WASHINGTON — The deputy chief of naval operations for information warfare recently warned sailors and other military officials they are marks for hacking attempts, especially at a time of international hostilities.
“Cyberattacks against businesses and U.S. infrastructure are increasing in frequency and complexity,” Navy Vice Adm. Jeffrey Trussler said in an unclassified memo, dated February. “DoD and federal law enforcement report adversary interest in our remote work infrastructure. This means that you are a target — for your access and your information.”
Hackers have exploited mistakes on Navy and private, at-home networks by stealing or guessing weak passwords and other credentials, furtively installing malware, and posing as service members or veterans to pry information out of people, according to the message.
“With heightened tensions throughout the world, ensure your team understands how the actions of a single user can impact our global force,” said Trussler.
The memo arrived amid an avalanche of cyberattacks in Ukraine and as Russia again pressed its western neighbor. Distributed denial of service attacks, which rely on overwhelming traffic to render something useless, paralyzed Ukrainian websites throughout January and February.
The White House National Security Council has blamed some of the attacks on the GRU, a Russian intelligence agency. Moscow has denied responsibility; the Russian Embassy in the U.S. on Feb. 18 said Russia “has never conducted and does not conduct any ‘malicious’ operations in cyberspace.”
While Ukraine was not specifically mentioned in the February memo, a long-term strategy for competition with Russia and China was.
Trussler has stated the Navy is investing in cyber, and last year said “cyber protection and operations” must be “culturally embedded in everything we do, and that will take a bit of education.”
“I think we have to get better at partnerships and putting creative teams together to test systems in order to tell you what’s safe and what’s vulnerable, using people who are capable of thinking like the adversary,” he said at the Sea-Air-Space 2021 conference, according to a Navy narrative.
Colin Demarest is a reporter at C4ISRNET, where he covers networks and IT. Colin previously covered the Department of Energy and its National Nuclear Security Administration — namely nuclear weapons development and Cold War cleanup — for a daily newspaper in South Carolina.
NORFOLK, Va. — The U.S. Navy’s cruiser modernization program has been disorganized in its planning and troubled in its execution, service leaders have told Defense News. But it’s a sliver lining for those working on destroyers, as they’re able to learn from mistakes in the cruiser effort and avoid repeating them.
The Navy’s massive upgrade project involved cruisers receiving improved combat systems, sensors and computers, as well as fixes to their aging hulls and mechanical and electrical systems. Now, as the service launches a destroyer modernization plan — much smaller in scope, but susceptible to similar challenges — those in the cruiser community are looking to help.
Seven cruisers were put into a particular variation of the modernization program as part of plans to extend the life of the Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruisers: They’d undergo an initial maintenance availability to modernize areas like the galley; go into a reduced operating status with a skeleton crew of about 35 sailors watching over the ship pierside for several years; go into a one-year availability to prepare for dry docking; and then conduct an “extended dry-docking selected restricted availability” where the bulk of the work would be done.
The first cruiser, Gettysburg, is nearing the end of that process and will go to sea this year, after its 2014 entrance into the service life-extension effort.
At the same time, the destroyer Pinckney is at the General Dynamics NASSCO shipyard in San Diego, California, for the “crawl phase” of the DDG Mod 2.0 program. While there, the ship will receive the Surface Electronic Warfare Improvement Program (SEWIP) Block 3, go on deployment, and then return to receive the SPY-6(V)4 air and missile defense radar.
The DDG Mod 2.0 program will eventually conduct the SEWIP and SPY-6 upgrades at the same time in a longer availability. For now, Pinckney and a few other vessels will undergo this “smart start” process so the Navy can begin learning lessons on SEWIP installation, even as SPY-6 lessons are learned separately though integration work at land-based engineering sites and aboard the first Flight III destroyers being built with a variant of the SPY-6, Capt. Matthew Tardy, the surface ship modernization program manager at Naval Sea Systems Command, said in January at the Surface Navy Association conference.
The guided-missile cruiser Gettysburg transits the Gulf of Oman with the Harry S. Truman Carrier Strike Group in November 2013. (MC2 Lyle Wilkie III/U.S. Navy)
Though the two modernization efforts differ in scope and duration, Commander of Naval Surface Forces Vice Adm. Roy Kitchener, told reporters in January that the Navy must ensure proper planning and oversight to avoid the delays that plagued the cruiser program.
“That’s a very complex availability, a lot of work when you’re taking SPY-6 and then integrating it with SEWIP and integrating it with another combat system. There’s a lot of work there, and I think we need to make sure we have that right, we have the proper oversight,” he said. “They’re lengthy, they’re challenging. We need to make sure that we get them done quickly and efficiently because it’s a great capability that we need to get out … to the force.”
The problem with cruiser modernizations
Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday recently visited the cruiser Gettysburg — the first cruiser that will come out of this program, and a ship where he served as executive officer earlier in his career. Defense News joined the CNO during the Feb. 4 tour.
“We’re in year three of a one-year avail[ability]. We were expecting to be complete almost two years ago,” Gettysburg’s commanding officer, Capt. Megan Thomas, told Gilday during the visit.
The cruiser receiving significant updates to its combat and computer systems, including upgrading to the Baseline 9 version of the Aegis Combat System, receiving the Consolidated Afloat Networks and Enterprise Services system, modernizing to the newest configurations of the AN/SLQ-32C(V)6 and the AN/SQQ-89(V)15, undergoing Cooperative Engagement Capability upgrades, and more. These processes, however, involve a lot of challenging cable work.
On the hull, mechanical and electrical — or HM&E — side of things, the 30-year-old cruiser received upgrades throughout the nearly eight-year modernization program. Some systems were fixed early on but sat unused while the ship was in reduced operating status for years, so getting them up and running is proving a challenge, Thomas said.
“Ventilation is probably our most troubled system right now,” she noted.
Few other ships in the fleet use the same outdated ventilation system, she explained, so the maintenance team had to fix components, such as motors, that might otherwise have been replaced if spare parts were available.
“A lot of the electrical connections associated with the motor controllers have degraded over time. And of course we had a large amount of contractors on and off this ship that are doing a lot of other cabling work,” which has caused damage to some of the ventilation system, she told Gilday.
The guided-missile cruiser Gettysburg undergoes its lengthy modernization effort and service-life extension at the pier at Naval Station Norfolk, Va., on Feb. 4, 2022. (Megan Eckstein/Staff)
She noted that Gettysburg hasn’t experience tank issues, but its fuel tanks haven’t been refueled yet. Tanks have been an ongoing headache for the cruiser fleet; Vella Gulf was sidelined as it tried to deploy in March 2021 because of fuel tank cracks, and Lake Champlain required repeated maintenance during its deployment to the Indo-Pacific region in 2017.
Thomas said Gettysburg will fuel up to about 60% to ensure no cracks in the fuel tank emerge; then 80% for additional leakage testing; and then fully refuel at sea while still testing for cracks and corrosion along the way.
The ship is to go to sea for HM&E trials in June, and it will soon kick off a lengthy 30-week process of combat system testing.
“We’ve been really trying to just claw our way back to get to milestones and really build some momentum,” Thomas told Gilday, noting that delays have harmed crew morale.
Gilday said Gettysburg’s experience confirmed what he was previously told about the cruiser program’s troubled life-extension efforts.
“We’re trying to drive down maintenance delay days,” Gilday said during the meeting. “In 2019, we had about 7,700, and right now for ‘22 we’re looking at about 2,200. Of those 2,200, 1,200 belong to four cruisers and an [amphibious dock landing ship].
Gilday also cited the significant cost of keeping old cruisers ready for missions: more than $80 million in unplanned maintenance costs in FY22 as well as a strain on the limited ship repair workforce. For those reasons, he reaffirmed his desire to retire some of the cruisers earlier than planned — “not Gettysburg, but other hulls,” he told Thomas — despite congressional opposition throughout the last decade.
Sliver lining
Though there’s little for the Gettysburg crew to do now other than try to stay on schedule, Thomas has identified lessons learned that can be applied to other cruiser and destroyer modernization programs.
A key issue for Gettysburg was planning. Thomas said the original work plan called for concurrent activity by BAE Systems and multiple subcontractors in various spaces on the ship, but that work was poorly deconflicted.
“There needs to be a lot more planning in advance of the execution of an avail[ability] that’s going to be of this size, because as the contractors, subcontractors and [alteration installation teams] are all clamoring to get into the same space, we have definitely learned some lessons about sequencing of work,” she told Gilday.
Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday and Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy Russell Smith visit the cruiser Gettysburg and its leadership on Feb. 4, 2022. (Megan Eckstein/Staff)
Thomas told Defense News in an interview aboard the ship that miles of new cables were installed, but some of it got pulled loose as other work took place after installation.
“In one of our spaces, computer central, the ordering, the sequence of the work that I referenced, was problematic in that they put in the new cabinets and then they came in and did all the cabling, which runs in the false deck underneath it,” she said. “Sitting in the seats that we are now, it’s kind of like: How did we not see that? But it’s different companies doing these items, and so it really takes a full collaborative effort to make sure that those communications — whether it’s restoration meetings, or it’s daily production meetings — that everybody is sharing the information that they need to hear so that we’re not having to duplicate effort.”
Her crew also learned lessons about proper crewing during a major maintenance availability. Because the cruiser modernization program lasts so long, none of the sailors assigned to the ship before going into the Service Life Extension Program, or SLEP, are still around during the critical dry docking period and the effort to bring the ship back to life. This can be challenging, Thomas said, and she encouraged other cruiser captains to bring in expertise or send sailors to gain expertise on other ships to ultimately help with the most critical and complex parts of the SLEP.
“I have one sailor who was assigned to USS Gettysburg before it went into SLEP, and now he came back as a first class [petty officer] and now he’s a chief — so great to kind of have that continuity, but 1 out of 338 does not a crew make,” she explained.
Thomas has also developed a color-coded watch bill that identifies which crew members are qualified for which watch stations as well as who has previous cruiser experience. This helped her perform targeted cross-decking with other East Coast cruisers to get her watch team at-sea experience in addition to their classroom and pierside training.
Thomas praised Naval Sea Systems Command for providing technical expertise, and she recommended other ship captains coming out of lengthy modernization periods lean on the organization’s resources for help — especially because so few sailors, relatively speaking, have experience on cruisers.
“NAVSEA has worked to give us a number of people, senior enlisted folks, to be able to help understand, troubleshoot and correct material issues. That’s great for us — especially our apprentice-level and even some of our journeymen-level individuals who don’t know necessarily what right looks like. So they need that senior leadership walking alongside them to help them understand that condition,” she said.
Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday speaks with sailors aboard the guided-missile cruiser Gettysburg on Feb. 4, 2022. (MC3 Jeremy Boan/U.S. Navy)
She also recommended cruiser captains pay close attention to crew morale while contractors work on their ships. “Sailors join the Navy to get underway and see the world. And as we have gone through this availability, the number of times the goal posts have shifted has been very frustrating for them. So that’s why we have kind of worked in closer-in goals, so that they’re more achievable goals.”
Thomas and the crew have tried to celebrate each point of progress this year. Upon their arrival in Naval Station Norfolk from the BAE Systems shipyard, the NAVSEA fleet integration team welcomed the ship on the pier with “Welcome Back, Gettysburg” signs, she said, and “they stopped wearing hard hats for the first time.”
“So that was one of the first questions I was asked is: ‘Captain, do we need to wear hard hats when we go to Naval Station Norfolk?’ So I mean, that was a huge morale booster,” she added. “There’s an end in sight.”
Doing it different for destroyers
Looking to the destroyer modernization program, Thomas said the Navy is avoiding the biggest mistake: putting HM&E systems down for so long and then trying to restart them again.
She also hopes the DDG effort will focus on sequencing of the work, especially with the longer availabilities involving the SPY-6 and SEWIP installations on top of HM&E work; and she hopes technical experts will be kept on site as crews become familiar with their new gear and begin taking ownership of it.
Tardy — the surface ship modernization program manager at NAVSEA — said he doesn’t want to draw too close a comparison between the cruiser modernization effort and the upcoming DDG Mod 2.0 program. Many of the cruiser challenges stem from the ship’s long-term reduced operating status, which isn’t part of the plan for destroyers.
But Tardy did say the Navy learned much about getting systems up and running after a long maintenance period. The crawl-walk-run approach to DDG Mod 2.0 lowers the risk.
“We’re very conscious of making sure that those availabilities are executed and done correctly,” he said, with everything being done with an eye toward buying down integration risk early in the process.
Pinckney and a couple other destroyers will get the SEWIP installation only in their first availability, allowing shipyards like NASSCO to learn best practices for installation and integration.
The guided-missile destroyer Pinckney transits the South China Sea on July 22, 2021. (MC2 Jeffery Southerland/U.S. Navy)
Simultaneously, crews elsewhere are learning about SPY-6 installation and integration. The first radar has been installed on the Jack Lucas, the first Flight III destroyer being built at Ingalls Shipbuilding in Mississippi.
Between lessons being learned at Ingalls and fellow destroyer-builder Bath Iron Works in Maine, and at land-based test sites such as Lockheed Martin’s Moorestown, New Jersey-based Aegis Combat System test site, the Navy will have a good sense of how best to integrate the radar onto the destroyers.
“The real key, I think, is to make sure we involve all our stakeholders — so industry partners, our new construction counterparts, [Naval Sea Systems Command] and the [program executive offices] — so that we take the lessons that we’re learning on the SPY-6 that’s being installed there so we can apply over to the in-service side when we backfit,” Tardy said.
Dave Baker, NASSCO’s vice president for repair, told Defense News in a Feb. 15 visit to the San Diego yard that Pinckney’s availability — which includes the normal scope of a dry docking availability, plus the SEWIP installation — allows the company to focus on significant structural work associated with SEWIP installation without worrying about the SPY-6 radar just yet.
Older versions of the AN/SLQ-32 electronic warfare system were affixed to the destroyer below the bridge wing, above a platform for sailors to access and maintain the system. That entire area will now be enclosed in what Baker called “bug eyes” on either side of the ship. Those steel structures are complex and have to maintain just the right angles and flat surfaces for the system’s arrays.
Baker said NASSCO spent a lot of time understanding how to build, lift and install the steel pieces and then integrate the SEWIP system, but he acknowledged lessons learned would have to be captured and rolled into clean-sheet designs to inform future SEWIP installations as part of DDG Mod 2.0.
Pinckney’s availability began in October and is on track to end a few months early, around May 2023, at which point the Navy can combine lessons learned on SEWIP installation from NASSCO with those for SPY-6 installation in order to craft a plan for the longer modernization periods.
Megan Eckstein is the naval warfare reporter at Defense News. She has covered military news since 2009, with a focus on U.S. Navy and Marine Corps operations, acquisition programs, and budgets. She has reported from four geographic fleets and is happiest when she’s filing stories from a ship. Megan is a University of Maryland alumna.
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Marine Corps this week will officially stand up its first Marine littoral regiment, a linchpin of its plans to conduct small-unit expeditionary advanced base operations and to move high-end gear into and throughout the Pacific.
Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. Eric Smith told reporters the 3rd Marine Regiment in Hawaii will on March 3 officially be redesignated the 3rd Marine Littoral Regiment. The MLR will be subdivided into numerous EABO units of about 75 to 100 Marines, each highly trained in and equipped for their particular mission area.
Some EABO units will conduct strike missions on land and at-sea targets; some will create refueling and logistics hubs; some will do jamming, deception, reconnaissance and more. But they’ll all look relatively similar as they come off a transport aircraft or small ship, making it tough for the adversary to identify them and understand what they bring to the battlefield — if the adversary can even see the small and mobile units moving around vast littoral areas.
These small units will bring with them some emerging technologies, which Smith said in the Feb. 28 media roundtable will be employed throughout the region as the units maneuverin and out of the First Island Chain for exercises and experimentation events.
Smith highlighted four key systems that would be coming to the Pacific, or were already there and would be movedaround the theater to support EABO operations.
First is the Navy Marine Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System, or NMESIS, for long-range strike. The system consists of the Naval Strike Missile launched from the back of an unmanned joint light tactical vehicle. EABO units with the NMESIS would be able to conduct anti-ship strikes — or even gain sea control with just the threat of being able to target enemy ships — from beaches and straits throughout the region.
Second is the MQ-9A Reaper unmanned aerial vehicle for extended-range intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. This large UAV will help sense what’s happening in the region and pass its findings back to joint force commanders in the theater or even directly to Marines with the NMESIS to take immediate action.
Third is the Ground/Air Task Oriented Radar, or G/ATOR, as part of the communications architecture to enable data sharing among various EABO units and with the larger naval and joint force.
And lastly are two separate means of organic mobility: a long-range unmanned surface vessel the Marines would own and operate themselves, to move goods or potentially people around littoral areas, as well as the light amphibious warship the Marines would leverage in tandem with the U.S. Navy.
“Four good examples, concrete examples of the kind of capabilities we are working on — in some cases, have already — and now we just need to determine exactly where they should be laid down,” Smith said.
“Where the equipment is ultimately employed, is based — all that is going to be determined by the threat, where do we need it to be? These capabilities, whether they be lethal fires or communications or mobility, we will seek to place them where they can best be used to deter our adversaries,” he said.
The Marines will study where the new gear could be best leveraged, and then the service will conduct environmental and legal studies to ensure employment from any possible location is in keeping with local and host-nation regulations. Smith noted partnerships with host countries throughout the Indo-Pacific area were pivotal to the EABO concept, which calls on the small units to be constantly moving throughout island chains and beaches around the area to keep the adversary confused and unable to target them.
Smith said he must accomplish four things by the end of fiscal 2023: standing up the 3rd MLR, which will happen this week; moving additional KC-130J transport and refueling aircraft into the Pacific to boost the Marines’ organic lift capability; fielding the NMESIS in theater; and fielding the MQ-9A in theater.
That list of requirements “represents our ability to live, train and deploy in these small, disaggregated units” in the Pacific. A threat in the Pacific could pop up any time, Smith said, and the joint force commanders in theater could call on whichever EABO units they need based on the threat and have them ready to head out the door that day.
He argued this capability will have an immediate effect on adversaries like China, because China won’t be able to track the units’ whereabouts as they come and go and maneuver within the first island chain. And they’ll each pack a punch China can’t dismiss, he said.
Though not formally required to be fielded by the end of FY23, Smith said the Marines are in a good place with the G/ATOR radar, the LRUSV and LAW.
He said the Marines have a solid acquisition program for the radar, and G/ATOR units are already based in Okinawa, Japan, and have been used in events in Australia.
“Where we place them in the long run depends on where they’re most needed, but the capability has to be in the Pacific, and those G/ATOR radars are already in the Pacific,” he said.
On LRUSV, for which there is no program of record yet, Smith said the Marines have already experimented with a 33-foot rigid-hull inflatable boat and will continue experimenting with a 45-foot Metal Shark boat.
The Navy is farther along in getting to a program of record for LAW, with five companies doing concept design work for the Marine Corps and the service working hard to get acquisition funds into the Navy’s shipbuilding budget.
“In the interim, we’re using stern-landing vessels we are renting, leasing a vehicle through the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab to use as a surrogate,” Smith said. That vessel is doing experimentation work to refine the Marines’ size and beachability requirements, he said, ahead of the Marine Corps and Navy selecting a shipbuilder.
He noted the Marines may lease two additional vessels for experimentation, because “we don’t want to wait for the LAW to come online for us to then confirm — not come up with, but confirm — our concepts of operations.”
By the end of FY23, he said, the MLR would have some number of LAW surrogates at its disposal for testing and training.
Smith stressed this is only the start, and more types of units with more types of gear will be set up as China and other potential adversaries evolve their operations and capabilities.
“The MLR is the harbinger of things to come for us, both in the Indo-Pacific and in how the Marine Corps conducts business,” Smith said. “It is just the first step.”
Megan Eckstein is the naval warfare reporter at Defense News. She has covered military news since 2009, with a focus on U.S. Navy and Marine Corps operations, acquisition programs, and budgets. She has reported from four geographic fleets and is happiest when she’s filing stories from a ship. Megan is a University of Maryland alumna.
SAN DIEGO, Calif. — The U.S. Navy is releasing little information about its Project Overmatch progress or upcoming milestones, and it’s purposefully remaining mum so China can’t steal its work.
Navy leadership has touted Project Overmatch as key to its ability to conduct distributed maritime operations in the future. The development effort is meant to yield a network that can get the right information to the right users quickly, reliably, and on a network that’s resilient to efforts by an enemy to destroy or disrupt it.
Though the Navy has said it intends to conduct a first deployment of an initial capability on a carrier strike group in 2023, little information has been revealed about whether the Navy is on track to meet that goal.
Rear Adm. Doug Small, the commander of Naval Information Warfare Systems Command and the lead for Project Overmatch, was asked to connect the dots between the kickoff of Project Overmatch in October 2020 and the achievement of an early deployment in 2023, since other leaders have been short on details.
“I’m glad to hear that, because we’ve been very deliberate about keeping a low profile and not a huge internet presence on ‘here’s all your facts on Project Overmatch,’” Small responded during a question-and-answer session at the WEST 2022 conference, cohosted by the U.S. Naval Institute and AFCEA International.
“Our competitors steal everything, and frankly they’re not ashamed of it.”
Project Overmatch is the Navy’s contribution to Joint All-Domain Command and Control, or JADC2, an effort to seamlessly share data across the joint forces. According to the Pentagon’s vision, JADC2 would enable the military to take data collected from any domain by any service, fuse and process it with artificial intelligence to create a common operating picture, and then send data on any perceived threats to the best weapon system to respond with.
Each service has pursued implementation of the JADC2 concept independently, leading to different approaches in developing technologies and discussing those efforts publicly. While Project Overmatch involves classified spending and Navy leadership has been loathe to elaborate on the initiative, the Army has been far more willing to publicly discuss its own implementation — Project Convergence — briefing reporters and documenting their efforts in budget proposals. The Air Force has also been far more open about its effort, the Advanced Battle Management System.
Small declined to break the Navy’s relative silence on its JADC2 efforts, while insisting that the service was making progress.
“We have been working at a fever pitch to deliver on those goals, and I won’t go into any of the specifics on those things, but in general what we’re doing is bringing the best of world-class commercial technologies, how the best companies in the world deliver capability to their users, and we’re just bringing that into the Navy and doing it at speed and scale,” Small
He also bristled at how Project Overmatch gets characterized — with Navy officials, lawmakers, media and more referring to an “any sensor, any shooter” capability the Naval Operational Architecture will bring, such that any ship, aircraft, unmanned system or deployed sensor could share target-quality data in real time and allow the best-positioned missile launcher to take a shot at the target.
That’s part of it, Small said during the Q+A.
But “it’s also being able to send emails and do other things” to share data across the force.
“Overmatch is not necessarily just about connecting weapons and sensors. A lot of people try to summarize, whether it’s [Joint All-Domain Command and Control] or Overmatch or whatever it is, as any sensor, any weapon. It’s really not — Overmatch is about decision advantage,” he said.
He called for a culture change that embraces the networks, tools, data analytics, data architectures, and the infrastructure to move and understand data faster, allowing for decision-superiority in all things the Navy tries to do.
This isn’t the first time the Navy has been tight-lipped about Project Overmatch. In announcing the service’s fiscal 2022 budget request, the Navy noted just that Project Overmatch was covered by three research and development funding lines that were all classified.
Megan Eckstein is the naval warfare reporter at Defense News. She has covered military news since 2009, with a focus on U.S. Navy and Marine Corps operations, acquisition programs, and budgets. She has reported from four geographic fleets and is happiest when she’s filing stories from a ship. Megan is a University of Maryland alumna.
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