Facing the increasingly complex, and critical, mission of advanced technological and engineering support to the Navy’s information warfare community, Naval Information Warfare Center (NIWC) Pacific, headquartered in San Diego, Calif., requires naval-unique intellectual capital to consistently advance naval-relevant technologies and capabilities.
At the heart of this challenge is the NIWC Pacific workforce, and a persistent need to develop capacity and expertise at the leading edge. This is where senior leaders at NIWC Pacific made a crucial decision and turned to the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS).
Dr. Alex Bordetsky, currently chair of NPS’ Department of Information Sciences, worked with his NPS colleagues to create a hybrid doctorate program that would advance the science and research capacity of NIWC Pacific through advanced, mission-relevant education and sound technical research.
“What is interesting about our partnership with NIWC Pacific is that NPS is helping them to evolve organizationally in the S&T (science and technology) domain,” Bordetsky said. “The first cohort were the top leaders of the organization; the second, the organizational movers; and the third, top-notch S&T engineers dealing with breakthrough technologies.”
Information warfare, broadly speaking, is the battlespace employment of information and communication technologies – a combination of offensive and defensive electronic capabilities and cyber operations to gain a competitive advantage over an adversary before, during and after conflict. The ascendency of information warfare in strategic competition has given rise to critical technology requirements that enable decision advantage and naval strategies like distributed maritime operations.
To meet these requirements, the NIWC Pacific team set out to find ways to cultivate specific skills and capabilities within their civilian workforce development program and targeted advanced education in the information sciences, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, data science, autonomy, cyber security, knowledge transfer and sharing, and command and control. The resulting doctorate program developed by NPS and NIWC Pacific not only accomplishes these goals, but also sharpens the Navy’s competitive edge in support of the Naval Education Strategy, released by Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro in 2023.
Since the launch of NIWC Pacific’s venture with NPS, several NIWC Pacific scientists and engineers have entered this one-of-a-kind program, spread over three individual cohorts. A handful of students have already graduated with their doctorate, and several more are at varying stages in the four-year program.
“This is an important dimension of our workforce development,” said Michael McMillan, NIWC Pacific’s Executive Director. “The Ph.D. program at NPS is highly relevant to the unique aspects of the Naval information warfare mission, and provides an avenue for advanced education for NIWC Pacific employees. We have sent a few of our best.”
NPS Provost Scott Gartner agrees.
“NIWC Pacific’s efforts to advance their technical workforce can pay dividends for their people, the NIWC critical and unique mission, and NPS.” said Gartner. “It makes good sense that Navy civilian engineers should study and research alongside NPS’ operationally-experienced student warfighters and defense-focused faculty where all gain from each other’s insights.”
In recent years, communications technologies have swiftly advanced and proliferated throughout the world – and so have the demands and sophistication of information warfare. As a result, the Chief of Operations’ Navigation Plan (CNO NAVPLAN), released in 2022, identified information warfare capabilities as a crucial component of the Navy’s future fleet, in order to “counter adversary forces, complete kill chains, connect fleet platforms, and persistently cover the battlespace to ensure decision advantage.”
A center of technological and engineering expertise, NIWC Pacific is critical to the Navy’s information warfare mission. It provides research, development, delivery and support of integrated command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR), cyber and space systems and capabilities across all warfighting domains and all services – especially the Navy.
“NPS is a Navy organization and we’re a Navy organization, so there’s an aligning culture,” said Dr. Paul Shigley, who serves as NIWC Pacific’s C4 Technical Projects Officer and head of the Partnership and International Engagement Branch.
But Shigley, who was part of the initial NIWC Pacific cohort to enter doctoral studies at NPS, added that it’s not just about speaking the same language – ultimately, it’s the relevance of the applied research at NPS that makes the partnership so appealing to a highly technical organization like NIWC Pacific.
“We like our people to be working on things that make sense to what we do,” Shigley stated. “We’re not going to become professors. We are going to come back here and do research, and we like that research to align to things that NPS is doing. We’re doing that; we’re applying the skills and knowledge we gained from NPS on projects here.”
For his doctoral work, Shigley conducted a unique, quantitative thesis on a specific component of “Knowledge Flow Theory,” a framework and toolset for conceptualizing, analyzing, visualizing, and measuring knowledge flows. Specifically, Shigley dove into a concept coined “knowledge friction,” which is simply resistance to knowledge transfer, and some of the explicit factors that contribute to it.
Shigley’s work has been directly applicable for NIWC Pacific leadership as it turned to meet China’s mounting threat, where “organizational agility” is not just a catch phrase du jour.
Another beneficiary of the program is Dr. Clare Morton, NIWC Pacific’s Corporate Strategy Division Head and a second cohort NPS student. Morton, the most recent graduate from the program, was awarded her Ph.D. in Information Sciences in December 2023 for her groundbreaking work in the ability of bureaucratic public organizations to better react and respond to external events – such as COVID-19 – in an agile manner.
Drawing on an exploratory, multi-case qualitative analysis, Morton demonstrated through her dissertation that responsive agility can be achieved through “the generation of temporary routines, highlighting the importance of routine champions, and introduces the concept of knowledge cyclones.”
This approach was central to successfully guiding NIWC Pacific through the pandemic, and there are lessons to be applied to technology-driven organizations, where agility is critical to mission success.
“We’re continually looking to streamline bureaucracy and strategically work to prevent (obstacles to agility) in the future,” Morton said. “(My doctoral thesis) definitely plays into the work I’m doing.”
A member of the third cohort of NIWC students at NPS, William Stegner of NIWC Pacific’s Space Systems group, has his sights set on the next generation of fleet warfare in the information age – a new form of conflict in which NIWC Pacific will play a pivotal role.
Stegner’s research will draw on the work of the late, highly esteemed Navy Capt. Wayne P. Hughes, dean emeritus and professor of practice in military operations research at NPS. While Stegner is projected to complete his NPS doctorate in 2024, he said that his studies are already applicable to his work at NIWC Pacific.
“I’ve been able to examine the phenomenon of naval combat and the phenomenon of information warfare and actually look [deeply] at those things while I’m out working,” Stegner said. “Because of my work at NPS, I am both a scientist and an engineer. I work on information warfare in naval combat, but to really advance into the future, we need scientists, not engineers just building more of the same. I will tell you that the work I’ve been doing now in information warfare, I could not have done as well as I’ve been able to without help from the NPS information science program.”
To accommodate NIWC Pacific’s unique needs and requirements, Bordetsky and his team took the existing resident doctoral program – curriculum No. 474 – and adapted it to the needs of NIWC Pacific to form a customized, hybrid doctoral program.
“These [really] are two versions of the same Ph.D. program, and they work in parallel,” Bordetsky said. “Up until four years ago, we only had resident students. The only reason we got the hybrid program, with NIWC Pacific in the lead, happened because of the success of our resident program. That was no accident; it was just natural evolution.
“The difference between the two is minimal; that's one of our accomplishments,” he added. “The hybrid program is basically an 80 percent copy of our resident program. The difference lies in weekly seminars, in that hybrid students are required to be here every second week of any given quarter so they have the full benefit of communicating with faculty and the broader group of their classmates.”
This is a marked difference from distance learning (DL) and allows for greater flexibility for the doctoral students to make progress on their time, all the while directly applying it to their current work.
“NPS has been extremely flexible and adaptive to all of us that are coming from San Diego,” said Ph.D. student Jon Brewster, a NIWC Pacific operations research analyst and Electromagnetic Maneuver Warfare subject matter expert. Brewster’s dissertation will explore the possibilities of extended reality (XR) – immersive technologies such as augmented reality, virtual reality and mixed reality – in command and control.
“Dr. Bordetsky said, ‘I want you to lean way forward,’ so that’s what I’m doing,” Brewster added. “Having this requirement for one week in residence per quarter has been very good because I’m not really doing DL, but hybrid, which is sort of a mix. It’s really great because we don’t lose the pulse of what’s going on here (at NIWC Pacific), but we also don’t lose the pulse of what’s going on at NPS.”