by Linda Lewandowski, ICF International

Implications of the Changing Global Environment

A high-level U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) decision-maker recently remarked, “We’ve spent the last several years investing in technology, and the result is that I have more information now, much more, than I had before, but it doesn’t help me make better decisions.” His comments underscore how DoD, similar to many organizations, has struggled with the recognition that complex technologies have not single-handedly advanced these organizations or transformed them adequately to respond to continual change.

One important element of DoD transformation is to dramatically increase organizational agility, which will require the redesign of command and control (C2)¹. In fact, compelling evidence outside DoD substantiates the importance of design in achieving organizational fitness. For example, Procter & Gamble (P&G) found the design process to be a key driver of continuous innovation and fitness for reacting to rapidly changing competitive landscapes. P&G has identified how to blend innovation into the design process, which has imbedded in it continuous learning and adaptation. "Your products run for election every day," says P&G chief executive officer A.G. Lafley. "And good design is critical to winning the campaign."² P&G’s design process is an engine for continuous innovation and its structure allows access to knowledge across the organization, its products, and employee skills. Knowledge alone, however, does not ensure growth and increased competitive fitness. Leadership also is required to foster an environment in which creativity and innovation can flourish.

Information Age transformation is global and spans all competitive spaces, so harnessing collective knowledge is the key to growth and advantage. Organizations must systematically change their structure, management, operations, training, and education. To begin its transformation, DoD can adapt promising or proven business models and practices, structure the organization around the knowledge assets that will encourage value innovation, abandon the traditional C2 model, and move toward an adaptive enterprise design. These actions require significant changes to DoD’s business model, staff competencies, and leadership skills. A new design for C2 is critical to move DoD in the direction of edge organizations. Moving from hierarchy to edge involves allocation of decision rights, dissemination of information, and patterns of interaction among participants, and requires a “human-centric” design.³

The center of transformation, which also is the distinction between success and failure, is an organization’s ability to create an enterprise design that enables greater performance. Lessons learned both within and beyond DoD have begun to confirm the importance of a human-centric design. Although our environment has changed dramatically, the key role of the human being has endured. In fact, many researchers, visionaries, and others who study macro forces and drivers of change expect the human factor to prove even more significant in the years ahead for sensing, making sense of, and choosing solutions that mitigate risk and produce successful outcomes. Given the complexity and speed of change today, no single human or single organization is able to solve problems successfully, which has tremendous implications for C2.

Toward an Adaptive Enterprise

The changing nature of competition in a closely connected world means organizations must compete in learning, adaptation, speed of creating new knowledge, and innovative application of knowledge to drive value. Such an environment has a major impact on strategy, organizational structure, and business models, and foretells changes for human capital competencies. For DoD, this environment demands a dramatic shift in concept of operations and vision of capabilities.

The changing nature of competition and its impact on security operations was recognized by the visionary and influential Vice Admiral (ret.) Arthur Cebrowski, whose research and experience led him to develop the theory and principles of network-centric operations. According to Cebrowski, "Network-centric rather than platform-centric warfare means radical changes in how forces train, organize and allocate resources." Regarding intellectual capital, Cebrowski proposed, "Information-based processes are the dominant value-adding processes in both the commercial world and the military. Yet the military fails to reward competence in these areas. Operator status is frequently denied to personnel with these critical talents, but the value of traditional operators with little acumen in these processes is falling, and ultimately they will be marginalized, especially at mid-grade and senior levels."⁴

Cebrowski’s observation indicates the necessity to redefine the term operator in the context of DoD evolving toward an adaptive enterprise. In an effects-based context, an operator is knowledgeable and skilled in the application of all available instruments of power and influence to achieve desired national security outcomes. The definition of operator would be consistent across DoD, but decision-makers would have the knowledge and skill to set the context, develop strategies, and coordinate resources that will contribute in achieving effects.

Succeeding in the Adaptive Enterprise

In an atmosphere of accelerated change and unprecedented uncertainty—propelled by technologies that drive greater connectedness and transparency—leaders face a competitive landscape that challenges traditional methods of strategy development, planning, and practice, yet provides extraordinary opportunity to support value innovation. The adaptive enterprise holds tremendous promise to steer organizations to greater competitive fitness through the creation of new organizational designs. These new designs systematically make sense of complex environmental signals, choose the right options, and respond to customer needs within unpredictable environments. DoD senior leaders and managers facing discontinuous change must build capacity for the knowledge, methods, and tools to transform their organizations into adaptive enterprises, with minimal disruption to current operations.

An adaptive enterprise design calls for a capabilities-based approach to managing physical and informational assets, anticipating customer needs, and responding rapidly and effectively to add value for all end users. For DoD, this involves managing networked, modular, reconfigurable capabilities in real time rather than in sequential, fragmented functions and linear processes.

Required Competencies of the Adaptive Enterprise

Research on global business and government agencies has demonstrated that the adaptive enterprise model, its methods, and practitioner tools provide today’s organizational leaders and managers with a new approach to understanding the environment, anticipating demands, and continually developing and applying knowledge to produce innovative solutions and services. Haeckel outlined five core competencies or capabilities that adaptive enterprises must develop and excel at when adopting a sense-and-respond model: knowing earlier; managing by wire; designing a business as a system; dispatching capabilities from the customer request back; and context-giving leadership.⁵

An adaptive organization is structured for action and characterized by modular, reconfigurable capabilities, adaptive management systems, and robust operating designs that can survive independent of external threats, technologies, geographic areas, and organizational boundaries. To produce value for clients, information must be managed across the organization to enable smart and rapid decision-making for coherent and precise application of resources. However, developing new ways of operating with the customer in mind is often incompatible with the multiple structural layers and linear processes found in traditional organizations. To sense customer needs and deliver value faster and better than the competition, traditional organizations must move from centralized to decentralized decision-making.

Advances in technologies allow cheaper communication and collaboration across physical, informational, and organizational boundaries, enabling creative decentralized decision-making structures.⁶ New cross-enterprise organizational designs will help decision-makers at all levels systematically sense, interpret, and respond to situational and environmental turbulence. New management models, infrastructure, and practices will permit successful adaptation to competitive challenges. A new breed of risk takers and bold leaders will be needed to confront disruptive and discontinuous change, for failure to lead and implement systematic transformation will threaten organizational extinction.

For DoD, this transformation requires a dramatic shift from budget-based to capabilities-based planning and execution focused back from the customer (i.e., effects) and not back from the product (i.e. weapons system). A modular design of capabilities that can be integrated rapidly permits capability modules to be tailored to the scale of the problem. As an adaptive organization’s capability matures, it can anticipate customer needs and formulate appropriate responses, offering a model for conducting business in an information-rich and increasingly connected world.

Additional competencies are required to move DoD from centralized to decentralized decision-making, lead organizational transformation, and build capacity for applying knowledge and skills to achieving operational effects. New leadership and management competencies will be required to establish the context or commander’s intent, coordinate resources, and support team members in achieving desired outcomes. Cultivating individuals and teams requires leveraging collective knowledge and skills to achieve success. Malone’s research shows that today’s organizations operating in traditional hierarchical structures fall far short of realizing and taking advantage of people’s true potential for creating value. According to Malone, "In the old world of large-scale, mostly routine production, taking maximum advantage of everyone’s intelligence and creativity wasn’t critical, and the top-down, command-and-control management style was usually quite effective. But as organizations become more decentralized, as knowledge work comes to dominate the economy, and as innovation becomes increasingly important, taking advantage of people’s true intelligence and creativity will become one of the most critical capabilities of successful businesses."⁷

A leader’s role in this type of organization includes building infrastructures and incentives for sharing information that will continue to decrease transaction costs and increase the speed of decision-making to drive customer value or the quality of effects. Malone also defined the core capabilities for distributed leadership:⁸

• Visioning - concrete image of some outcome that you are deeply committed to achieving
• Sense making - being able to make sense of ambiguous data and recognize trends before others do
• Inventing - finding ways to achieve your vision and continually inventing new ways to do things
• Relating - managing relationships with others to achieve vision
• Managing your own time; putting human values at the center

These core capabilities for distributed leadership have universal organizational application, including in the military.

Creating New Competencies

A competency-based approach to human capital development is central to increasing new knowledge and skills to meet the demands of evolving toward an adaptive DoD enterprise. Without the intervention of innovative leaders, new competencies are not likely to evolve within the current organizational structure. Thoughtful design of this intervention is critical to the timely and consistent evolution of future competencies with the demands of the future Joint Force. To that end, the new elite needs to emerge through co-evolutionary development, which allows for continual refinement of joint concepts and competencies through seamless integration of concept design and experimentation—including rapid prototyping and direct interaction with operational users—to produce transformation shaped by changing demands.

Disruptive innovation is necessary to bring about the new elite and associated competencies, but bold, risk-taking leadership and increased cognitive skills also are required. The compelling nature of this change and the urgency to acquire necessary competencies sooner rather than later demand a well-planned and integrated strategy for the future.

Continuous Transformation Through Co-Evolutionary Design and Two-Way Learning

Integrating continuous transformation so capabilities and competencies emerge is important for institutionalizing a mechanism for value innovation. This ensures that implementing a transformational strategy is not an end in itself, but a continually evolving and adapting set of leadership skills, technologies, methodologies, functions, activities, and infrastructure, with associated doctrine, tactics, techniques, and procedures. These interdependent elements of a human capital strategy must respond to the evolving global security environment, experience gained through their implementation, and advances in technology.

Adaptive enterprise leadership and management capability should develop in a co-evolutionary manner, using techniques to stimulate disruptive innovation through continuous, parallel, and cross-correlated development and refinement of concepts, processes, technologies, and organizations. By employing these elements simultaneously, the objective is to start influencing change immediately.

An experimentation framework and experimentation campaign plan should feature two-way learning with participation and support from subject matter experts and users of adaptive enterprise knowledge, methods, and tools to validate emerging hypotheses and techniques. Experimentation also provides the means to explore, discover, test, validate, and adapt to feedback, lessons learned, and operational experience.

Co-evolutionary development products and experimentation results then lead to creation of a transition roadmap, which can provide assessments and guidance to DoD for supporting the growth of new competencies. A systematic capabilities-based approach will require portfolio management and investment strategy knowledge, skills, and tools within DoD. Thoughtfully adapting knowledge, tools, and practices of other organizations will benefit DoD’s ability to plan, organize, and manage transformation deftly within the limits of a declining budget.

These approaches eventually will yield results across DoD and beyond, which will influence technology, policy, acquisition, operations, organization, and the private sector. These changes will broaden the industrial base through public-private partnerships and strengthen U.S. core competencies for an increased competitive advantage.

FOOTNOTES

¹Alberts, D. S., & Hayes, R. E. (2007). The future of C2. The International C2 Journal, 1(1).
²Reingold, J. (2005, June). Fast Company, 95, 56.
³Alberts, D. S., & Hayes, R. E. (2003). Power to the Edge: Command and Control in the Information Age.
⁴Borchgrave, Arnaud De United Press International. International Intelligence. Commentary: 21st Century's Clausewitz, UPI, editor at large.
⁵Haeckel, Stephan H., Adaptive Enterprise, Creating and Leading Sense-And-Respond Organizations, Harvard Business School Press, 1999.
⁶Malone, Thomas W., The Future of Work, Harvard Business School Press, 2004, p.126.
⁷Malone, Thomas W., The Future of Work, p.153.
⁸Ibid, p.162. Read full article

The list is long, but among the more salient attributes are:

1. Advanced warning of the possibility of such events
2. Insufficient political will to make prior investments that would mitigate their impact
3. Ambiguity about accountabilities in fashioning a response
4. Relative clarity—in hindsight—only about what should have been done
5. Reliance on improvization in responding to the event
6. Resort to traditional managerial prescriptions in recommendations for improving things the next time

Four of the first five items are the norm in highly nonlinear situations, where instability, unpredictability, and turbulence reign, and where "far from equilibrium" conditions mean that small changes can have enormous consequences. The exception is item 2, which has to do with aspects of American culture (e.g., a low capacity for deferred gratification), and the commensurate presumption that re-election to political office depends on short-term and local, rather than long-term and global decisions about how resources are allocated. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright made this point succinctly and convincingly in her testimony before the 9-11 Commission: the government didn't do much of anything about Bin Laden and Al Qaeda prior to 9-11 because we the people would not have supported doing much of anything.

Katrina and 9-11 are history, even though their consequences extend far into the future. What can we learn from them about how to improve our performance in the next high-impact nonlinear event, such as an avian flu pandemic? And how could a National Security Enterprise contribute by addressing item 6 with a vastly superior way of managing large-scale responses to unpredictable security threats?

President Bush has raised the question of the military playing the lead role in such situations. Although there is an instinctive (and healthy) Eisenhower flinch by many at the thought of the military taking charge of domestic crises, it’s not hard to understand the features that made the idea worth surfacing: the military has scale, many of the most important response capabilities, and a well-defined command and control structure. Moreover, the Department of Defense (DoD) is the source of some of the highest quality thinking done anywhere about the implications of responding to the unpredictable change that is baked into the logic of the Information Age.

Take, for example, the DoD’s Network Centric Warfare imperatives of "massively distributed decision-making; local self-synchronization; shared situational awareness; and speed of command." These are crisp labels for some of the more important adaptive survival traits. They also reflect the kind of behaviors that federal intelligence and security communities were said to be incapable of by various 9-11 post mortem investigations. Most would agree that these characteristics were lacking in the Katrina response, as well. Confusion about authorities, accountabilities, and the availability of capabilities were obvious, as were questions about the competence of some individuals.

The difference between the response to 9-11 and to Katrina was not better planning, but better improvizing by more competent local and federal leaders. This might be called "the heroic model" because of its reliance on exceptionally talented individuals to overcome the systemic inadequacies of our legacy efficiency-centric concepts of strategy, structure ,and governance. Relative to the demand, there is a severe shortage of Russell Honores. (Honore is the colorful and exceptionally effective army Lieutenant General who brought "Don’t do stupid" and "Understand the difference between activity and progress" leadership to the Katrina response effort.)

The industrial-age management precepts that are still institutionalized in both government and private sectors systematically discourage precisely the adaptive behaviors we celebrate in our crisis-management heroes. That management system is predicated on predictability and efficiency. Strategy is a plan of action; structure is a set of vertical hierarchies of authorities linked by processes (aptly called "chains"), with the knowers at the top and the doers at the bottom. Governance is command and control (actually, in most large commercial organizations command and control has been replaced by "communicate, budget, design processes, and hope.")

So deeply ingrained and unchallenged are the principles of the legacy management system that most readers of the 9-11 Commission report—after becoming convinced that the Commission had nailed the problem (U.S. intelligence badly needs more accountability, collaboration, and information sharing)—would nonetheless find unremarkable the Commission's following organizational recommendation:

It seems unremarkable because we are so used to seeing this kind of picture. But in terms of the issues to be addressed, it is truly remarkable precisely because it is so traditional. It deals with the accountability issue by adding yet another "knower”" layer at the top. The sharing and coordination issues are not addressed at all (in this picture), presumably awaiting subsequent process designs that will specify and sequence all the response options and contingencies that can be predicted in advance. And even the most casual viewer can readily see the battle lines where future turf and budget wars will be waged. The Department of Homeland Security probably has a similar looking design, and Katrina demonstrated the impact on responsiveness of interposing a layer of DHS approval between FEMA and the President.

This picture is most emphatically not the way an adaptive organization looks or behaves. Adaptive people should not be—but regularly are—asked to improvize successfully in spite of the legacy structure and management system. Not many people are highly skilled in getting things done by not breaking too much glass as they finesse, evade, and ignore the institutionalized management system. Katrina makes it very clear how dangerous it is to rely on having an adequate supply of heroes on hand to handle the unpredictable. In order for ordinary people to achieve exceptional results, management must step up to its accountability for providing a management system that fosters and leverages coherent improvization—one premised on adaptability and effectiveness rather than predictability and efficiency.

In an adaptive enterprise, such as the National Security Enterprise (NSE) is envisioned to be, strategy becomes structure: a structure for action, featuring the synchronization and binding of capabilities at the latest possible moment, rather than at process design time. Structure becomes a system architecture of modular roles and accountabilities in which the interactions between capabilities, rather than the actions of them, are specified. These interactions are expressed as inter-role commitments to an exchange of outcomes and deliverables, with unambiguous accountability for the effects those outcomes produce.

And governance becomes Context and Coordination, where Context is a declaration of:

• organizational purpose (Reason for Being)
• Global Constraints and Restraints (Governing Principles)
• how people in accountable roles relate to one another to carry out the Reason for Being (Role and Accountability Design)

Coordination is self-synchronized from the 'Effect back,' using a technology-enabled Commitment Management Protocol to create and track the dynamically changing commitments between roles, and to propagate the Global Governing Principles as conditions that must be satisfied in carrying out any commitment.

Massively distributed decision-making is made coherent by the Governing Principles and by the Role and Accountability Design that shows the "Who Owes What to Whom" architecture of roles. These roles, and the capabilities they have at their disposal, are determined by a decomposition of the Reason for Being into subsystem roles, each of which is held accountable for using the capabilities at its disposal to create specified outcomes for other roles. These roles can be located in local, state, federal, private sector, or coalition partner "home rooms." The National Security Enterprise becomes, in that sense, a "real" virtual organization.

In a National Security Enterprise designed and managed as an adaptive organization, "Who Owes What to Whom" would never be a mystery because the strategic relationships are explicitly addressed by the Role and Accountability Design. Operational and tactical capabilities would be created by local managers when they decompose their accountability into subordinate roles. And some tactical role designs are created in the fray and on the fly...improvizationally, but always coherently, because they are systematically tested for conformance with higher-level designs and the global constraints and restraints.

The highest-level design, once adopted, becomes the national security "strategy as structure for action." Investments are then made to stand up to the capabilities specified in the design, which will be sourced from military, intelligence, homeland security, FEMA, local police and fire departments, Centers for Disease Control, engineering firms, hospitals, et alia. Roles are populated with individuals who might reside in a state, local, federal, or commercial sector "homeroom." The decisions about who populates a given role are made or approved by the person who is held accountable for the higher-level outcome to which the role in question is a contributor.

Note that the NSE need not "own" any of these capabilities—only the architecture and requisite authorities to populate and provide resources to the roles in the design. The actual use of those resources is event specific, and would be substantially different depending on the nature of the event. The response manager for an avian flu pandemic would dispatch a very different set of homeroom resources—and be a very differently skilled individual—than would the response manager for a chemical attack on a Chicago El station, or a 7.9 earthquake on the San Andreas fault, or a local disaster that requires resources housed in federal agencies.

This short essay is intended only to provide the bare outlines of how sense-and-respond managerial concepts could contribute to an adaptive and robust NSE. It does not treat many other important adaptive enterprise concepts, such as the scalability of successively more granular role and accountability subsystems. The emphasis here is on some of the benefits to be derived, such as:

1. The clarification of purpose that a NSE reason-for-being will provide
2. The modular nature of component capabilities that makes possible an exponential increase in the number of national security response configurations, the seamless incorporation of both highly proceduralized and highly improvizational behaviors
3. The intrinsic and dynamic alignment of organizational roles around a common purpose, and the corresponding elimination of sub-optimizing components that are a hallmark of industrial age management
4. The creation of a National Security Enterprise as a scalable design for security, not as a behemoth bureaucracy

In this vision, the NSE would not be designed to respond efficiently to predicted security challenges, but to respond effectively to the challenges that actually present themselves, be they predictable or surprising. Read full article

• establishing simple first order relationships among real world situational and environmental entities
• tracking their “status,” primarily location and activities
• providing relatively unsophisticated estimations that evaluate current or short-term future status

Supported operations definable with these computational tools have limited, simple objectives, again related to physical entities (adversaries, their organization, their operations). Indeed, most of the computational support is focused on such entities. We are only just beginning, for example, to consider the consequences and impacts of activities in one dimension of operations (say, military) against others (political, social, economic). Even there, the relationships are delimited by the simplicity of the data and knowledge development and management techniques in our toolsets, where complex cross-issues cannot adequately be addressed by the computational framework.

The operational context for national security operations is, however, far more complex, and exhibits all the characteristics defined by chaos theory (which is expected, as all leading military theorists describe the operational context as complex adaptive systems). We are mostly operating in that boundary between order and chaos, where concepts and perceptions are ultimately as important, if not more important, than grounded truth. The paucity of tools, conceptual baselines, and underlying theory forces the development of unique, hard-coded algorithms with limited range and scope to even begin to address the complexity (an example: the discrete dimensional models, at best very loosely connected, envisioned for Operational Net Assessment).

One of the best examples of the need for more advanced capabilities that allow us to operate in that range of complexity between chaos and order is found in Operation Iraqi Freedom, and in the continuing counter-insurgency and war on terror taking place in Iraq. In order to effectively (to use a word) deter, and even anticipate and preempt, the insurgency and terrorist operations, it is necessary to identify, if possible, a pattern of such operations and the potential perpetrators. To that end, it is necessary to identify which organization is truly responsible for some act. This requires being able to measure the potential relationship of an event to an organization or its constituent elements.

As many of the events are similar (homicide bombings, improvised explosive devices (IED), kidnappings, executing government agents), one must develop a concept that relates aspects of events, conditions, and behavior to one or another group (al Qaeda in Iraq, Sunnah, Baathist sympathizers, Sunni malcontents, old Iraqi security forces, Ansar al Islam). This leads to the development of a measure called “Zarqawiness,” which is independent from the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, but is representative of his organization’s actions.

Our current database technologies are not sufficiently rich to permit conditional, probabilistic assessments of actions relative to somewhat nebulous characteristics that adapt and morph over time. These assessment require higher order logic to be able to use templates of knowledge, i.e., metaknowledge, as part of the computational processes. They require knowledge management of a varying set of metrics, that is, parameters that describe events and are themselves linked to identify subtle, nuanced patterns of behavior. The “Zarqawiness” factor can coexist as a measure of an event with a “Baathness” factor, where the sum of its respective probabilistic assessments is not necessarily one.

In developing a cohesive, integrative, and holistic framework for national security operations, it will be necessary to stretch beyond the limitations of existing technologies and concepts to accommodate the complexity and chaos that is out there. Read full article

"The major institutions of American national security were designed in a different era to meet different requirements. All of them must be transformed."
The National Security Strategy of the United States of America – September 2002

It must be said at the outset that Distributed Adaptive Security Operations (DASO) does not exist yet. It is a framework that we are suggesting as a possible starting point for the development of an Adaptive National Security Enterprise. We are hoping to stimulate a dialogue that will tackle the critical problem of strategic transformation. These approaches will eventually yield implications across the U.S. Federal Government (USG) and beyond, which will influence technology, policy, acquisition, and the private sector. Such changes will broaden the industrial base through public-private partnerships and increase U.S. core competencies that will lead to an increase in competitive advantage. Please feel free to comment, criticize, correct, or otherwise provide feedback on this topic. We desire a learning environment where we can all develop this framework interactively and in a co-evolutionary fashion. We only offer initial fodder for discussion.

CONTEXT

In an environment of accelerating change and unprecedented uncertainty, more than 30 federal agencies now operate globally. Each of these organizations addresses various and vital aspects of the complex strategic challenges facing the country, but currently do so in a largely uncoordinated manner. Planning often is fragmented even across agencies with clearly linked strategic goals. Traditional planning is focused retrospectively; it assumes that the future can be extrapolated confidently from the past. That is no longer true in the post-9/11 environment.

PURPOSE

USG interagency strategic planning capability and management structure requires transformation to integrate diplomacy, security operations, and development in support of current and evolving National Security Strategy. The scale, scope, and speed at which global affairs operate in today’s environment require a very different approach to addressing this challenge than in previous generations characterized by process re-engineering, change management, and hierarchical, functional organizational constructs. Technology has far outpaced our ability to take strategies and create a management form that more effectively leverages the collective knowledge across the network of people and allow for rapid organizational adaptation to changes in the environment. This technology-driven rate of change requires that organizations learn and adapt more quickly to new developments and have an understanding across multiple dimensions of the security space.

There is sufficient insight from research, evolving global business models, and the Department of Defense’s Transformation experience to consider a totally different approach to sensing the environment, anticipating security demands, and continually developing and applying a range of options adapted to achieve desirable security outcomes. The starting premise concedes that the current global environment is experiencing discontinuous change where security demands are unpredictable and, therefore, application of traditional long-range planning methods and industry best practices (e.g., scenario-based planning) will not produce sufficient timely, actionable knowledge across the community of national security decision-makers to effectively anticipate, shape, preempt, and influence allies and challengers to desired outcomes.

Agencies across government must now, in concert, evolve new management models and practices along with the network-centric information technology (IT) infrastructure to successfully adapt to the global security environment’s demands in accomplishment of the nation’s strategic aims.

BACKGROUND

Recent events, combined with experimental observations, have emphasized that military force alone can seldom provide a solution that wins both the war and sets the conditions for maintaining peace. Winning the war and maintaining stability and peace to achieve our national aims requires an interdependent, coherently joint force that is integrated with the capabilities of all instruments of national power. The world can no longer be seen as a series of discrete events, handled by discrete players for discrete purposes; there are no meaningful lines of transition in the modern global context, which is distributed, dispersed, loosely connected, and yet highly interdependent. In a formal sense, the global situation is complex, adaptive, and chaotic. Other observations conclude that effective security operations are globally and locally distributed, may require coordinated strategic, operational, and tactical actions, and simultaneously require an operations spectrum spanning from humanitarian and reconstruction support to low and high intensity combat and stabilization.

Combat is changing. For that matter, peace is changing. War is no longer two great armies or alliances maneuvering to win a decisive battle, as in the Western game of chess, but rather a variety of multidimensional, localized maneuvers to try to gain overall advantage, as in the Oriental game of Go.¹ Twenty-first century security has become massively distributed, complex, and uncertain. We are in the midst of a global war on terrorism that knows no national boundaries and respects no traditional definition of combatant. Everyone and everything, everywhere, is a potential target of such networked terrorist organizations as al Qaeda and the narco-terrorists of Central Asia and Latin America.

• "Many of the U.S. strategic processes, models, and doctrine employ a reductionist and linear analytical methodology, which attempts to reduce an adversary’s capabilities and strengths into component parts."²


• "The global terrorist structures of today are not machines or nation states whose component parts are constrained by organizational structures and processes, which can be analyzed with linear reductionist methodologies. Indeed, networks appear to be highly resilient and evolve specifically to survive destruction of its seemingly most vital component parts."³

The nature of security operations is changing, and we must adapt to these changes.

In the global context, challenges and appropriate responses have multiple dimensions and interdependencies; there is a blurring between preemption and prevention; security is a major U.S. export (as distinct from freedom, which, "by its very nature must be homegrown. It must be chosen. It cannot be given; and it certainly cannot be imposed…."⁴); national ambitions must be coordinated with global prosperity wrought by free trade and economic opportunity. We are good at projecting capabilities (war and peace); what we want now is to provide coherence and commonality of purpose across interdependent junctures. Fundamentally, we are seeking global awareness and local optimization.

So what is to be done?

There must be an alignment of strategic thinking, intelligence, and influence functions to support a continuum of operations across the engagement spectrum. There must also be a focus on the new reality that the operational context is a seamless continuum of simultaneous actions and events that blur the lines between war and peace, and between categories, types, and transitions of military operations.

Distributed Adaptive Security Operations Defined

Distributed Adaptive Security Operations (DASO) provides a framework of cognitive decision support for complex integrated multi-agency operations. It is an organizational and operational mix of advanced and innovative concepts and capabilities, providing a contextual framework for identifying, assessing, and managing the multiple dimensions of complex, chaotic real-world security issues, adapting to evolving and rapidly changing operational context, and developing anticipatory and preemptive risk-mitigated courses of action.

DASO provides the means to continuously create, execute, monitor, and adapt operations to achieve national strategies, objectives and operational/tactical intent. Organized about a network-centric information infrastructure integrating strategic thinking, intelligence, and influence functions, it continuously monitors all dimensions of global security operations - diplomatic, political, security, economic, social - and uses adaptable, learning rulesets to identify emergent, abnormal, ambiguous, and unanticipated behavior and conditions.

DASO supports dynamic development and adaptation of organizations to achieve rapid and effective success. DASO delivers precise, integrated application of instruments of power across the range of security activities, simultaneously and seamlessly for all operational categories, types, phases, stages, and transitions. It is a strategic, operational, and tactical multiplier, providing flexibility to rapidly adjust and compensate to new adversarial tactics and responses to U.S. policy and strategies.

Within the global perspective, security operations require an increasingly integrated effort, involving coordination of all of the instruments of national power. This means harmonizing government, coalition, interagency, NGO, PVO, and the sustaining/industrial base efforts to operate effectively across the spectrum of challenges. DASO provides the conceptual and technological framework to make such integration and coordination a reality.

The DASO conceptual framework posits a number of capabilities, among which are:

• The ability to plan, execute and adapt policy and operations continuously in multiple dimensions and across widely distributed points of influence within each operations space


• Identifying and reacting to the multiple, often competing characteristics of modern security operations, using shared global situation awareness, knowledge, and cognitive decision support for local optimization and global synchronization of efforts


• Employing security enterprise resources in both supported and supporting roles


• A strong capability against adversaries actively working to deny access to an area or to objectives, even if the operations space lacks robust physical infrastructure or cohesive local political and government security framework


• The ability to deploy, operate, command, and sustain diplomatic teams while maintaining pressure on the constituent structures and populations we are trying to support and/or influence; shaping the context, adapting to changes in the environment, and shaping the outcome


• The ability to deny the adversary sanctuary or access across dimensions (i.e., deny influence space, delimit options, affect will and morale, turn public opinion, deny security, rehabilitate and restore impacted communities), while protecting U.S. diplomatic options


• The ability to organize, plan, train, and support the harmonization of military, interagency, and multinational activities at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels against any type of adversary, condition or behavior—from conventional enemies (or misguided friends) to those who operate on the cusp between combatant and criminal activity.


The federal government must structure its inter-agency operational capability to create, maintain and support the application of effects⁵ to achieve national objectives.

DASO will provide the mechanisms through:

• The ability to rapidly sense changes in the operational context, and to identify which of those changes require response


• Distributed, coherent creation of effects, continuous altering of conditions and behavior to shape outcomes, and a shared understanding of coalition as well as adversary intentions and objectives


• Increased competitive fitness through shared awareness, knowledge, learning, cognitive decision support, and adaptation



• The ability to respond to emergent, ambiguous, abnormal, unanticipated conditions and behavior


• The ability to operate within the uncertainty of risk (in the margins between confidence/certainty and ambiguity/uncertainty)


The prime metrics for all of this are speed and effectiveness in relation to strategic commander’s direction and local civilian/military authority’s intent.⁶

DASO is supported with advanced technology, incorporated in an innovative manner:

• Knowledge-enabled monitoring of conditions, behavior, data, information, risk, and the multiple dimensions of security operational context


• Rule-based operations, including context-adaptable, knowledge-enabled, multi-dimensional business rules, decision rules, risk assessments, and performance measurement


• Cognitive decision support, predicting future states, providing risk-mitigated options for courses of action and for proactive anticipatory and preemptive action


• Continuous evolution and adaptation of operations based on feedback, learning, and accommodation of current and future operational context, and evolving strategic command direction and local civilian/military authority’s intent


• Assessment and management of consequences across the multiple dimensions of instruments of power impacted by security operations, including assessment of operational worth and diplomatic space econometrics


• Automation, dynamic sharing, and coordinated understanding of situational awareness, and of the objectives, civilian/military authority’s intent, and outcomes that frame security operations


• Reduction of mundane activities, providing peer-to-peer, automatic and autonomous action wherever possible, employing local optimization while observing global context


• Simple to complex knowledge sentinels to identify evolving operational context, and identifying emergent, ambiguous, abnormal, and unanticipated conditions or behavior


• Mutable, context- and task-optimized organizations, operations control and information flow, based on modular, reconfigurable force and instrument of power capabilities, and on integration, coordination, coherence, and synchronism among all participants in security operations


• A common network-centric operations and influence infrastructure


• Standards of interoperability and shared understanding for all participants in security operations, either supporting or supported by the Department of State


• Co-evolutionary capabilities-based development, with rapid socialization, adaptation, and integration of advancing knowledge and capabilities


• Continuing transformational experimentation to ensure the relevance of DASO and its associated methods, doctrine, and TTPs


As in any large scale transformational initiative, a working example or "working experiment" must be used to test strategies for aligning policy, management practices, organizational roles and accountabilities, and operating methods. A rapid and iterative co-evolution of these elements within an operational context can both test strategies and work transformation of the cultural thinking and their resulting activities. Learned results and their change implications can be populated into a coherent approach to change across the entire organization.

Using the DASO strategic framework and rapid iterations of experiments, a roadmap can be created to manage the multiple dimensions of change and prioritize required resources. This document becomes a "living roadmap" whose instantiation into the organizations routine thinking and activities creates a mechanism for sustained innovation and competitive advantage.



FOOTNOTES

¹John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, The Advent of Netwar, Revisited.

²Major Darfus L. Johnson, "Center of Gravity: The Source of Operational Ambiguity and Linear Thinking in the Age of Complexity," Monograph, (Fort Leavenworth: School of Advanced Military Studies, 16 December 1998), 5.

³LtCol Michael Beech, USA, "Observing al Qaeda through the Lens of Complexity Theory: Recommendations for the National Strategy to Defeat Terrorism," Center for Strategic Leadership, U.S. Army War College, July 2004.

⁴Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Remarks at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques – Science Politique Paris, Paris, France, February 8, 2005.

⁵Effects-based operations (EBO) are "sets of actions directed at shaping the behavior of friends, neutrals, and foes in peace, crisis, and war." (Edward A. Smith, Jr., Effects-Based Operations: Applying Network-Centric Warfare in Peace, Crisis, and War, Washington, DC: DOD CCRP, 2002, p. 108). EBO meets the larger defense goals of 1) assuring allies and friends, 2) dissuading future military competition, 3) deterring threats and coercion against United States interests, and 4) if deterrence fails, decisively defeating any adversary.

⁶"What we measure, improves." Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Pentagon Town Hall Meeting, March 2005. Read full article