Navy looking to fuse data and sensors to fight better from maritime operations centers
SAN DIEGO, Calif. — Building out the Navy’s maritime operations centers is a top priority for the service and will be critical to enabling successful operations across vast battlespaces and against sophisticated adversaries, according to senior officials.
The chief of naval operations, Adm. Lisa Franchetti, in her Navigation Plan released late last year outlined that the MOC will be the “center” to how the Navy fights in a distributed manner. She noted that they must be capable of integrating with the joint force and partner nations to link fleet commanders to sensors and shooters across the battlefield. The CNO tasked all fleet headquarters, beginning with Pacific Fleet, to have MOCs certified and proficient in command and control, information, intelligence, fires, movement and maneuver, protection, and sustainment functions by 2027.
The change has been necessitated by the larger distances — namely in the Pacific — that the Navy must be ready to fight across. Forces will be distributed and must command and control their assets while passing critical data back and forth — a task too great for carrier strike groups to do alone.
The Navy’s initiative, and the reasoning behind it, is similar to others made across the other services, such as the Army moving the main unit of action up from brigade to division.
“This battlespace is just bigger and bigger across a larger amount of sea space,” Vice Adm. Karl Thomas, deputy chief of naval operations for information warfare and director of naval intelligence, said at the annual WEST conference this week, equating fighting from the MOC to being able to achieve decision advantage over the adversary.
He noted that as he and his organization are thinking about fighting from the MOC, information has to be be parsed and synthesized at machine speed across the vast battlespace.
“Decision superiority is going to be predicated on our ability to have the right information at the right time to the right warrior at the right classification level. And it’s got to support the seven joint warfighting functions,” he said.
Naval Information Forces (NAVIFOR) was recently named as the type command for the MOCs, charging it with training forces to operate them.
“The MOC TYCOM is not just an IW mission, but a whole of Navy platform that aligns the primary processes for Navy and Joint Force maritime component command C2 and decision-making. Our responsibilities as MOC TYCOM provide unique and challenging opportunities to drive success at the operational level of war across nine MOCs and every number fleet and fleet headquarters in the world,” Vice Adm. Michael Vernazza, NAVIFOR commander, said at the conference.
Vernazza told reporters that one of the things he wants to make significant progress on this year is readiness to fight from the maritime operations centers.
“Fight from the MOC, that also means that we have developed a well-trained and efficient MOC team that is able to execute the seven joint functions,” he said.
As he’s looking to build that capability out, Vernazza wants tools for faster decision-making such as artificial intelligence to fuse data.
“I’d say decision-making would be certainly an area, probably in terms of fires as well, and taking what we know will be a very complex and dynamic battlespace and creating a way to understand how the fires piece can work more effectively and more efficiently,” he said. “One area that can help in that is probably in the area of decision-making, in terms of whether it be AI or some other way of creating an advantage for the commander in terms of that OODA loop that [Pacific Fleet Commander] Adm. [Stephen] Koehler referred to, where we take all this tremendous amounts of data that we have and are able to fuse it quickly into a coherent picture that matches the commander’s timing and tempo and sequencing of events that needs to occur as he or she makes those decisions.”
