Terry Pudas enjoys home improvement projects and cooking. He finds working with his hands a welcome contrast to his job at the Office of Force Transformation, where he serves as acting director and is known as a key strategist for Defense Department transformation.
Through it all, Pudas said, he never forgets the true motivation for change. “One of the things that we try to keep in mind in this particular office is that there’s a great sense of urgency out there, and there are a lot of people in the services that don’t have a nice comfortable office to stand in every day,” Pudas said. “I feel very honored that I have an opportunity to contribute to this.”
GCN: At a recent Defense conference, Adm. Edmund P. Giambiastiani, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the writers of the Quadrennial Defense Review are now moving to implement the recommendations in the QDR. Are you involved in this process?
PUDAS: We have some activities that contribute to that. I think what Adm. Giambiastiani was referring to is the work that’s going on in the implementation road maps. There’s a number of different initiatives with regards to portfolio management and some specific thrusts to develop implementation road maps, so the QDR moves from a high-level document to [DOD officials] actually implementing some of the actions and initiatives that are in there.
GCN: What are your goals for this year?
PUDAS: I think one of the major initiatives is we want to focus some effort on this SSTR [Stability, Security, Transition and Reconstruction] directive [published last November]. That’s a big, broad issue that has to do with different kinds of capabilities.
We’ve been talking a lot about this whole notion of energy within the department. That’s very topical now because of what’s happening in the energy world. And so there’s some significant implications to that—there’s the security implication, there [are] the alternative fuel sources implications, there are conservation implications.
We’re going to continue the work that we’ve done in regards to education. [Among] the things that I think have not been as well-appreciated as the large-ticket items are the things going on in the schoolhouses with the DOD. And by that I don’t just mean the war colleges, I mean the academies, the Defense Acquisition University, the Air Force Institute for Technology, where they have really begun to take up this whole notion of transformation seriously.
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