PM PERSPECTIVE COL. CHARLES M. “CHARLIE” STEIN
COMMUNICATIONS READINESS: ‘CAN YOU HEAR ME
NOW?’ by Mr. James Christophersen
Tis column is the first in a new Army AL&T series, PM Perspective, which looks at acquisition from the viewpoint of the program, project or product manager. Tese are big programs—generally acquisition category I and II— not only in terms of their importance to the Soldier, but also in terms of sheer dollars. How do PMs deal with the complexity of the teams that staff these programs? What do they wish they’d known then that they know now? What lessons can other PMs take from their experiences?
Col. Charles M. “Charlie” Stein started his military career as a U.S. Marine Corps infan- tryman and mortarman. Spending six-month stretches on a flat-bottom boat in the South China Sea made land-based services look very appealing, and in 1990 Stein was commis- sioned as a second lieutenant in the Army Quartermaster Corps. Stein has been the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command/Army Forces Strategic Command Technical Center deputy director, product manager for Ground Combat Tactical Trainers, and proj- ect director for the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California. He relinquished his charter as the project manager for Defense Communications and Army Transmission Sys- tems, part of the Program Executive Office for Enterprise Information Systems, in August 2017 and is now director of fires for the assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology.
His education includes an M.S. in management from the Florida Institute of Technology. He has been an educator as well, as course director for the Army Acquisition Foundation and the Army Intermediate Program Management courses at the Army Acquisition Center of Excellence and as assistant professor of military science at Seton Hall University. He is a member of the Ordnance Order of Samuel Sharpe, Military Order of Saint Martin, the U.S. Army Space Professionals Association’s Order of St. Dominic and the Signal Corps Regimental Association’s Order of Mercury.
T
ucked away in a nondescript, temporary building on a cor- ner of Fort Belvoir, Virginia, sit the offices of the Project
Manager for Defense Communications and Army Transmission Systems (PM DCATS). Here, more than 200 men and women of the Army Acquisition Work- force manage more than $875 million for 30 strategic satellite and terrestrial com- munications systems.
Communications satellites orbit more than 22,000 miles overhead, invisible to the naked eye, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Te average person does not give a second thought to the mod- ern marvel of satellite communications (SATCOM). Although the U.S. Air Force enjoys
responsibility for
the headline-
grabbing launches, the satellites would be little more than multimillion-dollar space junk without the terrestrial infra- structure in place to communicate with them. It’s the Army’s software and land- based control centers that command
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COMMENTARY
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