1. 1 © 2006 The Aerospace Corporation Hierarchy, autonomy, common resources Russ Abbott, The Aerospace Corporation Roberta Ewart, USAF/SMC

2. 2 There is a reason American military officers express grim concern over the tactics used by Iranian sailors last weekend: a classified, $250 million war game in which small, agile speedboats swarmed a naval convoy to inflict devastating damage on more powerful warships. The International Herald TribuneThe International Herald Tribune (1/9/07) & The New York Times (1/12/07)The New York Times

3. 3 The International Herald TribuneThe International Herald Tribune (1/9/07) & The New York Times (1/12/07)The New York Times In a war game in 2002, Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper of the Marines was called from retirement to lead a surrogate Iranian force defending against a U.S. attack.

4. 4 The International Herald TribuneThe International Herald Tribune (1/9/07) & The New York Times (1/12/07)The New York Times The general was recruited for his special talent, devising creative ways to fight stronger, technologically superior opponents.

5. 5 The International Herald TribuneThe International Herald Tribune (1/9/07) & The New York Times (1/12/07)The New York Times Using motorbike messengers to keep his communications secure from high-tech eavesdropping, he launched a surprise attack on the U.S. Navy from a fleet of small, fast missile boats.

6. 6 The International Herald TribuneThe International Herald Tribune (1/9/07) & The New York Times (1/12/07)The New York Times In the simulation, General Van Riper sent wave after wave of relatively inexpensive speedboats to charge at the costlier, more advanced fleet approaching the Persian Gulf.

7. 7 The International Herald TribuneThe International Herald Tribune (1/9/07) & The New York Times (1/12/07)The New York Times His force of small boats attacked with machine guns and rockets, reinforced with missiles launched from land and air. Some of the small boats were loaded with explosives to detonate alongside American warships in suicide attacks.

8. 8 The International Herald TribuneThe International Herald Tribune (1/9/07) & The New York Times (1/12/07)The New York Times The barrage was intended to saturate U.S. anti-missile radars, allowing at least a few missiles to reach their targets. This worked perfectly. A U.S. aircraft carrier and 15 other warships went to the bottom.

9. 9 The International Herald TribuneThe International Herald Tribune (1/9/07) & The New York Times (1/12/07)The New York Times In response, the Department of Defense stopped the game, changed the rules, and pretended nothing had happened.

10. 10 The International Herald TribuneThe International Herald Tribune (1/9/07) & The New York Times (1/12/07)The New York Times In a telephone interview, General Van Riper recalled that his idea of a swarming attack grew from Marine Corps studies of the natural world, where insects and animals — from tiny ant colonies to wolf packs — move in groups to overwhelm larger prey.

11. 11 The International Herald TribuneThe International Herald Tribune (1/9/07) & The New York Times (1/12/07)The New York Times “It is not a matter of size or of individual capability, but whether you have the numbers and come from multiple directions in a short period of time.”

12. 12 What is command and control? “The exercise of authority and direction by a properly designated commander [emphasis added] over assigned and attached forces in the accomplishment of the mission. “Command and control functions are performed through an arrangement of personnel, equipment, communications, facilities, and procedures employed by a commander in planning, directing, coordinating, and controlling forces and operations in the accomplishment of the mission.” Department of Defense, Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms Assures accountability Enables hierarchical structure and control Commander- centric

13. 13 No horizontal communication. No dashed lines. (Is that good?) It’s not accurate as a communication or operational structure. It may represent how authority is delegated, and it may represent how responsibility is assigned, but it doesn’t represent how communication occurs or how organizations really work. Downward pointing arrows: commands. Upward pointing arrows: status reports. Can be implemented with point-to-point communication links. What’s wrong with this picture? Command and Control

14. 14 What is Command and Control? The future of command and control is not Command and Control. In fact, the term Command and Control has become a significant impediment to progress. Efforts have been made to (re)define this term in ways that would make it more relevant to 21st century organizations and endeavors. Efforts to date, however, have not been able to overcome the deeply ingrained belief that the term Command and Control is synonymous with a specific approach, namely the way traditional military organizations are organized and operate. The term thus has become unalterably frozen in time. Dave Alberts, Director CCRP. “Agility, Focus, and Convergence: The Future of Command and Control,” The International C2 Journal, DoD/CCRP. April 2007.

15. 15 What is Command and Control? For our purposes we will define command and control as The structures and processes through which an organization operates. The focus is on interaction among participants in the organization. David Sloan Wilson, Evolution for Everyone Everything is both an entity and a group.

16. 16 From point-to-point links to platforms Need more than fixed point-to- point communication channels The communication system (even if just a telephone system) is the start of net-centricity Must distinguish between communication structure and command hierarchy. Becomes reified as an additional component—not just a collection of interfaces. “Platform” But a network/platform does nothing on its own. The fundamental question How will the organization use the network/platform? Enabling communication neither eliminates responsibility nor undermines command intent. As a common resource, how does it fit into the hierarchy?

17. 17 Video and demos Deborah Gordon “How do ants know what to do?”How do ants know what to do? NetLogo Ant foraging When an ant finds a piece of food, it carries the food back to the nest, dropping a chemical as it moves. When other ants "sniff" the chemical, they follow the chemical toward the food. As more ants carry food to the nest, they reinforce the chemical trail. Termite nest building The termites follow a set of simple rules. Each termite starts wandering randomly. If it bumps into a wood chip, it picks the chip up, and continues to wander randomly. When it bumps into another wood chip, it finds a nearby empty space and puts its wood chip down. With these simple rules, the wood chips eventually end up in a single pile.

18. 18 Breeding groups/teams/systems Chickens are fiercely competitive for food and water. Commercial birds are beak-trimmed to reduce cannibalization. Breeding individual chickens to yield more eggs compounds the problem. Chickens that produce more eggs are more competitive. Instead Muir bred chickens by groups. At the end of the experiment Muir's birds' mortality rate was 1/20 that of the control group. His chickens produced three percent more eggs per chicken and (because of the reduced mortality) 45% more eggs per group. Traditional evolutionary theory says there is no such thing as group selection, only individual selection. Bill Muir (Purdue) demonstrated that was wrong. Wikipedia commons http://www.ansc.purdue.edu/faculty/muir_r.htm

19. 19 Group/system-level emergence Both the termite and ant models illustrate emergence. In both cases, individual, local, low-level rules and interactions produce “emergent” higher level results. The wood chips were gathered into a single pile. The food was brought to the nest. In Evolution for Everyone, David Sloan Wilson argues that all biological and social elements are best understood as both groups and entities.Evolution for EveryoneDavid Sloan Wilson You and I are each (a) entities and (b) cell colonies. In Evolution for Everyone, David Sloan Wilson argues that all biological and social elements are best understood as both groups and entities.Evolution for EveryoneDavid Sloan Wilson You and I are each (a) entities and (b) cell colonies.

20. 20 How Groups Work What holds for chickens holds for other groups as well: teams, military units, corporations, religious communities, cultures, tribes, countries. Successful groups are those that minimize within-group conflict and organize to succeed at between-group conflict. Groups with mechanisms for working together can often accomplish far more (emergence) than the sum of the individuals working separately. Mitochondria and “us.” But if a group good is also an individual good (e.g., money, security), the group must have mechanisms to limit cheating (free-ridership). Group traits (although they are carried as rules by individuals) evolve because they benefit the group. (E.g., insect behavior.) Group (and more generally multi-level) selection now accepted as valid. These traits may be transmitted genetically (by DNA). They may also be transmitted culturally (by training/parenting/indoctrination/mentoring/…). Human groups are much more complex because it’s not all built-in.

21. 21 Wise crowds: more than the sum of their parts Web wise crowd platforms Wikis Mailing lists Chat rooms Prediction markets (James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds) (Scott Page, The Difference) Wise crowd criteria Diverse: different skills and information brought to the table. Decentralized and with independent participants: No one at the top dictates the crowd's answer. Each person free to speak his/her own mind and make own decision. Distillation mechanism: to extract the essence of the crowd's wisdom. Condorcet Jury Theorem (18 th century) example Five people (a small crowd). Each person has a 75% chance of being right. Probability that the majority will be right: ~90% With 10 people: ~98% Traditional wise crowds Teams Juries Democratic voting Participant autonomy. Emergence.

22. 22 To identify and adopt C2 frameworks that encourage hierarchical organizations to build platforms that enable wise crowds and facilitate innovation. To identify and adopt C2 frameworks that encourage hierarchical organizations to build platforms that enable wise crowds and facilitate innovation. Was there a message in that bottle? The challenge Hierarchy (command intent and responsibility) is not inconsistent with net-centricity (platforms). Hierarchy (top-down control) can be a significant impediment to wise crowds and innovation. Governance of common resources (platforms) will be a challenge.