DoD USD "all hands": Under Secretary Aldridge asks, "what's on your mind?" - AT&L

Program Manager, Sept-Oct, 2002

Science and Technology

In the area of S&T [Science and Technology], we did get the S&T budget up a little bit. I didn't get it all the way to 3 percent of the DoD budget, but we got to around 2.7 percent. We now have got it on a positive trend. We pulled the attention of the Secretary of Defense to the S&T budget. He is fully supportive of it. Congress is fully supportive of our efforts to reach 3 percent for S&T, while at the same time balancing all of the things we had to do in this budget. We just couldn't quite get the S&T budget up to where we wanted it, but we got the ACTD [Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration] areas from $ 150-159 million to $200 million, restructuring ACTDs so we can incentivize the Services as best we can to come aboard. Essentially, we'll fund a little bit more up front if they'll fund some at the end.

Think About Innovation

So when you put all that together, I think you could safely say we are we making progress. I've only been here a little over a year. Many of you have been here less than that. But I think we can look back with a great amount of pride that we've made a lot of progress in this last year on top of having to fight the war on terrorism.

The Secretary has, in a briefing he gave to the senior staff the other day talked about a sense of urgency He's been here 18 months and is looking at what's going to happen over the next 18 months. As far as this Administration, we've got basically 18 months to go and probably only about six months to make a really big dent in getting a lot of things in place. So he is really encouraging all of us to think about innovation. Think about it in terms of urgency He keeps complaining about how long it takes to coordinate things around this building. I swear it does take a long time, unfortunately When I look at some of those congressional letters coming across my desk--and all the signature pages--I'm surprised we accomplish anything in the time that we have. But he really is going to urge all of us in the senior leadership to take on a sense of urgency and get a lot of these innovative things moving at a faster pace than perhaps we've been moving so far.

I keep telling him, however, as far as I can see, "the foot is on the accelerator." It's right on the floor and if he expects us to make any changes in direction, or do something new, something's got to go. Just keep that in mind because you'll hear some more about it. He's going to start a series of meetings like the QDR session that we had last year as we built up our strategies, meeting after meeting, wrapping our minds around where we wanted to go. He's going to do the same thing for these new innovative ideas--a series of meetings with the senior leadership, probably even one layer down, getting all the Presidential appointees involved in looking at new and innovative ways to make this building [Pentagon] work better.

Reengineering AT&L

You've heard a lot about reengineering AT&L. I find that we at AT&L have an enormous portfolio of things going on. I'm overwhelmed by it every day and I have a sense that we're spending a lot of time on marginal issues. We need to really think through what those marginal issues are. I find everybody in AT&L is tremendously busy We work entirely too long--at least I know I do. I don't like working Saturdays.