US Navy

The United States and NATO are facing greater threats from the Russian Federation, and a growing interest from China, in the waters of the North Atlantic and the Arctic, warned Vice Adm. Andrew “Woody” Lewis, USN, who spoke Tuesday at AFCEA International and IEEE’s MILCOM conference in Norfolk, Virginia.

The dual-hatted commander oversees both the U.S. Navy’s Second Fleet and NATO’s new Joint Force Command Norfolk. To combat rising threats and provide stability, both commands must improve their operational abilities in these northern waters, he said.

This month is a crucial time for the U.S. Navy, as far as information technology goes. Its Program Executive Office for Enterprise Information Systems is developing the request for proposal for its Next Generation Enterprise Network Re-compete contract that will provide information technology services, including cloud services, for more than 700,000 Navy and Marine Corps users.

Employing modern statistical inference tools can provide the U.S. Navy a bridge to improved searching and tracking for people, planes and ships across land and sea. The ability of the tools to incorporate even spotty intelligence data to help locate individuals elevates the Navy’s command and control posture and ultimately aids in protecting the United States from security threats.

The ability of the U.S. Navy to maneuver during combat will soon be as important in the airwaves as it is in the air and the waves. The sea service has designated information warfare a domain as critical as its more commonly known physical counterparts, and the capacity to exploit and operate within it may hold the key to prevailing in future maritime conflicts.

U.S. military medical researchers are using radiation to close in on a vaccine to eliminate malaria, the top infectious disease threat to troops in affected areas, according to the Defense Department. The vaccine would replace preventive measures that are only partly effective against the mosquito-borne killer.

Emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and cognitive computing soon could be setting sail to aid the U.S. Navy in its battle to conquer cyberspace. Such capabilities could hold the key to improving cyber defense, while other approaches are making their way into offensive cyber operations, says the Navy’s top cyber officer.

Some technologies the Navy seeks are dual-use in the sense that they can be employed by defenders as well as attackers. Automation, for example, is being used by nation-states to probe and prey upon large blocks of Internet protocol (IP) space in both the military and commercial realms. Yet defenders also may rely on automation to help detect and respond to cyberthreats early in an attack.

"Get it done quickly" is the mantra of Chris Miller, Executive Director of the Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command Center, Atlantic (SPAWAR), which is also referred to as the Navy's Information Dominance Systems Command. While SPAWAR's Pacific office handles research and development, Miller's group, based in Charleston, N.C. is responsible for acquisitions and getting technology on board ships and into the hands of warfighters.

Or rather, insignia. The U.S. Navy's chief of naval operations has approved officers and enlisted to wear the Information Dominance Corps Warfare insignia once they have completed a qualification program.

The warfare insignia was created to provide a common link among the IDC communities and to institute a rigorous qualification program to identify the Navy's information dominance professionals. The IDC will consist of more than 44,000 active and Reserve Navy officers, enlisted and civilian professionals who specialize in information-intensive fields.

The value of the virtual realm for training has been recognized for some time, but now artificial reality is being exploited for many other applications. Web 2.0 capabilities have opened new doors in cyberspace, and people and organizations are embracing the new world of virtual collaboration. The only limits to using this make-believe realm may be those of human imagination. SIGNAL's May issue looks at ongoing efforts to explore collaboration in the virtual world. One picture may tell a thousand words, but sometimes it takes more than that to generate a particular image. That was the case with the cover of this month's SIGNAL Magazine.