The U.S. Navy’s Naval Sea Command (NAVSEA) has a short window – two years – to ensure that the organization’s warfare centers are positioned to deliver ships on time and ready for tasking, an agency official said today.
At the ServiceNow Federal Forum in National Harbor, Md., Michael C. Sydla, command information officer for Enterprise IT at NAVSEA, explained that in the next two years his team will be looking across its warfare centers “to get rid of legacy environments that have been there for years, … and eventually get the tool sets,” needed to accelerate mission needs that align with the U.S. Navy’s “north star” agenda.
In 2024, Adm. Lisa Franchetti, chief of Naval Operations, set up a “north star” to guide Navy operations: readiness for sustained high-end joint and combined combat by 2027. Under the new agenda, NAVSEA unveiled its new strategic framework aligning NAVSEA activities to better focus on Navy priorities with five core line of efforts (LOEs).
LOE 1 aims to accelerate force generation by delivering ships and combat systems. LOE 2 focuses on generating readiness to maintain, modernize, and sustain platforms. LOE 3 emphasizes generating, capturing, and using data to drive innovation. LOE 4 seeks to strengthen the Navy team by attracting, retaining, and growing the NAVSEA workforce. Finally, LOE 5 prioritizes strengthening the foundation by enhancing NAVSEA’s critical infrastructure.
“We’re taking a very strong look of all our processes [and] all our key elements to see how we can increase effectiveness and efficiency,” Sydla said, adding that the agency’s current complex environment “does not let us get that force generation that we need in place.”
NAVSEA Warfare Centers provide technical expertise, personnel, technology, and engineering services essential to support the Fleet and meet the warfighter’s needs. As the U.S. Navy’s largest systems command, NAVSEA is responsible for engineering, building, procuring, and maintaining the Navy’s fleet of ships and combat systems.
“We have a short time frame, and we have to accelerate, and we have to be aggressive, and that’s really what we’re doing as a part of that conversation,” Sydla said. “At the end of the day, it’s not about the IT or the tech. It’s about us building ships or making sure those ships are deployed and building the groundwork.”
