Since we started our Naval Flight Officer syllabus review recently, I have spent significant time thinking about what we do here at VAW-120, as well as why and how we do it. I have become amazed at how "analog" our process is to train Naval Aviators, Naval Flight Officers, Aircrew and Maintenance Personnel for the Fleet. The advent of the internet, which ironically was born in the U.S. Department of Defense, has not had a significant effect on our training production process despite its pervasiveness in every other aspect of life.
Where we have become more "digital," it has largely been a digitization of an older, analog process, rather than giving birth to a new, and truly digital way of doing business. To illustrate the difference, imagine scanning a hard cover (i.e. analog) textbook into a .pdf format and posting that on a website for use and review. That is what I mean by the digitization of an analog process. Contrast that with what is happening at Rice University through a program called Connexions®. From the Connexions® website, "Connexions is an environment for collaboratively developing, freely sharing, and rapidly publishing scholarly content on the Web." Content is posted in .xml format using open content licenses to encourage collaboration. A truly digital knowledge ecosystem wholly different in nature from anything analog.
Today, our community is going through an enormous amount of technological change. We are digitizing our E-2C & C-2A cockpit instrumentation. We are also capitalizing on increased digital processing capabilities to improve our sensor performance. With the arrival of the E-2D, the digital space-time adaptive processing capability in our new APY-9 radar will provide a significant performance advantage to our new airborne command and control platform, the Advanced Hawkeye. Our thought processes and training processes must also adapt and digitize.One of the ways my thought process will evolve is through this blog. I've called it "Open Source Readiness" for several reasons. First, I used the term open-source because the concept is inherently digital. The open-source movement came to be with the rise of the internet. Secondly, our evolution as a community ought to be participatory, the product of many voices. Anyone, Officer or Enlisted, staff or student, active or reserve, military or civilian, is free to use, add to, challenge and improve upon the ideas I present here. I also used the term readiness for an essential purpose. The entire Naval Aviation Enterprise is aligned to the concept of readiness. Readiness is the key attribute of the aircrew and maintenance professionals we produce here at VAW-120. It is what we measure as a result of our expenditure of taxpayer dollars. If we are going to overcome the challenges of producing aircrew and maintenance professionals in a resource constrained environment and meet the demands of "better, faster, cheaper and safer" which always act upon us, we must become more digital and collaborative.
Let our digitization begin! ~ DDC
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Connexions® is a registered trademark of Rice University.
