NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. –The Naval Air Systems Command will work at the early engineering level to create capability-specific technical standards rather than platform-specific tech standards, and the Naval Sea Systems Command is launching a new commonality directorate, all in the name of creating a more effective, well-connected fighting force, officials said in a panel at the Navy League’s annual Sea Air Space conference.

NAVAIR Commander Vice Adm. David Dunaway said that even though NAVAIR funding is stovepiped into individual programs, his engineers needed to work across programs to ensure all the technologies they produce work together.

“We don’t fight as individuals, we fight as a package and the package has got to work together,” he said, saying the real weapon system for the Navy is the carrier strike group or the carrier air wing. “There is absolutely no reason we should not be engineering that way within our systems command in how we provide that capability to the warfighter. Nothing is more frustrating to them than to get a brand new piece of equipment, a great capability in that individual component, that doesn’t connect to the network, that doesn’t connect to the tracking, to the targeting.”

Dunaway said NAVAIR has two efforts underway to address the interoperability issue. First, he said NAVAIR is working at the fundamental engineering level to develop technical standards for a capability that could be used for multiple acquisition programs and even across multiple systems commands.

“We’re going to have a capability design spec; we’re going to train our people in that regard, and then we’re going to put it in a live, virtual and constructive environment so that our considerable assets that the taxpayer has given to us can be connected together to work with the surface, the sub, the aviation, the Marine, all communities in order to come together for the warfighting capability,” Dunaway said.

He also noted NAVAIR’s effort to become the lead system integrator for more projects, hoping that if the government owned more technical standards and authorities then it would be less expensive to integrate new ideas and upgrades industry develops.

The upgraded avionics on the AV-8B Harrier, above, will be among the first to be certified as meeting NAVAIR's FACE standards. Photo courtesy U.S. Navy.
The upgraded avionics suite on the AV-8B Harrier, above, will be among the first to be verified as meeting NAVAIR’s FACE common technical standards. Photo courtesy U.S. Navy.

Dunaway said NAVAIR had integrated more than 20 electro-optical and infrared sensors in the past decade, each of them complex and expensive because of their proprietary nature. “That’s money that’s lost to the system,” he said, noting that there would have been minimal integration costs if the interfaces were common and the sensors acquired through an open architecture process.

Separately at Sea Air Space, Capt. Tracy Barkhimer, NAVAIR’s air combat electronics program manager, said the avionics suites on the AV-8B and the C-130T would be the first two to go through a verification process to ensure they meet Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE) standards, which came out of a 2010 initiative to create common technical standards for avionics software that could be reused in multiple programs.

On the NAVSEA side, Commander Vice Adm. William Hilarides said that the Program Executive Office for Integrated Warfare Systems had made a lot of progress lowering the Aegis Combat System baselines, bringing up the Ship Self-Defense System baselines and “ultimately bringing those two together for the maximum amount of commonality on the warfare systems side.”

On the ships themselves, though, the NAVSEA’s other four affiliated PEOs–ships, Littoral Combat Ship, aircraft carriers and submarines–had a lot of work left to do.

“On the ships side, however, we haven’t done as much as we could on commonality between platforms on the [hull, mechanical and electrical] systems–broadly , the engines and the electrical distribution systems, et cetera,” Hilarides said.

NAVSEA on Monday announced the establishment of the Acquisition and Commonality directorate. It will be lead by Rear Adm. Thomas Kearney, who until recently was the vice commander of NAVSEA.

Hilarides said last week the new directorate would “bring real focus on bringing commonality on the HM&E side, that involves specs and standards as they flow through our shipbuilders and other purchasers.”

NAVSEA is hoping that it can save money by reducing the number of unique parts by finding common solutions that can be applied across ship platforms and their systems.

Hilarides said the effort would involve forward fitting and back fitting ships of all kinds to make their systems more common, which would simplify the logistics tail, lower the cost of training maintenance workers and more.