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Secretary Dominguez: Thanks for this opportunity to talk to you. I've got to say that I'm the relief pitcher because the person we had intended to bring to you today was the Program Executive Officer (PEO) for the National Security Personnel System (NSPS), Ms. Mary Lacey. I'll talk a little bit more about Mary and how she fits into the picture a little bit later on, and I'll do my best to fill in for her. She's the one who's been leading the engagement with stakeholders, the development of ideas from that engagement into proposed regulations, the turning of those proposed regulations into a system that can be operated by people in the Department of Defense (DoD). So Mary is the most knowledgeable person on NSPS right now. Unfortunately, she has a daughter in her senior year at Tulane University, so she's busy relocating her daughter from Tulane to Boston University, and she's going to be tied up for the next couple of days. In the meantime, this was too important a forum to cancel, so I hope that I'll be able to communicate a lot of where we've been, what we've been doing, where we are now, and some excitement about the future.

What is NSPS? Let me tell you from the get-go, the headline, the foot stomp, the answer to the exam question is that the National Security Personnel System is a transformational change opportunity for the Department of Defense. It is an opportunity to refocus and reorient this institution around a performance-based and results-focused culture. It is marginally about a civilian personnel system. It is fundamentally about performance, managing for results and a focus on outcomes. That's what NSPS is. It's a transformational change opportunity.

At the same time, it is a very, very public challenge from the Congress of the United States to the department saying, “okay, guys, you said you need to do this, we believe you need to do this, over to you. Make it work. Change the culture, change the focus, reorient the department, drive into the department a culture of performance, a culture of results, an alignment around achievement of results and use this civilian personnel system as your level.” So it's a challenge, a very public challenge, and a huge transformational change opportunity. The Congress gave us what we asked for November 2003.

After a brief false start, where we thought that NSPS was about writing a regulation, we regrouped in early 2004 and really confronted the complexity of the challenge that lay in front of us, realized it was an enormously complex undertaking, and then turned to the mechanisms and the systems and the practices and the behaviors and the skill-sets that we've developed and evolved in the Department of Defense for managing enormous complexity and delivering product in a short period of time. And believe it or not, that is indeed our acquisition processes. There's discipline in that, there's structure in that, there's a way of behaving, there's a set of expectations, there's things in there that we can understand and we can deal with and that system really does deliver very, very complex products from concept to rubber on the ramp. So we adopted that model because we recognized this indeed was also a very complex undertaking.

A key to doing that was recognizing this was not a staff activity. Staff had input, staff had necessary involvement, but this was a line management problem. We needed line managers involved and we needed a line executive running an office responsible for cost, schedule and performance; delivery of product out the door.

That is Mary Lacey, the PEO for NSPS. Now Mary Lacey is not a human resources (HR) officer. She is not a personnelist. Mary Lacey is a line executive. She used to run one of the Navy labs. She deployed one of the lab demos into her organization. So she's lived through and led the kind of change that we're asking her to build for us.

So we’ve got exactly the right qualities, exactly the right mindset here. Very complex line management function. Build something, deliver it, get it kicked out the door and turned over to the operating commands

The staff in this Overarching Integrated Product Team (OIPT) which I'm a co-chair of, we work problems for Mary Lacey. She brings us issues, we try and give her consensus answers. If we can't get to consensus answers we take it to Secretary of the Navy Gordon R. England. We've been meeting for two years now; every week, twice a week—my counterparts at the Assistant Secretary level, Mr. Roger M. Blanchard and his counterparts. Enormous focus of the senior leadership of the department on this major cultural change opportunity in NSPS, all of us working for Mary Lacey, helping her make it happen.

On February 14th of this year after the regroup and the rebalancing and the engagement that Mary led, we were able to issue what we thought was a pretty good set of regulations. Those regulations were published in the Federal Register, went through a public comment period, and then a specific meet and confer with the union representatives, as well as a lot more engagement with all the stakeholder groups to get people's reaction to that product that we built. As a result of that, we received 58,000 comments on that product. The result was we changed the regulations. The comments were good, they were worthwhile, they were meritorious, and they caused us to go back and retool, redesign and rethink some things.

So those regulations, these 40 changes, are now in a draft package which is in the final stages of coordination through the Administration to eventually, hopefully, be published soon in the Federal Register as a final product.

Now in the meantime, while NSPS is a fundamental change to the department and a cultural change, as I said it is a cultural change around the concept of managing for results, of being performance-focused. A lot of the civil service system doesn't have to change to enable that cultural transformation. So many things aren't changing. A lot stays the same.

What changes is how we pay people, the disciplinary actions, the mechanisms process for that, and then collective bargaining. So these three things do change. And without getting into all the details here, I want to give you a couple of themes.

The first in pay, what changes in pay is performance matters. It's now much more about performance and less about longevity. The second thing in pay that does change is bands, pay bands—the groupings of people into larger aggregations instead of the 15 steps, the GS-1 through 15 and the ten-step increases in each one of the GS series. So instead of that, you have large bands based on your career groupings and your professional scale. Those things change inside the pay system.

In terms of the disciplinary system, the biggest, most important change here is that the national security mission now matters. The mission and the national security imperative is a key factor in the decision-making. Partly that also changes who makes the decisions in disciplinary actions. We still use the Merit System Protection Board (MSPB), but the mission of the organization is now an imperative.

The last thing is collective bargaining. Again, the issues here are driven out of the national security mission. The national security mission now matters, so that the department isn't compelled to, but can implement a change first. Again, this is driven by the national security imperative, and we’ll go back and wrestle with our collective bargaining brethren about that. The second thing here is that the scope of the bargaining is limited or is changed somewhat as well. Again, it's the national security imperative and the performance imperative that drove those changes. Let's talk about some of that.

Rather than focus on the negative, it's important to put out there that there is a positive here as well. The people who are represented by collective bargaining agreements and their representatives can now get engaged with the Department of Defense, with our officials, in discussions about the HR part of the puzzle. They didn't used to have an entree into that system. It was not inside their collective bargaining, it won't be in the future either, but there is an obligation by us and a commitment by the management of the department to open that door and engage in the dialogue so there's an opportunity for union involvement, and I'll call it out to you later on in the presentation, where as we develop DoD directives to cover the human resources system, we'll be in dialogue with the union representatives over those things.

We have the authority to do national level bargaining, but probably more importantly, multi-unit bargaining, so you can go into a command and say, “okay, Air Force Materiel Command” or even a base that has many unions on it. We can engage in multi-unit bargaining, again driven around a mission. So the unions didn't grow up the way we're organized to accomplish our mission. Now with a mission imperative we can find that central focus, that central theme, and then do the bargaining around that in a multi-unit way. That's probably one of the more powerful changes we have on the labor side.

Again, I point out that implementing issuances is another way of saying some DoD directives, some potential Air Force policy directives or Air Force instructions, will be of a nature that will require us to reach out to our union representatives and engage in dialogue before we implement those directives. That's a new opportunity for the unions to get into a bigger scope of activity than they had previously been in.

Adverse actions. Things change. I think the big issue here is the single process for managing the performance problems as well as conduct problems. One process, streamlined. There's some anxiety about these mandatory removal offenses, but all that we've done so far is allow the Secretary of Defense to specify what they are. There's not any real consensus that we need to enumerate a bunch of them. It's just we didn't know that we didn't need to either, so the regulations preserve that opportunity for the Secretary to adapt into the future.

The appeals process changes. Again, the idea here is to compress it, to streamline it, and to make it driven by the national security mission. In fact, the MSPB, when they consider an appeal brought to them, the national security mission of the organization and of the management who made these decisions will be an important factor in their decisions about what they need to do with this appeal. But you can still take it to court.

The HR system design ... The staffing process, again, simplified and streamlined. The pay setting flexibility comes with this banding, the concept of pay banding, setting pay at a level that's driven by the market for people in these broad categories of skills. Veterans preference, however, doesn't change.

Reduction In Force ... The big change here is you don't get these massive bump and retreats. If I've got to eliminate one job in this pool, today the way we do it in the Air Force or have traditionally done it, you could affect 100 jobs because of bump and retreat. Under NSPS, you'll look at this broad category, a broad grouping of a profession and the achievement level, and then the persons with the lowest standing, those jobs will be eliminated and that's it. They'll be available for priority placement someplace else so there will be opportunities for us to help place them, but it's not the bump and retreat, so that you affect a number of jobs that you're going after and not a multiple of ten times that because of the bump and retreat thing.

Performance matters more under NSPS. It is not the only factor you consider, but it now matters a great deal more.

The career groups, the broad pay bands, market-based compensation ... Your payout for salary increases are now driven by the performance payout, not the annual increase, not the step increase.

Performance management is linked to the agency mission. This is one of the cultural changes. You all need to think about your work environment, your organization. Individuals under NSPS should be able to link their individual performance goals to the agency’s goals. Okay? That means your agency, your unit, your organization, has to have clear and compelling goals, objectives, that your work unit is supposed to attack. And that you understand your piece in that and you can measure it in objective, discernable ways. Did you get there? Did you not? Both at the unit level and at your individual level...

If commanders haven't been clear about what they want of the organization, its mission, the specific performance objectives they have for you this year, well then you can't do that. So leadership has to specify the results we intend to achieve so that you as members of the workforce can align yourself with those objectives, and link your performance plan to that organizational outcome. That's a piece of the broad cultural change, to align the institution around performance, around results, around outcomes.

This is hard work, by the way. It does not come easy. We're not as lucky as our Air Force Association brethren here because we can't just specify a market share and a profit margin. Our number's a little more complex than that. We don't have a marketplace to tell us whether we're successful or not. So you need commanders to step into the breach and create that structure for you. How do you know you're going to be successful? How will you know it when you get there? It starts with the command developing a clear statement of organizational mission objectives and the results they want to achieve in the coming year so that you can then hook your plans to that.

We heard from you in that engagement that many of our people don't have the skills to do what's required in a performance-based environment, so we're learning about that. We're learning how to do that, and I'll talk to you some more about the training that we're doing to get people ready for that. This is tough stuff—establishing performance goals, aligning those around expectations, establishing goals that are measurable, acceptable, realistic. There's a lot of work in here. There's a lot of time actually spent between the manager and employees talking to each other about what has to be accomplished. A lot of that work is not going on today. It now needs to.

Who's affected by NSPS? Ultimately, our concept is everybody in the department. We're going to start with the GS employees. Some categories were excluded—intelligence, the labs, wage grade people. We don't know how to do this in a GS environment, although we've had about a decade of lab demos and acquisition demos and lots and lots of experimentation by some creative people in the Department of Defense actually practicing this stuff, developing the skills, developing the lessons that we built on to build NSPS. There's a decade of application of this into the white collar workforce in the labs and acquisition demos. We haven't done it in the wage grade workforce, so we've deferred that into the next spiral to give us time to think through and learn from our broader application inside the GS workforce.

The labor system will go live over everybody in the Department of Defense 30 days after the final regulations are published in the Federal Register, so it's bifurcated. The Human Resources System gets phased in over time starting with the GS workforce and the labor system.

As I said, we heard from the engagement a lot of reservations about whether our people have the skills to do this, so as a result of that we developed a lot of training for all kinds of people in the workforce here, including the senior leaders and managers. We're training on the NSPS system itself, but also on the soft skills, leading in a performance-based culture, managing difficult conversations, setting realistic performance goals, agreeing on expectations, giving coaching and counseling feedback to people. All of those kind of things we haven't done consistently across the institution in a very high quality way. We will now need to do that. And oh, by the way, I'm glad to see so many people in uniform here because that means you with your civilian employees. NSPS touches everybody in the department.

Our rollout, the spiral 1.1. Spiral 1 is one set of regulations. Unless there's a major issue that would warrant a redesign, we're not redesigning the system. We're going to roll it out in increments into some manageable chunks to swallow, but we're not redesigning it after each one of these increments, so Spiral 1 goes out essentially the same way to everybody, 269,000 people. Then Spiral 2 will catch the rest of the people. If there's anything that needs changing or warrants changing from that first thing, then we can roll it back into Spiral 2. The laboratories were excluded by legislation so we saved them for Spiral 3.

Here's a couple of big headlines for you: Nobody loses money going into NSPS. So if you're a GS-7 Step 2 and you're due for your within-grade increase next year, you'll get your increase before we convert you in. You'll get the within-grade increase to Step 3 and then you get converted into NSPS. If you're due in two years for Step 9, well, you'll get one-third of that. If you've completed one-third of your journey to that next step, you'll get the part of it, that's complete before you go into the thing. If you've got a within-grade increase, and you're partially on the way to what would normally be a pay increase, you'll get your pro-rated share of that first, then you'll get converted over. So nobody loses money or loses standing as they convert in.

You must have a good performance period under NSPS before we evaluate you. We're not going to put you in it in December and then do a payout in January based on NSPS, right? You'll get your January '06 pay adjustment. For those of you converting under NSPS by January, you'll get that payout the way you got it every other year of your life in the civil service. Then you won't get a performance payout until you've completed a full performance period.

Protection of the pay pool funding is one of the obligations that we have. We had a major discussion at the senior leadership level. I'm going to be visiting with the Under Secretary of Defense Comptroller to have a nose-to-nose discussion about how we're going to do that. Pay for performance means if you deliver the performance, the pay's got to be there. We understand that as our obligation as an institution, so the pay will be there to meet you and we just have to figure out how you make that happen in a system as complex as DoD's financial management system. Not a trivial challenge, but one we are wrestling with and aware of.

The next steps … We're going to publish the regulations. Training is rolling out now. We've been through a couple of “train the trainer” sessions. The Program Executive Office now moves from being the supported organization where all the components were supporting the PEO, now the PEO transitions into supporting the components because NSPS gets implemented in the components. So the Air Force will implement NSPS and the PEO will support the Air Force, then prepare for the additional spirals.

Even though Gordon England is the Secretary of the Navy and the Acting Deputy Secretary of Defense, he has a couple of other hats to wear. One of them is NSPS Senior Executive. He retains that responsibility. He retains that passion. He retains his deep involvement in NSPS. So this is a cultural change and a transformational change opportunity that continues to have and benefit from energetic involvement by the most senior people in the Department of Defense, as well as some enormously talented professional people like Mary Lacey, like the PEO team that she's put together, and like a good chunk of the Air Force team as represented here by Sharon Seymour and Roger Blanchard.

That's the end of the monologue here. Now let me hear from you about the kind of questions you might have about NSPS.

Q: Will the slides be available on the AFA website?

Secretary Dominguez: Even more important, there's an NSPS web site at www.cpms.osd.mil/nsps/. We put everything out there, so there's lots of information about NSPS on that website, including the February 2005 draft of the regulations.

Q: Noting the diverse age range of federal workers, how does NSPS propose to hire/retain quality junior professionals?

Secretary Dominguez: Our expectation is that NSPS will help us compete for the highest quality young talent in the department. It does that in a number of ways. How many of you have teenagers in here? Okay. So those of you who don't have teenagers, if you think back on your personal experience, when you were a teenager or a recent graduate of teen-dom, you were absolutely confident that you knew everything in the world and you had all the answers. So if you're offered a system that says, “hey, we'll reward you for your performance.” You don't have to sit here and wait for ten years for pay increases. We'll reward you based on your contribution to the organization's mission, your performance against the technical standards in your profession, so it's kind of on you. This is the kind of thing that young people are looking for.

The young people of today are not getting into organizations thinking that they're going to be there for the rest of their lives. So a system like NSPS—as opposed to the standard civil service system, again which is very seniority-based—appeals more to their thinking.

Now the other thing is that your pay in those bands is going to be based on what happens in the marketplace in this career group and there will be a locality variant component of that as well. So you can set competitive pay levels to attract people into the system.

Finally, within NSPS we'll take those hiring authorities that we have where we can hire quickly when we have demonstrated need and we can move. And we'll try to expand those.

Do you want to take some of that, Sharon? Sharon Seymour is the Program Manager for the NSPS implementation in the Air Force.

Ms. Seymour: One of the things that impacts speed and hiring for civil service jobs is some of the requirements that we have to meet in regard to veterans preference and what not. That's still there, and of course it should still be there. So if it comes down to getting Person A versus Person B, there's still that consideration that you've got.

But one of the things that should really expedite hiring is that we don't have to say, “is this a five or a seven or a nine?” It will be in a fairly large entry-level group which gives you some flexibility in pay, so that the first person you offer the job to you have a better chance of getting, versus having to go through 15 people to get someone who actually takes the job. Right now we're also trying to fill a lot of jobs from within the current workforce.

A lot of that work will go away because we won't have to run promotions every time someone moves up. That will be a performance-based action that's done in the pay-pool process and the personnel system doesn't have to intervene, so the resources can be directed at external fills like you're talking about.

Secretary Dominguez: Let me add to that that we are working today within the current system to compress the cycle time. That's a major objective that we have underway at Air Force Personnel Center now. Ron Orr actually was the champion for that, the former Deputy Assistant Secretary, Installations and Environment.

Second is that we also have to recognize that we have the security clearance problem and the urinalysis, drug stuff. We'll work through those. But in many jobs, Lockheed Martin has that, too.

Q: Will supervisors and commanders now have more discretion in moving or removing employees? And what protections would be in place to guard against rater inflation?

Secretary Dominguez: This is one of the most important challenges that we have. First let me say that there is absolutely, positively more commander discretion in changing people's work. So separate geographic moves from that issue.

Today, if I have a person over here who's a GS-12 and they're working on this airplane, and something happens in the war related to my mission and I need that person now working in this GS-14 job on this unmanned air vehicle, that's more of a difficult thing to do in the current civil service system. In fact, it would require us to move a GS-12 to this G-14 slot over here, a competitive hiring action.

Under NSPS, if both of these things were in my organizational responsibility and the mission need now dictated it, I'd take this aerospace engineer from working on that aircraft and stick him on that unmanned air vehicle because the mission changed, the imperative changed, the work changed. Boom, we just go do it.

Absolutely, positively much more flexibility at command to adapt the workforce and shift the workforce into the needs of the mission. Not total unfettered flexibility, just more. You do have pay bands. You can't move a person from one pay band into another, but within a pay band you've got a lot of room to maneuver.

Inflation in the performance evaluation ... The guys actually who've mastered this, who showed us how to do it, are in the acquisition and lab demos. Any of you out there today from the labs or acquisition demos? See, they know how to do all this stuff so they didn't come to this session. But actually there are some people who really worked this out, who figured out how to do it, who developed tools and monitoring mechanisms so that you can evaluate successive levels of performance with review boards, so that you look at these things and say, “hey, Roger's a really, really, really tough grader. Yeah, but Sharon's pretty easy.” But at my level, since they both work for me, I have to harmonize that, I have to balance that stuff out. And there tools that have been developed over the last ten years to help people to do that. It's not going to be perfect, it's going to take a lot of discipline, a lot of working, a lot of checking, and it's going to be critical in our Air Force Instructions for how we do this. We have to build in that capacity for sure. It’s a big challenge.

Q: The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) just lost a lawsuit on their proposed personnel system. How will that or has that affected NSPS?

Secretary Dominguez: The technical facts under which the suit was filed under Homeland Security are different than the law that enabled the Department of Defense to do the National Security Personnel System, so it is not a slam dunk that the injunction from the judge against Homeland Security applies directly to us. It may, it could be. They'll have to take it to court.

That was one of the things also that we were looking at, where we could look at the challenges that were filed in court, look at the federal judge's reaction to those things, and think about them and say, “how can we adapt, what can we do without giving away NSPS, but to address those concerns?” We did those things in this final set of regulations. We tried to learn from the pioneering activity of our sister department, DHS.

In the final analysis, however, for the next several years both for Homeland Security and DoD this will be the full employment period for trial lawyers. Really the way this stuff works out is in court.

Q: If my supervisor causes the organization to perform poorly and therefore impacts my job, how does the employee hold their supervisor to a higher management standard through the system?

Secretary Dominguez: Good question.

Supervisors—actually Senior Executive Service (SES) and flag officers in the United States Air Force—are on performance-based evaluation standards today. Did you guys know that? The SES appraisal system which is now a performance-based system was completely redone over the last year. We looked at that in the Department of the Air Force and said, “you know what? We've been working for a long time here at integrating our executive leadership team. We've been assigning some civilians to what were historically flag officer assignments and some flags to historically SES assignments. We're managing them out of the same office, the Air Force Senior Leader Management Office. Let's use the SES performance appraisal system for flag officer evaluations.” So that's going on right now, today.

So supervisors are also under a performance-based system, and they are obligated to hit their performance goals and if they don't their supervisor, their bosses, are obligated to engage in this coaching dialogue/discussion.

The answer to the question is there isn't an ironclad way that I know of, but we're building a lot of training, a lot of development, a lot of coaching in there. A lot of conversations now will take place that didn't use to take place, including at these Senior Review Boards, so that the management actions of the people here are reviewed by a group of managers at the next higher level to ensure consistency. That's kind of the best we can do.

Q: Will the NSPS system change rules for civil servants who happen to also be Reservists or Air Reserve Technicians?

Secretary Dominguez: Nope. The NSPS will apply to Air Reserve Technicians, absolutely. It won't apply or it won't change fundamentally the status of people in the Air National Guard. Guardsmen are still Guardsmen and they're still working for the Governors and that kind of thing. Those things don't change. The military leave stuff also doesn't change. That's external to NSPS, that's actually in the military. The reserve personnel system is where those rules come from and the civil service adapts to that. That's one of those things NSPS doesn't change, but must accommodate.

Q: There are electronic tools to manage performance used in the workplace today. Will NSPS have an electronic tool that will allow assignment of goals, tasks to goals, and conduct feedback and communication so that we can manage our people efficiently?

Ms. Seymour: Yes, there will be an automated tool. A competition of sorts was held where half a dozen or so tools were looked at, including one that had been developed by the Air Force to support the General Officer and SES performance system that Mr. Dominguez mentioned. The one that was selected is an Oracle tool.

Eventually it will do many things. We are supposed to see it in its preliminary stages in early October I think it is, but that will only be phase one. But eventually, yes, it should do all those things. What we'll have ready for you in January or February, I'm not quite sure yet, but there will be something there.

Q: As a first level supervisor of a Spiral 1.1 organization, when are we going to see the details for pay banding, performance ratings, and career families?

Secretary Dominguez: The final regulations are in the final stages of interagency coordination, which is the final step to get them into the Federal Register. So our hope is that that will be complete in the first week or so of October. Then, shortly thereafter, we should start seeing the first drafts of the DoD directives which will come out, again, with some more of that detail.

Ms. Seymour: The details of what the pay bands look like and the family groups and everything are in the DoD issuances and those are still subject to the continuing collaboration with the unions, but you should be seeing more details within the next 30-60 days.

Secretary Dominguez: The first thing we've got to do is get the thing in the Federal Register and then we will come out with a draft of the DoD Directives, but those then require a collaboration with the union. Again, this never happened before. We didn't have to talk to the unions previously about DoD Directives. Now it's important for us to do that.

So you should see shortly after the publication of these final regulations in the Federal Register the first drafts of these DoD Directives. Then a comment period will begin on that. That's where all these details will start to show up.

Q: Why does the NSPS change the Merit System Protection Board appeal process but leave untouched the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) process, which already is a greater threat to overturn agency decisions than the MSPB? Won't the NSPS simply push more employees to file EEO complaints instead of Merit System Protection Board appeals?

Secretary Dominguez: Maybe. From the old hands, almost certainly. A couple of things, though. One is you should all be aware that the Air Force is piloting a vastly different, vastly simplified, vastly compressed way of dealing with EEO complaints. The Air Force stepped up as one of the pilot agencies for a 2003 law or opportunity the Congress created. So we have an experiment going on right now demonstrating fabulous results in some parts of the Air Force in terms of compressing cycle times and settling things outside of the formal complaint process, the Administrative Law Judges, etc.

Ms. Seymour: The law didn't allow us to make changes in the EEO system, so that's the technical answer.

Secretary Dominguez: We could change the MSPB and make it focused on the mission, but we weren't enabled by the statute to go into the equal opportunity laws. Besides that, I don't know that we had a compelling need to do so. As I've said, we've already got an initially successful transformational change opportunity going on right now in the EEO business.

Q: Another question about supervisors and managers ... How will the NSPS performance expectations be consistently applied and managed with a high rate of turnover of both military supervisors and managers?

Secretary Dominguez: It's one of the challenges that we're going to face. There are a couple of thoughts. Number one, NSPS is fundamentally about organizational performance and transforming the culture of the organization—the United States Air Force and DoD—into organizations obsessed with and passionately committed to results. This means you have to specify organizational objectives and align people's performance plans up with organizational objectives.

If the commands are clear about what matters to them and what they're trying to achieve; if the commands and commanders are obsessive about ensuring performance feedback is happening, coaching is happening, mentoring is happening, then you should be able to deal with the transitions in leadership that we have in our organization.

In addition that, you do have some stability created by the senior civilians. Every commander out there in every organization finds some member of the civil service who knows the business, who is a pro, who can help guide them and those people, the civilians, bring a measure of continuity. While we do churn civilians in the Air Force, we don't do it at the same rate as we do with the military. So there's that structure that we'll have to help us.

We also have the NSPS program office, the connections through that system, from your Departure Procedures all the way through the Major Commands and down to the wings. There are people there to help in these leadership transitions.

Q: From a strategic perspective, what was broke that requires this transformational change?

Secretary Dominguez: What was broke? Again, the first thing is I don't believe any reasonable observer could look at the Department of Defense at-large and the civil service system within the department specifically and say that it was a system that was results-driven and performance-obsessed. It's about outcomes. It's about achievement of organizational mission. It's about individual performance that drives mission success at the organizational level. That wasn't how we were aligned. So that was fundamentally broke.

If you look outside of the Department of Defense and the civil service and you talk to our Air Force Association brethren, in the last 20 years that's happened in the private sector. They are not about longevity. They're about success, about results, about rewarding people based on results. Alignment of the workforce around organizational success and organizational achievement, and individual achievement aligned with organizational achievement. They are a results and performance-driven culture and they've become that way in the last 20 years. We have not. So that was fundamentally broke.

Second, what was fundamentally broke was lack of agility inside the system. Agility. We have now an enemy who can attack us at any time. They can attack us at home, they can present unique challenges to us that we didn't plan for because they're different than the enemy we built ourselves to fight, and we need agility. So the work we need to do may change in a nano-second and I need a workforce that can do that.

We have a lot of that already in the military, but we needed the civilian workforce to be able to move that fast as well, driven by the national security imperative.

We had great civilians who would drop what they were doing and go make something happen, but that was in spite of the system and not enabled by the system. So it took enormous effort for people to rise up and make it happen as opposed to having a system that enables it to happen, so you don't dissipate all that energy and creativity and can focus on achieving results.

I guess the third thing is that in case you can't tell from my gray hair and Roger's gray hair and Jake Henry's gray hair, a large number of us in the civil service are seasoned and mature. We are concerned deeply about that next generation of talented persons who could be attracted to serve the nation for some period of their career, but didn't want to do it in uniform. We had to position ourselves to be attractive to those people, to bring in youth and energy and vigor in a new generation of public servants. We had to build something that they would find compelling and exciting and interesting and want to be a part of.

So those are three things just off the top of my head I think were broke here.

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