Admiral John M. Richardson, Chief of Naval Operations MCPON Russell L. Smith NSF Panama City - All Hands Call 12 December 2018

Transcription

1 Admiral John M. Richardson, Chief of Naval Operations MCPON Russell L. Smith NSF Panama City - All Hands Call 12 December 2018 Admiral Richardson: How s everybody doing? Hooyah. Can everybody gather in please? You probably don t want to get in the shade, but whatever you do, please don t sit in these chairs. [Laughter]. Sit in all the chairs. If you can, please sit down. I d just like, I don t want a moat between us here. The first thing we re going to do is to reenlist these sailors. It s a very meaningful thing that we re going to do here. First of all, they re going go to commit themselves to a few more years of service. And we re all going to get a chance to hear them renew their oath of office. And if you think about our lives, we do not take too many oaths. We hear about this, we renew this oath to support and defend the constitution of the United States. How many of you are married? You can raise your hand up. You ve made an oath, right, to your spouse, to support each other in good times and bad, richer and poorer, and if you ve been around the Navy for a little while we give you plenty of all of that, right? And then many of us take an oath, some form of oath to our faith. Right? A baptismal or something along those lines. Beyond that, it s really kind of hard to think about another oath that we ve taken. And yet it s also hard to think about any major decision, any major action that we ve taken in our lives that has not been shaped by our commitment to one of these oaths. Right? How many things have you done to show your commitment to your spouse? How many things have you done because you are a person of faith and you ve made a commitment to your faith? How many things have you done because of your commitment to support and defend the constitution? Including getting on a ship or deploying somewhere far away from your family. And you know also that by virtue of all these sort of working together -- your spouse and your family is serving the country as much as you are. Right? So these are very powerful things and it s worthy to come together as a team every now and then and just listen to the words of the oath and think about what it means. Okay? 1

2 I ve got to tell you, because they re so meaningful, although I ve done this hundreds of times, I always have a safety net here because you can kind of get overcome with the emotion of the event. So If I have to go to my safety net I d ask you all to just be tolerant of that, okay? All right, raise your right hand and repeat after me. And if you can all come to attention. I -- state your full name -- do solemnly swear to support and defend the constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic. To bear true faith and allegiance to the same, to obey orders of the President of the United States, and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulation and the uniform code of military justice, so help me God. Most of these folks are six-year reenlistees, so that s a big commitment, a bit chunk of their life. We ve got some coins for these folks and certificates. [Pause]. All right. I want to thank Skipper here, too, for setting this up and for the weather and the stage and the whole deal. It s a real privilege for MCPON and I to be with you. Come on up, MCPON. What I want to do here is just say a couple of words and then we want to have a conversation with you. We re most interested in hearing what s on your mind, answering your questions. We ve got some microphones up front. If you d rather not go to a mike, just sing your question out and I ll repeat it for the crowd. But let me just say that we landed at 10. We drove out through kind of the old part of town and came on base here, and had a chance to drive around the base some, see the housing, see the facilities, the buildings here, and just sort of get a sense for what is going on in the wake of Hurricane Michael. And what you really get a sense of is how tremendously powerful that storm was. Just a tremendous amount of energy in that storm. And it came up in a matter of no time. Right? It s not like we tracked this thing all the way across the Atlantic. It was really 72 hour s notice you got, during a holiday weekend, and from everything that I can tell, the team here on base worked -- 2

3 all of you, really got through that in about as good a shape as was possible. You really should feel good about how you dealt with that challenge. And if you think about, we throw a lot of words around like great power competition and peer competition. It s really about being ready for big challenges. This was a measure of your readiness with this big challenge. And you re about back up to full operational capability here on base. But I m also very mindful that many of your homes, schools and a number of things that sort of make your life whole are still coming together. So we want to be sensitive and mindful to that. But we in the Navy have been talking a lot about toughness lately, and I ll tell you what, looking out at this team and looking at everything you ve done to come back from this storm, that s the embodiment of toughness right there. You did not let this thing take you down. You are back and on the job again. When you think about that in the context of these reenlistments that we just did, this recommitment to taking on more of these challenges in the future, things that are thrown onto us. Manmade and not manmade. It s a really meaningful moment for me to come down here. I can t thank you enough for just hosting us here. That s really what I wanted to say. I wanted to say as CNO and as MCPON, one of the best things we get to do is come out and spend time with you and we wake up every single day and we think about what we can do to just help you meet your potential. We just want to remove obstacles and put a jet propulsion unit on you as an individual and as a team to do the absolute most that you can do to protect our country from attack, to promote our interests around the world, to enhance our prosperity as a nation, and so that has a tremendous amount of nobility to it. We ve got a tremendous amount of respect for that. So that s what we do. We wake up every day, we come and help, do our very best to help you do your jobs, and at the end of the day we kind of circle back and make sure we re true to that aim. Then we come out here to make sure that we re not missing something. That s really about all I have to say. Just an expression of the tremendous amount of respect I ve got for everything that you do, the whole Navy team. Our sailors, our civilians and our families have all really pulled together as a Navy, and 3

4 especially here in the Panama City area. You guys have pulled together as a community to get yourself through this real tough challenge. I ll stop there. MCPON, do you want to say anything? MCPON Smith: Sir, I d just add one thing. Probably the most inspiring thing that I heard this morning in talking to the CMCs and then at a Chief s Call was the way the community kind of came together in supporting each other. And that s really what it s about. It s about teams and the way people sort of came together to help each other in that time of need, neighbor helping neighbor, civilian helping military and vice versa, and not drawing lines where we sometimes do draw those lines. But reaching across and helping each other come as one big team helping each other. I think the CNO said it better than I could, but frankly, that s what it s about and that s why you guys were so successful in getting that initial operational capability back up on line so quickly. So great job to all of you, and it s nice to see that when we re tested, that s the reaction we get. So thank you to you, and to what you did to get that started. Adm. Richardson: Great. Question and answer time. Who s got the first question? Question: My name is RP3 Simmons. I work in the Chaplain s Office. My question for you today is, in reference to hurricane recovery, what does the Navy plan to do to better help our sailors financially in the future? Adm. Richardson: That s a great question. The rules of engagement are kind of like this. We ll listen to the question. If it s an easy question, I will answer it. And if it s a hard question, MCPON will answer it. Okay? That s kind of how we do this. With respect to yours, I think what we re talking about is sort of BAH adjustments and rental prices and those sorts of things and other financial aid. I will tell you, I ll ask the Skipper maybe to add on because he s most familiar with the local situation. But there s been a 4

5 number of teams that have come down here to survey the area. We ve made sort of an initial adjustment in terms of being able to, if your rent has gone up or you ve been dislocated and you re having to relocate in a different place, there s some flexibility there. I know there s a number of associations that can help out as well. So the combination of increasing funds for housing and subsistence and then these other funds, Navy and Marine Corps Relief Society and other things. There s a lot of opportunity for relief. So please be aware of all of that. That s why these organizations exist is to help out in time of need, and there s been a tremendous outlay for Hurricane Michael. There s been a tremendous outlay for the fires in California which were right on the heels of the hurricane. So that s why these teams exist is to help out sailors in need. Skipper, anything to add to that? Okay. MCPON Smith: BAH is going to persist at 130 percent. As we all know, unfortunately in our capitalist society, what little occupancy is out there is driving up, right? So the price of what little you can find has gone way up. So I believe what they re doing right now is another survey, an emergency survey to get a much higher number, because 130 percent of a much higher number is a much better number for you. So I think they re going to be done with that probably very shortly, within a couple of weeks. So that number will come on-line to help you get right, at least with BAH, that s a start. The Navy-Marine Corps Relief Society is a great place to seek help as well, like the CNO said. And there are some other organizations that exist out there. USAA and, I don t want to stump for any particular company, but there are lots of other philanthropic organizations that can provide aid as well. Skipper: The only thing I d add is we continue to use the family support, we have our Family Assistance Center. We did that as an emergency right after the storm, but we continue to have that open and that resource available for everybody on the base, to continue to know what the case management load is for you. If it s a new one that has arisen in the past 60 days since the storm that you didn t know about originally, this is 5

6 your opportunity, we re still open there. We still want to capture what those needs are so we can help you. Some are financial, some are counseling, some is housing. We re there for that piece as well. Adm. Richardson: I ll tell you one of the cool things was driving through housing, I mean the storm, you can definitely see the effects. But you can also see just how tough everybody is. So there s a lot of Christmas decorations out in the yard, there s a lot of lights and reindeer and snowmen -- that s a bold move down here this far south. But it s just sort of a statement. Hey, this is not going to define us. Right? We re going to spring back from this and we re going to get back to a normal life, and all of these other measures will help. So that s a great question. But I m tracking this BAH survey personally. The Skipper s going to keep me honest here. What else? Question: With the loss of Vice Admiral Stearney to suicide, will the loss impact the way the Navy approaches suicide awareness training in the future? Adm. Richardson: I ll tell you what. We ve been talking a lot about that. While Vice Admiral Stearney is a tragic loss, as all of them are, and I will tell you that every sailor we lose, that s a tragedy too. But when you have a very public one like Admiral Stearney, it kind of makes you think. There s probably, I will tell you, we put a tremendous amount of effort on this. My sense is that the most effective thing that we can do is, and it goes on what MCPON talked about. There s not going to be any kind of, I don t think, meaningful relief that comes from the top down. Right? We all recognize that this is just a terrible tragedy. But it s going to be peer-topeer support that is going to make a difference. So what I would ask you all to do is really just be very good team mates, which means to be aware, maybe even sensitive to what your team mates are going through. All of the policies and everything else that I could put in place, there would be no substitution for your personal contact with your team mate that would allow you to understand when 6

7 they re maybe going through a tough time, when they re acting maybe a little bit different. And there are a lot of success stories where a ship mate just sort of says hey, you know, what, I just wanted to come back and knock on your door because it didn t seem like you were all together. Something was troubling you. And that was the thing that made the difference. Okay? So this is a very, very human thing that we ve got to get after. It s not going to be solved with Facebook, it s not going to be solved with Twitter or any other technology. It s not going to be solved by a policy. This is going to be solved by us coming together as people and being mindful that every one of us, every one of us, is struggling through something, right? Everybody has something that they re struggling with. So let s be mindful of that. We have our own struggles, and get help with those. But be mindful that everybody that we re teaming with, that we run into, they ve all got struggles and let s be sensitive to that and help each other through this. I will tell you that there are some times that are more susceptible than others, sort of more vulnerable. Holidays are some of those times. So we re coming into a holiday season. For many of us who are with our families, holidays are going to be very festive times. For many others who might be separated, holidays are a challenge. So let s be sensitive to that. If you are in between assignments, you might be in between teams. You ve PCS d somewhere, you re in the middle of that. You ve left one team and you haven t joined the other. That can be a vulnerable time because you re a little bit on your own. So be mindful of all of those things. MCPON s done a tremendous amount of thinking here, I ll ask him to pile on as well. MCPON Smith: I have had moments over 30 years in my career where I have had points where I ve struggled, and I have used our service s clergy, mental health services, and I ve maintained my security clearance. I ve maintained my job status. I worked for a Marine, Brigadier General [Mizuski] who used to say it s okay not to be okay. It s not okay not to ask for help. And you have to recognize in your team mate as well as yourself when that moment hits you and you need to ask for help, or when you need to look at your ship mate, your team mate and say hey man, let s talk to somebody about this. 7

8 Sometimes the role you can play is a friend. Sometimes the role you can play is the ear. Sometimes the role you need to play is this is beyond me as a friend, I need to steer you to somebody that can help you with what you re carrying. But recognizing that moment and recognizing it for what it is, that s the hard part. That s the thing where we can make the most [money], that s where we can help the most in a team situation and get that person in front of somebody who can help them with that burden, and that s where we can really make the most difference. Adm. Richardson: How many people just getting through this hurricane recovery have had to reach out and get some help from someone? If you re not raising your hand, I think you re foolish. Everybody needed help, right? I mean you came together as a community to do this. And how many provided help? All right. Okay. And it felt pretty good on both ends. It certainly feels good to provide help. But I ll tell you what, it s a really good feeling to get help too, to realize that people are willing to provide help. Right? So this makes us tough. This makes us a better, more resilient, tougher team. This is what top-performing teams do. So we need to do that as well. Question: What is the time line for the new Navy evaluation system? Adm. Richardson: We talked a lot about that during the day. Very, very soon. We are going to roll it out and we re going to give it a nice long trial period. So it s going to roll out and be used as kind of a counseling period. I think you re all going to really be psyched about this evaluation system for a number of reasons. One, the target audience for this evaluation system is the sailor being evaluated. It is not a promotion board or a screening board. This evaluation s going to talk to you if you re the one being evaluated to help you become a better officer, a better sailor so we can get better at our jobs. We ll just have that great conversation and it will be about feedback in terms of how we can all get better. So that s one thing. The second thing is that we re going to do away with forced ranking. This new evaluation system doesn t have that built in. We did that because this forced ranking system, particularly with small teams, particularly with high-performing teams, where 8

9 everybody is really good, was creating kind of unhealthy competition between ship mates. We were doing crazy things to try and compete with one another. All kinds of collateral damage, et cetera, instead of just really concentrating on our warfighting responsibilities. The third thing that we want to do with this new system is we want to emphasis character a little bit more. Particularly as you get into leadership positions, I want to have a better sense that we are picking people to stand in front of our teams and lead our teams that are not only competent and expert at what they do, but are also people of good character, people that we would be proud to put in front of our sons and daughters and have them assessed and evaluated in terms of their character and integrity as well. So these are the things that comprise this new evaluation system. It s a lot faster. If you re taking more than 15 minutes to do an eval with the new system you re really, I don t even think you can because there s some time hacks in it. Right? It also allows you flexibility. So Lieutenant, if you want to get a sense, what do you do? What s your job? Adm. Richardson: So you lead a 27-person team. Let s say that you just want to get a sense for what they think of you, your leadership. Right? You want an evaluation from your team. How am I doing as the Port Operations Officer? You can put that together and all of your team will be able to fill out an eval on you and it will only go to you. It will just be for your benefit. It won t go to the bureau or anything like that. It allows you to get that feedback right from your team. You can say oh, here s what I m doing pretty well, here s what I might want to change. So it s a much more flexible system that will allow us to use our evaluation system to learn and get better a lot faster. Okay? So it should roll out any time. Many of you might have already had a trial run at this because it s been out in different pilot programs, but we re going to roll it out in big, big numbers real soon, give it a six-month trial period where you can use it as a counseling tool and become familiar with it. We will get better with the eval system if you give us some feedback. If you ve got comments you want to make. Then we ll roll it out as an official evaluation system within the next year. Okay? Great question. 9

10 Question: From your perspective, because I know both of you have seen situations similar to this in your history, what do you see as the biggest opportunity that our command can seize upon as we continue to recover from this? Adm. Richardson: This is a version of the question, in every challenge there is opportunity, right? MCPON, do you want to share some of your thoughts on that? MCPON Smith: It depends on how big the CNO s budget is. We need to kind of shuffle the deck and start over. You can do a lot of things perhaps more efficiently; you can lay things out in a better way. It gives you a chance to one, reevaluate your priorities. It gives you a chance to reevaluate where you re going to put things. Sometimes you can relocate stuff. Sometimes you can decide to stop doing some things that maybe got broken. Sometimes you can just decide to close a place. And I m glad they re not going to close this place. But I also remember Mount Pinatubo when it exploded in the Philippines and we just decided to go ahead and let go of that. You re right in anything that happens like this there s an opportunity to rethink what we do, and I don t know, obviously the boss it the guy that s going to have the master plan. Adm. Richardson: No, I m not. Your local team is going to have the master plan. And they re going to bring that plan to me and we ll fund it or listen to it. [Laughter]. But I ll tell you what, some of the opportunities, right? In fact one of them was discussed, and I might ask, I forget exactly who was briefing it, but I think it was Captain Peterson was saying hey, a lot of buildings got damaged. And there is this proposal, for instance, to say let s take 20 buildings that are between 30 and 60 years old and were further damaged by the storm, and let s just say it s over for those 20 buildings, and we ll build three new world-class buildings for people who want to come and work for you in technical areas. I ll tell you what, that plan, all of the glass for those new buildings and everything, that plan pays for itself on the order of ten years because it s so much cheaper to take care of three new buildings that are Cat 5 hurricane rated than it is to try and keep up 20 super old buildings that are not. Okay? So these are the sorts of opportunities that I think we have to seize on and those sorts of, that type of a plan, I think that 10

11 sells itself almost. Right? It just makes sense to do those sorts of things. So as you think about that, it s a bit of, it s kind of a clean slate in some ways. So let s let our imagination work a little bit here and see if we can t, just as you said ma am, take advantage of what we ve got here and rebuild something that is future [branded] rather than trying to reconstruct the past. Great question. I like the optimism in your question. Ma am, have you got a question? Question: Maybe not as much of a question as an observation. My name is Linda Hawthorne, I m a contract specialist. Oftentimes we are somehow not considered technical and as I heard you mention older buildings, we are in an older building, housed in an older building. So as we tear down, or if we decide to tear down older buildings, please do not forget the operations and administrative technical people as we emphasize the science and -- Adm. Richardson: You re absolutely right. Question: -- engineering, technical. Oftentimes we feel that, sometimes we re kind of forgotten and -- Adm. Richardson: Oh now, come on. Question: -- not prioritized. Until it s time to award the contract. Adm. Richardson: Exactly. Right? Let me tell you, you re a contract specialist, right? It s all about the contract. And we ve got, let s just give all of our contract specialists a round of applause because nothing happens without good contracts. Question: Yes, sir. And I also want to give the same kudos to our comptrollers, our legal department, our HR. All of the support activities that do a lot -- Adm. Richardson: Absolutely. Question: We just sometimes feel like we re not necessarily remembered as the buildings get knocked down. 11

12 Adm. Richardson: All right. A very, very valid point. Thank you for making it. I will tell you, one of the things that I, I ll just share with you. As I ve kind of become more into the financial aspect of our business and what we get for our money, the thing that we get for the money is exactly what the contract says we should get. So a well-written contract, we get tremendous value and a great return on that investment. A badly written contract, we get not so much. Right? So it s all about the contract. And of course everybody else that you mentioned, the comptrollers who watch our financial execution; the lawyers who keep us all between the hash marks legally; it s the whole team. So thanks very much for making that clear. Okay. Question: What s the future of MCMs? Adm. Richardson: That s a bold question. [Laughter]. Our current mine countermeasure ships are well past their design life, right? We have got to, and to the point about technology, there is a tremendous amount of new technology that s out there in unmanned vehicles and a number of things that will allow us to do this mission with a lot more reliability than we currently have because the ships are very old. And oh by the way, they re made of wood. Right? So they age. They re aging. And so our vision is that with respect to mine countermeasures, we would create this expeditionary capability and you would have these teams that would have deployable capability, a combination of unmanned vehicles, both surface and submerged; and then we ll get into clearance operations and all those sorts of things. We ll be able to search out an area on the sea floor, detect mines automatically. We ll use artificial intelligence to find the mine-like objects. If you re going to design this thing, if you have the choice between doing this by putting a man in the minefield or not, I m all about not putting a person in the minefield. It s a risk we don t need to take now that the technology s this good. The automatic unmanned detection schemes are operating just as well as manual detection, and they do it about a thousand times faster. So it allows us to get after this business in a much more quick way. 12

13 So that s sort of our future. And these teams would have to, and their gear, would be able to deploy and go on any vessel of opportunity that can power them up and host them. So our ships, merchant ships, USNS ships, allied ships, it s a big team sport and this deployable capability allows us to do it with a lot more flexibility. Okay? Question: I was wondering, have you ever read a book called No Higher Honor, saving the Samuel B. Roberts in the Persian Gulf? Adm. Richardson: I have read parts of that book. Question: Okay. I just wanted to mention that 20 years later, the captain of the ship still teared up when he talked about hearing back from his command telling him that you can t send any ships to help your very badly damaged ship because you re in the middle of a minefield and, well anyway, I just wanted to, our mission is to try and prevent that, but when we talk about automated mine clearing systems, automated systems to go help somebody who s unfortunate enough to find a mine spot the hard way. Adm. Richardson: Okay. We ll take a comprehensive approach to it. Question: Good afternoon, sir. I m feeling blessed today. I got to be motivated by your comments at the first NAVSEA leadership diversity event last November. And today I get to see you at a second event, ongoing as we speak. I was thanking leadership diversity, and several of the comments today to me all go back into inclusion and shining a light on that. Thank you. Adm. Richardson: Thanks. Now there is this big inclusion and diversity event going on. I was going to speak at that yesterday, and the Secretary of Defense had a better use of my time so I had to give my inclusion and diversity advisor the opportunity to speak and she did a terrific job. But I ll tell you what, just look around. Look to your left and right right now. You ll see America in our Navy, and there s a lot of diversity here. It only matters if we bring it all to bear in our planning and in our execution, in all of our thinking. I ll tell you, we re way past kind of a feel-good stage about this. We re working with some world-class decision scientists 13

14 who can scientifically prove that diverse teams make better operational decisions. Okay? So we are better warfighters if we get a diversity of opinions and points of view because we re less likely to miss something. Every one of us individually, we re all kind of brought up a certain way. Right? I was brought up my family, we kind of had a way of doing business. I grew up in the Navy in the submarine community, we have a way of doing business. Okay, there s that way of doing business. But there are a lot of other ways of doing business as well. If we get that team, the data the science shows that they all perform, homogeneous teams. So I look around this crowd and I feel really great because I see a tremendous amount of diversity. One thing, you talk about opportunities that arise from crises, I ll tell you, adversity brings us together in teams that might not have formed otherwise. We were driving through the neighborhoods and Captain [Seger] was saying hey, there s neighbors that are seeing each other and meeting each other and coming together to help each other that probably wouldn t have happened if we hadn t had this storm come up and impose this challenge on them. So I m super encouraged. Thanks for bringing that up. Question: I was just wondering if there was a time line for the elimination of the Navy advancement exam system? Adm. Richardson: I m going to give this one to MCPON. MCPON Smith: We re not going to eliminate these either. We eliminated, as you may remember, or I hope you know, that the 24 auto advance range no longer have an exam to E4. We talked about it, CNP originally talked about it when he came into his position, thinking maybe we could get there. We ve taken a long look at that. The Army kind of went that route and they found a lot of problems with cronyism and little black books and hookups and not a lot of good stuff. So we would like to not go that route. What we have done is we ve expanded slowly [MAP] which has now reached 15 percent and we re now looking at 20 percent as a target. 14

15 We believe in states rights. We think that nobody has a better idea of who the best performers are than the command teams and putting that power -- Adm. Richardson: Has any been meritoriously advanced in this team? Some hands going up. That s good. MCPON Smith: So putting that power in the hands of the command teams to tell us who the best performers are and advance them is the right thing to do with the right percentages. And right now we ve confidently done that at 15 percent and we ve graded the homework and it s come back awesome. So we re going to continue to kind of nudge that envelope to the right, and we re hoping to get to 20 next successfully, with the target hopefully being 25 percent. We are looking at getting to a point where you re taking a rating exam that is more carefully geared towards what you do rather than just the broad set of NECs that maybe your entire rating covers. Any [corpsmen] here? With 40 NECs that the corpsman rating covers, rather than just a small family of NECs that a career path covers. I d rather just test you on the things, the four or five, that cover your career path, that you re probably not going to stray out of, rather than the other 36 that you re never going to see. If you re never going to be an x-ray tech why do I want to ask you about that if you re a phlebotomist? So that s where we re headed. We ve got some challenges as we work through with IT and things, and CNP is working that harder than anyone in history. So we ll get there. Not in the Jetson s feature, you know, months, we re getting there but it s not here yet. Adm. Richardson: We ll take one more question. Question: Me and my fellow sailors love reenlistment bonuses. I think we re all thinking just how long you think those will be available? Adm. Richardson: I ll tell you what, I ll start trying to give you some philosophy and then I ll give MCPON the hard part. As you can probably understand, these reenlistment bonuses are just really incentive and shaping tools that we use to 15

16 incentivize people in rates where we are having trouble making our requirement to reenlist. That s exactly why they exist. To the point of MCPON, that MCPON just made in terms of hey, we re really now getting down to the point where we can tailor an incentive package, a career package to the individual. Right? We re doing, one of the, maybe the most important thing that the Chief of Naval Personnel is doing is upgrading our personnel system to 21 st century IT. Right now we have about 57 families of databases, none of which talk to each other. All of that is being imported into a very secure data environment that will allow us to understand what you value in terms of your career. Okay? So some of you may want to go and just run to the sound of gunfire, operational the whole way. I ve got lots of those. Some of you may want to say, you know what? I love all that but I also want to maybe stabilize for a little while while my kids go through school. We can do that. Some of you want to go get an education. Right? And this applies across the whole Navy. We ve got opportunities for education. We ve got -- my point is, we want to understand what every person values and then we ll tailor a package as best we can to say hey look, we ve got to do our mission as the Navy, but we can do that and we can give you this [off], right? Some of that might include a reenlistment bonus as some part of that, but what we re really getting after is almost a personally tailored package for you that allows you to execute your part of the mission in the Navy while having in common a tailored compensation package that addresses your priorities as best as we can. Okay? So reenlistment bonuses may be part of that. There may be, hey, if you want to stay down here in beautiful Panama City, okay. How much do you want to pay for that, right? So there s all sorts of these cool conversations that can emerge to really allow you to have a lot more say over what, your service in the Navy. So that s, I think, the overall direction., MCPON Smith: That s a far more broadly educational answer, but to the point of [bosun mate] and the -- 16

17 MCPON Smith: Yes, sir. Absolutely. But we re seeing numbers who are boatswain mates, and I know it s an awesome rate, and unfortunately, in an awesome rate where everybody wants to stay and be bosun mates, as you said, behaviors are what we use money as a tool and SRVs as a tool to drive those behaviors. I don t have to convince anybody to be a bosun mate because it s so awesome. So you re probably not going to get as big a bonus. But it s where I have to retain a skill set. So how can I get a bigger SRV? Convince others to leave. [Laughter]. That s not what we want you to do. Adm. Richardson: No, that s not the behavior we re after at all. [Laughter]. MCPON, turn your mike off. MCPON Smith: We need everybody on the team, and frankly, you ve got a rate that s one of the oldest in the Navy and it s one of the best, and frankly, because you want to stay and you love what we do, it s good that you don t. But there are other ways that you re going to find that compensation like you spoke to in location, the type of duty you can do as a bosun mate. There are subsets of the BM rating that you can pursue for a bonus. Adm. Richardson: The other thing, you ve heard of rating modernization. So it will allow you a little bit more flexibility as well, to become an expert and qualify in another sort of adjacent rate. You know, a rate that does a lot of the same type of things that you do as a bosun mate. So if you ve been down in forward ops doing something that, or watching somebody that says yeah, it would be kind of cool to do that as well. It s something that we can take advantage of. A lot of your education as a sailor and as a bosun mate, and just give you a little bit more to qualify you in that rate. Then you can compete, be advanced, be transferred in that rate as well. So you ll have multiple portfolios, if you will, that will allow you to even have more choices. I ll tell you what, I win as well because I have more places that I can send you. So it s a win/win situation. # # # 17