Thank you for that kind introduction, Admiral Donnelly. It’s really a privilege to be here. I’d like to start off by thanking our host, the Naval Submarine League, for everything that you do for our force each and every day. It’s just really a privilege to be here with this group. I’d also like to thank all of the sponsors that made this event possible, and I’d also like to say congratulations to all the awardees who we’re going to recognize shortly.
I have to admit when Admiral Donnelly reached out a few weeks ago to ask me to speak at today’s lunch, I had two reactions. The first one was I realized somebody really good must have canceled. The second one came after I got my marching orders from Admiral Donald because when we talked he said – I kind of asked him, what do you want me to talk about? Well, I kind of want you to give them an idea of everything that’s going on in the personnel world. You know, kind of cover it all. Take all the time you need, as long as it’s less than 50 minutes.
That’s when I had my flashback to when I was doing my acceptance interview at Naval Reactors 35 years ago. Define the universe, be brief, be specific. I faked my way through that interview adequately, so I’m going to give this one a try too.
This year’s theme “U.S. Submarines Getting Faster” couldn’t be more appropriate given the speed at which our world is changing. It’s an unrelenting pace. I know you’ve been talking about it for the last day and a half and it’s very consistent with the central idea of our design for maintaining maritime superiority. And again, you’ve been talking about that with a number of the speakers throughout the last day and a half.
But we just can’t afford to continue doing business as usual, and the people business is no exception. Part of my role as the Chief of Naval
Personnel is to make sure that we continue to have the best possible force in terms of people. That means, at least in part, knowing what kind of force we need.
We’re serving during a very challenging operational time to be sure, but it’s also a very dynamic time. We are, if nothing else, sort of on the precipice of large changes. I think those changes are going to require us to think in new ways.
If you’re a student of history, I also sort of think that it’s a time not unlike the inter-war period of the 1930s when we were experimenting with things like naval aviation and War Plan Orange. But really, in the back of our collective minds, as warfighters, we really sort of thought that we were going to fight the war at sea with battleships, until they were gone. But I think it’s clear, just like in that time, we are once again in a maritime era which makes it an exciting time to be in the Navy, even with all the challenges that we have ahead.
But with those challenges — I’m optimistic about our ability to meet those challenges because throughout our history the one constant has been our strength as the United States Navy: our people, our Navy team, our sailors active and reserve component, our Navy civilians, our in- dustrial partners, our families; our collective ability to innovate, the re- sourcefulness, the creativity and the toughness that we are always able to muster. So I think it’s important that we not lose sight of the fact that we have to continue to adequately invest in our people, even as we move to unmanned systems, because we are going to provide the command and control of those systems, I hope, not the other way around, unless we’re building SkyNet or something like that. So it’s what we do day-in and day-out, at sea and in the air, how rigorously we insist on training and qualifying our sailors, how we train them to fight hurt, how we lead them, and most importantly how we develop, mentor, and I use the word sponsor, our critical thinkers, our strategic thinkers of tomorrow. That, as much as any acquisition program, is going to determine our ability to meet those future challenges, maybe even determine the outcome of battles years from now.
So this is my team’s collective contribution to the design, the gold line of effort, which is strengthen our Navy team for the future. We are committed to getting faster and producing sailors with the right skills so we can ensure our ships, submarines and aviation squadrons are properly manned not only today, but long into the future. We’re doing that through a group of about 45 initiatives today. It’s a living, breathing group of initiatives collectively known as Sailor 2025, and it’s aimed at growing, building and empowering today’s sailors and the sailors of the future.
This is a little bit of a report card of where we are today with Sailor 2025. This started when I was working for Admiral Moran as M-13, and it was his initial vision. At the time when it was conceived, this was really an effort at getting after the war for talent that we predicted would be coming. It was about attracting and retaining that talent, providing choices, career flexibility and transparency in our processes so that we could emulate a lot of what we were seeing the Fortune 500 companies doing and help us in that war for talent.
A few years later, I can tell you that we are very much in that war for talent. We’re beginning to see our recruiting, we’re at 128 consecutive months of meeting our recruiting goal, but we’re seeing fraying at the edges. Retention is beginning to turn in key areas, and that’s happening just as we’re awaiting the formal order to begin growing the Navy.
But today, this is about 45 initiatives. Some of them are very mature.
We started and killed some, and we’re just about to launch other ones.
We’re not doing this as D.C. business as usual. We’re rolling them out, we’re putting quick risk mitigations in place, we’re learning using high velocity learning, if you will, and modifying them quickly to – as we learn to expand them we’ll put controls on them as appropriate.
As we began to learn from this we saw another opportunity to gain more from Sailor 2025, not just to make this useful in terms of the war for talent. We leveraged this in terms of our ability to help us with read- iness. There’s really two aspects of that.
The first aspect is in terms of our FIT of sailors. We talk about FIT in the manpower business in a number of different ways, but the fleet measures our ability to provide FIT in terms of the right rating or the occupational skill of the sailors and the right rank, which is a very sort of gross metric. But the sailors have individual Navy enlisted classification codes and an individual sailor might have four or five of those sub-skills.
There’s no demand signal in our industrial age personnel system for those individual skill codes. It’s very ad hoc. You could be on an Arleigh Burke destroyer that’s in one phase of modernization and be an electron- ics technician and be on the exact same ship class destroyer in a different phase of modernization and need five completely different skill codes.We don’t manage it to that degree of fidelity.
So we put a system in place last year to track it much more rigor- ously and help us in the people system produce sailors with that level of fidelity. We’re about two years out from getting the steady state. It seems like an obvious thing, but because we were in this kind of industrial age production mode, we’re still playing catch up with that. We want to get to the point where we are predictive in meeting the needs of the fleet and not having to do substitutions at the last minute before ships deploy. So this idea of FIT with those very detailed levels of skill sets is very im- portant to readiness.
And then the last aspect of readiness is the sustainability of our per- sonnel system. Fundamentally, we haven’t changed anything about our personnel system since the draft went away. We recruit on the order of 40,000 people every year. We also send about 40,000 people home every year.
There’s not a Fortune 500 company in America that does business that way. It’s unaffordable. It’s not wise. You can’t get a return on invest- ment that way, and it’s not wise for us to continue doing that.
When the draft went away we changed our operating model by throwing money at it. We don’t have more money, and even if we did it wouldn’t change folks’ behavior because we’ve reached that knee on the curve where it can no longer influence behavior sufficiently. Not only that, we’re well past the point where even if there were an unlimited line of people at the front door waiting to come in the Navy, and there aren’t, it takes upwards of two years on average to train enlisted sailors to get them ready for the technical skills we need. So it’s a long process and we can’t afford to bring them in, chew them up, spit them out, and assume we can just make more.
So we have to build a personnel system that rather than having a personnel pyramid that is very broad at the base, we need one that has a narrower base and is taller. Sailor 2025 is aimed at doing that, providing opportunities to perhaps change career paths if we need them to because the needs of the Navy change, or the enemy, the adversaries, they get a vote, the world changes so we need to reshape the Navy, or we put them in a bad place initially for their skills or their desires, and we need to repurpose them. And because as I approach 60, 60 is the new 20, and people are going to be productive a lot longer and we can keep them around a lot longer.
Last year we got authorities for 40-year career paths for officers in selected designators. We’ll do the same thing on enlisted career paths. This year we extended tenure for enlisted folks. Longer career paths make a lot of sense for a lot of different reasons. So there’s a whole host of items in here.
But if you look at it in its simplest phase, the first level of effort there is a wholesale modernization of the personnel system, long overdue. It’s things like the Fleet Scholar Program, which is a very competitive pro- gram for senior enlisted folks and junior officers to go to civilian insti- tutions in residence. It’s small numbers on the order of 30 folks a year and it complements our naval educational institutions. It doesn’t replace them. But we didn’t have an in-residence opportunity like this before at civilian institutions, and it’s very, very competitive.
It’s things like tours with industry, another very competitive program where we send senior enlisted folks and junior officers into places that we have agreements with. Some of the companies represented right in this room, defense industries, commercial industries like Amazon, Goo- gle, Apple. We’ll send a junior officer out for a year and a half or two years to learn their best practices and bring them back to the Navy. It’s a good retention tool for the Navy. It also brings us best practices back and helps us improve our processes within the Navy.
We’re overhauling the fitness report and evaluation system in a significantly radical way that gets after the behavioral science that has caused us to have to overhaul 52 times in the last 242 years, because reporting seniors don’t like to deliver bad news to the people that they grade. So we’re in the midst of doing that. When we’re done with that and can really get at evaluating people’s character, ultimately, it’s going to change the way that we choose our commanding officers and the way that we run selection boards. Instead of spending millions of dollars a year to find people into our state of the art 1998 selection board system in Millington, Tennessee, perhaps we’ll do it virtually, distributed in time and space at locations throughout the year across the country.
So, there are a lot of different things like that. Rating modernization is the tool by which we’ll allow our career enlisted force to move into different occupations, because so many of their skill sets have common foundations of training. With the advent of ready relevant learning, that I’ll talk about here in a minute, we’re going to have our training capacity distributed to the waterfront in mobile modular fashion, and they’ll be able to quickly and inexpensively gain additional training that will not allow them to change into another rate, but to gain additional skills and do both jobs. That’s what ready, relevant learning is, an enabler for that.
But ready, relevant learning is taking us from doing the careers with the training up front for our enlisted force, and doing it like we do for officers, the right training at the right time in the career path, instead of doing it all upfront like we do today which results in 50 percent of our enlisted force not using that maintenance training that we invest in. They get out and never use it. The other thing that happens for those that do stay in, they come back, and we’ve modernized the ship or aircraft that they work on and the training is still relevant. Then we have chiefs showing up at the platform and they’ve never seen the system before, and that’s not setting them up for success.
The training delivery methods are about virtual reality, putting the sailors in the environment so they can train and simulate environments that let them do hands on in volume in ways that we can’t replicate with real systems, because people learn by doing, not by sitting in classrooms looking at PowerPoint slides. We’ve got a lot of theory to practice data to back that up. It’s things like the submarine force has been using for a while now, like the Modular Reconfigure Training System in place up at the submarine school and submarine learning centers. People learn by using tools like that, and we’ve branched that out into other areas within the Navy.
So it’s very promising. We’ll have that in place Navy-wide by 2021, 2022. The training centers will be at the waterfront. There will be booths and classrooms. Sailors won’t meet a quota, it will be asynchronous.
We’ll still have instructors, though, we’re not going to do away with instructors. This won’t be SWOS-in-a-box type of thing that was experi- mented with 10 years ago. We’re not going to do that again.
And then the last column is career readiness, which is a smorgasbord of different initiatives, but leader development. The new aspect here is a refocus on character because the Navy relies on the trust of our leader- ship. We have a special obligation to be trusted by our civilian leadership because of the nature of our operations going over the horizon and out of communications the way we do, in particular in the submarine force, but the entire Navy as a whole, and the trust that our subordinates have to have in us as leaders because of the situations that we operate in.
We do this one time inoculation at our commissioning sources, the Naval Academy and ROTC boot camp. It’s not enough. Character is like a muscle or like being an athlete. If you exercise it, you can make it stronger. So we’re going to do that at the community level, at the big Navy level.
We’re working on fitness as a culture. We’re not trying to turn sailors into triathletes, we just want them to be healthy, to live longer, to stay out of the medical centers and stay at work longer. There’s a lot of work going on with respect to that.
We’re working to make the Navy a more family friendly service, which is an operational imperative for a couple of different reasons. It’s not just a political correctness issue, but it’s an operational imperative both to male and female retention. I’ll tell you, we are operationally de- pendent on the talent with the women that we’re bringing into the Navy. Twenty-six percent of our enlisted ascensions right now are women.
Twenty-seven percent of last year’s graduating class at the Naval Acad- emy were women. Six of the top 10 graduates were women. Fifty-two percent of the technical graduates in the United States at colleges are women. That’s where the talent is.
But this is not just a women thing, it’s equal for men and women. We are a sea going service. Long deployments and family separation is a way of life in the Navy. But we put a lot of unnecessary obstacles in the way of starting a family and raising a family in the Navy, so we’re trying to eliminate those as fast as possible.
It’s things like the Career Intermission Program which allows sailors to take a two to three year time out on their career, come back in, reset their lineal number, if you’re an officer, or come in with a different peer group if you’re an enlisted professional, and compete with a new peer group for advancement. We’ve had 140 sailors do that, officers included, come back in, compete even for command or statutory billets for promo-tion. All that were eligible have made it through their next wicket, so it appears to be working.
The thing I find surprising is that the numbers are so low of people that are using it. We have this cultural bias that if you do this you’re a slacker. If you take one of these time outs you’re not doing your job.
The same thing with maternity leave. We increased it from six weeks to 12 weeks last year. Women feel pressure to not take their entire entitle- ment because they may be penalized on their fitness report or their eval. We’re working to change that culture. That will come with time.
Child development center hours and capacity. We’ve expanded hours throughout FY ’17. We’re working on capacity. We’re working on spouse hiring initiatives. So a whole host of things going on across the board. We’ve got to do more. We’re working on them. We get our best ideas from the fleet. I’d certainly be interested on what you think we could take on to help add to this list. Next slide, please.
We’re kind of working this right now through the whole force, and we know that we can’t keep doing that. Under the hood we’ve got to get smarter. We’ve got to work smarter, not just harder. So about six months after we really laid into what we need to do, we started looking at how we needed to transform ourselves across the enterprise of manpower per- sonnel training and education. Again, another long overdue thing.
You wouldn’t have built my organization the way it is if you had started with a blank piece of paper. Consolidations, BRAC, all those are things that made us the way that we are. But given the state of play, what can you do with what we have?
So we started with processes. We leaned in with these. We looked at how it all broke out and we tried to put it back together again in a logical way.
We took processes that were 53 signatures and took six to nine months for a sailor to get an answer. We found out that 46 of them were no value added. We got rid of them.
We found that some of the underlying requirements dated back to 1793. The assumptions were no longer valid, and we got rid of them. It’s the personnel world, trust me. Some of them go back that far.
When we laid it all back together again this is how it came out. Force development was one of our critical lines of business. I use the term lines of business, and we think of our sailors as customers, because we want to become a customer service-oriented organization.
Force development is what we’re talking about, everything involved to get a person off of the street, turn them into a sailor — which I include officers as sailors – and get them to their first operational assignment. So the commander of Naval Education Training Command, one of my two- stars, is now also the deputy chief of naval personnel for force develop- ment. He has CHOKECON, as I affectionately refer to it, for everything under that business line: recruiting, recruit training, and all the officer as- cension sources except for the Academy, which I don’t own but we coor- dinate with; and then all of the training commands and even the detailers to get folks to that first assignment, which is radically different than the way it was before. We found lots of efficiencies by looking at everything under that one umbrella, soup to nuts, instead of the individual fiefdoms. Again, I think any company would have done it this way, it’s just taken us a while to start looking at it kind of in business lines like this.
Force management, we’re putting NPC and BUPERS back together again as BUPERS and simplifying it and we’ve broken up all of the little fiefdoms of information technology and things that were at the individu-al commands and centralized those. Things like information technology where all the money was locally controlled, and that’s how I end up with 55 families of systems, 252 different IP systems, no two of which talk to each other. It has really caused me a lot of problems.
We’re done with that. The organizational change stuff is in process right now. But our operating model and way sailors are going to interface with us is also going to radically change here over the course of 2018.
We’re kind of using the USAA business model. The main interface will be sort of a tiered customer service input: 2.0 will be through the In- ternet or their smart phone, and it will be via a portal we call 980 portal. That’s operational now. We have a low bandwidth version that ships can access. In six months we’ll have a smart phone path that they can get to it.
Everything that they do at Personnel Support Detachment today, they’ll be able to do via 980 portal. If they have a child or they get mar- ried, they’ll take a picture of the birth certificate or the marriage certif- icate and they’ll upload it just like depositing a check at a bank today. Their pay will be automatically corrected, and it will be right the first time because we’re not going to have to fat finger it between five differ- ent systems and manually re-enter it like we do today, which is very error prone and which is what causes all the problems that we have today. It’s just going to be done right the first time because the backbone of all this now is one single integrated commercial off the shelf pay and personnel system, which went live for testing on August 1st up at Great Lakes where we’re starting new personnel records.
We’re expanding that out over the course of 2018. Tier 2 will be our call center, which we’re going to call 980 Career Center. That will stand up about June of 2018 and it will be very much like, again, USAA. You’ll call, you’ll get a very knowledgeable customer service represen- tative, and then that will bump up to different levels of expertise as you go.
So by the middle of 2019 most of the services that you think of at a PSD will be gone and we’ll be able to accelerate the closure of those ser- vices and markedly improve the service for our sailors. So, 2018, I think, is going to be a year of big changes for how our sailors do business with my organizations, and I’m really looking forward to showing it to them.
I think I’ve gone over my time limit. I really appreciate the opportu- nity to speak here today. I appreciate the opportunity to show you what we’re doing and give me the opportunity to talk about what we’re doing for our sailors.
So with that, I think we have a few minutes for some questions.
Thank you for your time.
