Richard Cunningham

Director, Naval Enterprise Networks

U.S. Department of the Navy

Mr. Richard Cunningham serves as the Director of Naval Enterprise Networks. A distinguished senior
cyber warrior for the Department of War, he is recognized for leading the U.S. Navy’s largest-ever
defensive cyber operation, Operation Rolling Tide. As the operation’s planner and program manager,
he led a Navy-wide 48-hour cyber maneuver that successfully defeated a foreign nation-state actor, for
which he was named NIWC Atlantic’s FY14 Civilian of the Year and received a commendation from the
Chief of Naval Operations.
In his immediately preceding role as DISA’s Chief Strategist, Mr. Cunningham created and
implemented the Intermediate Military Objective (IMO) process to advance the agency toward its most
pressing challenge: enabling Long Range Joint and Combined Fires. This agency-wide process fuses
Lean Portfolio Management with warfighting doctrine, providing a new framework to balance DISA’s
dual roles as a major acquisition agency and a Combat Support Agency. He frames the goal of this effort
as the next evolution in fires doctrine — “adding tubes to the fight” — the next step in a progression of
fires data exchange that began with runners and signalmen and evolved through the telegraph,
telephone, and radio to the internet age. Using the IMO framework he established, he steered the
agency to move beyond legacy formats and pass enriched data objects directly between targeting
systems, a leap that allows the Joint and Combined Force to mass fires more effectively, shrink the kill
chain, and enable a truly integrated kill web.
A proven architect of national-level defense frameworks, Mr. Cunningham has led transformations for
multiple agencies. He created DISA’s Multi-Echelon Distributed Network and Defensive Cyber
Operations doctrine to decentralize network command while retaining enterprise control. Previously,
while embedded at U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency, he created the Joint Cyber
Warfighting Architecture (JCWA) and laid the intellectual foundation for two of Cybercom 2.0’s
transformation initiatives, the New Force Generation Model and the Cyber Innovation Warfighting
Center. He also spearheaded deployment of the Navy’s Cloud Based Internet Isolation (CBII) solution,
orchestrating a complex, 14-time-zone troubleshooting effort that culminated in the first-ever
deployment of a production cloud service to an underway warship, USS AMERICA. This pioneering
work established the repeatable, scalable model later used to deploy CBII across the Department of
War’s 3.2 million users. Mr. Cunningham has also served on numerous Source Selection and Evaluation
Boards as a senior technical expert, Source Selection Chair, and Source Selection Authority.
Mr. Cunningham’s career includes his current role as Director, Naval Enterprise Networks
(2026–Present); Chief Strategist at DISA (2025–2026); Enterprise Architect and Organizational
Consultant in private industry (2020–2025); and 14 years as a Senior Engineer and National-Level
Subject Matter Expert at NIWC Atlantic (2006–2020). He is a licensed Professional Engineer (PE), a
certified Project Management Professional (PMP), a member of the Defense Acquisition Corps, and a
graduate of the University of South Carolina (B.S., Electrical Engineering). His awards include NIWC
Atlantic’s FY14 Civilian of the Year, a Special Act Award for support of the Global Combat Support
System – Marine Corps (GCSS-MC), and numerous additional commendations.

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