· Navy is the largest tenant at NASA’s Stennis Space Center
· Provides “on-demand” data to deployed warfighters
· Oceanography and special warfare focus of Navy’s activities
It may be one of the more unusual jobs at John C. Stennis Space Center.
Back in April the Navy deployed long-endurance unmanned underwater vehicles in the Arabian Gulf to support mine-hunting operations during a nine-day, multi-national military exercise. At the controls of the vehicles were pilots thousands of miles away at Stennis Space Center’s Naval Oceanographic Office.
Unusual, yes. New, no. In fact, these deployments are daily and routine.
The Naval Oceanographic Office has logged some 60,000 hours piloting underwater vehicles, and the current crop of two dozen unmanned systems is scheduled to increase to over 150 by 2015.
And that’s only a small slice of the Navy activities at Stennis Space Center.
The sprawling NASA center with its 14,000 acres surrounded by 126,000-acre buffer zone is known for testing rocket and jet engines for NASA and contractors. But it’s also home to 30 federal and state agencies, and the biggest dog on the block is the Navy.
With over 2,000 people, the Navy’s operations at Stennis are heavily involved in two very dissimilar, but growing fields: one is science-focused operational oceanographic work, the other the blood and guts work of special warfare.
Indeed, the Navy activities and assets at Stennis are impressive: It oversees a fleet of high-tech ships that survey the world’s oceans; operates one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers; and has a world-renowned oceanographic library with materials dating to the 1800s. It also has a detachment of the Naval Research Laboratory, Special Boat Team 22 and a growing small craft school.
Since 2005 other activities have been established, including the Naval Oceanography Operations Command, the Naval Oceanography Anti-Submarine Warfare Center in 2006 and the Naval Oceanography Mine Warfare Center in 2007.
“The Navy at Stennis represents a growing and unique capability for our nation,” said Rear Adm. Jon White of the Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command. “When you look to the future … this place will have a role.”
Oceanography
The mission of the Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command is simple to state.
“We help to keep the fleet safe, and to enhance the operational effectiveness of the Navy in everything we do, in the air, on the surface of the ocean and subsurface. We do that by identifying risks and opportunities,” said White.
Oceanographers are tasked with figuring out not just what the environment is now, but what it will be like in the near future. Knowing that is crucial to determining the best platforms or tools to conduct a particular mission.
“We’re running really the world’s only operational global ocean model,” White said. “We’re probably maybe two decades behind the weather model, if you will, in terms of our accuracy and our ability to actually predict.”
The model is run 24/7.
“Every day we’ve got a prediction of what the ocean’s doing and oceanographic features that are going to impact all types of warfare,” White said.
Big subordinate
The Naval Oceanographic Office, NAVOCEANO, is the Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command’s largest subordinate command, where 98 percent of its workforce of 790 are civilian. Of those, 70 percent are scientists and 5 percent have doctorates. It has two subordinate commands, the co-located Fleet Survey Team with 70 people, two-thirds of them military, and the Washington, D.C.-based National/Naval Ice Center. It also hosts 200 contractors, both for permanent positions and special projects.
NAVOCEANO operates out of 630,000 square feet of space at Stennis, which includes the main building and a newly built $42 million Ocean Science Building, said Capt. Brian Brown, the commanding officer. It has an annual operating budget of $140 million, payroll of $84 million and close to $13 million annually in contracts.
NAVOCEANO is responsible for providing oceanographic products and services to all of the Department of Defense, and uses airborne, surface and subsurface platforms, remote-sensing satellites and seaborne buoys to collect data from around the world.
Global ocean and littoral data gathered with those platforms are analyzed by NAVOCEANO experts, who use computer models and other techniques to convert the data into specialized products and services to support virtually every type of fleet operation 24/7. Those products play key roles in operational and tactical decision-making.
New focus
Delivering those products directly to the hands of the warfighters is a new approach of relatively recent vintage, and represents a shift in the way the oceanographers conduct business. In the past, notably during the Cold War, much of what oceanographers did involved building databases for strategic level planning. Direct involvement with warfighters was not common. That’s no longer the case.
“We’ve put a lot of effort over the last 10 or 15 years on going from what I would call a strategic focused command to a more operational, tactical-focused command,” said Brown.
To that end, in the mid-90s the Warfighting Support Center was created within NAVOCEANO to focus on the outreach.
“What has essentially happened is that it started out as a small group, and now our entire production engine here, all our departments that deal with oceanographic production … all those now fit under the umbrella of the Warfighting Support Center,” said Brown.
It provides 24-hour support to warfighters with the near-real-time environmental analyses of the battlespaces they face, whether it is near shore, deep water or anywhere in between.
In Afghanistan, Iraq and other areas of the world where the U.S. has forces “we are providing products, we are getting requests and turning products around in tactical time scales – hours.”
The information is specific to the need.
“We’re not giving them a host of products and saying ‘pick what you need. Instead of giving them a whole bunch of science, we give them actionable decisions based on science. We know you need to go from A to B, but based on the environment, this is how we’d do it,” said Brown.
At the heart of all this is something called “Battlespace on Demand,” which is precisely what it sounds like: specific information needed by the warfighter. And a key part of that is “reach back.”
White said the command is the first organization in the Navy that’s been able to successfully execute a reach back concept of operation. It allows the warfighter in the field to reach back to the oceanography office and leverage all its expertise.
Part of what makes it work is to place sailors from the Stennis-based Naval Oceanography Operations Command on deployed ships.
“They don’t have a whole team,” said White, but they don’t really need one. With the Naval Oceanographic Office on board, they can “reach back to Stennis to a whole room filled with experts supporting the forward guys.”
At any given time there can be up to two-dozen of these ship-deployed experts serving on Navy ships.
Future
For the Navy, the remoteness of Stennis is a plus.
“We’ve got this buffer zone around here and from a Navy perspective we don’t have to worry about encroachment. In places like San Diego and Norfolk encroachment is becoming very big,” White said.
Being near other federal agencies helps.
“They all have a lot of scientific and technical work associated with them. So what that does is, it creates sort of a workforce that gains expertise in federal government work in science and technology work,” he said.
In an age when the nation faces both conventional threats from nations and unconventional threats from terrorists, the Navy at Stennis may be about as well-positioned as any military organization to be a major player against both threats.
“We’re ready to answer the bell. If we end up with a major conflict with another nation or trying to fight guys in caves and guys in boats, the ocean and the atmosphere is still very important,” said White. “We’ve taken a lot of steps to address both problems.”
