The Navy needs to improve at clarifying requirements and specifications to industry for the design of Open Architecture (OA) systems to ensure they meet durability standards, Adm. Jonathan Greenert, the chief of naval operations, said yesterday.
“These are areas where we have not been as good as we should,” Greenert said in a conference call with reporters following his opening remarks at the International Seapower Symposium at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, R.I.
The Navy cannot afford to bring systems onto ships that don’t meet the standards and therefore needs to better cooperate with industry in defining requirements, he said.
“We need to provide enough leeway for industry to be competitive…but be specific enough to meet federal mandates and military specifications,” Greenert said.
The Navy for years has identified the need to develop systems based on OA standards as a top priority, but there has been criticism the service has been too slow to implement the goal.
OA embraces the use of existing, commercially available technology to produce modular, interoperable systems with open design practices that can be easily upgraded and thereby reduce costs.
The goal is reduce numbers of legacy systems that are expensive to maintain and upgrade as the service has come to realize it cannot afford operating older networks in their current state over the long term.
“I share the view that open architecture is a good way to go,” Greenert said.
A key aspect of the Navy’s OA plans is the Consolodated Afloat Networks and Enterprise Services (CANES), which it hopes to first install on a destroyer in the next couple years. CANES completed the Critical Design Reviews in July and the service was expected to award a contract for the first production run by the end of this year or early 2012, but there are concerns reductions in the defense budget could delay the program.
Lockheed Martin [LMT] and Northrop Grumman [NOC] are vying for the contract.
CANES is intended to integrate multiple legacy networks responsible for command, control, computers, and intelligence (C4I) into a single, streamlined system.