For years, the U.S. Navy has been living with a costly maintenance, logistics and support problem. The trouble is this: Each of the C4I systems aboard its ships requires a separate network infrastructure with a unique set of wires and experts to keep the system running. Now, the Navy plans to replace those “afloat networks” with a single, common network system.

The purpose of the Navy’s Consolidated Afloat Networks and Enterprise Services (CANES) program is to bring an off-the-shelf network to the roughly 300 ships in the Navy’s fleet and to some shore-based sites. Navy leaders believe they have been leaving money on the table by maintaining their old systems without gaining new capabilities. By consolidating the computing infrastructure around a common network, Navy officials hope to extract best-of-breed technology and capabilities from the commercial sector.

The roadmap for the $1.5 billion CANES procurement, in which industry network architects will work closely with government counterparts, calls for the Navy to issue its request for proposals in November. In August 2009, the Navy plans to select two companies or teams to deliver competing engineering design modules. These are meant to meet Pentagon acquisition chief John Young’s order for more prototyping early on in major acquisition programs. The Navy will choose a single contractor after that 14-month initial phase. The first installations are scheduled to begin in 2011.

The major U.S.-based network developers — BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, Boeing and Raytheon — are expected to vie for the work in some form, perhaps through teaming arrangements as is typical for major contracts.

The Navy is planning a separate competition exclusively for small businesses to provide a data-sharing capability for CANES through what is known as a service-oriented architecture. The goal is to decouple the software from the hardware, permitting software updates without touching the ships. The service-oriented architecture work will closely follow the hardware procurement track, with the draft request for proposals scheduled for release in January 2009 and award to a single contractor scheduled for November 2009.

Just as planned, interest in the CANES program ranges from multibillion-dollar companies to 40-person companies.

Afloat but common

“What we’re trying to accomplish is to bring the Navy’s afloat network landscape up to the state of the art with respect to IT infrastructure and capabilities, and to give the Navy — from a network-centric perspective — the flexibility and agility to maximize capabilities that we deliver to them,” said Rob Wolborsky, the Navy’s program manager for afloat networks, information assurance and enterprise services within the Navy’s Program Executive Office for C4I.

“Today, every functionality comes aboard with [its] own set of infrastructure,” he said. “We want to start decoupling these applications and capabilities from the hardware baseline and port them into a common computing environment. By getting rid of expensive network capabilities and migrating to an enterprise network architecture that will be a single backbone with a uniform application of security and service, we will increase our ability to secure the network and add cutting edge functionality much quicker than we can today with our federated architecture.”

Presently, the Navy relies on at least 642 legacy systems aboard its 300-plus ships. There are 297 versions of the Integrated Shipboard Network System, some classified, some unclassified. There are 151 Combined Enterprise Regional Information Exchange Systems; 144 Sensitive Compartmented Information Network systems; and 50 SubLAN systems that are the primary shipboard infrastructure elements, along with NIPRNET and SIPRNET.

A total of 15 legacy facilities support those networks, comprising three help desks that processed more than 8,700 calls between 2005 and 2007, seven training sites, two supply-support units to handle spares, and three engineering sites.

Wolborsky said operating a single backbone with a common computing environment will be more secure than the present-day mish-mash of systems.

“You’re only as strong as your weakest link, and if you have 50 different networks, then you have a lot more opportunity to open yourself up to that weakest link,” he said. “CANES will give us a high level of assurance that everybody is operating inside that security boundary.”

CANES assistant program manager Cmdr. Phil Turner drew parallels to the highly secure networks operated by financial institutions: “There’s not balkanization in banking.”

Vice Adm. Mark Edwards, deputy chief of naval operations for communication networks (N6), was widely credited with recognizing that the Navy was way behind the times in migrating to a common network architecture. He argued that the Navy was annually spending millions more than it should because it was maintaining and supporting dozens of disparate systems. Officials credit Navy C4I Program Executive Officer Christopher Miller with leading the way to make CANES a reality.

“From a requirements and resources perspective, Admiral Edwards understood that the bills to maintain the status quo were unaffordable,” Wolborsky said. “The challenge is to overcome the technical challenges associated with de-coupling hardware and software, and they made some bold decisions to align resources.”

Arguably the boldest of those decisions was shutting off the flow of funding to a number of legacy network hardware programs.

“Vice Admiral Edwards had the ‘aha’ moment,” said John Dorn, director of enterprise best practices for BAE Systems’ mission solutions unit. “He looked at the billion dollars being spent just to support the existing stove-piped infrastructure without any new capability, and it didn’t pass his test.” Edwards announced his vision last year at the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association conference in San Diego.

“Not only would the Navy be looking at new technology, they are looking at a new business model. Where the Navy has been innovative is to break some china, per se, and get the programs of record to give up some money and in telling them that they are no longer buying hardware,” Dorn said.

The key to CANES will be to incorporate commercial off-the-shelf technology that can be strengthened but otherwise installed as is.

“We are not creating new technology. We are harvesting what is happening in the commercial marketplace and optimizing that technology,” Turner said. “Commercial requirements for things like switches and routers are close to military standards except for EMI [electromagnetic interference] and shock.”

If there’s one priority that the Navy has for CANES, other than meeting the stated technical requirements, it is to have a smooth procurement process that stays on track and within budget. The Navy is very aware of the management failings that have plagued some of its recent procurement efforts — with the Littoral Combat Ship topping the list.. Wolborsky and Turner said they are committed to not repeating the mistakes of earlier programs. The phrase “lead systems integrator” is not part of anyone’s lexicon for this contract.

Those involved with CANES are well aware that Pentagon acquisition chief Young, in a September memo, ordered competitive prototyping in the early phases of all major acquisitions in hopes of preventing costly development work during manufacturing. “The Navy wants a better definition of what they’re buying up front, especially system design specification details,” Turner said.“We want to work together on technical problems early in the program,” he added.

That has meant multiple industry days to answer questions and an open-door policy. Hundreds of industry executives have participated in that process already.

“My strategy is I want them to be sick of me by the time we get to the RFP,” said Turner, who was seconded by Wolborsky: “We’ve bent over backwards where I can barely get out of bed in the morning.”

However, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t some questions still to be answered.

“They’ve outlined the parts, but there’s still the question of installation,” Dorn said. “It is outside the scope of the contract, but you need a design for installation. The other thing the Navy has to wrestle with is, ‘How do you get CANES installed on all those 300 ships as quickly as possible?’ If you wait until they come into dry dock, it could take five years to install 300 infrastructures.”

The Navy’s responses are not fully drafted yet, but Navy officials know the direction they want to go on those issues.

“It takes us a long time to install backbone networks on ships,” Wolborsky said. “My challenge is to incentivize our industry partners so they take as much work as they can off the ship and develop the system in a production line so it can be done faster and as inexpensively as possible while significantly reducing the impact on the ship. Our goal is to be as noninvasive and as flexible as possible.”

CANES managers are feeling confident enough that they have begun looking beyond the legacy ships to the future. They are working to align CANES with network procurement for the Navy’s newest ships under development: the CVN 78 aircraft carrier, the DDG 1000 guided missile destroyer and the CGX next-generation destroyer.