The sea service’s maritime operations centers, or MOCs, are part of the Navy’s approach to fleet-level command and control and are expected to be “the center” of how sailors fight in a distributed manner in future battles, according to the CNO Navigation Plan released last year.

“MOCs and the processes they execute, whether in one location or disaggregated, are how fleets convert data into information to deliver decision advantage for the commander. MOCs must be capable of integrating with the Joint Force, Allies, and partners to link our fleet commanders to the range of sensors, shooters, and effectors distributed across the battlespace. To integrate a maneuvering, distributed, information-centric fight requires that we treat MOCs as the weapons systems they are,” then-Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti wrote.

She tasked all fleet headquarters, beginning with Pacific Fleet, to have MOCs certified and proficient in command and control, information, intelligence, fires, movement and maneuver, protection, and sustainment functions by 2027.

Franchetti was fired in February by the Trump administration amid a broader removal of senior military leaders at the Pentagon in the early months of President Donald Trump’s second term. Adm. James Kilby has been performing the duties of CNO since then.

Navy leaders have identified AI as a tool that could help commanders and the MOCs.

“One area that can help in that is probably in the area of decision-making, in terms of whether it be AI or some other way of creating an advantage for the commander in terms of that OODA loop that [Pacific Fleet Commander] Adm. [Stephen] Koehler referred to, where we take all this tremendous amounts of data that we have and are able to fuse it quickly into a coherent picture that matches the commander’s timing and tempo and sequencing of events that needs to occur as he or she makes those decisions,” Vice Adm. Michael Vernazza, Naval Information Forces commander, said earlier this year at the WEST conference.

The latest outreach to industry from the Defense Innovation Unit comes via a new solicitation for the Situational Awareness by Intelligent Learning Systems, or SAILS, program.

“U.S. Navy assets generate vast amounts of multi-source tactical data from various platforms, including space-based, shipboard, and airborne assets, as well as unstructured data (intelligence reports, watch logs, etc.) produced by sailors. Currently, Maritime Operations Centers (MOCs) must manage and analyze large volumes of multi-source data generated across the fleet to make critical resource allocation decisions for geographically dispersed fleet and national assets,” DIU officials wrote in a problem statement.

“The Navy seeks commercial AI/ML applications that accelerate the convergence of MOC-destined data inputs (e.g. intelligence reports, satellite-derived data, and existing common operational picture tools, etc.) to improve situational awareness for operators, and optimize existing decision support tools by offering track confidence scoring and real-time recommendations to assist commanders in allocating geographically dispersed resources (e.g. satellites, aircraft, vessels, etc),” they added.

Desired attributes for the technologies include watchfloor workflow automation via connection to third-party software and data platforms through APIs to deliver models developed for MOC use cases; provision of models to generate track confidence scores and threshold-based alerts to end-users; generation of sensor and resource allocation recommendations that take into account communication bandwidth conditions, geographic constraints, sensor reliability, past model performance, watchstander availability and other information to inform MOC commanders of asset availability and readiness; and “natural language-based model tuning that allows MOC end-users to interactively adjust objective functions, factors, and constraints” while ensuring that the model’s decision-making process is “maximally interpretable and/or explainable,” among other characteristics.

Solutions should enable role-based access control and cross-domain data sharing, comply with NIST 800-171 cybersecurity controls, support deployment on government or contractor-provided infrastructure and allow for operations across different classification levels, among other technical attributes, according to the solicitation.

Industry responses to the solicitation are due June 6.

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The blueprint, first developed over a year ago, documents the reference architecture to move from a host of interconnected systems to a capability platform model. Version two of the plan was published last fall, further defining features such as how cloud services interact with each other, Jennifer Edgin, assistant deputy chief of naval operations for information warfare (N2N6B), said in an interview at the Sea-Air-Space conference this week. She added that the plan also helped drive down some network redundancies to eliminate legacy networks.

The blueprint has “really laid a strong foundation for a lot of our infrastructure in terms of our network modernization … we want to have our interconnected MOCs,” Edgin said.

The Navy has stated that those MOCs, short for marine operations centers, will be the primary warfighting platform from which the service will fight and command and control its forces. This has been necessitated by the greater distances — particularly in the Pacific — that the Navy must be ready to fight across. Forces will be distributed and must command and control their assets while passing critical data back and forth — a task too great for carrier strike groups to do alone.

“To ensure that we maintain our warfighting advantage, our commanders have to have information and decision advantage. Our maritime operations centers is where we fuse that information. It’s where we make warfighting decisions. It’s where we outthink — it’s where we outmaneuver the adversary and where we generate orders to the fleet,” Vice Adm. Karl Thomas, deputy chief of naval operations for information warfare and director of naval intelligence, N2/N6, said during a panel at the conference. “In all cases, the complexity and the speed of the fight will rely on us synthesizing vast amounts of information. The amount of information that is flowing now compared to what it was in the past is a tremendous order of magnitude difference.”

Edgin explained that the MOCs are where the fleet will begin the process of commanding and controlling information and forces.

The Navy is targeting 2027 for all MOCs to be certified, beginning with the Pacific theater. Each MOC is slightly different, and to get to that point by 2027 will take a variety of efforts, such as developing back-end technology to enable the interfaces and information flows. They will also have to focus on training forces to ensure sailors are proficient learning in live, virtual and constructive environments.

“Just think of, you do something once, and then you don’t have to do it for a number of months, your skills atrophy. That’s just normal. We want to create that opportunity for sailors to get reps and sets of continuous,” Edgin said. The focus is “making sure that we’re getting the right sailors to the right places. Sailors today are our biggest strategic advantage. They come to the Navy with a whole host of skills that maybe my generation didn’t have. They’re digital natives. Unleashing them in a virtual environment, they’re going to help us advance even more rapidly.”

Moreover, that plan lays out a common reference architecture for what officials described as the tech stack for the MOCs, which will leverage the power of cloud and zero trust to allow customizable apps and interfaces for forces to use with standardized data. With forces using over 70 systems, they will rely on a tightly coupled tech stack from hardware up to the data, according to officials.

“Just like if you were building a subdivision, you would have a couple of different blueprints with some specific options for the houses. That’s exactly what we’re doing in the information environment,” Edgin said.

Edgin noted that the Navy’s Project Overmatch seeks to complement the ashore efforts.

“A lot of times when we think of our blueprint, we think of just our ashore infrastructure. Well, for the Navy, it’s ashore and afloat. Overmatch is our effort to implement our naval operational architecture, particularly at that tactical end,” she said. “That experimentation and that delivery of capability has really yielded great results, not only solving some problems, but for us to define how we want things to work. As we define that at the top of the kind of infrastructure that’s important. It’s a great kind of symbiotic relationship between the two.”

Among some major lessons from Overmatch, Edgin noted it has helped the Navy determine how to use what it already has in different ways, rather than having to make completely new investments.

“When we talk about something new, there’s often a perspective of, oh, you have to get rid of everything. No, there are some good things that we’ve put in place that have allowed sailors to be successful. We want to make sure that those things are kept in place, those continue to advance and it isn’t just a new build,” she said. “That’s where I think some of our biggest learning has occurred is how do you take something new, bring it into an environment that has years and years of capital expenditures and make it all work together. That’s what I think is our biggest lessons learned from Overmatch.”

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The chief of naval operations, Adm. Lisa Franchetti, in her Navigation Plan released late last year outlined that the MOC will be the “center” to how the Navy fights in a distributed manner. She noted that they must be capable of integrating with the joint force and partner nations to link fleet commanders to sensors and shooters across the battlefield. The CNO tasked all fleet headquarters, beginning with Pacific Fleet, to have MOCs certified and proficient in command and control, information, intelligence, fires, movement and maneuver, protection, and sustainment functions by 2027.

The change has been necessitated by the larger distances — namely in the Pacific — that the Navy must be ready to fight across. Forces will be distributed and must command and control their assets while passing critical data back and forth — a task too great for carrier strike groups to do alone.

The Navy’s initiative, and the reasoning behind it, is similar to others made across the other services, such as the Army moving the main unit of action up from brigade to division.

“This battlespace is just bigger and bigger across a larger amount of sea space,” Vice Adm. Karl Thomas, deputy chief of naval operations for information warfare and director of naval intelligence, said at the annual WEST conference this week, equating fighting from the MOC to being able to achieve decision advantage over the adversary.

He noted that as he and his organization are thinking about fighting from the MOC, information has to be be parsed and synthesized at machine speed across the vast battlespace.

“Decision superiority is going to be predicated on our ability to have the right information at the right time to the right warrior at the right classification level. And it’s got to support the seven joint warfighting functions,” he said.

Naval Information Forces (NAVIFOR) was recently named as the type command for the MOCs, charging it with training forces to operate them.

“The MOC TYCOM is not just an IW mission, but a whole of Navy platform that aligns the primary processes for Navy and Joint Force maritime component command C2 and decision-making. Our responsibilities as MOC TYCOM provide unique and challenging opportunities to drive success at the operational level of war across nine MOCs and every number fleet and fleet headquarters in the world,” Vice Adm. Michael Vernazza, NAVIFOR commander, said at the conference.

Vernazza told reporters that one of the things he wants to make significant progress on this year is readiness to fight from the maritime operations centers.

“Fight from the MOC, that also means that we have developed a well-trained and efficient MOC team that is able to execute the seven joint functions,” he said.

As he’s looking to build that capability out, Vernazza wants tools for faster decision-making such as artificial intelligence to fuse data.

“I’d say decision-making would be certainly an area, probably in terms of fires as well, and taking what we know will be a very complex and dynamic battlespace and creating a way to understand how the fires piece can work more effectively and more efficiently,” he said. “One area that can help in that is probably in the area of decision-making, in terms of whether it be AI or some other way of creating an advantage for the commander in terms of that OODA loop that [Pacific Fleet Commander] Adm. [Stephen] Koehler referred to, where we take all this tremendous amounts of data that we have and are able to fuse it quickly into a coherent picture that matches the commander’s timing and tempo and sequencing of events that needs to occur as he or she makes those decisions.”

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