5 (RC’s 5 Challenges): Communicate, Culture, Continuing Education, Commitment, and Call ("Be Ready!"). The CNO has clearly and repeatedly communicated his message – "we are all on one team" and we need to make sure our culture reflects this. As the CNO said, "RC is the AC’s surge force. . . trained and experienced volunteers that stand ready to augment at a moment’s notice in time of crises". We must be committed to this partnership. The Commander in Chief and CNO have told us to "Be Ready!", which means our continuing education must be fulfilled and we must be mentally, physically, and professionally ready to mobilize to answer the call.

4 (CNR’s 4 Priorities): CNR’s priorities are Predictability, Periodicity, Pay/Benefits, and Personnel Systems. CNR wants you to know when, where and with how much notice you’ll need before performing active duty. Periodicity means how often these service periods occur. Most importantly, when a RC sailor performs duty, the sailor wants the same pay/benefits as the AC sailor and with one pay system that is common among RC, AC, and military services. A common military personnel system is a high visibility item with OSD and CNR will continue to press for all these priorities.

3 (CNO’s 3 Priorities): CNO’s priorities are to sustain combat readiness, build a fleet for the future, and develop 21^st Century leaders. In order to help us accomplish these priorities, CNO has issued 3 watchwords for Navy leaders - "listen, learn, lead". Please be clear what the CNO means – we are all Navy leaders. The RC, and especially the Navy JAG Corps and LN community, is a veteran community with extensive experience for the Fleet to draw upon. Our job is to support the Fleet and help it remain ready to fight, win, and improve. A significant contributor to our successfully accomplishing our mission is to value every member of our Navy team – active, reserve, civil servant, and contractor. The Navy’s strategy for personnel or human resources is being developed to implement those values. We are doing our part in the JAG Corps, to the point where our community is recognized as leading the way in many respects for the rest of the Navy. Senior Navy leadership repeatedly tells us how much commanders appreciate and value our services. There will always be a place for those of us who remain Ready, Responsive, and Relevant.

2 (SECNAV’s Expectations): SECNAV expects us to be "Effective and Efficient". This means we must continually find ways to increase our effectiveness, which will help us find efficiencies. As SECNAV has said, "[e]ffectiveness is first determining what the ‘right work’ is and then becoming more efficient by doing the ‘work right’." Navy leadership encourages us all to challenge our assumptions and find ways to improve our Navy.

1 (One vision): These items all lead to one thing – one vision for the Navy team. That vision is to be prepared and to provide fully integrated operational support to the Fleet. We are one team, always ready.

We must be prepared, in temper and imagination, to participate in the initiatives our Navy leadership will pass our way as we find better ways to plan and fund our activities and missions. Challenge equals opportunity! Resource constraints drive innovation and attention to detail. Our JAG Corps community will continue to be effective and ready to support the Fleet through your ingenuity and efforts, which are more important than ever.

Further to this topic, many in our community will have heard about the fiscally constrained environment in which we are currently operating; many will have experienced already, as ADTs and IDTT have become hard to come. This circumstance is the child of many contributing factors, including the fact that we are in the second continuing resolution so far this FY as the budget is worked out. I have been in touch with SJAs and other key RC personnel about this issue via the first of a series of regular national telephone conferences and will summarize the information here to say that your leadership is actively engaged in addressing this challenge. We can expect that, as a result of this challenge, we will all see some significant changes in the ways we do and fund our RC business. I firmly believe that the changes will be for the better, but I also know that the transition from the old to the new will be an adjustment for all of us. Every one of us will be asked by our chains of command, RC and AC, to work harder to plan our operational support schedule and needs in much more detail and much more in advance than in the past. This will help us move to a world and way of doing business in which we are able to plan, budget and execute in a much more controlled and community-specific way. I will be sending much more detail to the field in due course; in the meantime, stay focused and continue to turn to. Despite the fiscal pressures, we have the resources in AT and IDT (drill pay) to meet the mission, as long as we are proactive and smart about it.

To put a finer point on this discussion, the good news is that there is money for entitlements such as AT and IDT, which means 14 days AT and 48 drills for SELRES. Please note that the typical CONUS AT is 12 days (Monday through the second Friday), which leaves 2 AT days left over – use them wisely and use them all. Leave nothing on the table. Discretionary funding such as IDTT, ADT, Additional Training Periods, etc., though, is extremely tight. This means that units and independent drillers will have to plan drills and AT carefully to maximize support to their supported commands within these funding constraints. Look to your chains of command for guidance, which will look to those of us in the leadership for the same. As I have noted, we are working all the related issues hard and have established firm and regular lines of communication to the field about them.

To another topic: BRAC is now final. Among other changes (including the closure of some Reserve Centers) this means that COMNAVRESFORCOM will be moving to Norfolk from New Orleans in FY 08; REDCOM South will be closing and consolidating with REDCOM MidWest in FY 06; and REDCOM Northeast will consolidate with REDCOM Midlant, which will be moving to Norfolk in FY 08. Of course, all BRAC closures/relocations are dependent on funding being made available for these actions. We will watch these developments closely, and adjust to the mission changes that may emerge in a carefully planned way, and I will inform everyone of what emerges in this regard as soon as I can. In the meantime, I can say that I do not foresee major changes in our force structure coming out of BRAC-mandated changes. The consolidation of the LN community into other communities is no longer on the horizon. This is good news for all of us, for the LN community is part of our heart and soul. The challenge for all of us, RC, AC, officer, enlisted, is to meet the challenge of using this resource better and in a more consistent way that is better aligned with the legal mission in every aspect and mission area. Part of the challenge includes the goal of rendering each legalman a trained and certified paralegal. Please watch for future communications regarding details and your responsibilities in this and related initiatives.

We are hard at work at shaping our community in every dimension. Inasmuch as this effort applies to AC-RC alignment, our efforts in this area are the successor to the ZBR, and we are benefiting by being able to own and shape the process. I am comfortable that the result will be a Reserve Law Program that is better able to address our shifting and changing missions, and I see nothing but opportunities. Our jobs will continue to change, but we will have important things to do, and plenty of places in which to do them.

As I have noted before, we need to push training opportunities for our officers and LNs. Even though funding is uncertain, I encourage everyone to apply for the various courses offered. Let’s load up the pipeline and work the funding as the year progresses. Training is an important component for us to remain Ready, Responsive, and Relevant.