As commander of SPAWAR in San Diego, Rear Adm. Kenneth D. Slaght may find it tougher to smile if next year’s round of base closures sends a big part of his 4,600 person operation packing.

What San Diego knows as SPAWAR on Pacific Highway in Old Town and on the bases lining the bay side of Point Loma is really a complex acquisitions and systems development organization that encompasses more than 7,500 employees and an annual budget of about $4.7 billion. Its payroll exceeds $74 million and the average salary is $77,000. Most of the operations are in San Diego, which includes 4,400 civilian employees and 200 military personnel. The remainder of its employees are at SPAWAR’s systems centers in New Orleans, Chantilly, Va., Charleston, S.C. and Norfolk, Va.

What San Diego is slowly learning is that SPAWAR is one of its defense installations most at risk in the pending Base Realignment And Closure procedure.

SPAWAR’s San Diego history dates back to the June 1, 1940, establishment of its first West Coast laboratory. The most significant event in recent times was the 1995 decision to close the command in Washington, D.C., and embark on a two-year relocation to San Diego. The man in charge here is Navy Rear Adm. Kenneth D. Slaght.

In San Diego, the primary pieces of SPAWAR are:

• SPAWAR Headquarters and the Program Executive Office C4I & Space, located at the Old Town complex. The headquarters is the engineering brains for the Navy, providing cutting-edge technology for a 21st century initiative called FORCEnet. Essentially, the initiative’s goal is for the sailor or Marine to have the right information, at the right time to make the right decision, via unbroken real-time communications. Not only will Navy and Marine operations be so self-aware, but FORCEnet also will ultimately allow seamless linking with joint, allied and coalition forces.
  
  
• PEO C4I & Space has the responsibility to acquire, field and support all the technology necessary to make FORCEnet a reality. The command here manages 121 programs and spends about $2 billion a year on acquisitions.
  
  
• Point Loma is the home of SPAWAR Systems Center San Diego, which is SPAWAR’s primary research, development, testing and evaluation facility.

Companies big and small, headquartered here and elsewhere, benefit greatly from SPAWAR in San Diego. A local example is ComGlobal Systems Inc., a computer-based information technology firm founded in 1995. Having grown to more than $30 million in revenue and 200 employees, ComGlobal has offices in San Jose, Virginia, Nevada, Hawaii, Massachusetts and the United Kingdom. Illustrating how proximity to SPAWAR does matter, while the employee-owned firm is headquartered in Hazard Center, it still opened a small office on Barnett, across the street from the SPAWAR campus, even though the amount of business involved is relatively small. It is those kind of offices, both big and small, some on-site and others nearby, that San Diego would lose if SPAWAR’s headquarters close.

In November 2002, most of the SPAWAR acquisition authority was reorganized into the Program Executive Office C4I & Space. The San Diego office hands out $2 billion each year in contracts with about $1.2 billion spent locally. The C4I stands for command, control, communications, computer and intelligence.

For San Diego-headquartered SAIC, SPAWAR is a big chunk of business.

“From a pure numbers standpoint, we have in the neighborhood of $330 million of business with SPAWAR for fiscal ’04,” reports Ben Haddad, SAIC’s senior vice president for communications. “We have 1,200 employees that work on SPAWAR work, 200 of those are on site.”

Haddad notes those jobs are here only because of SPAWAR.

“Essentially, wherever they have been, we have been there,” Haddad says. “If that command is continued, but relocated to another city, we could go with them. Not the whole company, but the employees that work on those contracts would be given the option of transferring. This is something we don’t want to see obviously. That’s why we will be working hand in hand with (William) Cassidy and Julie (Meier Wright) on why they should stay intact, or if anything, expand.”

SAIC is not the only defense contracting titan with a significant Pacific Highway presence. Lockheed Martin last month opened a new Global Vision Center on the SPAWAR site. It singled out the location’s strategic proximity to fleet units and waterfront commands.

SPAWAR stands for Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command. It is the Navy’s chief engineer responsible for providing state of the art technology to the Navy and other branches of the U.S. military.

Anther local firm, Cubic Corp., working with San Diego partners that include ViaSat Inc. and AMSEC, is a year into a five-year, $92.7 million contract to develop software-definable radios, satellite antenna and secure data technology. When one develops wireless modems that operate at more than 250 megabits per second, about 200 times as fast as a speedy home connection as Cubic does, the military is interested.

David Grundies, the executive assistant to the SPAWAR commander when it moved here in 1997, now works for Harris Corp., a $2 billion company that set up shop here to be near the command. Grundies says the value to the San Diego community is not so much the direct SPAWAR employment, but the companies like his — he describes them as “Beltway Bandits” — that have come to town to work for and on related contracts.

“My job will go away if SPAWAR goes away,” Grundies says. “Once SPAWAR is gone, it is gone and the Beltway Bandits are gone with it.”

— Tim McClain