Right. Norman Friedman had written about that in his book Network Centric Warfare: How Navies Learned to Fight Smarter Through Three World Wars. When you were working on targeting for the Tomahawk for anti-shipping roles, again, the problem was that target track being able to have the kind of integrity where you knew that you weren’t going to have the weapons hit a cruise ship or something instead of what you originally were going after. He made it plain that it was a very, very complex and difficult sort of problem to conquer.

It is, but I can tell you that it is my belief that the problem is technically solvable right now, but organizationally we can’t bring ourselves to do it. And I’ll give you an example. Two years ago I tasked my brilliant China Lakers to take existing systems and fly a Tomahawk through the side of a ship. So, what they did is they went out and got a very nice radar that could target outside of the threat ship’s weapons systems range – the specific ship in question. They used algorithms that have been used in guidance and control since the ’60s. They used an antiquated data link that has a horrible update rate in the Tomahawk. They used a shore-based computer to relay the information and cobbled together a system of systems that was an experiment of flying a Tomahawk through the side of a moving ship, and the first time that, we tried it, we did it, in January of 2015. You saw it in the press, and it was a big news event.

That was done with training dollars. I used money that we use to train our very inexperienced new kids, because it was a great training exercise to get our brilliant graybeards together with a bunch of young kids that we just hired and have them do this experiment and make it happen. Now, I’m not here to tell you that that is a robust kill chain, but it is a good kill chain and we can make it robust. I guarantee you I could make it robust. And if I had access to all the targeting assets other than the ones we used, we could, in the interim, in the near term, make something that could reach out a long way and shoot another ship. Which, when I’m in the Navy, I always find it compelling that our Navy ought to be able to shoot another navy at relevant range. I don’t know, call me silly, but that’s something I think is important.

That’s just an example and, oh, by the way, the ‘system’ would never have asked me to do that. Parts of the system really resisted and were vitriolic against it, because it threatened programs of record, and today we’re still slow on improving the robustness of that thread even though I know Adm. Rowden [Vice Adm. Thomas S. Rowden, commander, Naval Surface Forces] is a big advocate of it. That’s the kind of example of where I think we can head. And, anybody that wants to argue the robustness of that thread – that’s what they’ll do, they’ll find that chink in the armor of that thread and say, ‘Oh, you can’t do that to that, you know, it’s weak over here.’ What they won’t acknowledge is, ‘hey, give us some time and a little bit of effort and we can make it robust.’ That’s the direction that we have to go because if the answer is, spend another $5 billion dollars on a new weapon every time, that’s a going-out-of-business strategy. I truly believe that war is economics and that if you’re really spending a lot of money to have effects, then I think you’re going-out-of-business. You really ought to be able to have the effects without spending a bunch of money.

 

Sort of the Sherman tank argument in a way.

Right.

 

We went with something that was good in 1942 and we could make tons of them and they were well adapted to moving quickly across the ground when the breakthrough came and, yes, they weren’t a 100 percent solution, but as an 80 percent solution, it worked for us.

Quantity has a quality all of its own.

 

That was Stalin wasn’t it?

Yeah, it was Stalin. He also said that one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.

 

Yeah … that was a darker quote for sure.

Yeah a little bit darker, yeah. I didn’t want to give Stalin too much credit.

 

In your opinion, what has been the most transformational change you’ve seen in naval aviation during your career?

I would have to say it’s the introduction of GPS. You know, we used to struggle to make sure we knew where we were and where we were going. You’d have maps on your kneeboard, massive amounts of planning in trying to make sure that you got from point A to point B and that you hit the right place. It was a hard problem. And, now, all that’s an easy button. It really is.

 

There’s been a lot of excitement over the X-47B UCAS-D, and toward unmanned aviation in general. What would you say are the hurdles facing a robust unmanned naval aviation system?

Yeah, so I would tell you we’re pretty dang good right now. But, there’s two things that have to be improved in order for us to go much farther. One of them is [a] communication link to the unmanned system. When that communication link is fragile, which it is today, whether used in CDL [Common Data Link] or SATCOM [satellite communication], there is a fragility to that com link. The second issue is autonomous operation of the unmanned system. Right now we tell the unmanned what it can do, and it will do nothing else, which is great. That makes it very deterministic, but war is crazy, and we can’t always predict what we want it to do. We have to have a com link that connects to it so that we can change what we told it to do or we have to develop better autonomy for the system to decide on its own.