Naval Sea Systems Command

Wow.

And then I... got to my meetings with Naval Sea Systems Command.

They just moved into new buildings at the Navy Yard, so no one really had a television or anything set up yet, so we were just kind of searching for information.

And then my sister and her husband were both still on active duty in the Army, and they had just transferred up to the D.C. metro area and we're both supposed to be in the Pentagon that morning, and by tremendous luck, neither of them were.

I think it's gotten exacerbated by this combat operations and it makes the appearance that we're not making progress.

And as I said, in January of this year at the Surface Navy Association's annual symposium, There was a whole section of the symposium that the Naval Sea Systems Command representative, senior person there, was saying, we're going to start, you know, instituting new kinds of paints.

Now, again, everything is an execution.

And when you're in a, again, in this combat environment, these kind of things take time to be reflected.

But this is a problem that cannot be solved in one single administration.

We need continuity of vision and execution to get these things done.

And we also need to get after the problems that we talked about previously, which is the ship designs that we've had over the last 20 years with Naval Sea Systems Command have not been very successful.

The Littoral Combat Ship, the Zumwalt-class cruiser, problems with the Ford-class with the electromagnetic aircraft launch systems and advanced weapons elevators, magnetic elevators, and then the Constellation-class frigate.

...

some of, some of the work, uh, that you talked about in the robotic welding side, we looked at in a recent ETI report on robotic welding that was done by a NAVSEA engineer on loan to us for a little while.

Mm-hmm.

Talked about the almost lack of incentives sometimes to make use of robotic welding by people building ships for the Navy.

So then eventually the spoofer can actually go grab it and then take it.

And then we have worked with the Navy on that one, with NAVSEA.

And I think my colleagues, after I left Virginia Tech, they tested it in the Alaska base in the Navy.

So we have worked on that.

In any case, yeah.

And what's kind of funny is back in the 90s, EPRI actually accidentally steered the technology away from its core purpose, which was in 1985, NAVSEA.

the US Navy had done research on using current signature analysis for looking at pumps, fans, and compressors, the bearings, the belts, the components, all the rotating components using the motor as the sensor, not too much different than we are now.

I mean, mind you, we've got better resolution now, we've got more powerful, I mean, I look at my data from the 90s and now it's completely different.

... who preceded me at EINE, uh, had retired and had been working in the office of the Navy, uh, General Counsel, uh, as the Joint Guam Program Office counsel.

And he had just been selected for a new job as the senior OGC environmental attorney at Naval Sea Systems Command.

So in about the June, July timeframe, I get a call from Craig Jensen, a retired Navy Marine Court judge advocate, who had followed Ron Burrow as the, uh, Navy OGC assistant general counsel for energy, installation, and environment.

And he says, "Hey, um, Matt's gonna be moving over to Naval Sea Systems Command.

We've got an opening here.

Are you interested?" And I said-

She liter- literally resigned, uh, uh, her active duty commission and left work on a Friday, and started with Navy OGC on a Monday.

Her transition was that quick.

Yeah

... uh, NAVSEA-

Yeah

... uh, PAE now during the time.

Moosally approved it.

He was told the experiments had been authorized at Naval Sea Systems Command, but they had not been authorized.

The individual at NAVSEA who gave the nod had no authority to do so, and Moosally was misled about that, as, it seems, was Costigan.

That is the Navy's own finding, and it's important because the popular version of this story sometimes has Moosally running rogue experiments willy-nilly.