The proposed merger of fleet support (formerly the General Unrestricted Line), space and electronic warfare officers, and cryptology officers is a positive step toward consolidating the Navy's command, control, communications, computers (C4) and information warfare (IW) technical professionals into one distinctive, highly trained community. The consolidated community's mission would be to to plan, acquire, and maintain C4/IW systems in support of the warfighter.
Fundamental to the establishment of a community is a common culture, doctrine, and process. To create such a culture from diverse entities will be difficult. It requires the development of a cohesive career structure emphasizing critical Navy, joint, and combined C4/IW skills. The first step should be to create a set of basic tenets, then impart these to the new entrants. In short, formalize a Navy C4/IW community and establish a school.
A formal school for direct accessions, lateral transfers, and newly commissioned limited duty officers (LDOs) and warrant officers would set the tone for this community, as it does for others, by providing junior officers a standard knowledge base for managing the Navy's increasingly technical warfighting systems. As a C4/IW officer's career progresses beyond the first five years, graduate education in a related field would be mandatory. Additional technical training at the commander level would help keep the officer's knowledge inventory relevant and increase proficiency in managing C4/IW assets.
Unlike the Army, Air Force and Marine Corps, each of which has a discrete, highly specialized C4 cadre as a supporting element to the warfighter, the Navy has relied upon an eclectic group from various communities to fulfill C4 functions both afloat and ashore. Before the revocation of Title 10 and the specific restrictions on women in combat, male warfare officers, warrant officers, cryptologists, and limited duty officers filled the C4 billets at sea aboard combatants. Fleet support, warrants, select engineering duty officers, cryptologists and LDOs primarily occupied C4 billets ashore. As a result, pockets of specialization developed across a broad spectrum of designators. Lacking a focused career path, C4IW specialists often are difficult to identify. The ad hoc nature of this expertise, moreover, resulted in a lack of responsibility for ownership of the community as a whole and for developing officers' skills early through formal instruction.
A few notable exceptions exist. The surface warfare community conducts a five-week basic communications course in Newport, Rhode Island, for some of its officers, which a limited number of junior officers from other designators have also attended over the years. This course lacks comprehensive technical content, however, and is geared toward providing the surface warfare ensign the most rudimentary knowledge of fleet C4, not making a "subject matter expert." Cryptologists have much more formalized training in the form of a 16-week initial-accession training course for direct accessions, lateral transfers, and newly commissioned limited duty officers. While other avenues for C4 technical training exist, they do not provide entry-level instruction. For example, the Navy Postgraduate School offers a variety of C4 curricula, including the promising new information systems and operations curriculum, but it is generally attended by officers who have been in the Navy for more than five years.
The remainder of Navy C4 expertise prior to postgraduate school has been developed in the fleet through on-the-job training, resulting in widely varying levels of competency. On-the-job training, important and essential for any position, cannot be expected to produce junior officers who are C4 experts. Million-dollar systems but no dollars for training simply worsens a growing technological gap.
The fleet support community provides a perfect example of the junior officer training void inherent throughout the Navy with respect to C4 systems management. Fleet support officers, specifically the 40% in the space and electronic warfare core competency, work in C4 fields such as telecommunications, command and control, information management, undersea surveillance, and space systems. Upon removal of combat restriction laws, both male and female fleet support officers also have assumed limited roles afloat such as the combat systems officers on major combatants. Historically, fleet support officers have been used primarily to fill the majority of junior officer shore C4 billets, managing C4 elements for commands such as the Naval Computer and Telecommunications Command and Naval Space Command.
The fleet support community had no formal school to prepare these officers for their new positions. Unlike the formal indoctrination provided by every other community and in the other services, these officers were expected to learn their trade on-the-job. Limited duty officers, warrant officers, and senior enlisted were relied upon to provide the necessary technical expertise and to train these officers. While approximately 38% of fleet support officers attended the surface warfare officer's communications course, there was no effort to ensure that this training was a prerequisite to duty assignment in a communications billet. (This percentage does not reflect officers who received this training prior to a lateral transfer to fleet support.) Their effectiveness as professionals in these positions was hampered by their lack of knowledge. Consequently, many new fleet support officers focused on learning the administrative aspects of their job rather than the technical concepts associated with C4. In short, they learned to write evaluations-not communications plans. Learning about leadership and personnel management is never without merit for an officer. However, lack of structured, technical, introductory training in C4 theory and application limited their ability to make decisions regarding the C4 assets of which they were nominally in charge.
In today's era of personnel reductions and in an environment where technological advancements are occurring at lightning speed, the Navy must improve management of C4/IW personnel. Improving utility and productivity of junior officers in complex areas of operations can only come by thorough, professional, demanding training. As the Navy continues to automate all areas of warfighting and support, the impact these officers have on ensuring the most efficient use of information technology and systems will become more acutely felt. Comprehensive indoctrination in the fundamentals of C4/IW theory and application would provide junior officers with tools to help employ technology to its maximum potential, and to properly maintain and upgrade C4/IW systems.
Consolidation of all C4/IW personnel, including the limited duty and warrant officers, into one new community would provide an identifiable group to assume responsibility for instituting C4/IW initial assession training for the Navy. It also would eliminate the redundancy in managing similar billets among several designators and should reduce future costs, while increasing flexibility. Instead of having a cryptology school in Pensacola and a five-week communications course for surface warfare officers in Newport, one comprehensive curriculum similar in complexity to instruction given at the Surface Warfare Officers' School or Nuclear Power School could be developed and formalized at a single site. All newly commissioned officers and lateral transfers assigned to this community would attend the comprehensive indoctrination course before being assigned to their first duty station.
Prior-enlisted officers in a consolidated C4/IW community would need this training as well. To assume that all new LDOs and chief warrant officers are abreast of all the latest technological developments and can continue to be relied upon as the sole source of this expertise is an unfair expectation. The Informations Systems Technician A School has improved by an order of magnitude over the previous curriculum and offers a robust technical focus for new sailors covering everything from networks to transmission systems. Equivalent training for mid-career sailors, however, those in the window to become LDOs and warrant officers, is not available in adequate quantities. Quotas for sailors to attend information systems analyst, network security vulnerability technician, and advanced network analyst courses, however, are limited primarily to a few quotas per deploying battle group. In some cases, mid-career sailors have difficulty even meeting the prerequisites for these courses and must rely on the NET G computer-based training disks as their sole source of training. Until we improve the training provided to our sailors in the fleet, the level of technical expertise of our newly commissioned warrants and LDOs will not improve either.
The new C4/IW school could be collocated with the existing schools at Dam Neck, Virginia, to reduce infrastructure. This location would also allow access to hands-on training at Naval Computer and Telecommunications Station Atlantic and a variety of afloat platforms, including the amphibious command ship Mount Whitney (LCC-20). The resource sponsor for the new school could be the Navy's Space, Information Warfare, Command and Control Directorate. The school would be run by a senior member of the new C4/IW community and would be staffed with both officer and enlisted instructors. As all C4/IW billets gradually transition to one consolidated community, the need to specifically train surface warfare officers to fulfill this support function will diminish and eventually disappear. Their existing communications course in Newport, Rhode Island, could then be closed. The outcome would be one centralized location and curriculum for introductory training for a unified C4/IW community.
It is important to note that training on the capabilities and employment of C4/IW systems, not necessarily the technical details involved with managing them, should remain a requirement for the warfighter. While unrestricted line officers need not possess in-depth technical knowledge, it is important that these officers understand C4/IW systems and capabilities well enough tactically and strategically to exploit their full capabilities—hence the relevance of the information systems and operations degree now offered by the Naval Postgraduate School.
While the notion of one consolidated C4/IW community is politically charged and potentially hindered by current community parochialism, a change in the existing structure is essential to increase efficiency and make appropriate use of diminishing resources. The face of the fleet and technology in the Navy has changed drastically in the last ten years with no parallel and logical restructuring and consolidation of the C4/IW officer resources. The long-term improvements in C4/IW officer management and training far outweigh the near-term challenges of restructuring to enable consolidation.
If the pinnacle C4/IW positions such as Director of Space, Information Warfare, Command and Control (N6), on the Chief of Naval Operations staff will continue to require a warfare qualification as a prerequisite, then avenues must be made available for all junior officers in the consolidated C4/IW community to achieve qualification. If traditional warfare qualification will not be an option, then specific warfare qualification requirements and a designation could be implemented which would reflect the unique character and expertise expected by the Navy of this new community.
Some may argue that rather than establishing a new consolidated community, that unrestricted line officers could fill all C4/IW positions adequately. Officers would still need a career path focused on an iterative improvement of their technical knowledge through successive C4/IW tours and education, and this notion is incongruent with current unrestricted line community career objectives. Thus, the challenge of developing and cultivating extensive technical support expertise would remain as elusive as it is today.
The dispersed nature of the existing C4/IW professionals across many designators means that no one community assumes responsibility for the growing gap between technology and personal skills required to manage it. It is unrealistic to assume that the technical leadership the Navy needs at the deckplates will be satisfied through the use of civilian contractors and the small percentage of professionals who have become proficient in the latest technology through their own initiative. Unless the Navy plans to outsource all technical positions in the future, an unrealistic proposition, we must do a better job of developing our own C4/IW competency at lower management levels through consolidation of existing expertise into one identifiable community and by providing comprehensive training to new accessions. The alternative is a Navy with the latest technology but devoid of junior officers with the skills to manage it.
Lieutenant Barrett, a fleet support officer with extensive command-and-control experience, is serving on the staff of Commander Second Fleet. Most recently, she was the Navy Senior Fellow at the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association.