Todd Jacobson
NS&D Monitor
4/11/2015
The Congressionally appointed advisory panel on National Nuclear Security Administration governance won’t wrap up its final report until later this summer, but the chairmen of the panel told the Senate Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee this week they will have the "essence of the report" completed by Memorial Day. The panel’s recommendations are likely to come too late to be incorporated into the Fiscal Year 2015 Defense Authorization Act markups by the panel, or their House counterparts, but after reiterating their view that the semi-autonomous NNSA experiment had "failed," the chairmen offered hints yesterday of the direction their report may take. Former Lockheed Martin CEO Norm Augustine, who co-chairs the panel with former Strategic Command chief Richard Mies, said the recommendations will come in two categories. "One will be organizational, do we have the right organization, and it certainly appears that we don’t," he said. "It’s not clear what is the right organization. There are no silver bullets here."
The second group of recommendations will deal with cultural issues that pervade the NNSA, Augustine said. "Much of it is Management 101," Augustine said. "If I had to summarize one word of something that’s lacking, the word would be ‘accountability.’ And we have to get accountability into this system, and we’re going to make a number of recommendations in that regard." Mies said the issue was not simply isolated to NNSA, nor is there a quick fix for the problems. "The creation of NNSA was … moving the boxes around," he said. "It really didn’t address the cultural issues which, from my perspective, are DOE-wide, not just isolated to NNSA. And so there’s a real need to attack a number of the cultural issues, and you’re not going to do that in a short period of time. It will take a long time to make the changes you need."
Panel: Stability, Leadership Major Parts of Problem
During previous testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, Augustine and Mies were scathing in their criticism of NNSA, noting that its governance model is "fundamentally flawed" and that the agency is on a "trajectory toward crisis unless strong leadership arrests the current course and reorients its governance to better focus on mission priorities and deliverables." Their message this week was similar this week as they ticked off a litany of issues facing the NNSA. "Stability and continuity of leadership is a key element of it," Mies said. "Clearly defined roles, responsibilities, authority and accountability is another key element of having a well-understood, well-defined chain of command to make an organization responsive. I think career development programs with rotational assignments are presently weak within the Department of Energy and NNSA specifically, and there’s a need to have stronger career development to develop greater technical competence, to give people who are in the headquarters more field experience and vice versa, so there’s an appreciation on both sides."
Mies also emphasized that an overhaul was needed in project management. "Project management expertise has been weak and inconsistent," he said. "You’ve had examples of very deficient cost estimating processes. I would comment that the issue has not been cost growth, in many cases, of these projects, as it has been poor cost estimating up front, which came in with very unrealistic estimates of the cost of some of these facilities and the life extension programs. And that created unreasonable expectations." The project management issues have sapped the agency’s credibility, he noted. "Working on the cultural issues and trying to restore a sense of credibility and regain the trust that has been lost over a period of time, I think, is really critical to the success of the organization," he said.
‘One Day it May Not Work’
Augustine also noted that the NNSA was also facing significant issues because of the nature of its work, which is no longer at the cutting edge of technology. "The leading edge of technology is certainly not within the Department of Defense, and the nuclear deterrent has certainly not been the highest-priority issue among our nation’s leadership," he said. That has had an effect where the nuclear deterrent has been taken for granted, he said. "One day it may not work if we don’t pay attention to it, of course," he said. "We visited so many of these laboratories, and some of the buildings go back to World War II, and if you’re a young scientist, and you go to work in a place where there are buildings around from World War II, where you’re not sure if you’re going to be put on furlough, you can’t attend scientific meetings—that’s not an attractive place to work, and that should be a real concern of ours."