This is a top-to-bottom transformation of how the DoW plans and buys weapons, moving from contracts that prioritized process and how much a weapon costs, to how fast it can be delivered. It’s the Lean Startup plan for the Department of War.
Instead of buying custom-designed weapons, the DoW will prioritize a “commercial first” strategy – buying off-the-shelf things that already exist and using fast-track acquisition processes, rather than the cumbersome existing Federal Acquisition Regulations. To manage all of this, they are reorganizing the entire Acquisition ecosystem across the Services.
December 2025 Directory Update – Now Available Online and in Print Our December 2025 update to the Directory (Online here, Print copy here) describes the New Warfighting Acquisition Organizations – The Portfolio Acquisition Executive and the Capability Program Managers.
If you’re a startup trying to sell to the DoW, until now the biggest barrier has been a lack of information. That changes with this 3rd edition of the 2025 DoW Directory.
The Department of War (DoW) is one of the world’s largest organizations. If you’re a startup trying to figure out who to call on and how to navigate the system, it can be – to put it politely – challenging.Those inside the DoW have little perspective of how hard it is to understand what to an outsider looks like in an impenetrable, incredibly complex system.
Insiders know who to call, and prime contractors have teams of people following broad area announcements and contracts, but if you’re startup, you have none of those relationships. (And with the advent of Social Media even our adversaries have better knowledge.)
If we’re serious about building a next generation defense ecosystem (not just buying the next shiny object), then this is the directory the Department of War should be publishing.
Until then, here’s the second update to the Department of War PEO Directory. 500 new names/organizations in this DoW phonebook and startup Go-to-Market Strategy playbook.
Finding a customer for your product in the Department of Defense is hard: Who should you talk to? How do you get their attention?
Looking for DoD customers
How do you know if they have money to spend on your product?
It almost always starts with a Program Executive Office.
The Department of Defense (DoD) no longer owns all the technologies, products and services to deter or win a war – e.g. AI, autonomy, drones, biotech, access to space, cyber, semiconductors, new materials, etc.
Today, a new class of startups are attempting to sell these products to the Defense Department. Amazingly, there is no single DoD-wide phone book available to startups of who to call in the Defense Department.
So I wrote one.
Think of the PEO Directory linked below as a “Who buys in the government?” phone book.
The DoD buys hundreds of billions of dollars of products and services per year, and nearly all of these purchases are managed by Program Executive Offices. A Program Executive Office may be responsible for a specific program (e.g., the Joint Strike Fighter) or for an entire portfolio of similar programs (e.g., the Navy Program Executive Office for Digital and Enterprise Services). PEOs define requirements and their Contracting Officers buy things (handling the formal purchasing, issuing requests for proposals (RFPs), and signing contracts with vendors.) Program Managers (PMs) work with the PEO and manage subsets of the larger program.
Existing defense contractors know who these organizations are and have teams of people tracking budgets and contracts. But startups? Most startups don’t have a clue where to start.
This is a classic case of information asymmetry and it’s not healthy for the Department of Defense or the nascent startup defense ecosystem.
This first version of the directory lists 75 Program Executive Offices and their Program Executive Officers and Program/Project Managers.
Each Program Executive Office is headed by a Program Executive Officer who is a high ranking official – either a member of the military or a high ranking civilian – responsible for the cost, schedule, and performance of a major system, or portfolio of systems, some worth billions of dollars.
Below is a summary of 75 Program Executive Offices in the Department of Defense.
You can download the full 64-page document of Program Executive Offices and Officers with all 602 names here.
Caveats Do not depend on this document for accuracy or completeness.
It is likely incomplete and contains errors.
Military officers typically change jobs every few years.
Program Offices get closed and new ones opened as needed.
This means this document was out of date the day it was written. Still it represents an invaluable starting point for startups looking to work with DoD.
How to Use The PEO Directory As Part of A Go-To-Market Strategy While it’s helpful to know what Program Executive Offices exist and who staffs them, it’s even better to know where the money is, what it’s being spent on, and whether the budget is increasing, decreasing, or remaining the same.
The best place to start is by looking through an overview of the entire defense budget here. Then search for those programs in the linked PEO Directory. You can get an idea whether that program has $ Billions, or $ Millions.
Next, take a look at the budget documents released by the DoD Comptroller –
particularly the P-1 (Procurement) and R-1 (R&D) budget documents.
Combining the budget document with this PEO directory helps you narrow down which of the 75 Program Executive Offices and 500+ program managers to call on.
With some practice you can translate the topline, account, or Program Element (PE) Line changes into a sales Go-To-Market strategy, or at least a hypothesis of who to call on.
Armed with the program description (it’s full of jargon and 9-12 months out of date) and the Excel download here and the Appendix here –– you can identify targets for sales calls with DoD where your product has the best chance of fitting in.
The people and organizations in this list change more frequently than the money.
Knowing the people is helpful only after you understand their priorities — and money is the best proxy for that.
Future Work Ultimately we want to give startups not only who to call on, and who has the money, but which Program Offices are receptive to new entrants. And which have converted to portfolio management, which have tried OTA contracts, as well as highlighting those who are doing something novel with metrics or outcomes.
In the meantime send updates, corrections and comments to sblank@stanford.edu
Credit Where Credit Is Due Clearly, the U.S. government intends to communicate this information. They have published links to DoD organizations here, even listing DoD social media accounts. But the list is fragmented and irregularly updated. Consequently, this type of directory has not existed in a usable format – until now.
Silicon Valley emerged from work in World War II led by Stanford professor Fred Terman developing microwave and electronics for Electronic Warfare systems. In the 1950’s and 1960’s, spurred on by Terman, Silicon Valley was selling microwave components and systems to the Defense Department, and the first fledging chip companies (Shockley, Fairchild, National, Rheem, Signetics…) were in their infancy. But there were no computer companies. Silicon Valley wouldn’t have a computer company until 1966 when Hewlett Packard shipped the HP 2116 minicomputer.
Meanwhile the biggest and fastest scientific computer companies were in Minnesota. And by 1966 they had been delivering computers for 16 years.
Minneapolis/St. Paul area companies ERA, Control Data and Cray would dominate the world of scientific computing and be an innovation cluster for computing until the mid-1980s. And then they were gone.
Why?
Just as Silicon Valley’s roots can be traced to innovation in World War II so can Minneapolis/St. Paul’s. The story starts with a company you probably never heard of – Engineering Research Associates.
It Started With Code Breaking For thousands of years, every nation has tried to keep its diplomatic and military communications secret. They do that by encrypting (protecting the information by using a cipher/code) to scramble the messages. Other nations try to read those messages by attempting to break those codes.
The Army focused on decrypting (breaking/decoding) Japan’s diplomatic and Army codes while the Navy worked on breaking Japan’s Naval codes. This was not a harmonious arrangement. The competition between the Army and Navy code breaking groups was so contentious that in 1940 they agreed that the Army would decode and translate Japanese diplomatic code on the even days of the month and the Navy would decode and translate the messages on the odd days of the month. This arrangement lasted until Dec. 7, 1941.
At the start of WWII the Army and Navy code breaking groups each had few hundred people mainly focused on breaking Japanese codes. By the end of WWII, with the U.S. now fighting Germany, and the Soviet Union looming as a potential adversary U.S. code breaking would grow to 20,000 people working on breaking the codes of Germany, Japan and the Soviet Union.
The Rise of the Machines in Cryptography Prior to 1932 practically all code breaking by the Army and Navy was done by hand. That year they began using commercial mechanical accounting equipment – the IBM keypunch, card sorters, reproducers and tabulators. The Army and Navy each had their own approach to automating cryptography. The Navy had a Rapid Analytical Machines project with hopes to build machines to integrate optics, microfilm and electronics into cryptanalytic tools. (Vannevar Bush at MIT was trying to build one for the Navy.) As WWII loomed, the advanced Rapid Machines projects were put on hold, and the Army and Navy used hundreds of specially modified commercial IBM electromechanical systems to decrypt codes.
Read the sidebars for more detailed information
Electromechanical Cryptologic Systems in WWII
By the spring 1941, the Army built the first special-purpose cryptologic attachment to the IBM punched card equipment – the GeeWhizzer using relays and rotary switches to help break the Japanese diplomatic codes. That same year, the Navy received the first in a series of 13 electro-mechanical IBM Navy Change Machines to automate decrypting cipher systems used by the Japanese Navy. The Navy attachments were extensive modifications of IBM’s standard card sorters, reproducers and tabulators. Some could be manually reconfigured via plugboards to do different tasks.
During the war the Army and Navy built ~75 of these electro-mechanical and optical systems. Some were standalone units the size of a room.
However, the bulk of the cryptoanalysis was done with IBM punch cards, sorters and tabulators, along with special microfilm comparators from Eastman Kodak. By the end of the War the Army and Navy had 750 IBM machines using several million punch cards every day.
IBM’s other mechanical contribution to cryptanalysts was the Letterwriter, (codenamed CXCO) a desktop machine that tied together electric typewriters to teletype, automatic tape and card punches, microfilm and eventually to film-processing machines. By adding plug-boards they could automate some analysis steps. Hundreds of these were bought.
The Navy’s most advanced cryptographic machine work in WWII was building 125 U.S. versions of the British code breaking machine called the BOMBE. These electromechanical BOMBES were used to crack the ENIGMA, the cipher machine used by the Germans.
(Meanwhile in England the British code breaking group in Bletchley Park built Colossus, arguably the first digital computer. At the end of the War the British offered the Navy OPS-20-G code breaking group a Colossus but the Navy turned it down.)
Dual-Use Technology As the war was winding down, the leadership of the Navy Computing Machine Lab in OPS-20-G was thinking about how they could permanently link commercial, academic and military computing science and innovation to the Navy. After discovering that no commercial company was willing to continue their wartime work of building the specialized hardware for codebreaking, the Navy realized they needed a new company. The decided that the best way to do that was to encourage a private for-profit company to spin out and build advanced crypto-computing systems.
The Secretary of the Navy gave his OK and three officers in the Navy’s code breaking group (Commander Howard Engstrom, who had been a math professor at Yale; Lieutenant Commander William “Bill” Norris, an electrical engineer; and their contracting officer Captain Ralph Meader,) agreed to start a civilian company to continue building specialized systems to help break codes. While unique for the time, this public-private partnership was in-line with the wartime experiment of Vannevar Bush’s OSRD – using civilians in universities to develop military weapons.
Why Minneapolis/St. Paul? While it seemed like a good idea and had the Navy’s backing, the founders got turned down for funding by companies, investment bankers and everyone, until they talked to John Parker.
Serendipity came to Minneapolis-St. Paul when the Navy team met John Parker. Parker was a ex Naval Academy graduate and a Minneapolis businessman who owned a glider manufacturing company and was well connected in Washington. Parker agreed to invest. In January 1946, they founded Engineering Research Associates (ERA). Parker became President, and got 50% of the company’s equity for a $20,000 investment (equal to $315K today) and guaranteed a $200,000 line of credit (equal to $3M today). The professional staff owned the other 50%. The new company moved into Parker’s glider hanger. Norris became the VP of Engineering, Engstrom the VP of Research, and Meader VP of Manufacturing.
The company hit the ground running. 41 of the best and brightest ex-Navy technical team members of the Naval Computing Machine Lab in Dayton moved and became the initial technical staff of ERA. When the Navy added their own staff from the Dayton Laboratory the ERA facility was designated a Naval Reserve Base and armed guards were posted at the entrance. The company took on any engineering work that came their way but were kept in business developing new code-breaking machines for the Navy. Most of the machines were custom-built to crack a specific code, and increasingly used a new ERA invention – the magnetic drum memory to process and analyze the coded texts.
ERA’s headcount grew rapidly. Within a year the company had 145 people. A year later, 420. And by 1949, 652 employees and by 1955, 1400. Sales in their first fiscal year were $1.5 million ($22 million in today’s dollars).
During World War II the demands of war industries caused millions more Americans to move to where most defense plants located. Post-war era Americans were equally mobile, willing to move where the opportunities were. And if you were an engineer who wanted to work on the cutting edge of electronics, and electromechanical systems, ERA in Minneapolis-St. Paul was the place to be. (Applicants were told that ERA was doing electronics work for government and industry. Those who wanted more detail were given a number of cover stories. Many were told that ERA was working on airline seat reservation systems.)
How Did ERA Grow So Quickly? The Navy thought of ERA as its “captive corporation.” From the first day ERA started with contracts from the Navy OPS-20-G codebreaking group. ERA built the most advanced electronic systems of the time. Unfortunately for the company they couldn’t tell anyone as their customer was the most secret government agency in the country – the National Security Agency.
ERAs systems were designed to solve problems defined by their Navy code-breaking customer. They fell into two categories: some projects were designed to automate existing workflows of decoding known ciphers; others were used to discover breaks into new ciphers. And with the start of the Cold War, that meant Soviet cryptosystems. ERAs cryptanalytic devices were most often designed to break only one particular foreign cipher machine (which kept a stream of new contracts coming.) The specific purpose and target of each of these systems with colorful codenames are still classified.
What Did ERA Build For the National Security Agency (NSA)?
By the end of ERA’s first year, ERA had contracts for a digital device called Alcatraz which used thousands of vacuum tubes and relays. A contract for a system named O’Malley followed. Then two “exhaustive trial” systems called Hecate for $250,000 ($3.2 million in today’s dollars) and the follow-on system, Warlock ($500,000 – $6.4 million today.) Warlock was so large that it was kept at the ERA factory and operated as a remote operations center.
Next were the Robin machines, a photoelectric comparator, used to attack the Soviet Albatross code. The first two were delivered in the end of 1950. Thirteen more were delivered to NSA over the next two years.
ERA Disk Drives One of the problems code breakers had was the difficulty of being able to store and operate on large sets of data. To do so, cryptanalysts used thousands of punched cards, miles of paper tapes and microfilm. ERA was the pioneer in the development of an early form of disk drives called magnetic drum memories.
ERA used these magnetic drums in the special systems they built for NSA and later in their Atlas computers. They also sold them as peripherals to other computer companies.
Goldberg, which followed, was another room-sized special purpose machine – a comparator with statistical capabilities – that took photoelectric sensing and paper tape scanning to new heights.
Costing $250,000 ($3.2 million in today’s dollars), it had 7,000 tubes and was one of the first Agency machines to use a magnetic drum to store and handle data.
Another similarly sized system, Demon, followed. It was a dictionary machine designed to crack a Soviet code. It also used 34-inch-diameter magnetic drum to perform a specialized version of table lookup. Three of these large systems were delivered.
ERA engineers operated at the same relentless and exhausting pace as they had done in war time – similar to how Silicon Valley silicon and computer companies would operate three decades later.
For the next decade ERA would continue to deliver a stream of special-purpose code breaking electronic systems and subsystems for the Navy cryptologic community. (These NSA documents give a hint at the number and variety of encryption and decryption equipment at NSA in the early 1950’s: here, here,here, here, and here.)
ERA was undercapitalized and always looking for other products to sell. At the same time ERA was building systems for the NSA they pursued other lines of businesses; research studies on liquid fueled rockets, aircraft antenna couplers (which turned into a profitable product line,) a Doppler Miss Distance Indicator, Ground Support Equipment (GSE) for airlines, and Project Boom to produce instrumentation for what would become underground nuclear tests. A 1950 study for the Office of Naval Research called High-Speed Computing Devices – a survey of all computers then existent in the U.S. As there was no single source of information about what was happening in the rapidly growing computer field, this ERA report became the bible of early U.S. computers.
The Holy Grail – A Digital Computer for Cryptography? As complicated as the ERA machines were, they were still single function machines, not general purpose computers. But up until 1946 no one had built a general purpose computer.
With the war over what the Navy OP-20-G’s and Army SIS computing wizards really wanted was to create a single machine that could perform all the major cryptanalytic functions. The most important of the crypto techniques were based upon either locating repeated patterns, tallying massive numbers of letter patterns, and recognizing plain text, or performing some form of “exhaustive searching.”
How the NSA Got Their First Computers
Their idea was to put each of these major cryptanalytic functions in separate, dedicated, single-function hardware boxes and connect them through a central switching mechanism. That would allow cryptanalysts to tie them together in any configuration; and hook it all to free-standing input/output mechanisms. With a stock of these specialized boxes the agencies believed they could create any desired cryptanalytic engine.
Just as the consensus for this type of architecture was coalescing, a new idea emerged in 1946 – the concept of a general purpose digital computer with a von Neumann architecture. In contrast to having many separate hardwired functions, a general purpose computer would have just the four basic arithmetic ones (add, subtract, multiple and divide) along with a few that allowed movement of data between the input-output components, memory, and a single central processor. In theory, one piece of hardware could be made to imitate any machine through an inexpensive and easily changed set of instructions.
Opponents to the project believed that a von Neumann design would always be too slow because it had only a single processor to do everything. (This debate between dedicated special purpose hardware versus general purpose computers continues to this day.)
The tipping point in this debate happened in 1946 when an OPS-20-G engineer went to the Moore School’s 1946 summer course on computers. The Moore School’s computer group had just completed the ENIAC, arguably the first programmable digital computer, and they were beginning to sketch the outlines of their own new computer, the UNIVAC the first computer for business applications. The engineer came back to the Navy computing group an advocate for building a general-purpose digital computer for codebreaking having convinced himself that most cryptanalysis could be performed through digital methods. He prepared a report to show that his device would be useful to everyone at OP-20-G. The report remained Top Secret for decades.
The report detailed how a general-purpose machine could have successfully attacked the Japanese Purple codes as well as German Enigma, and Fish systems, and how it would be usefully against the current Soviet and Hagelin systems.
This changed everything for the NSA. They were now in the computer business.
ERA’s ATLAS In 1948 the Navy gave ERA the contract to produce its first digital computer called ATLAS to be used by OPS-20-G for codebreaking.
In hindsight, the NSA crossed the Rubicon when the ATLAS I arrived. Today, an intelligence agency without computers is unimaginable. Its purchase showed incredible foresight and initiated a new era of cryptanalysis at the NSA. It was one of the handful of general purpose, binary computers anywhere. Ten years later the NSA would have 53 computers.
ERA asked the NSA for permission to offer the computer for commercial sale. The NSA required ERA to remove instructions that made the computer efficient for cryptography, and that became the commercial version – the ERA 1101 announced in December 1951. It had no operating or programming manual and its input/output facilities was a typewriter, a paper tape reader, and a paper tape punch. At the time, no programming languages existed.
ERA had delivered a breakthrough computer without having an understanding of its potential application or what a customer might have to do to use the machine. In search of commercial customers, ERA set up a ERA 1101 computer in Washington and offered it to companies as a remote computing center. As far as the commercial world knew ERA was a startup with no real computing expertise and this was their first offering. In addition, the only people with experience in writing applications for the 1101 were hidden away at NSA, and ERA was unable to staff the Arlington office to create programs for customers. Finally, ERA’s penchant for extreme secrecy left them unschooled in the art of marketing, sales, and Public Relations. When they couldn’t find any customers they donated the ERA 1101 to Georgia Tech.
With their hands on their first ever general purpose digital computer, the Navy and ERA rapidly learned what needed to be improved. ERA’s follow-on computer, the ATLAS II was a 32-bit system with additional instruction extensions for cryptography. Two were delivered to NSA between 1953 and 1954. ATLAS II cost the NSA $2.3 million ($35 million today.)
Late in 1952, a year before the ATLAS II was delivered to the NSA, ERA told Remington Rand (who now owned the company) the ATLAS II computer existed (and the government had paid for its R&D costs) and it was competitive with the newly announced IBM 701. When the ATLAS II was delivered to the NSA in 1953 they again asked for permission to sell it commercially (and again had to remove some instructions) which turned the Atlas II into the commercial ERA/Univac 1103. (see its 1956 reference manual here.)
This time with Remington Rand’s experience in sales and marketing, the computer was a commercial success with about twenty 1103s sold.
ERA’s Bogart In 1953, with the ATLAS computers in hand, the Navy realized that a smaller digital computer could be used for data conversion and editing, and to “clean up” raw data for input to larger computers. This was the Bogart.
Physically Bogart was a “small, compact” (compared to the ATLAS) computer that weighed 3,000 pounds and covered 20 square feet of floor space. To get a feel of how insanely difficult it was to program a 1950’s computer take a look at the 1957 Bogart programming manual here.) The Bogart design team was headed by Seymour Cray. ERA delivered five Bogart machines to NSA.
By 1953, 40% of the University of Minnesota electrical engineering graduates – including Cray – were working for ERA.
The End of an ERA By 1952, the mainframe computer industry was beginning to take shape with office machine and electronics companies such as Remington Rand, Burroughs, National Cash Register, Raytheon, RCA and IBM. Parker, still the CEO, realized that the frantic chase of government contracts was unsustainable. (The relationship with the NSA’s procurement offices now run by Army staff, had become so strained that the Navy Computing Lab was unable to get an official letter of thanks sent to ERA for having developed the ATLAS.)
Parker calculated that ERA needed $5 million to $10 million ($75 to $150 million in today’s dollars) to grow and compete with the existing companies in the commercial computing market. Even after the NSA took over the cryptologic work of OPS-20-G the formal contracts with ERA were done through the Navy’s Bureau of Ships. NSA was known as No Such Agency and on paper its relationship with ERA didn’t exist. As far as the public knew, ERA’s products were for “the Navy.” Given that ERA’s extraordinary technical work was unknown to anyone other than the NSA, Parker didn’t think he could raise the money via a public offering (venture capital as we know it didn’t exist.)
Instead, in 1952, Parker sold ERA to Remington Rand (best known for producing typewriters) for $1.7M (about $12M in today’s dollars.) A year earlier, Remington Rand had bought Eckert-Mauchly – one of the first U.S. commercial computer companies – and its line of UNIVAC computers. They wanted ERA to get its government customers. ERA remained a standalone division. The ERA 1101 and 1103 became a part of the UNIVAC product line.
Parker became head of sales of the merged computer division. He left in 1956 and years later he became chairman of the Teleregister Corporation, the predecessor to Bunker-Ramo. He went on to become a director of several companies, including Northwest Airlines and Martin Marietta.
Remington Rand itself would be acquired by Sperry in 1955 and both ERA and Eckert–Mauchly were folded into a computer division called Sperry-UNIVAC. Much of ERA’s work was dropped, while their drum technology was used in newer UNIVAC machines. In 1986 Sperry merged with Burroughs to form Unisys.
Epilogue For the next 60 years the NSA would have the largest collection of commercial computers and computing horsepower in the world. They would continue to supplement those with dedicated special purpose hardware.
The reorganization of American Signals Intelligence, leading to the creation of the Armed Forces Signals Agency (AFSA) in 1949, then the NSA in 1952, contributed to the demise of the special relationship between ERA and the code- breakers. The integration of the Army and Navy brought a shift in who made decisions about computer purchasing. NSA inherited a computer staff from the Army side of technical SIGINT. They had different ties and orientations than the few remaining old Navy hands. As a result, the new core NSA group did not protest when the special group that integrated Agency and ERA work was disbanded. The 1954 termination of the Navy Computing Machine Lab in St. Paul went almost unnoticed.
But the era of Minnesota’s role as a scientific computing and innovation cluster wasn’t over. In fact, it was just getting started. In 1957 ERA co-founder William Norris, and Sperry-Univac engineers Seymour Cray, Willis Drake, and ERA’s treasurer Arnold Ryden, along with a half dozen others, left Sperry-Univac and teamed up with three investors to form a new Minneapolis-based computer company: Control Data Corporation (CDC). For the next two decades Control Data would build the fastest scientific computers in the world.
Read part 18 here and all the Secret History posts here
One of the most audacious and bold manifestos for the future of Naval innovation has just been posted by the Rear Admiral who heads up the Office of Naval Research. It may be the hedge we need to deter China in the South China Sea.
While You Were Out In the two decades since 9/11, while the U.S. was fighting Al-Qaeda and ISIS, China built new weapons and developed new operational concepts to negate U.S. military strengths. They’ve built ICBMs with conventional warheads to hit our aircraft carriers. They converted reefs in international waters into airbases, creating unsinkable aircraft carriers that extend the range of their aircraft and are armed with surface to air missiles make it dangerous to approach China’s mainland and Taiwan.
To evade our own fleet air defense systems, they’ve armed their missiles with maneuvering warheads, and to reduce our reaction time they have missiles that travel at hypersonic speed.
The sum of these Chinese offset strategies means that in the South China Sea the U.S. can no longer deter a war because we can longer guarantee we can win one.
This does not bode well for our treaty allies, Japan, the Philippines, and South Korea. Control of the South China Sea would allow China to control fishing operations and oil and gas exploration; to politically coerce other countries bordering in the region; to enforce an air defense identification zone (ADIZ) over the South China Sea; or to enforce a blockade around Taiwan or invade it.
What To Do About It? Today the Navy has aircraft carriers, submarines, surface combatants, aircraft, and sensors under the sea and in space. Our plan to counter to China can be summed up as, more of the same but better and more tightly integrated.
This might be the right strategy. However, what if we’re wrong? What if our assumptions about the survivability of these naval platforms and the ability of our marines to operate, were based on incorrect assumption about our investments in material, operational concepts and mental models?
If so, it might be prudent for the Navy to have a hedge strategy. Think of a hedge as a “just in case” strategy. It turns out the Navy had one in WWII. And it won the war in the Pacific.
War Plan Orange In the 1930s U.S. war planners thought about a future war with Japan. The result was “War Plan Orange” centered on the idea that ultimately, American battleships would engage the Japanese fleet in a gunnery battle, which the U.S. would win.
Unfortunately for us Japan didn’t adhere to our war plan. They were bolder and more imaginative than we were. Instead of battleships, they used aircraft carriers to attack us. The U.S. woke up on Dec. 7, 1941, with most of our battleships sitting on the bottom of Pearl Harbor. The core precept of War Plan Orange went to the bottom with it.
But the portfolio of options available to Admiral Nimitz and President Roosevelt were not limited to battleships. They had a hedge strategyin place in case the battleships were not the solution. The hedges? Aircraft carriers and submarines.
While the U.S. Navy’s primary investment pre-WW2 was in battleships, the Navy had also made a substantial alternative investment – in aircraft carriers and submarines. The Navy launched the first aircraft carrier in 1920. For the next two decades they ran fleet exercises with them. At the beginning of the war the U.S. Navy had seven aircraft carriers (CVs) and one aircraft escort vessel (AVG). By the end of the war the U.S. had built 111 carriers. (24 fleet carriers, 9 light carriers and 78 escort carriers.) 12 were sunk.
As it turned out, it was carriers, subs, and the Marines who won the Pacific conflict.
Our Current Plan Fast forward to today. For the last 80 years the carriers in a Carrier Strike Group and submarines remain the preeminent formation for U.S. naval warfare.
China has been watching us operate and fight in this formation for decades. But what if carrier strike groups can no longer win a fight? What if the U.S. is underestimating China’s capabilities, intents, imagination, and operating concepts? What if they can disable or destroy our strike groups (via cyber, conventionally armed ICBMs, cruise missiles, hypersonics, drones, submarines, etc.)? If that’s a possibility, then what is the Navy’s 21st-century hedge? What is its Plan B?
Says Who? Here’s where this conversation gets interesting. While I have an opinion, think tanks have an opinion, and civilians in the Pentagon have an opinion, RAdm Lorin Selby, the Chief of the Office of Naval Research (ONR), has more than just “an opinion.” ONR is the Navy’s science and technology systems command. Its job is to see over the horizon and think about what’s possible. Selby was previously deputy commander of the Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) and commander of the Naval Surface Warfare Centers (NSWC). As the chief engineer of the Navy, he was the master of engineering the large and the complex.
But there is an equally accurate statement that this is not a diversified portfolio because all these assets share many of the same characteristics:
They are all large compared to their predecessors
They are all expensive – to the point where the Navy can’t afford the number of platforms our force structure assessments suggest they need
They are all multi-mission and therefore complex
The system-to-system interactions to create these complex integrations drive up cost and manufacturing lead times
Long manufacturing lead times mean they have no surge capacity
They are acquired on a requirements model that lags operational identification of need by years…sometimes decades when you fold in the construction span times for some of these complex capabilities like carriers or submarines
They are difficult to modernize – The ability to update the systems aboard these platforms, even the software systems, still takes years to accomplish
If the primary asset of the U.S. fleet now and in the future is the large and the complex, then surely there must be a hedge, a Plan B somewhere? (Like the pre-WW2 aircraft carriers.) In fact, there isn’t. The Navy has demos of alternatives, but there is no force structure built on a different set of principles that would complicate China’s plans and create doubt in our adversaries of whether they could prevail in a conflict.
The Hedge Strategy – Create “the small, the agile, and the many” In a world where the large and the complex are either too expensive to generate en masse or potentially too vulnerable to put at risk, “the small, the agile, and the many” has the potential to define the future of Navy formations.
We need formations composed of dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of unmanned vehicles above, below, and on the ocean surface. We need to build collaborating, autonomous formations…NOT a collection of platforms.
This novel formation is going to be highly dependent on artificial intelligence and new software that enables cross-platform collaboration and human machine teaming.
To do this we need a different world view. One that is no longer tied to large 20th-century industrial systems, but to a 21st-century software-centricagile world.
The Selby Manifesto:
Digitally adept naval forces will outcompete forces organized around principle of industrial optimization. “Data is the new oil and software is the new steel”
The systems engineering process we have built over the last 150 years is not optimal for software-based systems.
The Navy has world-class engineering and acquisition processes to deal with hardware
but applying the same process and principles to digital systems is a mistake
The design principles that drive software companies are fundamentally different than those that drive industrial organizations.
Applying industrial-era principles to digital era technologies is a recipe for failure
The Navy has access to amazing capabilities that already exist. And part of our challenge will be to integrate those capabilities together in novel ways that allow new modes of operation and more effectiveness against operational priorities
There’s an absolute need to foster a collaborative partnership with academia and businesses – big businesses, small businesses, and startups
This has serious implication of how the Navy and Marine Corps needs to change. What do we need to change when it comes to engineering and operating concepts?
How To Get “The Small, The Agile, and The Many” Tested and In The Water? Today, “the small, the agile and the many” have been run in war games, exercises, simulations, and small demonstrations, but not built at scale in a formation of dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of unmanned vehicles above, below and on the ocean’s surface. We need to prove whether these systems can fight alongside our existing assets (or independently if required).
ONR plans to rapidly prove that this idea works, and that the Navy can build it. Or they will disprove the theory. Either way the Navy needs to know quickly whether they have a hedge. Time is not on our side in the South China Sea.
ONR’s plan is to move boldly. They’re building this new “small, the agile, and the many”formation on digital principles and they’re training a new class of program managers – digital leaders – to guide the journey through the complex software and data.
They are going to partner with industry using rapid, simple, and accountable acquisition processes, using it to get through the gauntlet of discussions to contract in short time periods so we can get to work. And these processes are going to excite new partners and allies.
They’re going to use all the ideas already on the shelves, whether government shelves or commercial shelves, and focus on what can be integrated and then what must be invented.
All the while they’ve been talking to commanders in fleets around the world. And taking a page from digital engineering practices, instead of generating a list of requirements, they’re building to the operational need by asking “what is the real problem?” They are actively listening, using Lean and design thinking to hear and understand the problems, to build a minimal viable product – a prototype solution – and get it into the water. Then asking, did that solve the problem…no? Why not? Okay, we are going to go fix it and come back in a few months, not years.
The goal is to demonstrate this novel naval formation virtually, digitally, and then physically with feedback from in water experiments. Ultimately the goal is getting agile prototyping out to sea and doing it faster than ever before.
In the end the goal is to effectively evaluate the idea of “the small, the agile, and the many.” How to iterate at scale and at speed. How to take things that meet operational needs and make them part of the force structure, deploying them in novel naval formations, learning their operational capabilities, not just their technical merits. If we’re successful, then we can help guarantee the rest of century.
What Can Go Wrong? During the Cold War the U.S. prided itself on developing offset strategies, technical or operational concepts that leapfrogged the Soviet Union. Today China has done that to us. They’ve surprised us with multiple offset strategies, and more are likely to come. The fact is that China is innovating faster than the Department of Defense, they’ve gotten inside our DoD OODA loop.
But China is not innovating faster than our nation as a whole. Innovation in our commercial ecosystem — in AI, machine learning, autonomy, commercial access to space, cyber, biotech, semiconductors (all technologies the DoD and Navy need) — continues to solve the toughest problems at speed and scale, attracting the best and the brightest with private capital that dwarfs the entire DoD R&E (research and engineering) budget.
RADM Selby’s plan of testing the hedge of “the small, the agile, and the many” using tools and technologies of the 21st century is exactly the right direction for the Navy.
However, in peacetime bold, radical ideas are not welcomed. They disrupt the status quo. They challenge existing reporting structures, and in a world of finite budgets, money has to be taken from existing programs and primes or programs even have to be killed to make the new happen. Even when positioned as a hedge, existing vendors, existing Navy and DoD organizations, existing political power centers, will all see “the small, the agile, and the many” as a threat. It challenges careers, dollars, and mindsets. Many will do their best to impede, kill or co-opt this idea.
We are outmatched in the South China Sea. And the odds are getting longer each year. In a war with China we won’t have years to rebuild our Navy.
A crisis is an opportunity to clear out the old to make way for the new. If senior leadership of the Navy, DoD, executive branch, and Congress truly believe we need to win this fight, that this is a crisis, then ONR and “the small, the agile, and the many” needs a direct report to the Secretary of the Navy and the budget and authority to make this happen.
The Navy and the country need a hedge. Let’s get started now.
We just held our thirteenth session of our new national security class Technology, Innovation and Modern War. Joe Felter, Raj Shah and I designed a class to examine the new military systems, operational concepts and doctrines that will emerge from 21st century technologies – Space, Cyber, AI & Machine Learning and Autonomy.
Today’s topic was The Navy and Modern War.
Catch up with the class by reading our summaries of the previous twelve classes here.
His insights on the future of the Navy and reimagining Naval power are insightful, innovative and exciting.
(ONR played a seminal role in the formation of Silicon Valley. Founded in August 1946 in the aftermath of World War II, ONR provided support of research projects at universities when government funding to universities had dried up. That same year, Fred Terman became Stanford’s dean of engineering, and he received four ONR research contracts for electronics and microwaves. These grants formed the heart of the Stanford Electronics Research Laboratory.)
I’ve extracted and paraphrased a few of Admiral Selby’s key insights and urge you to read the entire transcript here and watch his video.
The Naval Research Enterprise This picture is a way I divvy up my Naval Research portfolio:
On the left is the division that’s home to cyber and electronic warfare. A little bit of AI but really, mostly electronic warfare.
The next area is ocean battlespace. This includes unmanned underwater vehicles – UUVs. And we do submarine applications and oceanographic research in that division. We take a great deal of pride in really understanding and knowing the ocean environment. Of course, the submarine is critical, but really everything from the weather, to the way our forces must flow, optimizing transit routes, all depends on currents, winds, weather. We use those factors to help us also determine what potential adversaries might or might not do. All that goes into the calculus of how we position our forces.
In the middle are mission capable, persistent, survivable naval platforms. This division looks at the systems that are on our platforms, i.e. pumps, valves, materials science, corrosion. There’s science to be done in perfecting some of those, and they’re critical in the operation of these platforms. This branch looks at maintenance practices, trying to make sure we protect those.
Warfighter performance looks at how the human body responds to stress. How we can optimize performance of the human body in combat, or in other stressful scenarios? How does the human brain work? How do we think? When I look at reimagined Naval power, I think a lot of that is not about things, it’s about processes. It’s about how we present information. It’s about how we process information, how we use machines to help us make decisions. This group traditionally has not had as much focus as the others. But I think it’s something we really need to go after.
The far right is aviation. Jets, missiles, also directed energy, railguns, hypervelocity projectiles and hypersonics.
And across the bottom is the Naval Accelerator run by Rich Carlin. This group figures out how do we go faster in getting things to the fleet. From an ideation to a thing to a Warfighter. How do we do that faster than anybody else?
Reimagining naval power is about the way we think and organize, not about hardware I know you were assigned to read The Kill Chain. Fascinating read. As I read through this book, it really resonated with me because this is the world we’re in today. Naval officers still tend to think of the solution to the problem set as “I’ll just get a better destroyer.” Or, “I’ll just get another aircraft carrier, or a bigger, faster submarine.” And I don’t think that’s the solution.
This quote out of the book I thought was interesting, “Military innovation is less about technology than about operational and organizational transformation.” I hear you thinking, “You’re the Chief of Naval Research, and you’re saying that it’s less about technology?” Yeah, I am. When I say reimagined naval power, I’m not necessarily talking about new big gray ships or black submarines. I’m talking about changing our processes, changing about the way we think, and the way we are organized. I think a lot of the problems we have in acquisition today, in trying to go after these new technologies, is because of the way we’re organized. The way the Navy is established – separate system commands, one for Air, one for Sea systems, one for cyber systems, supply over here. They’re separate, you get stovepipes, and you get barriers. There’s friction between them. And all these differences come because of that, and that impedes progress. If we want to reimagine Naval power, we have to look in a mirror, recognize we need to change some things organizationally. We’ve got to change the way we do business.
What do you hope the fleet looks like 10 years from now to make it relevant in a fight with a near peer competitor? Is that a 355 ship Navy? Is it squadrons of unmanned vessels? Is it something in between? I think that it’s something in between. I think that you will see more unmanned, unattended things. They’ll be networked together. I think initially, what you’re going to see, and again, this is just the way we just tend to do things as human beings. When it comes to new tech, we take the new tech, and we jam it into a form factor of something we recognize and know. So what you’re going to see are unmanned surface vessels that look like the Sea Hunter. It looks like a catamaran. It looks like something you recognize and know. That thing, whatever it is, whether its underwater, surface, air, will initially operate in tandem with a manned platform.
I think the answer is not just to go build bigger, faster gray-hulled ships or black submarines. We still need this for a while. We’re not going to stop, go to zero and do something else. It’s going to be a gradual thing. But I think there needs to be a plan with a trajectory of slowly weaning us off of these very highly complex and expensive vessels that takes us into something else. And some of that something else might be unmanned/uncrewed. Uncrewed vessels, unattended sensors, highly networked together, passing tracking information back and forth. I think that’s more of the future, combined with how we make decisions in a more efficient, faster manner than the adversary.
You’re going to have these things as kind of wingmen that’ll be arrayed around your platform. And you may be able to send it a couple hundred miles out front to go do some probing of the adversary. Maybe it’s got some decoys and other things it can do while it’s out there, then it will then come back. You have to refuel it at some point, because it’s still going to have limited range. I think in 10 years, you’ll find many, many more unmanned things out there, but they will be operating close to the gray hull or the black hull submarine, able to go out and do things but come back. So I think that’s step one.
But over time, it’s going to be driven by the younger generations, people like you who are not constrained by thinking it’s got to be a gray hull or a black hull thing. And they will come in and look at us and go, “If you’d change the form factor, you can make that thing….” It could be a surface thing, but could also be a semi-submersible, when it needs to be. Make it so it just drops below the surface a foot. And it can still cruise along slowly. Things like that will happen. Because, again, this does happen all throughout history as technologies have been introduced. We always try to take it and make it do what the old thing did.
An Example of New Tech First Looking Like the Old – Photonics Masts on a Submarine Submarines traditionally have a periscope. You look into the barrel; it’s got the mirrors and the glass and a prism at the top looking out. And you’re looking through a circle. That’s the world for a submariner. That’s what I looked at for 20 years, 25 years. Today, we’ve got these new, cool electronic photonics masts. Guess what? When you look at that picture in the control room of a submarine, you may be on a big flat screen, you may control it with a joystick, but it’s still looking at a slice of the world.
We didn’t go, “Hey, if I put just four cameras or six cameras up there, and I was able to set them around looking, I can have a 360-degree camera all the time.” Well, we’re just now starting to do that. We started some R&D on that several years ago and it petered out because they didn’t have the money to keep it going. But now we’re back to, this is ridiculous, let’s get 360 out of that. That’s the challenge with new tech.
The problem today is, it’s going so fast that if you wait a generation to make those kinds of advancements, you’re so far behind anybody — adversary, other companies — that you’re irrelevant. We’ve got to break that pattern. And some of that is changing those organizational constructs that still have us back in 1994. We’ve got to get to 2020, or 2018, or 2015. I’d be happy with that. But we’ve got to get out of 1994.
As far as size, you may have seen the press. The SecDef just announced the Battle Force 2045. It talks about between 120 and 240 unmanned things in concert with a bunch of manned things. And it talks about a much bigger Navy. We’ll see what happens. A lot depends what happens with Congress.
How do we find a balance between funding exquisite equipment that costs a lot of money, and that’s very hard to replace, with building lots of low-cost equipment, but that’s less capable, but easier to replace? We have this very big appetite for highly complex, which are exquisite, phenomenal, best in the world. No question about it, costs a lot of money to build. And oh, by the way, they cost even more money to maintain over the life of a 30-, 40- or 50-year platform. We need to get away from that. Part of the answer is a lot of these uncrewed surface or underwater vessels. But even those, when we send a design over to my friends in the Pentagon to develop requirements, what they come back wanting is exquisite, too. You take this thing that should cost $10 million or $20 million, and it comes back costing $100 million, or $200 million, or worse.
I think if you could build cheaper, in more numbers that are maybe complicated, but not complex, that would be just fine. And I would build them so that they’re semi-disposable. You run them hard for 10 years, but you don’t spend a mint to refurbish them. You take them back to some yard, you recycle them. You take all materials out and build another one. That’s the way you’ve got to do it.
Another thing we have to do is recognize that we’ve got some constraints. We’ve only got a certain number of shipyards that can build these highly complex destroyers, submarines, aircraft carriers. Our industrial base is very fragile. Since we are going to still build some of those for the foreseeable future, let those yards build those exquisite things. But we need to go the nontraditional yards down along the Gulf Coast, Pacific Northwest, and other parts of country – even to boat builders, yacht builders. Let’s go to those folks to build some these unmanned things. And let’s give them some money. Let’s move some defense industrial base money around. And we can develop new expertise in different pockets that we’ve never developed before. And let’s do that at scale. And build a lot. I think that’s one of the keys to this reimagined naval power. Because again, we just cannot afford to keep building the same things.
If you went right now and asked the submariners what they want, they want SSNX, which is the next generation of submarine in roughly 2035. You talk to my aviator friends; they want the next-gen fighter about the same time. You talk to my surface warfare friends; they want the large surface combatant about the same time. Well, first of all that’s 15 years from now. So by our traditional design, build standards, that means you’ve got to start like right now, for all three. And we can’t afford that. There’s no way we can afford that.
You may have noticed the SecDef’s Battle Force 2045 came out saying you need to go to three submarines per year. So there’s a tremendous recognition that we still own the undersea. And we need to maintain that dominance. But Battle Force 2045 doesn’t call for as many surface ships, it does call for next-gen fighters. And there’s a lot of reasons for that, which we can’t talk about here. But it does not call for the large ships. At least not in numbers, and not at the same time. We’ve got to deconflict these things, and we need to build different things that are much less expensive.
How has acquisition has changed? What specifically, if anything, has changed to make us move faster? Some of what’s changed is it we are using OTA’s – other transaction authorities. We’ve been talking about this for a long time. We’re finally really trying to drive this hard. And we’re finally getting contract shops in different parts of the Navy using them. Up until probably only a couple years ago, it was only places like ONR that would do these nontraditional ways of buying things. We’ve now got the big SYSCOM acquisition shops and contract shops, realizing, “Hey, there’s something to that.”
How do you think about the development of technologies that cross traditional functional bounds? How do you get these folks together to solve these hard problems? We go inward, we try to find our smart folks in our own organizations that are somewhat constrained and tainted by the problem set already because they lived it. They’re inside of it.
General Stanley McChrystal in his book Team of Teams talked about how he organized to fight in the Middle East. What McChrystal realized was the value of the team of teams. The answers are not all inside my team, they may be in your team, or your team, or your team. The value or the power is how you net them all together. And so he used to do the same every single day. He would have this video teleconference. And he had one guy who ran the meeting. They would have a bunch of topics they would go over every day, a set of stuff you would do, an ops brief. And then they would have someone give a problem statement, and maybe a little bit of a brief. But then they let it go to the teams. The teams, not the team. And the synergy, the interactions of thought, it was incredible.
That is the model I’m trying to figure out how to bring to my own ecosystem, and then net in all the other teams around me. Whether they’re different warfare centers, or different parts of the Navy, Army, Air Force, whoever industry, academia. Because that’s the power.
I’m curious to hear more about why Warfighter performance wasn’t as emphasized as the other areas.
Traditionally, most of the money went to build those high-end destroyers and submarines and next-gen fighters. So that would be my vernacular in code 32, 3335, not 34, which is human performance. That’s the code that was on the right side of that graph. As a result of that, those other high-end things got all the money, that’s also where most of the R&D money went. And most of that was focused on either another submarine, another aircraft carrier, another fighter. And because of that, there was very little left to go do, kind of human forward stuff. I still contend that that is really where we as Americans have our advantage.
How do you recruit those people who are traditionally looking at the private sector as their career over to the Navy and to your research center? The way we traditionally do this is that someone like yourself, someone who’s in a grad program somewhere, gets involved in research sponsored by ONR, or NRL and you get your doctorate and will become a postdoc. And you continue to do that research in some field of study that we are sponsoring. And then at some point, back in DC, a vacancy opens and they say, “Hey, you can apply for this job.” Next, you get a job. A lot of Ph.Ds in my headquarters building came out of academia where they got their doctoral degree in some program sponsored by ONR.
COVID Has Changed Our Thinking About Recruiting for ONR COVID has taught us a lot of things about how to work. Today, for instance, I was at work, but only about 30 to 35% of the workforce was there. Most people are working from home. We do some classified work, but we do enough unclassified work that you can do a lot of work from home. I told my team: “I don’t want to go back to whatever was called normal back in March. Let’s find something good that comes out of this pandemic.” I want to be able to hire people in California, in Washington State, in wherever and tell them, “Hey, you can stay there and still work for me. I may ask you to come to DC once a quarter to do some required training and just to do something else where we want to get together. But I will let you stay remote.”
Because I think we were missing out on talent. A lot of people don’t come to DC and I don’t blame them.
How Can the Navy Attract More Diversity Into It’s STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) Fields? There’s a lot of concern in the DoD that we have some issues trying to attract STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) talent. So I’m trying to find ways to really amp up our STEM programs. I’m trying to find ways to attract more women, more diversity into our STEM field. Whether it’s undergrad internships or graduate internships. And I’m trying to find ways to get more people involved that we traditionally don’t get.
We put together a panel to give us some thoughts on how to attract the kind of talent we’re not traditionally attracting. We found it’s in middle school where we lose a lot of kids. Most elementary school kids think science is cool. I think for most kids, there’s a wow factor in science, but somewhere in middle school to high school it stops being cool. And that’s really tragic.
So we are figuring out ways to develop a cadre of mentors to go into the schools and help teachers and students, to pull them across that valley of death where we lose them. I think there’s far too many that we lose early for the wrong reasons. They don’t see someone that looks like them, they don’t think it’s cool, whatever. So we’re trying to figure that out.
Read the entire transcript of Admiral Selby’s talk and watch the video below.
The future is here it’s just distributed unevenly – Silicon Valley view of tech adoption
The threat is here it’s just distributed unevenly – A2/AD and the aircraft carrier
This is the second of a two-part post following my stay on the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson. Part 1 talked about what I saw and learned – the layout of a carrier, how the air crew operates and how the carrier functions in context of the other ships around it (the strike group.) But the biggest learning was the realization that disruption is not just happening to companies, it’s also happening to the Navy. And that the Lean Innovation tools we’ve built to deal with disruption and create continuous innovation for large commercial organizations were equally relevant here.
This post offers a few days’ worth of thinking about what I saw. (If you haven’t, read part 1 first.)
The threat is here; it’s just distributed unevenly – A2/AD and the aircraft carrier Both of the following statements are true:
The aircraft carrier is viable for another 30 years.
The aircraft carrier is obsolete.
Well-defended targets Think of an aircraft carrier as a $11 billion dollar portable air force base manned by 5,000 people delivering 44 F/A-18 strike fighters anywhere in the world.
The primary roles of the 44 F/A-18 strike fighters that form the core of the carrier’s air wing is to control the air and drop bombs on enemy targets. For targets over uncontested airspace (Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, Libya, etc.) that’s pretty easy. The problem is that First World countries have developed formidable surface-to-air missiles – the Russian S–300 and S-400 and the Chinese HQ-9 – which have become extremely effective at shooting down aircraft. And they have been selling these systems to other countries (Iran, Syria, Egypt, etc.). While the role of an aircraft carrier’s EA-18G Growlers is to jam/confuse the radar of these missiles, the sophistication and range of these surface-to-air missiles have been evolving faster than the jamming countermeasures on the EA-18G Growlers (and the cyber hacks to shut the radars down).
This means that the odds of a carrier-based F/A-18 strike fighter successfully reaching a target defended by these modern surface-to-air missiles is diminishing yearly. Unless the U.S. military can take these air defense systems out with drones, cruise missiles or cyber attack, brave and skilled pilots may not be enough. Given the F/A-18’s are manned aircraft (versus drones), high losses of pilots may be (politically) unacceptable.
Vulnerable carriers If you want to kill a carrier, first you must find it and then you have to track it. In WWII knowing where the enemy fleet located was a big – and critical – question. Today, photo imaging satellites, satellites that track electronic emissions (radio, radar, etc.) and satellites with synthetic aperture radar that can see through clouds and at night are able to pinpoint the strike group and carrier 24/7. In the 20th century only the Soviet Union had this capability. Today, China can do this in the Pacific and to a limited extent, Iran has this capability in the Persian Gulf. Soon there will be enough commercial satellite coverage of the Earth using the same sensors, that virtually anyone able to pay for the data will be able to track the ships.
During the Cold War the primary threat to carriers was from the air – from strike/fighters dropping bombs/torpedoes or from cruise missiles (launched from ships and planes). While the Soviets had attack submarines, our anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) capabilities (along with very noisy Soviet subs pre-Walker spy ring) made subs a secondary threat to carriers.
In the 20th century the war plan for a carrier strike group used its fighter and attack aircraft and Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from the cruisers to destroy enemy radar, surface-to-air missiles, aircraft and communications (including satellite downlinks). As those threats are eliminated, the carrier strike can move closer to land without fear of attack. This allowed the attack aircraft to loiter longer over targets or extend their reach over enemy territory.
Carriers were designed to be most effective launching a high number of sorties (number of flights) from ~225 miles from the target. For example, we can cruise offshore of potential adversaries (Iraq and Syria) who can’t get to our carriers. (Carriers can standoff farther or can reach further inland, but they have to launch F-18’s as refueling tankers to extend the mission range. For example, missions into Afghanistan are 6-8 hours versus normal mission times of 2-3 hours.)
In the 21st century carrier strike groups are confronting better equipped adversaries, and today carriers face multiple threats before they can launch an initial strike. These threats include much quieter submarines, long-range, sea-skimming cruise missiles, and in the Pacific, a potential disruptive game changer – ballistic missiles armed with non-nuclear maneuverable warheads that can hit a carrier deck as it maneuvers at speed (DF-21d and the longer range DF-26).
In the Persian Gulf the carriers face another threat – Fast Inshore Attack Craft (FIAC) and speedboats with anti-ship cruise missiles that can be launched from shore.
The sum of all these threats – to the carrier-based aircraft and the carriers themselves – are called anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) capabilities.
Eventually the cost and probability of defending the carrier as a manned aircraft platform becomes untenable in highly defended A2/AD environments like the western Pacific or the Persian Gulf. (This seems to be exactly the problem the manned bomber folks are facing in multiple regions.) But if not a carrier, what will they use to project power? While the carrier might become obsolete, the mission certainly has not.
So how does/should the Navy solve these problems?
Three Horizons of Innovation One useful way to think about in innovation in the face of increasing disruption / competition is called the “Three Horizons of Innovation.” It suggests that an organization should think about innovation across three categories called “Horizons.”
Horizon 1 activities support executing theexisting mission with ever increasing efficiency
Horizon 2 is focused on extending the core mission
Horizon 3 is focused on searching for and creating brand new missions
(see here for background on the Three Horizons.)
Horizon 1 is the Navy’s core mission. Here the Navy executes against a set of known mission requirements (known beneficiaries, known ships and planes, known adversaries, deployment, supply chain, etc.) It uses existing capabilities and has comparatively low risk to get the next improvement out the door.
In a well-run organization like the Navy, innovation and improvement occurs continuously in Horizon 1. Branches of the Navy innovate on new equipment, new tactics, new procurement processes, more sorties on newer carriers, etc. As fighter pilots want more capable manned aircraft and carrier captains want better carriers, it’s not a surprise that Horizon 1 innovations are upgrades – the next generation of carriers – Ford Class; and next generation of navy aircraft – the F-35C. As a failure here can impact the Navy’s current mission, Horizon 1 uses traditional product management tools to minimize risk and assure execution. (And yes, like any complex project they still manage to be over budget and miss their delivery schedule.)
Because failure here is unacceptable, Navy Horizon 1 programs and people are managed by building repeatable and scalable processes, procedures, incentives and promotions to execute and the mission.
In Horizon 2, the Navy extends its core mission. Here it looks for new opportunities within its existing mission (trying new technology on the same platform, using the same technology with new missions, etc.) Horizon 2 uses mostly existing capabilities (the carrier as an aircraft platform, aircraft to deliver munitions) and has moderate risk in building or securing new capabilities to get the product out the door.
An example of potential Naval Horizon 2 innovations is unmanned drones flying off carriers to do the jobs fighter pilots hate such as serving as airborne tankers (who wants to fly a gas tank around for 6 hours?) and ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance), another tedious mission flying around for hours that could be better solved with a drone downlinking ISR data for processing on board a ship.
However, getting the tanker and ISR functions onto drones only delays the inevitable shift to drones for strike, and then for fighters. The problem of strike fighters’ increasing difficulty in penetrating heavily defended targets isn’t going to get better with the new F-35C (the replacement for the F/A-18). In fact, it will get worse. Regardless of the bravery and skill of the pilots, they will face air defense systems evolving at a faster rate than the defensive systems on the aircraft. It’s not at all clear in a low-intensity conflict (think Bosnia or Syria) that civilian leadership will want to risk captured or killed pilots and losing planes like the F-35C that cost several hundred million dollars each.
Management in Horizon 2 works by pattern recognition and experimentation inside the current mission model. Ironically, institutional inertia keeps the Navy from deploying unmanned assets on carriers. In a perfect world, drones in carrier tanker and ISR roles should have been deployed by the beginning of this decade. And by now experience with them on a carrier deck could have led to first, autonomous wingmen and eventually autonomous missions. Instead the system appears to have fallen into the “real men fly planes and command Air Wings and get promoted by others who do” mindset.
The Navy does not lack drone demos and prototypes, but it has failed to deploy Horizon 2 innovations with speed and urgency. Failure to act aggressively here will impact the Navy’s ability to carry out its mission of sea control and power projection. (The Hudson Institute report on the future of the carrier is worth a read, and a RAND report on the same topic comes out in October.)
If you think Horizon 2 innovation is hard in the Navy, wait until you get to Horizon 3. This is where disruption happens. It’s how the aircraft carrier disrupted the battleship. How nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines changed the nature of strategic deterrence, and how the DF-21/26 and artificial islands in the South China sea changed decades of assumptions. And it’s why, in most organizations, innovation dies.
For the Navy, a Horizon 3 conversation would not be about better carriers and aircraft. Instead it would focus on the core reasons the Navy deploys a carrier strike group: to show the flag for deterrence, or to control part of the sea to protect shipping, or to protect a Marine amphibious force, or to project offensive power against any adversary in well-defended areas.
A Horizon 3 solution for the Navy would start with basic need of these missions (sea control, offensive power projection – sortie generation) the logistic requirements that come with them, and the barriers to their success like A2/AD threats. Lots of people have been talking and writing about this and lots of Horizon 3 concepts have been proposed such as Distributed Lethality, Arsenal Ships, underwater drone platforms, etc.
Focussing on these goals – not building or commanding carriers, or building and flying planes – is really, really hard. It’s hard to get existing operational organizations to think about disruption because it means they have to be thinking about obsoleting a job, function or skill they’ve spent their lives perfecting. It’s hard because any large organization is led by people who succeeded as Horizon 1 and 2 managers and operators (not researchers). Their whole focus, career, incentives, etc. has been about building and make the current platforms work. And the Navy has excelled in doing so.
The problem is that Horizon 3 solutions take different people, different portfolio, different process and different politics.
People: In Horizon 1 and 2 programs people who fail don’t get promoted because in a known process failure to execute is a failure of individual performance. However, applying the same rules to Horizon 3 programs – no failures tolerated – means we’ll have no learning and no disruptive innovations. What spooks leadership is that in Horizon 3 most of the projects will fail. But using Lean Innovation they’ll fail quickly and cheaply.
In Horizon 3 the initial program is run by mavericks – the crazy innovators. In the Navy, these are the people you want to court martial or pass over for promotion for not getting with current program. (In a startup they’d be the founding CEO.) These are the fearless innovators you want to create new and potentially disruptive mission models. Failure to support their potential disruptive talent means it will go elsewhere.
Portfolio: In Horizon 3, the Navy is essentially incubating a startup. And not just one. The Navy needs a portfolio of Horizon 3 bets, for the same reason venture capital and large companies have a portfolio of Horizon 3 bets – most of these bets will fail – but the ones that succeed are game changers.
Process: A critical difference between a Horizon 3 bet and a Horizon 1 or 2 bet is that you don’t build large, expensive, multi-year programs to test radically new concepts (think of the Zumwalt class destroyers). You use “Lean” techniques to build Minimal Viable Products (MVPs). MVPs are whatever it takes to get you the most learning in the shortest period of time.
Horizon 3 groups operate with speed and urgency – the goal is rapid learning. They need to be physically separate from operating divisions in an incubator, or their own facility. And they need their own plans, procedures, policies, incentives and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) different from those in Horizon 1.
The watchwords in Horizon 3 are “If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough.”
Politics: In Silicon Valley most startups fail. That’s why we invest in a portfolio of new ideas, not just one. We embrace failure as an integral part of learning. We do so by realizing that in Horizon 3 we are testing hypotheses – a series of unknowns – not executing knowns. Yet failure/learning is a dirty word in the world of promotions and the “gotcha game” of politics. To survive in this environment Horizon 3 leaders must learn how to communicate up/down and sideways that they are not running Horizon 1 and 2 projects.
Meanwhile, Navy and DOD leadership has to invest in, and clearly communicate their innovation strategy across all three Horizons.
Failure to manage innovation across all three Horizons and failure to make a portfolio of Horizon 3 bets means that the Navy is exposed to disruption by new entrants. Entrants unencumbered by decades of success, fueled by their own version of manifest destiny.
Lessons Learned
Our carriers are a work of art run and manned by professionals
Threats that can degrade or negate a carrier strike group exist in multiple areas
However, carriers are still a significant asset in almost all other combat scenarios
Speed and urgency rather than institutional inertia should be the watchwords for Horizon 2 innovation
Horizon 3 innovation is about a clean sheet of paper thinking
It’s what Silicon Valley calls disruption
It requires different people, portfolio, process and politics
The Navy (and DOD) must manage innovation across all three Horizons
Allocating dollars and resources for each
Remembering that todays Horizon 3 crazy idea is tomorrow Horizon 1 platform
Thanks to the crew of the U.S.S. Vinson, and Commander Todd Cimicata and Stanford for a real education about the Navy.
The future is here it’s just distributed unevenly – Silicon Valley view of tech adoption
The threat is here it’s just distributed unevenly – A2/AD and the aircraft carrier
Sitting backwards in a plane with no windows, strapped in a 4-point harness, wearing a life preserver, head encased in a helmet, eyes covered by googles, your brain can’t process the acceleration. As the C-2 A Greyhound is hurled off an aircraft carrier into the air via a catapult, your body thrown forward in the air, until a few seconds later, hundreds of feet above the carrier now at 150 miles per hour you yell, “Holy Shxt.” And no one can hear you through the noise, helmet and ear protectors.
I just spent two days a hundred miles off the coast of Mexico aboard the U.S.S. Carl Vinson landing and taking off on the carrier deck via a small cargo plane.
Taking off and landing is a great metaphor for the carrier. It’s designed to project power – and when needed, violence.
It’s hard to spend time on a carrier and not be impressed with the Navy, and the dedicated people who man the carrier and serve their country. And of course that’s the purpose of the two-day tour. The Navy calls its program Outreach: Americas Navy. Targeting key influencers (who they call Distinguished Visitors,) the Navy hosts 900/year out to carriers off the West Coast and 500/year to carriers on the East Coast. These tours are scheduled when the carriers are offshore training, not when they are deployed on missions. I joined Pete Newell (my fellow instructor in the Hacking for Defense class) and 11 other Stanford faculty from CISAC and the Hoover Institution.
I learned quite a bit about the physical layout of a carrier, how the air crew operates and how the carrier functions in context of the other ships around it (the strike group.) But the biggest learning was the realization that disruption is not just happening to companies, it’s also happening to the Navy. And that the Lean Innovation tools we’ve built to deal with disruption and create continuous innovation for large commercial organizations were equally relevant here.
The Carrier U.S. aircraft carriers like the Vinson (there are 9 others) are designed to put the equivalent of an Air Force base anywhere on any ocean anywhere in the world. This means the U.S. can show the flag for deterrence (don’t do this or it will be a bad day) or to control some part of the sea (to protect commercial and/or military shipping, or protect a Marine amphibious force – on the way or at a place they will land); and project power (a euphemism for striking targets with bombs and cruise missiles far from home).
On an aircraft carrier there are two groups of people – the crew needed to run the carrier, called the ship’s company, and the people who fly and support the aircraft they carry, called the Air Wing. The Vinson carries ~2,800 people in the ship’s company, ~2,000 in the Air Wing and ~150 staff.
Without the Air Wing the carrier would just be another big cruise ship. The Air Wing has 72 aircraft made up of jet and propeller planes. The core of the Air Wing are the 44 F/A-18 strike fighters.
The F/A-18 strike fighters are designed to do two jobs: gain air superiority by engaging other fighter planes in the air or attack targets on the ground with bombs (that’s why they have the F/A designation). Flying on missions with these strike fighters are specially modified F/A-18’s – EA-18G Growlers that carry electronic warfare jammers which electronically shut down enemy radars and surface-to-air missiles to ensure that the F/A-18s get to the target without being shot down.
Another type of plane on the carrier is the propeller-driven E-2C Hawkeyes, which is an airborne early warning plane. Think of the Hawkeyes as airborne air traffic control. Hawkeyes carry a long-range radar in a dome above the fuselage, and keep the strike group and the fighters constantly aware of incoming air threats. They can send data to the fighters and to other ships in the battle group which identifies the location of potential threats. They can also detect other ships at sea.
The other planes in the carrier’s Air Wing are 16 helicopters: 8 MH-60S Nighthawk helicopters for logistics support, search and rescue and special warfare support; and 8 MH-60R Seahawks to locate and attack submarines and to attack Surface targets. They carry sonobuoys, dipping sonar and anti-submarine torpedoes. And last but not least, there is the plane that got us on the carrier, the C2-A Greyhound – the delivery truck for the carrier.
You’re not alone Carriers like the Vinson don’t go to sea by themselves. They’re part of a group of ships called the “carrier strike group.” A strike group consists of a carrier, two cruisers with Tomahawk cruise missiles which can attack land targets, and two destroyers and/or frigates with Aegis surface to air missiles to defend the carrier from air attack. (In the past, the strike group was assigned an attack submarine to hunt for subs trying to kill the carrier. Today the attack subs are in such demand they are assigned by national authorities on an as-needed basis.) The strike group also includes replenishment ships that carry spare ammunition, fuel, etc. (The 150 staff on the carrier include separate staff for the strike group, Air Wing, carrier, surface warfare (cruisers with tomahawk missiles) and air defense (Aegis-armed destroyers.)
The strike group also receives antisubmarine intelligence from P-3/P-8 anti-submarine aircraft and towed arrays on the destroyers, and additional situational awareness from imaging, Electronic Intelligence (ELINT) and radar sensors and satellites.
Before our group flew out to the carrier, we were briefed by Vice-Admiral Mike Shoemaker. His job is aviation Type Commander (TYCOM) for all United States Navy naval aviation units (responsible for aircrew training, supply, readiness, etc.) He also wears another hat as the commander of all the Navy planes in the Pacific. It was interesting to hear that the biggest issue in keeping the airplanes ready to fight are sequestration and budget cuts. These cuts have impacted maintenance, and made spare parts hard to get. And no pay raises make it hard to retain qualified people.
Then it was time to climb into our C-2 Greyhound for the flight out to the aircraft carrier. Just like a regular passenger plane, except you put on a life vest, goggles, ear plugs, and over all that a half helmet protecting the top and back of your head while enclosing your ears in large plastic ear muffs. Then you and 25 other passengers load the plane via the rear ramp, sit facing backwards in a plane with no windows and wait to land.
On the U.S.S. Vinson Landing on an aircraft carrier is an equally violent act. When you make an arrested landing, a tail hook on the plane traps one of the four arresting cables stretched across the deck, and you decelerate from 105 mph to zero in two seconds. When the plane hit the arresting wire on the carrier deck, it came to a dead stop in 250 feet. There was absolutely no doubt that we had landed (and a great lesson on why you were wearing head protection, goggles and strapped into your non-reclining seat with a four-point harness). As the rear ramp lowered, we were assaulted with the visual and audio cacophony of crewmen in seven different colored shirts on the deck swarming on and around F-18s, E2Cs, helicopters, etc., all with their engines running.
Captain Doug Verissimo and his executive officer Captain Eric Anduze, welcomed us to the carrier. (One of my first problems onboard was translating Navy ranks into their Army/Air Force equivalents. For example, a navy captain equals an Air Force/Army Colonel, and a rear admiral is a brigadier general, etc.)
Then for the next two days the carrier’s public affairs officer led us on the “shock and awe” tour. In four years in the Air Force I had been stationed on four fighter bases, three of them in war zones, some with over 150 planes generating lots of sorties. But I had to grudgingly admit that watching F-18s landing on a 300-foot runway 60 feet above the water, on a pitching deck moving 30 mph at sea – one a minute – at night – was pretty impressive. And having us stand on the deck less than 50 feet away from these planes as they landed trapping the arrestor wires, and launched via a catapult was a testament to the Navy’s PR acumen. Most of crew on the flight deck are in their late teens and maybe early 20s. (And for me, hard to believe 4 decades ago in some other life I was doing that job.) Standing on the deck on a Navy carrier, it’s impossible not to be impressed with the precision choreography of the crew and the skill of their pilots.
Our group climbed the ladders (inclined at a 68-degree angle – there are no stairs) up and down the 18 decks (floors) of the ship. We saw the hangar deck where planes were repaired, the jet engine shop, jet engine test cell, arresting cable engine room, the bridge where they steer the ship, the flag bridge (the command center for the admiral), the flight deck control and launch operations room (where the aircraft handler keeps track of all the aircraft on the flight deck and in the hangar), and the carrier air traffic control center (CATCC).
At each stop an officer or enlisted man gave us an articulate description of what equipment we were looking at and how it fit into the rest of the carrier.
(What got left out of the tour was the combat direction center (CDC), the munitions elevators, ships engines and any of the avionics maintenance shops and of course, the nuclear reactor spaces.)
During lunch and dinners, we had a chance to talk at length to the officers and enlisted men. They were smart, dedicated and proud of what they do, and frank about the obstacles they face getting their jobs done. Interestingly they all echoed Vice-Admiral Shoemaker’s observation that the biggest obstacles they face are political – sequestration and budget cuts.
Just before we left we got a briefing from the head of the Carrier Strike Group, Rear Admiral James T. Loeblein about the threats the carrier and the strike group face.
Then it was off to be catapulted back home.
It’s clear that the public affairs office has a finely tuned PR machine. So if the goal was to impress me that the Navy and carriers are well run and manned – consider it done.
However, it got me thinking… new aircraft carrier’s cost $11 billion. And we have a lot of them on order. Given the threats they are facing are they going to be viable for another 30 years? Or is the aircraft carrier obsolete?
Tomorrow’s post will offer a few days’ worth of thoughts about carriers, strike groups and how the Navy can continue to innovate with carriers and beyond.
Lessons Learned – part 1 of 2
Our carriers are a work of art run and manned by professionals
Then for the next two days the carrier’s public affairs officer led us on the “shock and awe” tour. In four years in the Air Force I had been stationed on four fighter bases, three of them in war zones, some with over 150 planes generating lots of sorties. But I had to grudgingly admit that watching F-18s landing on a 300-foot runway 60 feet above the water, on a pitching deck moving 30 mph at sea – one a minute – at night – was pretty impressive. And having us stand on the deck less than 50 feet away from these planes as they landed trapping the 
