This is an Essential Element of Information for a Culture of Preparedness post

The Teams of Leaders (Tol) concept introduced in the book America's Army; A Model for Interagency Effectiveness by retired Army  Generals Frederic Brown and Zeb Bradford has been a point of discussion and thread through many articles and posts on both this blog and the  main "e-zine" website.  (See Edition 7 in the Archives for links to the primary articles). Now through hard work by PWH advisor and author of many of the articles discussing TOL in a homeland security context, Dag von Lubitz,  along with leaders at Central Michigan University and the University of Western Ontario, The Center for Collaborative Leadership in Healthcare is underway with a new website defining their mission, capabilities, and future plans.

As a refresher, from the site introduction,

Teams of Leaders (ToL) is an approach for rapidly building and effectively employing cross-boundary teams that are highly competent in making and executing decisions and in learning and adapting together. The ToL approach helps the leader-teams to gain a common understanding of the situation and requirements, develop shared purpose, trust and confidence, and reach a higher level of performance faster. Cross-boundary teams today consist of leaders from different organizations brought together to leverage the expertise, experience, and resources of their entire organization.

The Scientific Director is Dr. Dag von Lubitz, Adjunct Research Professor, College of Health Professions, Central Michigan University.  Leadership from Central Michigan University is   Dr. Steven Berkshire. Director, Doctor of Health Administration Program, College of Health Professions, Central Michigan University; and from The University of Western Ontario, Dr. Candace Gibson, Associate Professor, Department of Pathology, Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry.

As discussed in the current PWH e-zine edition on implementation of TOL in EUCOM, ToL policies, programs and practices are equally applicable across military or civil, governmental and nongovernmental organizations. Originally developed to serve in the military world of joint, inter-agency, inter-governmental, multinational JIIM teams it is exceptionally well suited for the same type of global activities executed by agencies and organizations of civilian corporations.  This is the first formal translation in a non-military context.

In every sense, as defined, this is an important INTERSECTION.

Essential Elements of Information for a Culture of Preparedness

Alternative analysis is the super-class of techniques of which red teaming may be considered a member… these techniques are designed to help debias thinking, enhance decision making, and avoid surprise. (From Red Team Journal)

http://redteamjournal.com/

As noted in The 2010 Announcement post, Project White Horse focus for 2010 will explore "what kind of organizations and indeed groups of organizations can operate at the required tempo demanded for survival when faced with worst case, unconventional crisis, or hyper complex events – the "CAT 5's."  

Now, consider just a quick bit of background to link red Team Journal's effort with Project White Horse perspective.

Considering that the PWH focus on decision making in unconventional crisis/hyper complex events has at its core the thread and ideas of "alternative analysis," the concept of integrating red teaming into organizational learning as significantly impacting the survival process is offered as absolutely critical – an essential element of understanding for a culture of preparedness. As such Red Team Journal is offered as an important resource. Note that the writing of Assistant Editor Adam Elkus has been featured multiple times on PWH, most recently in EEI #25 "What kind of War… Science, Defence, and Strategy … and John Boyd."

Defined by Red Team Journal – "loosely, red teaming is the practice of viewing a problem from an adversary or competitor's perspective. The goal of most red teams is to enhance decision making, either by specifying the adversary's preferences and strategies or by simply acting as a devil's advocate." For a quick look at red teaming and the writers see About.

A year ago PWH introduced a specially focused "carve-out," the INTERSECTIONS page, stemming from Frans Johansson's The Medici Effect and his model for gaining understanding, and developing innovative action -the intersection:

Intersectional ideas are those resulting from combining concepts from multiple fields – areas of specialization gained through education and experience – as compared to those created traditionally by combing concepts within a field – noted as directional ideas. Success in intersectional idea generation is dependent upon breaking down barriers of association that would more than likely indicate a "non relationship" or at best limited context between or among fields.

The question was then asked "Can the "train to the ace level" concept behind Top Gun, Red Flag, National Training Center at Ft Irwin, i.e. the combat training center or "CTC" concept be applied to hyper complex crisis, worst case  disaster command control learning, can ace decision makers be developed?" The following sub-pages continue to address various aspects of this question that include "red team" type functions and capabilities: 

These are considered "open/living threads.  PWH target audience will remain oriented at a community "team of leaders" inclusive of not only emergency management and first responders, but also private sector, and citizens, as required for survival of that community when faced with events that  are inherently severely de-stabilizing – marginalizing prior planning and anticipated response structure. Understanding risk – assessment, mitigation, management and the eventual acceptance level is crucial for a resilient community and part of a culture of preparedness.   By way of starting examples these Red Team Journal articles seem most appropriate

The Defense Science Board Calls for More Red Teaming    "Red teaming as the norm instead of the exception. Secretary of Defense direct the use of red teaming throughout DOD by developing and employing best practice guides, intellectual focus in professional military education, and more aggressive use of red teams in exercises."

 Interposing Tactics  " ... we are now seeing a new form of granular conflict, where the essence of tactical supremacy is achieved through coordination of multi factor, and multidimensional attacks and defense by individual force elements interposed against each other. ... will continue the process of dissolving force elements beyond the individual level to a new level of autonomous actions, which will lead to totally chaotic battles. The winner will be the force composed of individuals who are better at operating in this environment.

An Introduction to Reciprocal Net Assessment  ... good decision making is more than just reacting to threats in time to avoid them; good decision making involves avoiding surprise and creating it. The RNA approach can help analysts and decision makers do both. (and) is useful primarily as a complement to existing methods of red teaming, competitive and intelligence analysis, deception and counterdeception analysis, and business and military wargaming.

 Modeling and Simulation of Red Teaming   This and future position papers will explore possible ways to use M&S to augment or replace traditional red teams in some situations, the features Red Team M&S should possess, how one might connect live and simulated red teams, and existing tools in this domain.

Please make Red Team Journal part of your "resilient community" reading.

We continue to discuss the idea of "team of leaders."  This video well worth your time. Thanks to John Robb at Global Guerrilllas.  See his site for comments.

But let's take this one step further into the context of  "What kind of war"  determination as impacting how we approach "the war" once we have determined "what kind."  Consider the comments from  the Blog – Challenge COIN; Perspectives on the evolving U.S. Counterinsurgency and Counterterrorism doctrine. What works, what does not, and what we think we know: "COIN/CT Lessons from drug induced dancing."

... The main lesson to walk away with is how crucial it was to easily mimic the dance. Were this a difficult dance, the originator would have been nothing more than an observed solo performer. Also the role of the first follower made it acceptable for a few more people to join. Once the first follower's friends join in, the tipping point is then reached at 1:15. From then on, people join in groups and the originator or "leader" is irrelevant as the movement has a life of his own. Only the music ending stops everyone from dancing, not the "leader."

Now take that template and apply it to al Qaeda in Iraq. What sort of impact would killing or capturing the leadership have today? This is precisely why the classic insurgency texts emphasized the need to destroy an insurgency at its onset. Otherwise it becomes an integrated part of a society for at least a generation if not longer. So how do we end the al Qaeda-styled movements? Find the music and turn it off…

 Essential Elements of Information for a Culture of Preparedness

The military, facing a complex and intractable mixture of "wicked problems" on the battlefield, has responded with a doctrinal revolution in the production and practice of operational theory.  But most police agencies don't incorporate the "operational level of maneuver" into their planning and concept of operations.   We face a constellation of complex "high-intensity policing" problems such as counterterrorism, transnational organized crime and gangs that demand development of a true operational art and doctrine, rather than current focus on tactical response. The police service desperately requires an understanding of operational theory and must develop operational doctrine to successfully address contemporary threats.

We propose a model for urban police operational art that has a five-dimensional view of the operational space, focusing in particular on the doctrinally neglected elements of cyberspace and temporality.

Our intention is to summarize and clarify a wide array of military thought, incorporating it into an operational framework for police operational response. In particular we will examine the military theories of Robert Bunker, Robert Leonhard, and William McRaven

 

• Toward Operational Art for Policing at GroupIntel

• Police Operational Art for a Five-Dimensional Operational Space, at Small Wars Journal

Essential Elements of Information for a Culture of Preparedness

Why would our societal orientation in complex, dynamic, fast moving situations be good when our educational system trains people only to think through simplified, linear, sequential problems? Strategic thinkers need to be able to see "the big picture" and handle uncertainty, or they cannot be said to be strategic thinkers.

The ship of state has been steered, over the last forty or so years, into an epistemological cul-de-sac and we are headed for the rocks. America needs a grand strategy for a competent citizenry in order to reach the point where it can again have a grand strategy to deal with an unruly world.

I'm very pleased to announce that Project White Horse 084640 Edition #8 – A Culture of Preparedness and Intersectional Ideas  – is now on line.

The last two editions have provided perspective on "resilient communities" and leadership required. In Edition #8 we shift from providing "perspective" to creating actionable understanding and answers. The first part of the Edition #8 focus (and) title borrows from General Russ Honore's stated goal – developing a culture of preparedness. As Russ's words have been featured on the site, having "a culture…" seems to highlight the very essence of developing and nurturing a resilient community. As such, "culture of preparedness" can be seen to complete a "strong triangle" with the additional sides of "resilient communities," and Team of leaders. Faced with severe crisis, that model demands creative approaches. We must look beyond the norm to multiple fields and experience bases and find ideas and answers at the intersections.

Intersectional ideas are those resulting from combining concepts from multiple fields – areas of specialization gained through education and experience – as compared to those created traditionally by combing concepts within a field – noted as directional ideas. Success in intersectional idea generation is dependent upon breaking down barriers of association that would more than likely indicate a "non relationship" or at best limited context between or among fields.

To date, the site has consisted of the electronic magazine website and a Forum for posting of articles between editions. Based on the above, INTERSECTIONS now becomes a third element of PWH. This intersection will be created by providing the thinking of a group with multiple and diverse backgrounds, including medicine, first response, intelligence, academia, and military with experience from Great Britain, Israel, service in both Iraq and Afghanistan and on mean street USA. The content will be operational threads selected for potential to increase actionable understanding. The following two topics have been under discussion and the dialogue provided:

1. Actionable Intelligence and Resilient Communities
2. Training Decision Makers to the "Ace' Level

Please see the Editors Note and the article introductions for more detail and to put this edition in the context of actionable tools – useable by emergency responders, private sector organizations and citizens in the process of building a culture of preparedness. Most assuredly you will find perspectives and intersections. You will find understanding that can be acted upon. You will find answers.

A final note: Given the obvious, finding a picture of a leader on a white horse will surprise no one, but in this case there is more, there is purpose. While there are many representations of those who have been America's leaders throughout our history, including scores of George Washington as commander of the Continental Army and as our first President, the depiction of Washington with his troops, having crossed the Delaware and moving toward the attack at Trenton is, to me, iconic reflection of leadership in severe crisis, His adaptability and audacity after three major defeats saved not only the spirit of the Continental Army, it provided the underpinning that would remain through the victory at Yorktown. In so doing as General Nathanael Greene would say "he will be the deliverer of his own country." A century later, in a classic study of the Revolution, Sir George Otto Trevelyan stated "It may be doubted whether so small a number of men ever deployed so short a space of time with greater and more lasting effects upon the history of the world."

It was he who held the army together and gave it spirit through the most desperate of times… not a brilliant strategist or tactician, not a gifted orator, not an intellectual… (but) above all, Washington never forgot what was at stake and he never gave up … again and again in letters to Congress and his officers calling for unremitting courage and perseverance. 1776 by David McCullough

Noted as one of the world's 100 most decisive battles, the Battle of Trenton was most certainly testimony to General Washington's perseverance. He would not quit on the fragile American dream. In the sense of William Shakespeare's Henry V, I submit it is America's Agincourt moment – we few we band of brothers.

As stated in the previous edition, our forefathers by their actions in 1776 placed this country forever at the "dawn of victory." That victory demands perseverance in the face of great crisis and turmoil. It will be found in "a culture of preparedness."

Please join us at Project White Horse 084640

Ed @ PWH
29 April. 2009

Invest in preparedness, not prediction…I will never get to know the unknown since, by definition, it is unknown. However, I can always guess how it might affect me, and I should base my decisions around that."     The Black Swan, Nassem Nicholas Taleb

In  2001, the Defense Science Board investigated what they termed  "a revolution in training."  

The superb performance of our military in the 1990s was not just a result of technological superiority but equally of TRAINING SUPERIORITY.   Analysis of air, submarine and other combat showed that individuals who survived an engagement in which a kill was achieved were much more likely to win the next one. This had been originally thought to be battlefield Darwinism. But the combat training approach invented some 30 years ago (now 40 years, see  Scream of Eagles – Happy Birthday TOPGUN ) beginning with TOPGUN, showed this can be a function of learning. 

But they also noted that while there had certainly been a "Revolution"  (Top Gun, Red Flag, National Training Center {NTC}),  the results had not been appreciated nor expanded to other areas such as for joint warfare training. Indeed, today, there certainly appears to be no awareness of the truly spectacular results by the Department of Homeland Security, nor the public sector in general beyond that related to Maverick and Goose.

In this light, worth considering is a recent story based on remarks by new Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and the December 2008 Defense Science Board  report Challenges to Military Operations In Support of National Interfaces:   

As governor of Arizona, ... Napolitano sent a searing two-page letter to her predecessor as secretary, Michael Chertoff, complaining that a $25 million national exercise in October 2007, which she and 23,000 other federal, state and local emergency workers participated in, was too expensive, too long in planning and 'too removed from a real-world scenario.'

Now, in her first weeks as head of the Homeland Security Department, Ms. Napolitano has ordered a review of that program and several others, including cybersecurity, a strategy for protecting the border with Canada, and the vulnerability of power plants and other critical infrastructure.

The directives implicitly raise questions about how well the Bush administration prepared the nation's defenses against a terrorist attack … Her pointed comments on the emergency preparedness exercise, which she repeated last month at her Senate confirmation hearing, offer a glimpse into how Ms. Napolitano may retool one the centerpieces of the Bush administration's domestic security architecture.

'If we're going to be doing these kinds of things, and they are valuable, the underlying philosophy is a good one, but they need to be in my view streamlined,' Ms. Napolitano told the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs last month.

Ms. Napolitano's frustration with the system in place for rehearsing responses to natural disasters and terrorist attacks has struck a chord among state and local emergency managers, many of whom have long complained that the Homeland Security Department and its crisis-response component, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, have failed to consult fully with local communities in disaster planning. [For complete article and comments see RC#29]

The Department of Defense must change its conceptual approach to homeland defense … (it) can no longer think in terms of the 'home' game and the 'away' game.  There is only one game. [Vol. II, Part IV, Chapter 13, pg 203]

(and further) ... processes to ensure that plans are practiced and capabilities measured against readiness metrics are lacking.  While there are many exercises (possibly too many) the exercises are highly scripted, unconnected to each other, and typically focus on top-down approach (where the supporting organizations are 'training aids' to the senior-level players) instead of bottom-up approach (focusing on an integrated and layered response beginning with the initial event). Even the national-level exercises have not been effective… often stopped before the more difficult issues of transfer of command, employment of specialized assets, or unknowns (like public panic) come into play. ... More worrisome than the disjointed nature of the exercises is the lack of any process for effectively 'learning from' the lessons of these exercises, (or) ... no mechanisms to promulgate … to the wider (HLS & HLD) community.  [Vol. II, Part IV, Chapter 16, pg 250]

Mumbai attackers had hit list of 320 world targets http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/feb/19/mumbai-attacks-list-target s

Lashkar-e-Taiba ringleaders had ambitions well beyond causing mayhem in India, the Guardian has learned – Western intelligence agencies have accessed the computer and email account of Lashkar's communications chief, Zarar Shah, and found a list of possible targets, only 20 of which were in India.  The plotters behind the Mumbai attack, which left more than 170 people dead, had placed India's financial capital on a list of 320 worldwide locations as potential targets for commando-style terror strikes, the Guardian has learned.  It suggests that Lashkar-e-Taiba, the outlawed terror group that planned much of the attack from Pakistan, had ambitions well beyond causing mayhem in India.

As worthy of historical reflection, remember that Napoleon's army was not only great in terms of winning battles, but when his enemy broke and fled the battlefield, his troops pursued relentlessly, bloodily  insuring that there indeed, would not be "another day"  to fight.  Red-teaming  the world right now, what better time to pursue the "far enemy" (us) and destroy his will and confidence to go about in the world than now in our time of immense financial crisis when everything and everybody is focused on pure survival – all running in one direction, our backs to all other aspects of the environment?

Considering current preparation and readiness, there are two key elements missing from most training programs.  First is the notion of dedicated opposing force and second,  the need to include non-scripted decision making situations.   Most training events and drills are based on availability of resources – both human and physical - necessary for the management of, or the consequences of, a specific disaster type.  As stated previously, these mostly pre-scripted drills fail to address crisis development, eliminate the Observation and Orientation stages of the Observe Orient Decide Act (OODA) Loop by pre-determining their characteristics, thus eliminating uncertainty, and therefore, bypassing the essential element of critical command thinking.

The result: Level of readiness defined as instantaneous ability to respond to a suddenly arising major crisis based on locally available, un-prepositioned and un-mobilized countermeasure resources is either unchanged or decreased due to these flaws built into current philosophy of drills.  Therefore, this approach reduces or negates achievement of performance that our technical superiority promises. 

Resolution suggests a TOPGUN or "combat training center" type approach for homeland security and defense education, training, and exercises.  Elements would include:

• Highly competent Opposition Force using "enemy" equipment & tactics


• Objective, no-holds barred feedback so that no longer does first person to blackboard (or Bar) win


• Expectation of failure in the trained unit AND its commanders


• Metrics – You can't know there is a training problem until you have ways to measure proficiency

Development of an HLS/HLD "TOPGUN" will require answering these Questions?

1. Can the "train to the ace level" concept behind Top Gun, Red Flag, National Training Center at Ft Irwin, i.e. the combat training center or "CTC" concept be applied to hyper complex crisis, worst case  disaster command control learning?


2. Would "first mission" exposure for operational level decision makers provide value added? (consideration that  given funding constraints, daily normal real world law enforcement, fire response, emergency management, and job rotation, there may be only one opportunity in a three year cycle to expose the candidates. Can one exposure make a difference?  What would be the impact of dynamic simulation interjected into the classroom?


3. What needs to be included in pre-exercise classroom and simulated command problems to make the learning and training effective? In particular, by who and how are cognitive elements and related decision making in crisis taught?


4. What kind of research needs to be done in this area?

In closing, based on reports like that on Mumbai and Secretary Napolitano's concerns, is there a need and a receptive ear for a Scream of Eagles II from the first responder community?