Naval Ops for Info Dominance Plans Revealed

It's rare that an audience of industry and service members at all ranks get the chance to hear first hand from the first of a kind. But that was the case after eating lunch on Wednesday of WEST 2010. Vice Adm. Jack Dorsett, USN, the Navy's first N2/N6 may have begun his speech by wondering why he was among other high-ranking military experts at the conference, but he followed through with revealing the latest approaches the Navy is taking to achieve information dominance. The Navy is developing new mini-road maps of sorts that address nearly a dozen topics, including undersea dominance, maritime ballistic C2 and improved maritime domain awareness. Rather than write lengthy tomes on this topics that are more likely to grow rusty than be read, these topics are being tackled with short - 30- rather than 300-page - descriptions of where the Navy is going. Perhaps of most interest to the industry members in the audience was Adm. Dorsett's announcement that two industry days are already scheduled to take place where even classified information will be shared. The first one, in June, will feature Navy representatives laying out their requirements; the second, scheduled for September, will be industry's turn to come to the table with their ideas and solutions. Truth be told, many may say they've heard this all before. But somehow, when Adm. Dorsett explained the new plans, the cadence in his voice seemed to present an air of certainty unheard since perhaps the days of Adm. Art Cebrowski and talk of transformation. Time will tell. What do you think? Is this really a new approach, or just a new buzzword name for the same old concepts?