Previous IFPA-Fletcher Conferences

National Security Strategy and Policy:
Planning for and Responding to Threats to the U.S. Homeland

October 28-29, 2004
Ronald Reagan Building
and International Trade Center
Washington, D.C.

Admiral James M. Loy, USCG (Ret.),
Deputy Secretary, Department of Homeland Security

Keeping America Safe: Progress and Partnerships in the 21st Century

Introduction By: Dr. Robert L. Pfaltzgraff, Jr.

Admiral James M. Loy: Bob, thank you very much. It’s always interesting to hear your introductions, but when it includes “and his topic for the evening is,” that’s when you start paying attention and say maybe I'd better say something about that.

This kind of topic, of course, lends itself to hours and hours of debate, and weeks and weeks of study, and months and months of analysis, and hopefully a game plan that emerges every once in a while from the other end of that. But let me first thank Bob and all of the folks at DTRA and other places that have sponsored the work that you're doing together these two days. I was deeply impressed with the effort that Bob did for us up at Tufts in that window of time shortly after the tragedies of 9/11/01. We were able to pull together things that were enormously important to me and my Coast Guard at that time as a statement about what we should be trying to do on the maritime sector. At that point in time, my worries were about the maritime sector and developing an international standards array that we could take to the International Maritime Organization and begin the process of grappling with standard-setting and behavior change literally around the world, to of course include the United States, to recognize our responsibilities in this very different security environment that was thrust upon us by those 19 felons on 9/11/01.

The quality of what we got done there was enormously instrumental in allowing us to fabricate an agenda and take it to the international maritime organization, allow within about 10 or 11 months, that organization, which is normally known for its rather glacial pace of progress, to translate it into a diplomatic conference, and at the end of that inside a year, from the day we showed up offering the agenda, we ended up with 12 of those 14 points having been translated into standards for the rest of the world and signed onto by 170 nations.

That’s the kind of sense of commitment and urgency that I feel remains absolutely appropriate to our continuing task, and on many occasions these days I wonder about the waning of that commitment on occasion. Unless we get spurred by whatever might be a change in the homeland security advisory system level, or a piece of intelligence that any of us might see or read, or comments from one person or another on a videotape from God knows where that finds itself on the evening news without much of a trace of credibility or value to it.

I would offer that the opportunities, like these two days present, to continue the debate of what needs to be done continue to be absolutely invaluable. We certainly do not have it figured out. I'm constantly reinforced in my notion that the post-9/11 security environment is as different as was the challenges of the Cold War that emerged from the hot war of World War II, and figuring out that “the know your enemy” principle that Sun Tzu suggests is a good place to start is a challenge that we are undertaking while we’re buying time with the “best defense is a good offense” approach that plays out, for example, in places like Afghanistan.

This terrorism thing is a very new kind of enemy, and we have all heard that from so many different places, and I feel to some degree that I'm preaching to the choir a bit, because if you weren’t interested in having already had many of these conversations, you probably wouldn’t be in the audience. But I think the simple realities of “no flag, no president, no borders, no nation,” none of those things that we heretofore have found as common ingredients in the enemy inventory that we have dealt with as a nation before prompts us to have to do the research necessary with a degree of commitment and resolve, and with a sense of urgency, so that we can in fact build the algorithm of capability necessary for our country to deal with this one, not unlike we have always tried to deal with those enemies of America.

I believe words like transformation, which have become key words in this town, offered by not only Secretary Rumsfeld, but now interpreted by so many, I often feel that we are not giving them the due they deserve. And if there are pushback elements associated with those kinds of things, we must find the drive and the momentum-generating activity set that will bring them to our attention in the robust way that is appropriate.

I believe, for example, that we woke up on 9/11 as a nation that had found itself 10 or 12 years earlier, in the wake of the fall of the Wall and in the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Empire, as the sole surviving superpower with an inventory of stuff that we simply held on to over the course of the ensuing 10 or 12 years. We woke up on 9/11/01 wondering whether that inventory was the algorithm of capability necessary to deal with the new enemy, with the new threat.

I believe the challenges that are offered rhetorically by Secretary Rumsfeld and others deserve dramatic adjustment in that inventory of capability to be able to adequately grapple with the new enemy. I think we all must find ourselves as advocates of change, and embrace it rather than be the staffer rolling the obstacle in front of what obviously would be a significant new thrust or new way of doing business.

I asked Bob as I came in what had been the themes that sort of emerged from the day’s discussion, from the panelists, and from your questions to and from those panelists, and he indicated several that I would take a moment to reinforce. First, he indicated that part of this change algorithm has got to be recognizing a half-dozen or so themes that are very much a part of what we’re trying to do, not only at DHS, but in the Homeland Security Council inside the White House, and reaching as necessary to all the players around this country almost in an all-hands evolution sense. And all of us who have worn the uniform understand what that means. There are certain things aboard ship that can be done by the watch, and there are certain challenges aboard ship that require us to wake everybody up and get to the table as necessary to get the job done. And I'm of the mind that we all will be far better off if we err on the side of being the Rosie the Riveters of the 21st century, where our contributions as citizens, as members of a company, as members of a federal service or agency must be brought to the table to find a better way ahead.

And if a couple of those notions, like “push the borders out,” or the notion of public/private partnerships as a better way to do business than perhaps has ever been given credit for in the past, or recognizing this constant balance of three that we must always keep in mind when we’re developing or thinking about a better security paradigm in one walk of American life or another, the three being absolutely required that we raise the security paradigm, but it should never be at the expense of the flow of the economy that represents the underpinning of the quality of life that we enjoy so much as Americans, and the third leg being never to abrogate the Constitutional tenets associated with civil liberties and privacy.

We find programs being articulated and voiced and offered that still may very well not recognize the legitimacy and importance of that balance, even the imperative of that balance if we are to hold on across time to those things which we have always valued as Americans.

I have a copy of the Constitution that I've carried around in my briefcase for a long, long time, and I can tell you, after my battles in the last couple of years with CAPPS-2 and other such programs, the damn thing opens to the Fourth Amendment every time I want to open it. And that’s okay, because in and of itself that’s a bit of a reminder to reinforce the balance of those three things I just mentioned.

It’s important in this public/private partnership idea to recognize the quality of product that is produced if you have the private sector experts and the public sector rule makers, policymakers, reg developers at the table at the same time when those things are actually being developed. I never knew that quite as vividly as I feel it today until two experiences that I had.

First, the last couple of years of my time in uniform, when those kind of public/private partnerships were exhibited to me to demonstrate absolute better ways of doing business. When the American Waterways Operators and the Coast Guard of the United States got together and developed something called the National Carrier Program for all of the members of the American Waterways Operators, I can guarantee you that program is infinitely better than it would have been if we tried to regulate it from the feds’ end, or they tried to develop it exclusively from industry’s end.

But as a result of it, I can absolutely also guarantee you that there is less oil in the water from tugs and barges running around our waterways, and there are young sailors and seamen still alive today who otherwise would not have been because of the safety and environmental protection implications of that particular program. A public/private partnership that resulted in positive things happening in that industry.

Another example was when we were levying multimillion dollar fines from the Coast Guard on the cruise ship industry for dumping things into the water they should not have been, that’s what we were doing with the left hand while the right hand was working with them to develop a better regulation regime that would make sure that all of the players in that industry were trying to be good citizens, and some just need an extra push. And as a result, there is infinitely fewer major spills in the waterways of the globe, let alone the United States, today, and far less oil in the water from the cruise ship industry than ever has been the case before.

So when I translate that into, for example, my work at TSA and standing up that brand new organization, we could not have done it without the Boeings of the world and the Lockheed-Martins of the world. For God’s sake, TSA was a blank sheet of paper when the Congress passed the Aviation Transportation Security Act. And when Norm Mineta called me and others into his room to figure out how to begin the process of getting it on, to meet 36 mandated deadlines that the Congress had proscribed and the President had signed into law, the only way we were going to get those things accomplished for this country was by partnering with private industry to bring the best and brightest to the table to help us get done what needed to get done.

I can remember many a Monday morning seeking forgiveness for what I did not seek permission for on Friday afternoon, and the reason for that was 36 mandated deadlines, and if we messed around asking, rather than taking advantage of the authorities that were provided in that piece of legislation, to the administrator of TSA and no one else, we simply would not have gotten done what was necessary to get done, in what I would still recall as the bit of the impulsive aftermath of 9/11.

That sort of brings me to recognize that our nation has often just developed notions in that kind of a sequence -- a horrible tragedy which is immediately followed by impulsive legislation from the Hill that then takes five to ten years for everybody to sort out all of its implications. Is that where we find ourselves, in that five-to-ten-year window now in the aftermath of a tragedy on 9/11 with impulsive legislation that was enacted immediately, things like the Homeland Security Act, the Patriot Act, ATSA and many other things? I believe we must reason through that over the course of these next months and years, to really settle on the new paradigm of how we will grapple with those who committed those heinous acts on 9/11/01.

General Eisenhower once said, “History does not long entrust the care of freedom to either the weak or the timid.” And I think the boldness associated with what absolutely needs to be done in our post-9/11 security environment should not be lost as it relates to a sense of commitment on one hand and a sense of urgency on the other. And we are working diligently at our new department to try to breed into that culture, that brand new culture, a set of core values, if you will, that would go there, go to that commitment, hold on to that sense of urgency, and as people come to work each and every day the Secretary and I encourage them to hang on their wall or hang on the back of their door a picture of the World Trade Center as it used to be or, God forbid, a picture of the World Trade Center or the Pentagon as it was as the sun went down on 9/11/01, as nothing more than a reminder to the urgency and the commitment that’s appropriate to the task that we’re about.

These kind of conference opportunities enable that conversation and dialogue to continue when there are so many who would allow it to slow down or wane.

What is it about this new department? Astonishing undertaking, by far the most complex reorganization at the federal level since the National Security Act of 1947. And I would offer, if I have a moment to register one short, minor complaint. Unlike 1947, when the thought patterns of probably at least three, if not four years had gone into the developmental end of the National Security Act, where it produced not only the executive branch reorganization, but also a Congressional reorganization attendant to that newly arranged executive branch. That has not occurred yet. The 9/11 Commission recommendation package of 41 recommendations devoted one of those to recognizing that the Congress needs to deal in an oversight manner, in a far more effective and efficient manner than they have so far.

They produced, if you will, about half the chore. The executive branch reorganizational effort is under way. The attendant Congressional oversight reorganizational effort has not really even begun. Eighty-seven committees or subcommittees that we in the Department have to deal with as part of that oversight process. We have to find a way to do better than that, and the only responsible parties there are those who run the Congressional branch.

Twenty-two disparate agencies, 180,000 employees coming together in what was to be the synergistic means by which we were going to do this thing called securing the homeland better than we ever had before. It was, as I mentioned a moment ago, the most unbelievable challenge that had been laid on federal leadership for an awful long time. It’s both the challenge of meeting mission day after day, and the challenge of establishing the Department at the same time.

Just a couple numbers. We inherited 22 HR systems on the day the Department was stood up. We inherited 19 different financial bill-paying centers sprinkled somewhere through the Department. We inherited 13 different procurement systems to be used by this new entity called the DHS. And the list, I can assure you, goes on and on. Maybe my favorite one was that we inherited 37 different administrative systems to administer government credit cards. Now, I would have understood 22, but I don’t understand 37. But we have that 37 down to four. We have those 19 financial bill-paying centers down to ten, on the way to something less than that. We have those 22 human relations systems down to seven, on the way to one, because at the same time among, everything else that we’re trying to get accomplished, we have this great license to produce a brand new HR system at the federal level. The Pentagon is doing the same thing. We have stayed very close to one another with that work.

I can tell you that the reg package is very close to going forward that will replace, for the Department of Homeland Security, the civil service system of GS schedule that has served this country for over 50 years. But to us it was an imperative that we be about the business of rewarding performance instead of longevity. And if you think about the GS schedule, that’s precisely what gets rewarded when people get promoted. It’s not good enough for the challenges of the 21st century, and we better be about the business of making the right one come alive and be there when we need it.

What have been the accomplishments of this new Department? I would like for you to take away the notion that they have been a good bit. Just a couple of examples: Before September 11, ticket agents at the airport who dealt with the customer base asked you whether or not you packed your own bags. That was the security paradigm at the airports prior to 9/11. Today we have newly trained screeners who are adequately paid. We have thousands of federal air marshals on hosts of flights of the right kind day after day after day. We have thousands of federal flight deck officers, those pilots who volunteer for a rather difficult training regimen that enables them to take a weapon inside the cockpit, and that cockpit is now behind hardened cockpit doors. And the system-of-systems developed there is a classic example of what we have found to be the necessary approach.

Norm Mineta set people aside for four months out of the 12 months we had after ATSA was passed and challenged them to find the silver bullet associated with aviation security. And they, of course, were not able to do that. So our default position has become a system-of-systems, if you will, all those things I just mentioned and many others, which takes advantage of the simple notion that if you line up 75 or 65 or 80% effective pieces and line enough of them up in a row, you can take advantage of the law of aggregate numbers and find your way towards that 94, 5, 6, 7, whatever percent we think is the imperative of the day. And that’s why there are so many elements to the aviation security paradigm that we have built.

Think about what happens at the border today when you return from London or Paris or anywhere else abroad. In the old days when your plane landed, you stopped at the Customs desk and then were ushered to the INS desk, and then were ushered to the Agriculture desk before you went on into your own homeland. We have refashioned that notion to what is commonly referred to as one face at the border, a simple notion of a much more effective and efficient way of doing business, where there is now a primary and secondary approach to those coming back. And the officer that is at the primary desk is adequately skilled in all three of those early dimensions I just mentioned -- Customs, Immigration and Agriculture -- to deal with probably 90, 92, 93% of the passengers going by. And you are dealt with by a single face at the border and ushered into your own homeland. If there is a red flag that goes up in that officer’s mind, those very few that usher in that red flag are offered the opportunity for secondary screening to resolve whatever needs resolving. A much more efficient way of doing business.

INS came to our Department as probably the most broken federal agency in government. And we have in the course of eight months developed an entry/exit system for this country that for whatever reason defied that agency to be accomplished over the previous 20 or 25 years. US Visit is a terrific, simple system that adds about six seconds to your trip, one way or the other, where with two fingerprints and a digital picture-- it’s a digital scan and a digital photograph -- we capture the notion of those who enter and exit our country and can actually take action appropriate to whatever is found against databases that are checked when those fingerprints are offered.

So I could go on and on with the sort of hit list of good things that have been done as a result of this new Department coming together, but let me just give you one or two numbers and then turn to looking forward for a moment.

First responder community. If we learned any lessons at all on 9/11, it was that the police officers couldn’t talk to the firemen, who couldn’t talk to the EMTs, who couldn’t talk to their base units in New York on 9/11.

From 1999 to 2001, about $1.3 billion came out of the federal coffers to equip first responders and there were almost no conditions associated with those dollars going to those places. From 2002 to 2004, $13 billion, a greater than 900% improvement or addition, have gone to first responders with conditions associated with things like interoperability, information sharing, command and control system development, so that those dollars are literally translated into pieces of that algorithm of capability I mentioned a moment ago that must be part and parcel of what we’re doing for a living.

Our new department did not simply accept the regular old paradigm of prevention, response, and consequence management when we came together. We thought our way through a better way to do business that would be more inclusive of the challenges of this new post-9/11 security environment. And we broke out from prevention up front something that we have loosely referred to as awareness or domain awareness, the notion there being that challenge deserved our attention to the point where we wanted to know every bit of information, data, knowledge available about the domain in which we were responsible, so that armed with that we could build better prevention, protection, response, and recovery protocols, and that has proven to be something that we are making hay on day after day after day, to insist that people get into the knowledge information, domain awareness piece before we let them get into the design business for those other functional areas of securing the homeland that we’re responsible for.

Before September 11, from Washington, DC, there was no one who had the means by which they could speak with any of those police officers, firemen, or EMTs at the local level. Today the Homeland Security Information Network is in place to all 50 governors, all 50 Homeland Security Advisors, the 50 largest urban areas, and we routinely, week after week, gather them all on this new Net, either at the classified or unclassified level -- classified to secret at the moment and going to compartmented when we can. That system is in place today on a real time basis to share the kind of information that may very well be available to us some time that will make the difference tactically to firemen, EMTs, and officers in virtually any town, or county, or community in our country.

There are huge challenges yet to be undertaken, but as we look forward, the Secretary has itemized a half-dozen or so priorities for us to take on. Let me just mention them to you so if you're in the business you know we’re coming to you for help pretty shortly. This information sharing and infrastructure protection challenge we are working on diligently day after day after day. And it will be with us until we get it right.

The notion of interoperability, not only of communications but of equipment and training.

The notion of integrating our ports and borders so that the circumference of this country, nay, even this continent, because of the work that we’re doing, both with Canada and Mexico, is something that we have to focus on diligently day after day.

The whole notion of setting one of the directorates aside for the purpose of future investment in next-generation capability about technology and tools, pressing them to improve what we have today, replace what we have today. We spent about $4 billion buying electronic detection equipment for airports that is too big, too heavy, too expensive and not totally adequate to the task; 1995/’96 vintage technology. But the requirement was specified in the law that that was precisely what we would do. Our challenge, really, is to invest in the next generation of detection capability for explosives wherever they may be, and incorporate them into the daily work of those who screen things coming toward America.

Better prepared communities. The whole notion of how we enlist mayors and councilmen and citizens to stand up and be counted with respect to the readiness posture of any of our towns and states for what might occur.

Then two sort of administrative responsibilities that we have undertaken. The first; because we’ve got all of INS, which includes the immigration servicing portion, we must be about the business of reducing the backlog which is, in many instances, as long as eight or nine years today, to something much closer to six months to a year for the opportunity to process and educate prospective citizens of this great nation in the same fashion that they have and enable them as they have so often in the past to make the contributions necessary to our well-being.

Then lastly, the notion of a 21st century department. We want someone walking down Pennsylvania Avenue interested in public service five years from now to be very clear in their minds that the place they want to go to work is the Department of Homeland Security, and we’re going to buy the HR system attendant to that request and that interest and that desire. We’re going to build the procurement systems, the acquisition systems. We’re going to build the IT structures, and are in the midst of doing that, such that this brand new thing becomes the model of a 21st century federal cabinet level agency.

I've probably spoken long enough. This general topic is one that, as you might imagine, lends any of us to talk about, as I indicated earlier, for days and weeks. Jefferson once wrote that it is part of the American character to consider nothing as desperate and goes on to say, “To surmount every difficulty by resolution and contrivance.” Isn't that a great American thing? Resolution is about commitment and holding the sense of urgency I mentioned earlier in these remarks, but contrivance is about the American spirit. It’s about rising to the occasion when it’s necessary. It’s about creativity, it’s about innovation. It’s about being American and watching Americans solve challenges, problems and issues as they present themselves.

I offer that this new challenge we have in front of us called terrorism, the first “ism” we’re going to take on in this 21st century is one that remains enormously perplexing to us at the moment, but with the resolve and with the contrivance of the American spirit, we will take care of this in the same fashion as we have taken care of so many other things before.

But it will only get accomplished when each of us looks inside and decides to make that contribution day after day, whatever that may be, in whatever walk of life you walk. And I ask each and every one of you to take that message back to your workplace and challenge your colleagues, your family members, you fellow citizens of your communities to do that very thing.

That is how we will secure the homeland. Not by some federal decree from Washington, DC, but because America has used its resolution and its contrivance to figure out the best way to do that in the early days of the 21st century. Thank you very much. [Applause]

Questions and Answers

__: Admiral, thoroughly enjoyed your comments, as always. Industry is obviously here to support and you talking about your acquisition strategy for the future as you see forward. We’re used to working in a DoD-type, very disciplined process that’s taken a long time, obviously, to develop. Do you see your acquisition process looking like DoD in the future, or something entirely different, or what?

ADMIRAL LOY: It’s a great question, and I think how I would try to answer it would be this way: Secretary Ridge signed today a management directive that describes the means by which he wants procurement and acquisition as functions in the Department integrated over the foreseeable future. My challenge to both the agency heads inside DHS and the Secretary’s challenge and the line of business chiefs, I’ll call them, those people who are responsible at the senior level in the Department for functions, like the CIO, the CFO, CPO, those kind of folks, to first of all not be bound by whatever it is they have always been bound by. Secondly, to look around for the best practices they find, wherever they find them, in private industry or in the federal sector, or around the world, and design for the Department of Homeland Security the, in this case procurement or acquisition processes that will do for this Department, and therefore for the nation, that which needs to be done in an efficient, effective and timely manner.

So wherever in the process of multiple boards of review in the Pentagon, there are opportunities for delay. We would like to recognize those and eliminate them. But on the other hand, if the notion of a Joint Requirements Council leading to an Investment Review Board is the process with which we absolutely validate that the procurement on the table being considered will fit the policy parameters of the Department as a whole as a good piece of the action, we want those review processes to be there, to make certain that our obligations and responsibilities as good stewards of the taxpayers’ dollars are met.

But we also want to make certain that if the service or the product being considered for procurement has already been purchased by the federal government somewhere else, I’ll be damned if I want to spend a nickel of the taxpayers’ dollars to go buy it again from the same player.

So there are maladies and strengths of the system you were describing as that of the Department of Defense, and we will examine each and every one of those enormously carefully. But I want to also understand how Hewlett-Packard buys things and how General Motors buys things, so that the designed package of procurement for our Department is optimal, whatever optimal means. And our challenge to the business chiefs and to the agency heads will be in that fashion. Go find the best practices and incorporate them into the very best practice that we’ll put into place for this Department.

Let me give you a couple of for-instances from the TSA world. I used to think of zero-to-60 as what I did in the old man’s car when he wasn’t watching on Saturday morning. Now I think of it as going from zero to 60,000 employees in six months in the federal government of the United States of America. I don’t know how many people would like to put up their arm as an HR expert that could claim even anything close to that outside the military services in times when they could just go pick you off the street. Draft days is what I'm talking about.

We had to go find and recruit and train and distribute to 450 different business locations called airports around the country the wherewithal to dramatically improve the security associated with checking passengers and cargo at airports for this country. The only way we could do that was to reach to ways of doing business heretofore never used by the federal government. And that was fine.

And in the same fashion, when it came time to think our way through IT as a structural piece for this brand new organization, the great joy was that we didn’t have to break any rice bowls there, because there wasn’t anything there to break. So we could build whatever the hell we wanted to build.

So what we built was an IT backbone managed by the private sector with applications to be placed against that backbone as policy would dictate over time, not thinking that inside the federal government were the smartest folks in town to design what was necessary to build the enterprise architecture and the data backbone for what we needed to do for a living.

So the procurement process needs to be, in my mind, attentive to the reality of the threat. We have to shift gears from what has always been, despite the fact that the change algorithm necessary often to do that is about breaking rice bowls. Well, we have a lot of crockery litter in the halls of DHS already, and there’s going to be a lot more by the time we have redesigned this cabinet level agency to be efficient, effective and timely as it relates to addressing what we’re responsible for.

__: I'd like to narrow down on what you were just speaking of as far as the procurement. As an independent businessman, I face the prospect of going after the procurement system with a broad agency announcement that may take anywhere from six months to two years to pursue. That means that, at best, you might get the product you need to protect the country in two years. The threat is today. Have you made any provisions to address immediate requirements with immediate procurements with an expedited process? I use the issue of, say, the Central America problems of the 1980s, in which you could turn around and do a procurement in five minutes to address an immediate problem. Can you make that happen with the homeland security process?

ADMIRAL LOY: I think that is precisely the kind of thing that I would endorse dramatically and emphatically from my desk, and I think Secretary Ridge would support that as well, the whole notion. If you look very carefully at the authorities in the Aviation Transportation Security Act rendered to the administrator, it was all about sole source acquisition when you needed it. It was about recognizing the immediacy and the urgency of timely procurement and acquisition to get done what you needed to get done. Therefore, the means by which we developed the procurement of the package of gear currently installed in our airports across the country was done dramatically quickly, and that’s the kind of process that I think continues to be of interest and of necessity when certain elements need taking care of, not tomorrow, not six months from now, but today.

So the authority package that the Secretary has, interestingly, is not as strong as the authority package of the administrator at TSA, and I believe in many ways that’s all about a resistance to change that plays its way into legislation development and directional activity that challenges people to do things, but often does not provide the tools necessary to get it done.

So we must be about being harbingers of change. We must be about insisting, for the well-being of the country, that we find our way to those authorities, as had--

END OF SIDE A
SIDE B

--over the course of those couple of years, and Dave Stone, the administrator now, continues to enjoy. It was enormously important that we get about the business of doing what we needed to do quickly. First of all, the Congress had legislated deadlines to make sure we got done what we needed to get done in timeframes of their choosing, not when we got around to it, or when an announcement could go out with solicitation windows that take forever, and decisions processes that take forever, and frankly never get you to where you want to be.

That’s part of this challenge that I'm offering. A 21st century organization, if we can pull this off, will be the hallmark of what should be the norm, rather than the exception, and we must be about the business of pressing whatever’s necessary to try to make that happen.

JACK KELLY: Jack Kelly from IFPA. There’s a lot of people in this crowd from industry who urged two companies with very difficult and different cultures. You have 22 agencies, multiple cultures. What are some of the difficulties you’ve experienced? You’ve alluded to some of them. And what are some of the lessons you’ve learned, and how’s it going?

ADMIRAL LOY: Thanks. This is a beautiful facility, but the acoustics are really strange, but I think I got the question.

I came from an organization where I spent 42 years on a joyride, frankly, in many ways, but also that Coast Guard of mine, where we could show documented evidence of a six-to-one return on the investment of the taxpayers’ dollar also was an organization pressed for modernization monies, for research monies, for the wherewithal to take on the multiple responsibilities it has as an organization. But what it had, more than anything else, was a cultural norm that said if it’s wet and it’s really hard, give it to the Coast Guard, because we’re going to get it done. And over time, frankly, that’s exactly what occurred.

So I came to these new jobs from an organization that had as a cultural norm core values that everybody personally believed in. We started the notion of honor and respect and devotion to duty as the core value of that organization only in 1999-- I'm sorry, it was in 1992. I happened to be the Chief of Personnel for the organization at that point in time. And we knew we got those right when we offered those to the commandant as a public statement of the core values of our service because of how well they resonated at the chief’s core level, at the mess deck level, at the flight deck level around that organization.

Kids today that go through boot camp or the Coast Guard Academy or the Officer Candidate School, any of the entry points into that organization, learn those things at the visceral level very, very early. I want that cultural reality and norm to become the cultural reality of the Department of Homeland Security.

And, absolutely, you're right, it was, continues to be, and will continue to be enormously difficult. We had organizations like the legacy Customs Service in the Coast Guard with over 200 years of service to America saddled up beside the Transportation Security Administration, which was still wet behind the years with only a year of service to that point in its time. Pieces of organizations, like pieces of Agriculture that had been plucked out of the department and given to us because of some synergistic inference about the function they performed.

Secretary Ridge’s challenge is to make sure there is a common vision, a common mission that people don’t put on the shelf, but truly understand and can articulate, and that there are core values associated with the Department that resonate through all 180,000 people in that organization, and then strategically build a game plan of goals and objectives and activities with accountability, metrics-based compliance process at the tail end, that take you from strategic goals to budget line items that are actually going to affect the potential for you to get done what you’ve advertised as the most important work that you have, as you articulate those in your strategic goals.

I believe in that long-range planning process, I believe in that strategic planning process. It’s, frankly, not different from what McNamara brought to town in 1960, but it’s imperative for the nobility and the importance of the work that we’re undertaking at DHS almost goes without saying. If you do not have the attendant commitment, resolution and contrivance built into your department as part of the game, you stand the chance of not doing for this country what the citizens would have you do. That would be unacceptable.