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

Forty years ago, 3 March 1969, the first TOPGUN class  began "graduate level" fighter pilot education and training at Naval Air Station Miramar at the Fighter Weapons School. They were there because eagles screamed.

They were there because fighter pilots will not accept failure. In 1966 North Vietnamese fighter pilots (flying MiG 17 Frescos and MiG 21 Fishbeds) had accounted for only 3 percent of U.S. air losses. In the first three months of 1968, the MiG pilots now were responsible for 22 percent. The U.S. kill ratio was just about 2 to 1 (Air Force a little below, Navy, a little above) – as compared to the 10 to 1 of WWII and the Korean War – notably the worst ratio in the history of Naval aviation. Air crews were getting killed or becoming Hanoi Hilton residents, missiles and tactics developed to shoot down Russian bombers at long range were useless against an enemy intending to engage at close range coupled with U.S. rules of engagement prohibiting firing until positive ID obtained (which therefore put your aircraft inside the missile launch parameters.)

 Eagles screamed. Sometimes leaders listen and do what they're supposed to do – pay attention to those who've been in the crucible, and then act to take care of their people. This time they did.

Vice Admiral Tom Connolly (Deputy Chief of Naval Operations (Air) and Rear Admiral Bob Townsend (Commander Naval Air Systems Command) together representing both the operational and technical sides, assigned former Commanding Officer of the USS Coral Sea, Captain Frank "Whip" Ault to find out what was wrong. Ault was the right man. His nickname/call sign, "Whip," came from Korean War days as Executive – soon to be Commanding – Officer of VA-55 on USS Essex. He had told his squadron pilots "I can out-drink you, out-fight you, and out-fly you," and there's nothing more obnoxious than a guy who can back up what he says. When being interviewed for consideration to be Executive Officer of the Navy's first nuclear powered aircraft carrier, USS Enterprise, he so outraged the interview game playing Admiral Hyman Rickover, that Rickover called his boss and told him Ault was the most irreverent Naval Officer he'd ever interviewed – but he got the job.

... we sent our people out there not trained for dogfighting. We sent the aircraft out there not equipped for dogfighting… and we got into nose-nose combat situations where neither the guy flying the airplane nor the airplane itself had ever fired a missile.  Further, based on the expected nature of air war and our technical developments to intercept bombers at long range, we have lost expertise and continuity in 'being dogfighters' ... there is a need to establish a fighter weapons school to reverse this trend and to eliminate aircrew and ground personnel error…

Using Thomas (The World is Flat) Friedman's terms, they created a "different context, different narrative, different imagination" and they changed the Navy fighter pilot paradigm.

By January 12, 1973 when the last air-air MiG kill occurred (by TOPGUN graduate Vic Koveleski, VF-161, CAG 5, USS Midway) Navy fighter pilot kill ratio had risen to 15 to 1. Air Force, (had not yet established any higher level training) ratios remained throughout the war at 2 to 1. These statistics helped to create a virtual revolution in air combat training.  They had proven that what had been originally thought to be battlefield Darwinism can be a function of learning.
It is possible to train to the "ace" level without bloodshed

In 1975, the Air Force initiated "Exercise Red Flag," a graduate level air-air course.

Happy 40th

Fly Navy, The BEST Always Have

[Article sources: Friends and personal experience 1) while at the Naval Missile Center (NMC) Point Mugu (1970-1971) providing adversary support for Air Test and Evaluation Squadron Four (VX-4); 2) while flying with VA-56 off USS Midway in the Gulf of Tonkin, 1972-73 (MiG killers of VF-161 resided in Ready Room next to VA-56): and 3) Rober K. Wilcox's Scream of Eagles]

TOPGUN today – from Wikipedia:

On 11 July 1996, The Navy Strike and Air Warfare Center (NSAWC) consolidated three commands into a single command structure under a flag officer  to enhance aviation training effectiveness. The Naval Strike Warfare Center (STRIKE "U") based at NAS Fallon since 1984, was joined with the Navy Fighter Weapons School (TOPGUN) and the Carrier Airborne Early Warning Weapons School (TOPDOME) which both moved from NAS Miramar as a result of a Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) decision in 1993. The Seahawk Weapon School was added in 1998 to provide tactical training for navy helicopters.

New York Times, 16 February, 2009— 

The homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitano, is re-evaluating the largest federal program for testing the country's ability to respond to terrorist attacks, one of several Bush administration initiatives she has ordered to come under review.

PWH Chapter 1 (Part 1 of 2) The Constant Gardner http://www.projectwhitehorse.com/pdfs/B[1].%20PWH_Chapter1(1of2).pdf

(From Page 11) ... Studies clearly indicate that highly trained (i.e., prepared) personnel exposed to a sudden crisis whose nature falls outside the scope of prior preparation commit grave errors of judgment and procedure. Current training and drills are focused on availability of resources, both human and physical, necessary for the management of, or the consequences of, a specific disaster type. 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, eliminate uncertainty, and therefore, bypass the essential element of critical command thinking.

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 current flaws built into current philosophy of drills.

In this high-end crisis, where orientation to the problem is so essential, where potential is very high for decisions that could save or cause to be lost the most number of lives – decision makers have NOT been exposed to and are not aware of ingrained decision making biases, nor trained, or exercised in complex decision making in chaotic, uncertain environments.

The transnational and "total warfare" aspect of 21st Century conflict and the always possibility of "Category 5" natural disasters dictates a need for changes in how we educate and train, including exercise design and evaluation processes. The chaotic intent of terrorism and the complexity of the required multilevel, multi-agency response dictate that learning opportunities in complex environments must be provided.

RE-EVALUATION OF NATIONAL SECURITY ORDERED
By Eric Schmitt
16 February, 2009 The New York Times

In part:

WASHINGTON — The homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitano, is re-evaluating the largest federal program for testing the country's ability to respond to terrorist attacks, one of several Bush administration initiatives she has ordered to come under review.

As governor of Arizona, Ms. 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. But they also reflect what homeland security analysts say is Ms. Napolitano's desire to apply her practical experiences as a border-state governor to several important homeland security policies.
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.

… It will not take long to put Ms. Napolitano's new thinking to the test. FEMA is completing plans for the next major exercise, scheduled for late July.

…The exercise this year, for the first time, focuses on preventing a potential attack, not just responding to a crisis, federal officials say.

Emergency planners say they have already taken Ms. Napolitano's criticisms to heart, improving federal coordination with state and local partners in planning the disaster drill this summer, increasing the frequency of national exercises to every year from every two, cutting costs to encourage wider participation and providing feedback within 90 days to participants on what went well and what did not.
"Most of them were already on the radar scope in one way, shape or form," said Steve Saunders, a retired Army National Guard major general who is an assistant FEMA administrator overseeing the national exercise division, "but her letter helped crystallize, I think, some of the things we needed to do."

Mr. Saunders said he expected some changes as a result of the review ordered by Ms. Napolitano, but he cautioned in an interview, "don't mess around" significantly with this year's exercise or drills on the drawing board for 2010 and 2011 that will simulate an improvised nuclear bomb attack and a catastrophic earthquake.

Mr. Saunders said states and localities had already started budgeting for those exercises. "If we start shifting near-term activities," he said, "it becomes fairly problematic."

… States and cities routinely conduct emergency preparedness drills. Specialists in domestic security agree that it is also essential to hold large-scale national emergency exercises to test how federal, state and local officials and emergency personnel work together to prevent or deal with terrorist attacks.
Congress directed the government in 1998 to carry out a national exercise program, formerly called Topoff for the "top officials" who participate. There have been four major exercises since then, simulating chemical, biological and nuclear attacks. The exercises now also include foreign partners, like Britain and Canada.

Specialists in domestic security say Ms. Napolitano offers a new perspective to the program.
"She brings to the table real-world experience as a governor, as a person responsible for implementing these programs where the rubber hits the road," said David Heyman, director of the domestic security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Ms. Napolitano's unhappiness with the program stems from her participation in the five-day October 2007 exercise, which simulated a dirty-bomb attack against Phoenix; Portland, Ore.; and Guam. It was planned to test how well federal, state and local officials responded to such a cataclysm.
Within days after the exercise wrapped up, Ms. Napolitano complained to Mr. Chertoff that federal officials never contacted top Arizona emergency officials during the drill, did not involve her as much as she said she would have been during a real disaster, and gave participants too much advance information about the drill.

"When you have months to prepare for an exercise and you know the exact scenario being contemplated," Ms. Napolitano said, "a large part of the exercise's value is lost."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/17/us/politics/17terror.html?pagewante d=1&_r=1

After more than 37 years of uniform service to the U.S. army and our nation, I will spend the second half of my life committed to a new mission: Creating a "Culture of Preparedness'' in America. Every effort I take, whether it is this new Web site, public speaking/lectures, fund-raisers, or the books I have written or will write, will be committed to this cause.

Please Visit General Honore's Website: http://www.generalhonore.com/

Ed @PWH

We now move to

• >> Intelligence implications for a resilient community response force team in a low probability/high impact  worst case disaster environment:

• critical information – what, where and how


• education aimed at preventing "victimhood"


• planning on multiple levels


• being a responder not a victim


• building leaders AND followers – who, how 

By necessity that team will most likely include professionals (public safety and military – Guard and  Active Duty), private sector, and individual citizens or community organizations

If all would agree on the "team" response requirement and given the above – how do you inform, plan, and educate/train/learn across a team with few common linkages on a very practical basis?  How do you get ready for the "Black Swan?

It is easy to identify the problems, not too hard to come up with solutions, BUT the how and the doing is something else.

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…you always control what you do, so make this your end.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb – The Black Swan; The Impact of the Highly Improbable

>>  Thread #2 Intelligence meaning and usage in natural disasters with Katrina as an event example

This post continues the comments on resilient communities and actionable intelligence from RC#25 related to thread #2 focused on what we can learn from the response to "Katrina." It's significance is that the comments address "intelligence" – generally thought of in terms of  acts by humans, either criminal or warfighter – as a function of needs in response to a non-human generated disaster.

The issue is not so much what is most efficient or effective (though obviously important), but rather what can be learned from an intersection of experience from Marines and firemen and cops and brain surgeons in light of unconventional crisis, unconventional responses.

The development and exploration of critical "operational threads" for future editions is still necessary. It would appear to me that education for wearing a uniform in Detroit … or in Baghdad requires a global focus as well as local. Lessons in one are needed in the other.
Here are some issues under consideration: