CAPT Scott Heller is the commanding officer of the SPAWAR Systems Center (SSC) Atlantic, Charleston, South Carolina. Referring to itself as a Navy Engineering and Information Technology Command, SSC Atlantic provides engineering services for cybersecurity and surveillance, satellite systems, undersea surveillance equipment, remote sensors, and tactical and business IT capabilities. In addition to SSC Atlantic headquarters, which also houses one of the Navy's enterprise data centers, there are also operations at Hampton Roads, New Orleans, National Capital Region and Tampa.

Heller spoke to C4ISR & Networks Editor Barry Rosenberg about how SSC Atlantic operates as a working capital fund organization and its role in cybersecurity. David Monahan, acting executive director for SSC Atlantic, also participated in the interview.

With support of the war fighter a given, what's at the top of your to-do list?

CAPT SCOTT HELLER: Number one is we are a working capital fund organization that is used to provide engineering services to the various program managers that are delivering capabilities that our Navy requires. As we are providing engineering services, we think of ourselves as providing scientists and engineers that are the intellectual capital of the Navy that helps us acquire those capabilities for the least total ownership cost. We spend an incredible amount of time focusing on how we align our engineers so that for the least investment we can help our programs deliver the most capability and information dominance. This is specifically growing in the cyberwarfare domain.

We work similarly to a nonprofit in that we try to break even each year. We are not profit driven nor profit motivated. When Congress creates a working capital fund they give you a stake. It is an investment capital we call the corpus, which is an amount of money they set aside that you then work every year to make sure that you do your best to break even or have a near zero net operating result.

Fiscally what we have is a mechanism that allows DoD to very quickly scale and dynamically allocate particular skill sets based on investment from the customers that are trying to deliver capabilities. For example, a program manager may be assigned to deliver a new IT system or a new war-fighting capability, and are given a budget funding line. For that they need engineering services to help design it and define what the contract will be when we partner with industry.

[The program manager will then] transfer money to us, and we provide those engineering services back. What it does is it allows us to very quickly respond to the changing needs of our customer base.

Which gives you the ability to be nimble with fast-changing technologies like cyber, for example.

HELLER: Right, it gives us an ability to be very dynamic. It also allows us to realize economies of scale by concentrating a significant portion of the engineering and science knowledge in one place. We have a little bit over 4,000 employees. As you imagine, with 4,000 folks working on well over 1,000 different projects we can take our knowledge that we learn on one project, transfer it, and allow us to help other programs be more interoperable. Then we team as much as possible within our constraints—we all live within constraints—with other DoD organizations so that C4ISR comms don't stop at the Navy prow. We become as efficient as we can across DoD.

So what will be your main areas of work in 2016?

HELLER: Number one in our tech priorities is cyberwarfare. We have been strong in that domain for a significant period of time, but we are going to continue to invest and grow. We are building out lab infrastructure. We are building out cyber ranges so we can do testing in a safe environment not connected to the outside world, and then prove our capabilities. That is our primary focus for this year. Additionally, we are focused on—and I know it is a marketing buzzword—cloud technologies: things that allow us to do large data analytics and scale our operators' intellectual capacity to the greatest extent possible.

There's a new Navy Chief of Naval Operations and a new SPAWAR commander, and you yourself are relatively new in the position. What are the marching orders you've received from leadership that would affect your priorities?

HELLER: The primary marching orders are to focus on the naval information dominance core mission, and to deliver assured cyber operations as part of that. It aligns very well with the priorities that I just laid out for you, which is to deliver naval information dominance. Our number one tech priority is cyberwarfare.

Cyber is a rapidly rising issue where everybody that fields any equipment in the Navy from a fire pump to the most sophisticated IT systems has to pay attention to cyber to keep ourselves secure. We have well over 450 folks that are dedicated to different elements of the cyber domain as engineers, scientists and technicians supporting that. We team with folks in the intelligence community, and team across all navies. Since the creation of 10th Fleet and before with their predecessors, we have been helping to provide the intellectual capacity, engineering services, engineers and computer scientists.

Please bring me up to date on other programs like mobility, vehicle integration and CANES that affect the daily lives of sailors.

HELLER: We've stood up the Internet café programs in theater. We went from zero to hundreds in a very few short months, and there are over 1,100 now. We did all the vehicle integration for the MRAPs that were fielded in theater. It was over 30,000 vehicles integrated with C4I suites, and we peaked at over 75 vehicles a day coming off of our assembly lines here in Charleston.

In the area of enterprise information systems, we are teaming with PEO EIS to support hundreds of thousands of users on NMCI [Navy Marine Corps Intranet] and NGEN [Next Generation Enterprise Network], or ONE-Net if you're overseas. If you are communicating in the Navy and you were planning on using the Mobile User Objective System satellite, MUOS, we provide engineering services back into that program. For none of these are we the only contributor, but we are a strong role player in each one of these programs.

We have [in-service engineering activity] responsibilities for over 40 different systems in the Navy. If it is being sustained and if it is currently fielded, we are very highly focused on current readiness in the Navy.

You mentioned the vehicle integration work. Where do you see that function going post Iraq and Afghanistan?

HELLER: On the vehicle side, we are supporting networking on the move. We are engaged with the program office on helping them with procurement of the next generation MRAP. We are actively engaged with them on helping with the engineering services.

We have a fairly small team doing those tasks, but they have an outsized influence based on the actual capital they can inject into the process.

They help guide and ensure that when you field vehicles that work for the Army, they also work for the Marine Corp, and they can interoperate with the special forces. We think that is our sweet spot—working hard to make sure that we remain interoperable and our solutions scale very effectively across the services and SOCOM.

Share:
More In West 2020