Information Dominance - N2/N6 - COM10FLT

"Beginning today, the Navy no longer has an N2 or director for intelligence and an N6 director for command, control and communications. We now have a director for Information dominance. The reason it started today was the officer who was nominated for that position was just confirmed by the Senate on Thursday and as a former chief of legislative affairs, you never presume confirmation so we waited, but Jack Dorsett is off and running this morning with his fused organization that brings together information, intelligence, command and control, and in doing that we have also moved programs that have traditionally been the purview of what in the Navy we call the platform responders, the ships, the submarines and the airplanes, and we have now moved several of those programs out of the platform directorate, if you will, into the Director for Information Dominance, and unmanned systems fall into this new organization because the vehicle itself is nothing more than a node and it's the architecture and it's the information that is moving through those nodes that will give the war fighter the advantage in the future. So all of that has now been consolidated in there.

This is a significant move for the Navy to do this. We have also stood up a cyber fleet, the 10th Fleet, that will be the global operator of cyber, and how that feeds and fits and supports the unmanned will be evolving in the coming months, but those were the changes that we have made. You probably didn't expect me to quote Machiavelli at an unmanned systems lecture, but I have a little card on my desk that is a quote from Machiavelli and in it he says that, "Nothing is more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct or more uncertain of its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things." But this is the right way, this is where we have to go, and it will make us much, much more effective."

Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Gary Roughead at Brookings Institution on 2 November discussing Future Unmanned Naval Technologies