Author: Tim J. Clark

Army (ARDEC) – Recognized Sustained Excellence

REMARKS: Joseph A. Lannon, Director, ARDEC. 

It is a tremendous honor to stand here today and accept this prestigious award, the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, on behalf of my co-workers at the United States Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center, also known as ARDEC.

Our prescription for organizational success is very basic. Everything we do is bound by a commitment to the customer, our warfighters, whose lives depend on our work.

Four basic components—coupled with hard work, tenacity and vision—have shaped ARDEC into the organization it is today:

  • Innovation in both product and process;
  • Persistence in the pursuit of excellence;
  • External evaluation and continuous learning to accelerate improvement; and
  • A culture that thinks like a “for-profit” great business with a bottom line.

2007 was the first year for the nonprofit category.  The Award recognized SUSTAINED and PROVEN (auditable) excellence over several years.  

The Good or Great Page provides a notional comparison of Baldrige to the concepts of capability maturity, cost of poor quality, sigma, and knowledge of variation.

Call for Re-Design: National Security Apparatus

Two Decades Late. A post–Cold War military for a post–Cold War world. By Frederick W. Kagan. National Review June 16, 2008, Pg. 36

The current U.S. national-security organization was designed during the Cold War to face the threats of that struggle. The National Security Act of 1947 created the Air Force and what became the Defense Department, and reshaped the intelligence agencies. The structure was tweaked occasionally, but in very minor ways, until the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986, which made important changes (although nowhere near as fundamental as those made by the National Security Act). The U.S. military has remained virtually unchanged in its basic structure and function since then.

The world has changed, and the threats we face have changed, and that means it is time for a fundamental reorganization of our national-security apparatus.

Mr. Kagan is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the co-author with Thomas Donnelly of Ground Truth: The Future of U.S. Landpower.

Iran, Nukes, Negotiations

Sitting Down At The Nuclear Table With Iran, (Boston Globe)…Graham Allison

…But it is clear that Gates remains convinced that direct negotiations are imperative for solving the nuclear standoff. As he told the Academy of American Diplomacy last month, “We need to figure out a way to develop some leverage . . . and then sit down and talk with them.” Negotiations are never certain to yield results. The alternative, a world of nuclear anarchy, is of great concern to both nations.

Long View – Oil Policy – Strategic Vulnerability?

The Power of Four Dollars, By Charles Krauthammer Townhall.com, June 6, 2008.

At $3 a gallon, Americans just grin and bear it, suck it up, and, while complaining profusely, keep driving like crazy. At $4, it is a world transformed.

The wholesale flight from gas guzzlers is stunning in its swiftness, but utterly predictable.

Unfortunately, instead of hiking the price ourselves by means of a gasoline tax that could be instantly refunded to the American people in the form of lower payroll taxes, we let the Saudis, Venezuelans, Russians and Iranians do the taxing for us — and pocket the money that the tax would have recycled back to the American worker.

Iraq: Positive Trends, Next Steps

Iraq And The Election. (Wall Street Journal)…Editorial, June 6, 2008, Pg. 14

…We are winning in Iraq. Indeed, we can now say with certainty that we will win, as long as we don’t repeat our earlier mistakes and seek to draw down too soon.

For three consecutive weeks, the number of violent incidents have been at their lowest level since the spring of 2004. The number of U.S. combat fatalities last month, 19, was the lowest of the entire war, and Iraqi military and civilian deaths are also sharply down. In the first five months of this year, 4,500 insurgent weapons caches were found, compared to 6,900 for all of 2007. These numbers have sometimes moved in the wrong direction and may do so again, particularly during major combat operations. But the trend is unmistakably positive.

All of this means that it is now possible to foresee not merely a stable Iraq, but also one that can achieve our original strategic goals in the region. The strategist Frederick Kagan – an architect of the surge – makes the analogy to West Germany during the Cold War. A secure and pro-American Iraq would be crucial to expanding U.S. influence in the Arab heart of the Middle East, and especially to containing Iran. A democratic Iraq can serve as an alternative pole of Shiite power in the region, as well as an alternative political model to theocratic, radical Tehran.

We are winning in Iraq. Indeed, we can now say with certainty that we will win, as long as we don’t repeat our earlier mistakes and seek to draw down too soon. This is the improving Iraq that the next U.S. President will inherit, and it is the heart of the Iraq debate Americans should have in November.

Some irony with the earlier posting on ground breaking for the U.S. Institure of Peace to help prevent “external” conflicts. What would be truly ground breaking would be recognition on the need to resolve “internal” conflicts …. 

Opposition: NATO Expansion

Russian Leader Warns Against NATO Expansion. (Boston Globe)…Associated Press, June 6, 2008

Russia’s president showed muscle yesterday in his first major foreign policy speech since taking office a month ago, warning that a further NATO expansion eastward would ruin Russia’s relations with the West.

Speaking to a group of German policy makers and business leaders, Dmitry Medvedev’s warning continued the course of his predecessor Vladimir Putin – who fiercely opposed the alliance’s plans to incorporate Russia’s former Soviet neighbors, Ukraine and Georgia. Yet Medvedev also sounded more conciliatory, making offers to step back from confrontation and work out a new European security pact.