On the coronary heart of this problem is the NIWC Pacific workforce, and a persistent must develop capability and experience at the forefront. That is the place senior leaders at NIWC Pacific made a vital determination and turned to the Naval Postgraduate College (NPS).
Dr. Alex Bordetsky, at the moment chair of NPS’ Division of Data Sciences, labored together with his NPS colleagues to create a hybrid doctorate program that might advance the science and analysis capability of NIWC Pacific by way of superior, mission-relevant training and sound technical analysis.
“What’s attention-grabbing about our partnership with NIWC Pacific is that NPS helps them to evolve organizationally within the S&T (science and expertise) area,” Bordetsky stated. “The primary cohort had been the highest leaders of the group; the second, the organizational movers; and the third, top-notch S&T engineers coping with breakthrough applied sciences.”
Data warfare, broadly talking, is the battlespace employment of knowledge and communication applied sciences – a mix of offensive and defensive digital capabilities and cyber operations to achieve a aggressive benefit over an adversary earlier than, throughout and after battle. The ascendency of knowledge warfare in strategic competitors has given rise to essential expertise necessities that allow determination benefit and naval methods like distributed maritime operations.
To satisfy these necessities, the NIWC Pacific crew got down to discover methods to domesticate particular abilities and capabilities inside their civilian workforce improvement program and focused superior training within the data sciences, together with synthetic intelligence, machine studying, information science, autonomy, cyber safety, data switch and sharing, and command and management. The ensuing doctorate program developed by NPS and NIWC Pacific not solely accomplishes these targets, but additionally sharpens the Navy’s aggressive edge in help of the Naval Schooling Technique, launched by Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro in 2023.
For the reason that launch of NIWC Pacific’s enterprise with NPS, a number of NIWC Pacific scientists and engineers have entered this one-of-a-kind program, unfold over three particular person cohorts. A handful of scholars have already graduated with their doctorate, and several other extra are at various levels within the four-year program.
“This is a vital dimension of our workforce improvement,” stated Michael McMillan, NIWC Pacific’s Government Director. “The Ph.D. program at NPS is very related to the distinctive facets of the Naval data warfare mission, and supplies an avenue for superior training for NIWC Pacific staff. We now have despatched a number of of our greatest.”
NPS Provost Scott Gartner agrees.
“NIWC Pacific’s efforts to advance their technical workforce pays dividends for his or her folks, the NIWC essential and distinctive mission, and NPS.” stated Gartner. “It makes good sense that Navy civilian engineers ought to research and analysis alongside NPS’ operationally-experienced pupil warfighters and defense-focused school the place all acquire from one another’s insights.”
In recent times, communications applied sciences have swiftly superior and proliferated all through the world – and so have the calls for and class of knowledge warfare. Consequently, the Chief of Operations’ Navigation Plan (CNO NAVPLAN), launched in 2022, recognized data warfare capabilities as a vital element of the Navy’s future fleet, with a purpose to “counter adversary forces, full kill chains, join fleet platforms, and persistently cowl the battlespace to make sure determination benefit.”
A middle of technological and engineering experience, NIWC Pacific is essential to the Navy’s data warfare mission. It supplies analysis, improvement, supply and help of built-in command, management, communications, computer systems, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR), cyber and house techniques and capabilities throughout all warfighting domains and all companies – particularly the Navy.
“NPS is a Navy group and we’re a Navy group, so there’s an aligning tradition,” stated Dr. Paul Shigley, who serves as NIWC Pacific’s C4 Technical Tasks Officer and head of the Partnership and Worldwide Engagement Department.
However Shigley, who was a part of the preliminary NIWC Pacific cohort to enter doctoral research at NPS, added that it’s not nearly talking the identical language – in the end, it’s the relevance of the utilized analysis at NPS that makes the partnership so interesting to a extremely technical group like NIWC Pacific.
“We like our folks to be engaged on issues that make sense to what we do,” Shigley said. “We’re not going to develop into professors. We’re going to come again right here and do analysis, and we like that analysis to align to issues that NPS is doing. We’re doing that; we’re making use of the abilities and data we gained from NPS on tasks right here.”
For his doctoral work, Shigley performed a singular, quantitative thesis on a selected element of “Information Circulate Idea,” a framework and toolset for conceptualizing, analyzing, visualizing, and measuring data flows. Particularly, Shigley dove into an idea coined “data friction,” which is just resistance to data switch, and a number of the specific elements that contribute to it.
Shigley’s work has been instantly relevant for NIWC Pacific management because it turned to fulfill China’s mounting menace, the place “organizational agility” isn’t just a catch phrase du jour.
One other beneficiary of this system is Dr. Clare Morton, NIWC Pacific’s Company Technique Division Head and a second cohort NPS pupil. Morton, the latest graduate from this system, was awarded her Ph.D. in Data Sciences in December 2023 for her groundbreaking work within the means of bureaucratic public organizations to raised react and reply to exterior occasions – equivalent to COVID-19 – in an agile method.
Drawing on an exploratory, multi-case qualitative evaluation, Morton demonstrated by way of her dissertation that responsive agility could be achieved by way of “the technology of short-term routines, highlighting the significance of routine champions, and introduces the idea of data cyclones.”
This method was central to efficiently guiding NIWC Pacific by way of the pandemic, and there are classes to be utilized to technology-driven organizations, the place agility is essential to mission success.
“We’re frequently trying to streamline paperwork and strategically work to forestall (obstacles to agility) sooner or later,” Morton stated. “(My doctoral thesis) positively performs into the work I’m doing.”
A member of the third cohort of NIWC college students at NPS, William Stegner of NIWC Pacific’s Area Methods group, has his sights set on the following technology of fleet warfare within the data age – a brand new type of battle wherein NIWC Pacific will play a pivotal position.
Stegner’s analysis will draw on the work of the late, extremely esteemed Navy Capt. Wayne P. Hughes, dean emeritus and professor of follow in army operations analysis at NPS. Whereas Stegner is projected to finish his NPS doctorate in 2024, he stated that his research are already relevant to his work at NIWC Pacific.
“I’ve been in a position to study the phenomenon of naval fight and the phenomenon of knowledge warfare and really look [deeply] at these issues whereas I’m out working,” Stegner stated. “Due to my work at NPS, I’m each a scientist and an engineer. I work on data warfare in naval fight, however to essentially advance into the long run, we want scientists, not engineers simply constructing extra of the identical. I’ll inform you that the work I’ve been doing now in data warfare, I couldn’t have executed in addition to I’ve been in a position to with out assist from the NPS data science program.”
To accommodate NIWC Pacific’s distinctive wants and necessities, Bordetsky and his crew took the present resident doctoral program – curriculum No. 474 – and tailored it to the wants of NIWC Pacific to type a personalized, hybrid doctoral program.
“These [really] are two variations of the identical Ph.D. program, and so they work in parallel,” Bordetsky stated. “Up till 4 years in the past, we solely had resident college students. The one cause we received the hybrid program, with NIWC Pacific within the lead, occurred due to the success of our resident program. That was no accident; it was simply pure evolution.
“The distinction between the 2 is minimal; that is certainly one of our accomplishments,” he added. “The hybrid program is principally an 80 p.c copy of our resident program. The distinction lies in weekly seminars, in that hybrid college students are required to be right here each second week of any given quarter so that they have the total good thing about speaking with school and the broader group of their classmates.”
This can be a marked distinction from distance studying (DL) and permits for better flexibility for the doctoral college students to make progress on their time, all of the whereas instantly making use of it to their present work.
“NPS has been extraordinarily versatile and adaptive to all of us which might be coming from San Diego,” stated Ph.D. pupil Jon Brewster, a NIWC Pacific operations analysis analyst and Electromagnetic Maneuver Warfare subject material knowledgeable. Brewster’s dissertation will discover the probabilities of prolonged actuality (XR) – immersive applied sciences equivalent to augmented actuality, digital actuality and combined actuality – in command and management.
“Dr. Bordetsky stated, ‘I need you to lean approach ahead,’ in order that’s what I’m doing,” Brewster added. “Having this requirement for one week in residence per quarter has been excellent as a result of I’m probably not doing DL, however hybrid, which is form of a combination. It’s actually nice as a result of we don’t lose the heart beat of what’s occurring right here (at NIWC Pacific), however we additionally don’t lose the heart beat of what’s occurring at NPS.”
