FORT LEAVENWORTH, Kan. (July 16, 2009) -- The highest-ranking civilian at Fort Leavenworth is set to receive the Presidential Rank Award at the end of July.
Combined Arms Center Deputy to the Commanding General Dale Ormond will be presented the rank of Meritorious Executive by the Secretary of the Army Peter Geren on July 29, in Washington, D.C. Ormond holds the equivalent of a two-star position in the Senior Executive Service.
The awards, open to all government agencies, are administered by the Office of Personnel Management and the Office of the Secretary of Defense and are presented annually. After the nominations have been narrowed by OPM review boards, the recommendations are sent to the president for approval. Only five percent of the Senior Executive Service and agency equivalents receive the meritorious-level rank award.
Presidential Rank Awards are reserved for SES civilians who have provided exceptional service to the American people over an extended time. Ormond was nominated for the award for his work in chemical weapons elimination from 2004 to 2008.
Ormond began his career with the government and the military when he attended the U.S. Naval Academy. After graduation, he worked in the Navy's nuclear power program as a submarine officer for about three years.
"That was all about nuclear power, operating a nuclear submarine, dealing with radioactive material," Ormond said.
That was the foundation for his career, Ormond said.
When he left the Navy, Ormond began work with a company that had a contract with the Department of Energy disposing of radioactive waste. That job led him back to federal service and he eventually worked for DOE at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina managing plutonium waste.
Ormond said much of his work with DOE involved public safety and interfacing with the citizens advisory board at the site.
"We would talk to the civilians who lived in the community about what we were doing ... get their input and incorporate their input into the decision-making process." Ormond said. "It was my first real opportunity to engage with the public in a very real way."
In March 2002, Ormond came to work for the Army as the site project manager for the Tooele Chemical Agent Disposal Facility in Utah. The job involved working with the state regulators and a citizens advisory commission.
"A lot of the things I had done with nuclear power in the Navy and DOE with respect to safety and control of contamination and worker safety ... helped me be successful in that job," Ormond said. "All of the processes and ideas and approaches were very much the same."
After a couple of years, Ormond went to Washington, D.C., and began work as the deputy assistant secretary of Army for the Elimination of Chemical Weapons. It was in this role Ormond had oversight over the whole Army program.
Ormond said he was tasked with working with politicians and regulators to get the Army story out regarding the program.
"So over the course of four years I probably had upwards of 250 meetings on Capitol Hill," Ormond said. "I wasn't doing anything other than saying 'This is what we're doing, this is why we're doing it, this is why it's safe.'"
In 2007, Ormond was assigned the additional duty of acting director of the U.S. Army Chemical Materials Agency. He then had two jobs, both two-star general equivalent positions.
As the acting director of CMA, Ormond was tasked with executing the chemical weapons destruction program. Ormond was directly responsible for the operation of four chemical weapons storage depots, three chemical weapons storage activities and five operational chemical weapons destruction plants in seven states across three time zones.
Among his successes in the program, Ormond names the improvement in the program's relationship with Capitol Hill, accelerating the program's schedule to meet treaty dates, improving the environmental compliance and the reduction of employee injuries.
"We implemented a number of programs that really focused to improve safety to improve work control to improve our procedures," Ormond said.
Ormond was also instrumental in saving taxpayers more than $300 million when he directed an initiative to move wastewater from a destruction facility in Indiana to a treatment facility in Texas. When attempts to ship the wastewater to two other facilities failed, Ormond and the program faced looking for an alternative facility or building a new on-site facility.
"We met with every single congressional office between Indiana and Texas, all the governor's offices, all their emergency responders," Ormond said. "We explained what we were doing, why we were doing it, what we were shipping and why it was safe ... and what we were doing to ensure that it got there when it was supposed to."
By going down an alternative path, Ormond said the program was able to save the taxpayers a tremendous amount of money. He said there were a number of people in the organization who worked very hard on the project.
"(There were) a lot of great people in that program whom we were able to bring together and get focused on the right things," Ormond said.
Ormond said much of his career has been about motivating people, giving them a vision, showing them how to get from here to there, and working with them to stay within the boundaries of the commander's intent.
"As much as anything, my job is to walk around and open up doors and knock down roadblocks that are precluding the people who are really doing the work from executing it," Ormond said.
When he first heard about CAC, Ormond said he didn't even know what it was.
"Needless to say, there has been an enormous learning curve from essentially zero," he said.
The reason Ormond came to Fort Leavenworth, he said, was to work with Soldiers. Before, Ormond said, he really didn't have much contact with Soldiers or the operational Army.
"I wanted to get more involved with what the Army does," Ormond said.
Having served with CAC for a year now, Ormond said his job here is much the same as his last position, eliminating roadblocks. He said he is trying to ensure the different organizations under CAC are coordinating and communicating with each other.
CAC and Fort Leavenworth Commander Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV is driving CAC to be more productive, more influential and better at supporting the men and women in uniform, Ormond said. He said his job is to help Caldwell with that as well as make sure all the CAC organizations continue to get better at collaborating with each other.
"There is almost nothing in the Army that CAC doesn't touch one way or another," Ormond said.
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