By Dmitry Filipoff

CIMSEC had the opportunity to discuss the formation and future of the U.S. Navy’s Information Warfare (IW) community with Vice Admiral Brian B. Brown, commander of U.S. Naval Information forces (NAVIFOR). In this discussion, Vice Admiral Brown discusses how the IW community came together, how it is delivering capability to the fleet, and how information warfare is featuring in an era of great power competition.

The IW community was founded 10 years ago and saw the establishment of its own warfighting development center (NIWDC), numbered fleet command (10^th Fleet), type command (NAVIFOR), and other critical components. What has the journey of establishing this community been like? 

First, I have to give due credit to the founding fathers of what we call Information Warfare today, strategic thinkers like then-Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) Adm. Gary Roughead and Vice Adm. Jack Dorsett (the first N2/N6). Over ten years ago, those two leaders had the vision and foresight to see that we needed to reorganize to meet the needs of warfighting in the Information Age. And then they took the decisive action that made that vision real.

We started as a collection of high-performing individual specialties, including Information Professionals (IP), Intelligence, Cryptologic Warfare (CW), Meteorology/Oceanography (METOC), and the Space Cadre, which were originally established together as the information dominance corps (IDC). This was later rebranded under CNO Adm. John Richardson as the Information Warfare (IW) community. The change of IDC to IW community was more than just a name change. It was a recognition of our community’s value in delivering battle-minded warfighters and capabilities to the full spectrum of warfighting. Our current CNO, Adm. Mike Gilday, was a commander of U.S. Fleet Cyber Command/U.S. 10th Fleet, so the IW community continues to be a focus area at all levels.

It would be an understatement to say that we face more complex challenges in this information-based era of great power competition. It is now a much more cognitive operating space and requires a different kind of fighting force. We find ourselves in a time where information, no longer just firepower, brings true advantage. How effectively we operate in this information space determines our ability to decisively act faster than our competition.

We have come a long way in the past 10 years. While each information-based skillset brings significant and needed capabilities (the Navy still needs great intelligence, IP, CW, METOC professionals, and space expertise), this is a true case of the sum being greater than its parts. The combination of these capabilities brings winning advantage to the Navy’s needs in today’s complex fight. 

In the IW domain, you are constantly dealing with competitors every day, with DCNO for IW Vice Adm. Kohler stating “We consider ourselves in contact with the adversary now.” The Navy traditionally has its Phase 0 to Phase 5 spectrum of operations, but how does this apply to IW operations? How does the IW community balance winning the daily fight with being ready for what may be needed in a major conflict?

In today’s complex warfighting environment, we talk less about phases and more about the spectrum of conflict. That spectrum spans from so-called day-to-day/peaceful presence, through escalation and all the way up to lethal combat. We absolutely have to be ready for that high-end fight – lethal combat, but we also need to be successful across the entire spectrum.

Having said that, though, even in the peaceful presence side of the spectrum, there is daily conflict in the cyber domain. Both state and non-state actors leverage cyber to gain advantage in the strategic space below the threshold of armed conflict. Activity in this left-of-conflict spectrum run the gamut from intellectual property theft, to election interference, to ransomware and DDoS attacks, just to name a few. From a Navy IW perspective, this conflict at the left end of the spectrum is more than cyber, it is also contested engagement in intelligence, space, and the electromagnetic spectrum, and in understanding the physical domain.

Information Warfare is in that fight today in all those areas. The keys to this success are two-fold. First, we must defend forward. A great power’s weaponized information and influence operations are possible because of cyberspace. Defending forward means defending U.S. critical infrastructure from malicious cyber activity, individually or as part of a campaign, to prevent a significant cyber incident. Second, we must maintain persistent engagement. In cyberspace, this means the continuous execution of the full spectrum of cyberspace operations to achieve and maintain cyberspace superiority, including defending vulnerable networks through maintaining advantage in the electromagnetic spectrum.

Navy IW professionals use sensors, systems, and information to generate operational outcomes—passively and actively in all domains. While all those systems provide the tools to fight and win across the spectrum, people remain our greatest asymmetric advantage. We are fully using existing personnel policies and are constantly looking for new methods to attract and retain the best and brightest personnel. We need to maintain technical talent and personnel overmatch that includes our active and reserve uniformed personnel, as well as our civilian workforce. The Navy’s IW skillsets are needed more than ever in the daily fight of today as well as to be prepared for any potential high-end conflict.

How does information warfare fit into the Navy’s Distributed Maritime Operations (DMO) concept and other future warfighting concepts?

DoD’s and, in particular, the Navy’s primary mission is to protect the nation by defending forward. In the IW domain, that means disrupting and halting threats before they reach our networks or our forces. In the current era of great power competition, the concept of Distributed Maritime Operations (DMO) provides the ability for the fleet to maneuver effectively for advantage in a distributed manner, to create dilemmas for an adversary, while simultaneously maintaining the benefits of force integration. To accomplish that kind of maneuver across potentially multiple maritime combat formations requires all that IW delivers. The glue that pulls that all together is the collective set of IW capabilities.

Information warfare is a deeply cross-cutting discipline. How has the rise and establishment of the IW community elevated the understanding of IW more generally across the Navy’s communities? 

IW is a warfighting discipline, a set of warfighting capabilities, and a key enabler for all Navy mission areas. It underpins every warfighting domain from sea to land, to air, to undersea, to cyber, to space. It is a complex capability comprised of humans, machines, electromagnetic spectrum, and data that, when effectively combined, provides our force with non-kinetic options, increases the lethality of kinetic options, enables Distributed Maritime Operations, and delivers critical advantages in great power competition.

Over the past 10 years, the IW community has continued to further integrate fleet operations to provide vital decision space for our commanders. It is through collective IW capabilities that data from multiple sources are optimally transferred into actionable information to use for operational superiority.

One way the IW community has been elevated within the Navy is with the establishment of the Information Warfare Commander afloat. For several years now, the Navy has been operating with a senior, board-screened, post O-6 command tour IW captain as the warfare commander for information warfare on carrier strike groups, equal to other traditional warfare commanders. Based on value, the demand is expanding to amphibious ready groups and expeditionary strike groups.

We also have the Naval Information Warfare Development Center (NIWDC), established in 2017, that works with the other community Warfare Development Centers (WDCs) and the Naval Warfare Development Center (NWDC) to ensure our concepts, tactics, techniques, and procedures are fully integrated. This integration is critical, because the collective IW capabilities that assure command and control, provide predictive battlespace awareness, and deliver integrated IW fires are integral to all plans and operations.

What has been done to make IW capability and capacity more easily leveraged by sailors and commanders on the deckplate and afloat?

I’ve already mentioned the IW Commander Afloat role and the NIWDC, which bring the capabilities directly to the fleet, but I would also add that we have created an IW Training Group. This organization is analogous to and works closely with the long-standing Afloat Training Group structure to train individual ships and crews in IW capabilities at the deckplate level. This, along with NIWDC, is overseen by the IW Type Commander (TYCOM) – Naval Information Forces (NAVIFOR), which was established six years ago.

From the cybersecurity of the naval industrial base to hiring top-notch civilian talent, IW arguably demands an especially close relationship with the private sector. How do you view the nature of the IW community’s relationships that go beyond government?

Put simply, we could not succeed without our partners in industry. We work very closely with industry reps, at all levels, to ensure that the capabilities the Navy and Joint Force need to fight and win in the IW domain are available when needed. We feature significantly in a wide range of industry-focused forums, such as the annual USNI/AFCEA WEST Conference in San Diego, AFCEA EAST in Norfolk, and the Navy League’s Sea Air Space Symposium here in Washington, D.C., to build and maintain those relationships.

From year one of our existence, we have co-sponsored, with AFCEA and the Naval Intelligence Professionals organization, an annual IW Industry Day. This IW Industry Day provides a day-long series of briefs and discussions, in a classified venue, to allow us to discuss where the Navy and Information Warfare in particular, are focusing our efforts and what we need to fight and win. We have had up to 500 industry representatives attend our most recent event. And, of course, I and my fellow IW military and civilian leaders participate in various other industry breakfast, luncheons, meetings, and conferences throughout any given year.

With the advent of technologies like artificial intelligence and big data, some suggest we may be in the midst of an IW-driven revolution in warfighting. How do you view the potential of IW to transform the nature of the warfighter and warfighting going into the future?

These technologies bring significant capability, with increasingly more expected. We spend a good deal of effort focused on what those new technologies mean to us, and how they can improve our capabilities. These new technologies will continue to advance how we train and fight, not just in IW, but in every domain. We work hand-in-glove with the Office of Naval Research, and across the Navy staff and the fleet, to continually harness this revolution in technology to give the Navy and Marines Corps team the edge we need to succeed, across the spectrum of conflict and operations. We will be directly involved in developing and employing the advantages to be gained through the use of revolutionary technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Any final thoughts to share?

The recognition of the need for IW capabilities is now universal across the Department of Defense. We (the Navy) may have gotten to the table earlier, but all our sister services now have in place their own organizations aligned to the spirit of information warfare and are employing and building capabilities in the information domain. Each service may do it a little bit differently based on their own unique service cultures, but all understand the importance of harnessing these capabilities to fight and win today and in the future.

The Air Force, for example, combined their A2 (Intelligence) and A6 (Communications) directorates at the headquarters level here in the Pentagon as we did, while also creating the 16^th Air Force at the next level down. Within the Department of the Navy (DON), the U.S. Marine Corps created a counterpart to OPNAV N2/N6, the Deputy Commandant for Information (DCI), with Lt. Gen. Lori Reynolds in the role. They call their effort “Operations in the Information Environment (OIE)” and include psychological operations and strategic communications in their OIE approach.

We work very closely together to provide the DON an integrated Naval IE/OIE capability – bringing the power of both the Navy and Marine Corps to bear.

Vice Adm. Brian Brown is currently serving as Commander, Naval Information Forces (NAVIFOR), and is a 1986 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy. 

Dmitry Filipoff is the Director of Online Content for CIMSEC. Contact him at content@cimsec.org. 

Featured Image: Fort George G. Meade Md. (Sept. 27, 2018) – Sailors stand watch in the Fleet Operations Center at the headquarters of U.S. Fleet Cyber Command/U.S. 10th Fleet (FCC/C10F). (U.S. Navy Photo by MC1 Samuel Souvannason/Released)

By Dmitry Filipoff

Capt. Arthur “Trip” Barber (ret.) served in the Navy for 41 years, ultimately capping his career in the civilian Senior Executive Service as the Navy’s Chief Analyst for the last 12 of those years. In this wide-ranging and candid conversation, Barber discusses major challenges with ongoing force structure assessments, how he helped lead the Navy’s Assessment Division (N81) in shaping the budget, and what it will take for the Navy to make some of its most ambitious warfighting concepts a reality. 

The Navy is at an inflection point as it conducts force structure assessments to determine what the future fleet may look like, including along the lines of an integrated force that more closely involves the Marines. How do you view the challenges of force structure assessment and fleet design in this modern age of rapid change?

Force structure assessments should be based on some form of analysis of steady-state and wartime capability requirements that uses specific types of units to meet these requirements, and that uses a specific set of military objectives to be achieved, and a concept of operations for the units’ employment against specific threats when doing so. If the design of the force is stable and the characteristics and employment concepts of its units are mature, this is a pretty straightforward task. That is not where the Navy is today.

When major changes in unit characteristics and force employment concepts are underway but have not yet stabilized and the threat is evolving rapidly, the task of doing a force structure assessment that produces specific provable numbers as the “requirement” for each type of unit becomes an unbounded problem. That is the situation the Navy is in today. It does not help that the whole process has become politicized and that the Navy is operating with a force structure requirement number that is unaffordable with current ship types, but is being told that the number must be achieved anyway, and soon. Force structure assessments are actually a set of about ten separate assessments of the requirements for that many different specific types of ships, so the aggregate number of 355 or whatever is misleading. If a requirement for 62 submarines is part of the 355 and the Navy has 42, but has 20 extra ships of some other type above the requirement for that type, the aggregate fleet number may be 355 but it is not the right fleet. That nuance is lost in the political process.

Until the new types of units and concepts of operations for these units are decided upon that will best meet our projected warfare challenges, including the newest one of operating as an “integrated” force with the Marines as they implement their new Commandant’s brilliant and disruptive force-planning guidance, it would be nice if the Navy could stop throwing force structure assessment numbers around. It would be ideal, although probably politically unrealistic, to take a pause in such assessments while a whole new design for the future fleet is worked out in detail. This could and should have been done over the last three years since the last force structure assessment, but it was not because the amount of change required was simply too disruptive for the institutional Navy to handle at that time. I think it is underway now, finally, but it will take a couple of years to settle out to the point where a force structure assessment is meaningful.

The Navy is looking to move toward a Distributed Maritime Operations concept for how it employs its forces. What do you make of this warfighting concept, and what could it take the Navy to get there?

Operating as an aggregated and concentrated force against an adversary like China with a massive long-range precision reconnaissance-strike system is not a survivable concept. Distributing the force is essential, but the distributed units need to be able to support each other and concentrate their effects when and where necessary. This requires a significant degree of connectivity and data movement between units at beyond-line-of-sight ranges, in an environment where the adversary is attacking that networking capability as their principal line of military effort. If a distributed force is not connected, it will be defeated in detail.

The concept for executing this connectivity is the “naval tactical grid” or whatever the equivalent joint term of the moment may be. It means everybody can communicate what they need to, when they need to. This aspiration began with Vice Admiral Art Cebrowski’s FORCEnet concept in the 1990s, but it has not made the implementation progress that it should have. Engineering this without ripping out every radio on every unit and starting over is really hard technically, and expensive. Nobody wants to own and pay this bill. Enforcing conformance of all systems and units to common and truly interoperable data and communications protocols is very difficult organizationally. But until we do both, distributed operations will not work very well. Achieving this connectivity vision is as disruptive a change as changing the design of the units that make up the fleet, and this is another change that I do not think is going on at the pace that is appropriate to the strategic situation we are in.

You served as the Navy’s Chief Analyst for 12 years at the Assessment Division, OPNAV N81. During that time you sought to change the relationship N81 had with other organizations, namely from being a so-called “honest broker” and more toward an analytics service provider. What exactly does this change mean and what effect did it have on those relationships?

This operating model that I built for the Navy’s analytic enterprise during my 12 years was dismantled after I retired, so my comments on how it used to work are not too relevant anymore. The Navy’s analytic resources are no longer concentrated in N81, they have been distributed back across many sponsors who are now largely on their own to conceive and execute whatever analysis they think they need, subject to some review of the proposed topics by the Navy Analytic Office. This is essentially a return to the situation of the 1990s. No other Service today operates their analytic enterprise in this manner. N81 is no longer a “service provider” of analysis to other sponsors, although they remain the only Navy line organization with professionally-trained operations analysts who know how to conduct and supervise analytic projects, and the only organization that does not own the programs that it analyzes.

The freedom from program ownership lets N81 be a “dispassionate” analyst of capabilities. I never liked the phrase “honest broker” to characterize this, because it implies that all others are “dishonest,” which is simply not true. But a dispassionate provider may not choose to analyze issues that are not going to drive major areas of force capability, and the answers provided may not be those that the sponsor with the issue wants to hear. Both of these factors made the N81 service provider model a bit unpopular.

In recent years the OPNAV staff saw some restructuring that sought to give the strategists a greater ability to provide inputs into developing the budget, and where before the strategists were often viewed as relatively weak influencers when it came to developing budget builds. How do you see the evolving relationship between strategy inputs and the POM process?

“Strategy” is the purview of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the Secretary of Defense, not the individual services. What the services call “strategy” and own is the concepts of force employment that they plan to use in execution of the strategy. The Navy’s strategic expression that counts is the budget it builds that funds and delivers specific forces and capabilities. That determines what the Navy can do, and more importantly what it cannot do. Navy strategists have generally been unable to articulate timely guidance that made strategic choices about what to not do in order to focus the available resources on the most critical things that must be done. When resources are constrained, you cannot have one without the other. Their guidance said everything was important, few things could be cut, and it usually came out late, so far into the POM-development timeline that funding decisions had already been made. Time, tides, and POMs wait for no man.

Recent CNO guidance documents from the Navy strategists have been better than I have seen for several decades, but they still cannot seem to bear to identify the full scale of things to not do in order to maximize the strategic contribution of the Navy within actually available resources. In the end, if strategists cannot make such hard calls on the relentless POM timeline, then programmers must. It has typically been the job of N81 to use results from analysis to help the programmers make these calls; that is why I found working in N81 so professionally rewarding and why having it within N8 was so important to the Navy. Unfortunately, the current political imperatives of sustaining and even increasing force structure size without a corresponding top line increase have limited the effect of strategic focus and analysis on what actually gets funded in the POM.

There is debate on how well wargaming has been employed to inform decision-making, particularly with respect to analytic rigor and ownership. How could wargaming evolve to have greater analytic clout within DoD?

Wargaming can have a distinct and important role in shaping the Navy’s direction, particularly in times of disruptive and rapid technological change, such as we are now in. If wargames are structured in a disciplined manner with realistic assumptions about event timing, logistic feasibility, threat behavior, and technology; are focused on the most critical issues; and have the right participants, they can be very useful. They can provide insights about which courses of action, technologies and concepts of employment are promising, and which are unlikely to work in a specific scenario. Wargames are human-in-the-loop activities whose outcomes change with each set of humans that do them, they are not rigorous repeatable analysis. Their best role is to shape the assumptions that are used by quantitative analysis before that analysis is applied against new operational problems. This analysis should then ideally be tested through operational experimentation that puts hardware (real or virtual) in the loop to see if things work out the way as predicted.

This “virtuous cycle” of wargame-analyze-experiment is the ideal way to design a force, but each step of this cycle is today owned and operated by a different organization, and it is fairly rare that the full cycle is actually executed in a coherent, end-to-end manner on a specific operational challenge. It takes time, focus, and patience to achieve this end-to-end coherence, and with organizational leadership rotations being what they are in the U.S. military, this is hard to do. There are a few areas where this happens fairly well, such as in air and missile defense, but the Joint and Navy future-force planning processes could and should do this more broadly and better.

You once described your role as N81B as not necessarily being focused on the specific analytic techniques being employed, but on being the expert on what is worth studying. Among the many demands for studies and analysis across the Navy, how does one determine what is truly worth studying?

Uniquely within the Navy the N81 staff knows how to structure an issue into an analytic problem, how to select the appropriate techniques to apply to it, and how to either do the work themselves or find the right outside provider to apply those techniques. My job (and that of the admirals who were my bosses in N81) was really to have as many interactions with senior leaders as possible and pay close attention to the bigger picture of what Navy leadership was trying to achieve, what the key problems were in getting there, where they needed (whether they knew it or not) analysis to help them understand the value or risk of the alternatives before them, and what analysis had been done before on that issue.

Senior leaders often do not know how to break a problem down into specific issues where analytic techniques can be applied, nor what issues have been studied before. That is really not their job anyway; that is what they expect a “Chief Analyst” to be able to do. I saw it as my job to recognize and make that connection, then bring back to the N81 staff the key new issues to go work their analytic skills on. Fairly regularly I initiated analytic projects in anticipation of issues that I saw coming months in advance. My experience of being deeply involved in 26 POM cycles in the Pentagon gave me pretty good intuition about what issues were likely to be coming up.

The issues worth studying are the ones that will potentially have a significant impact on warfighting outcomes or on the cost of buying, operating, or maintaining the force; and that are susceptible to analysis. Many issues are interesting, some are important, and some of the important ones are not really amenable to analytic techniques. It was N81’s job when I was there, and it is now instead the Navy Analytic Office’s job to recognize which was which.

Arthur H. (Trip) Barber is a retired Navy Senior Executive Service civilian, a retired Navy Surface Warfare Captain, and an engineering graduate of MIT and the Naval Postgraduate School. He was the Navy’s chief analyst of future force structure and capability requirements on the OPNAV staff as a civilian from 2002 to 2014.

Dmitry Filipoff is CIMSEC’s Director of Online Content. Contact him at Content@cimsec.org.

Featured Image: PACIFIC OCEAN (Jan. 25, 2020) The Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group transits in formation, Jan. 25, 2020. The Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group is on a scheduled deployment to the Indo-Pacific. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Anthony Rivera/Released)