Navy secretary seeks 'agile and quick' organization

Gordon England has served as secretary of the Navy since May 2001. The former General Dynamics executive recently talked about his tenure, the war in Afghanistan and Defense transformation with Government Executive's George Cahlink.

Government Executive: You never served in the military. What qualifies you to be Secretary of the Navy?

England: My background for 40 years has been primarily in the defense industry. I've run a number of companies, been on a lot of boards and committees, been in [Washington] a lot.… I built a lot of … products, priced them, managed them, ran the factories. I actually know how all this gets built and understand the underlying technology. So to some extent it was a pretty easy transition because I knew the hardware.…One thing is different though. Decision-making is different because in corporations you make decisions and here you largely build consensus.

GE: Defense Secretary Rumsfeld has talked about running the department more like a corporation. Has there been any progress?

England: There's been success in moving towards it, but we're not there. I believe we will be there in the next 18 months. The Defense Reorganization Organization Act of 1947 set up the Pentagon management structure like a steel mill-long planning cycle, high asset capital expenditures, long-planning cycles. … That was OK during the Cold War. It was one steel mill against the other. That's not the case now. We have threats that are dynamic and changing and we need an organization that is very adaptive, that is very agile and is quick. Instead of having cycles that take years, we need cycles that take months…because the threat changes and we need quicker decision-making, so we need to significantly streamline the way we conduct business.

There is a direct tie between being efficient and being effective. Efficiency is not a question of saving money, [but] doing the job in a way that you are more effective and, as such, you also save money.

I believe there is an imperative that we improve our business practices as part of the transformation of Defense. Maybe you cannot transform the department until you transform the business practices because the business practice is the enabler to let you do the other things.

GE: What type of work is being done by the Pentagon's corporate board of directors, known as the senior executive council?

England: We have teams set up right now reviewing all the Defense agencies in terms of what is the best way that we can perform functions…. We really are looking at the whole enterprise to decide how we can do our business more efficiently and effectively.

People tell me that what lacks here is an incentive. In business there's a profit motive and there is not one here. But that's not a valid argument, I would claim that the people in this enterprise have a far greater incentive to protect and defend the U.S. So I feel like there is an incentive.

GE: What are some of the lessons learned coming from the war on terrorism?

England: No service can afford to [operate alone]. If you go into Afghanistan, the Navy was there because there were not any bases and so we used Navy ships for lots of activities but we had special forces on the ground from all the services. The Air Force and United Kingdom provided the tanker highway. All of the intelligence targeting assets came from across the services and Defense agencies. At the end of the day, this was a combined fight.

As we go forward, you are going to see more network-centric warfare-forces tied together with real-time data loops. That forces units to work together. We will have more and more jointness and we will become more specialized in things we do and rely on each other. GE: How long will the war last?

England: This war is going to go on a long time. If you go back to Korea when we went in 1950, nobody knew that was the first battle of a war that would not end until the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. When the president says this will be a long war, I like to remind people of Korea.

GE: What has surprised you about the war?

England: This was largely a naval war, which I don't think anyone expected. These targets were on land so it was a very long way from the Persian Gulf to targets in Afghanistan and, of course, the Marines were well inland. One attribute of naval forces is they carry their logistics with them so they have a 30-day supply of logistics with them all the time. So it's not just that we have deployable forces but we have immediately [available] forces.

The war has gone much better than I thought. Afghanistan is a huge country; it's a very difficult country for military operations and the precision weapons, the integrated systems, the networking, the intelligence all worked very well in Afghanistan. We never anticipated we'd be flying those kinds of missions, those kinds of distances that far inland, but it does demonstrate the utility of the naval force.

GE: How have Navy ships been used as bases for ground forces?

GE: Is this a good use of aircraft carriers?

England: At some point, we'll have some tailored platform for this mission rather than carriers because carriers are a very high-value weapon system, and there's a limited number of them. I would hope in time we use our carriers in a most effective way and we have some other sea based-platform for staging special forces. But we don't, so in the meantime we'll use carriers [and some smaller amphibious-ready group ships].

GE: How is the Navy Marine Corp Intranet program going?

England: Last year, I think it was in serious trouble. In one dimension it seems to be very simple: It's a service contract. You bring someone in and you replace all the old systems with new systems.... We found out that we had thousands of legacy systems .…. It took a while for us to understand the complexity of the problem. Now, we are making progress…. It's demonstrated that this can be done by a large complex organization. You have to do it in real-time. You can't shut every system down. I hope it's a demonstration that you can do it throughout the federal government.

GE: What are some other reforms being studied by the Navy?

England: When we deploy a ship, it takes a long time to get to out of port from where we are going, but if we can get there and can leave our ship and rotate our crew, we have effectively enlarged the Navy. One way to the enlarge the Navy is to buy more ships, the other way to enlarge the Navy is to get more sea time out of the fleet you have, and we are trying to do both. We are rotating people to ships rather than rotating ships. We have people looking at what we do in terms of maintenance versus what other sea-based enterprises do. [I hope] we will get better business practices and that could translate, if we have reduced maintenance time, to a larger Navy because we have fewer ships in dry dock [and in for maintenance].