That applies to facilities within the United States as well as overseas, including support for any future, post-Operation Enduring Freedom/Operation Iraqi Freedom conflicts. Facing a decade of change as dramatic, albeit in different ways, as the one just completed, USACE’s Campaign Plan is the central focal point, providing the enterprise-level strategic view on how USACE will deliver value to its customers and stakeholders. Slockbower then defines the MMSC as a “lens with which we look to shape future initiatives, as well as strategies and actions that will eventually be integrated in[to] the USACE Campaign Plan.”

Another planning document, the “Military Missions Portfolio of Initiatives,” aligns with USACE’s transformation from strategic surge to post-surge. The original intent was to determine how best to meet potential future needs, but recent history has re-emphasized the unpredictability of the future, so the effort instead focused on determining the suite of competencies that would be needed to deal with any and all eventualities.

“That was the basis for our Campaign Plan, to identify the competencies needed for the business we are in, competitive competencies. Ultimately, if you want to be best-in-class, you have to have critical success factors that really define that. For example, systems thinking – the ability of this organization to build connections with others to help us bring in the best talent,” Slockbower explained.

“That’s a long-term, enduring framework. In the next five years, we need to determine what we really need to focus on to find solutions for our customers. And what is the most important thing for the individual to have to be of value to the organization? The ability to bring solutions to the toughest problems.”

The heart of the MMSC are the Mission and Direction Statements, which define both mission and organization to lay the foundation for common understanding and unity of effort across the enterprise:

• Military Missions Mission Statement – “Provide premier engineering, construction, real estate, stability operations, and environmental management products and services for the Army, Air Force, other U.S. Government agencies and foreign governments.”
• Military Missions Strategic Direction Statement – “To be the Nation’s most effective and dynamic public engineering and technical services organization. In collaboration with customers, partners, and allies we anticipate and deliver innovative and sustainable solutions that support military readiness and operations, and national policies and objectives. We are a values-based organization and a force-multiplier with domestic and global capabilities.”

In identifying USACE core competencies to carry it forward as a high-value military and national asset, the MMSC determined those complex sets of organizationwide skills, knowledge, and resources that have evolved over time, are hard to replicate, imitate, or transfer, and cannot be contracted from external sources. By retaining veteran employees with that knowledge – and ensuring the next generation learns and sustains those skills – they can be applied across missions and product lines indefinitely.

The MMSC broadly identifies five essential USACE core competencies:

• Execution Focus – The capability to execute complex programs and projects globally;
• Integrated Project Delivery – Being able to marshal interdisciplinary teams with a full array of capabilities to execute facility and infrastructure programs and projects globally;
• Accountability – Delivering products and services with a full understanding of customer requirements and the importance of maintaining public trust as an embedded part of the military missions culture, people, processes, and systems;
• Diverse Technical Knowledge – Accessing technical capabilities from across the three USACE mission areas – military, civil works, and RDT&E (Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation) – to leverage the diverse range of scientific and technical expertise; and
• Expeditionary Support – The ability of USACE overseas elements to quickly respond to and support global contingency operations through Field Force Engineering and reach-back capabilities.

“We also have a suite of skills that sit above those core competencies: our ability to do risk management; provide effective and efficient delivery, to have a value proposition targeted to each unique customer; focus on continual process improvement; and our ability to reach across this organization, in virtual ways, and bring the skills and talents of 35,000 individuals to bear at the right time and place to solve problems,” Slockbower said.

“Lastly, the highest level that defines us is strategic sense-making – scanning the horizon for the next problems and opportunities and building the capacity to solve those problems; looking at systems, not isolation; building critical alliances; learning and innovation, taking knowledge from those who know to those who need to know, at the right time and place; and being an organization that can feed the passions of people. Now more than ever, our engineers are faced with managing complexity while driving innovation to meet the current and future infrastructure needs of our military and our nation. They are really more like ‘solutioneers’ as they blend creative imagination with technical know-how.”

“The strategic concept and portfolio is important – how you think, how we adjust, how we think, about our value to our customers and their constantly changing needs,” Slockbower concluded. “As we come out of an era of expeditionary ops, we clearly need to spend a lot of intellectual capital, time, and energy on how to apply the lessons learned to position ourselves in the shaping phase for the next mission.”

“It is important we do not lose our focus on expeditionary capabilities, but we also need to improve our ability to help make investment decisions. There will be declining resources – but we are expected to get the same or better effects. So an important part of what we will do is to develop the business sense required to take the technology our labs develop, the engineering and science we are applying, and know how to help our customers and stakeholders make the right decisions.”

This article originally appeared in U.S. Army Corps of Engineers: Building Strong®, Serving the Nation and the Armed Forces 2012-2013 Edition.