By Geoff Fein
Although the Navy has a history of operating in a network environment, working in the cyber domain presents a unique set of challenges for the service, according to the Chief of Naval Operations.
“We in the Navy live constantly in a network environment,” Adm. Gary Roughead told Defense Daily earlier this week. “If you go out to a strike group, it is all about networks. We moved a couple of years ago to go to the Maritime Operations Center and that fits in with how we do things in a network way.”
The Navy pumped a lot of electronic attack assets into Iraq, he added. “That’s all about networks and that’s all about controlling the electronic environment, defeating people who are trying to use that environment against us.”
There is also the school house at the Center for Information Dominance Corry Station, in Myrtle Grove, Fla., which is home to the Navy’s Center for Information Dominance, Roughead noted.
“What we are doing that is very different with not just the 10th Fleet but also with the N2/6 organization is that we are saying information is going to be more central to how we think and how we do than it has been in the past,” Roughead said.
While at the headquarters level there is a tendency to think more in terms of platforms, the 10th Fleet and the new Director for Information Dominance (N2/6) is more about looking at how the Navy senses information, moves it, and what happens to that information when the Navy gets it. And the platforms, from aircraft to submarines, are all part of that overall network architecture, he added.
“To be able to manage the elements of information dominance, which is the sensing and the transport and the decision making, to do it not in individual stovepipes by platform and to say ‘OK, if this is how we can get the most out of this information and if this is how we have to move it then what’s the best way to do that?’ And then the platforms become vehicles to make that happen,” Roughead said.
Following last week’s official stand-up of Fleet Cyber Command, and the recommissioning of the 10th Fleet, Roughead said one of the first steps the Navy needs to take is a to have a good hand-off between functions that Naval Network Warfare Command has been performing and moving them to the 10th Fleet.
“It’s also very important that 10th Fleet settle into the relationship that exists between it and the joint headquarters above it and the work they do for STRATCOM (U.S. Strategic Command)” he said. “Getting those relationships established is key.”
STRATCOM will be home to the United States Cyber Command.
Additionally, getting the right people in place is also key, Roughead added. “We do have incredible talent in this field.”
It is also important the Navy continue to identify where it will draw its future cyber force personnel from, he said. “Where is the talent? Who has the skill, and how do we want to develop that, is also really important,” Roughead added.
Additionally, the move into the cyber domain isn’t just about the 10th Fleet, he added.
“It’s about 10th Fleet and N2/6 because now what we need to be able to do is to make sure programs we are putting in place up here are informed by what 10th Fleet is having to deal with,” Roughead said, “and that we then can make the appropriate budget decisions, investment decisions, training decisions, equipping decisions that allow us to be more effective and ultimately more efficient.”
And Roughead is fully aware of the challenges of protecting the Navy’s networks in the cyber domain.
“I think it is arguably the most challenging domain we are going to deal with for a long, long time,” he said. “It seems very, very daunting but the other domains have been mastered as well.”
But unlike the other domains, cyber will require a different mind-set and different approach, Roughead added.
“The other aspect that is very unusual to cyber, it’s not simply a domain that you have to have significant resources to get into and have an effect,” he said. “To either exploit the maritime domain, or control the maritime domain, you need to make significant capital investments. The same thing with air, and clearly when you talk about space, you better have a lot of bucks if you want to go play in space. The cyber domain is very different in that regard.”
The forces that will play are very different and that is something Roughead thinks the Navy needs to think through.
“The price of access is a lot different [than the other domains],” he said. “We have to think our way through it.”