Friday, June 5, 2009

Is Cryptology Dead?


Interesting post over on the USNI Blog by a retired Senior Chief.

4 comments:

Mike Lambert said...

Cryptology is far from dead. Our cryptologic technicians, cryptologic officers, Navy civilian professionals and contractors prove this every day. Our CTs are saving lives in Iraq and Afghanistan every day using their exceptional cryptologic knowldge, skills and abilities. Some years ago I described the NSG as a transformational phoenix. I believed it then; I believe it today. Some things are broken that need to be fixed. And smart people are working to fix them.

NAVY RESERVE IWO said...

Captain,
I saw your post on the USNI Blog. I liked it, but thought that describing the community as "at risk" as a mild way of stating that the ship was starting to run up against the sand bar. SIGINT is declining rapidly within the Navy. While it is not dead, yet, it might be time to call out life support. The community is sustained by the talent of those who have been practicing the craft for years. As the Navy continues to lose the talent it has spent a half century developing, it replaces it with experts who are expected to understand information warfare, SIGINT, and cyber warfare. As the complexity of each of these fields continues to deepen, it is impossible to expect that those being trained to replace today’s Fleet SIGINT experts will be equipped to grapple with the complexities of modern communications systems while bouncing between tours involving information warfare, SIGINT, and network operations. We can not expect an officer to be an inch deep and a mile wide in such critical disciplines. What's more, the Navy continues to underfund the critical training and education needed ((SEE THE NAVY IG's RECENT REPORT ON "A" AND "C" SCHOOL TRAINING FOR VALIDATION)) to sustain a viable cadre of SIGINT expertise. We've lost our imagination and are simply trying to develop "strategies" and "CONOPS" that will sell well with a leadership that my not fully grasp the problem and desperately needs to save money to pay bills due for OEF/OIF, procurement, personnel.

Anonymous said...

Cryptology and sigint are more important now than ever. It is amazing as we saw an explosion in communications across all means of transmission the shortsighted Navy saw fit to terminate the command tasked with exploiting those communiations and create an unnatural shotgun marriage between the communicators and the siginters. It has been a disaster.
The navy learned this lession in WWII when Navy leadership recognized that OP-20 needed to be pulled out from under the Director of Naval Communications. Of course the business book admirals of the early part of this decade knew better than light weights like Nimitz and King.

Anonymous said...

Anonymous; is that ENS. or LTJG?

We all can probably understand your vast importance and opinion? Nimitz and King only helped to win WWII, and which of our countries wars is it that you have won?

Navyman834