NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — The U.S. military’s attempts to achieve interoperability remain a work in progress despite decades of effort to get its weapon systems to better communicate with each other, Navy and Marine Corps officials said April 5.
“We still have challenges, when I take a strike group to sea, to connect with the Air Force and get data from the Air Force,” said Rear Adm. Michael Manazir, director of naval warfare systems. 
Manazir, who moderated a panel discussion at the Navy League’s annual Sea-Air-Space conference, explained that the Navy’s “kill web” concept calls for allowing a shooter to automatically get the information he or she needs from any sensor on the network. “So moving information around disparate platforms is key,” he said.
Rear Adm. Nancy Norton, director of warfare integration, told the conference audience that the Navy is looking for ways to “stitch together those kill webs” to ensure they are robust and have “resilient paths.” Weapon systems need to be designed to handle rapid upgrades from the beginning so they can easily connect with the systems of other services or coalition forces, she added.
“We cannot force ourselves into a situation that requires major system hardware upgrades in order to be successfully pacing the adversary,” Norton said. “We have to be able to do that with software-reprogrammable payloads and radios that can be done oftentimes while a ship or an aircraft is on deployment or maybe even while they are on a mission.”
Marine Maj. Gen. Christopher Owens, director of the Navy Department’s expeditionary warfare division, told the conference audience that network upgrades being made to the Navy’s big-deck amphibious ships to accommodate the Marine Corps’ new F-35B Lightning II fighter jet will also help improve interoperability between the Marines and Navy.
“Those same network upgrades are going to allow a better accommodation of the large-scale staffs – the Marine expeditionary brigade, the expeditionary strike group staff on the Navy side – to allow that afloat command and control,” Owens said. The enhancements will “allow us to integrate more systems [and] distribute the right information to the right spaces in time aboard ship to give us that agility we need.”