The Navy announced Rear Adm. Douglas W. Small as the new commander of Naval Information Warfare Systems Command (NAVWAR) July 13.
According to a news release from the Defense Department, Small will replace Rear Adm. Christian “Boris” Becker, who has led NAVWAR since March 2017.
Small will be promoted to a two-star rear admiral as he takes over the San Diego-based organization. NAVWAR is responsible for the acquisition of command and control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance technologies for the sea service.
Small is joining NAVWAR as the program executive officer for integrated warfare systems in Washington, D.C. It is unclear what’s next for Becker.
During Becker’s tenure, NAVWAR migrated the Navy’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) tool to the cloud. The migration was the largest the Navy had completed thus far and was also completed 10 months ahead of schedule.
“It starts with commitment and preparation,” Becker said in a February interview with C4ISRNET. “The systems you’re going to migrate have gotta be cloud ready. And, in some cases, for systems and applications that currently reside in our own government data centers, they’re not there yet. A lesson to take away from the experience with ERP [is] that when you get your applications cloud ready, then you can move there and start to achieve those benefits of operating in this flexible architecture.”
At NAVWAR, Becker also had to work through difficulties in the Navy fleet’s network, called the Combined Afloat Network Enterprise Services (CANES). Initial feedback on CANES was poor, he told C4ISRNET, but the organization made improvements.
“Now are there things we’re still working on? You betcha,” he said in the February interview. “But as we look to the future of CANES, and we look to an architecture that’s fully digital, i.e., solid-state hardware, really delivering what I would call a cloud afloat. It’s delivering not only Infrastructure as a Service, not only Platform as a Service, but a software architecture that, in essence, provides Software as a Service.”
Before Small became the program executive officer for integrated warfare systems, he was executive assistant to the assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition.
Andrew Eversden covers all things defense technology for C4ISRNET. He previously reported on federal IT and cybersecurity for Federal Times and Fifth Domain, and worked as a congressional reporting fellow for the Texas Tribune. He was also a Washington intern for the Durango Herald. Andrew is a graduate of American University.
