The consolidation of Director of Naval Intelligence (N2) and the Deputy CNO Communications Networks (N6) into a single entity will ensure the fleet is provided the right information in a timely manner so that it can be used effectively, according to the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO).
Additionally, exploring other ways to deploy networks and sensors will become important as the Navy continues to develop its unmanned systems programs, CNO Adm. Gary Roughead told sister publication Defense Daily in a recent interview.
Roughead said the Navy has continued to look at itself as ships, airplanes and submarines. “That’s what you see. That’s what’s carrying the power of the Navy.
“The power of being able to generate a particular effect is enabled by those things, but the power is in the network,” he said. “The power is in the ability to use that force to provide the information at the right time, to the right place, in the right way, so that we can very effectively do what you need to do.”
Organizationally, the Navy is very much focused on the ships, airplanes, and submarines, Roughead said. “And, as a result of that, the decisions that we make, the way we can optimize the power of those individual units, has been hampered,” he said.
That’s because the service isn’t thinking in terms of being a network, Roughead added. “We don’t see the world that way. We don’t buy our stuff that way. We don’t envision the whole…we still look at it in piece parts.”
That started becoming apparent to Roughead when he was commanding the U.S. Pacific Fleet, he said.
“Then when I got up here and went through that budget cycle, it just continued to reinforce and reinforce and reinforce. And then at the end of the ’10 [budget] process, that’s when I moved,” Roughead said.
In a June 26 memo to Vice Adm. David Dorsett (N2), Roughead said the nature of operations today demands a whole-warfighting approach to how the service plans, resources, and assesses its operational and combat capabilities.
“The Office of the Chief of Naval Operations (OPNAV) must be organized to achieve the integration and innovation necessary for warfighting dominance across the full spectrum of operations at sea, under the sea, in the air, in the littorals, and in the cyberspace and information domain,” Roughead said in his memo.
“If you would have asked me a year ago, was I going to move at the end of the ’10 [budget] process, I would have told you ‘yes I am,'” Roughead said. “Because I knew we had to go there. But to throw that into the mix of a changing administration, a budget that is being [rewritten]…I just think it would have been extraordinarily disruptive.”
Additionally, Roughead said he was helped by the fact that the Defense Department has established the U.S. Cyber Command, and he has to create a component for that. “[I am] moving at the same time to create cyber fleet, [so] now is the time to go.”
“Also, I have two years left to continue to husband this and that is what I intend to do,” he added.
Developing, maintaining, and securing networks is an absolute imperative, Roughead said.
“When I was in the Pacific, in addition to being Pacific Fleet Commander, I was the Joint Task Force 519 commander, and the reliance on information…you have been able to see it build over time and over time and over time,” he said. “When I do training, I like to be as realistic as possible, and also to see how people react to outages of information, to generate that fog of war,” Roughead said. “You begin to see how critical it is, how important it is, and to a certain degree how inefficient you can be because you are overwhelmed with information.”
That led Roughead to question how does the Navy design the systems and put the processes in place so personnel are getting the right information, to the right place, at the right time.
“We could pump a lot of information. There is a difference between being able to move a lot of information and being able to move the right information at the right time to the right place,” he said. “The latter is a whole lot harder I think.”
And if the system is challenged, how is that overcome? How do personnel work around that, and how has the Navy designed its architecture to allow sailors and officers to work around and through those challenges, Roughead said.
“Because technology is moving so quickly, how are you able to make the right investment decisions as to what you are going to change, when are you going to change it, and then what configuration it will change, too,” he added. “What are you going to acquire, when, how, and then what’s your architecture? We don’t have a way of thinking about that.”
The Navy has kind of compartmentalized-off the power of the networks to its DCNO Communizations Networks (N6), Roughead noted. “Yet we still had other entities going off and making decisions that were sometimes disconnected from this. That is going to become, in my mind, increasingly important in the future.”
But it’s not going to replace the need to have that presence or kinetic capability when it’s needed, he added.
Roughead said it’s an easy trap to fall into–believing that the network can do all things–that the service will have ships out at sea with a massive network, and the Navy will be able to do everything. “But it sure does enable how you use the force.
The other aspect, Roughead pointed to, is that the Navy is going to be introducing and growing its unmanned systems capability.
“If we continue to simply use those unmanned systems like we use our manned systems, I’m not sure you are going to see that much of an operational gain out of it at all,” he said. “But if you can come up with different ways of deploying networks and control structures that are different than what you had, then I think you can realize a quantity improvement. If we don’t do that, we could actually end up going the wrong way on manpower because we will take the pilot out of the airplane…but there are 100 people in the back room flying everybody around.”
How to exploit unmanned systems is going to be a function of the networks and sensors, and how information is moved from sensors to the right person who really needs to have that information and not simply move it to someone because they want to have the information, Roughead said.
“Those are the things we are going to have to think about and if we can get our heads around that, then I think we can make differences in how a Navy operates at sea in ways we haven’t done before,” he added.