Information technology is providing big returns for Navy battle groups, including improved situational awareness across theaters, less maintenance downtime, and the ability to conduct training and debriefings without flying personnel between ships.
Information Technology for the 21st Century (IT21) is far more than just the installation of information technology afloat and ashore. It is a philosophy that the Navy has adopted to facilitate a revolution in military and business affairs. Based on a focused investment in information technology, and enabled by a Navy-Marine Corps intranet, IT-21 will provide end-to-end capability across the Navy's operational spectrum, afloat and ashore. IT-21 is knowledge transfer across a seamless voice, video, and data telecommunication grid. It is more than e-mail—much more.
IT-21 is to make us more effective war fighters. All other benefits and purposes, while valuable, are secondary. In the new millennium, information superiority will be the key to battle readiness and battlespace superiority, and Navy leaders realized that if we didn't capitalize on information technology now, we would fall behind someone else who did. We could not risk losing such a critical warfare and warfare support advantage, so we have invested heavily in information technology in general and IT-21 in particular.
Information technology is a warfare capability enhancer. IT-21 systems already have proved themselves on aircraft carrier battle groups operating in the Arabian Gulf, the Western Pacific, and the Mediterranean. The operational return on investment for the IT-21 initiative has been demonstrated spectacularly with both the Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) and Kitty Hawk (CV-63) Battle Groups.
For the Abraham Lincoln Battle Group during its 1998 Arabian Gulf deployment, IT-21 enabled near-real-time situational awareness and a common operational picture that allowed for more effective control of interdiction operations. Compared to 1995 and 1998 missions to enforce U.N. sanctions against Iraq, the battle group had a twelvefold increase in ships boarded and an eightfold increase in ships diverted. And this was with only about 25% of final planned IT-21 installs.
During the Kitty Hawk Battle Group's Arabian Gulf operations, the enhancements afforded by IT-21 included: improved situational awareness and understanding between commanders across the theater; improvements in logistics coordination and maintenance downtime, with a corresponding reduction in casualty reports; and the ability to conduct coordinated tactical training without having to fly personnel between ships. The most significant benefit, as noted by a majority of the battle group's units, was the ease and speed which an unprecedented number of systems users were able to access, manipulate, organize, produce, and transmit communications and information between units and commands in multiple theaters. This is information management at its best—thus, knowledge.
Saying that IT-21 is more than e-mail does not diminish its value as a tool for improving quality of life and communication afloat. Access to unclassified e-mail and the Internet for each sailor on board IT-21-capable ships has had a measurable impact on crew morale. The opportunity to stay connected to home while under way is arguably the most significant shipboard quality-of-life enhancement the Navy has provided in recent memory.
Classified (SIPRNet) e-mail also has become invaluable, as the operational commander's communications tool of choice for day-to-day operations and administration. SIPRNet has greatly improved secure operational connectivity between all units and warfare commanders and has provided a new and convenient way for operators to interact, plan, critique, and instruct. As an example, Carrier Air Wing 5 aviators on board the Kitty Hawk routinely debriefed with air intercept controllers on board other battle group units via SIPRNet e-mail after flight events. It also is significant that the battle group commander's staff was able to use SIPRNet e-mail to coordinate efforts of all battle group units while operating in the Arabian Gulf. Both examples illustrate the power of networked email communications to eliminate the traditional communication barriers of access, convenience, and time.
SIPRNet also was the path of choice for disseminating the battle group air tasking order, because it allows the transfer of this information in a form that is easily manipulatable with standard Microsoft Office products for enhanced usability. As a result of its capabilities, SIPRNet now is being used as an alternate communications path to reduce message traffic backlogs. It will become the prime communications path over the next few years.
The next level of return on our investment is happening now. The John C Stennis (CVN-74) Battle Group and the Bonhomme Richard (LHD-6) Amphibious Ready Group deployed in January 2000 with the complete IT-21 upgrade. They are first battle group to deploy with a fully IT-21 capable amphibious ready group, and I am convinced they will see even greater benefits. We deployed experts in process reengineering with the battle group and amphibious ready group to help them use the IT-21 installations to change how -processes are accomplished.
All deploying battle groups will complete their IT-21 installs by the end of fiscal year 2003. As a Navy, our return on investment will increase exponentially as we get closer and closer to a critical mass of IT-21 capable ships—when we reach the point where we recoup our initial investment in both increased efficiencies and improved warfighting effectiveness.
The Navy-Marine Corps Intranet
With the IT-21 effort ongoing afloat and in progress ashore, the next step for the Department of the Navy is the Navy-Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI). A natural outgrowth of the fleet-driven IT-21 strategy, the NMCI will focus on the regional shore infrastructure required to improve our business processes as well as the warfighting connectivity of IT-21. If IT-21 is the vehicle for putting all tactical and non-tactical applications onto a single coordinated network, then the NMCI is the tool that will enable widespread use of those applications. In addition, it will ensure that the return we experienced from the IT-21 warfighting effort is equaled in our business process reengineering effort. This will enable a seamless transition between shore and sea.
Because we are war fighters foremost, we began with network-centric warfare and IT-21 to revolutionize war fighting. Now we can focus on our business processes, and this is where the Navy-Marine Corps Intranet comes in. The NMCI will handle our business and administrative process in much the same way that a corporate intranet functions in the business world. It will tie every level of the Navy together so that all of our personnel may share information, make better warfighting and business decisions, and be innovative in the future "knowledge-centric" environment. It will ensure our information superiority—both in war fighting and in business processes—which in turn will ensure our preeminence, and even our survival.
This initiative will bring DoD networks, DoD and naval data bases, and the intranet to the desktop of every information worker in the Department of the Navy. It will provide hardware and services, ranging from personal computers to communications pipes, eventually to support 450,000 users worldwide. The plan is to take the NMCI, with the Marine Corps' Enterprise Network under its umbrella, and design it from the bottom up to provide world-class security and to support enterprise resource planning within the Department of the Navy, while also being interoperable with the rest of DoD. The NMCI will replace multiple independent naval intranets and provide a single coherent DoN-wide network.
Going to one common intranet will solve many of the problems we have had with inadequate security in certain networks and will eliminate the inefficiencies in operations, training, maintenance, and integration that arise from having multiple systems and multiple commands performing the same function. We expect to see an increase in business efficiencies, improved business processes, significantly enhanced security, and greater interoperability with DoD agencies, other geographic commanders-in-chief, and our sister services.
The Navy-Marine Corps Intranet is needed if we are to operate the Department of the Navy successfully in the 21st century. We must streamline our administration, human resources, financial and e-commerce, decision support, and other business efforts. Multi-module application software that is integrated with relational data bases and in place on our own "corporate" intranet will enable all personnel to use and share information in real time and in a common operating environment. It will allow leaders to make decisions with all the available facts and information at hand. It will reduce redundancy in data input and maintenance and the administrative burden of maintaining duplicate records. The efficiencies we can achieve with the NMCI in place are enormous, and the Navy and Marine Corps will share equally in the benefits of this effort.
The benefits that will come with the Navy-Marine Corps Intranet are twofold. First, the individual sitting at a desktop will have access to an information tabletop, on which are common applications, integrated data bases, shared tools, etc. This tabletop will, for example, enable expanded communications through such tools as video mail. By enhancing personal productivity with new and improved tools and increased access to information resources, the NMCI will make it easier for individuals to do their jobs.
Second, the Navy-Marine Corps intranet will enable group collaboration as we've never seen it before. Through net meetings and online collaborative planning and coordination, individuals will be able to connect with one another and benefit from shared effort and the give-and-take of conversation and contact. The NMCI will foster the growth of our organizational intellectual capital, enabling knowledge sharing and teaching at the same time. Communities of interest will be able to connect and publish their work for use by others with similar interests, speeding up learning. Lessons learned will be more accessible and usable. Peers will be able to propose questions to one another in a virtual environment, raising the tough "what if' or "why not" questions to stimulate discussion and innovation. The NMCI will open a window into a whole new networked world.
The immediate value of the Navy-Marine Corps Intranet may appear to be predominantly administrative, but warfighting commanders will benefit as well. They will have at their disposal all the information available to their supporting elements ashore. The NMCI will streamline administrative efforts afloat and improve communication between the operational commander and all elements ashore. In addition, it will facilitate modeling and simulation, which will provide for more realistic war gaming and operational testing of tactics and strategies. Finally, it is one more tool to encourage innovation from the bottom up, which has provided significant enhancements to our warfighting capability in the vast.
These are only a few of the benefits that we can predict now, without even having our intranet in place. If it works anything like IT-21 has, where our people ran with it and got more out of it than we imagined possible, its true value will be evident only after the project is complete in 2001. We know what tools and expanded capabilities it will bring to the table. What we don't know is how our innovative personnel will expand on these capabilities and take the possibilities to a whole new level. The nature of the return on investment for technology is exponential—technology, once in place, enables greater advances in technology and facilitates innovation, which in turn enable greater advances and increased capabilities. And so the pace accelerates.
Today we are using IT-21 to revolutionize war fighting, improve our business processes, and make the Navy a better place to work. Tomorrow we will use the Navy-Marine Corps Intranet to better manage our resources—fiscal, physical, and most important, personnel—and become an even more capable organization. We will reduce redundancy and make it easier for our people to do their jobs more efficiently. One thing is certain; it's far more than just e-mail!
Admiral Clemins served as Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Pacific Fleet.