A Myth, A Man, A Legend, A Navy PAO

Today Captain Cappy Surette will retire from the US Navy, indeed this blog post is intended to run an hour and a half before his retirement ceremony. I often get invited to promotion and retirement ceremonies, and I try to make the ones close enough to drive to, but I truly regret not being able to attend Cappy's ceremony today. DC based retirements are hard for me to make.

Many, if not all of you, likely saw the profile of myself and Information Dissemination on Wired Magazine's Danger Room. Like all profile articles in media, it cannot possibly tell the whole story, indeed journalists write articles for publications, not books. From my point of view, it is difficult to tell the story of Information Dissemination without mentioning Cappy Surette.

The first Navy public affairs officer to reach out to me as a blogger was Cappy. A few years ago CDR Salamander told me Cappy was one of the first to reach out to him as well. This was long before social media was popular, long before the Navy integrated social media into their own activities, and long before the trends in news information were notably trending towards social discussions. On more than one occasion, Cappy found ways to convince me that I needed to attend certain events, and he was very convincing.

I met Cappy in Durham, NC at the last of the Conversations with the Country tour of CS-21 in 2008. He wanted me to have lunch with Frank Thorp, CHINFO at the time, and wanted me to see what CS-21 was from their perspective. Later that year, he was who pushed for me to get on USS Freedom (LCS 1), basically making me the first 'blogger' the Navy treated like media. Keep in mind that this was still at a time where I was writing under a pseudonym - the world still only knew me as Galrahn, but to Cappy I was Raymond.

Like every interesting sailor, Cappy has great stories. For those of you who run into Cappy as he moves on to the next chapter of his life, should you see him - ask about the picture above. Yes, that is a beret. The ship is off Iraq in 1994, and the number of stories he can tell about that tour are likely endless, and can lead to any number of stories related to job, love, and life.

I wish Cappy the very best. This blog would never be what it is today if it wasn't for people like Cappy, who pushed experience, offered credibility my direction, and enabled my exposure and learning process with the US Navy in ways that the information highway simply can't do. The popularity of Information Dissemination is a manifestation of a lot of circumstances and people. USNI has had a huge influence in promoting the Navy online and Information Dissemination in particular, but indeed people in the US Navy are responsible as well - and it is in part because public affairs folks like Cappy Surette did little things along the way like elevate a small blog with an anonymous author by lending it the credibility of the Navy Information Office, and treating the blog and author as an equal among established media.

Have you ever seen a blog post in CLIPS? If you have, thank Cappy Surette, who long before the Navy dominated military discussions in non-news social media, argued for the inclusion of blog articles in a CHINFO establishment that didn't care much about social media at the time.

In the complex fabric of social network design and how that impacts the credibility of information sources, what Cappy did for Information Dissemination and the greater Navy social media community dating back to even before I met him in 2008 was at least as important as everything we the community were trying to do, and I hope he understands how much I truly appreciate his efforts, because in my opinion he deserves a tremendous amount of credit for the active visibility and engaged community the Navy has today through social networks like Information Dissemination that he helped promote as part of the Navy Information establishment. It may not have been his intention, but the results are what they are.

Congratulations to Captain Cappy Surette on a very successful career. You have long been a visionary among Navy PAOs and based on the results of my research into the subject, and you should be rightfully credited as the first Navy PAO to truly challenge the Navy on issues related to the impacts and benefits of social media, and the PAO who engaged the Navy online community in a meaningful way. The Navy enjoys a very strong traditional information market because of folks like United States Naval Institute and news magazines like Navy Times, but I also believe the US Navy enjoys a very healthy online discussion other services do not, primarily because of the work Captain Surette did to develop and foster opinions related to social media inside the Navy, even when they weren't necessarily being accepted by his superiors at that time.

Liberated Information and the Future of Irregular Warfare

The control, manipulation, and dissemination of information have always been a staple of conflict, but now the ability to use information in war is no longer a monopoly of the nation state. At USNI’s Blog, Petty Officer Lucien Gauthier cites a tremendous MIT Technology Review article on the subject and discusses the role of individuals who intervene in wars, with last year’s Libya revolution as a case study. Lucien presents some thought-provoking questions on the ethical dilemmas these activists will present to future nation state belligerents. Of interest to the naval crowd in the MIT article is how the how rebel NTC smugglers aided by one of their countrymen in Denver, Colorado circumvented NATO’s maritime embargo. “When the opposition smuggled weapons and humanitarian aid into Misrata's port, which was being heavily shelled by the regime, Benfayed gave NATO the time of the run, and the size and name of each boat, to reduce the chance of friendly fire. Benfayed ran his control room until he was confident he had directly linked NATO to the key leaders in each of his networks.”

The sort of informal humint network/virtual JOC Benfayed established is just the tip of the iceberg in regards to how global citizens will partipate in future wars.  The net result of this new reality is that even future state-on-state conflicts will devolve into irregular, population-centric warfare, as vigilante groups, hacktivists, diasporas, and other individual actors become engaged in the information and cyber battle spaces.

I have been researching aspects of this subject for an upcoming journal article and will discuss in future posts here how the United States and allied nations can embrace and exploit the concept of liberated information and virtual belligerents. The alternative - ignoring the power of non-state actors - will risk ceding control of not just the information high ground, but of entire military campaigns, as the initiative shifts to groups or individuals who are able to manipulate militaries on one side or the other to do their bidding.

The opinions and views expressed in this post are those of the author alone and are presented in his personal capacity. They do not necessarily represent the views of U.S. Department of Defense, the US Navy, or any other agency.

Observing Why Flight 0 LCS Will Do Just Fine

As has been known to happen, an interesting back and forth took place in the comments this evening in a previous discussion topic that caught my attention, and I feel it necessary to comment in a new post. It began with this comment by phrank47:

My problem with LCS has always been we are building a ship before we have the weapons that will go on it. Not just a little but years before. We are building ship that seems so pointed toward one goal that I wonder what we give up. I look at the navy what they are building and the numbers and I see a navy that 1/3 of there surface combat ships will soon be LCS I fear.

Where ID contributor CDR Chris Rawley responded:

The Spruance class destroyer entered the fleet with not much more than two 5"/54 guns, ASROC, and BPDMS. By the time the class was decomm'd, they had 61 cell VLS with TLAM and VLA, 2 x CIWS, 25mm, 8 x harpoons, and RAM, plus a number of C4I upgrades. Obviously, adding capabilities to LCS would be a bit different in there are weight (and volume) constraints tied to her speed requirements. The point is that it isn't unprecedented to commission ships with minimal weapons systems and grow them.

Which Scott Brim, USAF Partisan replied:

On the other hand, the Spruance design was up to the task of handling the upgraded capabilities, once they were mature enough for deployment. Given all the criticisms that have been hurled at the LCS, is it clear today the LCS will be a suitable platform once the mission modules arrive?

What a great topic. Lots of good points all around.

First, it is too early to tell what the Navy will do with LCS after FY15. Until more ships start getting fielded, it is very unclear whether there will in fact be more than the 24 already funded. Yes, the Navy has stuck to the official line of 55 hulls, but I know for fact that LCS-3 is different than LCS-1, and LCS-5 will be different than LCS-3. What will LCS-21 and LCS-23 look like? Evolutions throughout the first block could make the second block look very different, and the second block will likely come after we see foreign military sales injected into the equation suggesting design investment and options can potentially influence the LCS in many ways. What happens if, for example, beginning with LCS-25 or LCS-26 the Navy drops the speed requirement for one or both versions? The combat system question still lingers as unanswered, among many unanswered questions.

Second, what does growth for a small ship like LCS look like, and what needs to grow? Some would immediately suggest the LCS lacks firepower, of which I believe every SWO in the US Navy would agree wholeheartedly. Both LCS can trade the speed requirement for VLS from a design perspective, so it isn't as if options don't exist. But when I look out over the next 10-15 years, adding more weapons to LCS isn't my top priority in the context of growth.

Which leads to the last question asked by Scott Brim, "is it clear today the LCS will be a suitable platform once mission modules arrive?" The answer to this question is - YES - ABSOLUTELY, as long as Navy leaders remain focused on continuing to develop capabilities the LCS is designed and intended to do.

The biggest challenge facing LCS has nothing to do with details of individual module systems, nor the lack of firepower included in the Flight 0+ LCS design - the biggest challenge facing LCS is the development of the LCS information system that is in the future intended to feed significant multi-sensor data into a larger battle force network information system.

Sense. Decide. Act. And do it all in a combat functional communication system.

That is the biggest challenge facing LCS, and it entails a series of lessons yet to be learned and processes yet to be developed that will likely take a long time to work out the kinks; very likely the entire life-cycle of the first Flight 0 ships.

Today sense, decide, and act functions of the information system are relatively contained in form and function to an organization no larger than a strike group, but more specifically often limited to a few sensor platforms, a few strike platforms, and either a Hawkeye or CIC. With additional capabilities like the Littoral Combat Ship and associated modules, P-8, BAMS, etc, and continued evolution of combat and communication systems - the US Navy hopes to extend interoperability in both scale and scope throughout the entire Navy battle force network.

But it is actually much more than a cross-system interoperability challenge or even a bandwidth challenge (both being significant challenges on their own), rather the Navy must solve the very real challenge of collecting vast amounts of data from a vast number of offboard systems concurrently and convert that data into useful information that can then be aggregated throughout the network quickly - not just on LCS but eventually throughout the battle force network. Basically, we are talking about the bridge between Sense and Decide, taking data from multiple sensors and making that data useful information, and doing so at a speed that supports the decision process necessary to be relevant during combat operations where actions and reactions measured in seconds can mean life and death.

There are a large number of human and engineering challenges just to get Sense and Decide nodes designed into the LCS network model to function properly. The LCS is moving the Navy into an entirely new level of autonomous and remote controlled sensor capacity that is intended to accumulate enormous amounts of data under, on, and over the sea spread over vast geographical areas in a largely autonomous information system that today is done by the US Navy at sea almost entirely with manned aircraft - each of which is trained to function as part of a small manned network that took many years to develop, or as it's own Sense-Decide-Act information system if necessary.

Can you conceptualize what many of the challenges facing the Navy are as they introduced vast numbers of unmanned systems into their existing organizational structures? Can you conceptualize what the product will be once we see numerous Littoral Combat Ships distributed throughout a region like the South China Sea, each deploying half a dozen or more individual systems? For some, the complexity of the challenges are ignored because very little respect is given the immense difficulty facing the Navy to operate a battle capable network potentially 50x larger and vastly more distributed than the existing Navy network today.

In the future Naval Battle Force Network saturated with unmanned systems - which is the network the Littoral Combat Ship is opening the barn door towards; the US Navy wants to be able to take data from an autonomous sensor deployed from a LCS, rapidly convert that data from that node into usable information like the track of a ballistic missile submarine, move that tracking data of the ballistic missile submarine immediately to a another platform like a P-8, and convert sensor data into track information for a torpedo strike without the P-8 ever needing to reveal itself with it's own sensors to the SSBN before the torpedo hits the water and is on top of the SSBN.

What sounds like a simple process will place the US Navy generations ahead of where the rest of the world is today, or even tomorrow, because no one else is even remotely close to being able to execute that type of networked combat capability. The US Navy is fielding Littoral Combat Ships today that leads towards that capability down the road, and yet, critics say cancel the LCS because the ship can't shoot the torpedo itself - even though the LCS will likely be hundreds of nautical miles from the autonomous sensor that detected the SSBN, too far away to shoot ASROCs even if it had them.

Today's US Navy flies no more than a handful of UAVs at a time over vast areas of ocean. Believe it or not, on a good day the US Navy has one UAV able to function in an anti-piracy role off Somalia. That is one UAV - on a good day - for that vast region of seas pirates operate in. If you assume the US Navy is flying one or more than one UAV on an average day over the Indian Ocean, you have assumed wrong. That is where we are today, but for some reason people have a completely different expectation.

Why do you think deploying 3 Fire Scouts on USS Halyburton (FFG-40) was a big deal? The disconnect between the expectation of today's US Navy UAV networks and the reality of those networks is enormous. When the Navy operates UAVs today (which they do), the Navy operates those UAVs over land. Why? Because almost all of the infrastructure that supports UAVs are used for supporting operations over populated land areas, not the vast unpopulated areas of sea.

Just developing towards coordinating the data of a dozen offboard unmanned autonomous and remote controlled systems deployed simultaneously from a pair of Littoral Combat Ships is a giant early hurdle facing the US Navy in the very near future. So when Scott Brim asks whether the LCS is a suitable platform to handle the challenges it faces when the mission modules arrive, which is basically the development of a functional battle capable information system that supports large numbers of unmanned systems at sea, my answer is ABSOLUTELY - YES.

The challenge facing LCS is not the "act" (weapons delivery) module of the information system even if the "act" module of the information system is the single most cited complaint of the LCS; the challenge facing LCS is the development of the "sense" and "decide" functions and processes and lessons towards the future networked information system intends to field over this decade, and the LCS hull is designed to support the engineering upgrades necessary to address those sense and decide challenges.

Coast Guard as a Means of National Power

I received many great comments and e-mails, in response to my post a few weeks ago looking for thoughts as to ways the USCG was a national instrument of power and how best to articulate that value to the public.  A standard method at looking at the various elements of national power is to group them in one of four general areas, Diplomacy, Information, Military, and Economic.  This is the DIME model (as one commenter pointed out, there is a body of opinion that DIME is an outdated model in that other kinds of power elements may also be found.  I recognize this perspective, but personally prefer DIME, so I will use it here).

The thoughts on "how" were generally similar to my own:

The USCG is able to project US power and influence through when, where and over whom it exercises law enforcement jurisdiction, those with whom it works, trains, exercises, deploys, and when it is able to respond to a contingency, especially when already deployed.

All of this works well within the 2007 Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower, which is a great expression of how the efforts of the three sea services should fit together.

Across the USCG's 11 missions, I find six, Drug interdiction, Living marine resources, Defense readiness, Migrant interdiction, Ice operations, and Other law enforcement, that regularly fit within my definition.  My list is somewhat flexible as there are certainly times when the other five missions (Ports, waterways, and coastal security, Aids to navigation, Search and rescue, Marine safety, and Marine environmental protection) can also be flexed.  I am attempting to parse out missions that regularly reflect elements of power, rather than simply may appear on an international stage.  Feel free to fire away in comments.


The USCG's work in these six missions won't always be an exercise of power, but, looking at the elements of DIME, many of the activities undertaken in these missions do fit in at least one of the elements of power.


I will build on some of the specifics in my next several posts.

The views expressed herein are those of the blogger and are not to be construed as official or reflecting the views of the Commandant or of the U. S. Coast Guard. Nor should they be construed as official or reflecting the views of the National War College, National Defense University, or the Department of Defense.

Think Tanks, the Media, and the Future of Ideas Distribution

The Washington Post Think Tanked Blog is covering a news announcement this week that I have some thoughts on.

Time magazine and the Center for a New American Security have partnered to produce a new video series, Command Post. The series will examine key national security issues over the course of a week. Command Post will be co-hosted by CNAS President John Nagl and Time Pulitzer Prize winning national security correspondent Mark Thompson.

“Command Post will work to inform the American people about principled, pragmatic defense and security policies that will keep the country strong and safe,” said Nagl in a released statement.

The CNAS-Time project marks another collaboration between the think tank and media outlets of the kind that has been criticized in the past. The venture raises the question of whether think tanks, which may be beholden to their funders, make good partners for mainstream media.

Questions usually end with a question mark, so allow me to ask and answer the question. Is it a good idea for media organizations and think tanks to collaborate in the production and distribution of informed content? Of course it is, and this isn't a new phenomenon, rather a natural evolution and adaptation for both media and knowledge organizations like think tanks - indeed think tanks are simply catching up with academia in this regard.

The way information flows today is different than the way it did when fewer options existed. One of the criticisms mentioned in the Think Tanked article is the suggestion that think tank content is inherently biased or a form of propaganda due to the funding model of Think Tanks. Perhaps, but in my experience with think tanks, most think tanks produce legitimate ideas formulated through research and critical analysis - and yes one can often find good ideas even when a bias exists.

I also think this criticism is largely overblown, because it starts with the premise that important leaders and decision makers are incapable of evaluating the legitimacy or credibility of information. Because important leaders and decision makers in the US often shape information towards desired conclusions (particularly in political campaigns), folks sound silly to me when suggesting leaders are being unduly influenced. Seriously, are you suggesting an idea is genuine crap? Since when did the quality of an idea matter in highly partisan politics? Influence with ideas is often much more complex than critics of think tanks allow for in their criticisms.

Partnerships with media organizations isn't new to the Center for New American Security, which currently has two Senior Fellows consistently contributing on the Foreign Policy website; Marc Lynch and Tom Ricks. The extension of a media collaboration model to TIME magazine represents the traditional media outlet TIME expanding their new media models in new ways, not CNAS expanding themselves in new ways. If anything, CNAS can be accused of doing exactly what they are best known for doing - developing a larger influence enterprise through new media social collaboration models towards the purpose of distributing their ideas horizontally to broader audiences. How terrible! Think Tanks traditionally produce high quality content, so why wouldn't content distributors like TIME look to collaborate with organizations like CNAS that produce higher quality content. Indeed, some of the best ideas in the Navy discussion come from Think Tank folks, and too often the distribution models for those ideas are so small - nobody ever reads those ideas.

We have seen Think Tanks approach new media and the distribution of ideas in multiple ways attempting to capitalize on modern information network models. For example, The Heritage Foundation Foundry Blog is one example of an in-house publishing model for distributing the ideas of the Heritage Foundation outside their traditional backgrounder and report model. Center for American Progress also has a traditional content model of backgrounders and reports, but for their new media model they established Think Progress as an external, collaborative network for social networking their ideas horizontally. Most traditional think tanks, both partisan and non-partisan, have developed internal models for content distribution that now extends to blogging. CATO for example operates multiple blogs (here, here). CSIS uses multiple types of social networks to push ideas, and I would note CSIS and Lowy Institute both do a great job moving their ideas socially through Twitter - which is where I know a lot of researchers get exposed to their content. It isn't a stretch at all to say The Lowy Institute leads the Navy discussion among all think tanks globally because they do a better job than other think tanks promoting their ideas socially. This report, for example, is widely read and perhaps the most frequently publicly discussed think tank content produced in 2011 related to maritime affairs in the Pacific.

How powerful is social networking models for moving ideas produced from Think Tanks? In the global information distribution model of today, The Lowy Institute is leading the public naval affairs narrative by being the leading think tank content and ideas provider... and they are leading from Australia. The Indians read their work, the Japanese read their work, the Koreans read their work, obviously the Americans do, and it is safe bet the Chinese do... and in global social communities like Twitter where a policy discussion has been known to break out in public with many eyes watching, their ideas are prominently featured in the debates. Think about it.

CNAS is evolving into what can be described as a Think Tank 2.1 model where the traditional think tank model distributes their ideas with intent to influence through a social network, and they leverage the new media presence of traditional media brands to do it. It is effective, after all, the article I quoted regarding this new partnership between TIME and CNAS comes from the Think Tanked blog - published under the traditional brand Washington Post.

This is the future of think tanks, because influence can be measured a number of different ways for purposes of fundraising. Which scenario has more influence on you? When you find an interesting article from the AP while conducting a Google News search, or when a colleague you have high esteem for sends you an email and says "Read this!" and it links to an interesting article on some obscure blog brand like Information Dissemination? When colleagues I have respect for share a link with me, whether via email or Twitter or Facebook, it can have much more influence on my impression of the content than it would when I simply find an article reprinted in CLIPs.

That social model for information influence, enhanced by broader distribution through traditional media brands like Foreign Policy or TIME Magazine, is what CNAS is looking to take advantage of as a way of forwarding their ideas. The CNAS information model increases the probability that some staffer on the Hill will be informed by CNAS information and then forward that information to their Congressman or Senator, and through the consistency of good content generation, CNAS then competes for influence in the idea space among the decision makers in government.

This is a topic I've discussed at length with the folks at USNI many times - who do get it btw. Steve Waters and John Morgan didn't want to hear it, they already know everything - just ask them - which is why they need to go, but I honestly believe a similar model of leveraging partnerships within the Navy academia knowledge capital communities (USNA, NWC, NPS, NDU, etc) and think tanks who focus on naval affairs (Brookings, Hudson Institute, CATO, CSBA, CNAS) would allow a traditional media and publishing organization - USNI - find other partners in the Navy community (SNA, Navy League, NWC Foundation) to help build an idea influence enterprise network for broadly distributing relevant, credible Navy information to broader audiences. Because USNI Proceedings is a periodical, and not a news daily, there is no reason partnerships couldn't work with a traditional news organizations in print (WashPo, NYT, LATimes, Virginia Pilot, San Diego Union Tribune), TV (NBC, ABC, CBS, FOX, CNN), or radio.

Collaborative partnerships are the most productive way information can be moved today, and social distribution is the most effective way to be influential with good information. All CNAS and TIME are doing is proving that both organizations apparently understand how the model works better than everyone else, and in the end both brands will be enhanced by the effort.

Need an example how brand influence is expanded when it is implimented correctly? The Foreign Policy brand today vs before they revamped themselves leveraging their social model is a perfect example. Still an influence periodical (perhaps more influential today with broader name recognition), FP is also an influential contributor to the daily narrative on important foreign policy issues. One would be hard pressed to suggest CNAS hasn't also benefited greatly from brand exposure with the presence of Tom Ricks and Marc Lynch writing on the Foreign Policy website. Bottom line, the social information model works when content is good, and think tanks produce higher quality content than most organizations - after all it is their job to do exactly that.

The Slow but Steady Development of a Navy Influence Enterprise

This is Captain David Werner, the smartest sailor I know when it comes to social media. Also mentioned in this video is the wizard behind the scenes for Navy social media (Twitter and Facebook), LT Lesley Lykins. Hopefully as people watch this, they recognize the Navy is learning and adapting while moving rapidly. Social media wasn't even on the Navy map just 2.5 years ago, when for example, they invited me on USS Freedom.

By the way, note he mentions others by name (Spencer Ackerman, for example) when presenting Navy social media. It is a technique that can be described as public social networking. I honestly believe Captain Werner is the right man, in the right place, at the right time - because he is constantly networking. I believe the way networking is part of his personality is not only why he is good with social media, but why he is good at teaching social media.

The video is worth listening all the way to the very last question, which I think is a great question. I had to turn the volume up to hear the question, but the question deals with the process of turning classified information (operational information) into declassified information (operational information released by the Navy) presented to the public.

Watching the movie will you help understand the rest of this post...

Captain Werner gives the Navy answer, but I think the question carries with it a lot of depth for thinking about information flows and information uses in the modern information domain. It really is one of the most important questions facing the Navy today, and is not a question specific to social media. Stated another way, the question is:

How does the Navy align information with operations in a way where actions and information are congruent so that the message is delivered in context and the reader is informed as intended?

The question is about strategic communication, and the exposes the currently missing operational doctrine in the Navy where information is leveraged as part of an influence enterprise that tells the story of naval affairs, rather than simply informing the audience of a Navy action. The original question asked in the video could have also substituted the word "network" for "process" and hit the nail on the head.

I've often said that it isn't that the Navy doesn't have a credible story to tell, rather it is that the Navy doesn't know how to tell a credible story. Navy information today is always specific to a Navy action, and what happens is information crosses the classified-unclassifed bridge on any subject, from operations to acquisition etc., becoming a piece of Navy information that fits easily into a category:

strategy - operational - tactical - doctrine - acquisition - training - development

A lot of folks often wonder where the Navy narrative is. Well, an organization like the Navy requires many pieces of information to build a narrative from - and right now a lot of things the Navy is doing does not have an information component that makes the transition from classified to unclassifed. It is also important to note that the Navy also has a lot of information that does make that transition, and those pieces do fit into a category.

Should any piece of information in those categories not align with the narrative, then the problem is the narrative itself, the activity described in the information, or the absence of information that feeds the narrative.

But right now problems with the narrative doesn't actually matter, because the narrative doesn't exist. Worse, the Navy doesn't have anyone even trying to articulate a narrative for the Navy, yet. For example, on any day someone can find articles on navy.mil, Facebook, or any number of other official locations that are well written pieces of information and easily fit into the categories above. What you will not find is a network crafting the individual pieces of information the Navy puts out into a coherent and articulated narrative that tells the story of the US Navy today.

It has been suggested that the role of using pieces of information in a network is the responsibility of the Unified Combatant Commanders, or N3/N5, or maybe N2 should do it, or the role should be the CNOs to do. The answer, of course, is YES.

In order for a global organization like the Navy to 'operationalize' information at all levels into a narrative, the Navy is going to need to organize the pieces of information and assemble those pieces into a network that form a narrative. The Navy isn't there yet.

Like I said, when I look where the Navy is today from just 2.5 years ago, I am stunned by the rapid pace of progress, because impressive strides have been made in very a short time. Listen to Captain Werner describe what they are learning along the way with experience. There is a learning curve that directly impacts existing organizations, and fortunately the Navy is steady in making progress.

Change in an organization the size of the Navy will take time. I believe the next big change to watch for is when the Navy transitions from teaching processes and how to leverage various tools for organizing information in pieces; and begins to develop a global operational information network that takes all these various pieces and networks those pieces of information into an influence enterprise delivering a coherent narrative that tells the US Navy's story.