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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