To that end, the Department of the Navy must develop a strategy to achieve and maintain information superiority for naval forces. Information superiority must be established as a warfare area under an integrated organizational structure with responsibility for resource planning, program development, and budgeting for all Navy and Marine Corps information systems and services that are not unique to individual platforms or weapons systems. An information-in-warfare system for achieving information superiority comprises:

• Information sources, communications systems, information processing and fusion systems, and decision support and display systems, all seamlessly integrated by an infrastructure;

• The means for protecting these information systems and services by making them diverse, secure, and robust to attack or countermeasures; and

• The means to deny hostile forces the ability to degrade, disrupt, and/or utilize these information systems.

Today these three components are pursued separately and with unequal emphasis. The Department of the Navy must establish an organizational structure that integrates the development, protection, and denial of information services across all naval platforms in a ''system of systems" context. The importance of maintaining a tight coupling between information sources, systems, and services to include intelligence, sensors, MCG (mapping, charting, geodesy), command and control, weapons, and targeting systems cannot be overemphasized. We are rapidly moving into an information-rich era involving highly mobile forces, precision-guided weapons, exquisite global situation awareness, focused logistics, and full-dimensional protection of our forces. Information superiority must be the centerpiece for any vision of joint and coalition force operations in the 21st century. Information superiority will not, however, be viewed with the importance it demands unless naval officers are rewarded, career paths established, and education programs put in place within this warfare area.

To establish information superiority, a robust, seamless information infrastructure must be established to allow future military forces to transmit and receive needed information from any point on the globe in a flexible, reconfigurable structure capable of rapidly adapting to changing tactical environments. This information infrastructure must support these needs, while allowing force structures of arbitrary composition to be rapidly formed and fielded. Furthermore, the infrastructure must adapt to varying demands (i.e., surge conditions) during crises and stress imposed by evolving political and military situations. The infrastructure must allow information to be distributed to and from various force elements at any time; its architecture must not be constrained to support a