Eye On The Prize

Their eyes were always on the thing that would lead to command. . . .they were born to command and this was the objective, and anything else was a diversion.


Rear Admiral Chester W. Nimitz Jr.
(son of Fleet Admiral Nimitz)

A Crew Will Want to Know

"In every position, a commander's crew will want to know how much you care for them far more than they will ever care how much you know."

Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, USN (ret)
Chief of Naval Operations
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

Center for Naval Cryptology - Established on 28 April 2003 - 6 Years Young Today

Center for Naval Cryptology Is No Secret

"This is a great time to be a Sailor, this is a great time to be in the cryptology field," said center Commanding Officer, Captain Edward H. Deets III upon the initial commissioning of the Center for Naval Cryptology at Corry Station - Pensacola, Florida. "We have the best and brightest Sailors. They are very smart and highly motivated. For their service, we must ensure they are given all the tools and opportunities they need to succeed. The Center for Naval Cryptology is sharpening the point of America's spear."

Captain Connie Frizzell is the FIRST female Commanding Officer for the Center for Information Dominance and is the YOUNGEST Commanding Officer in the command's history. She was recently recognized by her high school when she was inducted into the school district's wall of distinction during ceremonies at the Cicero-North Syracuse High School.

She will be relieved as commanding officer by Captain Gary Edwards on 26 June 2009. Her follow-on assignment is with the Joint Staff at the Pentagon.

INTELLIGENT AGENTS FOR INFORMATION SYSTEM OPERATIONS

This paper discusses new information operations concepts related to the use of intelligent agents. The basic agent concept involves dispatching a group of processes across a network to service a user’s request at remote locations and to return selected results. With the growth of high bandwidth backbones, networks, and the expanded use of mobile computing, agents fill an essential niche as extensions of the user.

Agents assist users in coping with the ever-increasing extent of information available from a host of heterogeneous sources including the internet. Agents operate autonomously, have rules that constrain their operations, and are reactive to changes they detect in their environment. Advanced agents interact and collaborate with other agents and learn from their experiences. Other advances include increasingly sophisticated abilities to adapt their behavior. In networked environments, agents can be mobile to seek the information they need or to follow their user. For mobile users who only connect to a network periodically, the intelligent agent can act as a surrogate representative. Agent technology depends on the use of standards and technologies to support requested services.

In this thesis, 21st century aspects of this technology are discussed, including concepts for information acquisition, protection, processing, transport, and management.

Susan K. Cerovsky-Lieutenant Commander, United States Navy
B.S., University of South Alabama, 1984
Master of Science in Information Technology Management-June 2000
and
Evan A. Hipsley, Jr.-Lieutenant, United States Navy
B.S., Old Dominion University, 1993
Master of Science in Information Technology Management-June 2000

Can We Have A Reasonable Uniform Policy

I VIEW THE PROHIBITION AGAINST THE WEARING OF CLEAN, NEAT WORKING UNIFORMS OR DUNGAREES TO AND FROM WORK AS UNWARRANTED AND I NOW DIRECT THAT IT BE SUSPENDED FOR THE CONVENIENCE OF ALL CONCERNED.

TO STANDARDIZE CURRENT PRACTICES, WORKING UNIFORMS, DUNGAREES, AND FLIGHT SUITS ARE AUTHORIZED IN ALL NAVAL COMMISSARIES. EXCHANGES, SNACK BARS, DISPENSARIES, DISBURSING OFFICES, AND OTHER SERVICE TYPE FACILITIES, AND NO ONE WILL BE DENIED ENTRANCE FOR BEING IN THE "IMPROPER" UNIFORM, ASSUMING THOSE WORN ARE CLEAN, NEAT, AND IN GOOD CONDITION. BASE COMMANDERS WILL REVIEW SIMILAR RESTRICTIONS APPLICABLE TO DEPENDENTS AND ADOPT REGULATIONS CONSISTENT WITH CURRENT FASHIONS.

Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, Chief of Naval Operations
Z-gram # 57 (Elimination of Demeaning or Abrasive Regulations), 10 November 1970

Upon his death, President Clinton said "He is the Sailor who never stopped serving his country, never stopped fighting for the men and women in uniform, never stopped being the conscience of the Navy. His earthly voyage is now done. And now he sails beyond the farthest horizon, out of the home port where at last he is safe from all storms."

CNO Directs That ...

“Commanding Officers and officers in charge:

Use Navy history to educate and motivate our Sailors.

In line with my 2009 guidance and our Navy ethos, Commanding Officers are the front line in communicating our mission, spirit, and heritage.

We are a profession with common goals, common purpose, and strong culture that is a force multiplier.

Each year, Sailors face change; they grow, develop, lead, and move on to new challenges. the mission, the culture, and the bonds of service remain.

Commanding Officers lead development of those ties to professional esprit de corps.”

Better get to it.

Petraeus Outlines Basic Leadership Tenets

When it comes to strategic leadership, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan boils his philosophy down to four basic tenets:

1. Get the really big ideas right.
2. Educate – and if necessary, sell -- your subordinates on those ideas. Ensure everyone shares a common command vision.
3. Execute them (the big ideas) together. Once everyone is on the same sheet of music, the next step is to work together as a team to put those big ideas into action.
4. Then, identify lessons learned and best practices to improve the whole process. You have to feed them back in to refine the big ideas -- which then have to be transmitted to the subordinate leaders to change the way you are executing.

Army Gen. David H. Petraeus
Commander, U.S. Central Command

A Promise That Must Be Kept

"And I promise you this: From the minute you put on that uniform to the minute you take it off, and for all the days of your life, this country will stand behind you and will be here for you, because we know that you will be there for us."

Barack Hussein Obama
President of the United States of America
in his discussion with U.S. Naval Academy midshipmen at the White House


I am not exactly sure what this means but it sounds incredibly meaningful.

FY10 Information Warfare Officer Captains

CONGRATULATIONS TO THESE FINE OFFICERS

Mickey Batson - NIOC Suitland
Joe Boogren - Commander, 6th Fleet
David Carson - Commanding Officer - NIOC Menwith Hill Station
Susan Cerovsky - Information Warfare Commander - CCSG 12
Stone Davis - Commanding Officer - NIOC Texas
Eric Dietz - Commander, 3rd Fleet
Justin Kershaw - Commanding Officer - NIOC Yokosuka
Tim Rohrer - Commander, 2nd Fleet
Frank Shaul - Commanding Officer - NIOC Pensacola

Charting A Course To Command Excellence

In the Model for Command Excellence, between the inputs and results, were factors the model termed intermediate outputs. The intermediate outputs of superior commands also distinguished them. Sailors in the command had a sense of mission. They were motivated and committed to the command. Morale, pride, and teamwork were evident throughout the command. Attitudes and values of Sailors on board reflected this. These intermediate outputs directly affected the final outputs.

What accounts for the differences between them in superior and average commands?

Three areas make a difference between the results of superior and average commands:

• the Sailors in the command,
• the relationships between them
• the activities they perform

"Sailors" refers to the different people in the command. This includes the Commanding Officer (CO), the Executive Officer (XO), the Wardroom, the Chiefs Quarters, and the Crew.

"Relationships" refers to the relationships between different groups of Sailors and the ways these groups of people interact with each other. "Activities" include those things that people do that make the biggest differences between average and top commands.

Five activities were identified:

• Planning
• Maintaining Standards
• Communicating
• Building Esprit de Corps
• Training and Development

Ensign and Lieutenant Seed Corn

From NAVY TIMES

Captain John Schultz, head community manager at Navy Personnel Command, uses the farming analogy of “seed corn” for junior officers, a valuable resource for future needs.

“One of the things we’re working today is clearly defining what that agriculture base should be. We put a lot of emphasis on the control-grade work, but you don’t get people in the control grades unless you have a healthy O-1 to O-3, the seed corn,” he said.

My thoughts:

The Navy uses the farming analogy later on when these seed corn grow into O-4s and O-5s. They call it sorting the wheat from the chaff. And later, when they are O-6s, the Navy puts them out to pasture. This is all too much farm talk about Sailors as far as I'm concerned.

Sailors are our most important asset, maybe we shouldn't refer to them as an agricultural base. Makes me worry about them being tilled under (E7-E9 continuation boards) to produce a stronger crop.

Weaving the Threads of Leadership - VADM James Bond Stockdale

There are few topics in the Navy that are debated, studied, or written about as much as leadership. Navy leaders are said to be on a career-long leadership continuum that begins with recruitment and in many cases ends following retirement. Various Chiefs of Naval Operations have asserted that “every Sailor is a leader.” The history of the U.S. Navy is draped with the rich fabric of the threads of leadership – trust, judgment, authoritative speech, strengthening of others, optimism, enthusiasm, resolution, and positive example. No one in the Navy has woven these threads of leadership into a stronger fabric than CDR James Bond Stockdale during his nearly 8 years as a Prisoner of War in Hoa Lo prison in North Vietnam.

The heroics of this Medal of Honor winner while imprisoned in the infamous ‘Hanoi Hilton’ in Vietnam are legendary. The naval officers who have earned the inspirational leadership award in his name are extraordinary – though, to a man, I believe each would deny they were. Most of the winners that I contacted denied it outright – all acknowledged their crews’ contributions to command successes. These men uniformly displayed humility and a genuine willingness to self-critique; each considered himself to be an “ordinary man”. (To date, no woman has won the award and only one has been nominated – Captain Babette Bolivar, USNA 1985; 2006 Pacific Fleet Finalist.)

My article on The Extraordinary League of Officers and Gentlemen who have won his leadership award.

USS STOCKDALE was commissioned on Saturday, 18 April - my #1 son's birthday.

The Navy Believes. . .

in putting a man in a position with a job to do, and let him do it – [and] give him hell if he does not perform . . . We . . . capitalize on the capabilities of our individual people rather than . . . make automatons [out] of them. This builds the essential pride of service and sense of accomplishment. [And] if it results in a certain amount of cockiness, I am [all] for it.”

Admiral Arleigh Burke

Small Minded Men

There are plenty of small-minded men who, in time of peace, excel in detail, are inexorable in matters of equipment and drill, and perpetually interfere with the work of their subordinates.

They thus acquire an unmerited reputation, and render the service a burden, but they above all do mischief in preventing development of individuality, and in retarding the advancement of independent and capable spirits.

When war arises the small minds, worn out by attention to trifles, are incapable of effort, and fail miserably. So goes the world.

Archduke Albert

What Is In Store for the Information Warfare Community?

The Information Warfare community has the challenge and the opportunity to define, recruit, train and sustain the Navy's Cyber force of the future. We are already making significant progress in this area as the world and technology continue to change. I am confident the IW community will be successful in defining the Navy's Cyber Strategy, and Computer Network Operations will get us there. Our traditional roles in Signals Intelligence will remain our core competency.

Captain James Hagy
Commanding Officer
Navy Information Operations Command Hawaii
in the SPRING Edition of INFODOMAIN (90MB file)