Vice Admiral J. Kevin Moran: Winning the Navy's 'War for People'

"Time spent in a classroom comes out of what is called the individual's account," he added. "That's a bundle of money. If I reduce the time to train, I save the Navy money and can return that money to 'big' Navy to do other things with. Over the five years of the defense plan, I owe the CNO $2.2 billion back out of those individuals' accounts. (The Navy spends approximately 14 percent of its total annual funding, about $10 billion, on training.) If I reduce the time required to train, I save the Navy money."

The Naval Personnel Development Command also has moved toward gathering individual performance metrics, Moran said. "Much of what we did in the past was if you passed the final, you passed the course and you went out into the fleet with a particular certification," he said. "It's not good enough anymore to just pass the test. We want to really understand whether or not that sailor is ready to perform his or her job. We have various organizations in the Navy that actually go out and look at performance. Now we just want to get all of our performance metrics the same, understood and agreed-upon, and then we can connect it to the content. We want to have some of those performance-based metrics embedded in our hardware."

When all of the various elements of the Revolution in Training are fully realized, the benefits to the Navy - and, more importantly, its sailors - will be considerable. "That is the human capital strategy," Moran said. "Not only do we want to improve them professionally - to be a better technician or better troubleshooter - but we also want to improve them personally. We never want them to stop learning, from the time they enter the United States Navy to the time they leave, whether they stay in for one tour or 30 years. That's what (the CNO) means when he says, 'Win the war for people.'"

Brian Summerfield is associate editor for Chief Learning Officer magazine. He can be reached at brians@clomedia.com.

February 2005 Table of Contents