Project White Horse Forum

Washington’s insiders continue to fondly quote their ancient quip: “It doesn’t matter what you know but who you know.”  ToL changes all that: it does matter who you know, what you know, what they know, and what you all can do with the combined power of that knowledge.

We believe that ToL has an eminent place in the operational structure of DHS.  By engaging all actors, from the local community to the top tier of national administration executives, it transforms the top-down developed and imposed doctrine by transferring the emphasis from bureaucratically vertical echelons to the broad base of “practitioners of the art.”  Through the coordinated use of the current and developing capabilities offered by IT, IM, and KM, the lone “commander on the spot” transfigures into a vast network of Commander Leader Teams (Bradford and Brown, 2008).  >> DvL, JEB

Discussion

It is not the intent of this paper to provide the detailed view of ToL concept nor the full implications of its implementation.  The issues of its working characteristics, principles of management, potential impact on the homeland security and defense communities, unification of purposes, etc., will be addressed in the forthcoming papers.  Presently, our intent is to address the attention of actors involved in the extremely complex and even conflicting issues of the “Long War” fought with the increasing tenacity by the local communities, states, nation, and the global community of nations, to the “best practice” that rapidly changes the nature of another vast organization faced with the realities of a “new world.”

         We believe that ToL has an eminent place in the operational structure of DHS.  By engaging all actors, from the local community to the top tier of national administration executives, it transforms the top-down developed and imposed doctrine by transferring the emphasis from bureaucratically vertical echelons to the broad base of “practitioners of the art.”  Through the coordinated use of the current and developing capabilities offered by IT, IM, and KM, the lone “commander on the spot” that we described in the Introduction transfigures into a vast network of Commander Leader Teams (Bradford and Brown, 2008).  “What hath God wrought?” asked by Morse nearly 200 years ago was answered shortly thereafter by the short leash of “Control” in the C³ concept of operations.  ToL changes that: the leash disappears, and C³ converts it into the entirely unexpected, new C⁴: Command, Communications, Collaboration, and Cooperation.

         By harnessing concepts of social interaction, learning, knowledge development and management, and technology, ToL converts the evolutionary process into a revolutionary result.  In the realm of the military such process has been dubbed as RMA – Revolution in Military Affairs.  We believe that when applied to civilian bureaucracies, ToL may lead to RMS’s mirror image: an RBA, or a Revolution in Bureaucratic Affairs.

         During WW2 the efficiency of Allied escort groups protecting transatlantic convoys was not measured in the number of U-boats sunk during the passage, but by the number of merchant ships that reached the port.  Judged by such standards, DHS proved to be singularly effective: no terrorist attacks took place on the American soil since 9/11, and a number of plots have been thwarted.  The development and relatively rapid evolution of the comprehensive disaster management doctrine (currently NRF/ICS NIMS) should also be considered as a major credit to the department that has not existed six years ago.  At present, NRF and ICS NIMS provide the indispensable direction to the manner in which DHS responds to a wide range of potential threats.

         Nonetheless, one must constantly remember that DHS is, as far US bureaucracies go, a very new, almost neonatal, organization.  It is a department whose origin can not be traced to a slow process of evolutionary development, but to a hasty assembly of organizations, many plucked from their original parent departments, each with own well established structure and culture, all of whom still try to adapt to their new reality.  For this reason alone, DHS is neither a learning nor a knowledge-based organization yet.  It is still an exploring one.  Hence, errors of performance should be expected, but their gravity will steadily decrease and the handling of California fires in 2007 confirms this expectation.

         What the general public (and many researchers as well) fails to realize is the very steep learning curve imposed upon DHS by the very nature of the environment in which the department operates, and the large spread of missions and tasks that it is charged with.  The level of “quality of service” that took other “monocultural” agencies (e.g., DoD, HHS) decades to accomplish, the still “polycultural” DHS is expected to have reached or even exceeded within a fraction of that time.  Unconventional crises call for unconventional solutions (Lagadec, 2007).  Hence, determined implementation of ToL will not only move DHS toward the knowledge-based organization status, but, more importantly, it will provide the glue holding the structure of the intended preparation, response, recover, and mitigation activities together.  ToL will also provide the needed lubricant assuring these actions will not grind to a complete halt as it happened when a series of hurricanes struck the shores of Louisiana and Mississippi in 2005.

         The presented outline of ToL development process and the advantages accruing from its implementation appears more a wishful thinking than reality.  ToL is, however, the reality: US Army vigorously implements it in a number of major commands, and that the results prove the operational value of the concept (F. Brown, Z. Bradford, R. Morris: personal communication).  Also, in view of the rapidly increasing complexity and range of the assigned missions, defense establishments of other NATO countries begin to employ similar approaches (Forsdahl, 2008). Finally, the acceptance and rapid development of Network Enabled Capability (NEC – e.g., von Lubitz et al., 2008) throughout the European Union may be the reason for the implementation of ToL-like principles in EU’s business activities (Rifkin, 2004).

         While the participation in network-based transactions may erase some elements of individuality and independence, and also demands the pervasive presence of mutual trust and mutual confidence among all involved actors, the result leads to greater combined strength, speeding up of the collaboratively executed complex inter-organizational tasks, and the improvement of outcomes (Rifkin, 2004; see also Ward and Wamsley, 2007, O’Neil, 2008).  Hence, the combination of a much greater variety and penetration of civilian networks in EU with the seemingly more pronounced inclination of the Europeans to operate in joint, network-based environments comprising major governmental and private organizations (e.g., Rifkin, 2004; von Lubitz et al, 2006; von Lubitz et al., 2008a) might be among the principal reasons for the growth of ToL-like approaches in Europe.

         Washington’s insiders continue to fondly quote their ancient quip: “It doesn’t matter what you know but who you know.”  ToL changes all that: it does matter who you know, what you know, what they know, and what you all can do with the combined power of that knowledge.

REFERENCES

Available on request from projectwhitehorse@roadrunner.com.  The full article, with references will be placed in the PWH archives shortly.