As the Department of the Navy continues to bring innovative capabilities to its fleet, a significant challenge remains—accelerating the acquisition and integration of cutting-edge technologies. Rapid transformation is more important than ever in today’s world, where joint interoperability is essential to meet future challenges. One of the most critical areas requiring faster modernization is C4ISR—the ability to use command, control, communications, and computers to empower intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance.

At the AFCEA West 2022 Conference in San Diego, Navy leaders and experts from across the defense industry explored this year’s theme: “Are we committing to new capabilities rapidly enough to meet future challenges?” As the pace of technological advances increases, fast-tracking the deployment of new technologies and solutions without disrupting mission execution becomes an urgent priority. Here are some ways to further that goal.

One key takeaway from conversations between government and industry leaders was that accelerating new capabilities requires two equally critical elements: speed to acquisition and speed to integration. The Department of Defense (DOD) has been emphasizing faster acquisition, codifying it in late 2020 with DOD Directive 5000.01, “The Defense Acquisition System.” A primary goal of the directive is “to enable acquisition innovation approaches that deliver warfighting capability at the speed of relevance.” 

DOD has come a long way in speeding C4ISR acquisition through new strategies (for example, Other Transaction Authority agreements for research and prototyping and the software acquisition pathway). However, rapid integration into current operations is also essential to realize true speed to capability for the warfighter.

For the Navy, where integrating C4ISR innovation entails numerous afloat platforms operating worldwide, it's essential to identify all opportunities to streamline integration into the existing ecosystem. Stakeholders must then identify ways to bring those technologies and solutions into the operational environment.

Employing digital twins was one of the solution areas presented and discussed throughout AFCEA West 2022. There are several ways digital twins can move innovation ahead. One use case would be to replicate a ship’s existing C4ISR infrastructure in a lab environment. Such a replication could provide pre-deployment insights into how the new system and capability will operate in the existing environment—enabling interoperability and compatibility much earlier in the development and testing phase.

Yet regardless of the accuracy and maturity of a digital twin, the underlying engineering and cybersecurity processes will dictate the speed at which solutions can be integrated. Compliance with engineering and cybersecurity processes must be tracked across multiple systems, tools, and databases. As these disparate systems don’t always share information, inefficiencies result. Digital process modernization is essential to enable the rapid delivery of reliable, secure capabilities.

With a holistic data strategy and advancements in robotic process automation (RPA), digital engineering, and the creation of digital threads, the U.S. Navy and other services can gain significant efficiencies through gathering, inputting, processing, and correlating information required by necessary processes—for example, the Risk Management Framework approach, the Navy Modernization Process, and the Ship Alteration process.

Streamlining these labor-intensive processes by leveraging innovative RPA, data engineering, and digital engineering techniques will also deliver significant resource efficiencies downstream. This focus on speed to integration will ensure that the innovation the Navy requires is delivered as rapidly as possible, providing the true speed to capability that the fleet urgently needs.