Global Command and Control: Challenges and Opportunities
(Condensed from various C2 subject matter expert inputs by the LeMay Center Strategy & Concepts team)
The Air Force reexamination of global command and control comes at the perfect time, as the Joint Staff and OSD also realize that our legacy constructs lack the granularity and responsiveness needed to successfully succeed in an increasingly connected world. We need confront these realities before they consume us, but also be careful to protect the hard won wisdom that went into our current C2 systems.
What our Current C2 systems do well
Getting a single large organization moving in the same direction towards common goals is a huge challenge in itself, and getting many of them together is even harder. You need to generate linearity and predictability to make the efforts of many coalesce into one united effort. This requires collective sensemaking, common languages and products, and shared, predictable processes to bring diverse capabilities together in the appropriate time, space, and sequence. Preserving a unity of command tends to produce the best results when resources are scarce, when the situation is highly volatile, when competing interests are at stake, and when forces are highly interdependent. Common planning processes help us share information, cross cultural barriers, coordinate our actions, and ensure mutual security and sustainment. Above all, it allows us to create lots of impact with fewer forces, with our logistics, communications, and space capabilities that are usually taken for granted.
The problems with our Current C2 systems
Our adversaries have studied our methods for decades, and are ready to take advantage of our vulnerabilities. Big parts of our C2 systems are hosted on highly vulnerable communication networks with various points of entry and influence. Many of our systems have become so “tightly coupled” that we don’t even know where the vulnerabilities are. Our systems of deliberation, prioritization, and adjudication cannot always respond quickly enough to rapidly emerging events and contexts. Our Geographic Combatant Command borders, while useful for creating regionally specific competencies and relationships, have also created operational and legal seams that complicate cross-AOR effects coordination. Above all, stovepiped planning makes it hard or impossible to generate fine scale military options that match the specific context using the total capabilities available. National leaders feel “boxed in” when offered a few standardized options, which is often all that the system can generate.
How can we become more agile, adaptive, and resilient with advanced C2 capabilities? We can bin some promising approaches in the categories of Ideas, Groups, and Tools.
Ideas: The key to surviving and thriving in complex situations is not linear plans and positive control, but rather a resilient, highly adaptive network that can match the complexity of its response to the complexity of the task. We may talk about “dominating air, space, and cyberspace,” but in truth, there aren’t enough bucks in the world to afford that much Buck Rogers. We’ll need the forces we have to work more closely together across AOR boundaries on a daily basis, so that they can congeal around a problem with all of the capabilities we need, regardless of who owns the capabilities.
We need people who can usefully distinguish between complicated (lots of variables with stable relationships) and complex problems (variables and relationships in constant flux) and apply the correct methodologies to deal with each, recognizing that nearly all of our problems contain elements of both that need to be managed. We need people who can imagine and describe network linkages and interdependencies, who can design both resilient and robust networks, and who know when and where each approach is appropriate to achieve the aims of the mission at an affordable cost. We need people who don’t confuse elegance with simplicity, but who seek the former to reduce both the unpredictability and cost, and enhance the security of our systems. We need better understandings of how masterful intuition is built, and how it can be assisted with the aid of formal models and simulation, which will enhance human intelligence rather than replace it. We’ll need to realize that, there is no “optimal” level of decentralization, and that no viewpoint is inherently privileged when it comes to strategic context. We cannot and should not design C2 systems that do not allow us to throttle the levels of distribution to meet the context of the situation.
Our key challenge in the next two decades will be getting the best balance we can between what we do and what our machines do for us, knowing that we’ll get worse at whatever we delegate. Computers will serve us well with relatively linear and repetitive tasks, and we’ll be able to have them handle the actions that human beings cannot detect and react to quickly enough. But we must avoid the seduction of technological positivism, and not forget that we historically overestimate what our machines will be able to do for us, even though they can indeed do more and more. Big data and machine learning will help with pattern recognition with stable and repeating patterns, but will generate unexpected results once we turn them loose against complex problems. We’ll never be able to program our computers to capture all of the relevant variables that count when it comes to strategic effect, which starts and ends with socially constructed interpretations of what the results of our tactical actions mean.
Groups: While machines will help us communicate and collaborate in new ways that help to reduce some of the manpower and lead time that our current processes require, we’ll find that trust is still usually built face-to-face, even if it is only necessary occasionally to cement the distributed collaboration that will increasingly become the norm. There will still be the need for specialization and the social identities of separate organizations that help to preserve it, but common understandings of the situation across groups and AORs will be more, not less, important.
In order to promote more adaptive collective responses, we’ll need to create much more shared awareness across groups than we do now, and use this to empower much more decentralized execution that can rapidly form out of a larger global collection of capabilities and forces. This will require a culture change that is less dependent on controlling specific assets for specific regions or commands, one that is more open to sharing information across security layers, which may require more resilience than robustness to provide mission assurance of our data and communications. And we’ll need to protect the core competencies that we’ll never be able to delegate to machines by creating organizations that protect our C2-related human capital, who can bring the right combinations of distributed and in person presence to organize and lead both air component and joint operations.
In the Air Force specifically, we’ll need to create groups that can develop and protect our C2 human capital, and look across the entire enterprise – up to the Joint and DoD levels, and across to our sister services and allies – to collaborate on advancing our C2 practices, networks, and tools. If we want to lead JTFs, we’ll need to make sure we have specifically trained and equipped staffs who have the key competencies and tools needed to facilitate those coordination and planning processes. Making the AOC JTF capable is probably not the right answer, as we’ll still need to be able to fulfill a theater CFACC role even if that serves under a more globally oriented MDOC construct. We need to recognize that the way we balance the tradeoff between global and regional specialization in our C2 staffs, and between “force provider” and “force consumer” tasks, is not just a matter of managing IT networks and data. It’s primarily an exercise in balancing the cognitive bandwidth and time available in the day to maintain personal and staff relationships between very different chains of command and authority. While both roles require constant communication, trying to manage both roles with the same staff will become paralyzing rather than optimizing. By creating and protecting a cadre of people steeped in the theory and experience of command and control across the entire enterprise, we’ll have the ability to adapt to degraded situations and C2 with whatever tools are available. Human resilience will always trump machine resilience when it comes to C2, and only people will be able to handle the nuance and balance between aggressiveness and restraint if a near peer war is a lot more like Cuban Missile Crisis II (with some even more wicked nuclear, space, and cyber twists) than Desert Storm III.
We should also consider creating an AF level entity that can be the central C2 enterprise owner - not beholden to the often tribal interests of the individual MAJCOMS – for working across the MAJCOMs, with the DoD, industry, and with other services to pursue the interconnected innovations in C2 practices and systems that we need to create joint and coalition military options. Keeping the responsibility for C2 under one MAJCOM which also has four other Core Function Flight Plans has not created the necessary level of emphasis on C2 that we need. It’s not ACC’s fault that this is happening – it’s been forced to dedicate the limited cognitive bandwidth of its staff to the urgent problems of today. But that is holding back the innovations and synchronization that our C2 enterprise needs to move ahead, instead of just treading water using the same legacy systems we’ve had for almost twenty years.
Tools: We can’t create more time in the day, but we can create tools that help us share both data and context faster, even across different cultures and languages. Rich visualization of complex data in motion is one way to directly hack the brain by directly accessing the neural networks that generate the mental models we use to intuitively grasp the dynamics of change. Just like a colored animated weather map helps even someone with no meteorological training to look at billions of pieces of weather data without using any math and understand it, so too will operational visualizations help us understand the operational environment. Using real, mission assured data, dynamic real time monitoring, and replay of force movements in a 3Dvirtual representation of the battlespace, we could model and simulate large force movements with realistic constraint checks, allowing us to avoid many of the complicated processes like phone calls and VTCs to rapidly share awareness, and share both hard data and assumptions. Where a commander currently takes decision briefs in meeting rooms and through SVTCs, perhaps in the future he or she will put on a pair of VR goggles and see a visual fly out of entire joint schemes of maneuver, wargaming COAs real time while discussing them with the distributed planning staff who used the same environment to build the plans. Additionally, having a similar local capability at distributed C2 nodes could give local commanders the ability to rapidly assess their own operational situations, determining what is and is not feasible to plan and execute with the forces they’re still in contact with until contact with central authorities can be reestablished.