Aug 17, 2016 - ... availabilities, creating a culture of affordability, and cybersecurity. .... awareness and compliance
Commander’s Intent VADM Thomas J. Moore, NAVSEA Commander
In today’s global environment, the U.S. Navy protects America’s interests at home and abroad by maintaining maritime superiority, deterring aggression, and providing humanitarian assistance. The cornerstone of our Navy’s success is its ships and aircraft—and no other organization contributes more to advance our country’s naval presence than NAVSEA. For more than 220 years, NAVSEA and its predecessor organizations have been responsible for the design, construction, delivery, maintenance, and disposal of our Navy’s ships and ship systems.
The NAVSEA Mission “to design, build, deliver, and maintain ships and systems on time and on cost for the United States Navy” underpins my priorities and aligns directly with the Navy’s Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority. Everything we do will align to the Design and its four Lines of Effort that focus on warfighting, learning faster, strengthening our Navy team, and building partnerships.
You have already heard me talk a lot about my top three priorities—on‐time delivery of ships and submarines from maintenance availabilities, creating a culture of affordability, and cybersecurity. You’ve also heard me talk about “winning them all.” None of that happens without the great workforce we have at NAVSEA. You are the foundation for this plan and everything we do. Your growth, health, morale, and well‐being are of the utmost importance to me. I’m committed to ensuring you are provided with the best leaders, tools, training, resources, equipment, and facilities to enable you to maximize your contributions to the Navy mission. As the Navy’s innovators, I am relying on you to drive success and faster learning in all areas of our business.
Priority #1: On‐Time Delivery of Ships and Submarines Ensuring maritime superiority requires a ready and capable fleet of ships, submarines, and associated combat systems. Our Combatant Commanders rely on us to provide the naval assets they need, when they are needed. Our ability to deliver ships out of public and private yard maintenance availabilities on time, without cutting corners and with the requisite quality is critical to meet this demand. The Fleet relies on NAVSEA to get this right. Getting back to on‐time delivery of ships out of maintenance availabilities will require a multi‐faceted “all of the above” approach to include the following broad areas: People: Focus on talent management and develop and mentor leaders at all levels. Identify and reward outstanding individual and collective performance. I will personally lead this effort. Resources: Ensure workload, capacities, and funding are in balance. Identify misalignment as soon as possible; tough resource problems only get tougher with time. Planning: Get requirements right. Improve duration forecasts including growth and emergent work. Upgrade governance and process discipline. Execution: Deliver first‐time quality. Improve change management and reduce execution year workload churn. Contracting: Establish an executable, stable workload, well‐defined requirements, and incentivize contractor performance. Develop more effective contracting strategies and streamline the contract award process. Material: Improve material forecasting and availability. Infrastructure/Information Technology (IT): Optimize infrastructure investments, and replace, consolidate, and/or implement more effective IT tools and solutions. Requirements: Eliminate/streamline specifications and requirements that add unnecessary time and cost. Technical Excellence: Exercise sound engineering and risk management practices.
Priority #2: Culture of Affordability The American people expect us to invest their money wisely to protect them in a dynamically evolving security environment. We’ve got to get the most from our budget by reducing the cost of our products and processes within all areas of our complex business and throughout the lifecycle. We need to do things better and differently, focusing on cost judiciousness, challenging requirements and the status quo, meeting audit requirements, and making every dollar count. No opportunity to reduce cost is too small to merit our attention. This is a key enabler for maintaining the ships we have and ensuring we have the funds necessary to build the next generation of naval vessels.
Our affordability focus will assess costs in these areas across our business: Cost of Products: Look for ways to build, maintain, and acquire ships and ship systems more affordably. Ensure we understand lifecycle cost implications for technical specifications and contract requirements we impose. Pursue common solutions where they make sense, balancing acquisition and in‐service cost to minimize Total Ownership Cost and reduce variation and proliferation of non‐standard parts, material, and equipment. Cost of Processes: Assess our NAVSEA governance and internal processes, eliminating, updating and streamlining where possible. Scrutinize external processes levied upon us and assess and articulate where the value‐to‐cost ratio is out of balance. Cost of Our Day‐to‐Day Business: Apply a culture of cost consciousness in everything we do, particularly in areas of discretionary spending, administrative requirements, travel, and other needs.
Priority #3: Cybersecurity The U.S. and our international partners are increasingly dependent on data and information systems within Cyberspace to communicate and deliver essential services. As our adversaries develop and adopt unprecedented techniques and means to deny, disrupt, disable, or cause physical damage to our forces and infrastructure, Cybersecurity remains the challenge of our day, and a warfighting imperative for the U.S. Navy. NAVSEA plays a key role in the planning and execution of this mission. We are charged with protecting afloat and shore based systems (i.e. machinery control, combat system control and shore based information technology) from both insider and external cyber threats. To protect our control and IT systems, we must: Increase our collective level of knowledge of cybersecurity threats, processes, procedures and tools that enable us to effectively support the fleet. Affordably integrate cybersecurity into our current and future products. Transition to and effectively execute our assigned responsibilities within the new information security system known as the Risk Management Framework (RMF).
Each and every NAVSEA employee has a responsibility to better understand cybersecurity and the role we play in supporting the fleet and keeping our systems safe. We must establish a culture that embraces cybersecurity awareness and compliance, and applies high velocity learning to ensure we remain ahead of our adversaries.
None of these challenges are new, nor are they easy. Over the coming weeks, members of your leadership team will be assigned the lead in each of these major lines of effort. Make no doubt—the key to this plan’s success is through our people using the core attributes of the Navy’s Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority – Integrity, Accountability, Initiative, and Toughness. You are the best workforce the nation has to offer. I will set clear direction, empower you to execute that direction, and work with you to accomplish our goals. I’m committed to the CNO’s drive toward high velocity learning and innovation; these tenets cross‐cut our entire business and will be a focus area across the command. I will rely on your creativity, encourage informed risk‐ taking, and empower you to identify and pursue unique solutions to our complex challenges—and then rapidly share those ideas and best practices across the enterprise. I expect to win them all, and so should you. We can afford nothing less.
