New Special Assistant to Navy Secretary Will Oversee Cybersecurity

ARLINGTON,
Va. — The U.S. Navy is creating a new high-level position in the office of the Navy
secretary to oversee information management policy, including cybersecurity.
The position will be the special assistant for information management and will
be given authorities on the level given to the four assistant secretaries of
the Navy.

A person has
been selected for the position and that person’s name will be announced in
coming weeks, Navy Undersecretary Thomas B. Modly said when he spoke to
reporters Aug. 16 at the Pentagon.

Navy
Secretary Richard V. Spencer commissioned an independent cybersecurity study last
year in the wake of some significant cyberbreaches in the industrial base. Spencer
sought the assessment to see how the Navy was doing in cybersecurity and how it
should be organized to combat such threats.

“No one at a
senior level had responsibility for this,” Modly said, noting that the CIO
office was “more of a compliance shop, less for developing strategy.”

Modly said
the Navy wanted to change the portfolio of one of its ASNs but that Congress
did not like the idea. Like the other military branches, the Navy is limited by
law to four assistant secretaries, three of whom must be an ASN for research, development
and acquisition, an ASN for manpower and reserve affairs and one for financial management
and comptroller. The fourth, an ASN for energy, installations and environment,
is allowed by law but not prescribed.

Given the
limitation to four ASNs, the Navy elected instead to create the special
assistant, who will report directly to Modly and Spencer.

Modly has
been acting as chief information officer for the Navy, a position with has been
vacant for 20 months, to maintain “the elevation of the job.”

He said that
his meetings with the Defense Department’s CIO and the CIOs of the other
services convinced him of the need for the Navy to have an official to set
policy for information management, especially for cybersecurity. The CIO
position exists in the law.

The new
special assistant, who also will be the Navy’s CIO, will not require
confirmation by the Senate. The position will be co-located with the
department’s chief management officer and will be at an echelon just below the
ASNs. Modly said it would be an “E-ring office” in the Pentagon.

The special
assistant will oversee two four directors: chief technology officer, chief data
officer, chief of digital strategy, and chief information security officer. In
addition, two officials, the deputy chief of naval operations for information
warfare and the Marine Corps’ deputy commandant for information, will be
dual-hatted as deputies to the special assistant.

“We are
intending to bring in people from the private sector to help us in this
particular office, so we’re scouring both internally and externally to find the
right types of people to bring in, particularly in the digital strategy area
and the data strategy area,” Modly said. “There’s a lot more expertise outside
this building that inside this building and we need to rely on the lessons
learned in the private sector to do that.”

He said that
a couple of functions of the chief management officer that would migrate to the
special assistant’s portfolio, including chief data officer.

Modly said the new office
would not involve adding a huge staff at the headquarters, just “moving pieces
around the chessboard,” and that he did not anticipate that additional funding
would not be needed.