How Life Aboard A Navy Aircraft Carrier Changed When High-Speed Internet Arrived

As it battled Houthi threats around the Red Sea last year, the USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) also served as a testbed for vastly increasing the level of internet connectivity aboard the Navy’s deployed ships. Now we are learning specific details about how this mammoth change in at-sea connectedness impacted everything from how sailors went about their lives during a grueling deployment to how the ship and its air wing brought its firepower to bear on the enemy.

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighters assigned to the carrier offer a case in point for what more shipboard bandwidth — provided by commercial providers like Starlink and OneWeb — can mean at the tactical level. Jets with the embarked Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 314 took on critical mission data file updates in record time last fall due to the carrier’s internet innovations, a capability that is slated to expand across the fleet.

“This file offers intelligence updates and design enhancements that enable pilots to identify and counter threats in specific operational environments,” the Navy said in an October release announcing the feat. “The update incorporated more than 100 intelligence changes and multiple design improvements, significantly enhancing the aircraft’s survivability and lethality.”

Normally, such an update would take far longer, but it happened so fast in part due to the efforts of Capt. Kevin White, then the Lincoln’s combat systems officer, to make his carrier more connected to the internet in recent years.

“So [the Navy] reported that they delivered F-35 mission data file updates in record time,” White said this week at the annual WEST conference, which TWZ attended. “Yeah, we were doing that. And then they reported the first combat strikes in Yemen from F-35s. The enhanced nature of those strikes was because we were able to do this.”

The Lincoln’s deployment last year to the Middle East became a sea change signifier of how a ship connected to the internet via non-military satellite constellations can fight more effectively, while also offering a host of benefits when it comes to training, maintenance and maintaining crew morale when the working days are long and the port calls are few.

White noted how the F-35 “eats and breathes data daily,” and it has to be shared with commands ashore. The connectivity innovations he’s pioneered will enable such data transfers, which will only grow more complex over time.

“If you can’t get the data onboard, you’re probably going to be at a loss,” White said. “So large file transfer capability increases combat readiness.”

As TWZ previously reported, White’s work comprises the Navy’s Sailor Edge Afloat and Ashore (SEA2) program. It aims to provide high-bandwidth, resilient global connectivity for warships. It was largely conceived and tested out by White aboard the Lincoln, and the deployment last year offered further proof that the system can work. Such SEA2 systems have been tested aboard other ships as well. The Navy has identified Starlink and OneWeb as some of the private providers it is using for the effort.

It involves moving some communications aspects away from proprietary Defense Department satellites, while leaning on commercial satellite constellations and even cellular providers to keep ships more connected at sea for both personal and tactical uses.

While White’s talk this week offered some real-world indications of its benefits, TWZ extensively reported on the technical aspects of the effort last year.

SEA2 is now slated to become a funded Navy program of record. It will be known as Flank Speed Wireless, and efforts are underway to harden connectivity to an enterprise level, while scaling the innovations, said White, who is now assigned to Naval Information Warfare Systems Command.

“This is being discussed at all levels of the Navy right now,” he said.

During Lincoln’s cruise, White was transferring at download speeds of 1 gigabyte per second, with 200 megabytes on the upload, he said, provided to the 5,000 sailors on board for personal and work use.

White said there was not one equipment failure aboard Lincoln related to connectivity in the past two years, and that 780 terabytes of data was transferred during the five-and-a-half month cruise.

“I set a goal for a petabyte, but I missed that,” he said. “So there’s room for my relief to excel.”

Lincoln averaged four to eight terabytes of transferred data a day, 50 times greater than the fleet’s current capabilities. His team managed 7,000 IP addresses, with two full-time system administrators, one on during the day and one at night.

To be sure, the system was turned off at the commander’s discretion, particularly when Lincoln was in some of the Red Sea’s weapons engagement zone, and its use always took a backseat to the mission.

“We are not going to get into the details, but this is not counter-detectable,” Lincoln’s commanding officer, Capt. Pete “Repete” Riebe, told WEST attendees. “They did not know our location from what we were using. Now, when we went deep into the weapons engagement zone, we turned it all off. We turned the email traffic off, we turned the WiFi off.”

But when the system was on, it provided not only mission benefits, but benefits to the hard-working Lincoln crew as well, which was at sea for 107 days at one point with no port calls, Riebe said.

“Sailors being up on their WiFi, being connected to home, is really what made that doable in this day and age,” he said.

White said the average age of an embarked Lincoln sailor was 20.8, and Riebe noted that to attract young people into service, the Navy needs to recognize the innate connection they have to their devices.

“The next generation of sailors grew up with a cell phone in their hand, and they are uncomfortable without it,” Riebe said. “I don’t necessarily like that, but that’s reality, and if we want to compete for the best folks coming into the Navy, we need to offer them bandwidth at sea.”

Having better connectivity also helped with the ship’s administrative functions, Riebe said, making medical, dental and other work far easier than they have been in the past.

“All of that requires bandwidth, and [White] provided it to the ship, and we’re able to make the ship run more smoothly, more efficiently,” he said.

A sailor who can FaceTime with his family back home carries less non-Navy stress with them as they focus on the life-or-death duties at hand, White said.

“What we tried to do was enable a safe space for those online connections, to allow sailors to continue their continuity of life,” he said. “When it’s time to turn those connections off, the sailors are ready to run to the fire. They are ready to run to the fight, and that is what we saw on Abraham Lincoln.”

This beefed-up bandwidth allowed 38 sailors to witness the birth of their child, while others were able to watch their kids’ sporting events, White said. Several crew members pursued doctorate and master’s degrees while deployed due to better internet, while others were able to deal with personal or legal issues they had left behind back home. One officer was able to commission his wife remotely from the ship.

Dental imaging for a sailor’s custom crown moved through this enhanced bandwidth and that crown was later delivered to the ship, although White noted that medical databases remain “kind of cumbersome” to interact with, but that it lightens the load for the ship’s tactical online systems.

Content streaming posed some challenges, when it comes to copyright infringement “and activities that we’re not allowed to pass,” White said. But Lincoln was able to offer services like Netflix to sailors, as well as sporting events and access to basic internet luxuries, like fantasy football stats.

Better bandwidth also allowed sailors to order from Amazon and other online sellers. While it usually took about a month to get the package to the ship, the morale benefit was undeniable, he said. White recalled a sailor walking with a package and asking her what she had ordered.

“She’s like, I don’t know, I forgot,” he recalled.

Young sailors view internet connectivity almost like an innate thing they are owed, and having it onboard the Lincoln provided a massive boost for them, Cmdr. Eric Dente, commanding officer of Electronic Attack Squadron 133, which was embarked aboard the Lincoln, told TWZ.

“The ability to provide that connectivity … is a real boost for our sailors, who have learned in their lives to almost view having internet as just something that’s provided to them, like fresh water and food,” Dente said.

On the operational side, from “the most desolate waters,” Lincoln used its bandwidth to connect with a command in Norfolk, which undertook the ship’s annual cybersecurity scans “from halfway around the world,” White said.

“And we did it, we scanned all of our devices, we validated our authority to operate compliantly,” he said. “They validated the firmware and the device structure online … so that demonstrates that element of scalability moving forward. We should enable this type of capability, fleet-wide, write large.”

Lincoln even helped fellow carriers USS Harry S. Truman and USS Carl Vinson to help them connect similarly online, he said. Other benefits were found on the tactical side of things as well.

“A lot of tactical connected systems are actually approved to run commercial, and we should utilize that opportunity to our advantage,” White said. “We get high speed, low latency and we can also get preferred routing paths … We demonstrated several [use cases] during our deployment, and we were able to demonstrate some game-changing capability that we will pivot to moving forward.”

During a stopover in Guam, the Lincoln used six cellular antennas to connect to local cellular sites, White said. The ship ended up testing this capability at sea, achieving 5G connectivity 100 miles from shore.

“And then we immediately took it down at the end, because this was not rigged for the at-sea environment,” he added. “Put it away, but it just shows the opportunity.”

Taxpayer dollars can also be saved if a ship isn’t paying for WiFi access while in port, White noted, and the crew was able to start getting to know Italian allies online before an exercise, enhancing the personal aspects of such partnerships.

More bandwidth also means more onboard training, meaning some sailors who don’t have to leave to go to the school house, and sailors were able to get answers to maintenance questions from ashore commands faster as well.

“Just by being able to have more reliable access to support resources, we definitely become more effective at maintenance,” White said.

While taking its turn battling the Houthis in the Red Sea, the Lincoln has offered a vital proving ground for connecting a deployed ship close to the level enjoyed by all Americans back home. With proper security protocols and other institutional guardrails, better deployed bandwidth appears poised to be a game-changer for what a ship, and its sailors, can do while at sea.

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