Supporting the NSA through Budget

As a comptroller at the 704th Military Intelligence Brigade at Fort Meade, Maryland, Major Joshua Lakey ’19 MBA/EMPA (WSM/MAX) is responsible for budget planning, resourcing, acquisition and travel for the Army’s largest intelligence brigade, which provides support to the National Security Agency. 

“It’s a unique assignment,” says Lakey, who has held the post since June 2022. He says he was directly prepared for his responsibilities by the education he received in the Defense Comptrollership Program (DCP), a Department of Defense-funded graduate program run by Syracuse University. Over the course of the 14-month selective program, a mix of military and civilian students concurrently earn an MBA from the Whitman School of Management and an executive master of public administration degree from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.

“The DCP was essentially a crash course in things I do day in and day out when it comes to understanding Army resources, understanding how the Department of Defense and all of the services make resource decisions and understanding how what’s going on in Washington could potentially impact my budget for next year,” he says. 
Early in his Army career, Lakey was assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He had a supervising officer who was a graduate of DCP and encouraged him to apply.

“It’s considered an education-broadening assignment,” he says. 

Lakey, then a captain, was accepted into the program with eight years of active-duty service. An ROTC graduate of Florida A&M University, he had already completed a master’s degree in management and leadership from Webster University. But he says his educational experience at Syracuse was next level. “The caliber of both the faculty and the students was exceptional,” he says. “To be able to learn from faculty who are still operating at top levels within their space — publishing or influencing policy — along with a diverse group of peers that you’re not just learning with but also learning from.” 

The team-building skills acquired from working on group projects are something Lakey draws from on a daily basis, he says. “Command positions at my rank are primarily staff positions that require you to work with a lot of peers and provide peer leadership,” he says. “That’s something that I gained from working on DCP group projects where you had to overcome challenges — language barriers or scheduling conflicts — and pull on the strengths of others in a time-constrained environment while juggling four or five graduate level courses at a given time.”

Lakey says his most important takeaway from the program was a better knowledge of business analytics, “how to interpret data, visualize it, explain it and leverage it for enhanced decision making within your organization,” he explains. “The program also helped me communicate at a more executive level, to be clear and concise in both written and verbal communication.”

Lakey was inducted into Beta Gamma Sigma as part of the top 20% of his DCP cohort and received the LTC Thomas P. Belkofer Award for achieving the highest GPA in the DCP class of 2019. A year out of the program, he was promoted from captain to major.

For military officers working in finance, Lakey believes the DCP has a direct correlation to promotion rates. “I think everybody who leaves the program is going to be more prepared to succeed and is going to be put in positions where they can leverage the skill sets gained,” he says. “It certainly made an impact on me.”

By Renée Gearhart Levy