Idiosyntactix Strategic Arts and Sciences Alliance The Brand Name of the Media Revolution

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Recommendations

Recommendations

This section deals with the specific initiatives and actions that can be under-taken to ensure that the Department of Defense avoids, mitigates, and manages the unintended consequences of adopting information age technologies. There are a number of opportunities for DoD leadership in this arena. These include providing vision to ensure the community understands the problem and the required types of solutions, articulating particular operational needs, influencing the investments in information systems and their implementation, using joint doctrine to reap the benefits of new technologies while guarding against inherent problems, establishing professional military education and training requirements, and providing an operational perspective on research priorities and the test and evaluation process.

Vision

The vision needed includes a determination to harness and leverage information technologies as an essential part of the requirement to maintain the military strength of the United States in the global arena and to protect against asymmetric vulnerabilities arising from foreign exploitation of information technologies. More-over, this vision should stress the need to tailor systems to missions and to focus attention on mission capability packages as the vehicle for addressing this problem.

Requirements and Investment

Three types of requirements can be identified: operational, technical, and budgetary. Warfighters can and should help shape the requirements for information systems and influence DoD's investments in these by playing an active role in the MCP process. The technical and operational communities need to work much more closely together to develop new MCP concepts and to refine these concepts. Given the set of inertias involved in some components of an MCP, these concepts need to be incubated and nurtured long before the technology reaches the market-place. Defense planners and budgeteers need to think more in terms of MCPs than in terms of individual programs, using MCPs to link programmatic activities needed to implement or maintain an MCP. This would help ensure that all of the necessary components are adequately funded and properly synchronized, thus eliminating one significant cause for an MCP's lack of completeness or coherence.

Joint Doctrine

The doctrine community should be involved at the beginning of the process. When the nature and distribution of information changes, radically new ways of doing business and complications in the old ways of doing business emerge. In many cases, new or modified doctrine can ease or simplify these changes. Changes in doctrine are often essential if the benefits of new information systems are to be realized and inconsistencies between capacity and doctrine avoided.

Involving the doctrine community early will also facilitate the key process of "embedding" doctrine in new systems. Doctrine is being written or changed when decisions are made about who will automatically receive some class of information, who has the work stations from which a database can be updated, or who is able to access and use some class of data. This process needs to be consciously and carefully monitored. Unless the doctrine community is involved, technical personnel responding to technical criteria and standards will be, in effect, making doctrine. If, however, the doctrine community is involved, new systems being fielded will contain and help support current doctrine.

Finally, the movement toward on-line doctrine delivery systems should be supported and rein-forced. The process of doctrine development tends to be slow and cumbersome, in many ways because of the number of people and organizations involved. Automation of the doctrine development and review process will enable simultaneous review at many locations, ease the process of updating or modifying drafts, and enable almost instantaneous distribution of new doctrine publications. Field units could also reduce the paper they maintain if they had global access to publications they use infrequently.

Joint PME and Training

Professional Military Education (PME) must serve as a change agent for the military grappling with the information age. Raising awareness of the threat, opportunities, and vulnerabilities inherent in the changes underway can best be done through the PME structure. If a "teaching hospital" model is adopted so that this new information is conveyed in the context of "real world" experience and actions, the impact can be direct and effective.

While some progress has been made toward bringing PME into the information age, the process needs to be accelerated. This involves changes in the curriculum so that students become current in information technologies (including their advantages, vulnerabilities, limits, and applications) as these impact and are likely to impact military affairs; developing methods of teaching that enable (and require) PME students to become computer literate and knowledgeable of how to obtain information electronically; and developing connectivity within and between PME institutions as well as between these institutions and the simulation and training centers with which they have natural synergy.

Training is perhaps the arena of military affairs where information technology has already had its most profound effect, but also remains an arena where much more can and should be done. Educated military professionals are ready to train on information systems, but these systems must be mastered and their practical limits learned in the more realistic training environment. Moreover, improvements in virtual reality technologies and connectivity provide options for diverse mission rehearsal and training at a fraction of the cost of field exercises. Defining when and where these lower cost training opportunities exist and taking advantage of them must remain a priority. The most cost effective systems will be those that possess embedded training packages and provide near real time feedback, easing the comprehension and retention of lessons learned.

Research and T&E

There is a need for more operationally-oriented command and control research, research that focuses on exploring command concepts and approaches rather than on the technologies that support them.

Another significant contribution can be made to reducing costs, accelerating schedules, and improving the quality of new information systems if the operational, technical, and test and evaluation communities can come together to develop a new approach to T&E. What is needed is an approach that is less "arm's length" and adversarial and is more supportive of an evolutionary design and acquisition strategy.

Currently, the T&E community tends to focus on easily measurable technical standards while avoiding the more difficult task of assessing the operational capabilities and impacts of new systems or their defenses against unintended consequences. Tests are typically pass/fail rather than designed to provide constructive feedback. This approach is more in keeping with traditional acquisition practices than with the evolutionary acquisition processes, adopted more than a decade ago, that have been proven essential in the command and control arena.

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