Tightening the Net

After years of planning, the Navy is about to breathe life into the FORCEnet concept mandating change to every aspect of naval warfare

By RICHARD C. BARNARD, Editor in Chief

The top officials behind FORCEnet, the Navy concept for warfare in the 21st century, will take some solid steps this spring to revamp the service’s acquisition process and provide a turning point in its overarching effort to change the very nature of naval warfare.

Vice Adm. Joseph A. Sestak Jr., the service’s deputy chief of naval operations for warfare requirements and programs, is putting the finishing touches on an enforcement process to ensure that all Navy programs will be compliant with FORCEnet criteria and all hardware and software will support it. It will affect the design and acquisition of weapons and systems for years to come.

The new rules of the road are contained in the Navy’s draft “FORCEnet Consolidated Compliance Checklist.” Weapons and systems that comply with the new criteria will be retained. Those that don’t will be improved or terminated. Systems now on the drawing boards must be designed with the checklist in mind.

“The compliance checklist is the metric,” said Rear Adm. Elizabeth Hight, Sestak’s director for net-centric warfare. Its purpose is to help systems program managers “understand the standards … and the architectures to which they should be compliant.” The enforcement process is an acquisition obstacle course comprising policy, operational and technical criteria requisite for the Navy’s future way of war.

One of the last hurdles on that course is a management tool called the FORCEnet Implementation Baseline (FIBL), which will be used to assess existing programs against the criteria in the checklist and was developed by the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR). “It’s a way of doing a check and balance” at various points in the enforcement process, said Hight. The checklist contains the standards and the FIBL provides a methodology to ensure those standards are being met.

The Navy has been planning FORCEnet for years. Adoption of the enforcement process is among the service’s first concrete actions to bring alive the concept, which calls for elementary change to every aspect of naval warfare by 2015-2020.

The Navy has staked its future on the successful implementation of FORCEnet to leverage U.S. superiority in information systems and bind together and enhance the military’s ability to sense, detect, identify, communicate, attack and assess. Adm. Vern Clark, chief of naval operations, and Gen. Michael W. Hagee, commandant of the Marine Corps, in February issued a statement of FORCEnet goals. A supporting document states the “concept envisions command and control characterized by shorter decision cycles” that will enable commanders “to make and implement better decisions faster than any enemy can tolerate.”

Greater initiative, adaptability and increased tempo will accrue to the U.S. military once “all forces and organizations down to the level of individual entities are interconnected in a networked, collaborative command and control environment,” the document states. The essence of FORCEnet is that U.S. military forces and coalition allies will move as one with speed and power sufficient to overwhelm any enemy. Joint planning and operations are a basic element of the concept.

Based on Navy forecasts, the tactical gains to be derived from the implementation of FORCEnet would include, for example, a 50-fold improvement in the percentage of land targets destroyed in time-critical strike missions, and a 10-fold increase in area search rates during mine countermeasures missions, according to a 2003 report to Congress by then-acting Navy Secretary Hansford T. Johnson. The forecasts were based on modeling and wargaming.

However, there is a huge gap between improvements of that magnitude and today’s realities. Current war-fighting strategies, support structures and technologies will not yield the synergistic operations and tactical advantages envisioned by the architects of FORCEnet. That vision encompasses assets such as always-on dynamic libraries of intelligence data, scalable pictures of the battlespace, intelligent software that passes surveillance data to sensor acquisition systems, munitions with internal sensors providing instantaneous battle damage assessments and firing systems that automatically trigger resupply requests. All would support the centerpiece of FORCEnet, a widely dispersed fighting force with its many units acting in concert bolstered by shared intelligence and seamless communications.

The enforcement process is a way to close that gap. Its compliance checklist is “the tool that program managers use to understand if what they are building will be ready to be implemented on the Global Information Grid in a joint environment. That’s the goal,” Hight said. For example, one of many FORCEnet criteria is that systems comply with Internet Protocol Version 6 to buttress information assurance and protection. Protocols are sets of rules networks use to specify data format and transmission parameters.

The ubiquitous enforcement process will be run by an array of top Navy officials, principally Sestak; Rear Adm. Kenneth D. Slaght, SPAWAR commander; and Vice Adm. James D. McArthur Jr., commander of the Naval Network Warfare Command. The task of putting all naval weapons and systems through the enforcement process will be long and tough. Rear Adm. Will Rodriguez, FORCEnet chief engineer at SPAWAR, has compiled a database of 430 weapons and systems to be assessed for FORCEnet compliance.

Rodriguez, Hight and others involved in the enforcement process will not attempt to swallow that database in one gulp. Instead, they are establishing priorities based on the Pentagon’s primary war-fighting capabilities, such as joint close air support, integrated fires and focused logistics. The Navy conducted a pilot test of the enforcement process using the technologies needed to support another primary capability: time-critical strike.

Other technologies to be assessed early on for FORCEnet compliance include those essential for antisubmarine warfare, mine warfare and the deployment prowess to ensure “that we can reach the fight in time to make a difference,” Hight said.

Initial results derived from the enforcement process will be reviewed by a series of teams, including the FORCEnet Compliance Review Board and the FORCEnet Compliance Flag Board, to answer questions such as: If a particular system “is noncompliant but terribly necessary, then we are faced with the next decision: do we make it compliant?” Hight said. “What is the return on the investment to make it compliant? What are the consequences of it not being compliant in a joint fight?”

But the enforcement process is not just about winners and losers, as the Navy sorts out its systems requirements for the future. The rigorous scrutiny intrinsic to the process is expected to reveal gaps in the Navy’s war-fighting capabilities. Also, service officials will weigh the potential benefits of FORCEnet against its substantial risks. These include the potential for debilitating informational overload, especially among the rank-and-file who actually fight the nation’s wars. Frequent tests, such as the Navy’s annual Trident Warrior sea trials, will abet the enforcement process as the service charts its future.

The results and analyses derived from the FORCEnet implementation baseline go to John J. Young Jr., assistant Navy secretary for research, development and acquisition, and will be reflected in the Navy’s investment decisions beginning with its 2008 budget request.