Newport, R.I. — The head of the Navy on Tuesday morning made this hypothesis: In the near future, just about anybody is going to be able to see almost anything anywhere in the world on demand.

"It's going to be as accessible to my daughter on her cellphone as it is going to be to my son, a Navy lieutenant, in a SCIF," said Adm. John Richardson, chief of naval operations, referring to a Secure Compartmentalized Information Facility, a room considered secure enough to communicate secret information.

Richardson was speaking on the first day of a two-day forum on naval strategy put on by the Naval War College in Newport. He talked in detail about the rapid rate at which technology is being developed and adopted.

Take satellites, for example. Almost one third of the roughly 1,500 operational satellites in orbit today have been launched in the last seven years, Richardson said, who added that "only about 40 percent of what's in orbit now was launched by the United States."

Information is going to be "ubiquitous" and "on demand," so the "advantage boils down not to who gets the data, the information, but who can make better sense of it. Who can orient themselves better and make a better decision," Richardson said.

He used those points to emphasize the need for a sense of urgency on the part of the Navy.

"We no longer have the luxury of moving slowly. ... We no longer have the luxury of just leaving our information and data unexamined. We gather a lot of data, but, as you look around the Navy right now, we're not taking full advantage of it," Richardson said.

That same call to arms was emphasized in a white paper, issued recently by Richardson, which can be boiled down to this point: the Navy needs to build more ships and build them faster. In it he reiterated that the Navy needs at least 350 ships. On Tuesday, he also talked about making those ships more capable through technologies such as unmanned vehicles to grow naval power.

Richardson joked that he stole the ideas in the white paper from former Secretary of the Navy John Lehman's book "Command of the Seas."

Lehman, who spoke before Richardson, pointed to a "rhyming" today with 40 years ago, when there was a long decline of the size of the Navy "in the sense of its mission," "a coming together of first-rate leadership in the Navy" and bipartisan support in Congress.

Under President Ronald Reagan, Lehman led the buildup to a 600-ship Navy. He advocated for having a clear strategy, which was shown in part by exercises at sea, to change the bureaucratic approach that, he said, slows down acquisition.

He noted the 970,000 civilian full-time employees in the Pentagon today compared to the 450,000 "full-time bureaucrats" in the Pentagon when he was in office.

j.bergman@theday.com