Q&A: Rear Admiral Michael C. Bachmann
Written by Harrison Donnelly
Keeping the Drumbeat Focused on Fleet Issues
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Rear Admiral Michael C. Bachmann
Commander
Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command
Bachmann has acquired extensive acquisition experience through a wide variety of afloat, shore-based and joint duty assignments. He has completed ship’s company sea duty assignments aboard USS Ranger, USS New Orleans and USS Enterprise, and fleet assignments at Naval Air Station North Island and the Commander Naval Air Forces Pacific staff.
In 1990, Bachmann was assigned to the Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) as the deputy director for aviation logistics information systems. He was subsequently assigned to the Joint Logistics Systems Center, WPAFB Ohio, as a DoD major program manager (ACAT I). In 1993, he became director of the Joint Depot Maintenance Analysis Group under the direction of the joint logistics commanders and the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
Bachmann assumed command in 1995 of the SPAWAR Naval Tactical Command Support System, which subsequently received departmental recognition for acquisition excellence. During this period he was assigned as the acting director of information support systems and was responsible for the oversight of a multitude of information technology acquisition programs.
From 1998 to 2000, Bachmann was assigned to the Chief of Naval Operations, Air Warfare Division, as the head of aviation maintenance programs, where he was responsible for the execution of accounts in excess of $18 billion. Upon selection to Rear Admiral in 2001, he became commander, Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division, with additional responsibilities as NAVAIR assistant commander for test and evaluation, and shore station management. He was assigned as the NAVAIR assistant commander for logistics and industrial operations in 2003, and as NAVAIR vice commander in March 2005. Bachmann graduated in 1974 from the U.S. Naval Academy with a Bachelor of Science in aerospace engineering. He subsequently attained a Master of Science in systems management and a doctoral degree in psychology and technology from the University of Southern California.
Bachmann was interviewed by MIT Editor Harrison Donnelly.
Q: What is your role as SPAWAR commander?
A: As the commander, SPAWAR, one of my principal roles is that of the Navy’s chief engineer for C4ISR, space and business systems. In this specific role, I work across the various systems commands within the Navy. That’s because our C4ISR and space systems are integral to the Navy’s platforms—from ships, subs and aircraft to expeditionary platforms. In this capacity, I also work very closely with the assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition’s chief systems engineer to ensure that the systems we design, develop and deploy meet the interoperability mandates specified by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
I also have another primary responsibility role to the chief of naval operations for the support and sustainment of the C4ISR, space and business systems that are fielded throughout the fleet. We operate within an enterprise construct, referred to as the Naval NETWAR FORCEnet Enterprise. In that role, I act as the chief operating officer. I directly support the Naval Network Warfare Command, which is the Navy’s networks type commander and requirements provider, as well as our resource sponsor, OPNAV N6. That triad meets on a weekly basis, and I’m responsible as chief operating officer for keeping the drumbeat alive. This works well because, as a systems command leader, I also have a role to both the chief of naval operations and ASN RDA for the life cycle support of our systems that are fielded. So this is a great forum for addressing any reliability issues that we might have with our systems. It also allows me to ensure that the fleet is appropriately manned and trained to exercise the systems that we deploy. So it’s a great forum that keeps us focused on both near-term readiness as well as future requirements.
Q: What role is SPAWAR playing in development of the Naval NETWAR FORCEnet Enterprise?
A: As I mentioned, my role as chief operating officer is to keep a drumbeat focused on fleet issues. When I came aboard, we really didn’t have a focus across the enterprise, since it was relatively new, on fleet readiness. We immediately started aggregating readiness metrics for each and every ship, strike group, expeditionary strike group and independent deployer. We’ve really focused on manpower levels, training readiness levels and configuration control, which appeared to be lacking. So we instituted a process called the Information Technology Readiness Review. This allowed us, working with the other type commanders for the air, surface, expeditionary and undersea warfare communities, to focus on how effectively our systems were being utilized.
For example, we started an ambitious effort to catalog our network configurations. This is critical in this era of information assurance vulnerability. It was critical to understand if our systems were configured correctly, and if only the applications that were approved to be installed on those networks were in fact installed. So the side product of this initiative, which I’m very proud of, was that our in-service engineering agent created what I refer to as a digitized LAN logbook. This allows us to have near-term visibility on network configurations on all of our platforms, or at least the ones that we’ve visited thus far. This is a pretty detailed review with the ship’s company, which typically takes several months to complete on the carriers.
At this point we have a very good configuration logbook that we can readily access when the ships are at sea, since it’s hosted on our classified Web portal. This allows us to understand and reconcile issues that might arise while those platforms are deployed. It helps us to conduct distance support and troubleshooting more effectively. That’s just one example of the benefits of operating within this enterprise initiative.
Q: Explain the concept of Team SPAWAR. What major programs is the collection of organizations developing?
A: The ones that are most pressing and will be for the next year or year and a half include the Consolidated Afloat Networks and Enterprise Services [CANES] initiative, which is a very ambitious program that was initiated about a year ago. OPNAV N6 made some radical changes to move resources out of a myriad number of programs that had their own hardware instantiations and into the CANES program. What that allowed and will allow us to do was to migrate to a common computing environment and collapse at least four separate networks—ISNS NIPRNet, ISNS SIPRNet, SCI and CENTRIXS—onto a common computing environment, which will allow our programs to focus on application development. We feel we’ve done a good job on this collectively at Team SPAWAR, in that we introduced risk mitigation through previous Trident Warrior exercises in ‘06, ‘07 and ‘08. The Trident Warrior exercises are the Navy’s C4ISR and space operational testing venue for looking at initiatives that could be fielded rapidly and to ascertain how they would operate in a naval environment. We attempt to capitalize on commercial developments and move them into an operational environment to see how effective they’ll be.
CANES is marching forward as a program of record under PEO C4I, and doing very well. We’ll conduct an early-adopter scenario in 2009, onboard the Lincoln Strike Group. We’ve just recently embarked on the USS Lincoln, and worked with the crew to prepare them for the first instantiation of the program. The actual program will have a competition, which will extend into FY10, where we’ll finally have a program of record that will then be deployed aboard all Navy ships. We’re very excited about that.
Other programs that we’re focused on include the Navy Multiband Terminal and the Commercial Broadband Satellite programs, with a rapid-deploying capability that PEO C4I and our SPAWAR team helped deploy. It is right now bringing more bandwidth to the fleet, which is certainly well received, and we’re quite proud of. It’s met all the milestones successfully and is being deployed right now.
Another extremely important program, which is the replacement for the Navy Marine Corps Intranet [NMCI], is a program of record within PEO Enterprise Information Systems that is referred to as NGEN. That is our shore-based networks, which are currently run by EDS under the NMCI program. It’s a huge program, with which we want to make sure that we’re meeting the warfighter’s requirements in seamless ship to shore and shore to ship, as well as operations with our Marine Corps teammates. There’s a big focus on the engineering aspects to ensure that the request for proposal is crafted correctly, and that we’ll be able to have the appropriate test environment in place to ensure that we’ll be able to meet the requirements that have been established for this future system.
A key program in PEO Space Systems, the Mobile User Objective System [MUOS], is critical for the Department of the Navy because we are the agent for the UHF spectrum for DoD. MUOS is designed to support users who require greater mobility, higher data rates and improved operational availability. The MUOS team is on track for initial on-orbit capability in 2010.
Q: What is your involvement with the Maritime Domain Awareness program?
A: The Maritime Domain Awareness [MDA] program has been directly sponsored by the secretary of the Navy, and Team SPAWAR has been integral to this program’s rapid and successful deployment. MDA crosses several user communities, not only Navy but also the Coast Guard, combatant commanders and interagency task forces. We’ve capitalized on work that we’ve done over the last year and a half. We had initially completed some early pilots with service-oriented architectures [SOA], in an initiative that was referred to as the Maritime Domain Awareness Data Sharing Community of Interest. We demonstrated how we could exchange information across agencies and services in a seamless manner through the publish-and-subscribe process that SOA provides. That was very successful and promoted the establishment of an MDA project office within PEO C4I, which was working directly for the secretary of the Navy in expanding this across several geographic regions, from the CENTCOM AOR to the PACOM AOR, as well as interagency partners.
MDA is focused on capabilities for enhanced vessel tracking, anomaly detection and threat detection, as well as providing linkage to Expanded Maritime Interdiction Operations for the sailors, soldiers, Marines and Coast Guardsmen who actually board vessels. It involves cargo data analyses, port and coastal surveillance, and geospatial collaboration. It’s a huge initiative, which was subjected, just as a regular program of record would be, to independent testing by the Navy’s operational agent, commander operational test and evaluation force. We passed a milestone last year with a go-ahead, meeting the secretary of the Navy’s direction to address the National Strategy for Maritime Security and National Security Presidential Directive 41. We’re very proud of that, and the next cycles of MDA will build off Spiral 1. We will be taking the results of a major Navy requirements analysis in 2008 and moving toward initiating a new MDA program of record.
Q: How effective is your command at working on joint research with industry, and is there anything you can do to improve the process?
A: I’m a big proponent of collaborative research, based on my prior experiences including that of commander, Naval Air Systems Command’s Weapons Division, as well as NAVAIR’s assistant commander for test and evaluation. I’m also a big proponent of cooperative research and development activities, and I have to say our folks have really done a great job in this area. We want to foster this kind of arrangement with both industry and academia. Recently, SPAWAR Systems Center Pacific signed an agreement with Elemental Wireless LLC, which represented DoD’s largest patent license agreement, and contained the single largest upfront licensing fee ever negotiated by the Navy and DoD. This included more than 60 patents and represented the combined work of more than 90 individual inventors. We’re really proud of this multimillion-dollar initial upfront fee, with the promise of bringing new technology to the commercial world.
We’re very focused on creating innovation with the labs. Over the last year and a half, we’ve created an innovation program in which SPAWAR Systems Center Atlantic set aside some funds and opened doors for our new professionals. They said, if you’ve got some great ideas, bring them forth and let us assess them, and if there is some relevancy to the warfighter, we’ll provide you some money to press forward. This had some great benefits for us—recognition of these young professionals by the secretary of the Navy and the ASN RDA at the time, Dr. Dolores M. Etter. We had several people who had patented designs that are in the field today, and that was just within the last two years. Of course, partnering with industry is critical. We’re very good at design, but we don’t have the facilities to mass produce. So we look for those opportunities to optimize delivering integrated platforms to our fleet, and I encourage it whenever I talk with our industry partners. We also encourage partnering within our established programs of record, outside of innovation, because the handoff between industry and us is critical for incorporating new technologies seamlessly within the fleet. Anytime we can apply Lean Six Sigma principles to improve that process, it benefits the fleet and saves DoD money.
Q: You have extensive experience in the Navy acquisition process. What lessons from that part of your career are important in guiding your work at SPAWAR?
A: For my responsibilities as SPAWAR commander, I brought a couple of principles that I’m pretty proud of and that the team has adopted. The foremost is an alignment of our team across headquarters and the systems centers. We refer to this as Competency Alignment. This couldn’t have come at a more critical time in our evolution. This includes logisticians, contract specialists, counsel, finance, business operations and, most importantly, our engineering group, which is pretty diverse. We do everything from software development to command and control, communications and ISR. We are ensuring that our work force was categorized correctly and, more importantly, making sure that each discipline has a well-defined career path and training curriculum to grow our folks.
You might ask why that is important. With two huge programs like CANES and NGEN, there was an increasing demand for network engineers. We did not have the depth here at headquarters. So understanding a demand signal such that, having the ability to develop the work force and to make sure they are available throughout the life cycle of the programs, is paramount.
Also, there are areas where we are pretty much the DoD domain expert. One of those is SOA, which is an area I plan to grow. I tasked my systems centers to identify those folks who have done a lot of work over the last five years in this domain, and want to grow that for the next five to 10 years. That’s the value of Competency Alignment that I brought here.
Another area that was lacking was a systems engineering technical review process applied across our programs. It is critical to have strong technical intersections—cost, engineering and logistics—and associated reviews as programs evolve from concept development through sustainment. This is a healthy intersection, with people who participate in scheduled reviews of our programs to make sure they are postured for success. That’s my role—to act as the technical authority, the technical conscience for ASN RDA.
Q: What about test and evaluation?
A: Test and evaluation is also critical to me. I noticed as I traveled around our sites that we had T&E practices, but they were not standardized. We’ve made a big push in this area and created a separate competency for T&E. We’re involved right now in exercising some commercial tools that no other systems command or DoD activity is using. Our SPAWAR 5.9 Test, Evaluation and Certification [TE&C] competency is currently evaluating several methods and tools that may help improve the efficiency and effectiveness of TE&C activities for Team SPAWAR. We are currently in the process of completing a report that will provide a summary of a pilot application of design of experiment methods using the Phadke toolset. This is one of a series of pilots that the 5.9 TE&C competency has initiated as part of an assessment phase in a phased implementation plan for TE&C methods and tools. In this pilot, the effectiveness of these methods and tools were analyzed for a Maritime Domain Awareness FAIRGAME 08-02 Quick Reaction Assessment that was executed in August 2008 and supported by Team SPAWAR.
Design of experiment is an area of statistics that provides disciplined, scientific methods for optimal test design. Robust Testing methods are based on DOE principles, and are used to define tests such that there is maximum coverage of system requirements with a minimum set of test events. Phadke Associates is a worldwide leader in robust design, systems engineering and robust testing methods, and their tools have demonstrated potential for substantial cost savings in many commercial and DoD applications. We’re still evaluating these tools, but it has garnered a lot of interest within DoD in assisting us to ensure that we are testing the right things and are postured for success, not only during development testing but also in operational testing.
We are the first command in DoD to enter the National Security Personnel System, which we did flawlessly. It’s another good effort that is going to reap benefits for the work force, and in turn for the warfighter. Another major initiative is our rollout of the Navy’s enterprise resource planning system. The commercial product is from SAP. We have had some past experience with this system, but this is a radically new blueprint. It represents the combined blueprint for the Navy, and we’re the next systems command in the queue. Our target date for standup is October 1 at all of our sites, which are currently operating on myriad financial and project management systems. It will now all be in one global system. There will be great benefits for the Navy, great transparency in fund execution and project management. We’re very focused on that, and we’ll have a go-live activity in less than nine months.
Q: What changes are you making to achieve the CNO’s call for bringing more “game-changing ideas” to the fleet?
A: Our systems centers deserve most of the credit in this area. One game-changer was a rapid deployment capability just over the past 15 months: the mine resistant ambush protection vehicle program. That was a game-changing program, as shown by the fact that OSD designated it the number-one program of record. When the Marines were given this program to execute, they immediately came to us and said, “We want you to be our partner in this because of your expertise in C4ISR integration.” We did that, under a lot of scrutiny from Congress, where we promised that within four months we would go from integrating approximately five vehicles a day to more than 50, and we did that. We met our goal, and that was due in large part to our upfront focus on capacity analysis, as well as Lean Six Sigma tools. We’ve subsequently been recognized by the Department of the Navy for our Lean Six Sigma initiatives. That was a game-changer, and our folks at SPAWAR Systems Center Atlantic continue the integration work on a daily basis out of Charleston, after which the vehicles are shipped into theater.
We just cycled a game-changer that SPAWAR Systems Center Pacific has been working on. It’s in the ISR domain, along the lines of predictive analysis—to try to forecast or predict events from data fusion. So it’s the same type of work that we’re doing in MDA, such as anomaly detection: Why is this ship doing a particular activity when it shouldn’t be? We’re taking that same type of technology, but going one step forward. The CNO has a group of “graybeards” that he uses, and they were very excited by some of the work we were doing, which they categorized as some of the most innovative they have seen. We continue to do that, and our engine for that is the Innovation Program.
We’re also encouraged by legislative changes recently approved by Congress that now allow the DoD labs to segment a small percentage of money to do innovation-focused work. I can’t think of a better venue than the DoD labs because they understand warfighter requirements. We’re not only supporting those systems, but we know when the requirements are changing. So this is a great opportunity that we will be able to leverage. Also, we’re bringing our industry partners in up front on some of those initiatives.
Q: Is there anything else you would like to add?
A: First and foremost, I would like to thank MIT for conducting this interview. I’m really proud of our team because they see the value of our realignments in supporting the warfighter. In addition, I am committed to growing the next generation of leaders across all of our competencies. This is absolutely crucial, as I have discovered that the domain we operate in, and that MIT routinely reports on, is absolutely critical to warfighter success. The warfighter is dependent on the technical skills that are represented across Team SPAWAR, and it is our responsibility to ensure that this support is always available.
Likewise, I have discovered that these technical skills are critical not only to our Navy and Marine Corps, but we also have a demand pull from outside Navy that is quite significant, extending to support of the Coast Guard, Army, Air Force and combatant commands. We do a lot of work, and I’m not adverse to that, as long as I can show relevancy to Navy programs and to keeping those core technical capabilities fresh. We are DoD’s smart buyer for C4ISR systems. We’re supporting a lot of initiatives—DISA, joint staff and the Department of Veterans Affairs, which recently came to us to help them develop a significant application to support the new and improved GI Bill. I view that as my mandate—to ensure that we have that talent available.
Since I’ve been here, I’ve seen numerous demand pulls from outside the Navy. In my opinion, that’s a tribute to the Navy, because our systems extend to the tactical edge and our team is postured to support these systems at the tactical edge. For example, there are the MWR Internet cafes—we do that for the Army and DISA. We have hundreds of these cafes, which we manage through a government-industry partnership that enable sailors, soldiers, airmen and Marines throughout Afghanistan and Iraq to communicate with their family members. We’re doing a lot of the government work for surveillance systems on the oil platforms in the Gulf, before we turn those over to the Iraqi government. We’ve done a significant amount of work for the Air Force, for air traffic control systems, which we’ve successfully fielded. We are truly called on because of our proven track record in this domain. It’s a very exciting time to be at the helm! ♦
