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00–000
2000
[H.A.S.C. No. 106–23]
HEARINGS
ON
NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT
FOR FISCAL YEAR 2000—H.R. 1401
AND
OVERSIGHT OF PREVIOUSLY AUTHORIZED PROGRAMS
BEFORE THE
COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SIXTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
MILITARY PROCUREMENT SUBCOMMITTEE
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ON
TITLE I—PROCUREMENT
TITLE II—RESEARCH, DEVELOPMENT, TEST, AND EVALUATION
HEARING HELD
FEBRUARY 23, 1999
MILITARY PROCUREMENT SUBCOMMITTEE
DUNCAN HUNTER, California, Chairman
FLOYD D. SPENCE, South Carolina
BOB STUMP, Arizona
JAMES V. HANSEN, Utah
JIM SAXTON, New Jersey
JAMES TALENT, Missouri
TERRY EVERETT, Alabama
J.C. WATTS, Jr., Oklahoma
MAC THORNBERRY, Texas
LINDSEY GRAHAM, South Carolina
JIM RYUN, Kansas
JIM GIBBONS, Nevada
MARY BONO, California
JOSEPH PITTS, Pennsylvania
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ROBIN HAYES, North Carolina
NORMAN SISISKY, Virginia
IKE SKELTON, Missouri
JOHN M. SPRATT, Jr., South Carolina
LANE EVANS, Illinois
ROD R. BLAGOJEVICH, Illinois
TOM ALLEN, Maine
JIM TURNER, Texas
ADAM SMITH, Washington
JAMES H. MALONEY, Connecticut
MIKE McINTYRE, North Carolina
CYNTHIA A. McKINNEY, Georgia
ELLEN O. TAUSCHER, California
ROBERT BRADY, Pennsylvania
Steve Thompson, Professional Staff Member
Roger Smith, Professional Staff Member
John Sullivan, Professional Staff Member
Doug Necessary, Professional Staff Member
Noah Simon, Staff Assistant
MILITARY RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT SUBCOMMITTEE
CURT WELDON, Pennsylvania, Chairman
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ROSCOE G. BARTLETT, Maryland
STEVEN KUYKENDALL, California
DONALD SHERWOOD, Pennsylvania
JOHN R. KASICH, Ohio
HERBERT H. BATEMAN, Virginia
JOEL HEFLEY, Colorado
JOHN M. McHUGH, New York
HOWARD ''BUCK'' McKEON, California
JOHN N. HOSTETTLER, Indiana
SAXBY CHAMBLISS, Georgia
VAN HILLEARY, Tennessee
JOE SCARBOROUGH, Florida
WALTER B. JONES, Jr., North Carolina
BOB RILEY, Alabama
OWEN PICKETT, Virginia
GENE TAYLOR, Mississippi
MARTIN T. MEEHAN, Massachusetts
PATRICK J. KENNEDY, Rhode Island
SILVESTRE REYES, Texas
TOM ALLEN, Maine
VIC SNYDER, Arkansas
JIM TURNER, Texas
LORETTA SANCHEZ, California
CIRO D. RODRIGUEZ, Texas
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ROBERT E. ANDREWS, New Jersey
BARON P. HILL, Indiana
JOHN B. LARSON, Connecticut
Steve Ansley, Professional Staff Member
Robert Lautrup, Professional Staff Member
Jean Reed, Professional Staff Member
William Natter, Professional Staff Member
Erica Striebel, Staff Assistant
(ii)
C O N T E N T S
CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF HEARINGS
1999
HEARING:
Tuesday, February 23, 1999, Fiscal Year 2000 National Defense Authorization Act—Defense Information Superiority and Information Assurance—Entering the 21st Century
APPENDIX:
Tuesday, February 23, 1999
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 1999
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FISCAL YEAR 2000 NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT—DEFENSE INFORMATION SUPERIORITY AND INFORMATION ASSURANCE—ENTERING THE 21ST CENTURY
STATEMENTS PRESENTED BY MEMBERS OF CONGRESS
Hunter, Hon. Duncan, a Representative from California, Chairman, Military Procurement Subcommittee
Pickett, Hon. Owen, a Representative from Virginia, Ranking Member, Military Research and Development Subcommittee
Skelton, Hon. Ike, a Representative from Missouri, Ranking Member, Committee on Armed Services
Weldon, Hon. Curt, a Representative from Pennsylvania, Chairman, Military Research and Development Subcommittee
WITNESSES
Campbell, Lt. Gen. William H., Director, Information Systems for Command, Control, Communications and Computers, Department of the Army
Cebrowski, Vice Adm. Arthur K., President, Naval War College, Director, Navy Doctrine Command
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Clemins, Adm. Archie, Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet, United States Navy
Donahue, Lt. Gen. William J., Director, Headquarters Communications and Information, Department of the Air Force
Money, Hon. Arthur L., Senior Civilian Official, Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence
Natter, Vice Adm. Robert J., Director, Space, Information Warfare, Command & Control, Department of the Navy
Rhodes, Lt. Gen. John E., Commanding General, Marine Corps Combat Development Command, United States Marine Corps
Woodward, Lt. Gen. John L., USAF, Director for Command, Control, Communications, and Computer Systems, the Joint Chiefs of Staff
APPENDIX
PREPARED STATEMENTS:
[The Prepared Statements can be viewed in the hard copy.]
Campbell, Lt. Gen. William H.
Cebrowski, Vice Adm. A.K.
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Clemins, Adm. Archie
Donahue, Lt. Gen. William J.
Money, Mr. Arthur L.
Natter, Vice Ad. Robert J.
Rhodes, Lt. Gen. John E.
Weldon, Hon. Weldon
Woodward, Lt. Gen. John L.
DOCUMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD:
[The Documents submitted can be viewed in the hard copy.]
Briefing on DOD Information Assurance: Vulnerabilities, Challenges, and Accomplishments
GAO's Report entitled ''Defense Information Superiority, Progress Made, but Significant Challenges Remain''
Richard Danzig's letter to Hon. Spence and Report to Congress on Cooperative Engagement Capability Frequency Issues
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QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD:
[The Questions and Answers are pending.]
FISCAL YEAR 2000 NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT—DEFENSE INFORMATION SUPERIORITY AND INFORMATION ASSURANCE—ENTERING THE 21ST CENTURY
House of Representatives, Committee on Armed Services, Military Research and Development Subcommittee, Meeting Jointly with Military Procurement Subcommittee, Washington, DC, Tuesday, February 23, 1999.
The subcommittees met, pursuant to call, at 2:10 p.m. in room 2118, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Curt Weldon (chairman of the Subcommittee on Military Research and Development) presiding.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. CURT WELDON, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM PENNSYLVANIA, CHAIRMAN, MILITARY RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT
Mr. WELDON. The Subcommittees on Military Procurement and Research and Development will come to order.
Today the two subcommittees are meeting in a continuing co-effort to assess the Department of Defense information superiority and information assurance programs, and the measures that are being taken to establish and maintain information assurance as the Armed Forces enter the 21st century.
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For the information of the public, we have just completed a classified briefing on the subjects by Dr. John Hamre, Deputy Secretary of Defense. I want to say on the record, as I have in the past with Dr. Hamre's testimony, that the briefings that he conducted last year on this topic for us and this year are among the most provocative briefings that I have been privileged to witness in the 13 years I have been in this Congress. They are issues that are extremely important, not only to this committee but to this entire Congress and to all Americans. This is a topic that we have to increasingly pay more attention to.
It was Dr. Hamre who last year in our public hearing stated on the record that it is not a matter of if America will have an electronic Pearl Harbor, it is a matter of when, a very grave prediction and one that we need to take to heart. I think Dr. Hamre's testimony in the classified session underscored that in a very aggressive way during the past hour and 15 minutes.
I would like to move to include an unclassified version of Dr. Hamre's briefing in the record in this hearing.
Hearing no objection, that is now ordered.
[The information referred to can be found in the Appendix.]
Mr. WELDON. I would also like to include two reports in the record. The first is the General Accounting Office's August of 1998 report entitled ''Defense Information Superiority: Progress Made, but Significant Challenges Remain,'' which provides the background for much of what will be discussed by our witnesses today.
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The second report is by the Secretary of the Navy, and addresses the operational and funding impacts on Cooperative Engagement Capability from reallocation of certain segments of the DOD radio frequency spectrum to nongovernment use. Such reallocation was mandated by Title VI of the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act for fiscal year 1993. It has significant long-term effects on our Armed Forces communications systems, and it is expected to be addressed by several of our witnesses today, with hopefully some follow-up questions in that area.
Hearing no objections, it is so ordered.
[The information referred to can be found in the Appendix.]
Mr. WELDON. In March of 1997 we held our first major hearing on this issue. Ever since the Defense Science Board issued its famous report of three or four years ago, 1996, these subcommittees have aggressively tried to put more money and resources into the Administration's efforts at addressing the information warfare and cyber terrorism problem. I want to applaud my colleagues in both parties, on both sides of the aisle, for their leadership and for their votes and their voices in plusing up these areas, and would ask that we continue to provide that focus in this year's budget process.
I am the first to admit that the Department of Defense, I think, is moving in a very aggressive and I think a very successful way. I had the pleasure of visiting our Army facility in the afternoon yesterday for several hours at Fort Belvoir, and I was extremely impressed with what the Army is doing. I have been at Navy facilities out in San Diego on board the U.S.S. Coronado, and understand the work there, and I am well aware of what the Air Force and Marine Corps is doing. I can tell you that I am convinced that the administration and the Pentagon are taking this issue in an extremely serious manner, and I am very pleased with what I have seen so far.
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Today's hearing will focus on what has taken place within the Department of Defense since our last hearing in implementing the Department's information superiority program and in protecting the defense information infrastructure.
The tasks faced by the DOD are not easy. I am quoting from the work that the General Accounting Office completed for the Research and Development Subcommittee last year:
''Achieving information superiority will be expensive and complex. Based on its analysis of fiscal year 1999 through 2003 Future Years Defense Plan (FYDP), DOD estimates it will budget an average of $43 billion a year, nearly 17 percent of the $257 billion budget request for fiscal year 1999, for C4ISR systems and activities during the plan period. Achieving information superiority is complex because it involves thousands of decentralized C4ISR systems and information networks. Furthermore, the systems, networks, and information superiority activities are managed by many different offices of the Secretary of Defense, Joint Chiefs of Staff, services, unified commands and defense agencies throughout the DOD.''
Nevertheless, as will be discussed by our witnesses, we are aware that much progress has been made. The critical issues for the Department and for the subcommittees are what remains to be done by the DOD, by the Administration, and by this Congress, and there are actions that each of us must continue to take.
With us today to discuss these issues are the Honorable Arthur Money, senior civilian official of the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence, the DOD's chief information officer, the J6 of the Joint Staff, General John Woodward; the chief information officer of the services, General Campbell from the Army; Admiral Natter from the Navy; General Donahue from the Air Force; and General Rhodes, commander of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command. To provide an operational perspective, we are pleased to have Admiral Clemins, commander-in-chief, Pacific Fleet, and Admiral Art Cebrowski, president of the Naval War College. Gentlemen, we welcome each of you and look forward to your testimony.
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Just in summary, before I turn to my colleagues, I think the summary of where we are in America is that one of the greatest advantages and one of the greatest assets to improving the quality of life for all American people in the 21st century is the use of information. One of the greatest weaknesses and perhaps one of the greatest vulnerabilities of the American people and our quality of life in the 21st century is our use of information and information systems. It is at one and the same time a great asset to our country, and it is also one that presents extreme vulnerabilities that we have to be aware of and deal with.
With that, I would turn to my distinguished colleague, Mr. Hunter, the chairman of the Procurement Subcommittee.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Weldon can be found in the Appendix.]
STATEMENT OF HON. DUNCAN HUNTER, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM CALIFORNIA, CHAIRMAN, MILITARY PROCUREMENT SUBCOMMITTEE
Mr. HUNTER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to thank you for your partnership in putting together both subcommittees to have this very important hearing.
I want to add my welcome to the distinguished panel of witnesses. As you noted in your statement, two years ago we held the very first hearing in which all the Department chief information officers appeared together for the first time as a group. We also had with us then as well former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence Duane Andrews, who at that time had just completed a Defense Science Board study on information warfare.
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The study found that there was a need for what he called extraordinary action to deal with the emerging challenges posed by information warfare, and he recommended that $3 billion of additional funding be provided over a five-year period to counter the growing information warfare threat.
As you also noted, last year we heard from Dr. Hamre on measures being taken to protect the defense information infrastructure, the DII, from unauthorized intrusions. We have just had, I think, a very good recap of that in classified session, including the establishment of the defense-wide information assurance program that provides central oversight and a common management framework for ensuring the reliability of the DII. We also learned about the vulnerabilities of the DII that were exposed by the ''Eligible Receiver'' exercise and the real world cyber attacks, as well as the potential for what Dr. Hamre called a future electronic Pearl Harbor.
We have just concluded a progress report from Dr. Hamre with respect to recent actions the Department has taken to protect the DII. Now we hope to get a similar report from the chief information officers regarding their ability to obtain, process and disseminate information to the warfighters on the global information grid. We as Members need to understand the status of their efforts to connect the dots, so to speak. That is to ensure that the right information gets to the right decisionmaker at the right time, and that both the sender and the receiver are authenticated, legitimate users.
I realize that this is a terrifically complex task, but if information superiority is to be the heart of the Department's Joint Vision 2010, and the fundamental enabler for precision engagement dominant in the newly focused logistics and information protection, then we need to do everything we can to ensure its success.
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So let me say to my good friend in the chair that I believe we have chosen exactly the right topic to begin our authorization hearings this year, and I look forward to our witnesses' testimony on this vitally important subject.
Thank you very much to all the witnesses. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. WELDON. Thank you, Chairman Hunter.
The ranking member of the R&D subcommittee, Mr. Pickett.
STATEMENT OF HON. OWEN PICKETT, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM VIRGINIA, RANKING MEMBER, MILITARY RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT SUBCOMMITTEE
Mr. PICKETT. Mr. Chairman, I join you in welcoming our witnesses today speak on this most important subject. Before we move quickly to hear the testimony of our witnesses, I want to mention only briefly my interest and heightened concern about this subject.
As mentioned by Chairman Weldon, we have had two hearings over the past several years specifically focused on information superiority and information assurance. To date I am most impressed with the amount of effort that DOD personnel have expended, and acknowledge the successes already recorded.
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The great concern of mine is my fear of falling victim to what I call the technological surprise, potentially on the battlefield and perhaps in the offices where the security systems are, and recognizing that this does include both offensive and defensive capabilities.
Today we have the opportunity to focus on the defensive nature of military requirements and thereby examine our ability for assuring and maintaining secure and operational systems. I look forward to hearing the comments of our witnesses today, and also look forward to working with my colleagues to strengthen our Nation's capabilities in these areas.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. WELDON. Thank you, Mr. Pickett.
We have been joined by the distinguished ranking member who is going to give the opening statement for Mr. Sisisky. We appreciate his attendance.
We have been joined by our distinguished chairman, who is a very busy man but is always welcome here. He is our leader and sets the tone for all these very important hearings for us. We appreciate him joining us today as well. I will first turn to Mr. Skelton and ask our distinguished chairman if he would like to make any comments.
Mr. Skelton.
STATEMENT OF HON. IKE SKELTON, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM MISSOURI, RANKING MEMBER, COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
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Mr. SKELTON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. In the absence of Mr. Sisisky, I do have some comments. First, I wish to welcome this very, very distinguished panel in discussing this highly complex issue. I am reminded of what my fellow Missourian Mark Twain once said: ''The more you explain it to me, the more I don't understand it.'' I certainly hope that we can receive information at least to the point of being able to make some headway in understanding and hopefully correcting the threat that is out there.
Back in 1997 we received testimony from the Department of Defense on an emerging topic called information superiority and information assurance. No less than a year ago we received testimony from Dr. Hamre on this subject. Dr. Hamre's testimony was more than informative, it was very eye-opening, and he characterized an attack on our cyber-based infrastructure as potentially the electronic equivalent of a Pearl Harbor.
In spite of this wake-up call for the emerging vulnerability of our increasingly cyber-based military, I have not seen or heard anything in the past year to suggest that my concern may be misplaced. Attempts to gain unauthorized access to critical Department of Defense cyber-based systems seem to be on the increase. At the same time, our efforts to develop hard-knit sentry warfare systems seem to be suffering more than their fair share of setbacks.
Presumably much has been accomplished since last year. I expect our witnesses will highlight the meaningful information, assurances and accomplishments, and identify the key challenges remaining.
More importantly, we would like to get some sense from our witnesses as to whether the services, the Department of Defense, the administration, and the Congress really understand this problem, and whether the commitment of this defense establishment is consistent with their understanding of the challenges.
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We look forward to the testimony. We thank this very distinguished group for testifying today.
Mr. WELDON. Thank you, Mr. Skelton. With that I will turn to our distinguished Chairman, Mr. Spence, for any comments he would like to make.
Mr. Spence. No comments, other than just to welcome our panel today. Thank you very much for coming.
Mr. WELDON. Thank you.
Gentlemen, we would ask you to summarize your statements. We do have a number of witnesses. Verbalize whatever points you want to make. Without objection, we will include your written statements in the record that you would want to submit to us.
I would say to the Members, continuing the policy that we started in the informal session, if you have a burning question, ask it during the process. But if it can wait, we will have a round of questions at the end. We want this to be a process where you can—if a question arises during a session, irregardless of where you are sitting, just indicate you want to be recognized and you can ask your question at that time.
With that, we will open it up and welcome our witnesses.
Mr. Money, it is all yours.
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STATEMENT OF HON. ARTHUR L. MONEY, SENIOR CIVILIAN OFFICIAL, OFFICE OF THE ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF DEFENSE FOR COMMAND, CONTROL, COMMUNICATIONS AND INTELLIGENCE
Mr. MONEY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Mr. Hunter, Members of the subcommittee. I am truly honored to be here today, and pleased, very pleased, to have this opportunity to discuss with you the subject of information superiority. This is a very important issue to the Department of Defense and, as evidenced by this hearing, to Congress as well.
My job in the next three or four minutes and for the rest of the afternoon is to try and focus all of us on a much broader subject than what was discussed with Dr. Hamre. We really want to broaden the subject of information security across the board.
Let me first, for the sake of not running amuck here with Mr. Skelton, of confusing folks further, let me try and define information superiority. There is a definition. It is in the Joint Staff publication. It is the capability to collect, process, and disseminate an uninterrupted flow of information while exploiting and/or denying an adversary the same, the ability to do the same.
Let me take each of those words briefly.
''Collect'', what do we mean? Worldwide, global collection. We need to improve and optimize both joint and combined, i.e., coalition or allied operations as well, information and intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance. We need to improve the state-of-the-art, multidisciplined, multi-intelligence, or multi-INTS with real-time capability.
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What do we mean by ''process?'' We need real-time, high value, state-of-the-art processing and correlation capability. This will generate a common operating picture and ensure situational awareness.
What do we mean by ''disseminate?'' We need a global, worldwide, secure, assured, end-to-end, coherent connectivity. Information assurance is a subpart of this, and for it, throughout all of DOD, we are talking about, by information assurance, availability, integrity, confidentiality, authentication, and nonrepudiation of whoever is receiving that data.
We need to have adequate spectrums available to the warfighters, to any of us, when we transmit and receive this information. We need to ensure what we call the last mile, getting the information to the ultimate end user, to the real user, again through a compatible, coherent, interoperable communication and information flow.
''Disseminate'' means the capability to simultaneously disseminate all forms of information, whether it is voice or data or imagery or video, all of this across the defense infrastructure, common operating environment. That is one of the major standards and one of the major things that enables us to have interoperability, all this with defense in depth.
''Uninterrupted flow of information'' means robust, multiple paths, redundant communications or information networks to ensure the data or the flow from the sensor to the shooter or to the national leadership. It ensures the continuity of mission-critical systems through, for example, Y2K disruption periods. It provides information systems and technologies needed not just for the warfighter but also for what we call the revolution in business affairs.
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There are two major themes in the Department of Defense, revolution in military affairs and revolution in business affairs. In fact, then, we will align those two processes.
It is to ensure that the global combat support systems, GCSS, and the global command and control system, GCCS, are in fact compatible. Ultimately, it integrates the revolution in military affairs and the revolution in business affairs into a coherent interoperable information system.
''Exploiting,'' what does that mean? Information will be integrated in real time. It will be analyzed or exploited by a knowledge-based work force, analyzing and exploiting all the available data. It will then generate this total common operating picture, and it will ensure that total situational awareness is available to all that need it. It also means we are going to have a greater reliance on reserve units to help us do the exploitation, both military and civilian reserve units.
What do we mean by ''deny?'' Here we get into subjects called information operations, information warfare, electronic warfare. Improving the existing capabilities of electronic warfare is a major issue. We need to develop capabilities to deny, disrupt, degrade, and in fact destroy adversaries' infrastructure. All of this needs to be developed with flexible, adaptable, real-time retargeting tools.
So those are the things that, in a synopsis, we mean by ''information superiority.'' Why it is important is what you are going to hear from these warfighters that are sitting here around me. It is summarized here briefly.
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It will generate increased combat power. It enables faster decision cycles to be made. It assures we will have improved, assured, and shared awareness. That will then lead to increased speed of command. It will then generate a higher op tempo, ensuring greater lethality and increasing our survivability.
These panelists here will present these various points of view from each of their joint or their service perspectives. Also, as you pointed out, Admiral Clemins is here to talk about what he has done to implement these information superiority systems in the Pacific Fleet, and as we wrap up the presentations, we will get to Vice Admiral Cebrowski, and he will bring from his vantage point at the Naval War College.
From my point of view as the C3I or the Secretary's principal staff assistant for information superiority, information superiority is not just essential, it is absolutely essential to achieving Joint Vision 2010. What you will hear today is a lot of what is already being achieved.
But this is not just a good news story. We also will talk about the bad and the ugly, and what ultimately I will end up at the summary, after you ask your questions, is with five things we will ask Congress to help us with. When I put all this together, though, I have ten goals as the C3I or as the CIO, chief information officer of the DOD.
The first one is to ensure the continuity of mission critical systems through any calendar disruption, through any Y2K problem. There are multiple hearings on that during the next several weeks. I will assure you that the DOD will in fact be able to meet any contingency, any kind of operations necessary during this time frame.
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The second goal is to implement effective programs for information assurance and critical infrastructure protection. You heard some of this with Dr. Hamre. We will talk a little bit more about it today.
Third is to build a coherent global network based upon efficient and effective use of information architectures and procedures.
The fourth goal is to plan and implement joint and combined end-to-end C3ISR and space integration, bringing all those sensors to bear.
Fifth is to establish, create, if you will, a knowledge-based work force throughout DOD, and clearly here we need some help.
Sixth is to establish policies and budget priorities that will lead to the reinvention of intelligence in the 21st century.
Seventh is to provide policies for information operations, security and counterintelligence.
The eighth one is the other side of the house, if you will, to establish electronic commerce and business practices reform throughout the functional areas of DOD. Because of the subject matter of this hearing, we won't talk a lot about that today. We will stay more focused on the warfighters' needs.
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But in the context of this, we are buying more and more commercially available, but we also have consulted. Five percent of what is not available we then need to develop through R&D through the DOD, so we will develop advanced technology plans to in fact be able to totally deliver what is needed in information superiority.
What are the impediments to information superiority? You will hear from the panelists about those, but quickly let me read off a few: visibility. Visibility across the DOD of information superiority is very difficult. We have service centric programming, and sometimes then we lose the jointness.
We have research and development issues, technology cycle issues. Dr. Hamre mentioned this briefly. We are on Program Objective Memorandum (POM) cycles of FYDPs five years out, starting a year or two out and going out for five. We are in an information technology cycle that goes through a generation about every 15 to 18 months now, so we have a mismatch right from the get-go relative to our processes.
We have huge interaction and interoperability problems with allies and coalition partners. We have competition for the spectrum. We clearly have security balanced against business practices. Again, Dr. Hamre mentioned some of those; the lack of and the growing need for an increased knowledge-based work force.
Ultimately, we need an assured, secure global network.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I will now pass this on to J–6, Lieutenant General Woodward, who will bring the joint perspective. We are going to work our way down the table.
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[The prepared statement of Mr. Money can be found in the Appendix.]
Mr. WELDON. Thank you.
General.
STATEMENT OF LT. GEN. JOHN L. WOODWARD, USAF, DIRECTOR FOR COMMAND, CONTROL, COMMUNICATIONS, AND COMPUTER SYSTEMS, THE JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF
General WOODWARD. Thank you, Mr. Money. I appreciate that very much.
Mr. Chairman and Members, I am very grateful to have an opportunity to address the community on the topic of information superiority and its central role in the military transformation process, and to discuss specifically the Joint Staff's plan to address this complex issue of great importance to our Nation and to the military forces.
I am Lieutenant General Jack Woodward. I am your Joint Staff director for command, control, communications and computer systems, and I am also the Joint Staff coordinating authority for information superiority as a result of the Joint Vision 2010.
My testimony this afternoon focuses on the challenges of information superiority from a joint perspective. Here at the dawn of the 21st century, the joint warfighting community is fully engaged in the information age. As you have cited today and have cited in other documentation, Joint Vision 2010 is the overarching vision that describes joint warfare in that information age. This Joint Vision, signed by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, articulates a vision for future warfare where information is a fundamental enabler of the emerging operational concepts of both precision engagement, dominant maneuver, focused logistics, and full-dimensional protection.
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The term we use to describe this enabler is information superiority, as defined by Mr. Money in his testimony a minute ago. A closely-related concept of increasing importance is network-centric warfare, which Vice Admiral Cebrowski will address in some detail in his testimony today as well. Information superiority and network-centric warfare are multifaceted concepts with significant and far-reaching implications for all of the (CINCs) Commanders in Chief, the services and the agencies.
In an effort to define and bound information superiority, the Joint Staff, in conjunction with the CINCs, services, and agencies, has identified three primary information superiority challenges. The first challenge is battlespace awareness, the second is information transport and processing, and the third is information operations.
The magnitude of achieving information superiority becomes very apparent when viewed from the position of a joint task force commander who often must integrate joint, allied, and coalition forces into a coherent fighting force. When planning and executing operations, joint task force commanders and their forces require access to the fundamental information elements of battlespace awareness, things like information on the blue forces, information on the adversary, and information on the environment.
Furthermore, as ongoing peacekeeping engagements are highlighting, knowledge of neutrals and noncombatants is also extremely important. Each of the services and several key agencies make important contributions to generating battlespace awareness for a broad range of mission areas in support of joint operations, from space to the surface of the earth, and certainly involving our oceans and the depths of the oceans.
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As was demonstrated recently in Operation Desert Fox, comprehensive battlespace awareness is essential for precision engagement. The ability of a joint task force to operate as a coherent fighting force is also dependent on the ability to transport and process information between all elements of the warfighting enterprise anywhere in the world.
We have identified four primary operational capabilities associated with information transport and processing: that of capacity; certainly interoperability; assurance, as we have talked about; and information management, which is rather key.
The emerging joint foundational construct for accomplishing these challenges is something we are referring to as the global information grid, as Mr. Money mentioned. The global information grid can best be understood as the provider of worldwide dial tone or web tone or data tone, or the video teleconference tone.
The enabling role of information in future warfare requires acknowledgment of the global information grid as a weapons system, not just a matter of support. The global network information environment process, or GNIE as we are referring to it in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, mentioned by Mr. Money, acknowledges the central role of this grid by identifying the resources and policy needs and the key technologies required for its deployment.
The components of the global information grid consist of deployed tactical networks, the defense information systems network, which is our principal Department of Defense long-haul communications backbone, and the transmission capability supporting our own camps, posts, stations, and bases. These capabilities are increasingly important as we transition to the network-centric operations which call for us to move more information and less people. With network-centric operations, forces based in the United States will be key to enabling the command and control of deployed forces, as well as contributing to the development of shared battlespace awareness.
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Our recent success with the performance of federated battle damage assessment and Operation Desert Fox highlighted the power of network-centric operations and increasing battlespace awareness, as it was very visible on the television sets.
Fielding the global information grid is a high priority for the Department of Defense because it provides a form of combat power which recognizes that communications is a part of the fight; not just for the fight, in support of the fight, it is part of the fight.
As we advance in implementing information superiority, we need to be firmly grounded in the reality of the present. A broad range of assessment approaches, including Joint Staff command and control, joint warfighting capability assessment, we refer to as JWCA, our team's activities, coupled with the Chairman's joint monthly readiness review, we call JMRs, as well as our commander-in-chiefs' integrated priority list, have identified deficiencies and areas for improvement in the following arenas.
First, C4 (Command, Control, Communications and Computing) interoperability at the CINC, the joint task force, and certainly coalition levels is consistently identified in these assessments. C4 force structure modernization is on every CINC's priority list. You have heard that in some of the testimony.
Then training, both operational and technical, for C4 fielding. Transmission capacity, bandwidths on demand. Quality of that service for our warfighters' joint network management and the information dissemination management. C4 infrastructure of our posts, camps, stations and bases, highlighted in the current chairman's program review language which goes to the Secretary of Defense here shortly.
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Information assurance, which is such a big one. The technical work force for both operations and the maintenance of the C4 operating systems. Spectrum preservation and the use of that spectrum and the freedom of the use of that spectrum. And also the buying process versus the technology explosion, which has been mentioned several times.
All of these areas have assigned responsible accountable offices of primary responsibility. Each subject above is also under senior management review, as you might guess. All areas require joint solutions and close coordination with all of our allies and coalition partners.
Let me highlight some of these challenges. I will mention just quickly four. First, the C4 interoperability. As you are aware, interoperability is a complex topic with multiple interrelated threads, including information sharing, releasability, sharing, and cryptology, security levels, and technology interoperability.
Solving these problems requires us to simultaneously focus on technology, doctrine, policy, tactics, technique, and procedures. The CINC service and agency staff's are working these issues hard.
Direction and control measures include mandatory use of the Department of Defense's joint technical architecture, documents, and all the acquisitions. Another control mechanism is the joint requirements oversight council process that uses interoperability as a major key performance parameter for new requirements.
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Also there is the building of a DOD C4 system architecture template recently, which leads to joint operational architecture, joint tactical architecture, and certainly systems level architecture to help guide the investment level decisionmaking in the future.
C4 infrastructure. When our joint warfighters deploy, we face significant challenges with respect to communications, landing rights, host Nation approval, as well as broader issues of local C4 infrastructures that rank from well developed to almost nonexistent. As we have seen, dealing effectively with these issues is the key to requiring, acquiring and deploying the fighter base C4 capabilities required to support a joint effort.
The Joint Task Force Radio System, JTRS, will play a key role in helping us deploy the theater base component of the global information grid, again a capability that was born joint. These are necessary for employing the global command and control system and the global combat support system in support of the joint task force commander, also a ''born joint'' type of system.
Next, network management and operations. Our joint task force warfighters need significantly improved capabilities for joint network management, for information dissemination, and for the network operations, especially in the area of information assurance and understanding what is going on in our networks. Recently the Joint Staff helped field an interim joint network management capability for each warfighting commander-in-chief's headquarters and their joint task force. The operational requirements document for this, for a long-term solution, is going before the Joint Requirements Oversight Council this next month.
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The last example of the spectrum is that warfighters must have assured access to the frequency spectrum to accomplish the full range of military operations and to train for these operations. The military also must be good stewards of this precious spectrum commodity in the international arena as we require and field new capabilities.
As you are aware, the information technology explosion has increased and accelerated the communication industry's need for spectrum. However, I do not believe that the Nation's business practices should put at risk our national security military needs. We can't fight a digitized network-centric battle without a coordinated spectrum plan. We also may need a national spectrum policy that balances our economic needs with our national security interests.
Transitioning to information superiority and addressing these joint warfighting deficiencies and transitioning to a knowledge-based, network-centric fighting force, the Joint Staff, CINCs and services are aggressively working along a broad front with focused efforts. These efforts include working CINC funding for command and control improvement projects, for infusing technology through projects, like our advanced concepts technology demonstrations, performance joint warrior interoperability demonstrations and information superiority experiments.
Joint and service experimentation in the information domain is a key element of our strategy for achieving this information superiority. We know there are nontrivial technological, organizational, and doctrinal components associated with achieving information superiority. We just cannot go out and deploy advanced C4 and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems and expect an immediate increase in combat power. Consequently, both service warfighting experiments and joint warfighting experiments are focused on helping us address the fundamental organizational, doctrinal, and information technology issues that we must to achieve this information superiority and realize Joint Vision 2010.
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To deploy the global grid or the capabilities required for Joint Vision 2010, we need to focus our investments and more effectively exploit rapidly emerging information technology. Our emerging focus on this grid is the entry fee for information superiority, and network-centric warfare provides a logical model for synchronizing the initiatives of both the services and agencies as they field or provide the advanced technology pieces, parts, and components of the grid, as well as the information services provided by the grid. These information services include mission critical applications, like command and control, weather, logistics or personnel, just to name a few of those.
Our approach for synchronizing and integrating C4 intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance initiatives employs an architecture of procedures and processes, with an approach focusing first and foremost on the joint task force warfighter. The process is not perfect. Sometimes, despite our best efforts, carefully planned synchronization efforts fall short of the mark. But on the whole, the process that we have established greatly assists our synchronization efforts, starting at the requirements front end through the acquisition process to the actual service fielding schedules.
Improving our ability to synchronize service and agency information superiority initiatives is one of my most important priorities. I am working closely with the CINC services agency and especially our J–8 in money matters to balance the budget on this.
Before I conclude, I will spotlight the key to our success. That is our intellectual capital. The men and women with the technical acumen to develop, deploy, operate and defend the information grid are a precious commodity for information superiority. We need to support these people by making prudent investments in corporate outsourcing of selected information technology (IT) functions. America needs to better develop these same national skill sets through our colleges, universities and vocational schools in the area of information technology as well.
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The Joint Chiefs are calling for an across-the-board pay table reform, pay raises, and return to a 50 percent 20-year retirement full-time. That is another sure means of meeting our most pressing retention and recruiting challenges and protecting our most valuable resource, that is, our people.
In conclusion, I believe we are making solid progress towards implementing a joint strategy for information superiority that supports the warfighters.
Mr. Chairman and Members, I want to thank you for your interest, vigilance, and support in this area of national importance. These hearings are certainly indicative of your vital role and the position you have taken with regard to information superiority in terms of our national strategy. I look forward to helping make the information superiority challenges a success that I have shared with you this afternoon, and to address you in the future with related successes and lessons learned. On behalf of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, I appreciate the opportunity to present some insights into this matter in regard to information superiority. Thank you very much.
[The prepared statement of Gen. Woodward can be found in the Appendix.]
Mr. WELDON. Thank you, General Woodward.
Our next two panelists are going to deal with each of the military departments' actions and their operational perspectives. We have accepted your written statements, so we would appreciate it if you would give us the highlights, the meat of what you want us to hear from you, so while we have a significant amount of members here we can have a dialogue with you, hopefully to plus up some funding that you would like to have so we can have interaction about where you want that money to go.
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With that, we will turn to General Campbell and then Admiral Natter, then General Donahue, General Rhodes, then we will go to our operational leaders, Admiral Clemins and Admiral Cebrowski.
STATEMENT OF LT. GEN. WILLIAM H. CAMPBELL, DIRECTOR, INFORMATION SYSTEMS FOR COMMAND, CONTROL, COMMUNICATIONS AND COMPUTERS, DEPARTMENT OF THE ARMY
General CAMPBELL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I will, as you suggested, make my remarks very briefly.
The United States, as everyone knows, has ever since World War II espoused a strategy of using high technology for national defense. Nuclear weapons and their deployment systems are perhaps the prime example. In the 21st century, it is our view that the high technology of choice that will give us the decisive advantage on the battlefield and allow us to achieve efficiencies in our institutional Army is information technology.
For the past five years one of our highest priorities has been digitizing the Army, which really means inserting computer technology, linking it together with digital communications, and providing connectivity from the soldier at the point of the spear with the land warrior system on up through the succeeding command centers.
The Army is focused first on the tactical and operational forces, focused on interoperability, focused on providing those forces that will operate as part of a joint task force. Our (CONUS) Continental United States-based forces, however, need to have connectivity from their sustaining base to the forward areas where they deploy.
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We will be using the Defense Information Systems Network, we will be using commercial systems, and in addition to the commercial technology, we see a continuing need to have some proportion of our communications in protected MILSTAR type communications that we own and we operate.
Our vision extends to fielding the first digitized division in the year 2000, the second by the year 2003, the first corps by the year 2004, and a digitized Army by the year 2010.
Sometimes we are asked, why are you doing it so fast? What communists are you going to kill in the year 2000? That is the wrong question. The real question is how can we accelerate the process, how can we incrementally insert technology on the same cycle that the commercial world does, and how can we unburden ourselves from the stifling weapons systems-related acquisition policies that put us in a heel-to-toe system and have us delivering obsolete technology instead of staying with the current cycles?
As we work with Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), with the Joint Staff, with our sister services, and with the Congress, we look for a continuing partnership working with you on the resources that we need and working with you on changing the processes so we can modernize America's Army faster.
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
[The prepared statement of Gen. Campbell can be found in the Appendix.]
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Mr. WELDON. Thank you very much, General, for that statement.
Admiral Natter.
STATEMENT OF VICE ADM. ROBERT J. NATTER, DIRECTOR, SPACE, INFORMATION WARFARE, COMMAND & CONTROL, DEPARTMENT OF THE NAVY
Admiral NATTER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I also will make my remarks very brief.
Specifically, the Navy's effort in information technology is built around a number of systems which we call IT–21. What does IT–21 give to the warfighter? Basically it allows us to do collaborative planning between distant commanders. This is awfully important for naval forces who are normally separated by some ocean and many times a lot of oceans. It also permits us to share a common operational picture, which is extremely important if we are going to successfully conduct joint operations, which we are all required to do these days.
Do our commanders want this technology? I would like to provide a couple of quotes. Most recently, from Lieutenant General Carl Fulford, Commander, Marine Forces Pacific, in a message just 18 days ago when he wrote to Admiral Clemins, the Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet, saying that some of our ships will deploy without the communications systems required for collaborative planning and effective command and control. He went on to ask for accelerated installations in our Pacific Fleet amphibious ships.
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Vice Admiral Moore is the commander of our Fifth Fleet. Today he singled out a couple of systems that were major enablers for him during recent Desert Fox operations. If I could put up the slides here on each of the easels. One in an Air Force system, a developed system, EHF MILSTAR. On that system he provided all Tomahawk command and control, both voice and data. Its reliability was 100 percent. With this system he knew, he was very confident in being able to send missions out to the ships, change those missions as they had to be changed, and in one instance in November over this circuit was able to cancel a launch just minutes before it was scheduled to launch.
With SIPRNET connectivity with all our forces, it was used for coordination and passing of real time intelligence data, including gun camera video, as file attachments which enabled our analysts to have faster access to raw data, to start the very important battle damage process prior to the follow-on strikes.
Let me quote from Rear Admiral Dawson, who was the U.S.S. Enterprise Battle Group commander, in a message shortly after Desert Fox operations: ''Desert Strike operations and dual Carrier Battle Group operations were significantly enhanced by IT–21 systems. Strike coordination, execution, and reporting occurred almost exclusively over the SIPRNET. Our ships are now better informed and our pilots have the tools to plan and execute their strikes more efficiently, not to mention a quantum leap in their situational awareness due to information available to them as a result of IT–21''.
The other U.S.S. Enterprise after-action comments included the turnover process. Specifically, U.S.S. Enterprise Battle Group got underway from Norfolk, Virginia, and was told to make best speed to reach the Arabian Gulf and be prepared to conduct combat operations upon arrival.
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Now, a few years ago when I had command of a ship that deployed to the Gulf, we arrived there, put a boat in the water, went over to the ship we were relieving, asked for copies of all the publications, asked them who the good guys and the bad guys were and what the rules were. Then it took a number of weeks for our crews, our watch sections, to get trained up to where they knew what they were doing.
U.S.S. Enterprise was able to do this at 30 knots going across the Atlantic, then into the Mediterranean, through the Red Sea, and were ready right on arrival to conduct combat operations.
Also, the turnover between the U.S.S. Enterprise and the U.S.S. Carl Vinson Battle Groups occurred over the same sort of technology, so when the U.S.S. Carl Vinson arrived in the Gulf, she started flight operations the day she arrived and participated in the last days of Desert Fox operations. I don't have to tell you how professionally those operations and those strikes were conducted.
If I could put the next slide up, please, I want to also share with you an operation that I am personally aware of. It occurred about nine months ago when I was commander of the Seventh Fleet and stood up in May to form a joint task force to proceed down to Indonesia for the possible evacuation of American citizens from Jakarta and possibly throughout Indonesia.
We were told to proceed down to the vicinity of Indonesia, work with the Air Force, stand up a joint task force and be ready to conduct those operations. We were notified on the 19th of May. By the evening of the 19th of May we had flown from Tokyo down to Singapore and we had done planning en route on our computers. We had done some of that while we were still in Japan.
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We were not able to get underway on the flagship because it was in a repair availability. We left most of our staff aboard the U.S.S. Blue Ridge, the command ship, where they were able to continue coordination and planning operations with U.S. CINCPAC and Commander in Chief, Pacific (CINCPAC) fleet headquarters back in Hawaii.
Once we arrived in Singapore about midnight we were able to get on SIPRNET, get on the circuits that were required right in Singapore, because we had installed those capabilities in Singapore at our forward logistics base there. That is also the location where our C–130's were based and were able to do coordination with us. The next morning we deployed out to the U.S.S. Belleau Wood Amphibious Ready Group, and were able to do face-to-face planning with the new commander and the Amphibious Ready Group aboard the ship, as we proceeded down to the vicinity of Jakarta.
We were also at the same time able to continue doing collaborative planning with the headquarters back in Hawaii, including video teleconferencing with the planners there and with our planners aboard the U.S.S. Blue Ridge, as well as our planners in Singapore.
This operation was planned and could have been executed within a matter of a couple of days, and the operations order was distributed to everyone. Everyone knew exactly what they were expected to do. The intelligence data flowed in to us from Hawaii and from Washington via these network circuits. Without this capability, such an operation could not have been planned and certainly could not have been executed.
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I would like to close in saying that the kind of energy that this capability provides to our forces is very significant, but it is not without problems. I have been asked by Mr. Money to point out some of the problems we have had.
Number one, coalition warfare. Our coalition partners have been in to see me asking for assistance in getting them into this technology. The fact is that our coalition partners have always been trying to catch up with us on our collaborative planning tools and communication capabilities. They have a lot of work to do here, but we are doing some work with them to try and bring them into this process, and specifically we are working with some allies who are proceeding over and will participate with our forces in the Gulf in the near future.
Also we have had a problem in the Navy with the installations on some of our ships. We have been very fortunate in that our plan has included putting these installations into our battle groups and amphibious ready groups (ARGs) as they deploy. That is why U.S.S. Enterprise had it when they were over conducting operations in the Gulf.
We have only accomplished this in three Battle Groups and ARGs. The problem we have had is, quite frankly, we have been putting the available funds into the Amphibious Ready Groups, in ARG ships or Battle Group ships, as they have deployed. As a result of that, the installations have gone in late, and in some cases all the installations have not been completed, and in every case our people have not been trained and equipped to repair, maintain, and operate these capabilities as they should be.
I sat down with representatives from both fleet commanders and we drew up a plan with available funds to make sure that these installations would be completed six months prior to the deployment of these ships. We laid out a plan where that can be executed, and that will be executed by mid-00. What that required us to do was to skip the installations in a Battle Group/Amphibious Ready Group each year until the '03. That would have been the U.S.S. Carl Vinson and U.S.S. Belleau Wood Battle Group and ARG. The alternative would have been to continue doing just-in-time installations with crews that were not well prepared to operate and maintain these systems.
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As a result of the recent addition of funds provided to the Department, the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) and Secretary have provided additional funding in '00 to do the U.S.S. Carl Vinson and U.S.S. Belleau Wood Battle Group and ARG, and that is about $135 million. It is in the budget that will be coming to the Hill. I would certainly ask for your support in keeping those funds intact so we can get every ship that deploys, so they can all be ready to conduct these kinds of operations when they arrive on station.
Mr. WELDON. Is that a reprogramming or part of the supplemental last year?
Admiral NATTER. Part of the addition of funds the administration put in that will be coming to the Hill. It is not a reprogramming, sir. I am done, sir.
[The prepared statement of Adm. Natter can be found in the Appendix.]
Mr. WELDON. Thank you. I didn't mean that to be your ending statement. Thank you. With that we will go on to General Donahue.
STATEMENT OF LT. GEN. WILLIAM J. DONAHUE, DIRECTOR, HEADQUARTERS COMMUNICATIONS AND INFORMATION, DEPARTMENT OF THE AIR FORCE
General DONAHUE. Mr. Hunter, Mr. Weldon, and distinguished Members of the committee, I want to thank you for your interest in this very important area. It is enormously interesting to me, but it is also very important to this Nation.
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For the sake of brevity, I will dispense with the charts and get to key issues that I am going to talk about. First and foremost, we have made enormous progress in this information arena. However, all is not perfect. We are only just beginning our journey in this area.
We continue to develop, we continue to invest and grow in this area because it is important to our current and to our future successes. We believe that information superiority is an Air Force core competency on a par with all our other core competencies that we have.
The United States Air Force is roughly 30 to 40 percent smaller than we were back at the early 1990s, it depends on how you count, yet we are deployed 400 percent more than we were at the start of the decade. We are turning to information technology to make every bomb and bullet count, to be agile, flexible, to be able to rapidly maneuver to achieve the military objectives.
I would like to give you some detail on how we are doing on exploiting information technologies and how we are doing in attaining information superiority.
First and foremost, we are making tremendous progress in this area because we have got great people. The highly trained, highly motivated people that we have, make this technology useful. However, these people are a highly sought commodity, particularly by the private sector. The demand for their skill makes it very difficult to recruit and retain these information technology professionals. We are working very, very hard to turn this around, but it is an enormous problem.
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For example, we have targeted enlistment bonuses, paying bonuses to those who sign up and work in the information technology arena. We are targeting reenlistment bonuses. A nine-year technical sergeant reenlisting for six years is given a $44,000 reenlistment bonus in the Air Force. That sounds good and it is good, but I must remind you that is on top of a base salary of $21,000 a year, or about $10 an hour.
We don't expect people to join the Air Force to get rich being system administrators in our networks. We want them to join to serve this country, to experience the thrill of exciting jobs, and to shoulder the enormous responsibilities that we will give them. But they will leave us when the pay gap is too big, when the rewards for their service are not there, and when they begin falling short of partaking in the piece of the American dream that the public at large enjoys.
We are also making great progress on our journey because of the superb training we have. But I can tell you, this training is stretched very, very thin as we race to keep abreast of this rapidly changing information technology. We in the Air Force have invested $120 million additional in our Program Objective Memorandum (POM) to beef up our information technology training.
We also recognize that this training is not a one-time event, it is a continuous process. So we have gone out and we have purchased an Air Force-wide license for computer-based training courses, and we make this training available to everybody in the Air Force; civilian, military, and officers. That is a double-edged sword. They like this training. It prepares them better for the outside world, where there is enormous economic reward for their talents.
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We are also preparing for the future through modernization; not all the modernization that we need, but a program that carefully balances our spending on people, our infrastructure, our readiness, and the new systems that we need. Do we need more? Yes, we do, but we first and foremost need that which is in our POM, our FY '00 budget submission.
We put all these people, all this technology, all this equipment together in a well-conceived doctrine. Our information operations doctrine was just developed last year. I have copies of this in your information packet. This doctrine is very important because it brings together all of the dimensions of information operation-centered warfare. We see it as two pieces: It is information and warfare, and it is information warfare.
While the nature of warfare is in fact changing, as is the nature of information operations, we do not treat information warfare as a separate, distinct form of warfare that solely exists onto itself. In this information age, we view it as new threats, new targets, new weapons that we must integrate with all our information capability, with all our information tools, all our military tools, into a military operation. It is the desired effects and outcomes that we seek through the smart use of information and information technology.
We have also made some organizational changes in the Air Force, some changes that are very important, particularly in this information technology domain. We have established an Aerospace Command, Control, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Center at Langley Air Force Base. Their task is to develop our operational architectures for command and control, to build our road maps, to work the integration of the many programs into a cohesive whole, and to make recommendations on balancing our investments across this whole very wide domain of information technology, command and control, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. Initially we have charged that center with managing our experimentation effort. We think this experimentation piece is very important to our success in the future.
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In 1997 we have stood up six battle labs and charged all of them with exploring advanced concepts to help us become more effective when it comes time to fight. Experimentation is a key ingredient.
More important, we have undertaken a series of joint expeditionary forces to explore these advanced concepts, how we can command, control, and operate as an expeditionary Air Force that is frequently called upon to deploy from the U.S. overseas to do the Nation's bidding.
Our expeditionary force experiment, EFX–98, successfully explored a number of advanced concepts. That experiment centered on the hypothesis that advanced warfighting capabilities can enhance the Nation's ability to halt an invading force anywhere in the world, even with limited warning. The roots of many of those experiments were in fact information superiority, information technology-based.
We explored a split air operations center to see if we could reduce our forward footprint while retaining the essential capability back in the continental United States, connecting the two together to be operational and effective, and we proved that we could.
We explored concepts of distributive, collaborative planning to see if we could increase our effectiveness in air campaign planning and execution by bringing together centers of excellence that had solutions to the problems. We think we can do that.
We also experimented with an airborne operations center to see if we could keep the joint forces air commander informed, helping him plan and keep a situation awareness while he flew to his destination. We proved we could do that.
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We also experimented with tactical data links in our bomber fleets. We are absolutely convinced they will give the bomber crews improved situation awareness. In fact, we are putting money on that, to put the JTIDS links into our bombers for the future.
While EFX–98 had very important joint content, we are expanding our efforts in 1999. In fact, we are calling it joint EFX–99. Our hypothesis there is to see if we cannot enhance our capabilities by integrating, thoroughly integrating command and control structure down to the tactical level, to enable us to achieve the joint operational objectives more quickly and with less risk to the friendly forces.
One important piece in all of this is what we call a spiral development process. It is an acquisition process that tightly links the requiring activities, the users, and the acquisition people together so we can rapidly field successful capabilities. We will experiment with it to see if it makes sense and puts them in the field with the warfighters as fast as we possibly can.
We have been looking at an 18-month cycle from the time we conceive the experiment, do the experiment, and put the capability out there. We are working very hard on that, because that is just as important as an experimentation process.
All of these advanced concepts that we have, information superiority will only be achieved if it rests on solid foundations of robust connectivity and information assurance, the assurance that the information is going to be protected, it is going to be reliable and available to those who need it.
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Our notion is that it need not matter where you are, it only matters that you are on the net. We are building our piece of the information grid, fielding a very robust infrastructure at our bases. We are supplying high capacity unclassified and classified connectivity to all our bases with a very capable high-speed backbone. In fact, we are investing over $1 billion over the POM to build this infrastructure at our bases.
We also want to provide our theater air bases with a near clone of what they have in the U.S., so when we deploy out there they will have the same kind of high-capacity connectivity both on the base and off the base. The system we have for that is called the theater deployable communications system, and on that system we are spending over $600 million over the POM. This system delivers light, lean, and very high-capacity service to our warfighters. We have also invested very heavily in tactical data links for our fighters. Like I said, we are expanding that into our command and control aircraft and to our bombers.
We have invested very heavily on our space-based pieces of this information grid. We are going to launch about 15 satellites between now and 2005, our MILSTAR satellite, a very enhanced defense satellite communication systems, our wideband Gapfiller global broadcast satellites. We are working very hard to expand those grids because it is very important for the connectivity.
We talked about the information assurance issue with Dr. Hamre. I can assure you that the crown jewels of the information age are the stuff in our networks, and we are relentlessly pursued by hackers and attackers trying to get at that information. We have taken several steps to counter this.
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We stood up our Information Warfare Center in 1993. It is at Kelly Air Force Base, and we have a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week Air Force computer emergency response team. In fact, I invite you to San Antonio to see that. We have not brought that up here to the Washington area because it is not easy for us to bring it to you. But if you are ever down there, we can make that available to you to show what we are doing because it is very important. It is a good capability.
We have made a substantial investment in information protection tools, network management tools. In 1998 we purchased a very powerful suite of information assurance tools for all of our bases. We are hard at work bringing them up to full operational capability.
Again, we are making progress but we have a long way to go in this area because it is a very, very tough problem. We have just completed our first year of a multiyear program that I call operationalizing and professionalizing our networks. This involves treating our networks like the weapons systems that they have become.
When the Chief of Staff of the Air Force gets his morning report, he gets a report on every bird strike that occurs, every aircraft incident that occurs. He now gets in his morning report information on every attack that occurs at our bases, every network incident that occurs. It is an operational issue. We are paying very close, close attention to that.
In all warfighting arenas, especially in the information and operations arena, joint systems and joint perspective and joint operations are the key to our success. We fully support the Joint Vision 2010. Our expeditionary force concepts will result in a coherent presentation of the aerospace forces to the Joint Task Force commander, and our work horse sensor platforms will be there building that common operating picture. We think aerospace power, we think information superiority means military superiority, our freedom from attack, our freedom to maneuver, and our freedom to attack.
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I want to close with a brief focus on our recent operational successes. Our Nation has every reason to be proud of its military. From intense preparations and operations to precise execution to the humanitarian relief operations you saw back here in the fall, we continue to demonstrate that there is absolutely no peer to the U.S. military.
When you look at what we did in the fall by building the tanker and airlift bridges, and you look at what we did just this last weekend, the Nation has every right to be proud and should be proud of the enormous capability that our people bring. They deserve the very best we can provide, and they deserve the full support and appreciation of the American people.
The United States Air Force is very proud of its progress in information superiority. We have much more to do to maintain that advantage that we now enjoy. We appreciate your interest and your support in this. I look forward to your questions.
[The prepared statement of Gen. Donahue can be found in the Appendix.]
Mr. WELDON. Thank you, General.
General Rhodes, before you start, we have two votes that have been called, so we will proceed for probably eight minutes and get whatever we can done by then. Then we will have to break, go over and vote, and come back.
General Rhodes.
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STATEMENT OF LT. GEN. JOHN E. RHODES, COMMANDING GENERAL, MARINE CORPS COMBAT DEVELOPMENT COMMAND, UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS
General RHODES. Thank you, sir. It will be my intention to get done before the eight minutes is up.
Mr. Chairman, we welcome this opportunity to discuss information operations or, if you will, information superiority, and how we intend to use information to enhance our combat capabilities as well as our efforts to achieve and maintain interoperability and to protect this critical warfighting enabler.
I agree with Mr. Skelton, it can be difficult to grasp a clear, common definition of information superiority. I attribute this to differing perspectives, to differing roles and missions, to differing environments in which we fight, to differing levels of conflict, whether strategic, operational, or tactical, or whether it is at the bottom of the conflict spectrum of military operations or at the top of total out-and-out major theater warfare. Most importantly, I attribute this to the fact that we are only at the initial stages of the information age.
Marines would say that information superiority is getting the right information with knowledge and understanding to the right Marine at the right time. If you want a more technical definition, I will go ahead and accept Mr. Money's in his testimony. He stated at the heart of the Department's Joint Vision 2010 is a capability to collect, process, and disseminate a steady flow of information to U.S. forces throughout the battlespace while exploiting or denying an adversary's ability to gain and use battle-relevant information.
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One of the difficulties in defining information superiority is the nature of warfare itself. Warfare is a violent clash of wills. It is chaotic, it is unpredictable, for warfare involves the human element, a living, thinking, breathing enemy.
In warfare we have opposing sides, frequently from different cultures with different values, with different aspirations, with different motivations. These differences compound what Von Clausewitz refers to as the fog of war. We are making good progress in clearing this fog, but it is doubtful that we will ever be able to totally eliminate this fog. Commanders must be prepared to make decisions in the face of uncertainty.
Information superiority will greatly improve our combat capabilities because it will help reduce that uncertainty. It will enable faster and better decisions. The Marine Corps intends to use information superiority as an integrating enabler, one that facilitates all the warfighting functions of command and control, fighters, maneuvering, logistics, intelligence, force protection. We view information superiority not as an arrow in the commander's quiver, but as a broad-based concept that makes the commander's bow stronger.
General Woodward may call information superiority the fundamental enabler of emerging operational concepts. I agree. Admiral Clemins may discuss information superiority in terms of a knowledge-centric environment. I agree. Admiral Cebrowski may talk about information superiority in terms of network-centric warfare. I agree.
So what is the focus of the Marine Corps in information superiority? The Marine Corps focus will be on info-oriented activities that best support the traditional applications of combat power, not of information and technology of itself. Yes, we are interested in pursuing this rapidly expanding technology of the info age, but only in the context that that technology assists our warfighters, our Marines.
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I agree with General Donahue. First and foremost, we are making tremendous progress in this area because of the great people we have. We as a Corps realize we must change to meet these challenges of the new age. We are meeting these challenges across a broad front.
First, we are developing a new military operational specialty (MOS) for Marines. In 1996 we combined the communications officers with data processing officers and developed a new MOS, which is our communications information systems officers. I call these Marines our info warriors. They will no longer be a commodity service provider, but will evolve into a combined arms branch, and in the future will be as important as artillery or arms.
We have also made organizational changes, battle managers, combat information operational staffing Commanding Officers (COs), as well as developing formal schools for both our captains and our lieutenants. Additionally, we are experimenting with various changes in the infantry squad size and configuration, to look at changes to go ahead and bring ourselves into the information age.
As we move forward with these new capabilities, we share the concerns of equipment interoperability. We understand the difficulties to achieving interoperability between a wide mix of equipment initiatives. To help us tackle this problem, we have developed what the Marine Corps calls an architectural vision called Arch. It is located on our web, which is password-protected as well as encrypted. Arch Vision sets forth the Marine Corps overarching vision with requirements for a standards-based architecture. Arch Vision is based on Joint Technical Architecture standards and the Defense Information Structure Common Operating Environment.
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The last area I wish to address are our efforts to protect this critical warfighting enabler. Information management assurance is part of our Marine Corps Enterprise Network. The hub of the Marine Corps Enterprise Network is located at Quantico, which recently completed a comprehensive initiative to protect this enterprise.
This comprehensive review included installing information walls, intrusion filters, screening routers, network security monitoring software, as well as the traditional annual Operational Security (OPSEC) training for our Marines. Additionally, the Marine Corps actively participates in joint working groups and wrestles with information assurance initiatives, systems administrator certifications, and public encryption.
Frankly, I, like you, am concerned with our total information assurance posture; not that we are not moving out sharply in the right direction, but that info ops are the critical warfighting enabler for the future, and there is just so much we don't know. However, rest assured we will continue to press forward on all fronts to protect this critical function.
Mr. Chairman, we greatly appreciate your concern, your assistance, and this opportunity to discuss this important matter with you.
[The prepared statement of Gen. Rhodes can be found in the Appendix.]
Mr. WELDON. Thank you, General.
With that, we will stand in recess until we complete these two votes. Then we will go to our final two witnesses and then questions. We appreciate you bearing with us. This hearing is in recess.
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[Recess.]
Mr. WELDON. The subcommittee will reconvene. Members will be returning from these votes, but in the interest of time and in the short time you are going to be here, let's get started and have Admiral Clemins and then Admiral Cebrowski. Again, your statements will be submitted for the record. You can make whatever verbal comments you would like.
STATEMENT OF ADM. ARCHIE CLEMINS, COMMANDER IN CHIEF, PACIFIC FLEET, UNITED STATES NAVY
Admiral CLEMINS. I am going to stand over here, if this is all right, Mr. Chairman. I will only discuss five items, and I would like this opportunity to put them forward.
First of all, I would like to reemphasize what everybody else has said about Joint Vision 2010, that it is a good vision. It depends on information superiority, but more importantly, the technology to do Joint Vision 2010 is here today. So the real challenge is how do we use information technology to do what we need to get done, and do it now and not wait until 2010.
The second thing that I would like to just reemphasize is the need to do end-to-end capability, because that is so important to what we do. Admiral Natter talked to you about IT–21, that focused the expenditures to be able to get network-centric warfare.
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The Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) has laid down the gauntlet that said we will put in a Navy-wide Internet by the end of 2001. That is really important to us, because that does on the shore side what IT–21 did on the sea side. It enables us to have end-to-end capability, to be able to support the warfighters and the non-tactical logistics supply personnel and other issues we need to deal with.
Over these past three years in Commander in Chief, Pacific (CINCPAC) fleet we have put in a world class Internet, if you will, at our headquarters and at the echelons right below us. You have to do that before you can have a revolution in business affairs. We did this to be able to maintain the readiness of the fleet. Chairman Hunter can tell you that my job is to get all the maintenance done, steam all the days, fly all the hours, and the question is how do you do that so your people have the readiness that they need to maintain?
The number two item I would like to point out is how do you get from an infrastructure to a knowledge management environment, because this is more than just band width and personal computers. It is really taking and sharing information and turning it into knowledge and using that to change the processes and the way you do business. That is what we have been very successful in doing in CINCPAC fleet.
More importantly, it takes the largest cultural change to be able to do that, so at the same time you are trying to do knowledge management, you have to take the organization and you have to go through a cultural change to get there.
To do this, we went out and looked in industry at the best and the brightest, and we asked people, ''I would like to see on your resume where you have worked with a 750-person public organization to do that.'' Not one company had that on their resume, that they would let us go talk to a public organization where they had done this with. So while this looks very simple, it has a lot of moving parts to it that you have to go through to be able to make the transition to a knowledge management environment.
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What we found out was that you hear all these terms—data warehousing, relational databases, data mining—and yet you sit and look at it and you say, ''Who uses those and what do they do with them?'' So the issue was to be able to use all these capabilities; to go to a common tabletop and to be able to use shared applications to get to a knowledge management environment.
We have done this at CINCPAC fleet headquarters over 1998 in a nine-month evolution, and we have already realized a 35 percent return on our investment in going through and doing that. There is about three—
Mr. HUNTER. Explain how you have done that, Admiral. How has that given you a 35 percent—
Admiral CLEMINS. What we found is that the headquarters staff—there have been two things. The people do their work more efficiently. Number two, we had a lot of work that was not getting done. Number three, we have continued to downsize our staff as people have retired and have taken other jobs, and not replaced them. So part of the analysis was how many man-hours of work do you now get done that you were not getting done before. That is a 35 percent increase of what we are doing.
A couple things on how we did that, just to show you. First there is the knowledge home port, which you would say is a browser, but it is a way you get access to all these relational databases, so you only put the database in one time. When we started this process we found there were 260 separate databases just on CINCPAC fleet staff. Now you find out that you can combine them, where they reduce that and get access to these relational databases.
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The other one is a workload management system that is a central tasking and tracking of work. The action officers, we found out in going through and doing the analysis that 50 percent of their time was on tracing their work after they had completed it to make sure it got somewhere. Now we have returned 50 percent of the time to the action officers just by going to a workload management system, and that has been a great investment.
Three other things are going on in the rest of the fleet. The GRACE is a relational database that was made up by a Lieutenant Commander in the submarine force, where the data goes into this database, the type commander or Commander, Submarine Force Pacific or Atlantic Fleet looks at the data, and instead of sending people down to inspect the ships, now reviews the data to see whether they need to go inspect the ships or not.
Likewise, the SHARP system is a relational database that is used by the aviation community now to do training and readiness of pilots and aircraft in every squadron, and it feeds into the training and readiness matrix system so that the readiness of the squadrons is monitored, but more importantly than monitored, is managed. It is used on the deck plate for management and used in my headquarters for monitoring. So all of these things is what we have put together, that we are still working on, to do business process reengineering from the bottom up, and to actually work in a knowledge management environment.
You all had mentioned several times today about the importance of keeping quality people, and Congressman Bartlett is not here, but I would like to read one letter, because if you were going to keep people in the Navy, would people go join a low-tech organization today, and would that really be an opportunity or an option you had?
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This was sent by a sailor on the U.S.S. Carl Vinson in the Arabian Gulf over Christmas. He wanted to let his mother know he was safe. He had e-mail. She didn't. Like all resourceful sailors, he found a way to get the job done. His solution was to send an e-mail to his hometown newspaper, the Cumberland, Maryland, Times News.
It goes something like this. Here was his e-mail:
''To the editor. My name is John Packard and I am from Flintstone, which is near there. Right now I am in the Persian Gulf on board Carl Vinson aircraft carrier.
Would you please tell my mom that I am okay? She does not have e-mail and I have no communications right now.''
''I visit your newspaper site often to catch up on local happenings. Things are hectic here and intense and exciting. Maybe you could pass on to the fine citizens of the Cumberland area that I think of them often, and to wish us luck at this time, especially with Christmas a few days away. We work 17 to 20 hours a day, and it is in the 90s every day. My mother's name is Norma Packard. Thank you for your time and consideration in this matter, John Packard, U.S.S. CARL VINSON.''
But it is more than e-mail, but the quality of life you bring with it when you have these two things together. The Navy-wide Internet and the Network Centric Warfare give us a real capability to use for many purposes, many of which we couldn't even think of today.
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Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
[The prepared statement of Adm. Clemins can be found in the Appendix.]
Mr. WELDON. Outstanding, excellent presentation. We will relay to Congressman Bartlett the story that you just conveyed. Thank you.
Admiral Cebrowski.
STATEMENT OF VICE ADM. ARTHUR K. CEBROWSKI, PRESIDENT, NAVAL WAR COLLEGE, DIRECTOR, NAVY DOCTRINE COMMAND
Admiral CEBROWSKI. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for inviting me back. I was here two years ago when we first talked about Information Superiority and Network Centric Warfare and I talked much too long then and hopefully I won't do so today. But much has happened since then, and there are a couple of, I think, very prominent examples of that.
This past summer in Newport at our global war game, Global 98, we had representatives of all of the services, and many of our most important allies came to Newport to discuss and play an operational-level war game using Network Centric Warfare. Frankly, we were all very pleasantly surprised. Even the people who came who were skeptics and weren't sure they agreed with this whole concept came away saying such things as, ''Shared awareness is enormously powerful. With this, I can do things that I always wished I could do but never could, and now I can. Now, what I don't understand is why do I feel uncomfortable with this? Why am I against this?'' And, of course, the reason is because it involves cultural change, organizational change, doctrinal change.
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And people from not only the U.S. services, but our allies and coalition partners got together and said this is an inevitability, this is our future, it is much better than anything we could picture in the past. It is the way ahead. And so I feel very good about that.
Perhaps one of the best illustrations of this is an anecdote, if you will, from the Navy Fleet Battle Experiment Program. In October of this last year, we conducted a fleet battle experiment in the 7th Fleet off the coast of Korea, actually on Korea as well. It was coincident with a joint and combined exercise run by General Tilelli, the CINC in the area, called FOAL EAGLE. So what started out as a Navy experiment turned out to be a joint experiment and a combined experiment with our allies.
I suppose one of the important questions to ask is: How do you know you have truly conducted an experiment? I believe one of the answers is you are surprised by the outcome, and we were indeed surprised. There were three very important areas that we explored, all of which were very important to the CINC, but one of them I think illustrates the point. North Korea has the capability to send literally thousands of special operations force personnel by various small boats and craft down each side of the Korean Peninsula at the beginning of hostilities. These are not the kind of people you want to have behind your lines when you are waging a war. One of the jobs, in fact one of the principal jobs which falls under the naval commander there is to stop all of these boats. This was one of the key pieces of the experiment process.
By establishing a high-quality information network, with Army forces assured as well as the Navy forces, what we call IT–21, we were able to pass information at high speed to the Army, our Army colleagues, not just up to headquarters, but down to the shooting level as well, particularly the Apache squadrons. As a result, one of the things that happened is that higher-level commanders who in the past would make decisions as to whether or not to commit this Apache against this target or that one against some other target, found that all they had to do was monitor these Apache squadrons as they responded to the information which they had. The governing principle was unity of efforts and commander's intent. This is a great example of the power of Network Centric Warfare.
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We ran this in the experiment and in simulation, and we found, for example, that the number of enemy boats that got through was reduced by a factor of 10. We found that it took less than half the time to complete the mission. We found that it took 15 percent fewer forces to complete the mission, and we found that the forces we did use were 50 percent more effective every time we used them.
Now, that is good. That is making a difference, and the CINC in the theater is adjusting his plans accordingly. But one of the key things that happened here was that because of this tactical success, the CINC now has options as to how he may reassign the forces he had to hold in reserve before. In other words, it changes the complex of the entire theater, and that is an example of the power of Network-Centric Warfare. We are seeing it again and again.
So it is not just theory anymore. Admittedly, two years ago we did a lot of arm-waving on this and we had to point to successes in the private sector and in such places as municipal police departments for examples. But increasingly now we can point to it, in fact, inside the U.S. military. So that is, I think, a piece of excellent news.
Now, the bad news. We do this for a long time and we focus on weapons reach, which we do, and we do have very long-range weapons. It impresses everyone around the world, and they are increasingly impressed at the way we bring them to bear. War is a fully two-sided game and we can expect the enemy to respond. I use the word ''enemy,'' I suppose I shouldn't, but potential enemies, other nations will respond. And one of the ways they will respond is by changing the characteristics of their targets.
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For example, as targets become more mobile, more stealthy, more camouflaged, covered with electronic deception, perhaps, in effect what they do is they reduce our engagement range. Sure, the weapons, as a matter of physics, can fly just as far as they could before, but the whole system range has been reduced by the amount that you can see. So I project that one of the things we will have to do in the future is to explore new kinds of tactical sensors, the kinds of sensors that can maneuver in close, under the control of tactical commanders, be themselves very well netted amongst each other and to the various enforcement engagements as well as command echelons.
This is not Blue Sky technology. We can do it, it is just a matter of putting our mind to it. And I frankly, as the person who is responsible for Navy experimentation, I would love to start a program on that. It is one of the areas that we are exploring.
There are some capabilities that are already underway which address this issue that we can in fact leverage. One of them is weapons control information. The system of greatest note for that is the Cooperative Engagement Capability (CEC) for air defense, but that technology could be applied more broadly. Tactical data links are very important in this area, because one of the things you get with tactical data links is the ability to move away from centralized control, and instead, decentralized self-synchronizing operation at very, very high speed, such as what we saw off Korea with the Navy and the Army. You can't get to that kind of performance without the information system to support it, and the information system is itself worthless unless you have the sensors that can put the information in there. So I think that is a very important area for us.
There is a collection of dangers in this that I would just raise as caution. We are all inclined to realize that well, this is good or that is good and put somebody in charge of it and say, well, what we have to do is optimize this. My question here is that optimization tends to be around a point, a specific solution, but the world doesn't stay the same. It continually evolves. So the emerging concept of what is called dynamic fitness then comes to the fore, and you want to be able to adjust as time goes on.
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The Commander of the Naval Space and Warfare Systems Command says, Cebrowski, you have a time horizon of 5 to 10 to 20 years. He says mine is only 18 months, and I can't imagine thinking any further than 18 months, because I have problems in that 18-month window to execute. But every day, new solutions come into that window that make the old solutions look passe, and I don't want to reach for them anymore, and I need the ability to respond to that.
So I guess that brings up, then, two last points, and that is that we need the capability to respond in relatively short timelines in two areas.
First, there are opportunities in the world of information technology which are appearing before us on a daily basis, but by the time we run through the whole POM cycle business, you get the work here and we finally bid under control and all that, we have missed the wave, and we start, and we are behind. As I say, we have to go through this great bureaucratic churn. I don't know what the answer is, but in my gut I know there must be some better way to do that.
A second area is in experimentation. Last week we had before all of the Navy flag officers Jack Welch who is the CEO of General Electric, and we asked Jack Welch what the most important thing he did in his firm was, and he said, to experiment, experiment at all levels. He said, as a leader, you got to get out there with your bag of fertilizer and your watering can and fertilize these ideas from the bottom up and make them happen. And he thought that was absolutely critical.
And when I look around now as the person who is in charge of Navy's experimentation program, I see opportunities for experimentation that I couldn't see a year ago. But I would like to move on now; I would like to move on these within the next 18 months. But I am not going to be able to do that. Yes, I do have an experimentation budget, and that is laid out. That money is already committed. And so consequently, these other ideas we can't go on, except to the extent that I can wrench some money away from my colleagues.
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So there are some very important opportunities here for us, and it is indeed a very exciting age, and since I spoke with you last, the progress has been absolutely enormous.
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
[The prepared statement of Adm. Cebrowski can be found in the Appendix.]
Mr. WELDON. Thank you very much, Admiral. Did you want to make some summary comments, Mr. Money, before we ask questions?
Mr. MONEY. I have five points I wanted to summarize, if you will; and one of the requests from your staff was what we want or request Congress to do, so that is what I would like to end up with.
Mr. WELDON. Okay, fine.
Mr. MONEY. The first is to fully support the budget that is before you, both the 2000 budget and the supplemental. There has been thought put into that, albeit the discussion that Art Cebrowski just had that was predicated on where we were a year or so ago, but at least that is a good place to start.
Mr. WELDON. How about if we go beyond that?
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Mr. MONEY. Here it comes. We have a great opportunity, and I believe, based upon going back to Dr. Hamre's presentation, we have a need to accelerate the information assurance area. DOD's reliance, as you heard several times today, on advanced information technology and smart weapons and sensors and network data processing makes DOD's systems and networks a likely target for internal and external threats. We didn't talk much today at all about internal threats. We talked about hackers and so forth. We also have insider threats, so we are looking both ways here with regard to this.
The Defense information infrastructure must be resistant to cyber-attacks across the full range of threats, both hackers from nation states, transnational threats, and for that matter the ad hoc attack. We must limit their damage and recover rapidly when attacks do occur. The DOD's strategy is to provide this by example, a model for the information assurance approach that in fact a broader government community needs to address.
And as I will end up this few minutes here, it is not only the government community, it is industry, it is the American public, and ultimately the international partners as well. Because of the magnitude of this structure, the use of multiple security solutions is in fact needed. A layered security solution is in fact what is being developed.
The Defense Information Assurance Program is in fact a layered defense, many layers. Putting all of this into context, the existing planning and programming activity, substantial shortfalls exist that inhibit the development, the acquisition, and the deployment of these technologies needed to address the network of vulnerabilities.
Let me just rattle off a couple here:
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The Global Information Grid. We have a process ongoing we call GNIE, the Global Network Information Enterprise; ''enterprise'' purposely chosen because it is not just the warfighters' side of the business we need to protect, it is also the day-to-day commerce that we need to protect and in fact bring those two together to operate in a totally interoperable sense. So we need to provide end-to-end protection, assurance, and security across all of the DOD to in fact realize the revolution in business affairs as well as the revolution in military affairs.
Tools for real-time collection and analysis, attack warning, attack sensing are needed, also voice data and multimedia encryption systems. Earlier I said 99 percent, or maybe it is 95 percent of what we need in the IT area, in the information technology area, we can probably derive from the commercial area. But very high-speed, very high bandwidth encryption systems aren't something in the commercial areas to develop. We are developing those. Things like Fast Lane come into mind. A system, for example, Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), networks and security terminals—we have deployed Secure Telephone Unit (STU) for secure voice conversations now for a number of years. It is time we moved on. That algorithm is getting old. It is time that we moved on to what we call Security Terminal Equipment or STEs.
All of this, then, represents an investment opportunity that the overall information assurance posture of the Department could readily take advantage of. So to accomplish this I was asked what kind of numbers were we looking for. I don't want to give you a number today. I would rather develop a program in concert with your staff and bring that back to you.
Second point, again, the purpose of this request is to make sure our defensive site is totally taken care of. Another example of this, or an element in this defense, layered defense in the DOD's information assurance strategy is the use of Public Key Infrastructure. We are laying this out today, and I will cut through this. I will leave this text for your staff. We are talking here probably $100 million over a couple of years, we can in fact totally secure the Internet, our connections with the Internet. We need to go to digital signatures for nonrepudiation and paperless contracting and so forth so that there is an opportunity, and in fact we need to do this, the sooner the better. The plans today were to lay it out over a 5-year period. That is way too late. I would rather do this over the next year or so.
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Third point. You have heard this many times today. We have an information technology education shortfall, training shortfall. I think one of the members here talked about well, we have people in for four years, they roll out, we need to train somebody else. We have a constant training problem. Then we have the retention problem, after we do train people, of retaining them in the services. We need to accelerate training and have it more consistent and continuous.
I will assert that back when you were briefed on Solar Sunrise a year or so ago, 75 percent of that attack could be blunted at the very beginning with well-trained, disciplined assistant administrators. We are putting more energy into that area, but we still haven't gotten there.
Finally, I think what we need to do in this regard is to identify information technology people as being as important to the services as doctors, lawyers, pilots, mathematicians and so forth. In the latter—doctors, lawyers, pilots and mathematicians—the DOD has the wherewithal in fact to give them additional pay for whatever that specialty skill is. We do not have the authority, we do not have the authority in the military today, both for military or civilian, to do this in the IT professionals. So we think we need to create, I know we need to create a professional, skill-based incentive, if you will, additional pay for those kinds of people. That will help tremendously in the retention of the talent that we desperately need here. So we will develop that plan of how to incentivize assistant administrators, maintainers, the ones that have the requisite skills to ensure that the network is properly used, configured, and maintained.
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Fourth point, hit very lightly today, but really what is behind everything we are talking about here is we do not have in the DOD, a robust, high-fidelity, end-to-end Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconaissance (ISR) simulation, Command, Control, and Communications (C3); and then intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance end-to-end simulations. So there are requests that we have here to robust up that area.
By not having that, we lose visibility to the end-to-end information superiority. When I was in the Air Force and came before you, we talked about weapons system after weapons system, F–22 or Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) or whatever. What ties all of that together and makes it work is, in fact, information superiority. The way the Department is organized, the way the Planning, Programming, Budgeting System (PPBS) system, the way the budget comes to Congress, we lose the identity of, we lose the visibility of information superiority. So in that regard, the end-to-end simulation, we have to sell it in-house, if you will; not only there, but also to Congress.
The fifth thing, this is way beyond this committee, it is way beyond DOD, but I take this opportunity to address this. Information assurance is not just a concern of the Department of Defense, nor is it just a concern of the U.S. Government. It in fact needs to be the concern and, in fact, a responsibility of every citizen and clearly every company in the U.S. Today in the digital business world, I will harken back here to the old cliche, ''A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.''
We can sit up here and talk about how we are robusting up the DOD, but if we are wide open from a national standpoint or another part of the government or from a company or a power grid, we are still weak. So we need to address this on a much more comprehensive global effort.
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In that regard—Dr. Hamre mentioned this—we have had many, many contacts and discussions with industry, and frankly industry is slow to the fight here. I think it is going to take a Pearl Harbor, an electronic Pearl Harbor to wake up industry.
So in that regard, I don't think we can stand that, so we want to request this, for Congress to really put its heads together. We will work with you, but it is clearly a broad problem to incentivize industry and the American public in whatever way that is appropriate, to get more on board with protecting themselves, and consequently the U.S. and the national security, with a capital N. Things like tax incentives may be the proper way, or Federal augmentation of indemnification through the insurance areas, or various other methods that you have at your disposal. We would be willing and very happy to work with you in that regard, but really we need to address this as a much bigger problem than just the DOD.
Finally, Mr. Chairman, you have heard the presentation. I want to thank all of these people. Some came from a far distance, they came willingly because of the opportunity to present these ideas and have the discussion, and now the questions and discussion that we are about to have. So I thank you for your interest and we will accept whatever questions you have.
Mr. WELDON. Thank you, Mr. Money. I want to thank each of you for your outstanding testimony.
This is reinforcing the major focus on this issue that we intend to keep for the next two years. We started this process three years ago with the initial Defense Science Board report, and have tried to keep the focus of our colleagues on this issue throughout. So you have our ear, and I want to applaud you, because from what I have seen, you are all doing a very commendable job, and it is amazing to see the strides that are being taken within the military to protect our systems. While I agree with you that I don't think we are there yet, we are making great progress, and each of you are to be commended for your part in that effort.
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I would like to start first of all, Mr. Money, with you helping me characterize the testimony of Dr. Hamre in the private session. I don't want to go throug