It is an old story, but new versions keep happening. A high-level military official negotiates with a contractor. He seeks employment, leaves the government, and joins the contractor. He may not have a conflict of interest, but if it looks like he does, that’s trouble. The Federal Drive with Tom Temin discusses this potential problem with Zach Prince, a procurement attorney with Haynes and Boone, LLP.

Interview Transcript:  

Tom Temin Zach, tell us about the most recent decision resulted from protest, but a company was left out of a competition because of that appearance. What happened? Yeah.

Zach Prince So this is a procurement involving, dual band decoy system, which is intended to be, mitigation system for radar guided missiles that are targeting military aircraft and specifically the F-18. So right now, that you’ve got missiles that use two bands of radar to track aircraft, it’s very challenging to have effective countermeasures for them. So, the Navy is trying to develop and then implement a replacement for their current solution. So, they had two rounds of this and they’re going to have multiple iterations of the program. The first was a technical demonstration type portion that started a few years ago and followed on with an engineering, manufacturing and design phase and phase. Now, ultimately, it’ll go into, you know, low rate and full rate production. BAE and Raytheon were both recipients of the contract for the demonstration of the existing technologies. As part of this, at some point between that portion and the next portion, Raytheon started discussing employment with a Navy employee, longtime mathematician and technical expert with the Navy, with Navy Air, specifically who was running this program. And he left and joined Raytheon and then began representing Raytheon back to the government as a concern. This program had something to do with their response to the Navy’s request for information for the second round, some disputed amount of involvement for the submission of the proposal for the second round. And at some point the Navy realized, hey, this at least has a bad smell to it, and started doing a pretty thorough investigation.

Tom Temin Right? So, this fellow VK had participated in all of the work on the Navy’s behalf for the first phase of this long-term program, and while he was negotiating and dealing with Raytheon, he was also trying to get a job there, basically, and got the job. And now they’re into the dealing with the Navy for the follow on.

Zach Prince Yeah, to be fair, it wasn’t as egregious as I think. We all remember the tanker case from back in the early 2000 with the Air Force and Boeing. This guy VK was not actually negotiating for the government. He was doing some very technical work making recommendations on the technical implementation of the program. He wasn’t deciding solutions, but he did have access to proprietary information. And he had signed an NDA with the Navy expressly saying that he wouldn’t work for anybody who was part of this program.

Tom Temin Okay, so if it’s a very wide gray area, he was at one edge of it, let’s say, and a contracting officer decided to pull on that thread.

Zach Prince Yeah, he did. And somebody from the government raised the issue internally. The Navy did exactly what they’re supposed to do. They did a very thorough, extensive, monthslong investigation where they spoke to a number of people in the Navy. They gave Raytheon multiple opportunities to offer, comment and respond. And ultimately, they concluded that the appearance of impropriety here, they didn’t say there was necessarily impropriety, although it was really close, but at least the appearance was enough that they felt they had to exclude Raytheon from the competition.

Tom Temin And therefore I imagine Raytheon said, nope, we protest.

Zach Prince That’s right. I mean, it’s an important program. And the initial award, the MD phase, I think it was maybe $50 million. So, it’s not huge. But I think long term this is going to be multiple hundreds of millions of dollars not to get into full rate production or more. So, this is an important project for them. They protested to GAO and lost. Because the agency has a lot of discretion in these types of determinations. And then they filed that on to the court.

Tom Temin Right. And what happened at the court level?

Zach Prince They lost again, they had some pretty extensive briefing, some interesting arguments raised about why the mere appearance of impropriety without real hard facts that taint the procurement is not enough. But ultimately, their arguments tried to sideline some pretty clear Federal Circuit case law and the consistent decisions of the Court of Federal Claims, which really uphold the decisions of the contracting officer on this issue. In fact, Judge Sampson, who wrote this decision, said he did a survey of all the cases that have been decided by the court on this issue, at least since a federal Circuit decision that sort of set the precedent in the early 2000s. And not once has the court overturned the government’s decision on this.

Tom Temin Yeah. You wonder what the motivation of the company, or at least the judgment of the company was. I mean, you can see from an employee standpoint, the industry beckons with compensation packages, you know, in a cushy type of situation. But the company institutionally knows these shoals, especially long serving old line company like Raytheon. I mean, we can only speculate. So right now, then they’re out. Period. The end.

Zach Prince Yeah. That’s right. And my impression from reading these cases, I don’t think Raytheon really knew at all how much in-depth involvement this guy had with the program, and they knew that he was a fairly senior, very technically skilled individual from the Navy office that they have dealings with. And I think the level of expertise in electronic warfare countermeasures, particularly that this guy had, are really unique. So, Raytheon wanted to hire him on. He didn’t tell them that he had involvement with this program. And in fact, he called HR, the record shows like two days after he started with Raytheon and said that his involvement was very, very light in this program. He didn’t tell his ethics people that in the government, when he got his ethics letter, it was pretty clear that he was obfuscating his involvement because he did want to go to the private sector.

Tom Temin Right. So, one of the lessons is you don’t have to be part of the source selection board to get the government and your future employer into trouble.

Zach Prince Yeah. That’s right. If you’re a contractor, don’t let your contracting officer counterparts be blindsided by stuff like this if you possibly can. And maybe they couldn’t have. Here, make sure that you’re coming up with some mitigation strategy as early as you can. And Raytheon, as much as I just said, yeah, they probably didn’t know his full involvement. The record also shows it, BAE sent a letter to Raytheon not long after this guy started saying, hey, we know that you’ve got this guy. We think that there are some major issues with you having had this guy, because he had major exposure to our technical solutions and IP, you know, make sure to be following those government employment restrictions. They didn’t really.

Tom Temin Yeah. It’s almost what happened with the Defense Department more recently with the cloud contract, the Jedi contract that ultimately got sank. And one of the reasons involved there was that someone had worked in the government and ended up at the cloud company, or had been at the cloud company, then at the government, whatever. Not a source selection person necessarily, but an influencer, an adviser deep in there. And somebody ferreted that out and that ultimately helped sink that whole program, which they’ve now replaced with the joint warfare cloud capability. And that one is going and its multiple vendors. So, any other lessons that companies ought to take from this?

Zach Prince Yeah. It’s always such a challenging balancing act because on the one hand, as a company doing business with DoD, you want to have people who understand the inner workings of DoD. On the other hand, there are many situations were hiring just those types of people can create at least the appearance of conflicts, and that’s enough to taint the procurement. If the government is not convinced that there are mitigation mechanisms in place. So, you do want a firewall. People like this off from their former programs as much as possible, set up some ways in advance that you’ve documented for avoiding the appearance of impropriety, because otherwise you could end up in this type of situation precluded from doing work in a major program.

Tom Temin Yeah, sometimes the revolving door leads to a brick wall, you might say.

Zach Prince Good way to frame it.

The post When the door from government-to-industry leads to a brick wall first appeared on Federal News Network.

• The Navy has a new strategy for science and technology. Navy leaders have branded it a “call to service” for scientists and engineers from across the country to help solve military problems. The focus areas include autonomy and artificial intelligence, power and energy, manufacturing, and a host of other issues. The plan does not spell out how the Navy will make progress on those objectives, but Navy Secretary Carlos del Toro said the new work will involve partnerships with the Office of Naval Research, the Naval Postgraduate School, the U.S Naval Academy and the Naval War College.
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The post Navy unveils new strategy for science, technology first appeared on Federal News Network.

A few years ago, the Defense Department drafted a legislative proposal to get rid of principal cyber advisor positions across all services.

While this idea didn’t make it out of the Pentagon, three-plus years later, Chris Cleary, the former principal cyber advisor for the Department of the Navy, said that was a good thing.

Cleary, who left government recently and joined ManTech as its vice president of its global cyber practice, said the impact of the principal cyber advisor in the Navy is clear and lasting.

“This is challenging because all the services in the very, very beginning wanted to get rid of the principal cyber advisors. There was a legislative proposition that was trying to be submitted and Congress came over the top and said, ‘No, you’re going to do this,” Cleary said during an “exit” interview on Ask the CIO. “So year one in the job, I make the joke, I was just trying to avoid getting smothered by a pillow because no one wanted this position especially after we just stood up the re-empowered CIO office so what’s a PCA? And what’s this person going to do for the organization? I was very attuned to that and ready that if the decision is to push back on this creation, and maybe do away with the PCA job, I was just going to go back to being a chief information security officer. I was being a good sailor and focused on whatever are the best needs of the Navy. I was prepared to do that.”

The move to get rid of the principal cyber advisors never came to fruition and, instead, the Navy, and likely other military services, now see the value in the position.

Cyber advisor wields budget influence

Cleary said one way the principal cyber advisor continues to provide value is around budgeting for cybersecurity. He said each year his office submits a letter on the “budget adequacy” to the Defense Department’s planning process, called the Program Objective Memorandum (POM).

“I found that the PCA office really became the champion for advocating and supporting programs like More Situational Awareness for Industrial Control Systems (MOSAICS), which was a thing we were doing for operational technology systems ashore, and another product called Situational Awareness, Boundary Enforcement and Response (SABER), which was its cousin and for OT stuff afloat,” he said. “What you found is both of those programs are being championed by hardworking, honest Navy employees that just couldn’t break squelch to get a properly resourced or funded or programmed for. The PCA was able to champion these things within the E-Ring of the Pentagon. Things like MOSAICS, as an example, I am very proud of, we worked very closely with the Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Energy, Installations and Environment, Meredith Berger. She very quickly recognized the problem, most of this fell kind of within her sphere of influence as the person responsible for resourcing all of the Navy’s infrastructure. She very quickly embraced it, adopted it and hired an individual within the organization to look at this specifically.”

Cleary said over the course of the next few years, he worked with Berger’s team as well as other cyber experts in the Navy and across DoD to do deep dives into how to secure OT.

When the Defense Department rolled out its zero trust strategy in November 2022, the services faced more challenges around operational technology than typical IT. Cleary said the PCA helped the Navy better understand the OT stack was more complex and the tools used for IT wouldn’t necessarily work.

“The further you get down closer to an actual device or controller you can’t just roll a firewall out against that,” he said. “They have their own vulnerabilities and risks associated with them. But they’re things that we haven’t traditionally looked at when you when I’m talking about OT, like weapon systems, defense, critical infrastructure, these massive foundation of things that not only enable what we do from an enterprise IT standpoint,  but we’ve got to keep the lights on and the water flowing, and the Aegis weapon system has lots of computers with it, but that isn’t an enterprise IT system so who’s looking at those, who’s resourcing those, it’s only been the last decade or so that we’ve seen a lot of these is legitimate target areas.”

Champion of attention, resources

Cleary said his office helped get the Navy to spend more money and resources on protecting operational technology because it wasn’t always a top priority.

The OT example, Cleary said, is exactly why Congress created the PCA.

“We didn’t do any of the work to create these things. We just champion them appropriately and ensure they got the attention they deserved. And then ultimately, the resourcing required so they can be successful,” he said.

Cleary said it was clear that after three-plus years as the principal cyber advisor for the Navy, the benefits outweighed any concerns.

He said with the cyber world becoming more convoluted and complex, the position helps connect dots that were previously difficult to bring together.

“I think Congress would come and ask a question and they would get 10 different answers from 10 different people. I’m not saying we got there. But the idea of the PCA was to get those 10 different answers from 10 different people and then try to consolidate that answer into something that made sense that we could agree upon and present that answer back to Congress,” he said. “I’m not going to say we fully succeeded there because there are a lot of ways around the PCA and the PCA offices, but I think as the offices get more and more established, organizations like Fleet Cyber Command for the Navy, the Naval Information Forces and others were seeing the benefit of the PCA’s job to be the middleman and deal with the back and forth.”

Continue to create trust

Cleary said toward the end of his tenure, these and other offices, including the Marines cyber office, started to work even more closely with his office on these wide-ranging cyber challenges. He said the principal cyber advisor was slowly, but surely becoming the trusted cyber advisor initially imagined.

“I use the analogy of a fishing line, when you start pulling out a fishing line and you’re not sure what the weight of the fishing line is, but if you break the line, it’s over. So the trick was to pull on it with just the right amount of tension without risking or breaking it,” he said. “I knew the PCA office was something new and if the relationships with those organizations became tenuous, or were cut off because of the PCA coming in and say, ‘Hey, you shall do this or that,’ it wasn’t going to work. The way I envisioned the role of PCA was not to tell anybody inside the organization how to operationalize their own environments. My whole job was to go to them and understand what it is they needed, based on their experience and their expertise, and then get them that. The more that I could be seen as a value and not here to check their homework and poke them in the eye about their readiness, the more successful I’d be.”

Cleary said for the principal cyber advisor to continue to be successful, they have to continue to establish trust, understand their role is personality driven and focus on getting the commands the money and resources they need to continue to improve their cyber readiness.

The post Why the principal cyber advisor ended up being a good thing first appeared on Federal News Network.

For the first time in its nearly 250 year history, the Navy has a woman as Chief of Naval Operations (CNO). Adm. Lisa Franchetti, in a recent Navy Times article, credited an earlier CNO (Elmo Zumwalt), for enabling women to advance in the Navy. CNOs, in fact, have exerted a lot of influence. Now the Naval History and Heritage Command has released — in hard copy — a 2015 volume detailing the activities of a century of chiefs of Naval operations. For more,  the Federal Drive Host Tom Temin spoke with historian and co-author Curtis Utz.

Interview Transcript: 

Curtis Utz Well, the position of Chief of Naval Operations again is legally established in 1915. But we do go back and look into the late 19th and early 20th century as to why did this position develop the greater professionalization of the Navy, the need to have better control. Because prior to this, the secretaries of the Navy are directly commanding the squadron commanders. And if you go back far enough, even individual ships. And the Navy realized that while they’d been able to succeed with this during the war with Spain, if you were going to start considering conflicts with larger naval powers, you have to be a bigger force, you have to get together, you have to be orchestrated and led by a uniformed officer that has a better understanding of what’s going on.

Tom Temin Almost like the British model where you have a politician, but you also have a professional that are close in rank, even though the politician may outrank, but really directing ships and saying, left rudder, right rudder fuel here. You need somebody that knows the ocean.

Curtis Utz Right. Well, one of the great controversies in creating this office was that secretaries of the Navy did not want to cede civilian control, which is required by the Constitution and by law for them to have. And the naval officers who were involved with this early on, they also understood that, but they were just very concerned that they didn’t have, necessarily, you would get a secretary with a good understanding of the professional and technical requirements of the early 20th century Navy.

Tom Temin Yes, there was a big shift to more mechanization. Aircraft were beginning to learn how to land on shift. It was getting complicated.

Curtis Utz Oh, yes. Very, very highly complicated. And when you look at some of the things that are in the early office of Chief of Naval Operations, they actually have the organization that oversees naval communications. You know, the development of radio, more advanced technology. Aviation is also under the organization, but they also have the people who oversee engineering and gunnery competitions, which doesn’t sound like much, but this is really advanced training. We are trying to encourage people to get better with these very sophisticated systems, because in the case of gunnery, you’re starting developed by 1910, 1912 period, where you’re throwing shells 12 or 15 miles and a pretty good physics problem to figure out if it’s going to be able to hit something. It is roughly two lengths of a football field.

Tom Temin Why did the Navy not call it the chief of staff like the other armed services?

Curtis Utz One of the things that several of the secretaries of the Navy had been worried about, and the term that a couple of them used was they were afraid of the Prussianization of the Navy because, the Prussian General Staff was very well known, and the Navy wanted to make it clear that this is more about operations. Because beyond this staff within the CNO’s office, there was the shore establishment that reported to the Secretary of the Navy, Bureau of Navigation, Bureau of Ordnance, Bureau of Construction and Repair, Bureau of Supplies and Accounts, Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, who provided a lot of the support. This organization was primarily focused on how do we go and operate.

Tom Temin Interesting. And now we have the Chief of Research in the Navy. That’s one of the ones that would be not reporting then, in this day, to the CNO.

Curtis Utz Well, at that time, I mean, [Naval Research Laboratory (NRL)] hasn’t even really gotten off the ground yet. And they are doing work by the 20s and 30s where, yeah, the chief of Naval Research is one of the guys who reports to the secretaries, because the bureau chiefs continued to report to the secretary. They did not report to the CNO, and that caused a bit of friction over time, as you can imagine.

Tom Temin I can imagine we’re speaking with Curtis Utz. He’s an Austrian with the Naval History and Heritage Command. And looking at the CNO from 1915 to 2015. Do they have influence on the Navy or as just people who operate? And they’re there for a couple of years come and go. I think I know where you’re headed on this answer.

Curtis Utz They have tremendous influence, but the types of influence vary over time. The one goal that all CNOs have had is make the U.S. Navy, the institution a better organization than you found it when you took the job. And part of their primary mission, again, throughout this entire period is how do you man train and equip the Navy? And that’s one of their primary responsibilities. Now, the one thing that does change a lot over time is, while they’re originally designed as an operational oversight, with the establishment of the Department of Defense and various reforms, since then, more and more of the operational authority of the CNO went away. First, under the 58 Reorganization Act, under the Eisenhower administration, and then, basically taking the service chiefs, not just the CNO out with Goldwater-Nichols to where operational control is out with the combatant commanders.

Tom Temin And let’s talk about some of the people involved, though. Zumwalt, we mentioned at the top is, I think, widely recognized as a transformational CNO who in the hundred years that you studied, who were some of the standouts and why?

Curtis Utz Well, Zumwalt obviously stands out because he’s quite young. He’s very much aware of the issues going on in the late 60s and in the 70s. He had commanded him Vietnam, and he realized there was a huge amount of transition going on that the Navy had to figure out a way to deal with, particularly as a transition to an all volunteer force first, having draftees. I think one of the admirals that came in to after him was Admiral Hayward. Admiral Hayward had been in command in the Pacific before becoming CNO, and he was really the first officer in the post Vietnam era that saw that the Navy didn’t have to just be defensive, because one of the big pushes was defend the sea lanes to Europe or, if necessary, Asia. And he’s like, no, we need to be able to project power ashore. And what he comes up with for the Pacific, he keeps pushing that when he CNO. And then essentially what he comes up with is co-opted by John Layman as the maritime strategy, which completely changes the outlook and direction of the Navy for the rest of the Cold War.

Tom Temin So then the CNO really can have a lot of influence, and then that devolves into what they buy, how they acquire the force structure and so on.

Curtis Utz Yes. The CNO still have the ability to influence these things. And they’re also the CNO is a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They have to interact with the other joint chiefs and the chairman trying to figure out how are we going to meet the national level mission. And one of the other things the CNO has had to worry about most of the time is how do we pay for it?

Tom Temin Yes, that’s always a question. Anything federally connected? And I had a technological question because,  just before Zumwalt, in those years, there was a convergence nuclear power for subs. But earlier than that, and I think within the span of this book, going back to 1915, steam conversion to more modern propulsion methods, it sounds like just an arcane thing down on the bottom of the ship, but that really affected range and logistics and a lot of other operational aspects that matter.

Curtis Utz Steam power had been around since the middle of the 19th century, but as you come up with better engineering plans, you have a conversion from coal to oil power. You come up with better design, more efficient systems. But when you do start transitioning to nuclear power plants, initially with submarines, then with aircraft carriers and even some cruisers starting in the 50s, essentially, instead of using an oil burner, you’re using a nuclear power plant to generate steam. You’re still using essentially a steam system. But the thing is with nuclear power, essentially, you’re range is unlimited, as far as that. You still have to have other supplies. You have to maintain your sailors.

Tom Temin You need stake and lettuce aboard.

Curtis Utz You know, stake, lettuce, ammunition, medical supplies, all those sorts of things. And arguably, you don’t really get true submarines. You get advanced submersibles until you get nuclear power.

Tom Temin Any new CNO that would come in in the future, what will they get out of this book, do you think?

Curtis Utz I think what the CNOs and the OPNAVs staff will get, and this was one of our goals, is here are the challenges your predecessors have faced in the past. And here is how they’ve looked at going about dealing with them. And some of them had to be exceedingly creative in how do you deal with situations? And hopefully this would get them to start thinking about what are your options. Don’t get stuck in a rut of the tradition that you’ve worked with, because sometimes you have to get out of that. But of course, there are limits on that. There are limits from the political specter. And of course, also, again, the financial perspective of how do you pay for this?

Tom Temin Maybe that’s the real naval tradition, is that you’re always changing tradition.

Curtis Utz You’re changing how you operate, you’re changing how you’re organized. But you still have the same in many ways. Basic mission of you have to go to see you’re often forward deployed, protecting the national interest. And I think that’s one of the things that the vast majority of people do not understand is the Navy is always on the job. The Navy is always serving in defense of the nation far forward. And it’s a huge challenge.

Tom Temin And briefly tell us about yourself. You’re not a veteran of the ocean, but you’ve been with the Navy a long time and I’m told you know where the bodies are buried.

Curtis Utz Yes. I first joined what was then known as the Naval Historical Center in 1992. I had done my graduate work at the University of Maryland, College Park, and had written on naval history, and served with the old Naval Historical Center for a couple of years. Went to another part of DoD, was a historian there for nine years, and then came back to the Naval Historical Center to run the Naval Aviation History Office. Then I ran the Naval Archives, and then they let me go back to just being a writing historian, which is good.

Tom Temin Have you been able to get aboard a couple of vessels?

Curtis Utz Yes. When I was first with the command, I went to see during the period where we were transitioning from, there’s no more Soviet Union. What do we do with power projection ashore? And I went out and participated in a multi-day exercise. It was on both Mount Whitney and the old Guadalcanal, which was one of the old big deck. And I got to see a little bit more of how things operate. I’ve also been on naval aircraft. I’ve been to any number of naval stations. The first time you get to sea and you’re out there for any length of time, you get a better understanding of what’s going on.

The post How the Navy has been shaped by its operations chiefs first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Coast Guard may be the most active federal agency in the aftermath of the Baltimore bridge that was knocked over by a container ship. For a summary of what it’s had to do so far and the resources it’s deployed, the Federal Drive Host Tom Temin  spoke to Baltimore District Commander Col. Estee Pinchasin.

Interview Transcript: 

Estee Pinchasin We’re about a week and a day in to the operation. The first day you remember was search and rescue and then recovery. We shifted to recovery operations, and it’s very hard decision to then go into salvage, because at that point we realized it was just too dangerous. The wreckage was so unstable that we didn’t want to put the divers in a in a dangerous situation. So we shifted to salvage operations. And in the meantime, we’ve marshaled the most incredible team resources, equipment to be able to tackle this. And you’ve got three efforts. You’ve got the channel, the 50 foot shipping channel that needs to be cleared and opened. You’ve got the vessel that needs to be refloated. And in the area outside the channel, there’s the bridge wreckage that needs to be removed. So that will rebuild the Francis Scott Key Bridge, as the governor describes. You need to know that while you’ve got these three efforts, they are being coordinated in an overarching manner through the Unified Command the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has brought on the supervisor of salvage from the United States Navy. Those are our nation’s top salvage experts reaching into the salvage community. So we’ve got the right team here. And it’s not just about the wreckage. It’s not just about the engineering to get the wreckage out. We know that recovery of those four unaccounted personnel is a part of this. So when we see the salvage operations that are going to be taking place in earnest, need to know that this is going to be an iterative process with every layer of wreckage that we pull up, we have to go back in and scan and survey and inspect to make sure that the load reacted the way we believed it would, that it’s as stable as it needs to be, so that the next iteration can be done safely. But they’re also going to be looking for any signs of the missing personnel or any areas that need further inspection that they could possibly be found. We all recognize that’s a very integral part of this operation. We’re not forgetting that it’s a part of every step.

Eric White  I don’t know if you have exact numbers or anything like that, ballpark is perfectly fine. As far as those resources from the Army Corps of Engineers itself. Can you just kind of tell me the sort of equipment and personnel that your agency is deploying to the situation?

Estee Pinchasin So right off the bat, the Corps started deploying its emergency response personnel. We brought in structural engineers from within the Baltimore district, but also from our structural center of expertise. Over in Philadelphia district, we launched survey operators and vessels from Philly as well to join up with the Baltimore district teammates. We brought in emergency managers and experts from areas around the corps. I don’t know how much people know about the Corps of Engineers, but we’re 38,000 people strong that literally build our country. We are engineering that our vision is engineering solutions to our nation’s challenges. And this is exactly what that is. But we bring in other partners as well. And that’s where the Navy and tying in with the Coast Guard in this unified command, all our state and federal partners, it’s a very powerful partnership. Another thing to remember is that this community and this the Baltimore community, we work together in this port on these channels all the time. The Baltimore District of the Corps of Engineers clears, navigational hazards and maintains the depth of these channels all the time, whether people realize it or not. When they’re ordering things on Amazon, that’s why that’s happening for our port. So the team that was able to spring together had the preexisting human infrastructure of relationships to come together quickly. There wasn’t a learning curve in figuring out who’s who. So that that made this response very quick and efficient.

Eric White Yeah, I wanted to touch on that. This is a good segue into, this is such a heavy undertaking. How are you maintaining the standard operations that your district already does, the important work that your district is already responsible for, while also contributing to this recovery and rebuilding effort?

Estee Pinchasin We are not doing this alone. When I mentioned that unified command, the Coast Guard, who is responsible for the overall waterway and their sector commander, Captain Dave O’Connell, he is the captain of the port. So he’s here with a massive amount of personal experience and expertise to put together this unified command, along with the state, along with the military, with the Maryland State Police, all the state agencies, federal partners supporting and helping. We also have the responsible individual that represents the shipping company who is responsible for removing and refloating the vessel. So this is not done alone with the Corps. The Corps doesn’t do anything alone. We are very reliant on our partners and especially our partners in industry.

Eric White And apart from the government agencies that you’re working with, what sorts of contractors have you all been working with in order to get this thing underway? I imagine somebody’s got to have those cranes. Somebody is the shipping company.

Estee Pinchasin Like I mentioned, we’ve got these three lines of effort we have, and I’m talking from a salvage operations. The governor put out our priorities. We know the top priority is recovering those families, that recovering the missing from our families that are still here in Baltimore. When I step down and do just the salvage operation, we’ve got three efforts here. We’ve got restoring the 50 foot federal channel, the shipping channel. We’ve got refloating the vessel. And then we also have to restore the overall waterway so we can rebuild the bridge. We have three salvage then that are working, that are salvage experts, that are working to restore all the conditions in the channel. And they’re working together. They’re sharing information. They’re sharing coordinated under the unified command through the Corps. But with the help of our partners in United States Navy, the sup sal, or supervisor of salvage operations for the Navy, and they come in with salvage expertise that can’t be matched. And it’s humbling to see, it’s inspiring to me as an engineer to see them duking it out and figuring out the best way to get after these things. There’s such passion here. And I think that for a lot of folks, any construction project, any dredging project, any major operation that’s taking place usually have these big, major pieces of equipment moving. And that’s when you think things are happening. But behind every one of those lists is a tremendous amount of engineering analysis that has to take place for them to figure out where to cut, how to cut, how to rig it, how to lift it. I’m learning so much about salvage operations through here that to understand that sometimes rigging a particular load, if we’re going to lift something that’s near 1,000 pounds, because that’s what we’ve got here, we’ve got a 1,000 ton crane that can lift a load that much of the Chesapeake 1,000. You might hear it being referred to on the radio as a chassis. If that’s going to lift 1,000 pounds, you’re going to have a lot of stabilization that’s taking place. You might have additional cranes that are stabilizing other parts of the spans that are being cut and then lifted. Behind every one of those lifts, someone is designing how to cut it, how they’re going to rig it, how they’re going to lift it. And they’re planning to do that not just to get it up. They’re planning on how they’re going to lift it so that the load underneath will react a certain way, so as to not endanger the crane operator and not to make the conditions more dangerous or complicated later. They’re looking long term out.

Eric White Are there any sorts of timelines that have been established yet, or is it just still so early?

Estee Pinchasin No, it’s so early. And I mean, honestly, we’re focused right now on clearing the channel and hopefully recovering our missing personnel. From my vantage point that’s our top priority, giving closure to those families that just celebrated Easter in an unthinkable way and trying to find a way to work as close as we can safely and as quickly as possible to get as much traffic as we can back going through to the Port of Baltimore. We’ve got 8,000 workers from that port. It had to make a mortgage payment two days ago. I think about that. That’s what’s motivating me, because I know the Corps serves our country, but we’re serving our people. And I know people can say, that sounds cheesy, but that’s exactly what that is. That’s always serving.

Eric White And can you tell me just about how you heard about when it happened? It happened overnight. Living here in Maryland myself, all my social media feeds were ablaze when this occurred. Can you just kind of take me through how you were alerted that such an event had occurred?

Estee Pinchasin So it’s interesting how it happened. My mother in law was the first person to call my husband’s phone. And as he hands me the phone and he tells me this, I pick up the phone and my phone starts going crazy. I mean, thank God for her. She’s up early. She’s incredible. She was the one that made the first call. Maybe we have to hire her into our emergency operations section, but, yeah, that was my first call. If anybody really wants to know on the record. And then I started getting calls while I’m on the phone with her internal to my organization. So from that, I call immediately to, captain O’Connell with the Coast Guard. And, we’ve been here together ever since. But you need to know that we know that this is a long road. We are getting our team together every day. We’re already looking at further out who’s going to come and replace our folks and everything that we’re working on for these intermediate milestones before we get the port completely open. And I think that’s the right answer. You don’t want to sprint and then die. You want to make sure that you can go in it for the long term, so that you’re fresh and sharp and thinking as clearly as you can bring in the assets that you need. So, that’s our plan. We have a good battle rhythm going, lots of good decision making and analysis. So I’m very proud of team. Can’t say enough about them.

Eric White One last question here. I know you’re busy, so I’ll let you go, but you’ve been here a while now. I’ve lived in Maryland all my life. Can you just talk a little bit about the uniqueness of these bridges? We’ve got the Bay bridge, and then we have also the Key Bridge. Just these long bridges over a big stretch of body of water that is so important in shipping, important shipping lanes. Where does that factor in of as far as just the amount of material that is required to build these bridges and now are in the body of water themselves? And what that means.

Estee Pinchasin It’s really complex. I think when you look on the horizon right now and your heart sinks when you see it from far away, that gorgeous bridge that you would see in the distance that’s now broken up in the water. I have to tell you, it can be a little misleading, because when you’re looking at it from a distance, you see these spans that are sticking out of the water. And you look at it looks like there’s some structural integrity there. They might they look like they’re kind of intact. As you start to get below the water and into the mud line, especially further down, we’re seeing through 3D side scan sonar. We’re getting a much better picture of the extent of the damage, and it is far more than we thought. When you look at it, your imagination will take you down and you almost think like that span is just going straight down. But as you start to get deeper and deeper, that is 50ft down, and that 50 foot channel is mangled and cantilevered, and there are portions of it that are completely crushed. They’re completely collapsed. So when we talk about cutting out these spans into bite sized pieces, and those bite sized pieces are hundreds of tons and being lifted up. You can envision it. It’s not easy when you see the imagery of the person on the truss and you know that he’s got three stories of building above him and three stories of building below him, and he’s cutting. You start to see the magnitude of this, but you can still envision I’m going to cut through. We’re going to have these pieces being taken off. As you start to get into the water, and you start to see the mangled mess that is displaying with the 3-D imagery. You start to realize that it’s much more complex, and being able to pull that out is going to require a lot of ingenuity, and they’re going to use different types of equipment for that. They’re going to they have cranes, heavy cranes that you might see. You might have heard about the Chessie 1000 being here, but you’re going to see they’re going to have to have grabbers and salvage buckets that are going to pull out wreckage. So it’s going to be an amazing feat. And I have no doubt we have the right team. 100% we have the right team. And Baltimore is going to come back from this. I hear the mayor, I hear the governor, our team. And a part of that is also just making sure that we give closure to the families that are part of this, too.

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When the Navy needed to quickly pivot tens of thousands of remote users off of virtual private networks because of the Ivanti security vulnerability, it managed to quadruple its use of a newer solution within the span of week. But it’s unlikely that officials would have had the confidence to make such a large move if the Navy Reserve hadn’t already paved the way.

That newer solution — called Nautilus Virtual Desktop (NVD) — started as a pilot project in the Navy Reserve in 2022. That was a logical starting point, since many of the 60,000 sailors who make up the reserve tended to be the least likely to have physical access to Defense Department networks in their day-to-day lives.

NVD makes that a nonissue. Sailors can access a virtual instantiation of the Navy-Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI) from any computer, including personal ones.

“We have Navy Reserve centers in every single state, and every sailor that is in the Navy Reserve right now is either in a fleet-concentrated area or in a non-fleet-concentrated area,” Cmdr. Stevie Greenway, the reserve’s deputy chief information officer, said during an appearance during Federal News Network’s DoD Cloud Exchange 2024. “For the sailors who are not in a fleet-concentrated area, they don’t have a lot of access to government computers and devices. So the virtual desktop is a perfect opportunity for them to be able to work from their homes and do some of their drill weekend stuff anytime they need to.”

Increased cost effectiveness

That ability has already helped the Navy Reserve cut its IT costs. Although it still maintains government computers at its reserve centers for sailors who are unwilling or unable to use their own computers via NVD, in most cases, there’s no longer a need to maintain large computer labs at those centers just so sailors can check their government email.

But making the transition also involved some up-front funding and technical challenges, said Lt. j.g. Christopher Gregory, command technology director for the Office of the Chief of the Navy Reserve.

“Our number one hurdle was kind of figuring out, ‘OK, each account represents dollars. How are we going to control this? How are we going to parse it out to our force?’ We started out with kind of a rudimentary process that involved a number of steps,” Gregory said. “I came in with that deck plate knowledge because I was the sailor coming in on drill weekends. And I thought to myself, ‘What’s the easiest way for one of my members to get online and to register and to send an email?’ So we designed an automation that removed all barriers. With a blank email sent to our addresses, a sailor is signed up, and they’re good to go with NVD.”

For the broader Navy, the eventual goal is to move about 200,000 users to NVD, which Gregory said offers sailors a better user experience than connecting directly to NMCI on a government-furnished computer.

Next step: Mobile devices

Meanwhile, the reserve is in the second phase of another pilot project to accomplish essentially the same objective with mobile devices. It’s called Mobile Application Management Without Enrollment. Much like the NVD concept, the idea behind MAM-WE is to let sailors use mobile apps to access their Navy accounts from their own devices.

“It’s another game changer,” Greenway said. “It allows you to use things like Microsoft Teams and Outlook, so you can send Navy emails from your personal device. Our big belief is we have to focus on the workforce — that’s one of the pillars in our information strategy. We have young sailors coming in, and we cannot tell them, ‘Hey, you can’t use your $1,000 device.’ We want to maximize that ability wherever they are to be able to work on their personal devices and do the Navy Reserve work they need to. We’re still getting user feedback, but everything so far has been very positive.”

MAM-WE works by keeping government applications in separate, virtualized containers on a user’s phone — isolated from other software that could pose a threat to government networks. And officials consider the risk of data spills to be very low because no government data is stored at rest on personal devices. Rather, it’s kept in a secure cloud environment.

For both NVD and MAM-WE, those types of advancements have helped make Navy security officials comfortable with bring your own device concepts that would have been difficult to swallow a decade ago.

“Honestly, it’s industry technology. The state of the market has risen, and DoD has smartly matched that,” Gregory said. “We’ve embraced zero trust in our architecture and how we build our networks, which is what the rest of the industry is going with. We have conditional accesses, which are kind of a first step. And then there’s artificial intelligence — our favorite buzzword — out there monitoring our networks autonomously and intelligently for the first time. So when a potential adversary tries to log in with a conventional conditional access token, from some area in the world at a certain time, the AI is able to identify that and shut them down. I would love to take the credit, but technology has come so far, so fast, and AI is really protecting our networks day in and day out.”

Discover more articles and videos now on Federal News Network’s DoD Cloud Exchange event page.

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The Navy bases its guiding principles for digital transformation on four basic concepts that is calls “horizons.”

Its Naval Identity Services are on the cusp of Horizon 1 — being offered as an enterprise service.

Meanwhile, the service’s virtual desktop pilot aims to make it easier for sailors, seamen, civilians and contractors to bring their own devices onto Navy networks. The service expects the pilot to remain in Horizon 2 for the foreseeable future, said Louis Koplin, executive director of the Navy’s Program Executive Office for Digital and Enterprise Services. The pilot’s team must demonstrate that the approach is ready to move into an enterprisewide service.

There are a host of other digital services that are in Horizon 3, the evaluation stage of whether it even makes sense to test them for enterprise use. And Horizon 0 is when a service or system is set to be retired.

Koplin said moving a project into Horizon 2 depends on several considerations.

The first is obvious: Does something actually need to be an enterprise service?

“If you build something that is lean learning and enabling so it’s efficient, it’s lightweight and it’s responsive to feedback and gets better, and actually lets people do their jobs faster, quicker, more securely and more cheaply, no one’s not going to want to use it. So you build a world-class product, and people are going to adopt it,” Koplin said on Federal News Network’s DoD Cloud Exchange 2024.

“On the flip side, there’s definitely value in the designation — for one thing, the process statements and criteria that really forces things to get to a certain level of maturity. We don’t want to put out something that is not credible. I personally have been very defensive about what we call an enterprise service for that reason. I don’t want to put something out that we announced as an enterprise service mandatory use, and then people go and they literally can’t order it. There’s no website. There’s no rate card, or maybe it’s centrally funded, or maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s on less than a full authority to operate. We’ve seen these attempts in the past, and it really is corrosive to the mindsets we want to have with digital experimentation and scaling, and innovation adoption.”

Finalizing memo on Navy Identity Services

The second useful part about the designation as an enterprise service is that it becomes a part of the Navy’s enterprise architecture. Navy PEO Digital detailed each of the technology horizons as part of a communication to industry.

Take the Naval Identity Services. The Navy has been testing NIS out for several years. It’s a key piece of the service’s zero trust journey and consolidates and standardizes the Navy around identity and access management.

The success of the NIS means Navy leadership is expected to sign a memo designating it as an enterprise service this spring.

“It’s got a bunch of things that are really great. The one that I think people don’t realize that I like the best is it allows us to do away with a system access authorization request, that DD-2875 form. It’s not because we’re not doing those checks and balances, of course, but because there’s a workflow and integration with authoritative data sources,” he explained. “For instance, being able to pull civilian status data from the Defense Civilian Personnel Data System instead of having someone type it in, or from the Defense Manpower Data Center for the official defense manpower data. I mean, that’s just great. It saves time, saves effort and the data quality is higher. Then, knowing that you’ve got access to an enterprise information environment when you onboarded, now we don’t need to fill out more of those PDFs. All we have to do is update the attributes, which roles and which workloads are you going to get access to. We have an automated standardized way to do that.”

Koplin said the benefits of NIS will extend beyond individuals, and help the Navy in  other ways, including with the goal of being financially auditable, federating privileged access management and giving users the ability to work offline, afloat and disconnected.

“Coming up in the next few months, we’ll start work on the Impact Level 6 implementation to go to the secret level,” he said. “We’re working on integration with Marine Corps directory services, synchronization with the Flank Speed attributes. In some cases, we are retiring some legacy identity infrastructure. But in other cases, it’s integrating where it’s already modernized and underpinning our zero trust cloud, and it brings additional capabilities in terms of automation, integration and control.”

Making progress on Navy-wide virtual desktop

The Navy’s other digital transformation efforts are a bit behind NIS.

The service is piloting a virtual desktop for bring your own device users with about 1,000 people. Known as Nautilus, the program aims to take these efforts across the virtual desktop, the physical endpoint and to mobile devices.

“We’re scaling all of them in line roughly with the Windows 11 mandate timeline, so that puts us around 18 months from now. The goal is to have all these composed capabilities that can meet different mission needs based on the persona of the customer that we’re supporting,” Koplin said. “There are some personas that the virtual desktop is great for them because either they don’t get issued a government device or they do today, but we’d like not to issue them a government device. The Naval Reserves have been big users of Nautilus’ virtual desktop.”

Another ideal Nautilus persona is an employee from industry who needs access to the Navy’s networks but can’t have a government-furnished device.

For most Navy servicemembers and civilians, however, the benefits of Nautilus will be two-fold.

“What this really lets us do is reset and go back to industry standard commercial configurations and commercial business processes so that you can log into a device fresh out of the box off the shelf. Just by using your Flank Speed email, your government email, it will log in, connect to the server, configure and register the asset, do all those things. So within, say, 30 minutes, you’re up and running,” Koplin said. “When we talk about moving the dial on those world-class alignment metrics in terms of having a higher customer satisfaction experience and reducing the time from potentially weeks or days to hours or minutes, it knocks them out of the park on many fronts. And that device is fully well managed in our zero trust architecture.”

Accelerating Navy cloud capabilities

Underpinning many of these efforts is the Navy’s cloud management office  runs called Neptune. PEO Digital recently went live with the first incremental upgrade of a servicewide cloud portal, and now it’s going to accelerate the pace to deliver more capabilities, Koplin said.

“2024 is definitely a building year for us, and that’s where we focus our efforts on getting applications migrated and modernized. But absolutely, we need to think about how we do that and that we’re not pushing a rope; that we don’t want to lift and shift an archaic application into a modern cloud environment and not really gain benefits — potentially even incur greater costs — because it’s not really a cloud-compatible architecture,” he said. “We are being very deliberate about how we do that. There are a lot of things in flight now that I expect to see bear fruit over the rest of 2024 into 2025, whether it’s those standardized onboarding processes, cloud maturity frameworks, standardizing some of our service models and service level objectives and agreements, our financial operations capability. It’s really keeping an eye on the business command and control of our cloud environments and how we’re consuming cloud.”

Koplin said the Navy isn’t doing all of these technology initiatives in a vacuum. The end goal isn’t just to implement the technology but rather improve the end user’s experience without sacrificing cybersecurity.

“Typically, we see this trade-off between security and convenience, customer experience versus cybersecurity. But in the case of zero trust, we’re getting more of both. That’s really exciting when you can make the users happier with a more convenient, lower-friction experience and the cyber operators happier because they have greater control, greater visibility and more fine-grained control,” he said. “We are really helping to enable that change in terms of designing, delivering and sustaining this world-class digital experience. One of the ways we do that is with our world-class alignment metrics, things like reducing user time lost, improving customer satisfaction and improving our adaptability and mobility.”

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For the Marine Corps, the move to zero trust is as much about collapsing networks and consolidating cloud instances as it is about modernizing its approach to cybersecurity.

This network unification and modernization initiative is why the Marines believe making the Defense Department’s 2027 deadline to meet the initial requirements under zero trust is more than doable.

Shery Thomas, the cyber technology officer and technical director for the Marine Corps Cyberspace Command, the Marine Corps Space Command and the Marine Corps Information Command, said the service is moving quickly toward a zero trust architecture.

“We looked at both the threshold and the objective requirements [of zero trust] and in terms of what are the capabilities that are currently available on the Marine Corps enterprise network. How do I transpose that to the tactical edge? Because if you do it the other way around the tactical edge might be a little bit deficient, and we didn’t want to do that,” Thomas said in an interview with Federal News Network at the AFCEA and U.S. Naval Institute West conference in February. “The assistant commandant has a directive that says to unify the network, and the unification of the network helps in terms of the agility, the response to decision making and the advantage that we bring to our warfighters. I treat the network as an adaptive organism that continues to change.”

Thomas said his team is optimistic about where they are on the zero trust journey after looking at their current cyber capabilities and comparing it to the target architecture they have to reach by 2027 as laid out by the Defense Department chief information officer’s office.

“From the individual pillar standpoint, I’ve got a big data platform. I’ve got enterprise data coming in. I’ve got tactical data. I’m able to put more sensors on those networks and I’m able to figure out in terms of user behavior, user analytics and then transpose that into the both the big data platform and into security information and event management (SIEM) and security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) short term analytics, storage, anomaly detection, the whole nine yards in terms of the totality of all of it,” Thomas said. “Why I can do that? Because I’m unifying the network. That’s a critical piece of it.”

Thomas said the Marines will no longer have to implement cyber capabilities on individual networks, allowing for standardization and optimization as well as the ability to ensure the cyber tools reach the tactical edge too.

Marines’ zero trust priorities

The Marines are moving from, for example, 17 different cloud instances that supported disparate networks like the ones used by the Marines Expeditionary Forces. Thomas said the Marines have been consolidating them into an enterprise network called the Marine Corps Enterprise Network and then finally the Marine Corps Warfighting Network.

“This will alleviate all of the problems in terms of individuals trying to get to that [zero trust] state, and then the entire Marine Corps, at one level, providing that,” Thomas said. “A tail to that is once the unification happens on the Marine Corps side, this will help in terms of the joint all-domain command and control (JADC2) interoperability with our service partners and coalition with our bilateral or any other partner nations. And then there’s this Cyber Command of in terms of big data platform, so once it’s all together, it helps in terms of a single repository containing all the information. I am not putting it into one platform or one tool, it’s a mesh.”

While the network consolidation continues, Thomas said the Marines have several ongoing zero trust priorities, including obtaining impact level five (IL5) for the unclassified network, improving the Marines Corps’ identity and access management capabilities, and implementing a big data platform.

“We’re moving out on the secret network rollout. So multiple different areas in terms of what’s the structure in terms of tactical edge and enterprise,” he said. “A new thing that I’ve been done to try to figure out to just unification of all the Marine Corps Community Services facilities related control services, industrial control systems and the SCADA networks, I’m bringing all that in so I can figure out the risk posture and do risk management across the entire terrain. What are our single points of failure? Because number one priority for the network is assured command and control in a crisis in conflict and in competition.”

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The Maritime Economic Deterrence Executive Council, or MEDEC, will focus on addressing risks related to foreign investments, enhancing supply chain resiliency and protecting innovation, technology and research efforts.

“While the work to protect our defense industrial ecosystem by each organization is not new, bringing them together as a unified, focused council to address maritime economic deterrence allows us to better synchronize our efforts,” Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro said at the Aspen Strategy Group event Thursday.

The council will be co-chaired by Vice Admiral Francis Morley, the principal military deputy to the assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition and Chris Diaz, the secretary’s chief of staff.

MEDEC will include representatives from various sectors, including the research and development community, critical infrastructure subject matter experts, the acquisition community, as well as law enforcement and intelligence organizations.

The council will use authorities already granted to the Navy, according to Del Toro.

Given a shift in reliance on the private sector to drive technology advancements that the Navy wants to leverage, including unmanned systems, advanced sensor technologies and artificial intelligence, Del Toro said the service needs to adjust its approach to protecting next-generation capabilities from the earliest stages of their development.

“The work of MEDEC is more than just preserving military advantages for our Sailors and Marines — we are undertaking these initiatives to better support our business and investment communities that we rely on to design, test and build the technologies and capabilities we adopt and field,” Del Toro said.

“As we broaden our engagements with our nation’s start-up, investment, and business communities that are responsible for driving advances in critical technologies, the work of MEDEC will only become more important.”

The Navy has been exploring unmanned surface vessels as a force multiplier and situational awareness tool. Task Force 59, for example, the service’s first task force driven by artificial intelligence, has already reached its full operational capability. Since its establishment, it has tested and operated more than 23 different unmanned systems. Last month, the task force launched a new task group with a focus on unmanned operations. The task group’s objective is to use unmanned systems to bolster security in the Middle East region.

The move also comes amidst the rollout of Project Overmatch, the service’s contribution to the Pentagon’s Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control, or CJADC2. The goal is to establish seamless communication and data-sharing capabilities across its entire ship fleet and all its assets. The project has been veiled in secrecy since its inception in 2020, with little to no details available about the initiative.

The council’s establishment also follows the White House’s efforts to bolster the country’s semiconductor capacity and catalyze research and development through the CHIPS and Science Act.

Last week, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy published an updated list of critical and emerging technologies significant to national security. The list includes artificial intelligence, advanced computing, data security and cybersecurity technologies and networking technologies.

Additionally, the Pentagon recently released the first-ever National Defense Industrial Strategy, laying out the Pentagon’s approach to strengthening the industrial base.

“We in the Department of the Navy are closely aligned with the NDIS, the broader Department of Defense community, and the White House on this issue,” Del Toro said.

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Unfortunately, bottlenecks in the submarine industrial base have regularly reared their heads in recent years, largely because capabilities in producing for this industry are often hard to come by. This isn’t surprising when you take into account that the submarine industrial complex has observed a shrink of more than 70% since the 1980s, and that’s one reason the Navy has begun to look towards additive manufacturing, also known as 3D printing.

While many may still think of 3D-printed objects as better suited for a toy store or a scientific lab, the ability to produce components using military-grade materials has taken shape in recent years, much to the Navy’s benefit. Parts large and small can now be produced on demand, in some cases consolidating hundreds of parts together, but without full buy-in from decision-makers, the technology may not reach its full potential.

A new breed of resilience

Despite that aforementioned shrink in the submarine industrial complex, the Navy plans to build two Virginia-class submarines and one of the much larger Columbia-class every year starting in FY2026, effectively five times the work that is performed today (one Virginia-class per year). This represents an enormous commitment from the Defense Department, one that would be difficult to achieve using traditional approaches.

Recently, HII’s Newport News Shipbuilding division and General Dynamics Electric Boat sourced a component from a 3D printing company that they plan to integrate onto the Virginia-class general attack submarine USS Oklahoma.

Because the original equipment manufacturer equipment integrators of the fleet implemented copper-nickel and other marine-based alloys, HII and GDEB created a deck drain made of those same alloys using additive manufacturing. This is one recent, salient example of how 3D printing affords the ability and opportunity to quickly onramp production capacity by fabricating the essential parts that keep vessels at sea for long periods of time in high-performance structural alloys.

Demands for relentless innovation

Between schedule delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic and supply chain related delays due to a lack of suppliers, the Navy and its manufacturers are seeing significant setbacks in their ability to deliver submarines on the cadence originally agreed upon. To make matters more complicated, the service says the high-priority Columbia-class submarines cannot fall behind schedule.

Additive manufacturing is being tested to fill that gap. In November 2023, the Navy sought to expand the supply chain for submarine parts by supporting companies explicitly interested in demonstrating capabilities in metal additive manufacturing. The Additive Manufacturing Center of Excellence has been purported to be the service’s only path to building the two submarine classes on time.

The Navy has already used additive manufacturing to print for several applications, usually small repair pieces needed for ships at sea: circuit covers, radio knobs and other items that would be difficult and expensive to access while deployed. However, this is a far more encompassing endeavor entirely – seeking to produce parts of incredible scale as well for the most demanding structural applications. The advent itself of the Additive Manufacturing Center of Excellence is a great sign of what lies ahead for the marriage of the emerging technology and submarine-related applications.

It’s an equally good sign that the Navy has faith in these applications. The director of the Navy’s submarine-industrial base program told reporters that metal additive manufacturing could increase capacity by 15-20% while improving quality and cutting production by as much as 90%.

Securing dominance in manufacturing

Already, there have been breakthroughs that make additive manufacturing a more comprehensive solution for the Navy and other maritime-related production industries – most notably the ability to print using specific alloys tailored to specific vessels. Another vital breakthrough required is the capability to test in reference environments 3D-printed parts and structures, ensuring a stark trend downward in faulty parts that could stall production at best and endanger servicemen and servicewomen while at sea at worst.

Transformational innovations in additive manufacturing for these applications are being developed by emerging startup companies and the private sector – everything from artificially-intelligent systems in control of intricate weld pool dynamics, to significantly higher deposition rates capable of printing at scales far in excess of what’s been observed in traditional applications. Currently, additive manufacturing is being employed to bolster certain parts installed in Naval submarines, though the Navy is poised to nurture the technology in order to ensure more integral, more structural components, could also be manufactured using additive in the near future.

As the Navy invests in the world of additive manufacturing, it’s incredibly likely that there will emerge more opportunities for other similar industries to take advantage of these developments, such that they could utilize additional alloys or additional 3D printing methods that are in development. As demand continues to skyrocket and supply through more traditional approaches continues to wane, additive manufacturing will become an increasingly more effective and immediate answer that can continue protecting nations on the capabilities of a new breed of advanced manufacturing.

Christian LaRosa is CEO and co-founder of Rosotics, an additive manufacturing firm that is rapidly developing the technology to print large-scale components

The post 3D printing might be saving naval manufacturing first appeared on Federal News Network.

Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro has made it clear, time and again, that readiness will not suffer.

Del Toro met with acquisition leadership yesterday to lay out how it will prioritize readiness over investments in new products.

Russell Rumbaugh, the assistant secretary of the Navy for financial management and comptroller, said Thursday that the acquisition professionals heard some of the details about the steps the Navy would have to take if Congress doesn’t pass a full year budget.

“Obviously, we’re still hoping this doesn’t happen. But it’s a little bit breathtaking when the Secretary has to sit there and hear the bad news delivered to his acquisition professionals,” Rumbaugh said after speaking at the ACT-IAC Digital Transformation Summit in Reston, Va. on Thursday. “Every time we go through these budget shenanigans, it makes everybody’s life harder. All of the funds distributions are different. We have multiple ways that we may have to chop it up to make sure we stay within the controls that we’re stuck with because of a continuing resolution and to create a lapse, it’s even worse. There’s plenty of drama and turbulence no matter what.”

The first of two current continuing resolutions expire March 1 for some agencies and March 8 for others.

It’s unclear if Congress will even pass all spending bills and there is some discussion about a full-year CR.

The Congressional Budget Office reported in January that a full-year CR could require big cuts to agency discretionary budgets. Non-defense agencies would face a 5% or a total of $41 billion in cuts, while defense agencies would have to reduce their discretionary spending by about $1 billion or 1%. If Congress passes a full-year appropriations at current levels, only non-defense agencies would face cuts under sequestration of about 9% or $73 billion.

In December, the Office of Management and Budget said that cuts under sequestration would not be decided until later this spring.

Navy to make readiness a priority

All of this uncertainty is leading the Navy to plan for the worst.

Del Toro said at the AFCEA and U.S. Naval Institute West 2024 conference in San Diego on Feb. 15 that the Navy may face a deficit of $40 billion without a full year budget.

“[W]hile Congress has so far avoided a painful and disastrous government shutdown, a full-year continuing resolution would be monumentally damaging to our efforts to build and maintain the fleet of today — much less the fleet of the future,” Del Toro said. “Without a full budget, our safety and readiness will suffer, at a time when we are ill able to afford it—lost time in readiness cannot be bought back through future funding.”

Rumbaugh added that the cuts from sequestration in 2013 severely impacted the Navy’s readiness and a decade later, it is “still trying to dig out of that hole.”

Other military services have rang similar alarm bells. The Air Force said a yearlong continuing resolution, estimating that the service would lose as much as $13 billion in buying power before adjusting for inflation. The Space Force would face the largest funding gap, losing nearly $2.6 billion in research dollars. The Air Force would lose up to $1.4 billion in research, test, development and evaluation dollars. It would have to cancel 34 construction projects, and the measure would impact seven national security space launches.

Navy auditability could suffer

Sabrina Singh, the deputy press secretary for the Defense Department, said on Monday that a full-year CR would have a major impact on the services and defense agencies’ readiness.

“No amount of money can buy back the time we lose when we are forced to operate under continuing resolutions,” Singh said. “If you add up the total time spent under a CR going back to 2011, we’ve spent nearly five years under CRs.  That puts our national security at risk and prevents the department from modernizing as we continue to be constrained to existing funding levels and prevented from launching new programs. We must break this pattern of inaction.  We can’t outcompete the People’s Republic of China with one hand tied behind our back three, four, five or even six months of every fiscal year. The best way that Congress can support the department is to pass appropriations bills into law as soon as possible. We need predictable, adequate, sustained and timely funding.”

Rumbaugh said both the potential funding shortfall and the focus on readiness over investment will have downstream effects on the Navy’s goal to become audit ready by 2028.

He said the migration to the new enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems is considered an investment. So if the Navy is prioritizing readiness over investments, including new ships, all the progress the service has made over the last few years will slow down.

“By 2026, we want to shut off [the legacy system] SABERS for the Department of the Navy and be out of that and into our big ERP. The nitty gritty is taking a bunch of commands and moving them, and some of them do have unique financial transactions we haven’t dealt with before,” Rumbaugh said. “Other times it is a modern magnification. And most probably you just kind of take the people with you. They have to learn we’re asking a huge amount of them to not just do their day job, but learn how to do their day job in a totally new environment. We are very sympathetic and very concerned about them even as we have to just do it.”

Marines already migrated

The Navy recently completed the migration of the Bureau of Personnel to the ERP. Rumbaugh said the Fleet Forces Command are among the final organizations that need to migrate and that will happen over the next few years.

“Migrating them is in process. We’re just cleaning their data, which you won’t be surprised to hear is a fairly formidable challenge. But we’re in the process, I can see the end of this migration. It’s great,” he said.

As a part of the ERP modernization effort, Rumbaugh said the Navy has retired 11 of 16 financial management systems, but a CR and/or sequestration would impact the service’s ability to shut down the remaining systems.

The Marines Corps already are well on their way to not only moving to a new systems, but, hopefully, auditability.

Rumbaugh said the Marines decided to move to Defense Agencies Initiative (DAI), a financial management modernization effort that doesn’t involve the services.

“They’re all the way there on the financial management, and that does just address a huge amount of problems,” he said. “There was still a bunch of side things we had to do, but that migration, that huge cultural change, which was absolutely turbulent, absolutely painful, they are through, and in fact, I think, now healing from it.”

The post Without full year budget, Navy to face $40B shortfall first appeared on Federal News Network.

SAN DIEGO — Like almost all agencies, the Department of the Navy does a good job of buying and replacing old technology. Where the DoN, and most others struggle is how to sustain that application or system over the long term.

Jennifer Edgin, the assistant deputy chief of naval operations for information warfare, said her office is leading a perspective shift to ensure technology is onboarded quickly and is always modernized.

“It used to be you would buy a system, a box that was contained with hardware, software, all different types of things and use it until its end of life. Then you replace it with the next best thing,” Edgin said in an interview with Federal News Network at the AFCEA West conference. “As cloud computing and other cloud-based technologies have come online, it changes that model. The Defense Innovation Board had a great quote. It said software was never done. So when we talk about sustainment, we are talking about the iterative updates, the update of software, the update of different capabilities and new things that come online. That’s a mindset shift. That’s what you see kind of permeating across a lot of the conference talks that we’re having out here and a lot of the perspectives that we’re trying to drive as a resource sponsor. Changing our mindset from a buy and replace to a buy and sustain so that our sailors can get updates when they need them, how they need them to face whatever they may be facing at sea.”

The mindset comes from initiatives like the Navy’s Black Pearl software development platform. It comes from the success of Operation Flank Speed to give more than 600,000 sailors, seamen and civilians access to modern workplace applications in a secure cloud.

Jane Rathbun, the DoN chief information officer, said giving sailors, seamen and civilians access to platform- and software-as-a-service that meets the Defense Department’s zero trust requirements through Operation Flank Speed underlies this new approach.

“We are encouraging and driving to the optimal use of that platform so that we can get out of on-premise servers and get out of shared drives and things like that. We really want to take advantage of the cloud platform that is so agile for us and will allow us to maneuver in places that we have not been before,” Rathbun said in an interview on Ask the CIO. “We’re testing out Flank Speed on a ship. We put a hyperconvergence infrastructure stack on the ship so that we could drive to, what the secretary would like to see, is email for life for our sailors. I think you’re probably well aware that today when you’re going to ship, you get a new email address. If you’re the commodore of multiple ships, you have multiple email addresses. It seems maybe not one of the most important priorities that we could be working on, but I think if we’ve got the technology, the technology is demonstrating that it can work, we should start evolving and improving the experience of the sailor.”

The aircraft carrier the USS Abraham Lincoln will test the hyperconverged infrastructure version of Azure, using different connections including low-earth orbit satellites or other access methods.

Navy modernizes records management

Rathbun said the Operation Flank Speed is an evergreening approach, meaning because it’s updated all the time, understanding how it works afloat is important.

“We also are looking at what unclassified applications could we store in that environment that could be leveraged on the ship? Think personnel training and logistics kinds of capabilities,” she said.

Rathbun said Operation Flank Speed is more than just email. The Microsoft Azure platform will let users develop applications at no or low cost, which is much different than the old way that relies on program managers and acquisitions.

A recent example that the DoN CIO implemented recently is around records management.

Rathbun said the Marines Corps started using Office 365 suite tools to manage a majority of their records and the DoN CIO saw that success and expanded the mandate to all of the Navy.

The new approach replaces the DoN Tasking, Records and Consolidated Knowledge Enterprise Repository (TRACKER). The Program Executive Office Digital worked with the Naval Network Warfare Command to test out a minimal viable product moving more than 20 million records to the new system.

Once the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) confirmed the MVP worked, the DoN CIO made this new approach the only way forward.

The Navy is considering using a Microsoft capability called Form Recognizer, which relies on artificial intelligence technology that lets users upload files and extrapolate text, whether handwritten or types, from forms, to further expand the records management capabilities.

Breaking up requirements

The move of records management to Office 365 is also a good example of another piece of this change that Edgin is pursuing. She said separating the functional requirements from the technical requirements is also part of this effort.

“When you say things like no code, low code, those are design parameters or technical requirements that we can put in place. The functional requirements are from a user’s viewpoint. I’m a sailor on a surface vessel, and I need to be able to accomplish A, B and C. That’s a great functional requirement,” she said. “If we look today, all of those things are integrated together. One of the things that we’re doing from our role as a resource sponsor is separating them because low code, no code could be what we use today, but maybe there’s a great computer advancement a year from now. The functional requirement is still valid, but how we meet that requirement could change. That’s where separating these two things will allow us to iterate very, very fast.”

Generally speaking, functional requirements remain relatively stable, while the technical side can change rapidly. Edgin said that is why having a good governance process with the technical side, the user community and industry also is key.

Edgin said the Navy needs to create an ecosystem that can support not only the separation of the technical and functional requirements, but also the ability to iterate software capabilities faster.

She said that ecosystem must be based on application programming interfaces (APIs) and driven by the people, processes and technologies.

The Navy recently addressed a key piece of the ecosystem by updating one of its main cyber policies last year.

Edgin said the old policy didn’t specify the role that everybody played in this modern technical ecosystem.

“We spent some time last year getting that policy right. I like to say we invited everyone to Thanksgiving dinner and put the place cards out, and now everybody’s really seated at that table,” she said. “Things from the technical side of our acquisition arm, where do they come into play here? Where does our fleet come into play here? How do we look at cybersecurity compliance and then the authority to connect? So where does the network owner, the platform owner come into this? We spent some time really getting that right, getting a governance structure right for how we make decisions and how we interact. The next hurdle that we’re climbing over is the playbooks. How do these work? How do we define those business process? That’s what we’ll be releasing in the next year.”

The post Navy seeks to break its buy, replace technology model first appeared on Federal News Network.

With the emergence of generative AI, the service is looking into the idea of incorporating natural language capabilities into classification guides to help assign security labels more accurately.

“The thing that typically comes up is, ‘Why can’t I have a little clippy on my machine that says it looks like you’re writing an email, you might want to classify this paragraph.’ It sounds easy in theory. And given all the cool things that we’re continually seeing being developed on the large language model stuff, you’d think this would be a slam dunk. It turns out, it’s really hard,” David Broyles, research program director at the Center for Naval Analysis, said at the DON IT West conference Wednesday.

Security classification guides are general by their nature since they can’t specify every single case. They rely on people’s ability to take a generic statement and make a determination about the appropriate classification.

Broyles said security classification guides tend to specify what information needs protection, but they lack explanations for why certain information needs a specific classification label.

“It would be interesting to ask the why because now we’re in a mode that is natural language. And this is where the large language models can come into play,” Broyles said.

“I asked Bard, ‘I want to know the general types of information about satellites that I would need to protect and why.’ After convincing it that I didn’t want to cause national harm, it finally spits out, ‘Here are some general types of information we might need to protect and why. For example, orbital parameters, which could be used to track the satellite or protect its movements.’ It also went into operational details about security measures, mission objectives, schedules. It identified key parameters very easily, but most importantly, it spits out why.”

In this scenario, analysts can combine the documents with the large language models to actively probe datasets to better understand the implications to security and subsequently be able to assign classification labels more accurately.

Broyles said while it’s not automation, it’s the first step of combining more powerful tools to be able to ask questions about datasets.

“Is this feasible? Is this possible? I don’t know. But it’s that sort of cusp of an idea of where things might go and might be possible,” Broyles said.

The topic of automation of data classification is a perennial one. The volume of restricted documents continues to compound every year, and no effective system exists to automate the process of data classification. While generative AI could potentially help tackle these complex challenges, Broyles said there is still a long way to go.

“We have large language models; generative AI has burst on the scene. And the question is, how much has changed? And to give you a little bit of a spoiler, the answer is really not much. It’s still really hard,” Broyles said.

In addition, any experimentation of AI tools for data classification and analysis would need to be conducted within secured enclaves.

Bill Streilein, CDAO’s chief technology officer, said that modeling and simulation can help address the challenges of working with classified data.

“Modeling and simulation is a way to create surrogate data sources that can help you build up the capability, demonstrate the power of what you can learn from that and then help motivate changes to policy and to practices and processes that can help you leverage more classified data,” Streilein said.

Broadly, Broyles said it’s important to incorporate a bottom-up approach and empower individuals directly impacted by a particular problem to identify solutions and drive change.

“The people closest to the problem are the best ones to be able to identify what would be great to be able to fix, automate, adapt,” Broyles said.

The post Navy explores generative AI to automate security classification first appeared on Federal News Network.

SAN DIEGO — When the Ivanti virtual private network vulnerability came to light in January, the Department of the Navy had an answer.

The DoN expanded its virtual desktop interface to 110,000 users from 25,000 in less than a week, moving them off of the risky VPN product.

Jane Rathbun, the Department of the Navy chief information officer, said the forced move to VDI opens the door wider to more secure capabilities, especially around the idea of bring-your-own-device.

“This was somewhat of a forcing function for us, but really it always was part of our plan to move away from VPN dependency and give more flexibilities to our workforce using the Nautilus virtual desktop because of its great flexibilities,” Rathbun said in an interview with Federal News Network at the AFCEA West conference. “We always wondered what scaling would look like and whether or not there would be a stress to the infrastructure in doing that. And I have to say, we didn’t miss a beat. I’m really proud of the team for being able to rally. The other thing it did for us and allowed us to strategically communicate, ‘hey, remote workers, you have other options, here they are.’ People have just been amazed at how the capability works and how quick it is, and that they really have not missed a beat.”

The Department of the Navy, like many federal agencies, faced a short timeline to move off of Ivanti’s Connect Secure and Ivanti Policy Secure VPN products after the company revealed vulnerabilities that would let attackers bypass the authentication requirement and access restricted resources by bypassing control checks.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued an emergency directive on Jan. 19 requiring all civilian agencies to move off the products and/or mitigate the vulnerabilities. CISA then issued a supplemental emergency directive on Feb. 1 requiring further action by agencies.

The cybersecurity threat gave the DoN a perfect opportunity to accelerate the expansion of its VDI software, which it was planning on doing anyways.

Rathbun said a big benefit of the move to the virtual desktop is letting users access Navy applications and data from a personal device. She said the VDI software reduces the need for a government furnished device.

“We have put protections in place for security purposes so you can’t download things on your personal device. But you’ve got access to all the things that would have been available to you on your VPN connection,” she said. “Our two goals [with the VDI software] are customer service and customer experience, and operational resiliency. For me, operational resiliency is cybersecurity and redundant paths so that you can be productive 24/7/365 from anywhere in the world. Our plan has always been to offer, as we learned about the capability when we moved to our Operation Flank Speed platform, this as a good tool to meet our workforce needs where our workforce is.”

Rathbun said the DoN can’t quite fully abandon the VPN because some applications are not accessible through the virtual desktop interface. Until those applications are updated to work with a VDI, the DoN, and really others across the Defense Department, will continue to have both access approaches.

Navy moving away from the RMF

The VDI, however, is part of the broader move to zero trust. Rathbun said using a VDI helps focus protections on the device, the person and data, which is part of the principles around zero trust.

Underlying the Department of the Navy’s move to zero trust is its move away from the Risk Management Framework (RMF) and toward the “Cyber Ready” approach, which focuses instead on continuous monitoring and ongoing risk assessments. Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro announced the “Cyber Ready” initiative in August 2022 in a memo outlining its principles of pre-emptive cyber defense.

“With ‘Cyber Ready,’ we see us evolving away from the checklist mentality, the compliance mentality to processes that are established at the enclave or platform layer level. We understand that not every platform needs the same type of cybersecurity tooling and end-to-end approach,” Rathbun said. “We want to make sure that in our ‘Cyber Ready’ that from design all the way to operate to sustain, that we have built cyber capabilities, cybersecurity capabilities into every phase of that ecosystem.”

The Navy has been testing out the concepts that make up “Cyber Ready” with the Naval Air Systems Command and with the Program Executive Office Integrated Warfare Systems (PEO IWS) over the last year.

Rathbun said each of the organizations is looking at the approach a little differently.

“NAVAIR is thinking about it holistically. What would it look like to give NAVAIR a ‘Cyber Ready’ designation built into their whole process? These are the things we need to see, that you’re producing the telemetry that the cyber operators need, that you can assess threats, that you can give us a risk score,” she said. “We’re building a set of criteria that allows us to feel good about the level of risk you’re accepting in your systems and so they’re looking at the whole process.”

‘Cyber Ready’ pilots progressing

PEO-IWS, Rathbun said, is looking at three programs in various stages of the lifecycle. One is a new start. One is modernizing its technology, and the third is just on their three-year cycle for a new authority to operate (ATO).

She said the third program is looking at how they can incorporate some of these “Cyber Ready” approaches like continuous monitoring into their current cyber posture.

“Ultimately, what we’ll be doing with PEO-IWS is looking at combat weapons system because it is an enclave unto itself. They will go through the same approach that NAVAIR is going through for their enclave and get a ‘Cyber Ready’ designation for their process,” Rathbun said. “The ‘Cyber Ready’ pilots are helping us evolve to this state where we believe the answer is going to be, in the future, at a system command via an enclave, they’re going to tell us what the ‘Cyber Ready’ process looks like. We’re going to evaluate that process along with our Cyber Command leadership and say, ‘yep, you are cyber ready. Anything you run through this meets the requirements and you will get an authority to operate.’ Then, we will do spot checking. We’re going to do scorecards to do all the same things we do today, but as long as you are continuously running this process and running a ‘Cyber Ready’ approach, then you can move things through.”

The post Navy used threat of cyber vulnerability to expand VDI first appeared on Federal News Network.

With conflicts in the Middle East, and having to keep tabs on affairs in the Pacific, the Navy has a hefty to-do list. How is it coping? To find out, Federal News Network’s Eric White spoke with naval analyst and Hudson Institute Senior Fellow Bryan Clark on the Federal Drive with Tom Temin.

Interview Transcript: 

Bryan Clark So the Navy is stressed as you might expect there, because we’ve got forces deployed in the Middle East. Ships deployed and the European theater out in the Indo-Pacific, they’re all facing active adversaries. In some cases, they’re actually being shot at. And maintaining that operational tempo is putting stress on the Navy. Also, the Navy doesn’t have that flexibility to be able to pull ships off deployment for training or maintenance like they might have in the past. Because these operational needs are overriding that. It also means that schedules are being changed. So, you’ve got ships being extended on deployment. That impacts their ability to come home and do the maintenance periods of the repairs that they had scheduled. And so back here in the United States, you’ve got, repair yards, training facilities that are having to juggle their schedules. Which adds to costs, adds to complexity. So, yeah, it makes management of the fleet a lot harder, makes it more expensive, and also from the sailors’ perspective, they’re obviously a lot busier and they’re staying on deployment longer.

Eric White Yeah. You touched on the part I wanted to ask you about next, which is obviously the cost of all of this. This is stretching manpower is one thing. Stretching the dollars to pay them is another. What can? What does the future look like for Navy budgetary concerns now?

Bryan Clark Yeah. So, the Navy is taking these operations out of hide right now. So, the argument would be, well, these ships would be on deployment anyway. We’re essentially just using them for these missions as opposed to doing training or exercises, or whatever they would have done otherwise. But we’re starting to see ships stay on deployment longer than they were intended. We’re seeing ships get deployed earlier. So as a result, we’re burning up a lot of money in terms of just ship operations. And then, like I said, on the back end, what happens is when you’re trying to schedule maintenance, our ship repair capacity is pretty constrained. And so, if you just like if you go to the car shop and your car needs, extra work, you’re going to have to pay extra and somebody else is going to get bumped in order to make that happen. These ships are going to come back. They’re going to need extra maintenance. That’s going to increase costs. It’s going to bump the next ship down the line to later, which means rescheduling and replanning. That creates more costs. So, we’re creating costs across basically every link of the readiness chain we’ve got ships on deployment longer, needing more repairs, creating scheduling complexity creating more costs for, adaptation on the on the maintenance repair side. And then we’re creating a whole set of new needs in terms of training, to prepare ships for the kinds of operations they’re doing now, which might have differed from what they were going to do when these deployments were planned, you know, six months or a year ago.

Eric White You keep on providing me perfect segues, because I wanted to touch on the manpower issue. And, you know, recruitment. We’ve heard from armed services leaders that recruitment has been tricky nowadays. And when people are seeing action, it can sometimes give a little bit of boost to recruitment in the first part. But then as things stretch on, that kind of has an effect on it. Is that what the Navy is seeing right now? Is it in a similar situation as other branches of the military?

Bryan Clark Yeah. So, we just actually did an event with the Marine Corps assistant commandant, and he made the point that the Marines made their recruitment cut quotas. And that’s largely because people believe in the mission. They believe in the culture of the Marines and they’re joining for that reason. So, like you said, in some ways, the current operations are going to be, make it more attractive to join the Navy because you’ll actually go feel like you’re doing something and making a difference. And, you know, in this case, protecting shipping in the Middle East, for example. But you’re right, the stress of know long deployments, you know, going on deployment more frequently, coming home and basically turning right into maintenance as opposed to getting a sort of stand down. Those things are going to really wear on the fleet. And when new recruits are talking to recruiters or talking to people in the Navy, they’re going to get that feedback and that’s going to hurt recruiting. The Navy fell 20% short of its recruiting quota this last year. That’s significant. And I think they might get a little bump, you know, from these current operations. But I think it’s still going to be a really challenging recruiting environment. There are other places to work. Pay is really well, you know, really good in the other sectors of the economy. And the challenge we’re going to see what the Navy probably is going to be increasingly retention. So, retention has been great. You know, the Navy’s had no problem keeping people in. But I think when you get these longer deployments, more frequent deployments, that’s going to cause people to rethink their decision, maybe to go for that next term in the service and look at some of these other options in the commercial sector, which are pretty lucrative and very attractive. Now, if you’re if you’re eligible to serve in the military or you’re already serving, you know, you’re a really attractive recruit for a company that has to try to deal with lots of other, you know, challenges out there in the civilian sector.

Eric White We’re speaking with Bryan Clark. He’s a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. And yeah, it’s not all doom and gloom. I don’t want to portray it as some sort of dire situation the Navy is facing. So, what are the positives of what is happening right now? At least? You know, the Navy gets to maybe try out some new technologies and look at those future capabilities for, you know, the next battle is they currently testing any new technologies, you know, in the conflicts that they’re dealing with right now?

Bryan Clark Yeah. So, some new technologies are already getting rolled out that might help the fleet. So counter UAS, counter drone technologies. So, like electronic warfare systems, high power microwave systems, which we use around airports and airfields today here, but they haven’t gotten used on ships very much. Those systems are going out there. The idea of using drones to attack other drones, that’s probably going to, you know, get some traction now with the Navy. So that’s a good impetus to bring these new technologies out to the fleet faster. The other thing the Navy’s getting practice doing is just the mechanics of conducting missile defense, because all of our missile defense operations, you know, until recently were exercises so they’re kind of scripted, you know, they’re kind of known quantities. Here you’re putting multiple ships and multiple crews in a position of having to react to an enemy’s attack, even though the attack is with less sophisticated systems, you know, the mechanics and the processes are the same as what you’d use against the Chinese or against the Russians. So that’s really good practice and gets people used to the stress of, you know, a real operation. And also, the, you know, just the mechanics and, you know, human machine interface that has to occur there to make it a successful one.

Eric White Are there any needs that aren’t being met from the ship commanders who are asking for whether it’s finally getting to use the lasers that they’re equipped with, or is there other things that they are desiring to help them fulfill this mission and maybe speed things up a little?

Bryan Clark Yeah, I’d say what commanders are really asking for is a lot more counter drone technology, right. Because we’ve been having to use surface to air missiles to shoot down some of these drones, which the cost exchange is not very attractive from the U.S. perspective. So, you’re shooting down a $10,000 drone with a $1 million missile, which makes sense, because if you’re defending a ship in the Red sea, that cost exchange is worth it. But still, you know, over a long term that’s not sustainable. So, the fleet commanders want to get electronic warfare systems out there like we use ashore, right? When you look at what the Ukrainians are doing to defeat Russian drones, it’s mostly jamming. It’s, you know, jamming the radar, jamming the sensor, jamming the GPS, jamming the communications. And then its high-power microwaves disrupt the electronics on top of those or on those drones. And then it’s, laser systems, you know? So, laser systems are something the Navy has been trying to introduce. I think what the what this might highlight is that the Navy should field the kinds of lasers they can already get access to, which are these, you know, kind of less than 100 kilowatt, you know, models that would really be good against drones but maybe aren’t great for missile defense. And I think that’s where the Navy’s the debate in the Navy has been, is do we wait for a bigger laser that’s able to take down a cruise missile, or do we field a smaller laser today that can take out a drone? And I think what the operations in the Middle East are going to highlight is the fact that we should get those lasers out there more quickly to deal with the drone threat and save us the need to use expensive surface to air missiles to shoot them down.

Eric White And overall, the current state of the US Navy, what sort of metrics are used to measure how well it matches up against other nations navies? You know whether it’s even our allies in Europe or things of that nature?

Bryan Clark Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, I think, you know, fleet size matters because, you know, ships, unlike airplanes, which can move around pretty quickly and are pretty fungible. Ships can only really be in one place at a time. So, you have to have a fleet that’s big enough to like, you see what the US Navy operate in the European theater in the Middle East, in the Indo-Pacific simultaneously. So that’s one measure. And then the other measure might be, you know, how, well, you know, ships are able to conduct offensive and defensive operations. Yeah. If you look at the Chinese navy, for example, which is bigger than the US Navy, most of their ships are really designed for kind of coastal or near shore near seas defense. So, they’re really able to only defend themselves, but they can’t really project power in addition to that. And they’ve got a small portion of their fleet that’s growing that’s intended to do both projecting power offense and defense. So that’s one another thing is, you know, can your ships individually conduct both offense and defense? And then I’d say the last thing is just kind of looking at, you know, how are they going to fight? What’s the are they equipped to do the kinds of operations that you’re likely to have to do? So, for example, the littoral combat ship, you know, was initially not really equipped to do the kinds of operations that the Navy thought it might do, which is sort of escorting ships and protecting sea lanes because it didn’t have enough defensive capacity. So that’s changed. They put some more weapons on them, and you see them now operating in the South China Sea and in protecting sea lanes there and helping allies and partners defend their maritime territory. So, I think that’s the last thing is sort of are they equipped to be able to do the kinds of missions that they’re going to be expected to do? We don’t need a littoral combat ship to be, you know, a destroyer or a cruiser, you know, but it can’t do the things that it’s, you know, meant to be able to do. Well, I think, you know, the other thing that came out of this was sort of the importance of you know, naval aviation, you know, we used a carrier-based aircraft to go attack these, these sites ashore. We’ll probably continue to do that. And now you’ve got a marine Corps, or rather, an amphibious ship in, in the, eastern Mediterranean that’s deploying Marine Corps F-35s, and they’re able to continue that, carry that fight. But, in this case, you had a lot of countries that are sort of sitting out, you know, this confrontation because they don’t want to get on the wrong side of either Israel or the Arab community. And so, the US has to depend on these naval aircraft,,, to be able to conduct operations, because that’s the only base that’s got they’ve got access to. So really highlighted the importance of naval aviation and the need for the Navy to really think about how to create a sustainable mix of aircraft over the long term, because the F-35 is pretty expensive, expensive to operate. The new aircraft they’re pursuing might be even more expensive.

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