Today's operational commanders must do more with less. Budgetary constraints and a fragile, complex geopolitical environment combine to ensure that a smaller military force structure will have to meet an increasing number of contingencies. In response, "Joint Vision 2010/2020," "The Navy Operational Concept," and other service documents boldly assert that our technological superiority will be a force multiplier-but without saying exactly how and without satisfying concerns that access to huge amounts of information simply will create more friction. These documents describe an operating environment in which integrated information technology is used to deliver a key element of success: speed of command. The implication is that neither the old ways of coordinated operations nor the current concept of interoperability can achieve the speed necessary to, as "Joint Vision 2010" states, "transform warfare from a step function into a continuous process." Integration and network centricity are the answers, but there is no guidance on how to get there.
Ultimately, joint solutions must be found. In the meantime, the Navy must come to grips with the implications of integration within (vertical) and among (horizontal) its own platforms, systems, and programs.
Integration Challenges
A smaller, thinly spread force structure dictates that our ships and aircraft must be multirole platforms, flexible enough to handle most missions independently but able to complement each other when part of a joint force. New technology, including the Global Positioning System (GPS), improved weapons and warheads, and advanced surveillance platforms are expected to enhance warfighting capability. Naval systems are to be offensive, integrated, and networked. But extended-range weapons, better platforms, and precise sensors alone are not sufficient to successfully complete our missions. Our ability to use the new weapons at all, let alone to their full range and effectiveness, requires a matching capability to detect, locate, and identify targets rapidly at great distances, to pass data to decision makers and shooters, to plan and deconflict missions, and to fire rounds and assess results. Delivering this end-to-end capability to the fleet means achieving unprecedented integration across systems and platforms and, by extension, across the program and requirements organizations that manage them.
Notwithstanding hard work in programs such as Aegis and the F/A-18E/F, there is consensus that a truly integrated force is not on the horizon. Numerous shortcomings lead to this conclusion:
- Legacy platforms—aircraft and ships alike—being backfitted with new systems are having difficulty meeting cost, schedule, and operational performance thresholds. Cooperative engagement capability is only one example of the challenge of trying to incorporate a new system into a complex architecture such as Aegis.
- Yet to be developed are a computing architecture and data interchange standards capable of integrating intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and targeting information from disparate sources into an intuitive operational picture and then sharing it among members of the naval (and/or joint) force.
Case Study: Navy Surface Land Attack
Surface forces are beginning to assume an expanded role in striking targets ashore. The primary mission of the Zumwalt (DD-21)-class destroyer will be land attack, and prior to her planned introduction in 2007, late-model Arleigh Burke (DDG-51)-class guided missile destroyers will be equipped with a more potent land-attack capability. Beginning with the Winston Churchill (DDG-81), a longer range 5-inch/62-caliber gun battery firing extended-range guided munitions (ERGMs) will be installed. Land-attack Standard missiles will be added to the vertical-launch system at a later date. A new naval fire control system (NFCS) is being developed to operate the improved weapons. However, lack of an end-to-end requirement (targeting, fires, impact, assessment) for the land-attack mission increases the possibility that neither the DD-21 nor the last DDG-51s will ever achieve their potential.
Two major factors contribute to the potential operational limitations of the Winston Churchill's new gun and missile systems: targeting and system integration.
Targeting. DDG-81's land-attack systems will use GPS guidance to correct for errors in weapon pointing, ballistic dispersion, and environmental factors such as wind. A GPS-guided munition will navigate to a specific point on the earth's surface regardless of variations in external error sources, but its accuracy is affected by target location error (TLE), GPS signal error (local quality/accuracy of GPS signal at weapon launch), and flyout error (ability of weapon guidance system to fly the commanded path). The focus here is on TLE.
TLE is the difference between the measured or reported position of a target and its true position. Thus, if TLE is not equal to zero, the weapon aim point—coordinates given to the weapon guidance package—will not be collocated with the target. The weapon will be misaimed in a direction and magnitude equal to the TLE.
TLE relates to weapon miss distance and thus to lethality and effectiveness. When using GPS- or Inertial Navigation System (INS)-guided munitions, the number of rounds required to achieve a given probability of kill or damage is directly affected by TLE, which carries forward into cost per target kill, replenishment requirements, and all other aspects of operational efficiency. Targeting sensors and sources, plus the connectivity required to support them, therefore must provide timely, highly accurate targeting information.
This leads to a critical issue. There is no end-to-end operational requirement for the land-attack mission (i.e., no "Land-Attack Operations Requirements Document"). Therefore, the accuracy specified for ERGM in its operations requirements document is stated relative to the provided coordinates. If the coordinates are not accurate, the ERGM round will not hit its target. There is an ongoing effort to task the NFCS with calculating the number of ERGM rounds to shoot depending on the understood accuracy of the targeting provider—i.e., if the targeting source is known to be inaccurate, fire more rounds. This eventually might destroy or damage the target, but it requires much more ordnance. Only with an end-to-end operational requirement can the engineering community develop an appropriate error budget to be allocated across all components in the land-attack weapon system chain.
System integration. Typically, each mission-area system in an Aegis ship is integrated into the overall combat system, so that the commanding officer can control all the weapon systems from a central location. This requires considerable cooperative development between the various program offices and industry partners. The advanced gun system (5-inch/62-caliber gun, ERGM round, and NFCS) was developed independently, without NFCS integration into the Aegis combat system. Digital information from the combat system, including targeting information and firing orders, will not be available to the NFCS. The commanding officer and tactical action officer will not have automated access to the information from the NFCS and may have to leave the Aegis display, which provides the larger tactical picture, to execute or approve gun missions—with possible loss of situational awareness.
Absent an end-to-end operational requirement for the land-attack mission, the acquisition program offices responsible for development of the ERGM, land-attack Standard missile, and NFCS components followed their individual requirements documents—with no one responsible for the overall system. There was no documented requirement to integrate, so no funding was provided, which resulted in "stand alone" systems. Horizontal integration could have been achieved using a total-systems engineering process.
Case Study: F/A-18 AESA Radar and JDAM
The F/A-18 Hornet is the Navy's primary delivery platform for the exceptionally accurate Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM), a strap-on GPS/INS guidance kit for BLU109, Mk-84, and Mk-83 bombs. The next major sensor upgrade planned for the Hornet is an active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar, which, in addition to greatly improved air-to-air search/track and self-protect jamming capability, offers the potential to perform precision air-to-ground, all-weather targeting using a high-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR).
Synthetic aperture radars have long provided high-resolution ground target images, but to be useful for precision self-targeting of JDAM or other GPS weapons, the Hornet AESA SAR also will have to provide accurate target location. The TLE required for JDAM to achieve its specified accuracy is 7.2 meters, but lower is better. The TLE performance of SARs is driven by several factors, including resolution, altitude, and airspeed, but the most important contributor is reference velocity error. For the aircraft to determine where targets in the SAR image are located, either relative to the aircraft or relative to other objects in the radar scene, the aircraft weapon system must know precisely its own position and velocity. In the Hornet weapon system position and velocity data are provided by the aircraft's GPS and INS subsystems.
A stand-alone operational requirements document has been drafted for the Hornet AESA radar program. Its threshold and goal performance parameters for SAR TLE clearly are intended to enable an AESA-equipped Hornet to use the radar to self-target a JDAM (threshold) and/or the longer range Joint Stand-off Weapon (goal). It does not, however, state an operational requirement that "an AESA Hornet be able to achieve XXX (classified number) meters circular error probable delivering a JDAM against a ground target using solely SAR as a targeting sensor." It merely requires that the AESA radar be capable of providing ground target locations with "maximum TLE of XXX meters at YYY nm range," given certain assumptions. One assumption is that the reference velocity provided to the radar will have a certain maximum error. Given this specified velocity error, SAR is capable of achieving the required TLE, but any larger velocity error would hinder accurate JDAM delivery.
As with the DDG-81, the need for further integration and an end-to-end precision strike requirement for the Hornet is clear. N88 action officers do indeed track F/A-18 system integration requirements, but this discrepancy was identified after the AESA program was well along in the planning, programming, and budget system cycle and already had a program objective memorandum budget number. Between now and 2005, when AESA is to meet initial operational capability, the aircraft GPS and INS systems are to receive several upgrades, including the GAINS 2000 Ring Laser INS and integrated GPS/INS. These acquisitions are supported by their own requirements documents, but the specified velocity-error performance of the upgraded, 2005 navigation system is several times larger than what was assumed in the AESA document. In addition, there is no documented requirement or budgeted funding for the additional system integration needed between the AESA radar, other relevant aircraft subsystems, and JDAM to provide a complete self-targeting capability (in-flight target detection through weapon delivery). At the end of the day, even if all planned and documented upgrades are carried out, without additional integration work an AESA-equipped Hornet will not be able to self-target JDAM using the radar.
Organizational Integration: Solution or Pipe Dream?
The technical challenges to integration are significant, but there may be even greater difficulty in reconciling inter- and intracommunity practices and cultures in requirements and acquisition. It is one thing to generate consensus on a common goal—the vertical and horizontal integration of all naval surface, subsurface, air, and expeditionary warfare systems. It is quite another to forge a common approach to its realization. Our requirements and acquisition processes are stove-piped by community, platform, and system, and while parochialism is understandable—planning, programming, and budgeting wars are played as a zero-sum game—it is intolerable when the readiness and capability of the fleet become casualties. Many dollars are wasted and potential warfighting enhancements never realized because one community refuses to consider using a system developed by another.
The reorganization of the Navy Staff several years ago—which reduced the status of the warfare barons and placed them under the aegis of N8, the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations (Resources, Warfare Requirements, and Assessments)—has not realized many of the intended benefits. It remains to be seen whether the ongoing reorganization within the OpNav staff will tackle some of these issues; details still are being worked out by the new Chief of Naval Operations and his transition team. It was hoped that community- and platform-centric requirements generation would be subordinated to a "One Navy" need administered by N8. Instead, the mini-barons have been forced organizationally to continue the practices of their predecessors. Each remains a sponsor for vertical integration, but no single entity has the charter for horizontal integration. In fact, in N8 today, "program integration" usually is taken to mean allocation and prioritization of program funds into a program objective memorandum, not operational integration of systems to achieve an end-to-end warfighting capability.
The integration dilemma is magnified in both the Assistant Secretary of the Navy (Research, Development, and Acquisition) and the Systems Command organizations because, with a few notable exceptions, program executive officers and program offices focus principally on systems, not capabilities. These structures abet neither vertical nor horizontal integration. Resource/requirements sponsors must deal with several, often unrelated agencies to deliver fleet requirements.
There is no question that platforms, systems, and mission areas require sponsors and program managers. There also should be no question that integration requires the same kind of sponsorship and management. Two candidate reorganizations should include:
- Establishing a resource/requirements sponsor for horizontal integration. The sponsor must be senior to the warfare barons and have a measure of control over their funds.
- Establishing an overarching organization or program executive officer for integration while eliminating duplicative program offices. A first step was the creation of a chief engineer billet within the Assistant Secretary of the Navy (Research, Development, and Acquisition) organization with responsibility for all weapons, combat, and C4I systems, current and planned.
Most legacy platforms and systems were not designed with integration in mind, as evidenced by their closed architectures and intertwined software segments. In the short term, this may make reaching the desired level of horizontal integration unaffordable. The longer term offers a glimmer of hope, but it will wane rapidly without significant changes in organization and processes. DD-21, for example, will be the legacy surface combatant of the first half of the 21st century, yet its inception is being managed by a traditionally platform-centric program executive officer and program office. This approach may achieve vertical integration, but horizontal integration remains problematic.
As new platforms and systems are developed and deployed, it is imperative that they be fully integrated. We cannot afford redundant and overlapping functionality, and we dare not deliver systems to the fleet that will not work together. The fleet requires capability that meets tactical response times while employing fewer operators and maintainers. Stovepiped, nonintegrated systems will lead to higher life-cycle support costs and will force our sailors and Marines to be their own integrators using workarounds and sneaker-nets.
At a time of exciting advances in technology and innovation in acquisition, we are on the verge of repeating many of the same old mistakes. To avoid this, we need to break down institutional and cultural biases within and between the requirements and acquisition communities and rid the naval services of parochialism. To build a Navy and Marine Corps of maximum effectiveness, we must formally state and defend a requirement for that force. Then, we must design it and buy it. But first, we must evolve our organizations to do so.
Colonel Kuzmick commanded VMA-131, and Captain McNamara commanded the USS Taylor (FFG-50). Commander Willis was an engineering-duty officer as well as surface warfare officer. All three are no employed by Whitney, Bradley & Brown, Inc., in Vienna, Virginia.