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Navy PEO C4I focusing on speed, creativity, effectiveness
Agencies and contractors often throw around the word “innovation” like sprinkles on ice cream. A little bit here and a little bit there.
But one Navy organization is trying to take the concept of innovation and spread it around like hot fudge.
Capt. David Gast, the innovation lead for the Navy’s Program Executive Office for Command, Control, Communications, Computers and Intelligence (PEO C4I), said innovation doesn’t happen with a new technology or new approach, but it comes from asking questions about how the Navy can do things faster, more creatively and more effectively.
Capt. David Gast is the innovation lead for the Navy’s Program Executive Office for Command, Control, Communications, Computers and Intelligence (PEO C4I).
“What are the metrics by which we measure our readiness as an organization from a technology and capability perspective? How agile are we? How resilient are we? How rapidly can our systems recover from faults or attacks or that sort of thing?” Gast said on Ask the CIO. “It’s really what are the measures by which we know we’re getting better as an organization? The way I look at it, at my role, is how do we prepare ourselves for whatever future comes, rather than a specific date and a specific challenge?”
Capt. David Kuhn, the Wartime Readiness Officer also with Navy PEO C4I, said the organization’s action plan, called Pinnacle 27, is an example of how they are not only aligning their innovation efforts to the Navy Navigation Plan, but focusing on answering all of his questions across three lines of effort: C4I readiness, fleet readiness and critical warfighting advantage.
“What are the things that we in PEO C4I, which is an acquisition command that provides all of the key C4I gear to these ships, submarines and shore sites, need to be focused on for 2027 and beyond? Because the other key thing that Dr. [Bill] Luebke, [the Navy’s PEO for C4I] was very clear with me is that Jan. 1, 2027 is our target date. But it’s not a one and done. It isn’t that we get to January 2 and we’re done. … This is for posterity,” Kuhn said during an interview after speaking at West 2025 sponsored by AFCEA and the U.S. Naval Institute. “What’s the focus getting to January 1 and then how do we keep accelerating beyond there to maintain and so he’s asked me to look across the PEO and we’ve identified three different areas or lines of effort. What do we need to be doing within PEO C4I to have our workforce ready, our facilities ready and understanding our critical systems.”
This means PEO C4I has to also focus on getting the Navy’s technology in better shape to deal with things like contested logistics, autonomous vehicles, cybersecurity threats and attacks and ensure sailors and Marines can fight from the maritime operations centers (MOCs).
Software improvements needed
Kuhn said PEO C4I provides a lot of equipment and technology that goes into the MOC to ensure commanders get the data they need to drive decisions.
“We are going after a full scale model-based systems engineering approach, where we’re going to be mapping our different systems and all of the pathways they have. So for instance, how do I map a data flow and fight from the MOC and then, as our systems engineer them, rather than have a separate group, have to pay and go create this interface and this mission threat analysis, if I’ve done my model-based systems engineering right, when my system makes an engineering change, that mission threat analyst can suck in the change and see what happens to the architecture and what’s about to happen, rather than us have to find that out later or spend extra money to go back and fix it before we can field it,” he said. “That will speed up the pace of change, and it will also tighten our integration. We’ll use that also to develop our critical systems list, which we will coordinate with the fleet to say these are the systems that we think are most important from a contested logistics perspective or from a kill web perspective — do you agree? Because if we discover a problem here, how do we pivot? If there’s a gap filler system, that’s the one we should emphasize over this other system, which is a good system, a nice to have system, an important system, but maybe isn’t that gap filler. We can help score that impact across the C4I enterprise.”
The move toward model-based systems engineering is part of a broader effort to improve the software pipeline on ships.
Kuhn said the goal is to create more agility and speed in how PEO C4I, or whomever, updates or adds new capabilities to applications rather than having to replace the hardware.
Solving near-term problems
Gast said the Navy will continue to put technology racks on ships, but the focus is more about the entire compute infrastructure that is required to meet current and future capabilities.
“One of the things I’ve learned over the course of my career is the way you think about problems changes and the solutions that become apparent to you as possible ways of solving that problem. Everything I’m doing is very much in support of that, and it’s really because we have that limited timeline, Jan. 1, 2027 we have to be ready, and then we have to remain ready for the foreseeable future,” he said. “It’s less about predicting what that future is, and ensuring that the systems that we design, deploy and maintain support over time are ready for whatever that strategic surprise is. And because of the tight timeline we’re on, how rapidly can we change the way we operate to make them as agile as possible, as soon as possible.”
Gast added this also means that C4I has to look toward the future about current and emerging technologies that could impact the service.
“What could we incorporate of what’s possible today? What are the things that industry is already doing or other organizations are already doing that we can take advantage of to position ourselves for whatever that next thing is?” he said. “Things like designing for instability, so that we don’t have to put a ship in a shipyard for months at a time just to upgrade the network on that ship, which is the historical way we’ve done it. Captain Kuhn and myself are both trying to drive the organization toward the same problem set.”
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