In San Diego, the U.S. Navy is continuing a year-long struggle to limit public scrutiny of port operations. In early November, as the newly-refitted USS Pinckney (DDG 91), a Flight IIA Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, left port for an initial shakedown cruise, harbor webcams tracked the vessel’s every move through the port. Online, a viral frenzy dissected the Pinckney’s ungainly, “bug-eyed” refit. Days later, the U.S. Navy Criminal Investigative Service started shutting the webcam service’s cameras down.
It was a strange incident. The USS Pinckney, testing an important electronic warfare system, sported a new topside geometry, modifying the distinctive Arleigh Burke silhouette. Commentators and internet observers employed San Deigo webcam images to help news of the destroyer’s new refit go viral, detailing, discussing—and sometimes disparaging—the destroyer’s top-heavy new look.
The Navy’s apparent response to the USS Pinckney’s mixed on-line reception was swift. Barry Bahrami, the San Diego Web Cam’s long-time volunteer organizer, took to the site formally known as Twitter, reporting that NCIS personnel had “reached out to Kona Kai”, a local waterfront resort currently hosting a few of the service’s cameras. Citing a range of concerns and threatening the property with litigation, the investigators urged the resort to, essentially, stop the show.
According to Bahrami, the cameras are now down, but if NCIS fails to justify the legal basis for their verbal request in writing, the cameras will, in a few days, go right back online. Fed-up and frustrated by the Navy’s actions, Bahrami is perplexed by Navy’s refusal to engage directly with his Navy-friendly volunteer organization—or to even simply talk about ways to resolve any outstanding security issues. An irked Bahrami now seems ready to engage the Navy in a bruising legal action to affirm the public’s right to livestream harbor traffic.
The NCIS actions were oddly timed. After allowing the harbor cameras to go unmolested for more than a decade, NCIS has encouraged the shut down of Bahrami’s unsparing cameras twice this year-but only after the webcam feeds fueled widespread viral scrutiny, likely discomfiting Navy leaders.
NCIS’ interest in the San Diego Web Cam can be traced back to November 2022, when the service’s webcams caught two Navy ships going head-to-head in the San Diego port channel, narrowly avoiding a collision. The Navy’s high-level investigation into the incident, fueled by public outcry over the viral webcam clips, detailed serious operational failings aboard both ships. As the investigation results leaked into public view in April 2023, NCIS encouraged the National Park Service to shut down San Diego Web Cam cameras located on National Park Service property—the very cameras that had originally detailed the Navy’s dangerous game of port channel “chicken”.
While the San Diego Web Cam’s constant, high—definition video monitoring is certainly jarring, the Navy’s effort to cut San Diego’s harbor webcams seems, at this point, more punitive than prudent. Over the course of the Cold War, Soviet trawlers lingered outside key U.S. submarine ports, filming and monitoring military comings and goings. The Navy was pretty sanguine about that surveillance work, confident transiting subs and ships suffered few ill effects.
Today, surveillance trawlers are Cold War relics, and adversarial surveillance has likely moved ashore and online. China and Russia almost certainly maintain constant overwatch of San Diego’s naval infrastructure through sensors in rented housing, hacked cameras or other obscure technical means.
But the key difference is that the contents of rival surveillance is never made public.
And that is the point.
Aside from the fact that the Navy seems able to tolerate close opposing force surveillance, detecting rival surveillance and rolling it all back is really hard work. NCIS, for its part, certainly hasn’t reported many instances of detecting and degrading persistent foreign surveillance of critical ports and naval infrastructure.
Instead of protecting the force from foreign monitoring, Navy security appears to be taking the far easier and higher profile path of protecting the Navy’s reputation.
It is telling that, the moment webcam footage began informing public discourse, revealing some Navy fault or sparking other tough discussions, the Navy’s security apparatus rolled into action, seeking to eliminate the reputational “threat.”
Reputation management and force protection are related, but they are two distinct activities that should not be conflated.
SEWIP Block 3 Has An OnlyFans Moment
The Navy has good reason to be sensitive about the USS Pinckney. As the first demonstrator of what may grow into a class-wide, $17 billion modernization project, upgrading the electronic warfare systems, radars and software aboard most of the Navy’s large Flight IIA Arleigh Burke-class destroyer fleet, the $121 million Pinckney upgrade is a big deal. After a disastrous Ticonderoga-class cruiser modification program, the Navy, obviously eager to couch the refit as a success, is likely to be somewhat oversensitive to the ship’s public reception.
Poor public reception aside, the Navy also likely has good reason to be bit shy about revealing detailed imagery of the ship’s new structural modifications. The USS Pinckney is testing out a new electronic warfare system, SEWIP Block 3, known officially as the AN/SLQ-32(V)7 Surface Electronic Warfare Improvement Program Block 3. The last thing the Navy wants is a close inspection of the new weapon system as it goes through tests and trials.
The new system, emplaced in complex steel “bug eye” structures on either side of the ship, that, according to Defense News, “have to maintain just the right angles and flat surfaces for the system’s arrays.” Adversaries, by getting a close look at the geometry beamed to them via the internet, can get a jumpstart on figuring out ways to defeat the new gear.
It is hard to underestimate just how critical SEWIP is for the U.S. Navy.
As a platform that enhances anti-missile defenses, while also providing counter-targeting, counter-surveillance, electronic attack and other interesting capabilities, the SEWIP Block 3 is rightfully wrapped in mystery. But the public can make a few simple guesses about what the new SEWIP can offer. With, for example, more confidence that incoming missiles won’t land, the Navy can shift the contents of the fleet’s limited number of vertical launched missile tubes towards other missions—and that is a big deal as China and the U.S. square off in the Pacific.
Informed observers, eyeing the platform from a more adversarial point of view, can make inferences of their own, immediately employing the high-resolution images to start work to degrade the effectiveness of America’s latest-and-greatest electronic warfare platform. Nothing is certain, but, given the system’s complexity and the Navy’s constant struggle to integrate interdisciplinary systems engineering assessments into complex platforms, Navy engineers may well have overlooked security concerns, and, in the ship’s structure, revealed more than might be advised.
Force Protection Does Not Mean Protection From Mistakes
In an increasingly crowded world, public encroachment on military bases and Navy operations is a fact of life. And with technology offering ever-more opportunities for constant, intrusive surveillance, the Navy is obviously struggling to adjust. The abrupt technology-driven empowerment of public scrutiny is a sea change for Navy officials, and the Navy is simply not managing it well.
Nobody likes being on stage all the time, but far from being a threat, interested outside observation is an asset. For decades, the Navy has paid millions to think tanks and consulting companies for “external assessments of performance.” Today, webcam operators, bloggers and commentators are offering many of these insights up for free.
While disconcerting, these are opportunities worth exploiting.
But the Navy, where careers can end in a viral moment, hates being embarrassed and, as a result, the organization fears public engagement it cannot fully control. So, more often than not, the institution resorts to a sort of defensive crouch, lashing out at well-meaning observers and often refusing to engage observational stakeholders that are beyond the fence line.
Rather than engaging these interesting—albeit hard to control—assets, and getting about the business of fixing—or even exploiting—things, the Navy resorts to a crude form of maladroit expediency. Time after time, the organization simply ignores the issue at hand and, instead, tries to limit or remove the means for public scrutiny.
The Navy is comfortable using security as a reason to squelch domestic debate. With no public oversight, the organization simply circles the wagons and act as if mishaps don’t happen. It is how big Navy debacles like Red Hill, fire safety, bad barracks or other local problems are allowed to fester—and by failing to percolate up the internal command chain, these issues lurked until they exploded into something impossible for the Navy and Navy policymakers to ignore.
The San Diego Web Cam crackdown is not an isolated incident. In 2008, facing a blog-fed public uproar over the materiel condition of the fleet, the Navy closed off public access to vessel inspection reports. By classifying the already-redacted reports, choking off any external means for the public to evaluate the material condition of naval vessels, the Navy then let their vessels continue to decay. Ironically enough, it is why the Navy is so worried about the Pinckney refit—the surface Navy’s materiel condition has decayed to the point where, if the Arleigh Burke refits fail, the organization will have little left in reserve.
At the end of the day, public scrutiny from interested stakeholders helps the Navy get better. While wide public notice and viral discussion of mistakes, anomalies and accidents are embarrassing and may discomfit those in charge, few things encourage the Navy to change course faster than sustained public attention.
There’s certainly a line somewhere. The fight in Ukraine is demonstrating the value of real-time social media leaks. Information on vessel location can quickly get flipped into a targeting solution for incoming missiles. Technical information gleaned from video close-ups can give opposing-force researchers a leg up. That’s nothing new, but, these days, America’s cadre of public observers likely offer little information that America’s sophisticated rivals haven’t already discovered.
It is a big challenge, but the Navy certainly won’t resolve those threats if it continues the stupid business of conflating reputation management with the tough work of real, honest-to-God force protection.
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