By Geoff Fein
The Navy’s Consolidated Afloat Network Enterprise System (CANES) is not only taking a number of existing legacy efforts, funneling them down into a single program, but whichever design is finally chosen will be owned outright by the service, according to a Navy official.
CANES is predominately a low-risk program, taking five legacy systems and combining them, programmatically, and from a requirements perspective, into a single infrastructure, Capt. D. J. LeGoff, program manager for tactical networks program office, Program Executive Office command, control, communications, computers and intelligence (PEO C4I), told reporters during a conference call yesterday.
Those five legacy systems are:
- Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) Networks;
- Integrated shipboard network system (ISNS) on platforms today;
- Combined Enterprise Regional Information Exchange (CENTRIXS), which is the Navy’s coalition infrastructure;
- Submarine Local Area Network (SubLAN), the standard network on submarines; and
- Video information exchange (VIXS) program
“The obvious benefits here, if you take a look at those five legacy programs, each one of them grew up separately with their own requirements documents, they run the spectrum from a non-ACAT (acquisition category) to an ACAT 2, they grew up with different technical solutions,” LeGoff said.
“If you look at the programs and the products that [make up those program] you can come up with 35 different racks associated with those programs,” he added. “If you think of the logistics cost, the training, the supportability and usability concerns there for the sailor, you find that is an untenable situation we find ourselves in.”
CANES takes that infrastructure and reduces it to a common baseline, LeGoff said. “There is obvious savings there for us to realize. We are going through the process of realizing those [savings].”
What is key to CANES is that the efforts are based upon using commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) solutions, he noted.
“We have told our primes we don’t want them to reinvent the wheel on this. This is predominately a COTS integration effort using smart current business practices to do good things for the users,” LeGoff said.
There will be nothing in the CANES program that hasn’t already been approved. The Navy is not waiting for any technological breakthroughs to make this program a success, he added.
One of the key tenets of CANES is that the Navy is building security in from the ground up, LeGoff noted. “CANES is the only fully funded computer network defense program in the afloat Navy right now.”
The Navy is currently in the midst of a competition between Lockheed Martin [LMT] and Northrop Grumman [NOC], both winners of an earlier competition. The service received four bids for CANES; the losing entries were from BAE Systems and Boeing [BA].
In March, Lockheed Martin was awarded 14.9 million for a 14-month system design and development (SDD) phase. Northrop Grumman won a $17.4 million contract for its SDD effort (Defense Daily, March 5).
“We source selected down to two [primes] based on some prototyping efforts, architectural approaches and engineering approaches. In about nine months from now, we will once again do a competition. We will select a single design from our winning vendor and that design will be turned around into GFI (government furnished information) and we are going to compete one more time for full-rate production,” LeGoff said.
Both Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman successfully completed their preliminary design reviews in July. The two teams are now focused on completing their critical design review phase.
Last week, the Navy wrapped up its cost review board, LeGoff said. “We now have an approved cost position for the program, which is another step forward in the process.”
LeGoff is preparing for a gate review next Monday before Sean Stackley, the Navy’s acquisition chief
After that, CANES enters into the Office of Secretary of Defense staffing chain, he added. “If things continue on pace, then we are scheduled for our Milestone B with AT&L on or around mid-November. Again, all of that is going according to scheduled, according to pace.”
CANES will initially be installed on two DDG-51-class combatants in early fiscal year ’12, LeGoff said. Those installations will represent the first two engineering development models, he added.
The current schedule based on the current budget has the Navy doing 11 more installs in FY ’12, 19 in FY ’13 and 24 in FY ’14, LeGoff said. “Then we ramp up from there. Granted that is all based on budgets today and that can change, but that is what we are looking at right now.”
The Navy’s funded inventory objective is to install CANES on 189 ships and four training sites, he added.
“The full operating capability, meaning our entire inventory objective, is populated for afloat ships is FY ’18,” LeGoff said. “Our submarine full operating capability is 2021, but we don’t start until 2014.”
But before any installations begin on surface ships, the Navy intends to hold a final competition for the full-rate production contract to get CANES into the fleet, he said.
“The existing contracts go through a competitive phase downselect that has a one-year option for limited deployment and an additional one-year option for full fielding,” LeGoff explained. “After that, this contract is no longer good.”
The final contract is still to be hashed out, he said. “We have folks off doing studies on what are the best strategies forward for that contract.”
The contract will have three major pieces to it, but whether they are contained in one contract or three separate contracts is something the Navy is working on, LeGoff said.
Those pieces are:
- Design services;
- A production piece; and
- An installation piece as an option.
“All three of those pieces have to be molded into a single strategy,” LeGoff said.
“When we downselect in July next year, we will downselect to a design. That design will be government owned and will be GFE (government furnished equipment) and GFI,” he said. “We welcome any vendor to come and bid on it. We are not downselecting to a specific set of boxes, we are downselecting to a design.”