Q&A: Rear Admiral Victor C. See Jr.
Space Communicator
Leveraging Knowledge Across Classified and Unclassified Space
Rear Admiral Victor C. See Jr.
Director, Communications Systems
Acquisition and
Operations Directorate
National Reconnaissance Office
Commander, SPAWAR
Space Field Activity
Program Executive Officer
for Space Systems
Rear Admiral Victor C. See Jr. became director, Communications Systems Acquisition and Operations Directorate, National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) in August 2004. He is also the commander, Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command’s (SPAWAR) Space Field Activity (SSFA) and the Program Executive Officer (PEO) for Space Systems.
See is a 1980 graduate of the Naval Academy. He received his Naval Aviator Wings in October 1981 and was assigned to Helicopter, Anti-Submarine Light Squadron 32 (HSL-32) in Norfolk, Va. In 1985 he reported to the Naval Air Systems Command as avionics system project officer. He was selected as an Aerospace Engineering Duty Officer (AEDO) and sent to the Naval Postgraduate School. He graduated in September 1989 and became the community manager for AEDO.
See reported to the Naval Research Laboratory in June 1992 as the System Engineering Division head for the Special Systems Program, subsequently becoming deputy program manager and then program manager in January 1995. In July 1995, he assumed command of the Defense Contract Management Command Lockheed Martin Federal Systems, Owego, N.Y, overseeing management of 660 DoD contracts, including delivery of the Navy’s SH-60B and MH-60R programs.
In August 1998, See reported to the SPAWAR SSFA, NRO. Prior to his current position he held positions as the chief of systems engineering for the Integrated Overhead SIGINT Architecture- Phase 2 program, program manager for advanced SIGINT architectures and technology and director of the Acquisition and Engineering Group in the Communications Directorate.
See was interviewed by MGT Editor Harrison Donnelly.
Q: You hold three different positions. What are they, and what does each involve?
A: The Navy has asked me to perform three jobs. My first job is as director of the Communications Directorate at the NRO. The second is PEO for Space Systems, reporting to the assistant secretary of the Navy for acquisitions, Dr. Delores M. Etter. In that job, I buy UHF satellite communications for DoD. I’m also commander of the SPAWAR Space Field Activity, reporting to Rear Admiral Michael C. Bachmann, commander of SPAWAR in San Diego. That job involves the leadership of Navy personnel who work in space acquisition. So I have people in San Diego, Los Angeles at the Air Force Space and Missile Center, Hanscom AFB, Mass., and the Naval Research Lab, as well as a big contingent here at NRO.
As communications director, I am the "phone company" for NRO. We have a worldwide, space and terrestrial, enterprise network. I provide telephone, video teleconference and information technology and enterprise services to a large number of government and contractor personnel who work in this organization. It’s a substantial, high-speed network, with large bandwidth and all the peripherals that go with delivering IT services.
One of the real benefits to the Navy of the way that my three commands are set up is my ability to look across classified space here at NRO, and unclassified space through my PEO Space hat interfacing with the Air Force space and make capability improvements. I can look across both worlds, and make good decisions and trades with respect to resources and people. We bring people from the classified world to the unclassified world in San Diego, Los Angeles and at the NRL. So we have a good ability to leverage knowledge across classified and unclassified space. The Navy sees benefits to that—it may not be obvious, but they can leverage all the capabilities from National Security Space.
Q: What is your role as commander of the SPAWAR Space Field Activity?
A: With my job as commander of the SPAWAR Space Field Activity, I oversee the Navy people who work in space acquisition. That’s about 120 officers, 65 enlisted positions, and a little more than 100 Navy civilians. That is the major contingent of what is known as the Navy Space Cadre. If you go back to the 2000 Space Commission, chaired by Donald Rumsfeld just before he became Secretary of Defense for the second time, the recommendation was that each service needed to establish a space cadre. The Air Force is the executive agent for space systems, but it’s important that the Army, Navy and some of the other services and agencies establish a formalized space cadre. I am the manager of the Navy Space Cadre, reporting to the commander of the Naval Network Warfare Command [NETWARCOM], who is the senior space champion for the Navy.
Vice Admiral H. Denby Starling II is the new NETWARCOM commander, and he is the operational representative to the Chief of Naval Operations for what the Navy is doing in space. He is the sponsor for the Space Cadre, and I do the day-today management. The Space Cadre is a huge job, because I interface with the Naval Academy, with connections into the aerospace engineering curriculum there. I also am the subject matter expert for the space curricula at the Naval Postgraduate School. So I interface with the midshipmen at the Naval Academy and officers, enlisted and civilians as they come into operations in the Navy, while also keeping track of the curricula at the Naval Postgraduate School and tracking the graduates. From a Space Cadre perspective, I have insight not only into how we’re doing with respect to supporting service to the fleet, but also how we are training and educating our people and how we use them once they are educated.
Q: What is the mission of the SPAWAR Space Field Activity?
A: The SPAWAR Space Field Activity is what we call the command of all the Navy people here at NRO. What it does is a management function of all the Navy people, and through detailing work with the Bureau of Naval Personnel, we determine where the Navy people will work across this enterprise. Historically, Navy personnel at NRO all worked in signals intelligence, going back 40 years. What we’ve done through the standup of the Space Field Activity is to integrate Navy people across all the disciplines here at NRO. There are Navy people in the Communications Directorate, as there are in the other three directorates across the organization. We’ve taken our stovepipe experience and grown it to imagery, signals intelligence, communications, and advanced science and technology, as well as support to the fleet through the deputy director for mission support.
Q: What is your role at PEO Space Systems?
A: PEO Space Systems is the executive agent for narrowband UHF satellite communications reporting to the DoD. Under a prior name, it bought all the UHF satellites that have been launched and are operating. Today, we are 36 months into procurement of the next-generation UHF satcom, the Mobile User Objective System [MUOS]. My PEO duties are to lead the program office team out in San Diego that’s buying MUOS. We are procuring MUOS, the first satellite for which is supposed to launch in November 2009, with an on-orbit operational capability of March 2010. We’ll be launching four more satellites at one year intervals giving us a total of five satellites on orbit, with four operational and one on-orbit spare. These will replace the eight UHF satellites that are up today.
The chain of command for National Security Space programs goes all the way to the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition [USD[AT&L]. For MUOS, I report to the ASN[RD&A], Dr. Etter, then to undersecretary of the Air Force for Space, the USD[AT&L]. The next MUOS milestone decision is build approval scheduled for October 15.
Q: What is the current status of MUOS?
A: The driving priority for MUOS given to us by the Joint Staff is schedule. Because the UHF satellites are old and degrading at a reliable rate, we have a requirement from the JROC to provide 70 percent availability of seven UHF satellites. That degradation curve is coming fairly close, which means that we really need to keep the MUOS launch on schedule. The MUOS contract is currently more than $2 billion, and we are having some cost challenges. We’re working those, and there are no major show-stoppers, but just the normal satellite development and integration issues that you have when you’re building a new capability on a satellite system. The prime contractor is Lockheed Martin Sunnyvale, with the subs being Boeing Satellites in Los Angeles and General Dynamics in Scottsdale. The satellite bus is being built by Lockheed Martin in Newtown, Pa. So we’re working through the normal satellite integration issues, but right now we’re on schedule and still have some margins.
Q: Does MUOS provide new capabilities?
A: The new capabilities that MUOS brings into the mix respond to the Army’s need for communications on the move, with many more accesses than the current system provides. It’s a 10-fold increase in capability, as well as networking capability for the Army and other DoD customers and other agencies. It’s small, mobile, highly flexible forces that are moving all over the battlefield at high speeds, which all want to be connected and communicating, not only speaking voice but sending data, through a whole host of difficult requirements. That requirements set has been flowed to us from JROC, and we’re working hard to meet all that.
A big piece that is required for full operational capability of the MUOS satellite system is the Joint Tactical Radio System [JTRS] terminals. We’re working hand in hand with the JTRS program office to look at schedules for the delivery of the advanced maritime fixed radios that the Navy needs, as well as the hand-held radios needed by the Army. We’re working closely with the JTRS office to ensure that deliveries are expedited as soon as possible.
Q: What are some of the other programs at PEO Space Systems?
A: The other thing we do at PEO Space Systems is that we have a contract with industry called Leasat, under which we lease commercial UHF satcom. The Leasat contract has been around for a number of years, and there are a lot of industry teams that provide UHF satcom. In the future, once we get MUOS on orbit, and it provides at least a 10-fold increase in bandwidth and access, we’ll have to do a year-by-year look at how much UHF satcom that we have to go get from industry. Right now, we’re not sure.
Q: What do you see for the future of commercial satcom use by the military?
A: If you go back to Desert Storm and look at the way our operational forces used satellite technology, there was a large growth in need for not only commercial satcom, but also for more of all of our satellite services, such as ISR, weather, and positioning, navigation and timing [PNT]. Because DoD could only deliver a certain level of satellite services, there was a large growth in going to the commercial satellite industry, especially in the communications arena. When you jump forward to OEF/ OIF and look at the exponential growth in what DoD and the intelligence agencies said they needed from satellites, it was a whole lot more of satcom, ISR, PNT and so on. The Global Positioning System is now used by everyone, and we have precision guided munitions.
So when you look at the increase in connectivity and netcentric fighting, the need for satellite services is even greater. The delivery plan for milsatcom includes the Wideband Global System getting ready to launch, the Advanced EHF satellites getting ready to deliver, MUOS, and in the future the Tactical Satellite [TSAT], which will be the next big milsatcom program. When all those deliver, we will do an analysis of how much the warfighter is using versus how much their needs are, and we will continue to go to the commercial satellite world for more leasing when it makes sense.
The bottom line is that with the innovative way the Army is rolling out capability—with comms on the move, FCS and the way small units will fight and be connected—the need for greater capabilities from satellites is going to continue to grow. Army acquisition officials—including the outgoing Army CIO, General Boutelle, and the incoming CIO, General Sorenson, who visited here not long ago—have been very proactive in understanding what they can get from space versus what they need. So they’re the big driver, but all the services are similar. The Navy, for example, will need increased satellite connectivity as it moves to net-centric warfighting and the Maritime Ops Centers are moved on-shore. All of those requirements are still coming at us.
Q: Can you tell us a little more about your role at NRO?
A: The Communications Directorate provides IT services and service management to everyone in the organization, as well as to many external customers. It’s similar to what DISA does for DoD. I do that for NRO and many of the intelligence agencies. We have a high-speed network that we provide service through. In the recent past, we’ve started providing services along the lines of the way industry provides IT services. It’s service management, where we have service-level agreements with all of our customers, and what their expectations are. We have a strong industry team, which is a big piece of how we deliver service management. It’s been very successful to date, and has allowed us to grow the number of requirements while realigning our organization and seeing efficiencies in our budget.
Q: When you speak at conferences, what messages are you trying to get across to industry?
A: My big message is that it’s important that we all understand that we provide a critical service, which has to be very reliable. We’re always looking for innovative ideas, so we work with a lot of companies and teams to help deliver innovative services. We’re open to new ideas, and we work with the 16 intelligence community agencies to share best practices. I’ve been able to take some of my experiences from DoD jobs—I was the commander of Defense Contract Management Command at Lockheed Owego—and bring those processes into NRO.
One of the processes that has been highlighted in the past was Alpha Contracting, which was big in the Navy about 10 years ago. I was able to bring that to my job as an acquisition leader here, and we now have the tenets of Alpha Contracting going on throughout this organization, and especially here in the Communications Directorate. I’ve done many events in the PEO Space world on Lean Six Sigma, which was mandated by the Secretary of Defense and Secretary of the Navy, and I’ve been able to bring Lean Six Sigma into NRO. We’ve briefed it at the board of directors and here at the comms management panel, and now we are doing Lean events across many of the processes here at the Communications Directorate, to improve service delivery to our customers and shrink the time it takes to deliver services. I believe there are more efficiencies that we can harvest in the future by increasing the number of Lean events. My operations group director has held some Lean events, and there are a lot of good lessons learned that we’re trying to bring back and forth between the NRO and DoD side.
Q: What is Alpha Contracting, and what results are you getting here from it?
A: Alpha Contracting was born when the Navy and Lockheed Martin Owego put the H-60 Romeo on contract. Alpha Contracting works when you have a sole-source contract, so you know who the contractor is going to be and have an established relationship. When you go forward with a major contract or engineering change proposal, you have teams in place, and as the company develops a proposal, you have government and industry people working together on the proposal’s costs, hours, engineering and logistics. They work hand in hand to develop a streamlined proposal.
They do this hand in hand, so that when it comes time to negotiate the contract, many of the questions and issues are already worked out, and the costs are agreed upon. We were able to shorten the contract-award timeline in Owego. When you save time needed to award a contract, you also save people’s time, so that in the long run you save money that you can put on contract rather than doing a lot of negotiating back and forth. Every service now has something akin to Alpha Contracting, such as One Pass for the Air Force. We’ve been able to use that process in the NRO as well. All of the directorates are using various forms of Alpha Contracting, so it’s really a good news story.
Q: What are some of your goals for the future?
A: [NRO Director Dr. Donald Kerr] has delivered his strategic framework for NRO. That is his vision to deliver a much more integrated product to the intelligence community from this organization. The Communications Directorate is a big piece of helping the NRO integrate its products and capabilities to deliver a more refined and integrated service to all of our customers. In the recent past an operator would have to request services or capabilities from SIGINT, IMINT—you name the ‘int.’ But what we want the operator to be able to do is to ask the question once and get an integrated delivery of the best product in a correlated fashion. We in the Communications Directorate are working to help Dr. Kerr deliver his strategic framework. There will be new programs with improved capabilities delivered in the next months and years. ♦
