Information - financial, administrative, statistical, technical - is the lifeblood of the modern world. For the U.S. Navy's tactical commanders at sea, information can well mean the difference between victory and defeat, life and death.
Naval Information Warfare Center (NIWC Pacific) is responsible for development of the technology to collect, transmit, process, display and, most critically, manage information essential to successful military operations. The Center develops the capabilities that allow decision-makers of the Navy, and increasingly of the joint services, to carry out their operational missions and protect their forces.
Our business is C4ISR--Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance--providing the information technology resources essential to the U.S. war fighter in today's increasingly complex, increasingly hostile world. In the development of these technologies, we are contributing substantially to the achievement of the future vision of the Department of Defense and particularly of the U.S. Navy. Forcefully stated in the Sea Power 21 concept of the Chief of Naval Operations, this vision centers on sea-based operations using "revolutionary information superiority and dispersed, networked force capabilities to deliver unprecedented offensive power, defensive assurance, and operational independence to Joint Force Commanders."
Enabling the CNO's three fundamental concepts of Sea Power 21--Sea Strike, Sea Shield and Sea Basing--is FORCEnet, "an overarching effort to integrate warriors, sensors, networks, command and control, platforms, and weapons into a fully netted, combat force." NIWC Pacific is contributing significantly to the efforts of the FORCEnet Project Coordinator and Lead Type Commander, Naval Network Warfare Command, and of the FORCEnet Chief Engineer, Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR)
NIWC Pacific's vision of an essential supporting concept is Composeable FORCEnet. It is a capability that will provide joint warfighters operating in a FORCEnet-enabled environment superior decision-making capability and will enable the Joint Force Commander to achieve full spectrum dominance. The key word in this is composeable: Commanders must have the ability to compose a command and control capability that meets their warfighting requirements from a broad array of components, including multi-tiered networked platforms and sensors, dynamic bandwidth capabilities and tailorable visualizations. This will provide them the framework to achieve fast, flexible and agile speed to capability in the face of rapidly evolving threats and missions, and enable them to make the superior decisions necessary to win in battle.
To support the system engineering and integration functions that are key to NIWC Pacific's efforts, the command also maintains research programs pushing the state-of-the-art in such diverse fields as atmospheric physics, electro-optics, underwater acoustics, engineering psychology, signal propagation and processing, artificial intelligence, material sciences, microelectronics, chemical oceanography, environmental and biological sciences.
