Remarks to the Assistant Directors, Line Officer Team, and Regional Fire Directors
3 November 2008
Tucson, AZ NAFRI

On 02 November 2004, when we were in San Diego, two notable events occurred, both of which were met with some alarm by this group. First, Jerry Williams stood and announced his retirement, and second, Jerry announced I would be the next National Fire Director for the USFS. I remember the event well.

It is now 4 years and a day removed from that event. Perhaps I am halfway through my hopeful tenure as your National Fire Director, and these opening remarks today are a time for reflection and consideration for me.

I’m pleased to welcome the Regional Fire Directors, the Line Officer Team, and our Deputy and Associate Deputy Chief to this meeting. Tomorrow, Regional Forester Corbin Newman will be with us. Wednesday the Chief is going to call and talk to the LOT. You deserve, and attract, much attention.

Before more philosophy, let me make some recognition –

We’ll have a good week here; we must have a good week here. The investment is too great not to have significant return. The week is filled with meetings, work groups, reports, time to interact, and time to produce. Many good ideas will be distributed among us this week. I’m pleased we could come to NAFRI and utilize this wonderful facility. I hope what you see here is the incipient stage of a “Fire Management University”. I want to thank Merrie Johnson and her staff for hosting us. Tomorrow, we’ll have a great opportunity at lunch to meet the staff.

I’d like to talk a little to begin this, but then I’d like us to interact. I hope you have some questions for me after I conclude these remarks. I like the interchange better than the lecture.

I always feel the weight of responsibility as I try to kick off these meetings. These opening remarks are intended to set the tone for the meeting.

I’ve now been in DC for 7 years. There are pluses and minuses to that tenure. This will end up being my longest tour of duty in any one place in my career. I’ve been your National Deputy Director for 3 years and your National Director for 4 years. The time has been a time of learning for me. I’ve learned enough to feel confident, and I’m prepared to do well in the second half of my tenure, especially as we get ready for a new Chief Executive.

I have learned some new things and reaffirmed others. Of course, none of us can do our work alone. No one working alone can have the best or brightest ideas. I have the benefit of working with some very good folks, you included. The folks who endure the HQ experience back in DC deserve your thanks. I’ve learned that change comes slowly in a large bureaucracy like the USFS. That is good for some initiatives and bad for others. I had hoped the self-evident benefits of doctrine would sweep like a wave across the agency. No such luck. Don’t think that we are such a shining example of adaptability because I’ve learned that inside fire and aviation management (FAM) we also have our own waves of resisting change. Our decentralized organization has strengths, but coherent, quick, change is not one of them. I know that fire is only one, and sometimes a small “one” of the major issues the Chief has to deal with. I know that “line” (taken as a whole) is a little skeptical of FAM for a variety of reasons, one of those being the strength of the alignment we sometimes show on issues. I know our federal and non-federal partners are also a little skeptical of us, and that recently some of the trust we had with them has been eroded as we try to change. I know we see ourselves differently, sometimes quite differently, from those around us. I know that those in the emergency management community and in the forestry community both want to know who we love the best. I understand that people not only want to know who we love the best, but they want our opinions and answers in ways they can understand.

I’ve learned that in many places across our nation and across the world, we’ve built a base of extraordinary trust and goodwill because of our performance. I’ve learned that while we are noted for our results, the cost of those results, especially in large fire performance, is putting extraordinary stress on the constrained budget of US Forest Service. I know that tens of millions of acres of increasingly flammable wildlands, encumbered by development and tens of millions of homes, along with the climate change patterns (hotter and drier) is making a boiling cauldron of witches’ brew. But in juxtaposition to that witches’ brew, I’m more assured than ever that good ideas make a difference, and that good people, who we have many of, are key to any success we might have. Good ideas and good people will allow us to find adaptive solutions.

I mentioned how cognizant I have been, and am, of the fiscal tension in our agency. We’ve spent significant time as a group dealing with those tensions. It is perhaps the most obvious and most immediate, of the internal challenges I see ahead. Given the existing budget “rules”, FAM is in the process of a hostile takeover of the USFS. The price of our expansion, even unintended, is the contraction of programs near and dear to the agency. An internal crisis is within view. Many within and without the agency, want bold, dramatic action to change the current situation. But, except for the budget partitioning ideas we formulated in Park City a couple years ago, a clear pathway of bold, dramatic action has not been embraced by the agency, approved or sanctioned by the OMB or Administration Executives, or initiated by Congress.

In fact, the context of our clear and compelling agency problem pales in comparison to the level of crisis in many other sectors of our nation. What we know today, is that if we don’t help ourselves, there is little likelihood others will help us. We can not have it “all”, so we must decide what we need, what we need most, and how we make a compelling case for it. In spite of our good large scale results, we know the USFS FAM lacks several compelling performance metrics. We must add sophisticated metrics beyond simple measures of acres treated, IA effectiveness, and large fire costs. We need metrics tied to doctrine. We need metrics which display “return on investment”, “cost benefit” ratios, and efficiency. We’ll spend some time this week talking about that, especially in the context of our most costly challenge, large fires; and more specifically, those twenty or so large fires which cost us about $400 million per year. These measures are important not only because of fiscal exigencies but because of the era we have entered. I’m convinced the era of “asymmetric fire” is upon us. I believe the future will be one where we’ll have small fires, big fires, and “in between” fires. Those fires will be scattered across the landscape at places and times we wouldn’t expect historically. We’ll have good fire, bad fire, unplanned fire, and prescribed fire. We’ll have more fire with more partners, some familiar, some not, some prepared, some not. Resources will be scarce and needs will be great. I see this Quadrennial Fire Review as our best guess as to the possible scenarios we’ll face in the future. Our ability to see holistically, to see systems and connections across all of fire and aviation management will be challenged because of the inherent complexity of the future.

The complexities of the future will not overwhelm us. The pathway forward will be fraught with potholes and detours, but I see the framework of adaptive solutions. Priorities will need to be set and enforced. The mind will be more important in the future than today. Critical thinking and the dialectic will have an even more significant place in FAM. Doctrine and enhanced application of risk management principles will be key to our ability to overcome, improvise, and adapt. Discipline, innovation, and execution will not just be the outline of the FAM logo, but fundamental to a framework of behaviors. Speed, agility, and focus will become our mantra not only for large fire but in all we do.

Telling our story, to the intended audience, is critical to success. To those who work on budgets, improved performance metrics are a must. To the public, boiling down complexities to profoundly simple ideas has to be done. We are a niche profession, a respected niche profession, acting now as professionals without a defined separate federal job series, a written set of defined professional ethics, or professional respected licensed credentials. And that is our future. We are wildland fire and aviation management professionals with one foot in natural resources and one foot in emergency management. We live in both worlds and are at ease in the interface of Los Angeles as we are in the Bob Marshall Wilderness.

Minds, ideas, thinking, challenging ourselves, and determining what we can do is the future. We’ll work as hard as we can to change the vegetative characteristics of wildlands, the organizational behaviors of ourselves and the myriad of partners we work with, and the behaviors of individuals. We’ll build a collaborative framework that encompasses partners both traditional and non-traditional across the full range of FAM activities.

We’ll talk more specifically these next four days about solutions, but we must take on the key issues, and you must put your best thinking and energy into this limited time together.

Beyond these broad concepts, let me describe a few key items for our future:

This is a time of challenges with a cacophony of voices striving for our attention. You are overworked, underpaid, and underappreciated. More than pay and benefits, what I want for us is “hard-earned” respect; respect as professional wildland fire leaders. We’ll earn that respect by being disciplined, innovative, and executing the program. Pay and benefits come as a result of respect, not a precursor to it.

You are a key component of fire leadership. We give our best ideas with our best sense of impacts to the Deputy Chief, the Regional Foresters, and the Chief.

We’ll be analytical; we’ll be passionate; we’ll be thoughtful; and we’ll do our jobs. To paraphrase SecDef Gates, this work is uncertain, inefficient, and far too frequently tragic.

A few weeks ago, I was able to take a trip to the Delaware River near Trenton. I was able to stand on the river bank and think about the events in late December 1776. It had been a bad year for our fledgling republic. Washington was faced with what looked to be insurmountable challenges. With his council of war, ideas were formed. Those ideas led to a plan. The plan required careful preparation. That plan spawned action, but there came a time during the late afternoon of 24 December 1776 when it looked to many like certain failure was once again at hand. Washington looked at the situation and made a decision. Leading from the heart and with spirit, he said “Go”. The Hessians at Trenton, then Princeton, were surprised, and the course of world events was changed forever. I’m not suggesting any of us are George Washingtons, but I am suggesting that the best work, the enduring work, does indeed come from the heart and from the spirit.

I have just a few years left as your Director. I’m going to try and remember that moment, and so many others I’ve had over the years, and work from the heart and from the spirit. I will make these years as meaningful as I can, but I know I need you with me. I can’t do it alone, we can do it together.

Thanks,

Tom

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