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West 2006, the annual conference and exposition sponsored by AFCEA International and the U.S. Naval Institute, began with a day of vital speeches and panels and ended with bagpipes and a videoteleconference with U.S. Marines in Iraq.

Special operations, technology challenges and personnel issues dominated the second day of West 2006, the annual conference and exposition sponsored by AFCEA International and the U.S. Naval Institute. The busiest day of the three-day program, titled "Services Roles and Structures: What's Right for the Way Ahead," featured two top-level speakers and three panel discussions.

The final day of West 2006, the annual conference and exposition sponsored by AFCEA International and the U.S. Naval Institute, was a star-studded event marked by a panel comprising high-ranking flag officers and a pair of speeches by two of the Navy's highest-ranking admirals.

From its start as an adjunct to warfighting to its expanded role in all forms of military activities, the discipline of information operations has steadily increased in importance to the modern force. The concept has grown in size and scope, and it now finds itself occupying an important seat at the table of force projection. Yet this evolution did not come about without difficulty, and challenges still remain before the true effectiveness of information operations can be realized.

An expendable one-way gateway buoy that provides a paging system for submarines is undergoing technology demonstrations in the Pacific Ocean. The U.S. Navy considers the buoy to be a possible near-term interface between radio frequency satellites and acoustic communications. This paging system is designed to ensure submarine communications at speed and depth.

The U.S. Navy is developing the first group of hybrid sailors to serve on a vessel that is revolutionary in its technology as well as in how it will be manned and employed. To aptly prepare the crew members, the service is revamping some of its training curricula so these sailors can handle the multitude of tasks required in a totally systems integrated environment. This is the first time the groundwork for a ship's manning as well as its training requirements is being based on job task analyses conducted across the enlisted community.

Changes are afoot in the fleet as the U.S. Navy plans for greater versatility in force and execution. The Navy's vital FORCEnet program, which is the baseline for the service's infostructure, will alter Navy capabilities significantly. However, it is more than just an end in and of itself. As revolutionary as FORCEnet is to naval planning, it also represents an evolutionary phase that offers to lead to a complete revolution in warfighting amid seamless integration in the joint realm.

A new high-power commercial X-band communications satellite, designed to meet growing bandwidth demands, will help satiate the U.S. military's voracious appetite for space-based connections. Rapidly increasing satellite communications requirements are expected to continue outstripping government-owned satellite capacity for the foreseeable future.

Flattening a network instead of a city may be the key to successful urban combat operations. U.S. Army intelligence is restructuring its information architecture both to suit the ongoing force transformation and with an eye on the joint arena. The Army's goal is to create a network that extends the reach of vital information across the breadth of the force and down to the individual warfighter.

Although centuries old, information operations is fast becoming the newest strategic weapon in the U.S. military's arsenal. The reformation has come about more by evolution than revolution, bringing individual specialties such as electronic warfare, operations security, military deception, psychological operations and computer network operations under one umbrella. But the result of this synthesis is a military capability that can be a force multiplier when integrated early, often and continuously throughout mission planning and execution.