Acquired and Deployed but Not Adopted: Lost Mission Effectiveness Without Resilient Chat Afloat

Abstract

The U.S. Navy increasingly emphasizes communications resilience in distributed maritime operations. In the face of communications degradation and denial, we can improve warfighter effectiveness even using current systems when they are underused. By developing better ways to use deployed systems and applying lessons learned to new systems, we can maximize the value of system requirements and adoption of future acquisitions. Through our work on Navy communications systems’ configurations, we find that some resilient systems go underused in practice, despite Navy requirements for system resilience designed into deployed systems. The Navy depends on Internet Protocol networks for conveying command and control (C2) communications. We examine the Navy’s email and chat use for conveying C2 communications. We survey (n = 69) command, control, communications, and computer (C4) leadership to inform a sociotechnical analysis of how Sailors afloat use chat, considering a distributed chat architecture’s resilience benefits. To ensure that acquired technologies do not go underutilized, our research results lead us to conclude that solutions must be sociotechnical: better technology alone does not solve the problem of resilient communications. Without understanding the operating environment, including operators’ and their leadership’s motivations, new technology solutions can go underused, limiting the anticipated gain in mission effectiveness.