and the Navy and all the different roles that you've had, how have these experiences prepared you for your current leadership role, and perhaps have shaped your leadership style?

Mr. Carey: I have learned over time in watching my bosses. I have always been fortunate to have really good bosses, by and large. And you learn from them, watch what succeeds and what doesn't succeed. You learn that the "I say, you do" mentality of the old Navy doesn't work very well. You learn that consensus building and team-based approaches, obtaining buy-in early on works a whole lot better, because if people are not surprised when they see change coming or if they were part of it when it was being developed, they will embrace it a whole lot better and try to make it go.

So my leadership style has been influenced by my experiences in the uniform Navy as well as my civilian assignments to be collaborative, to be team-based, to be one of obtaining consensus before you move on, although I believe that I can make decisions as well. There comes a point in time in an argument that we have to make a decision and we have to move on, and you just have to realize when do you cross that point.

So I think that's helped me understand both the uniformed Navy -- while I was in Fallujah living with the uniformed Marine Corps for seven months, I learned how they operate in the field in combat conditions. So when you bring all that back, you have an appreciation of how should I now try to make large change management and issues in information technology go.

Mr. Morales: That's great.

What about the Department of the Navy's IT transformation? We will ask Robert Carey, Chief Information Officer at the US Department of the Navy, to share with us when the conversation about management continues on The Business of Government Hour.

(Intermission)

Mr. Morales: Welcome back to The Business of Government Hour. I'm your host, Albert Morales, and this morning's conversation is with Rob Carey, Chief Information Officer at the U.S. Department of the Navy. Also joining us in our conversation is Bob Reeve, partner in IBM's DoD practice.

Rob, we've all read that the DoD is transforming from a platform-centric to net-centric operations. And I would imagine as the CIO, you're providing some of the key leadership in this regard. To this end, could you give us a brief overview of the Navy's IT strategic vision? Specifically, could you describe the vision that underlies and unifies your IT goals? And to what extent is this vision driven by the overarching DoD Department-wide goals?

Mr. Carey: Al, yes I can. I have been working in the CIO organization for over eight years now. And believe it or not, the vision has been the same. The technologies have enabled us to move at different paces to achieve the vision, which is accessing information securely from anywhere at any time to support decision-making, whether you're on the ground in Fallujah in a Marine Corps unit, or you're aboard a ship helping the folks in Burma, or you're at PACFLT on Oahu, that you can access the information that you need to make the decisions you need to make, and that the information is secure and trustworthy and so on and so on.

What I call the information management value chain of how we get to information, how we exercise the information, and how we put back a business result is the thing that we are trying to connect together and then drill into the various elements of -- to deliver that vision, deliver upon the vision that we've had. We see that there are things like service-oriented architectures out there that allow us to place information up for consumers to draw. However, you must change your applications in the way you access and intercept the information that you put up there.

We have things like networks, and we have authoritative databases, we have security profiles, we have common access cards, and PKI, that all become elements of this information management value chain, that allows us to now break down the components of accessing what I call the network to gain information to either conduct a transaction, or to deliver a business result in such a way that it's the most efficient and effective, and also interoperates with our joint partners in the other services.

So at the end of the day, we have worked very long and hard. Most of the elements of the strategic plan that we have written have remained virtually stable, because they are the right things to do. The strategic plans are not things that flip-flop every two years. The Congress requires that we put a plan out every two years, and we do. But the elements are basically the same. The six goals in our strategic plan have only changed a little bit to take in some of the direction from the Secretary, the CNO or the Commandant, and then embrace it as the DON's way ahead.

Mr. Morales: So with that overview, could you tell us a little bit more about your tactical approach as you have outlined in your CIO campaign plan. Specifically, to what extent does it detail those actions with the biggest impact in the shortest time frame, and how does it complement the Navy's IM/IT strategic plan?

Mr. Carey: Sure. The campaign plan was something I wanted to write when I came back from Fallujah in April of 2007. And I wanted to take our strategic plan and break it down one more level of detail, that there were deliverables on behalf of the Department that we were willing to commit to. There are seven goals in the campaign plan; there are six in the strat plan. The seventh one, that was called out -- actually it's goal two in the campaign plan, is protect PII, personally identifiable information.

The Secretary asked me directly you need to get on top of that. So I added that as a tactical goal that was achievable in my mind over a sort of a 500-day window. So I decided that I would produce a document and think through in each of these areas one level down what would we be working on at a fairly high level, but still making a deliverable that reflected progress along what the strategic plan was looking for. And so therefore, the campaign plan was developed and promulgated at the end of the summer last year, was intended to be a 500-day plan, which does coincide with the end of the administration, but that's purely coincidental.

This is about the amount of time it's going to take to get these things done. This is when they are needed. We are and have checked off several of the deliverables in this plan, and we're on task and on schedule to complete a successful plan. In all likelihood this fall, I will revisit this and rework it, and institute yet another one that now will capture the next set of major adventures that we want to go do. And I will produce that plan after the new administration takes in or, you know, gets in place.

Mr. Reeve: Rob, you've mentioned your time in Fallujah on active duty, and you are a civil engineering corps officer in the Navy Reserve, and I would think that brings a unique perspective to your role. How's being the actual customer of IT at the tip of the spear, so to speak, influence your current vision and tactics? What lessons have you learned from your frontline experience, and how has that changed the way you think about your job?

Mr. Carey: Bob, the privilege of serving right at the tip of the spear, where everything you do matters, had a profound effect on me, because you can sense the frustration of folks when things aren't working well. You can also sense the successes when things are working well in the communications IT space.

I got to see the young sailors and marines operating their systems at a level that I would not have expected; watching a young marine managing 15 chat sessions at once, where he would've had a bank of phones, and he would've been a fairly busy guy, sitting at his workstation really in great command and control of the knowledge of what was going on in those 15 places wherever they may have been. So to observe that, and then understand how is information technology supporting warfighting; that's our very basic mission. And how does it support decision-making; watching generals making decisions to put marines and sailors in harm's way based on the information they get, whether it's intelligence or it's a presentation or it is a point paper or what have you, was sort of bringing IT full circle for me. So it helped me understand the real consumption, and how does any one person sitting at a workstation feed the machine, if you will, feed the warfighting engine.

The other thing that it brought me in my service was that things really show up on the battlefield slow. They do not show up at a speed that the commanding generals would like. And in my mind -- just my mind -- information technology is something that can be delivered more rapidly. We cannot deliver Apaches or Abrams tanks any faster than we are. IT solutions can be developed very rapidly and delivered very quickly to those who need them, which again provides better information, more integrated database information than was previously realizable, perhaps, to the warfighter to allow them to make better decisions and support better, more safer combat operations.

So I saw a need for that that I would not have seen, and then seeing again the millennial generation fully engaged, operating IT systems that I would not have given them credit for being able to do, you know, successfully, as if it was just their job, it was just a piece of cake for them to do this, although they were downrange doing it.

Mr. Reeve: You describe a world there that calls for open and accessible information at the battlefield. In my experience, information technology is an area sometimes noted for turf battles and proprietary views. Could you elaborate on your efforts to foster an enterprise view to IT, and could you elaborate on your efforts to enhance IT governance within your Department?

Mr. Carey: IT governance is an issue of great debate right now, because there are things in Title 10, things in Title 40, that clearly delineate who does what or how things get done, but there is no precedence between the two for example. And those are -- Title 10 describes the responsibilities of the military departments and the DoD, and then Title 40 is the Clinger-Cohen Act, describes what CIOs do for example.

So as we foster and build enterprise alignment across the greater IT team, that allows us to get buy-in on enterprise approaches to IT systems and IT policy. Aligning the acquisition with the resources, with the policy, with the requirements, and the operation, is the task at hand right now. We have work to do in that space, but we operate pretty well today. But there's improvements we could make to make it a smoother transition.

Whether you use proprietary software or you use open source software, they both have a fit. They both play roles in our world. And we can't jump to any one thing at any one time; it's not possible. What is possible is to make maximum use of the IT that you have to deliver, whether it's business value or warfighting value. And to continue to refine and reduce the IT spend such that the pointy end of the spear receives the vast amount of resources, then the IT that runs the C2, and the back office activities are minimized.

Mr. Reeve: Let's talk a little bit more about those resources. I understand your Department's information technology capital investment portfolio is in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Would you elaborate on how you've strengthened your IT capital investment process to assure that investment decisions are mission-aligned and cost-justified? Specifically, how do you work with other elements in the Navy in managing an investment review process?

Mr. Carey: There are several layers from the DoD on down that we -- several procedures that we follow. JCIDS is the Joint Capabilities Integration Development System that actually is the process by which we delineate requirements and validate and vet them. How we move through acquisitions and how we work with the acquisition team to deliver IT solutions is based upon -- you know, the OPNAV staff and the CNO and the Commandant of the Marine Corps, and their staff work the requirements piece.

They are the ones that are chartered to deliver what does this thing have to do. The acquisition team is chartered with determining how do I go by what it is you need. We help in the IT space of setting the policy, the strategic direction, and help shape the solution side of -- with the acquisition team, the requirements of what does that mean, what's the thing that we're going to get.

We do have a portfolio management instruction that is in the signature cycle now, in the job cycle, if you will. But it delineates how we're going to now continue to codify and structure the review of IT investments, similar to how DoD has their investment review boards, and create the structure by which we can enable the various mission areas to understand, review and decide they want to continue to invest in what they are investing in today. And make sure -- again, it's about alignment, of do you understand which part of your portfolio you're investing in, and do you want to continue to do that.

As we transform the Department, this actually provides visibility into the spend. And the spend is, you know -- the Department of Navy's IT budget I believe on the Hill is about $7.1 billion. So the review of that portfolio and the detailed understanding of it is important. While the IT budget has gone up a little bit, the Department of Navy's budget has gone up at a greater rate. So therefore, the percentage that we spend on IT is smaller. And that's actually what you're looking for. And we still try to reduce our IT spend in support of the CNO and the Commandant, so that we can buy ships and tanks.

Mr. Morales: So Rob, I would imagine that there's probably a line a mile long in your office of folks wanting to show you some of the latest and greatest technologies. How do you take advantage of some of this R&D done both within the DoD, as well as by commercial enterprises to solve some of your more pressing business and mission challenges? And how do you balance operating between leading edge technologies versus some of the more proven technologies?

Mr. Carey: Al, we keep a close ear to the ground with respect to where's technology going. We visit companies, companies visit me, but we have a pretty good understanding of what is state-of-the-art, what's going to be state-of-the-art, and then sort of what exists now and is sort of getting long in the tooth, which presents an opportunity to you to think about, can I do that better. What I -- I use the federal CIO best practices committee, I'm a co-chair of that.

I use my own industry site visits to sort of gain this fundamental understanding of what technologies deliver what business results. When people come to my office and want to talk to me about technology, I ask them to talk to their technology in the context of a business problem that I have. If they can't do that, then there's probably a challenge right away. Even though I am sure that the technology works, it has to be delivered in the context of a problem that we have. And then I can understand the business case and the ROI -- much as anyone in industry would go to their boss and say, "Don't you want to invest in this?" I think the boss would say, "Well, yes I do, but show me how this pays off and when."

So we keep an ear to these things and we embrace them, and push those ideas and technologies into those solution sets -- whether it's at ONR or the acquisition research guys -- and make sure that they are aware of the capabilities of certain tool sets out there, which continue to evolve. Things change so rapidly, it is hard to put a peg in the ground and stay stable. But that being said, with an 800,000 person organization, we have to put our peg in the sand at the appropriate location to take advantage of technology, but it has to have the kinks worked out before we get there.

We have places that we'll take advantage of leading edge technology and evaluate them for us, but by and large, if it is going to be an enterprise solution, it's going to take time to roll it out anyway. So I have to sort of balance the two between my desire to have the latest and greatest thing and the stability of the enterprise.

Mr. Morales: So along similar lines, let's talk for a moment about NMCI, which I understand is the largest intranet in the world. Could you tell us just a little bit about the plans for the Next Generation Enterprise Network, otherwise known as NGEN? To what extent does this look to fill some of the gaps that exist in connectivity between the warfighter and CONUS and the forces?

Mr. Carey: The follow-on to NMCI, termed NGEN, is a network environment that we want to build that we believe will continue to unify the Navy-Marine Corps team in a consistent environment that allows us to access information from anywhere and be able to make decisions from anywhere. So we see the attributes that we want to build in are things that we build upon our successes from NMCI, we will make sure where we stubbed our toe in NMCI, that we don't do that again.

We've written a strategy document, the NNE, Naval Network Environment 2016, that sort of lays out in broad terms where we intend to go. One of the tenets of that is really about -- information technology is so critical to the success of the Department of the Navy, the Navy-Marine Corps team, that we want to have a stronger role in that than we had with our NMCI partners.

At the time the NMCI was deployed, we made the decisions that were proper at that time. It is many years later -- and when you revisit those decisions, you could possibly change them. And that's where we think we're going to go into a much stronger government role. So we think that connecting and creating the seamless network environment, and eliminating legacy networks and rolling them in and creating this process that allows us to manage information across a homogeneous environment will better serve the warfighters.

Mr. Morales: Great.

What about the Department of the Navy's IT security efforts?

We will ask Robert Carey, Chief Information Officer at the U.S. Department of the Navy, to share with us when the conversation about management continues on The Business of Government Hour.

(Intermission)

Mr. Morales: Welcome back to The Business of Government Hour. I'm your host, Albert Morales, and this morning's conversation is with Rob Carey, Chief Information Officer at the U.S. Department of the Navy.

Also joining us in our conversation is Bob Reeve, partner in IBM's DoD practice.

Rob, we all know that technology has not only enhanced our ability to share information, but it's also made organizations more vulnerable to unlawful and destructive penetration, and you referenced this in the first segment. So having said this, information access and knowledge sharing is obviously key to your operations, but there's a delicate balance that needs to be struck there. Could you elaborate a bit more on your chief IT security initiatives, and your efforts in balancing this delicate issue of access and security?

Mr. Carey: Sure, Al. We have worked very hard, and my former boss, David Wennergren, who is up at OSD now, has mentioned to me we're not really balancing so much as we are working both delivering access with security. So the balancing act almost seems like you are willing to compromise one for the other. And we really -- it's sort of like you have to have your cake and eat it, too. You have to have information access and you have to have the appropriate level of security.

So that unto itself becomes a challenge, because people are generally willing to swing the pendulum into the security space and lock a network down, or on the other hand, the Internet itself is inherently wide open, and there's a balance or a compromise that we have to make that allows both to succeed. So as we deploy things like the common access card and public key infrastructure, the log-on component accessing the network and authentication and verifying identities becomes the first thing that we've pretty well succeeded at.

And then as we move into HP-based access controls, which is more of an identity management-based process that allows us to move into the place where data is tagged, and if I have the right access controls, I can get to it -- we're starting that venture now and there is a lot that will be rolled into that -- PKI and biometrics, smart cards, things like that. But we have to get to the place where we can ensure that Rob Carey is allowed to access the information Rob Carey is allowed to access, and not the information he's not.

And it plays out on things like in the classified networks that we have, we have to make sure that we can control things adequately, yet make sure that information is able to be shared. We want to get rid of user names and passwords. Again, back to the log-on thing, so much of what we do in the security realm is fairly simple and straightforward, it is not difficult to have people log on with their common access card, but it is once again a change in how they do business.

We have extended public key infrastructure to our BlackBerries, so we have smart card readers that are Bluetooth-enabled, that allow my credentials from my common access card to be transmitted through Bluetooth to the BlackBerry, and I can sign-in and encrypt e-mails from that wireless device. That is a huge step forward as we try to lockdown -- did that e-mail come from somebody that I thought it was? Was it Bob Reeve or was it signed by Bob Reeve? You know, I need to know that in the future, because the threat can do things with e-mails that heretofore we need to be aware of.

We have invested a fair amount of resources in raising the security bar of the NMCI and the other networks because we have come to the realization, and I think this Secretary, Secretary Winter has come to the realization or he's known this, that security is not something we debate, security is part of the basic system, and so he has helped bolster something that, say four or five years ago, we would debate, and it's not debatable now. It is to make sure we're investing in the right sets of tools and activities that again balance access and security, or allow us to have both.

Mr. Morales: Taking the same issue, but from a people perspective, what steps are you taking to create or cultivate a culture of accountability for the protection of sensitive personal information to ensure that you are continuing improvements in this area and addressing any security weaknesses?

Mr. Carey: Last year, we embarked upon a journey to strengthen our management of PII, privacy information. We developed some processes of how you handle it and deploy those. We took those who engage PII and put them through additional training. So we're working our way to a place called "accountability," that now we manage that information as if it was something that there would be a consequence if it was not handled appropriately.

That's an important distinction, because classified information, if you're in the military and you mishandle it, you will be held accountable; whether it's on a fitness report or civilian evaluation, there is a consequence that will be brought to bear. In the PII world, that's a more difficult challenge right now. If it's malicious, obviously we can, but we have to get in and understand our handling procedures and create a sense of accountability and ownership of those folks who manage Privacy Act information, such that they will manage it in a more coordinated and consistent manner.

If a laptop is stolen out of someone's car that's in the trunk -- that you would have put it there anyway, it seems to me that that's an issue that you are remorseful about, but you would have not known someone was going to break into your car. Leaving a laptop on the front seat of a car in plain view is sort of -- in the wrong part of the neighborhood, for example, is sort of something that you have to be aware that you could have done that better, you could have put it in the trunk, you could have done other things.

We have a lot of issues with the prolific amount of information that we have, whether it's on thumb-drives, whether it's on PDAs, whether it's -- even sometimes just paper. So we're trying to wrap all these information flows into a consistent procedure, and then make sure that whether you are a civilian, a uniform member, or a contractor, that there is an accountability delivered, and that there will be a consequence on the other end if you do not handle the stuff properly.

Mr. Reeve: You mentioned some of the downside of social networking, but there is a lot of press about those models and technologies that are redefining the relationships of citizens with their government, and I understand that you may in fact have the honor of being the first federal agency CIO to have his own public blog, recently recognized by Federal Computer Week.

To that end, what are some of the more important business potential applications that you have identified within the Department of Navy, and more importantly, what does this mean for federal government as it pursues the possibilities of web 2.0?

Mr. Carey: Bob, the web 2.0 technologies present great opportunities to accelerate the delivery of information to -- whether it's taxpayers and delivering citizen services for the agencies and departments that are in the District here, as well as the Department of Defense to deliver value to warfighters. They are stretching how we move information around, how we integrate information in real-time, our very basic tenets of netcentricity, using the net to convey information and move information and integrate information to present a picture that a decision-maker will use.

The web 2.0 can only make that better and does make it better. For example, when we write policy, one of my main tenets, policies can take months and months and months to be deployed, because there is a draft created, then it's routed around, and it's -- we incorporate comments, it's routed around again. Wiki technology allows me -- and I intend to do this, to deploy and develop a policy on a wiki -- it will be a closed wiki, because I can't have the public making policy, but I can have the Department of Navy employees latched on to a wiki, using that technology, to in essence put their money where their mouth is, and write it like you want to see it.

Now, I can do that in a matter of -- my sense is 30 to 60 days. Focus your energy, write the words you want to see there, this isn't about routing it around ad infinitum; this is get it to the place where the draft takes a very short amount of time to get very close to being the final version, and that technology lets me do it. Not to mention, I can track all the changes, I understand who said what, when they said it, who overwrote somebody else's words, and I can then create what I believe is a consensus-based team-built document that the organizations will all sign up to.

Things like RSS feeds and mashups again allow us to use and integrate information far faster than we would have, enabling people even on the battlefield to make decisions, where you see a lot of Google maps, and you will see a little arrow, a pin dot into the map so you now have your location, you hit the little dot and you will see an address and a phone number, those types of technology seem very simple, but are very powerful in our utilization of them.

Mr. Reeve: When you talk about all of those different components, the knowledge management capabilities of the organization to intersect people technology and processes, to enable informed decision-making and help you accomplish your mission; you talked a little bit about that. Could you expand on where there are some other recent examples of your use of knowledge management in the Department of Navy?

Mr. Carey: Bob, we have had great success in our diligence with knowledge management and its importance to our very basic operations. We have been pursuing knowledge management tenets in the Department of Navy CIO's office ever since I got there. So that eight years now, we have been working towards creating an environment and creating people that understand that information in context is far more powerful than data to help decision-makers in order to conduct transactions in the business of the Department.

Today, there are knowledge management officers in battle groups; there are knowledge management officers on most of the fleet staffs. Four years ago, that did not exist, but they have that very title. That's their full-time job, they are responsible for how are we collaborating, how are we exchanging information, what are the standards, how do certain systems need to interface that maybe didn't today.

So it's really exciting for us to watch the fruits of our labors over time now become courses that are taught to larger and larger audiences about how do I capture knowledge; how do I use information systems to deliver business value. We have moved into and maybe back to the future the information management space: who needs what information when. And how do I integrate things like content management or search, because at the end of the day, knowledge management is about attaching information to a context, and then I have to be able to search information and then make some decisions.

So as we work with those various aspects of KM, the knowledge management, we have struck upon what we think is a real way ahead for our tool sets to really shorten the cycle time between someone's idea in his head at a very basic level and an action on the other end that has information behind it.

Mr. Reeve: Talking about change in people, with the rise of the so-called net generation, could you elaborate on your Department's efforts to meet the challenges this new generation brings, specifically how are you leveraging the capabilities and the expectations of this generation and integrating them with the established culture, a senior leadership that didn't grow up in such a digital environment?

Mr. Carey: Bob, a great question. Today's senior leaders in all of DoD, but certainly in the Department of Navy like me -- I am the average age of an IT worker, I'm 47, I have been working in IT approximately eight years, although the average IT worker has been working 16 years in the business. So right away, you think I am a Boomer and I am two generations away from the folks we're recruiting and trying to attract and retain.

I am a digital immigrant, I have moved into the space -- being an engineer by training, I sort of understand and consider myself dangerous, but when I sit in front of my daughter or my son who is 10 and they offer me PowerPoint advice, I feel very humbled, because they have been working in this environment since they touched computers, which was in preschool. You and I didn't touch a computer in preschool, we probably touched it in college and then thought it was a little bit different, the gray screen or the green screens.

So as we try to take advantage of this talent base that exists out there, this unharnessed talent base, as we move into the next generation network environment, we have to understand the strengths and skills that these younger people bring make us a little nervous, the decision-makers are a little nervous, okay, because we don't know how to do what they have done ever since they were born.

They don't know not having a cell phone; they never heard of an LPA vinyl record, they don't -- never heard of a cassette tape or an 8-track, right. They only know CDs and so these digital natives make us a little bit nervous, but they are our future, and so we work on, and we are working on creating an intern program for people in the Department to bring them aboard, appropriately pay and retain and train them to continue to serve the Department as civilians or in the uniformed military as sailors or young officers.

They understand wikis and blogs, they understand the new technologies. They expect that, which is something again that the older leadership has to grapple with, because I understand these things because I work in it, but I would tell you, peers of mine would look at this and they would not understand necessarily. So it is an important thing for us to focus on this next generation, and make sure that they are following behind us and able to deliver value to the Department.

Mr. Morales: So along that vein, can you tell us a little bit about the Information Technology Exchange Program, or ITEP, because I understand that this is geared towards this issue of attracting and retaining some of these new generations of IT people?

Mr. Carey: It is. While the ITEP legislation did expire, we are working the path to the future for that particular program. We like the fact that we can leverage industry best practices and bring them into supporting our missions and vice versa. So I think there's opportunities there, and again, industry hires young people all the time. We hire young people when we recruit sailors or marines, they go to boot camp. They are by definition mostly pretty young; in the civilian sector is really where that gap is, in my mind, because for example, I spoke at a conference in San Diego last fall and I asked people, you know, all the millennials in the audience, please raise your hand. There was about 800 people in the audience, and I got less than 10 hands, which was very telling to me, that they are not associated with us and we need to work that. So the ITEP program creates another venue to leverage that talent.

Mr. Morales: Great.

What does the future hold for the U.S. Department of the Navy's IT function?

We will ask Robert Carey, Chief Information Officer at the U.S. Department of the Navy, to share with us when the conversation about management continues on The Business of Government Hour.

(Intermission)

Mr. Morales: Welcome back to our final segment of The Business of Government Hour. I'm your host, Albert Morales, and this morning's conversation is with Rob Carey, Chief Information Officer at the U.S. Department of the Navy.

Also joining us in our conversation is Bob Reeve, partner in IBM's DoD practice.

Rob, we've talked with many of our guests about collaborating with industry, and you've called for an innovative partnership with industry. Could you elaborate a bit on the kinds of partnerships you are developing to improve operations, and in what areas would you like to enhance or expand this public-private collaboration?

Mr. Carey: Al, there are so many opportunities in the Information Age to collaborate with industry. I'll start with just a couple. We work on enterprise licensing agreements for software and some hardware sets that allows us to buy in economical order quantities. But what has been an interesting twist over the last 12 months, for example, is the advent of netcentric licensing. What does that mean? That means that as we develop joint systems, as we develop systems that the Army, the Navy, the Air Force and Marines will access, are the licensing agreements for the software built to enable that sharing?

Typically, licensing agreements could be for an organization as large as the Department of Navy and focused internally. So everyone in the Department of Navy can access a certain system and share the information accordingly within the tenets of the licensing agreement. But what about when Army and Navy have to share, when DoD and DHS has to share? So that's a really exciting opportunity to redefine the landscape of how we do IT systems management, IT systems procurement.

I have spent a fair amount of time with the IAC team and the ACT team, building relationships with industry to better understand what you all do, and if I don't do that, I am remiss in my responsibilities of understanding where is industry going with technology, and how does the Department of the Navy take advantage of it. Again, when we have partnerships to deliver capabilities at the other end that aren't adversarial at all, that are collaborative, we get products and solutions, and you get to stay in business delivering those solutions on our behalf. So it's an important thing for us to continue to better relationships, understand what each other's needs are and then deliver collaborative solutions.

Mr. Reeve: Rob, you've talked in the earlier segments about the team that you work with across the government IT space. Could you elaborate on your approach personally to empowering your employees? How do you lead change and enable your staff and those within the organization to accept the inevitability of change and make the most of it?

Mr. Carey: Bob, I am one of those managers and leaders that I like to coach and help. I do not want to get in and make decisions, although I can if I have to. I like to empower the team to go solve problems that I didn't even know about, and then come back and tell me that they did that. And my team is very good at that. I learned that from my previous bosses, David Wennergren and Dan Porter, that you're empowered to go solve problems on my behalf, that you see -- maybe not that I see -- all problems don't come through the CIO's focal plane, they are all over the map, and then deciding which ones are appropriately resolved by my office and which ones aren't is a designation that my team leaders understand.

We also think of ourselves as a learning organization, which is an important attribute, so I run a quarterly training series called Expanding Boundaries, and we review latest books, we have a world-class instructor and educator by the name of Barry Frew, who used to teach at the Naval Post-Graduate School, help us with understanding new concepts of how to manage change, how to lead, how to embrace our own strengths, and then deliver value.

Mr. Reeve: With the evolution of the global threat environment and the many challenges associated with that, how do you envision DoD and its information technology efforts evolving in the next two to five years to meet these challenges?

Mr. Carey: I think we will see the Attribute-Based Access Control, ABAC, come to reality. I think we will see an integration of biometrics and public key infrastructure into a complementary set of tools. Today, there are some that think it's one or the other, but I think they're complementary technologies that deliver the security at the front end of the system. I think we'll see identity management technologies blossom, which is getting the physical and logical access deployed in such a way that it is consistent across the DoD.

I think we will see service-oriented architectures and the enablement of netcentric activities to really begin the blossom. I think we will see IPv6 rolling out -- while it has been on the horizon, the horizon is getting closer, and we're now investing in those activities to enable our enterprise to take advantage of IPv6.

Mr. Morales: So along similar lines, what emerging technologies hold the most promise for improving federal IT? And how much is the existence of open standards and open architectures, service-oriented architecture, which you mentioned earlier, and the availability of free systems, such as Linux, influencing some of your thinking?

Mr. Carey: Open systems provide an opportunity for the Department of Navy to use that as a tool in the toolbox. I wrote a letter last year that pretty much delineated that. It did not say anything other than you can use these as if they were COTS technology, and that they are aligned with every other acquisition regulation out there. That allowed people to embrace them to the extent that, and give them sort of top cover that, hey, they are okay to use open source technologies.

So you know, we believe open standards are the right way to go, because open architectures and open standards are the things that we want to gravitate to, because they facilitate interoperability. The proprietary systems are embedded in where we are; however, we want to make sure that when we go and create our component of the GIG, the FORCEnet, Naval FORCEnet construct which is the Naval component of the GIG, the way we are interoperable, is if we have open standards and define ways of communicating across systems. So open architectures and open standards, service-oriented architectures are tools in our toolbox to enable information sharing and information access.

Mr. Morales: So Rob, you have got one of the most popular blogs out there on the net. You're a Federal 100 award recipient, you've clearly had a very successful and interesting career. So other than blowing things up in the Army, what's been the most rewarding aspect of your career, and what advice might you give to someone who is out there perhaps thinking about a career in public service?

Mr. Carey: I have not had -- I've had so many rewarding parts of my career, whether it was serving in Iraq, serving my nation in a uniformed capacity in a wartime environment, whether it was blowing things up at Aberdeen Proving Ground, but I look back at what I have done over the last 25-27 years and I think of the opportunity to serve the nation, which was a goal of mine to sort of give back to what we have, and then I think that that desire to contribute is something that if you want to serve the government, you want to serve the Department of the Navy and you want to be sort of turned loose to go make a difference -- this is what I would counsel young people to do.

Because when I came to the Department of Navy, and even when I worked for the Army, I was pretty much turned loose, so my success was what I made of it. My failures are what I would make of them, and I appreciated that opportunity, that I could sort of run with the ball, if you will.

And I got a great deal of satisfaction out of every job I've had being afforded that opportunity to make a difference. And if anybody sees any e-mails from me, that is sort of my tagline, is make a difference every day, because I believe that. And I believe that there is an opportunity in the Department of Navy, in public service, to make a difference, whether it's for the taxpayers or the warfighters.

Mr. Morales: That's fantastic. Unfortunately, Rob, we have reached the end of our time. I want to thank you for fitting us into your busy schedule.

But more importantly, Bob and I would like to thank you for your dedicated service to our country across the many roles you have held at the DoD.

Mr. Carey: Al and Bob, I appreciate you having me on the show today. I think this was a wonderful forum to just discuss what we're doing in the Department of Navy. I do want to thank -- my team at DON CIO -- because of all the hard work they do, we are successful in sharing information across the Department, and I do want to recognize all the men and women that are serving in harm's way today, because without them, I don't think we would be here.

Mr. Morales: That's fantastic, thank you.

This has been The Business of Government Hour, featuring a conversation with Robert Carey, Chief Information Officer, at the U.S. Department of the Navy.

My co-host has been Bob Reeve, partner in IBM's DoD practice.

As you enjoy the rest of your day, please take time to remember the men and women of our armed and civil services abroad who may not be able to hear this morning's show on how we're improving their government, but who deserve our unconditional respect and support.

For The Business of Government Hour, I'm Albert Morales. Thank you for listening.

Announcer: This has been The Business of Government Hour. Be sure to join us every Saturday at 9:00 a.m., and visit us on the web at businessofgovernment.org. There, you can learn more about our programs and get a transcript of today's conversation.

Until next week, it's businessofgovernment.org.

Originally Broadcast Saturday, December 16, 2006

Washington, D.C.

Mr. Morales: Good morning and welcome to The Business of Government Hour. I'm Albert Morales, your host and managing partner of The IBM Center for The Business of Government. We created the Center in 1998 to encourage discussion and research into new approaches to improving government effectiveness. You can find out more about the Center by visiting us on the web at businessofgovernment.org.

The Business of Government Radio Hour features a conversation about management with a government executive who is changing the way government does business. Our special guest this morning is Vice Admiral John Harvey Jr., Chief of Naval Personnel and Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Manpower, Personnel, Training, & Education.

Good morning, Admiral.

VADM Harvey: Good morning.

Mr. Morales: And joining us in our conversation is Bob Bleimeister, partner in IBM's human capital practice.

Good morning, Bob.

Mr. Bleimeister: Good morning. Glad to be here.

Mr. Morales: Admiral, can you tell us about the mission of your office and how it supports the mission of the department, and the Navy specifically?

VADM Harvey: Certainly. I think the best way to think of it is I am the Navy's people-guy. I represent every aspect of the people part of our Navy, the best talent that our nation has to offer, and how we bring them into the Navy, how we take them through the Navy -- their training, their education, their assignments -- and then how we either retain them up to the point where it's time to retire or they separate and go on to another career. So it's a pretty all-consuming version or view of the people in the Navy and everything about their lives with us in uniform.

Mr. Morales: Admiral, I probably should have asked you this to start with, but perhaps you can give us a sense of the scale here. When you say Navy, how big is the Navy -- the military, the reserves, civilians -- and can you relate this size to the scope of your efforts and how your office is organized? And perhaps you can tell us a little bit about the budget that you manage.

VADM Harvey: Sure. The numbers will I think make clear that we stay pretty busy. On active duty today, in the active duty force, we have about 350,000 sailors -- that's officers and enlisted. About 50,000 officers and about 293,000 enlisted, with 4,400 midshipmen at the Naval Academy on our books. For the reserve component of the Navy, for the ready reserve, it's a total of about another 130,000, with 70,000 in our selective reserve who we have in a drilling status, who we still see in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and around the world in various places, and then in our individual ready reserve who are on standby working through their lives but on our books as potential to serve, that's about 60,000. When you look at the civilian component, which I am not strictly responsible for, that's another 175,000 individuals. So when you total it all up, we've got close to 900,000 folks in the Department of the Navy doing the nation's business every day. Now in terms of my budget, I spend about $30 billion a year in terms of direct costs in our military personnel accounts -- that's paid allowances, training costs, et cetera. So it's a pretty hefty sum to take care of all those folks.

Mr. Morales: So just to clarify in terms of the scope, it is the men and women in uniform, both active and in reserves, but not the civilians.

VADM Harvey: Correct. That is correct.

Mr. Bleimeister: Admiral, you've got a dual title: Chief of Naval Personnel, and Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Manpower, Personnel, Training, & Education. Could you describe in a little more detail your personal role and responsibilities?

VADM Harvey: Absolutely. When you look at the title "Chief of Naval Personnel," that's rooted in law and deeply rooted in our history. The first chief of the Bureau was put in office in 1862, and that was in result to the growing demands of a rapidly expanding navy in the Civil War, when you used to just bring in and pay off the crew members on the ship and never worried about anything beyond that immediate tour of duty. When they expanded the Navy to fight the war, they realized that model was not going to be a model for success.

So today, the Chief of Naval Personnel is responsible for the recruiting function of all our officers enlisted, the training function across the board, getting them ready for what we want them to do, distributing them throughout the Navy to where we need them to be, and then again retaining those that we want to keep in for their career, who want to stay with us who we want to stay, up to the point where it's time to either retire or separate. So that's kind of the today job.

There's a future look to it, which is the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations, where I look ahead and say, "Okay, here's what the Navy's structure is going to be 5, 10, 15 years from now. What do we have to lay in in terms of our plans and policies to ensure we have the right kind of people to match that kind of structure for the global environment we expect to face out at that time frame." So that's the future look, if you will. And making sure we have those roadmaps in place to get us from today to what we believe will be our future that will match up with what we think the Navy's going to look like at that time as well.

Mr. Bleimeister: Admiral, you've had a very interesting career up until you took over this job about a little over a year ago. Could you talk about how your career in the Navy started, and leading up a bit to before you took this role?

VADM Harvey: Certainly. Like so many others, it started at the Naval Academy, and I graduated from there in 1973 with a degree in political science, but I don't want to go into too much detail. It's important because one of the really big things I learned there set me on the path that has carried me through for 33 years. I was a political science major and I loved it, and the math and science and technology, the physics, electrical engineering, didn't come that easily to me, and because it didn't I sort of avoided it and didn't perhaps make the level of effort I needed to along the way. But I went on a summer cruise and realized that at its heart, this was a technologically-oriented Navy, and that to make the most of the ships, the aircraft, and the systems that we operate, you really do have to have a deep understanding of what it is -- the fundamentals of what you're doing.

And so I looked around and said getting into the nuclear propulsion program would be a way of helping to really upgrade the technical side of my education, and that was putting it mildly. I was lucky enough that I had a good enough foundation to go and be interviewed by Admiral Rickover, be accepted into the nuclear propulsion program, and since that time, I've been able to blend together my desire to command a ship with a career of working my way through the surface side of the nuclear propulsion program, where I ended up as a reactor officer on board an aircraft carrier, as well as being able to go on to command a destroyer and a cruiser. So I blended the nuclear side -- the nuclear propulsion side -- of our Navy with the surface side and that sort of defined my at-sea career.

And then on the shore side of the house, when you weren't at sea, just by accident I developed a sub-specialty in the people business, and it was purely just a random assignment when I was younger, but I really loved it. I really enjoyed every aspect of dealing with the individuals and finding out what makes them tick and how do we find the best fit for their knowledge, skills, abilities, and talents in our great Navy. And so I stayed with that on the shore side and worked the personnel piece and then the manpower policy piece, and so it just so happened I ended up ready to be given the job that I have today. So a combination of good fortune, good experiences, and great teachers made this all happen.

Mr. Morales: For someone who admitted that he didn't care for math or physics too much, that leap into the nuclear program must have taken a lot of courage.

VADM Harvey: It was a non-trivial event, let me tell you.

Mr. Morales: It's one of those life-defining moments.

VADM Harvey: Right, it really was. It was a very challenging program, and I just can't overemphasize what it meant, the sense of accomplishment that it gave me when I came through the program. And I didn't just sort of reach the finish line and collapse, I went through well and it really gave me a lot of confidence for the future. I have always felt one of the best decisions I ever made was one of the first ones I ever made.

Mr. Morales: Admiral, you have served in a variety of roles, and you've just described some of them, but can you tell us, based on some of these experiences, how have they prepared you for your current leadership role and have informed your management approach and your current leadership style?

VADM Harvey: Well, I think one of the very important things I do today is to convey to our Chief of Naval Operations, to our senior leadership, the Secretary of the Navy, a sense of the force, a sense of the people -- how do they view themselves and their Navy, their place in the Navy, their future, their opportunities, are their capabilities being exploited to the maximum that there is? And so that's a very important thing for me to understand and be able to pick up on what that is, and then turn that into something coherent for our CNO -- here's what we need to be worried about, here are things we need to be focused on, and here's where we need to be headed for the future. So my experiences in command of a battle group, of a cruiser, of a destroyer, and then my experiences ashore in the people business I think have really helped me be able to develop that sense for where the force is, and what we need to be worried about, thinking about, and doing. And that's the first big thing.

The second big thing is really getting a bead on the future, having a good understanding of where the rest of the Navy is headed so we can integrate the human capability with the technological capability we're building, understanding the global environment we're going to be in, and then pushing that forward. And so I've been very fortunate to have some tours, whether it's my postgraduate education, my experiences when I worked in the office of the Secretary of Defense for Policy, getting a global view of that, and then some other jobs I've had on the Navy staff, where I've understood what the future is in our ships, our airplanes, and our weapons systems. So to blend that together to help give that good, coherent picture that the people need to fit into.

Mr. Morales: Excellent. How is the Navy transforming, maintaining, and shaping its force structure?

We will ask Vice Admiral John Harvey Jr., Chief of Naval Personnel and Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Manpower, Personnel, Training, & Education, to discuss this with us when the conversation about management continues on The Business of Government Hour.

(Intermission)

Mr. Morales: Welcome back to The Business of Government Hour. I'm your host, Albert Morales, and this morning's conversation is with Vice Admiral John Harvey, Chief of Naval Personnel and Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Manpower, Personnel, Training, & Education.

Also joining us in our conversation is Bob Bleimeister, partner in IBM's human capital practice.

Admiral, would you tell us about the Navy's strategy for our people? How does this enable the Navy to assess, train, distribute, and develop its manpower to become a mission-focused force that meets the warfighting requirements of the Navy?

VADM Harvey: Sure. There are two very distinct but interrelated components on the strategy for our people. The first part, the people side, starts with understanding and defining the workforce of the future -- what is the work that our sailors will have to do, what are the knowledge, skills, and abilities that they're going to need, and then how will these knowledge, skills, and abilities be utilized on our ships and aircraft and systems? So that's the people side, and understanding the work that those people will have to do.

Then there's the business side, which is how will we transform our existing processes that govern all those activities I just described to ensure that we deliver the skilled sailors we need to have who can do the work we believe we're going to have to do? Now the goal of the people side, or the strategy for our people is to define the future Navy workforce, and then what is that human capital strategy that will govern how we recruit, train and manage them for mission accomplishment? And the business side is taking a look at my domain, if you will, the manpower, personnel, training, and education, bringing those together into a single value chain, and focusing that value chain on getting the best value from the people we bring in. So it's two pieces put together, and that would comprise the total strategy for our people.

Mr. Morales: Along this same theme, Admiral, could you elaborate on the Navy's new Sea Warrior program? How does this enable a more flexible and responsive development and deployment of the total Navy workforce and provide sailors with more control over their careers?

VADM Harvey: Sea Warrior is how we brought together the training, education, and career management systems that provide and govern the growth and development of our people. Sea Warrior is how we look at this in a holistic fashion. At the heart of it is giving the individual a real input into their own career development, their buy-in, if you will, to the Navy. For 200 years, we sort of told people where to go, what to study, and what to do. What we need to do for the future is bring these individuals in and make them part of that process -- put them at the heart of it -- because it's their future that we're trying to bring together with the Navy's future. And if we get that kind of buy-in in terms of career management development, then I think we really unlock the full potential of these folks when they commit to us for a career. And so that's the growth and development of our people.

Then there's that piece I talked about -- better understanding the work and what it is that the future's going to demand of us, and then relating that work to the mission and to the capability that our ships and aircraft have to provide. So at the end of the day, I don't want to just say that a sailor delivers on a particular job, I want to be able to say that this sailor delivers this capability to the Navy and to the nation.

Mr. Bleimeister: Admiral, you've talked a bit about this -- it's really a newer focus on skills, capabilities, competencies, as some people call them -- can you elaborate a little more on how you think that's going to impact the future force, and what are some of those skills and capabilities you think are going to be more in need?

VADM Harvey: Oh, sure, and this is really exciting stuff, and I mean that in the fullest sense of the word. Since 9/11, we have been coming to grips with the rapidly changing global security environment that we're going to have to deal with today, three years from now, ten years from now. And so you have these kinds of rapid changes, and these very new demands on our sailors of what they're going to have to be able to do and where they're going to have to be able to do it. And we look at where we've been traditionally -- we've sailed to the Pacific, to the Atlantic, we've sailed in what I think people have as this vision of the victory-at-sea Navy, their view of what we did in World War II -- and now we have to expand that so dramatically in places we haven't gone before, in mission sets we haven't done before, and that type of thing.

And so as we bring that together, how do we look at the capabilities that have changed that are going to be demanded of our sailors? And within those different capabilities, what are the bundles of competencies -- those knowledge, skills, and abilities -- that we have to bring together? Because we're getting beyond "single sailor, single job" -- this is the real breakthrough concept, I think. We're looking at single sailor brings a competency, a group of competencies, that enable that individual to go in many different directions for us. Because that's the kind of flexibility and agility that our force is going to have to have, so therefore, it must be the flexibility and agility that our people are going to have to have as well.

Mr. Bleimeister: Great, and if we take that down to a specific ship, there's a relatively new ship coming to the Navy, the littoral combat ship, and a program called Train to Qualify that will help enable those sailors that man those ships to be fully ready when they arrive. Can you talk about that?

VADM Harvey: Well, absolutely, because this is a dramatic change that is driving a lot of what we've just been talking about. The littoral combat ship is our newest ship. We've just launched the first one, the Freedom. We expect to commission it and place it in service in July of next year. That ship will have a basic crew of about 40 sailors doing what used to take a ship of that size between 180 and 220 sailors to do. Obviously, when you change the math like that, you have to change some other things very dramatically as well. One of the things that we no longer have the luxury of doing is putting a sailor on board that ship and then taking the four to six months to qualify on all the various jobs that that sailor may have to do. Because there are only 40, and because they operate as such a coherent and cohesive team, that sailor must show up ready to go in all respects, with the knowledge and the ability to deal with all different watch stations, to do the specific functions and skills that we require. A very different concept, and so we call it "Train to Qualify" -- train before you get there, be qualified when you get there. So we get the maximum out of that sailor right from the minute he or she shows up to the ship.

Mr. Morales: So there's really no more on the job training with this new model.

VADM Harvey: Well, there's always on the job training, no matter where you are and what you do, but it's going to start from an incredibly high level of proficiency, and so I would call it not so much on the job training, but really the enhancement of the team that would start when you get there. The training, we're going to have to provide before that individual shows up.

Mr. Bleimeister: Great. There's another dimension to development: the Navy's professional military education continuum. Could you talk a little bit about that, what that consists of?

VADM Harvey: One of the things that we've talked about so far in this show is the rapid pace of change across the board that we're having to deal with. And so one of the ways we deal with that is recognizing that at every step in a career, we want to be sure we're investing in the individual -- officer or enlisted -- and that investment is in education. How do we keep that individual current? How do we help enable the critical thinking for that sailor that enables her to do what we need them to do in a very uncertain world? And so it starts with a required reading list that we now have. Wherever you are in the food chain -- at the lowest level of our enlisted ranks or the most senior officers -- we have a required reading list we think you need to execute and absorb in order to be proficient in what we expect you to do.

And then at every step in the career, we feel there's going to be some points for professional military education, for particular graduate education, and then for joint military education, because now we fight as a joint force. There are no Navy-only or Army-only battles anymore. So we try to blend this in across a career, both for our officers and enlisted, so that we're always bringing them more new topical knowledge to help them develop and be more effective in the jobs we expect them to do.

Mr. Morales: Admiral, you referenced the dramatic changes in the landscape that occurred since 9/11, and I would imagine that the Navy is seeking to develop and enhance its foreign language skills, its regional expertise, and its awareness of foreign cultures. Could you tell us about some of the key initiatives that fall under this effort, specifically your language, regional expertise, and cultural strategy?

VADM Harvey: Yeah, this has been a very significant line of effort for us since 9/11. It was really in the most recent quadrennial defense review, and this is the big review that went through in the last year within the Department of Defense saying, "okay, what does our future look like and how do we as a Defense Department respond to that?" Obviously we were part of all that, and the big piece of this was understanding what our language requirements are to be effective in the future. We don't just go to Europe anymore, or we don't go to Hong Kong where they speak English. We're now going throughout Indonesia, we're going into Africa, we're going all around the globe in places we never really used to engage that much before. So how do we do that? It's not just language, it's the expertise, the cultural awareness, those things you've just mentioned.

So we've stood up a new foreign area officer program, where we will educate specialists in each one of these areas that we have strategic interests in for the nation and the Navy. And we'll build around them. They will serve as naval attach�s; they will serve in key policy positions to be sure they bring that detailed area knowledge into our policies, our programs, and the decisions about what we do and where we do it.

We're realigning our personnel exchange program. If you looked at where we sent our officers and enlisted on the exchange programs that do so much to develop a really good mutual understanding with other navies and other nations, you would see we were perfectly aligned to the foreign policy of 1806. So we need to get that up to 2006, and that's what we're doing right now in terms of our exchange programs. We're heading south and east; we're not so much focused on north central Europe any longer. Languages: we just finished about 138,000 individual assessments of our sailors in 274 different languages. I was stunned at what I learned about what our sailors already know.

And now we're taking that baseline and saying, okay, where are these strategic areas that we have to have a far better linguist capability, which is really native-speaker type capability, and then just awareness where you can engage with someone but not necessarily in a perfectly-translated way? What are those requirements, where are they, and how do we fill them? And so we're very focused now on developing that program to be sure we cover all those areas. We've stood up down in Pensacola in our training command a center for language, regional expertise, and cultural awareness to help centralize how we train throughout the Navy on just those very particular areas.

The first test case of that is we're sending a riverine squadron over to Iraq, so they're getting language, they're getting the cultural piece, the tribal culture that exists over there, the obviously different ethnic backgrounds that we're reading about so much every day today. Making sure that they go in understanding the fundamentals of language and the fundamentals of culture within which they'll be expected to operate.

Mr. Morales: How is the Navy transforming its personnel function?

We will ask Vice Admiral John Harvey, Chief of Naval Personnel and Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Manpower, Personnel, Training, & Education, to discuss this with us when the conversation about management continues on The Business of Government Hour.

(Intermission)

Mr. Morales: Welcome back to The Business of Government Hour. I am your host, Albert Morales, and this morning's conversation is with Vice Admiral John Harvey, Chief of Naval Personnel and Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Manpower, Personnel, Training, & Education.

Also joining us in our conversation is Bob Bleimeister, partner in IBM's human capital practice.

Admiral, can you elaborate on how the Navy is transforming from the largely blue water force from the Cold War to a much more broadly and joined, engaged force to meet the challenge of an ever-changing world? And specifically, what are some of the key components in terms of infrastructure and force capability associated with this transformation?

VADM Harvey: Sure. The first and most important piece of that is that we stood up a naval expeditionary combat command that took all these types of forces that we found being used over the last four years to support our efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, that aren't those mainline blue water forces that we all kind of grew up with and understand so well. So it's the CBs, or the construction battalions, civil affairs, the intelligence specialists or master at arms, the riverine force I talked about, maritime security, small boat detachments, and all these types of forces that we brought together in one command so that we can focus their efforts, their training, their development, and their deployment in the right way and what's demanded by our support of the joint fight.

When I took the job, if someone had told me three years ago that I'd have 10,000 sailors on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan today doing all kinds of missions that they're uniquely qualified to do in support of our fight there, I would have looked at you and said, "c'mon, go back where you came from." But it's true. We have 10,000 sailors on the ground doing all types of things, leading the electronic warfare battle against the IEDs, providing security at prisons, all the things that we're so talented in, that we have so much talent and so much ability to do, and providing that to the joint force in those areas. So a huge investment in our people, in our effort, and our resources to make that happen.

We have 180 sailors on provisional reconstruction teams high in the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan working to bring that country back into the 19th and 20th centuries from where the Taliban took them. So it's just amazing stuff that's going on and we have reorganized and reshaped and recruited and changed who we bring in and how we bring them in in order to be able to be relevant and ready and responsive to these demands that we're seeing now.

Mr. Morales: Admiral, could you describe for us some of the key retention and recruitment efforts being pursued by the U.S. Navy as it transforms itself to a leaner, more agile force?

VADM Harvey: One of the very big things to understand is that we were about 382,000 strong in November of 2002. Today, as I said at the outset of the show, we're about 350,000, and we're going to head down to about 340,000 at the end of this next fiscal year. So as you lean that force, you have to be far more precise in who you bring in and ensure you have the right skill sets available to you at the right time, because you won't have the luxury of just throwing numbers at a particular situation anymore. So we're very, very focused now on the right sailor coming in with that right skills set and qualifications, so that we can train them up and get them out and into the field or into the fleet where we need them right away.

The biggest challenge I have -- this is really with our special warfare communities, our SEALs -- the War on Terror, this long war that we're in now, has demanded a significant growth in our special warfare and special operations skills sets. You don't just go out and find a SEAL on the street here in Washington or anywhere else. We have to go out and find them. It takes a lot of effort, and then it takes a lot of effort for them to get through our training, as you might expect. So that's a very, very tough nut to crack for us -- increasing those numbers from where we are today to about twice the size of the force we have right now, and making that a reality that we sustain over the long haul. Our explosive ordnance disposal specialists, our special operations folks, again very, very unique skills sets, unique individuals, incredibly valued, so big changes for us in the skills sets that we're looking for, in addition to sustaining the ships and the aircraft that we've been doing for so long.

Mr. Morales: Admiral, if I may, on this topic of recruitment, what role do things like bonuses or other incentives, as well as the sailors' quality of life issues, enhance your ability to successfully recruit and retain these types of individuals?

VADM Harvey: Well, I think they're incredibly important. You can image that we have a sustained unemployment rate in this country now of about 4.75 percent, and that defines our recruiting battle space. The job creation market is very strong, and businesses are going for the same very talented young men and women that we are. So one thing that I can offer, though, is an incredible array of training that prepares these young men and women for a future that's theirs to make. And so to help focus that possibility for them, I have a very good array of bonuses that I can pay for enlistment, if you are the type of person we need in our nuclear propulsion plants, or for the SEALs, or for a wide variety of other skills sets, I can put a bonus out there, get their attention, talk to them about the training they're going to receive, the education, and what it means for their future, and generally when we get their attention, when we have this conversation, I can get a pretty good result out of that.

So the bonus structure enables, really helps us get the attention and get the conversation started. I don't think anybody truly just comes in for the money. They come in for the opportunity. That join the Navy, see the world, learn a skill, get educated, build for the future whether in the Navy or outside of it -- that's been true since John Paul Jones took the Bonhomme Richard to sea back in 1775, so it's true today.

Mr. Bleimeister: Admiral, I imagine there's a linkage between sailor and family-readiness and combat-readiness in the Navy as a whole. But with ongoing deployments, how is the Navy helping sailors and families maintain a balance?

VADM Harvey: Well, this is one of the great a-ha moments that we've had over the last couple years. With the increased pace of operations and the lack of predictability of operations in our post-9/11 world, we've recognized that the old paradigm that you took a set amount of time to get the ship ready, to get the sailor ready, and the family ready for deployment no longer meets the mark. What we have to do is get the sailors ready sooner individually, and keep them ready longer, and so that means that families need to be prepared as well sooner and maintained at a higher level of preparedness for short-notice deployments, or deployments that were thought to be going this long in this place and now they're going a different length of time in a different place.

So the family preparedness becomes equal to sailor readiness, which then becomes obviously equal to our unit readiness. So that's that whole paradigm we have to shift to, and we have to solve that equation together. You can't just focus on the sailor, you can't just focus on the ship, you need to focus on the family, the sailor, and the ship at the same time, get them all ready together, keep them ready longer, and make sure that we're paying equal attention to all component parts of our overall fleet readiness.

Mr. Bleimeister: And one of the components of readiness for the sailor, I imagine, is fitness. Can you talk a bit more about the Navy's culture of fitness initiative?

VADM Harvey: Absolutely. We talked about the lack of predictability in our lives right now, whether you're in the Navy or outside of it. And so one of the things we found was that in terms of being ready, we used to be on this long stair-step approach -- take a fitness test twice a year, check the block, and then go back to whatever your lifestyle was until a couple of weeks before the next fitness test. That doesn't meet it for our demands these days. So we have really refocused our commanding officers on saying, "you are responsible to have a program where your sailors are maintaining a much higher level of fitness across the board," and that means they have a better level of wellness across the board, because there's a direct correlation between your physical fitness and your ability to sustain it and your overall health, which has obvious impacts on your overall job performance over a career. So we want to be ready in a physically fit type of way. It's the foundation for getting back into this idea. Think about it -- I've got 10,000 sailors on the ground carrying 60-pound packs in 120 degree weather out there in the desert. You have to be fit to be able to do that. And you may not get a whole lot of notice that you're going to have to go do that. So we've refocused our efforts to say we want to be at a higher level of fitness across the board all the time than what we sustained in the past.

Mr. Morales: Admiral, the Navy has a commitment to maintaining personal links with its seriously injured sailors. To this end, would you tell us a little bit about the recently established Navy's Safe Harbor program?

VADM Harvey: Yes, as you could imagine, when you have some of our sailors -- and there are equivalent programs for all the services, and it's really the right thing to do -- you have some of these sailors who have been very severely injured in the events in Iraq and Afghanistan, and how do you bring them back? Not only just sustain them medically but help them rebuild their lives, rebuild their abilities to function in our society, and then fulfill our moral obligation to help them make whatever transitions they're going to have to make to get on with their future and keep their families in the equation as well? There's a wide array of things that these sailors and their families have to deal with. There are our own fleet and family service centers, there's the Department of Veterans Administration and the wide array of services that they offer, there's the Department of Defense, their pay, Department of Labor programs -- it's really a dizzying array of initiatives, policies and programs that you just can't dump somebody into and say, "Good luck and figure it all out."

So Safe Harbor keeps them within the family, and keeps us engaged with these sailors and their families, help them navigate this very, very difficult process they're going to have to follow, where either they're able to return to duty at the end of a long recovery/recuperation period or transition to another aspect in the civilian world and help them get off to a good start there. It's not simple, it's very challenging, it's demanding physically and emotionally. We owe them this, it's a Navy family thing, and we're going to stay with them right through 'til when they can take care of themselves on their own.

Mr. Morales: That's fantastic.

What does the future hold for the Navy? We will ask Vice Admiral John Harvey, Chief of Naval Personnel and Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Manpower, Personnel, Training, & Education, to discuss this with us when the conversation about management continues on The Business of Government Hour.

(Intermission)

Mr. Morales: Welcome back to The Business of Government Hour. I am your host, Albert Morales, and this morning's conversation is with Vice Admiral John Harvey, Chief of Naval Personnel and Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Manpower, Personnel, Training, & Education.

Also joining us in our conversation is Bob Bleimeister, partner in IBM's human capital practice.

Admiral, as you take a look over the next ten years, what type of personnel concerns do you think the U.S. Navy will face?

VADM Harvey: There are three big things that I focus on when we take our long look and try to match our people to the demands that the nation's going to place on our Navy. The first one is the changing nature of warfighting. Now, I'm not saying "the changing nature of warfare" -- that I think will stay pretty stable, but the characteristics of warfare obviously are changing -- have changed dramatically. And I think they will continue to do so. We face far more diverse, globally networked adversaries and families of adversaries -- state, non-state, loosely-allied, loosely-allianced actors -- it's a very dynamic situation. And so you're going to have to have a force that can deal with that. Not necessarily the set piece -- there's the Soviet navy, that's what we focus on, that's what we study, and you spend years and years studying that and focusing on that. We really have to widen our aperture and be far more flexible in our ability to understand the threats we face. And so we need people with different skills and knowledge and abilities to do that for us. So that's very important to me.

The second thing that's really important is the changing nature of the society that we serve, and the society from whom we draw our sailors. The demographics of this country are changing dramatically. It's not just a guess; the science of demographics really gives you some very good, hard results that are going to unfold -- a rapidly growing Hispanic population, the shrinking of our Caucasian young males in the age group between 18 and 25. So our methods of recruiting are going to have to change. We have a generational shift going on -- the millenials are coming in and the aging baby-boomers are on their way out, and Gen-X, and so we have to look at this new labor market, if you will, understand where our sailors are coming from, where the talent is, and how we reach that talent and not only bring it in to our Navy, but then make sure that they understand, these wonderful young men and women, that they have a future with us, with the kind of a Navy that we're going to be. So it's that whole nature of the people that's changing, and how we have to change as an organization to get the most out of them.

And then the third thing -- this is Washington so we're going to talk about money -- and what are the fiscal constraints that I'm going to be under. People are more expensive -- it's true in the Navy, it's true at IBM. Anywhere you look, people costs have just exploded over the last 10 to 15 years. I grew up in Baltimore, Maryland and I can remember this big huge industrial complex called the Sparrow's Point, Bethlehem Steel. It doesn't exist any longer, and it was done in partly because of extraordinary labor costs that were locked into the people and the way that their workforce was shaped. We can't afford to have something like that happen. We can't be a dinosaur and have a dinosaur approach to this, so we're going to have to find some pretty innovative ways of dealing with the fiscal constraints, the cost of people, the capabilities we have to deliver, and how we bring those together in a sustainable way for the future. So those are the three big ones that I spend a lot of time worrying about right now.

Mr. Morales: Let's talk a little bit about the base realignment and closure recommendations and the quadrennial defense review decisions. How is personnel and manpower involved in helping to ensure a seamless transition to new structures and missions while preserving its uniquely vital capabilities?

VADM Harvey: Well, this is really a pretty challenging process. One thing, I'm very glad that we had this base realignment closure. I fully understand a lot of the pain it can bring to individual regions, but if we haven't had this to rationalize our support structure, then I am using a lot of people doing things that don't return as much to the Navy in terms of capability as they should. So it's very, very important to us to get the most out of our people, to have the most efficient structure we have from all our supporting bases and installations. The QDR helped to clarify our future and what it is I need to focus on and what my priorities are. So it's given me that impetus to say, "okay, here's what we have to do more of; here's what I have to do less of," and then how we apportion our resources accordingly.

The one thing is that -- I'll take one exception to the wording -- is no transition to anything is ever seamless. If you talk about one of my lessons learned from 33 years, there are seams but how do you recognize them and how do you mitigate them? I think that's the key, and so it's how we work the people piece, how we work this process piece to be sure we're driven by the capabilities we must provide, and taking advantage of the technology, and then putting those together and saying, "okay, what is the infrastructure we require to deliver on these capabilities?" That's what the BRAC has given me, that's what the QDR has helped do for me, and then we're putting that together to make sure that we have that right balance between our capabilities, our force structure, our people structure, if you will, and the fiscal resources I have to sustain them.

Mr. Bleimeister: Admiral, with all this change going on, the Navy's civilian workforce is also going to undertake some transformation with DoD's National Security Personnel System. Could you tell us how NSPS will affect the Navy's civilian workforce?

VADM Harvey: Yes. You heard me use the words through the course of this interview "changing," "agile," "flexible," "adaptable," and "uncertain environment." Well, that applies to our civilian workforce as well. They face the same environment that the uniformed sailors do. So how do we best prepare them -- how do we help shape them to deal with that same type of uncertain world, with that same level of response that we require out of our sailors?

And I think this is what the national security personnel system, which is NSPS for short, does for us. It focuses on individual performance goals that are aligned with the organization's goals. Tell them why we need them to be performing at certain levels in certain areas. And so you keep the people aligned with the mission and aligned with the organization. I think that's a huge step forward. And then it gives me the ability to be far more agile in how I move this workforce around and put the capabilities that these wonderful people have against the problems we need to address. And so it gives you that kind of flexibility that's so important to us in the future. So I think this is tough, it's big change -- it is real deep change, but it is right change and it's the right thing to do.

Mr. Morales: Admiral, you've given us just a wonderful window into the exciting personnel transformations going on within the U.S. Navy. I'm going to give you an opportunity here to put on your recruiting hat and tell us, what advice would you give to a person who's interested in a career, say, in public service, especially in the military? And finally, what do you say to that young sailor out there about the career opportunities and climate of the future Navy?

VADM Harvey: Well, that's a terrific segue and I really appreciate this, because I do have some very deeply-held feelings about both those issues. Number 1, this is a democracy; it is a participatory democracy, and our armed forces across the board and our Navy will only be as strong as the investment that our people make in them. And the most crucial investment the people of the United States are going to make in their Navy is who they send to be in that Navy. And so recruiting is at the heart of everything we do. We need the best young men and women this country has to offer to defend this nation 365 days a year, around the globe, against a dazzling array of very, very deep and dangerous threats. So public service for me is service to your nation. I hope that people think about this and look at the enduring contribution that this Navy has made to this nation for the last 231 years. We are a maritime nation. Our commerce, our economy depends upon the free flow of goods and services and resources across the seas. It did in 1776 and it does today. So we need to make that investment, sustain that investment in our people, in our Navy. I think that's of paramount importance.

To the sailors today, they know and I want them to have confidence in our ability and our commitment to their future with us. They have extraordinary opportunities. We will invest in their training, we will invest in their education, and we will invest in their future. And we are committed to them being able to unlock all the opportunities and potential they have within them, to be the kind of person they want to be, to be the kind of sailor we need them to be, and to recognize that a future in the Navy is a bright one, it is a promising one, and one that offers them tremendous returns individually as well as the ability to say at the end of the day, "I served my nation, I served my Navy, I wore the uniform, and I did it proudly."

Mr. Morales: Admiral, thank you very much. Your passion is very exhilarating. Unfortunately, we have reached the end of our time, but I do want to thank you for fitting us into your busy schedule. But more importantly, Bob and I would like to thank you for your dedicated service to our country in all the roles you've held within the United States Navy.

VADM Harvey: Well, thanks very much. It was great pleasure to be here today, and I look forward to continuing this dialogue any time in the future.

Mr. Morales: Fantastic. This has been The Business of Government Hour, featuring a conversation with Vice Admiral John Harvey, Chief of Naval Personnel and Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Manpower, Personnel, Training, & Education.

Be sure and visit us on the web at businessofgovernment.org. There, you can learn more about our programs and get a transcript of today's conversation. Once again, that's businessofgovernment.org. As you enjoy the rest of your day, please take time to remember the men and women of our armed and civil services abroad who can't hear this morning's show on how we're improving our government but who deserve our unconditional respect and support.

For The Business of Government Hour, I'm Albert Morales. Thank you for listening.