On the Navy and Oversharing

Earlier this week I attended the Navy League's annual "Sea-Air-Space" Symposium, and among the thousands of attendees were a number of my friends in the Navy trade press. Quite independently, three working journalists each brought up what one of them called the "CNO's gag order"--recently released guidance by the CNO to Navy Leadership discussed yesterday by Sydney Freedberg in a piece that also features the CNO's memo. I was unfamiliar with the memo, but not with the sentiments CNO expresses in it. His dissatisfaction with the amount of information getting out has been a popular topic of recent conversation, but I wasn't in on the memo.  But now that I am, I have a few thoughts on the subject.

There is no doubt in my mind that the Navy is "oversharing". There is also no doubt in my mind that it is "undersharing". There is furthermore, no doubt in my mind that the Navy is "inefficiently-sharing". The plain truth is that the Navy is incapable of figuring this out because it is not organized to address it. So when Freedberg opines in the column above that "many of my fellow reporters here at the Navy League’s Sea-Air-Space conference said they’d felt a chilling effect from the CNO’s memo", no one should be surprised at the wholly foreseeable reaction that CNO's memo caused among his flag and civilian leaders--even though he stated that "....I am not asking you to throttle back engagement with the media or with the public." In the absence of actual, specific guidance, their instinctual reaction is simply to clam up. This is how one avoids running afoul of the CNO, but this is not in the long-term interests of the Navy, American Seapower, or national strategy. Ultimately, the CNO must take responsibility for this and begin to advocate for necessary change. And that change must occur within the staff of his boss, the Secretary of the Navy, and within the OPNAV Staff.

Before I get to this weightier subject, some vignettes. In February of 2015, I had my hip replaced, and I was convalescing in an opioid-induced fog at home rolling through my Twitter feed, when I came upon this press release from the Naval Air Systems Command announcing that "Navy demonstrates synthetic guidance technology with Tomahawk missile". Had I been physically capable, I would have jumped out of my chair. In this test, what had previously been solely a long range land attack missile had demonstrated the capability to act as a long-range anti-ship missile targeted against a moving target. Having been involved in the creation of the concept of "Distributed Lethality" within the Surface Force, I found myself wondering how it was that this important component thereof found its way into the open press. Who made this decision? Why was it made? What was the process that created it?

Nearly a year to the day later, I was again at home rolling through my Twitter feed (ok, I spend too much time on Twitter) when I came across tweets from the OSD account announcing that the SM6 missile was being modified to provide a supersonic anti-ship capability. Knowing that -- or at least thinking that -- this information was classified, I began to write to some of my friends in the Pentagon wondering what was happening. Why was this capability being announced? Why now? As I watched my timeline roll on, more and more information ensued. Here is USNI's story on the subject from the very next day. 

Now, back to the problem and what to do about it.

The bottom line here is that we are re-entering a period of great power contention, but the Department of the Navy is still acting like it is 1996 and there aren't any real threats--at least at the level of how to communicate strategically.  In a post here on ID a little over a year ago (and just days before Secretary Carter spilled the SM6 beans), I advocated for a series of reforms of the Navy Secretariat, one of which was to bring some rigor to its strategic communications efforts. Clearly, if the Secretary of Defense decides he wants to declassify something, it is likely within his authority to do so. In this case though, there was no Service position from which to advise him. And this is because there is no formal or organizational method of achieving such a position.

If the Navy were serious about actual strategic communications, it would begin to think deeply about what it means to do so. The CNO's well-intentioned memo is the antithesis of effective strategic communications--in that the wholly foreseeable outcome of it is for the service to simply clam up, and in the process miss out on important opportunities to shape behavior of both potential adversaries and friends alike.

Effective strategic communications planning would necessarily involve (at a minimum) public communcations (CHINFO), legislative communications (OLA), executive communication (OSD), capabilities (SYSCOMS) and operational objectives (FLEET). This function would have a modest staff to serve as an administrative tool for teeing up subjects and tracking decisions to completion. The bottom line here is that a concerted effort to achieve message alignment requires both organization and action, and in their absence, lurches in unanticipated directions will disturb the illusion of calm created by enforced silence.

Every single program manager has a list of milestones for his or her program. Those milestones include tests and demonstrations of new or innovative capabilties. Every single one of these tests is an opportunity to communicate a message--yet we have no effetive mechanism for determining which ones should be released, which ones shouldn't, how information should be shared, what should be stressed, to what end, and how will that end be measured.

We need to get serious about this end of the business. There will be times where we want to rock our contenders back on their heels. There will be times when we wish to be coy. There will be times when we wish to remain silent. How we distinguish among these times should not be left up to chance. It is time for the Navy to get its strategic communications act in gear, and it isn't going to happen without the CNO making it so.