Over the past ten years the Naval Security Group Command (NavSecGruCom)—responsible for the Navy's cryptology—has become a costly burden to the Navy. Loescher examines the present state of the Command.
For more than 75 years, Navy cryptology has been going down to the sea in ships and providing unique intelligence and targeting data. Now, over the past ten years-lost in organization nostalgia and shackled by a myopic vision of the past and the future—the Naval Security Group Command (NavSecGruCom) has become a costly burden to the Navy. Here is the present state of NavSecGruCom:
- Not a single NavSecGruCom system has come into the fleet on time, on cost, or on specification in the last decade. What is worse, none is configured to allow Navy ships to capture the signals intelligence of the coming decade.
- The Navy's ability to sense the open oceans has declined dramatically as a direct result of NavSecGruCom's failure to articulate a winning case for a next-generation national sensor architecture.
- The Navy's network security today is not any better than it was ten years ago and hundreds of millions of dollars later-because of NavSecGruCom's failure to field a set of products that close the silicon gates.
- Today, the administrative security systems are in the same condition that permitted the Walker-Whitworth spy scandal.
- NavSecGruCom's principal role as the Navy's partner with the National Security Agency (NSA) has been reduced by NSA to a backwater effort.
NavSecGruCom, which has rested since its inception on four missions, has lost its role in all four. No longer able to field a meaningful capability at sea to target or exploit operationally important signals, NavSecGruCom not only does not operate open-ocean sensors, but its inept staff work has led to the effective loss of open-ocean surveillance for the Navy. The Navy still finds multilevel security an impossibility, and network security simply is not here. Finally, NavSecGruCom's national role as partner with NSA has become so eroded that it no longer can argue its force structure on the premise that it adds value to the Navy.
All these tactical failures are compounded by two massive and simultaneous strategic failures: the mission for information operations effectively has been lost to the Air Force; and, if current plans are executed, national sensor support to military operations will be in a nose dive compared to the past three decades. NavSecGruCom therefore presents the Navy with a paradox that is deeply disturbing: how could the organization it relied upon to carry it into the Information Age fail so utterly in each of its principal mission areas over the past decade?
The reasons can be both identified and remedied, and cryptology once again can serve the Navy well if it adopts a forward-looking future instead of a backward-focused self-preservation effort. There are three ways it can do that.
First, the Navy needs to recognize that the important part of cryptology is its intellectual capital, not the old organizational edifice of NavSecGruCorn. NavSecGruCorn was constructed as a second-echelon command to manage more than 30 field activities, nearly all of which are gone today. Moreover, NavSecGruCom never has passed a single Inspector General inspection, which surely is less challenging than the missions themselves. The command is ineffective and has lost its original reason for being, and through their efforts to preserve it at all costs the Navy's cryptologic flag officers are wasting both time and resources trying to save yesterday—while providing little capability today and ignoring tomorrow almost completely. The simple truth is that although the Navy must retain its cryptologic talent, it does not need NavSecGruCom. Its flag officers and staff would be better invested elsewhere, where they can help build and buy tomorrow's systems and set meaningful policy for information operations.
Second, the Navy needs to invest its cryptologic resources more and more at sea, where its extraordinary talent can come under the influence of operators, not a self-serving bureaucracy. Cryptologists have been at sea since 1924, but almost always in the operation of unique systems that have less and less value today. Where cryptologists can become valuable tomorrow is in building the emerging doctrines for information operations, not in hiding behind the green door and resting on yesterday's laurels.
Third, while the Navy's espousal of network-centric operations is nothing short of a remarkable turnaround in policy and vision, NavSecGruCom acts as a huge sea anchor against its progress.
Ten years ago, the Navy actively practiced doctrinal exercises to minimize its communications; now the Navy advocates that its entire force structure should hinge on networks. The Navy cannot do all of this without a unified workforce or sharply focused expertise and advocacy. Today, the Navy's intellectual leaders in information operations (at least among its officers) do not get promoted for advocating this kind of revolutionary future. Instead, officers get promoted for advocating that the past should be continued in an evolutionary way—that is, supporting their existing communities, not the operational vision. Restructuring the Navy's information technology expertise in a more appropriate way will build the advocacy that network-centric warfare needs to succeed.
None of the communities is better at preserving the past than NavSecGruCom. The future of the Navy's information technology is in its people, and NavSecGruCorn has locked a huge number of them behind the green door, just to preserve itself. It is time to open the door and let them out.
Commander Loescher is the Executive Fellow of the Copernicus Foundation and a retired Navy cryptologist.