SAN DIEGO—Future naval battles could hinge on how quickly information warfare officers analyze and send information from maritime operations centers to the fleet, the chief of the U.S. Navy has said. And while AI can help with that, there are some caveats, said a top naval intelligence official.
“I really do think there’s opportunity space here with AI, but AI has the challenges of the data source has to be trusted and curated. And so there’s clearly a lot of work going on in AI, in the world of [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance], in the world of PED, but we’re working through that still,” Vice Adm. Karl Thomas, deputy chief of naval operations for information warfare and director of naval intelligence, said Wednesday during a presentation at WEST 2025.
Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti named “fighting from the MOC,” or maritime operations center, as one of seven goals to accomplish by 2033 in her 2024 NAVPLAN. Thomas leads that effort; MOCs are the epicenter of naval communications and intelligence.
The Navy is working with other agencies, such as the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, as well as the Pentagon’s chief data and AI office, to develop a common intelligence picture with a focus on “targeting quality pictures,” Thomas said.
Using AI could prevent “cognitive overload” for information warfare officers—as long as the data can be trusted.
“In this more complex and expanded battle space, I would argue that our MOCs really are going to be the linchpins that will have an outsized role to integrate not only our U.S. forces, our joint forces, but our combined ally and partner forces,” Thomas said. “As we get more and more sensors on the field, that means more and more processing, exploitation and dissemination—PED. And it’s kicking my butt in some areas because we’re getting so much information, we have to figure out how to process it quickly. We need to figure out how to exploit it, we need to figure out how to make sure we trust it and then disseminate it.”
The hardest part is fusing all the information together and picking the right data source that leads to reliable fires targeting data he said.
“How do you prioritize one or the other? How do you create the rule sets? How do you decide this is the most trusted data set? And then how do you get it in to say, ‘This is where the guy is’? …You can’t just say, ‘This is where the guy is.’ You [have to] continually update at the fires ranges that we’re talking [about]. That’s the challenge of the day that we’re working on,” Thomas said.
Additionally, there’s been some concern that the “fight from the MOC concept” could reduce commanders’ ability to pivot during operations, especially in the Indo-Pacific, where connectivity isn’t guaranteed. But Thomas said they trust commanders to make the right call, even if communication lines go down.
“If the data can be pushed out across the networks that we’re trying to make more resilient…to get that information in those orders to the tactical edge, absolutely. But if they don’t make it, the mission command and the trust that we impart in our commanders is the failsafe or the fallback,” he said. “I think we’re starting to see the resiliency and the redundancy that we’re not going to always have perfect information, we’re not going to always have perfect connectivity, but it’s getting better.”
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