Navy
Navy unites data in ‘nerve centers’ to accelerate decisions
Vice Adm. Karl Thomas, the deputy chief of naval operations for Information Warfare, said the Navy is figuring out how to deal with the explosion of data.
For the Department of the Navy, one of its main focuses over the next two years is to make sure its Maritime Operations Centers can fight at the speed of relevancy.
What that means is for commanders to have the data and systems to analyze and understand what’s happening in real time.
Vice Adm. Karl Thomas, the deputy chief of naval operations for Information Warfare (N2N6) and director of Naval intelligence, said the centers, known as MOCs, are the nerve centers for the service’s numbered fleet commands.
“If you think about a high-end fight with a peer adversary, every movement is going to matter, every shot is going to matter, and the adversary is going to get a vote. So, this effort that I’m undertaking to make sure that I better fuse information at the root of all of that is data. We know that sensors are proliferating. We know that everything is a sensor. We’d like every shooter to have the opportunity to shoot on the right data. So how you marry all that together is a huge problem across a large swath of battle space, and that’s the essence of the challenge that we’re facing,” Thomas said in an interview with Federal News Network at the recent West 2025 conferenced sponsored by AFCEA and the U.S. Naval Institute. “It’s about getting a decision advantage. It’s about turning inside the adversary’s decision process so that speed, that velocity of data — which is really important — and certainly, as the other side is going to try to interrupt that data. The battle space that we’re looking at, which also is a contested battle space, where you have to move that data from the edge back to the decision process and get it back out to those shooters.”
It’s that explosion of data that is driving the Navy to modernize and continually provide new tools for commanders using the Maritime Operations Centers.
Thomas said the MOCs are a key ingredient to the DON’s joint warfighting ecosystem, which includes dozens of disparate systems across the Defense Department and among allies and partners.
“Everybody understands that data is at the root of the issue. How do you store that data? How do you structure that data? How do you move that data? That is the thing that I need to work at and hope to be able to come back a year from now,” he said. “It’s already in the works — It’s not new — but it’s harmonizing the efforts across not only the joint force, the allies and partners, so that we’re getting the right data to the right person at the right time, at the right classification. That really is the crux of the challenge that we face.”
Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, the deputy commander of the U.S. Central Command, told a story about the importance of the MOC and the data it provides to the Navy.
He said during recent action against Houthi rebels, the command had to deal with the speed and the diversity of the data as well as the need to rapidly move data to get an understanding of how engagements went or didn’t go. From that data, the command could decide what tactics, techniques and procedures needed tweaking, as well as how to use the data in the future to detect an attack from a single source or whether it’s coming from multiple sources.
AI tool to fuse data
Thomas said CENTCOM is using the Maven Smart System (MSS) as a way to fuse this data.
In June, the Pentagon announced it was rolling out MSS to thousands of users worldwide. The system pulls data from a wide range of sources — existing intelligence databases, satellite intelligence, publicly available data, social media feeds or open-source intelligence — and provides a single interface that allows users to access, analyze and make decisions based on the data. The system is also a successful example of the Pentagon’s Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control concept being put into practice.
Thomas said this example shows how the Navy has to use data to move even faster in a fight against a peer adversary.
“The environment that we operate in in the western Pacific is much more complex against a better adversary, so we have to be just that much better,” he said. “This data movement, this learning, it’s all about speed. It’s about turning it quicker and having better understanding the adversary, and that is really the goal.”
Thomas said the Navy is looking for tools and other technologies to better integrate and drive faster decisions. He said the technologies need to be based on open architecture concepts so moving data in and out of applications is less burdensome.
“It’s about using artificial intelligence that has its own challenges sometimes when you’re talking about weapon system data, but we all know that’s direction we need to go is let machines do what machines do best. It allows humans to make the decisions they need to make with the data that is presented to them, and having a single pane of glass that’s about understanding the battle space, understanding the intelligence in front of you, and then when it comes to target quality data, so we can get the right data to the weapon,” he said. “There’s an urgency behind what we’re doing right now and so, I need industry to be on time, on budget and provide me with the best tools. I think we’re seeing a little bit of a change in the way that we develop things, test them and then iterate. That’s not the standard purchasing acquisition process. We definitely need to follow the DoD 5000 and acquisition process, but there’s many things we can do more rapidly — and we’re seeing that happen. We all recognize that we can’t afford to wait. We need to be able to scale at speed. We have an adversary that’s quite capable that we need to deter.”
Copyright ©2025 Federal News Network. All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.
READ MORE
