WEST 2026 — The Navy’s upcoming budget request will include a focused pot of money to increase cybersecurity aboard the fleet, the department’s principal cyber adviser told Breaking Defense.
“With the secretary’s focus on shipbuilding and the announcement of Golden Fleet, we spent some time this year talking about cybersecurity risk to the fleet,” Anne Marie Schumann said during a Tuesday interview at the annual WEST conference. “That’s an area where I think you’re going to see a lot of progress in the next year, especially given a number of the reform initiatives that are going on, acquisition reform, we have the announcement of the CNOs Fighting Instructions.”
“I think you’re going to see increased investment and increased attention on cybersecurity of the fleet this year,” she added.
Schumann noted that with several high profile efforts such as acquisition reform, Golden Fleet and emphasis on ship building, the demand signal for cybersecurity of the ships will have to increase.
The stakes really couldn’t be higher for the Navy, she said, because adversaries understand that ships are essentially floating computers and are looking for any asymmetric advantage they can achieve. In order to realize the idea of the Golden Fleet — a still largely-obscured concept that is highlighted by the Trump-class battleship design — that armada has to be resilient and survivable.
Historically, cybersecurity in ships has been a bolt on, not baked in from the beginning. After all, cyber wasn’t even a word in the lexicon when many legacy platforms were being designed and engineered, she pointed out
“It is absolutely critical to bake in cyber and have that security by design in any new ship that we build, whether it’s manned or an unmanned ship,” she said.
Part of that resilience and survivability involves having the right cybersecurity as well as the right level of readiness of sailors and Marines to operate in that cyber contested environment, she said.
“How do we understand what are our core warfighting capabilities and make sure that as we are an increasingly denied environment, that we can still perform those abilities, even as we maybe shed some of our less critical efforts that we do on the ship,” Schumann said. “There’s the idea of what is the core mission I need to perform. Can we do that? Yes or No? Are the sailors trained to make sure that we can sustain that mission?”
