By Dan McCue
Staff Writer

James D. Ward, who for nearly a decade has served as the senior civilian official and U.S. Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center in Charleston, has told his senior staffers that he plans to retire.

He reportedly informed about 50 of his senior staffers of his decision during an impromptu meeting this morning.

As technical director of SPAWAR Charleston, an organization estimated to have an annual $1 billion impact on the local economy, Ward has been in charge of overseeing one of the largest single clusters of computer scientists and engineers in South Carolina, and the continued vitality of the organization is often cited as one of the reasons Google, among others have chosen to locate facilities in the Lowcountry.

In fact, so vital has SPAWAR Charleston been over the years that Angelou Economics, the Austin, Texas-based consultancy, said the advance security and information technology should be targeted as a market the region should pursue for economic development.

Ward, a native of Hampton, Va., originally relocated to the Charleston area in 1996 during the consolidation of the Navy’s four East Coast electronics engineering centers.

In 1998, he was selected to head the consolidated organization’s Command and Control Systems Department and was responsible for the work of more than 450 government employees and multiple contractors engaged in the design, development, production and deployment of state-of-the-art command and control systems.

An electrical engineer who also holds an MBA, Ward always described SPAWAR as atypical when compared to most other government organizations. That’s because, unlike other federal agencies, SPAWAR has never received direct funding appropriations from Congress. Instead, it competes with the private sector and other government agencies for contracts.

“That gives us a different mind-set,” Ward told the Charleston Rotary Club during an April 2007 presentation. “We have to stay competitive.”

During his tenure, Ward has lived by that mantra, and insisted his personnel did the same.

In a study commissioned by the Secretary of the Navy, the consulting firm Booz & Allen found that SPAWAR Charleston was the Navy’s most cost-efficient engineering organization when measured by factors such as workload in relation to overhead expenses.

During his 2007 presentation to the Rotary, Ward said he prided himself on Booz & Allen’s conclusion, saying that it recognized his staffs’ signature strengths: competency, business acumen, innovation, agility and speed to capability.

At the time of his speech, more than 250 of his 2,300 employees held master’s degrees, and there were more than a dozen Ph.D.s on staff.

Among the SPAWAR Charleston innovations he pointed to with pride was an inflatable antenna which is much lighter than its predecessor, thus saving troops from carrying heavy equipment through the battlefield.

He also established a new “Purple Heart Professional” program, through which SPAWAR Charleston will hire individuals who have come back from combat injured and use their competency toward a meaningful career.

Widely recognized for his proactive leadership and management style, Ward was the recipient of the Charleston-area Federal Executive Association’s Outstanding Manager and Executive Award in 2000, and in April 2001, he was the recipient of the Navy Superior Civilian Service Award for his leadership in the integration of major elements of the Navy’s telecommunications infrastructure.