ASNE President's Club Luncheon Address

VAdm Arthur K. Cebrowski

ASNE President’s Club Luncheon Address March 4, 1998 VAdm Arthur K. Cebrowski Kayleen Green, Chairman, President’s Club

Introduction by Kayleen Green

mong the phrases all of us are hearing a lot of these days are network-centric warfare and information warfare. In virtually any discussions of systems for the 21st century you’ll hear those terms being used often. Because all of us

in this room have an interest in what those systems of 21st century warfighting are going to be and because some of us, including me, need to know a lot more about this area, we invited as our speaker today the person who is probably the Navy’s most knowledgeable spokesman on what these terms mean to us. Vice Admiral Arthur K. Cebrowski is the Navy’s Director for Space, Information Warfare, Command and Control, N6. He previously held a similar position on the Joint Staff as Director for C4 systems. Over the course of his naval career Admiral Cebrowski commanded Fighter Squadron 41 and Carrier Air Wing 8 embarked in the USS Nimitz. He commanded the assault ship USS Guam. During Operation Desert Storm he commanded the USS Midway. He served as Commander America Battle Group, Commander Carrier Group 6, as well as having duty with the U.S. Air Force on the CINC staff and four separate tours on the CNO staff. In addition to combat deployments to Vietnam and the Persian Gulf, he deployed in support of UN operations in Iraq, Somalia, and Bosnia. Admiral Cebrowski has a B.S. in Math from Villanova and an MS in Computer Systems Management from the Post- graduate School in Monterey He has numerous personal decorations and awards, including the 1991 John Paul Jones award for inspirational leadership. We asked Admiral Cebrowski to join us today and to address us on technologies to achieve interoperability across the battle space and particularly to talk about the importance of engineering the human interface and training for these systems to prepare our sailors for the 21st century.

VAdm. Cebrowski: Thank you very much, Kayleen. I was with you until you got up to the subject matter of my remarks. I’m a little bit of a fish out of water here, as you could tell from the Bio. First, I’m not an engineer, but I like engineers a whole lot. Perhaps as a class, one of the few truly honest groups. And secondly, I’m not an acquisition person. But I know how hard a job it is, and I know our acquisition professionals and our uniformed engineers and our SES leaders who work the engi-

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ASNE President’s Club Luncheon Address

neering problems, and it is indeed difficult, and I know that many of you will want to pull me away onto that turf. And I’m willing to venture out there, but please keep in mind it will only be opinions.

As far as the subject matter was concerned, we mentioned interoperability and interfaces, and I thought that I’d start off in the ether for just a couple of minutes and then try to come down to earth progressively to come to grips with that notion. First of all, as the N6 of the Naw, not the Department of the Nav, but the Navy Chief Infor- mation Officer, probably more than anything else I am a change agent. As change agent, it is not so much my responsibility to produce change, but rather to help direct it and smooth the bumps, because I believe that the change is inevitable. It is a natural outgrowth of the information age. I’d like to stand a couple of thiigs on their heads for you a little bit. If you look at the information age through the language or lens of complexity theory, which I believe is an operative theory with regard to the information age, you find out that with your information age or information revolution you also get a complexity revolution. The reason is because one of the key features, perhaps the dominant feature of the information age is access. And access means increased interactions. So access is going up, and everybody values access and increasingly so. So with increased access we can get increased interactions. With increased interactions, you get increased adaptations, and with increased adaptations you sharply increase the probability of non- linear effects. That is what goes on in the information age. And it is really quite natural. Many people looked at the demise of the Soviet Union as the fact that, we overpowered them economically, or alter- natively, Gorbachev through Perestroika opened the doors. All the information poured in, and it turned out to be inconsistent with what the people had been told and you had this explosion, or implosion, and the Soviet Union collapses. Another way to look at it is that in the information age, with increased adaptations and non-linear outcomes, a society which could not adapt, because it did not have the interactions, simply couldn’t keep pace. The performance was decidedly lower. And so, this phenomenon quite naturally extends to our Navy, and indeed to all of the services. They are all going to change. I don’t care what kind of reactionary you put up here in uniform, he is either going to change

or he is going to retire. And the effect is the same. It is simple reality So the question then becomes, for people like myself, how do I steer this? Now, if you go back to the Soviet Union model, look also again through the lens of complexity theory If you look at the underlying theory of communism, as practiced in the Soviet Union, you had the primacy of the State and the primacy of the Party And then below that, the various Party apparatus, the bureau, the district structure, and then finally you come down at the absolute bottom to the individual. Whereas if you look at America, and America is inherently very difficult to govern, we have the primacy of the individual. It is the exact opposite. And if you look at complexity theory, you see that complex organisms or organizations organize themselves best when they are organized from the bottom up. You get superior performance. So once again, looking at what’s happened through the eyes of complexity theory, you could see the demise of the Soviet Union was really foreordained when its opponent was organizing from the exact opposite construct.

This, of course is very useful to a person who’s the N6, quite natural that an N-6 would come to these conclusions because my business is interactions and access. So I’m trying to facilitate that. Part of my business is O n g to brush aside impediments to that. And impediments come in many forms. If you don’t like that as a straightforward reason for why we’re going to change, we’ve got several other reasons why we’re going to change. One of them is the budget pressure that you all are witnessing here. Oh, if I might back up for just a second, a note that I wanted to make about this individual versus the state, the state organization. If you look at that construct then, it should be no surprise to you why small businesses are flourishing in America. That’s American business organizing itself from the bottom up, enormously powerful. What does that then say about these great big mega-defense organizations of which some of you may be part? It tells you that if you run that organization in the Communist format, you’re going to fail, because it will be top down command directed. Whereas, if you look at it in another wax where you have a large number of much smaller business elements and they are empowered to organize themselves within the firm, and it is the responsibility for the senior leadership to facilitate that, that

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ASNE President‘s Club Luncheon Address

firm will flourish. And so there’s appropriate models here that I think that we could use, whether you happen to be in a big or small firm.

Okay, but then there’s a whole bag of other pres- sures that come along with it. Obviously, I’ve already talked about the information age business; that’s one of them. The big kick in the pants is the budget. Folks look out at the demographics at 2010 and they start to see the shift, but if you talk to your broker, he’ll tell you what his corporate planner is thinking about. What he’s thinking about is that these aren’t dumb people. Most of the people who have big money in the market are reasonably smart people and they will reposition themselves, in advance, and that repositioning is going to start happening in about five years. This has probably already started a little bit, but it’s going to accelerate. Probably the only thing that’s holding it back right now is some of the tremendous gains of globalization. So you’re going to have this acceleration. You’ll see a repositioning of capital coming through ‘03 to ’05. This changes things dramatically, and then you’re going to hit the big demographic piece that comes later with the huge impact on government. So we are in for some exciting times here.

Of course you have big changes in technology. That’s another dnver, and incidentally technology in general takes a long time, as most of you know A good idea takes a long time to get up out of the lab and into the market. What the exciting thing is that most of us, who are consumers like myself, see the short time from introduction until one of the lock-out or lock-in mechanisms takes place and you get the big market capture. And that’s really at the heart of the Bill Gates testimony out there, these are very straightforward economic laws that he has been able to capitalize on. However, they happen to be new laws that are based on the increasing returns on investment economy, which is a rela- tively new thing in the economic world. And so, this is an exciting debate, because what you are going to see is the degree to which government inserts itself into this new economic process, and we know from experience that when government inserted itself in a heavy-handed way into the old economic process, general failure resulted. It takes a fairly light hand, a deft hand, to deal with the economy. So, it will be interesting to see and I think that’s going to be one of the telling things;

how heavy a hand is going to reach into the market- place.

Globalization, I already mentioned. That’s another factor and it’s not just the fact that firms have overseas offices, which firms have had for a very long time, but also the globalization, which means that it’s as if national boundaries didn’t exist, for most practical purposes. And then for Navy, the last point is the strategies that are available to our enemies are all likely to be based on speed. There- fore, you need speed-oriented responses and capabilities. And so, when you add this whole thing up, you end up essentially where I began: interactions, access, adaptations, and then the non-linear results. I’m not sure what you take home from that. Maybe it gives you a warm feeling that you can explain away some of the phenomena that you’ve seen and you can feel more comfortable with that. But the question then becomes, how do I focus down a little more to make judgements with regard to the Navy.

There are really four macro-level decisions that Navy has to make. How big is the Navy; what is the size of the Navy; how do I operate the Navy; and what’s my technology assimilation plan and rate of technology assimilation? Those are really the only four top-level decisions that we have to make. And to varying degrees, they are debatable. And how those debates resolve themselves will impact your business opportunities in a very straightforward way I’ll try to give some examples of that.

First, size. I have a chart in my office. It’s not a chart, it’s a big piece of paper, and on this piece of paper is the plot of one day’s electronic activity in the atmosphere on the surface of the earth. And if you ever see this thing, it just captures your imagi- nation. But once you take away the eastern and western seaboard of the United States, transconti- nental America, and transatlantic lines of communication, you end up with three big hubs. And those are around Europe, principally in the Mediterranean, but also in the Baltic, the Persian Gulf area, and from about Tokyo down south to Singapore. This kind of electronic activity represents transportation activity, whch represents economic activity, and consequently it’s pretty easy to see that this is the focus of the Navy. So somehow or another you need a three-theater Navy to do that. How much in each theater and the



mobility between them is debatable, but in general you have to be able to work those three areas. And that impacts size. Now you can make some judg- ments about size. You can say, well, I’ll just focus. I’ll shed a whole bunch of missions and I’ll just come down to this one area. That amounts to predicting the future. Folks have tried that. Look at what the UK had to do to deal with the Falk- lands. Not focused on this area of the world, it wasn’t their job until it showed up on their door- step. So, you don’t want to do that. Another way to deal with this is to say well, we’ll just spread our forces a little thinner. Well, that’s not particularly rewarding. Or, I’ll pick my theater. All right, which one? Which one or two of those are you willing to give away? This becomes very hard.

Okay, next is balance and I think this is the place where Navy has its single biggest problem. There is a continuing debate inside Navy about how future-going we should be versus how much we should focus on the here and now This is a very good debate. I think that Navy will always come down generally on the side of its day-to-day respon- sibilities. The nation cannot tolerate a near-term major failure owing to its military overseas. We’re the principal element of that overseas business, so we must be good at it. At the same time, we can’t be eating our seed corn. And you look around and you say, gee whiz, that’s exactly what you’re doing. This is not good, and adjustments are being made. But, this is the fundamental balance issue that we have. However, it’s not the only balance issue that we have.

Our warfare model has four parts: The Information Back Plane, because information processes are the key value-adding process, Sensors, Shooters, and Command and Control Applications. What’s our balance amongst those? I think that the richest area for future work is in sensors. That is where we have to reach for the future. The CNO said that the Navy will directly and decisively influence events ashore, and I think that’s a laudable and correct vision. But to do that, we have to sense what’s going on ashore. We have some organizational dysfunction there. I am responsible for sensing what goes on the surface of the ocean, principally from space. That doesn’t help us with the shore piece, but we are working on it. We talked about overland air defense, overland cruise missile defense, strike, close air support, battlefield

interdiction, and information warfare. All these things have dry side components and we must have sensing there, as well. If that’s where we’re going to go, and that is indeed where we are going to go, then we need to work very, very hard in sensing. And outsourcing a piece of your fundamental warfighting model just doesn’t make any sense. So, Navy is going to have to move in that direction. That’s a prediction, not policy, a prediction based on the fact that I think we don’t have a choice.

We, of course, have to balance missions. We have new mission areas coming, such as ballistic missile defense, information warfare, and the like. So, we have to balance the old missions with the new, and there’ll be a debate on that. You are going to see this coming up over and over again. Questions like, how we train our people, arise. The 1110 was always our jack-of-all-trades officer and the rela- tively small surface combatant has been our do- everythmg ship. Do we still do that? What is the right balance? It is interesting that in every war, what really happens to us is that we end up short of small ships, but we are not buying any small ships now I’m talking about a ship size somewhere between a patrol craft and a destroyer, particularly today’s destroyers. The Coast Guard guys love this. But maybe, this is not a bad approach. It’s a different form of outsourcing and I think that’s the kind of outsourcing I can live with. So, somehow that’s going to have to be addressed.

Having discussed size and balance, next is operations. Forward and focused landward. I don’t think strategic deployment from home is an option for Navy. We will always be an element of the strategic deploy from home strategy, insofar as we support Army and Air Force deployments. And of course we’ll always have a fraction of the ships at home as they go through maintenance and training, so you’ll get that, but as an operating concept, we’ll be forward.

Technology assimilation. There is room, I believe, for some state-of-the-art products. It must be finely focused. One of those areas again is in sensors, but generally, in information technology, in the broad course of things, we’re interested in the state of the shelf. We’d like to be working in the front of the shelf as opposed to the back, but state of the shelf sounds about right to me. And we’re going to have to move away from the performance

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paradigm. Let’s face it, we have always been wdling to accept some slippage and cost over-run if we could only get this performance plus up. It doesn’t work anymore. It just plain doesn’t work, so we have to reach to different methodologies for this. And we might have to reach to some strange, what we would now consider strange, cost suppression techniques. For example, the ship could be modular. I mean you engineers work it out and tell me. It wouldn’t bother me if the weapon systems were delivered in one big large shipping container where several of them would just get tied down to the deck or put in the hold. That’s, as far as I’m concerned, a doable do. Maybe I shouldn’t worry about reloading VLS tubes underway Maybe I ought to worry about how I just transfer a whole container, all up and loaded. Maybe I can do the same thing for big elements in my command and control. I know if I want to set up a command and control unit ashore, I have several mobile or relo- catable command and control systems, whch are joint and very capable. If I can do that ashore, I can do it on a ship. Maybe I can have a little bit of flexibility that way; if I decide I want more land attack, I’ll load more land attack weapons. If I need more air defense tubes, I’ll load a whole shipping container full. I’m open to that, but I think that’s the kind of stuff that we have to think about.

One of the things that I caution people in OPNAV about is that it doesn’t make much sense to me to insert new technologies if I can’t move along the organization, the operating concepts, and the doctrine at the same time. I’m pretty much convinced that we already aren’t getting good utili- zation out of what we have, that we can indeed do better. Admiral Clemins points out that you have Joint Vision 2010, and we’re hoping to buy information systems which will take us to JV 2010; but, if we buy the u-dormation technologies which are currently available to us, we could do JV 2010 next year. We’d be ten years ahead of schedule.

So, I’m interested in interoperability from many levels. And the interoperability requirements are always going to be very high. I don’t want my information technology access or services to be hard- wired in terms of doctrine, because we’re going to evolve. You can see the Surface Navy moving towards Strike, which is good. The number of

Mobile targets is going up, and the only people really available to service them is Naval Aviation, which should be taking on the mission.

You can see that the Surface Navy is great and submarines are great, but let’s face it, they have a s i m c a n t height-of-eye problem. Every weapon that Admiral Murphy tells me he wants to put on DD 21, very enthusiastically, I might add, shoots further than he can see. So, unless we solve his height-of-eye problem, then he’s buying excess capacity Of course we want to take advantage of that capacity, so who’s going to do that? So missions move around. Submariners reduce doing USW to the extent that they have been doing so traditionally, although they never stop entirelx and they focus more and more on surveillance and strike. We’ll have Aviators re-focus on USK So you can see that all this stuff is starting to move and you’re trying to position yourself to sax how am I going to respond to this?

Organizational changes are going to be important. Navy headquarters is the smallest of the service headquarters and it’s going to get smaller as we move things out. If you look at the more successful large firms, their headquarters have gotten smaller and they have moved things out. If you start viewing your enterprise as a collection of individ- uals who will organize themselves from the bottom up and empower them to do that, and start pushing stuff out of Washington, out of Headquarters, the Headquarters will get smaller. The great traditional fear of command is that you lose control of your forces, but the definition of what control means has changed dramatically

Tactically things are going to change and I think you are going to see changes in acquisition. New inter- dependencies are going to spring up, as they must.

It’s a great pleasure to be here and I really appre- ciate your organization and all the work, all the great work you folks do for the Navy. Perhaps more than anything else, I need to team with you because in terms of change agent work, you are a big part of our change mechanism. And in a very straightforward wax how you respond to RFPs makes a big difference. And to a certain extent, the throttle for change in the Navy is in your hands.


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ASNE President's Club Luncheon Address