Navy unites data in ‘nerve centers’ to accelerate decisions
Vice Adm. Karl Thomas, the deputy chief of naval operations for Information Warfare, said the Navy is figuring out how to deal with the explosion of data.
Jason Miller@jmillerWFED
April 30, 2025 3:46 pm
For the Department of the Navy, one of its main focuses over the next two years is to make sure its Maritime Operations Centers can fight at the speed of relevancy.
What that means is for commanders to have the data and systems to analyze and understand what’s happening in real time.
Vice Adm. Karl Thomas, the deputy chief of naval operations for Information Warfare (N2N6) and director of Naval intelligence, said the centers, known as MOCs, are the nerve centers for the service’s numbered fleet commands.
“If you think about a high-end fight with a peer adversary, every movement is going to matter, every shot is going to matter, and the adversary is going to get a vote. So, this effort that I’m undertaking to make sure that I better fuse information at the root of all of that is data. We know that sensors are proliferating. We know that everything is a sensor. We’d like every shooter to have the opportunity to shoot on the right data. So how you marry all that together is a huge problem across a large swath of battle space, and that’s the essence of the challenge that we’re facing,” Thomas said in an interview with Federal News Network at the recent West 2025 conferenced sponsored by AFCEA and the U.S. Naval Institute. “It’s about getting a decision advantage. It’s about turning inside the adversary’s decision process so that speed, that velocity of data — which is really important — and certainly, as the other side is going to try to interrupt that data. The battle space that we’re looking at, which also is a contested battle space, where you have to move that data from the edge back to the decision process and get it back out to those shooters.”
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