Unleashing Innovation at the Naval Postgraduate School

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Unleashing Innovation at the Naval Postgraduate School

“Experimentation can be highly disruptive and thrives in a culture which embraces innovation and risk-taking.” The Honorable Ray Mabus, Secretary of the Navy1

On 15 October 2015 Secretary of the Navy, Ray Mabus issued two important memoranda with the following subject lines: “Increase Resources and Opportunities for Experimentation” and “Afloat and Ashore Installation Policies for Experimentation and Exercises.”2 The stated aim of both of these documents is to change the current “culture of caution” in order to foster “a culture of innovation.” The documents direct the Navy and Marine Corps to “[re]establish robust and agile experimentation” so as to achieve “a strategic innovation advantage.”3 This essay will argue that the fastest and most efficient way to ignite a culture of innovation across the Navy and gain truly strategic advantages is by leveraging the incredible human capital resident at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterey, California.

Innovation, experimentation and defense related research have always been the focus of NPS. With shrinking defense budgets and downsizing, NPS should be encouraged to innovate and experiment more. NPS is unlike any other defense related university or academy as it operates based on an entrepreneurial, largely reimbursable budget that fosters competition for a wide variety of scientific research directly related to enhancing the combat effectiveness of the Navy, Marine Corps, and other military services and government agencies.

A Little Bit of History

The Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) was founded in 1909 at the U.S. Naval Academy. In 1951 NPS relocated to Monterey, California and evolved into a world class graduate research university focused on Navy and defense related curricula that support over fifty different graduate degree programs across a wide variety of scientific disciplines. While NPS was created to support U.S Navy and Marine Corps officers, it has evolved into a truly joint institution that is open to all U.S. government agencies. The stated mission of NPS is, and has always been, to “provide relevant and unique advanced education and research programs to increase the combat effectiveness of commissioned officers of the naval service to enhance the security of the United States.”4

1 Secretary of the Navy, Memorandum for Chief of Naval Operations Commandant of the Marine Corps Assistant Secretary of the Navy Research, Development & Acquisition (ASN (RD&A)), Increase Resources and Opportunities for Experimentation, October 15, 2015.2 Secretary of the Navy, Memorandum for Chief of Naval Operations Commandant of the Marine Corps, Afloat and Ashore Installation Policies for Experimentation and Exercises, October 15, 2015.3 Ibid.4 Chief of Naval Operations, OPNAVINST 5450.210D, Naval Postgraduate School Mission and Functions, 30 March 2012.

“New technology is common, new thinking is rare.”5 Sir Peter Blake

Why NPS Matters More Today

NPS is home to approximately 1,600 resident students and nearly 1,000 more who participate via distance learning from across all the military services, government agencies, and our global partners. Today a large percentage of NPS’s student have years of combat experience due to the ongoing conflicts following 9-11. These combat experienced, warrior scholars are teamed up with a world class faculty that is drawn to tough, national security and defense related problems. This unique national defense focused environment provides a learning experience across dozens of academic disciplines that is not replicated anywhere else in the world. When combat tested graduate students come in contact with world class scholars, incredible innovation, learning, and new thinking is the natural result. Those who have been fortunate enough to attend NPS understand this benefit intuitively.

NPS encourages students to study and research defense related topics which interest them. NPS students tend to naturally focus on areas that they already have had first-hand experience with in the field. After they graduate these same students then go back to their operational units with more knowledge, new thinking and continue to innovate as end users. Here are just a few of the most recently published theses at NPS from the class of March 2015 that demonstrate this point:

“Crowdsourcing Intelligence to Combat Terrorism: Harnessing Bottom-Up Collection to Prevent Lone-Wolf Terror Attacks.”

“Preempting Mass Murder: Improving Law Enforcement Risk Assessments of Persons with Mental Illness”

“Syria and the Rise of Radical Islamist Groups”

“Privacy in the Face of Surveillance: Fourth Amendment Considerations for Facial Recognition Technology”

“Mobile Konami Codes: Analysis of Android Malware Services Utilizing Sensor and Resource-based State Changes”

“Improving Maritime Domain Awareness Using Neural Networks for Target of Interest Classification”

“Littoral Combat Ship Crew Scheduling”6

The list of fascinating topics goes on and on for several pages. NPS students put out on average between 100-180 theses in dozens of different scientific fields every quarter.

5 Quote by Sir Peter Blake as found on teachbytes.com and technoliterate.com, 11 November 2015.6 Naval Postgraduate School, Compilation of Abstracts, Unrestricted Theses, Dissertations, and Final Projects, March 2015.

NPS has a unique, competitive driven research model amongst government funded graduate research education facilities. At NPS professors are only paid for nine months on average, and have to compete for a minimum of 3 months of their salary by obtaining research funding from U.S. government and select civilian sponsors focused on naval and defense related issues. This competitive model drives a world class NPS faculty to work even harder to earn research monies and opportunities across dozens of scientific disciplines.

NPS loses is glow

In 2012 NPS came under the scrutiny of the U.S. Navy Inspector General and U.S. Navy Audit Service. NPS was accused of being mismanaged and not compliant with fiduciary and other U.S. Navy regulations. Strangely enough, one of the accusations from this period was that NPS was doing too much research, and expanding its work force when the rest of the Navy was downsizing. NPS did have some process and management issues, but these problems were all remedied by the end of 2013, after new senior leaders at NPS reorganized the staff and effectively addressed all the deficiencies and recommendations noted by the Navy Inspector General report of 2012 as well as follow on reports by the Navy Audit service.

Despite all this effort, some senior civilian leaders in Washington D.C. continue to be distrustful of NPS and it is unique work acceptance and research model. This mistrust, or lack of understanding depending on one’s perspective, has created a risk averse environment regarding NPS. Auditability, cost savings, and full compliance with financial regulations seem to be the primary focus regarding NPS today. Constant data calls, investigations, inspections, audits, and assist visits have significantly constrained NPS’s workforce, morale, and productivity. NPS staff and faculty are being driven to focus more and more on administrative matters rather than fostering the pursuit of scientific discovery and innovation.

Many NPS staff and faculty report that they are fatigued, over trained, and cannot focus on their primary mission in many cases because of the level of micromanagement from outside of NPS. This over inspection and scrutiny of NPS has caused a brain drain, with over 25% of the faculty that were present in 2012 leaving for other universities and opportunities. NPS remains under a strict hiring freeze which has greatly reduced the flexibility of both the staff and faculty to innovate or experiment with new curricula and courses of study.

NPS continues to persevere and innovate, however, like a ship trailing a shaft, full power is not being directed to maximize innovation. The desire to achieve 100% auditability and compliance with regulations appears to be the primary direction for NPS presently, which seems at odds with the recent push for more experimentation and innovation by both the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of the Navy.

NPS’s Innovative Spirit and Cycle of Innovation

The faculty, staff and students at NPS are a national treasure and natural engine for innovation. NPS students, which include front line operators from all of the U.S. military services as well as other national, state and local first responders, routinely tackle real world problems and issues and make them their singular focus in the form of research and theses. After graduation these junior officers then return to the operational fleet in their respective services and drive change and innovation from the inside. NPS graduates become leaders in their fields, from space exploration to command and control of the U.S. military and government. NPS has contributed significantly to U.S. domestic efforts as well, with recent NPS graduates from the Center for Homeland Defense and Security playing leading roles during our nation’s most recent domestic crises, including the Boston Marathon bombing, landslides in Washington state, and the Navy Yard shooting in Washington D.C..

The NPS education cycle drives innovation, research, and defense related problem solving, continually benefiting both the Navy and the Nation. Anyone who has ever attended NPS intuitively understands this win-win relationship, and the benefits of a NPS degree. The defense related networking and research that happens amongst NPS students and faculty is unsurpassed anywhere in the world. The lasting bonds between both the faculty and the students continue to drive innovation at sea, in the air, on land and now in cyber space long after graduation. NPS students continue their education when they return back to operational military units, and many times relay what they learn back to the faculty at NPS for the rest of their military careers. It is difficult to capture these intangible benefits on a spreadsheet or power point slide, but those who are knowledgeable understand how this cycle drives innovation throughout the Navy, the Department of Defense, and across the U.S. government enterprise.

NPS vs. Civilian Graduate Education

For those who are not knowledgeable about the U.S. Navy or military, it might seem reasonable to ask why does the Navy need its own graduate research university in 2015? Why not just send all Navy and military officers to civilian graduate schools? The simple and most obvious answer is that MIT, Cal Poly Tech, Stanford, Harvard, and all the other prestigious graduate universities across the United States simply do not focus on defense related studies. NPS is one of only a few defense focused, accredited graduate research universities around the world. Its student body and faculty exist to study, research, experiment and innovate in defense related scientific fields. When you bring the nations’ smartest and most motivated professional military officers together in one place and subject them to a rigorous course of scientific and defense related education, innovation is the natural byproduct.

When a military officer attends a civilian university for graduate education the real beneficiary more often than not is the civilian institution. Civilian graduate students and their faculty gain the benefit of the professional military officer’s real world experiences at sea or in combat zones. Military officers are experienced leaders by the time they arrive in civilian graduate classrooms, whereas their peers are usually not. Civilian graduate institutions are simply not

geared to naval and defense related fields of study, and thus, do not focus on how to improve combat effectiveness and win wars at sea, on land, in the air or in cyber space.

While there is no doubt that officers attending civilian graduate schools can benefit the Navy and the nation by infusing outside of the box thinking back into military culture, there are also lost opportunities and costs associated with this diffusion of talent away from Navy and other military services. NPS offers Navy and military officers opportunities to network and bond with peers in their chosen field of study across all the military services. NPS’s joint international military learning environment fosters collaboration across all the armed services as well as those of some of our key partners and allies around the world.

A typical Navy lieutenant or Marine Corps captain serving at NPS will encounter and most likely befriend at least one colleague from a foreign military partner who is also attending NPS. These lasting relationships benefit the individuals, their particular service, as well as their nations. Often times foreign partners send their best and brightest junior officers to NPS. These NPS graduates go on to become the leaders of their respective military services. The intangible benefits from international military networking at the most formative stage of an officer’s career is another hidden benefit that an NPS education brings the Navy and the nation.

Military officers usually arrive as students at NPS somewhere between their fourth, fifth or sixth year of active duty service. Attendance at NPS incurs a further service obligation of at least two to three years, which means most NPS graduates intend to make the U.S. armed forces their careers. This direct investment in human capital for the Navy (i.e. an NPS graduate degree) is compounded by the fact that much of the learning at NPS happens between professional military students who are driven and competitive by nature. This chain reaction of learning is captured and recycled back to the fleet every quarter as NPS operates continuously throughout the year.

When an officer attends NPS instead of a civilian graduate university, that officer will study defense related curricula, bond with peers who have chosen the military as their careers, befriend foreign military officers who will likely someday lead their services, and then upon graduation cycle back to operational units where their education will further enhance the combat effectiveness of the U.S. armed forces for years to come.

“Our students are consummate professionals at every level, our faculty are world-class, and our educational programs are relevant, adaptable and of immediate value to the Navy and DOD.” 7

Ronald A. Route, Vice Admiral (Ret), President, Naval Postgraduate School

Recent Innovations at NPS

7 Ronald A. Route, President’s Message, Naval Postgraduate School In Review Magazine, February 2014 edition, p.1.

NPS students are currently working and studying problems in new emerging defense related fields such as cyber defense; big data analytics; autonomous swarming unmanned aerial vehicles; climate change, design thinking, and social network analysis. Innovation occurs at NPS because of a fortunate set of conditions which includes the opportune geographic location of NPS near Silicon Valley. NPS has always had deep ties to innovators and researchers in the Valley, and has already started partnering with the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental (DIU-X) in Mountain View, California to leverage this capacity.

Recent innovation and experimentation at NPS does not tend to make splashy headlines in the national media. One example of ground breaking innovation at NPS, however, which did grab some national attention involves a team of students and faculty lead by Dr. Timothy Chung. Dr. Chung and his team have been studying how to get autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) to fly together in order to defend U.S. Navy ships against potential swarms of attackers. By using, small inexpensive autonomous UAVs, Dr. Chung and his team hope to reverse the swarm, and use this technology to defeat would be attackers. His team recently set a world record by flying 50 autonomous UAVs together, successfully controlling them using on board artificial intelligence without continuous communication with a ground based supercomputer. No other robotics lab in the United States has been able to accomplish this feat.

Another recent example of innovation at NPS is the work performed by Lieutenant Colonel John Alt whose Data Analytics Team has developed social network analyzers that have detected hidden clandestine terrorist networks and improvised explosive device (IED) makers attempting to hide in the dark web of the internet. Lieutenant Colonel Alt’s team worked across different academic fields, including statistics, operations research, computer science, information systems and business to develop new methods and tools for big data problems. These methods and tools can help screen valuable pieces of information from the white noise of the internet, and extract weak indicators which lead to uncovering hidden networks operating clandestinely on unclassified networks. Lieutenant Colonel Alt and his team are working with both the Office of Naval Intelligence and Silicon Valley data analysts to enhance this new capability.8

These are just two examples of the innovative and experimental research that happens at NPS day in and day out. NPS’s greatest strengths are its professional military officer student body; its world class faculty and staff; and its successful history of defense related graduate research education.

Conclusion: Charting the Course Ahead

Exciting and innovative research projects by students and faculty are not new to NPS. This is exactly what this defense oriented graduate research university was conceived to do back in 1909. For more than a century NPS has expanded, contracted, evolved and adapted in order to

8 President, Naval Postgraduate School, SECNAV INNOVATION AWARD IN DATA ANALYTICS submission, 30 October 2015.

provide “relevant and unique advanced education and research programs to increase the combat effectiveness of commissioned officers of the naval service.”9

In industry and the armed services, innovation comes from end users. The AK-47 assault rifle, the nuclear powered submarine, and the Aegis weapon system were all envisioned, built and perfected by the end user—military professionals. While lots of innovation happens in civilian labs and workshops across the United States every day, almost none of it is focused on winning wars at sea. Strategic advantages for the U.S. armed forces from innovation, whether it be with electric rail guns, unmanned aerial vehicles, or cyber systems will come from the civilian and military personnel who study and work with these systems day in and day out—the end users.

If the Navy and nation are serious about expanding and encouraging more defense related innovation at a faster pace, then the most logical place to start is at NPS. NPS already has the existing infrastructure and human capital to expand innovation across the military services. By simply encouraging NPS to experiment more and tolerate some failures, the level of innovation would rise without a large increase in direct budget. If NPS could hire more faculty and researchers, and was allowed to pursue more joint programs with its sister services and other government agencies, this too would increase the ability of NPS to innovate.

NPS is a uniquely funded Navy command. In 2014 NPS’s operating budget was roughly 65% reimbursable and 35% direct funded.10 NPS research and innovation is driven largely by competition for reimbursable dollars from the Department of Defense and other U.S. government agencies. This capitalistic driven research model fuels innovation, growth and development. Because of this unique model NPS tends to naturally grow and expand both its innovation capability and its work force. In 2012 it was this unchecked, seemingly unregulated growth that caught the eye of Navy inspectors and auditors. Since that time, however, near continuous inspections, audits, and assist visits have swung the pendulum away from growth towards contraction. Today NPS continues to shrink both its workforce and its ability to innovate. NPS is forbidden to take on any new work that will require more FTE (full time equivalent—the hours worked by one full time employee). This limits the type and scope of research (i.e. innovation opportunities) that NPS can currently engage in.

This limit on NPS’s workforce seems to run directly counter to the Secretary of the Navy’s edict “to restore adequate resourcing and opportunities for experimentation” and to “continue to evaluate ways and means to reduce barriers and cost, time, and effort required for experimentation.”11 The quickest and most immediate way to stimulate more innovation across the Navy is to remove the restrictions and barriers that are currently in place at NPS. A simple cap on the upper level of NPS FTE, and or end strength, would provide a check on

9 This is the actual mission of NPS as stated in OPNAVINST 5450.210D dtd 30 March 2012.10 Naval Postgraduate School 2014 Annual Report & Fact Book, page 49.11 Secretary of the Navy, Memorandum for Chief of Naval Operations Commandant of the Marine Corps Assistant Secretary of the Navy Research, Development & Acquisition (ASN (RD&A)), Increase Resource and Opportunities for Experimentation, October 15, 2015.

unregulated workforce growth. If NPS could hire up to 1100 civilian faculty and staff this would stimulate new research and innovation across emerging areas of study, such as robotics, cyber warfare, design thinking, and network analysis. NPS should also be encouraged to partner with other military and government services and agencies in order to leverage economies of scale in emerging technologies and defense related academic disciplines. A joint vice Navy centric approach to innovation and experimentation at NPS would increase the opportunity to gain strategic advantages across the Department of Defense and U.S. government.

Innovation is a complex process. Innovation that will provide the U.S. with strategic military advantages will come from its end users—military professionals. NPS has a large concentrated group of military professionals focused on innovation and education in defense related fields. The most logical way to increase the Navy’s opportunities to innovate is to fuel new and diverse fields of study at NPS. NPS would not require any significant growth in direct appropriated funding due to its unique model which is based on competition for reimbursable budget across the U.S. government enterprise. This would be a low risk, low cost way for the Navy to quickly improve its ability to innovate.