By TED POTTS
Donald B. Johnson is very interested in the antique business.
The 58-year-old Southmont resident also does paintings and has a longtime interest in photography.
Those interests are quite different from his 30-year career as a civilian employee in the defense industry, with many of those years spent working at the Pentagon directly with the secretary of defense on readiness and training matters.
Johnson is a native of Key West, Fla. He did not make his home in Johnstown until taking a job with Concurrent Technologies Corp. after retiring in 2004 from his Defense Department work.
He also was employed briefly on a part-time basis with Northrop Grumman’s Johns-town operations.
He served as a business strategist at both operations.
He began his defense industry career in 1974 as a graphic artist at the Navy Training Equipment Center in Orlando, Fla. While there, he received a letter of appreciation for developing a classified briefing for then-President Gerald Ford concerning Russian nuclear submarines.
He prepared the briefing with information he was given by experts on that topic, he said.
In 1976, he led the development of the first interactive video disc for military training.
This marked the beginning of the military’s use of commercially available and much less expensive multimedia technology in its training, Johnson said.
In 1989, he was reassigned to the Pentagon in the secretary of defense’s office. He worked with five secretaries of defense, resigning in 2004 because of a disagreement with the Bush administration over training policies.
More about that later.
It was in 1991, during Operation Desert Storm, that the realization came to the forefront that the military branches needed to be coordinated into a rapidly reconfigured joint force for training. And that training needed coordination with the entire U.S. command structure as well as with America’s allies.
Johnson was given the task of developing policies, plans and budgets to make that a reality.
He was successful in that endeavor, but not before he had convinced leaders of the branches that this approach would better prepare their forces for their missions and the new threats they were encountering.
Johnson led an advanced distributed learning – or ADL – initiative in 1996, developing policies and overseeing programs.
ADL was a public-private partnership aimed at getting the nation’s leading information-technology companies to cooperate with each other and the military to develop a common standards program that could be used no matter what brand of computers were being utilized.
“That was a massive collaborative effort,” Johnson said.
He said Concurrent Technologies Corp. did the work and that U.S. Representative John Murtha was instrumental in getting the project funded.
Johnson received the Secretary of Defense Civilian Career Service Award for his ADL efforts in 1997 from then-Secretary of Defense William Perry.
With Sept. 11, 2001, came the realization that the military joint training must include other government agencies as well, such as the intelligence community and foreign agencies.
And the training transformation went from training individuals to training groups, Johnson said.
He led the training transformation, developing plans that were acted on at higher levels of government.
In 2001, he received the Secretary of Defense Medal for Exceptional Service for his vision and leadership as director of the ADL Initiative and the resulting improvement to the readiness of the U.S. armed forces. He received his second Secretary of Defense Civilian Career Service Award in April 2004 for his success in shaping the department’s training transformation initiative.
He resigned in 2004 when his efforts to convince the nonmilitary Pentagon leaders to integrate training with specific operations failed. When the nonmilitary leaders continued to see training as separate from operations, Johnson left.
About two years later, he said training and operations were integrated.
Johnson’s interest in antiques runs to old paper, such as postcards, photographs and deeds. He said he plans to buy and sell on the Internet and at auctions.
He has antiques for sale at Cottage Pine Antiques and Sugar Grove Herbs, both in Somerset.
He is planning to tie his antique operations with genealogy, the study of family histories, he said.
Johnson is the father of three daughters: Rachel (Johnson) Ramerez, 26, Eglin Air Force Base, Fla.; Jessica Johnson, 22, a student at George Mason University, Fairfax, Va.; and Zoe Johnson, 13, a student at Westmont Hilltop Middle School, who resides with her father.
Their mother is Christine Johnson of Orlando, Fla. The Johnsons are divorced.
