Electronics Technician 2nd Class Kattie Smith troubleshoots a computer system aboard the Freedom-class littoral combat ship USS Sioux City (LCS 11) while transiting the Atlantic Ocean, Aug. 17, 2022. U.S. Navy / Petty Officer 3rd Class Nicholas Russell
Send Me Software, Not Hardware, Navy Infowar Leader Says
“Boxes of computers” aren’t so helpful aboard space-limited ships, Rear Adm. Doug Small said.
SAN DIEGO—Rear Adm. Doug Small, the commander for Naval Information Warfare Systems Command, said he only wants software solutions rather than another box of computers.
“If you want to bring a whole box with computers and cross-domain solutions and power supplies and all that, it's a lot harder to put that on a ship than it is software,” Small said during a presentation at the WEST 2023 conference Tuesday. “Don't bring us boxes of computers, bring us software.”
Small, who is also leading the Navy’s Project Overmatch effort to connect command and control communications across the service, also said that interoperability was key.
“Everything we do should be with the mind toward being absolutely interchangeable with our partners,” he said. “From Project Overmatch, we've been pushing on that pretty hard. We've already got an agreement at the Five Eyes level. We've been working toward a project arrangement toward that…we expect to be hand in glove with our international partners.
Then he said: “I think the future is very exciting for true interchangeability from operational all the way down to development in a true DevOps framework; that's what we want to get toward.”