It's not like you'd think, says Jim Symonds. Well, yes, the people who work for him always call him "sir," and they tend to jump to their feet when he walks into the room.

But U.S. Navy Rear Adm. James A. Symonds says that he can't rely on his lofty title and his fancy uniform to get his team moving in the direction he wants.

"If I'm down to that, I feel I've failed," he says.

So if he can't pull rank, what does an admiral do? The same thing as CEOs out of uniform, he says.

"Keep people focused and motivated, take advantage of their strengths, understand what they're telling you about their jobs. My units have done fairly well, and I didn't come at it with any more complicated idea than I was going to see to my folks' welfare, make sure they're challenged and rewarded.

"That's my bumper sticker on it," he says. "Take care of your people, and your people will take care of combat readiness."

Symonds is the commander of Navy Region Northwest, the third-largest of the Navy's eight regional commands. In that role, he oversees operations at Naval Base Kitsap, Naval Station Everett, Whidbey Island Naval Air Station and a couple of smaller installations.

By any measure, it's one of the state's largest organizations. Symonds has 3,000 people working for him and an annual operating budget of $340 million. If Symonds' command were a private company, it would be one of Washington's 20 largest, in terms of dollars -- and the second-largest in terms of manpower. It often gets overlooked, but the military is a major component of the state's economy, says Donna Thompson, a state labor economist.

There are more than 100 military installations around the state, from the Army's sprawling 87,000-acre Fort Lewis -- home to some 25,000 active-duty and civilian personnel -- to small-town National Guard armories scattered from Montesano to Moses Lake. The Department of Defense spent nearly $4.77 billion statewide in 2006, Thompson says. The Navy alone had a $1.5 billion payroll last year -- making it roughly the size of two Amazon.coms -- plus it spent another $477 million buying goods and services within the state.

That doesn't take into account the dollars spent by military families and retirees, Thompson says. And it also doesn't include the money the military spends on Boeing airplanes or weapons research, says Erin Nielsen, the director of the Washington Procurement Technical Assistance Center. She says that amount totaled nearly $3 billion in the last federal budget year.

The bases Symonds runs are home to a force greater than most of the navies on Earth. Two aircraft carriers are based on Puget Sound -- the USS Abraham Lincoln in Everett and the USS John C. Stennis in Bremerton; so is Destroyer Squadron 9, a flotilla of surface escorts intended to protect the Lincoln at sea. The Navy's entire force of electronic warfare planes -- the radar-jamming E/A-6B Prowlers -- is based on Whidbey Island. And that's not to mention the eight Ohio-class submarines at Bangor, on Hood Canal, each carrying 24 Trident missiles with eight nuclear warheads, or the half-dozen or so torpedo-toting attack subs based at Bremerton and Bangor.

Symonds doesn't command those ships or planes, but he does command their home bases, providing the ship captains with the manpower and materiel needed to keep them combat-ready. It's a pretty big job for a guy who figured he'd do one quick tour of duty, take his wife out to see the world, and then settle into a nice career as a high school math teacher.