"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