Eifert said SOA “facilitates
potential for greater speed of services, in other words, greater speed
and flexibility in getting critical
information to the warfighter.”
Navy officials see CANES as not
only desirable, but essential to modernizing its networks at an affordable cost.
Eifert said CANES will provide
greater cost savings by eliminating
disparate network architectures
throughout the fleet.
“To truly take advantage of the
opportunities that SOA provides, we
must reduce redundant operations,
systems and databases across the
fleet,” she said. “So there is much
work to be done to coordinate critical paths and eliminate waste. Policy
and governance are critical elements in these challenges.”
Although SOA is sophisticated, technology is not
the top challenge to implementing CANES in the fleet,
Wolborsky said.
“The biggest issue is change in the way that we’re fielding capabilities and the way we operate,” he said.
“[Ensuring] that people who used to provide all of their
own capability organically subscribe to an enterprise capability and [that] multiple communities of interest accept
that capability uniformly across the whole domain.”
Because some of the Navy’s C4I systems are becoming obsolete and replacement components are difficult
to obtain, the Navy is taking the opportunity to replace
some next year with what Wolborsky calls early
adopters: migrating existing applications from their
design baselines to a decoupled software and hardware.
In 2009, the Navy will field a common computing
environment on some ships, followed by some elements of SOA before CANES is fielded in 2011.
“We’re doing things sooner versus later to field the
functionality and the capability that are cornerstones
and hallmarks for CANES in 2009 and 2010 before the
real full-blown CANES program record system shows
up,” Wolborsky said.
The initial elements of CANES will be installed in
2009 in three cruisers of the USS Abraham Lincoln
carrier strike group, as well as the U.S. Pacific fleet’s maritime operations center, said Turner.
Sailors will begin training on the full CANES
Increment I system in 2010. It will be fielded on four
ships and the Pacific Fleet maritime operations center in
2011, followed by a higher level of capability in 2012.
The Navy’s vision is to install Increment II of
CANES — a from-the-ground-up implementation —
U.S. NAVY
Operations specialists man the Advanced Combat Direction System console
aboard the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman in December 2006.
CANES will provide a common computing environment for many Navy ships.
on the next-generation cruiser, CG(X). Increment II
also will extend the capability to aircraft.
Implementation for the early adopters is being
funded within various existing C4I programs, such as
the Integrated Shipboard Networking System (ISNS),
the Global Command and Control System and the
Distributed Common Ground System–Navy. To date,
$1.5 billion has been allocated to CANES development
from fiscal 2009 through 2013. Funding for CANES
Increment I, not yet determined, is being developed by
the Navy for the fiscal 2010 budget.
Representatives from more than 400 companies
attended a Navy-sponsored industry day in March to
receive more guidance on the CANES program.
Wolborksy described them as “a virtual who’s who in
the commercial networking domain and the defense
industry’s technology domain.
“There’s a tremendous amount of interest with respect
to the CANES program from industry’s perspective,” he
said. “There’s going to be a significant amount of competition that will all turn into a benefit to the Navy.”
The Navy expects to issue a draft request for proposals in July, followed in October by the formal request.
In accordance with congressional direction, and
Navy acquisition reform in the wake of the troubles of
the Littoral Combat Ship program, the CANES program
will not have a lead systems integrator, relying instead
on a government engineering team for oversight. Turner
said industry will be asked to perform more engineering
early on in the program.
Defense and information technology companies are
in the process of forming their teams for the CANES
competition. Two companies throwing themselves into
the effort are Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.
