Interagency
For more than 20 years EBR has been a leader and pioneer in interagency research, development, and analysis. One of its most successful efforts was undertaken for the Office of National Counter-Drug Policy (ONDCP) and the White House to (a) use information from across the entire intelligence and law enforcement communities to determine how illicit drugs, particularly cocaine, were moving from their countries of origin into the United States and (b) recommend alternative investment patterns and interdiction efforts to reduce the flow. To accomplish this task, EBR worked with all those agencies that have data about drug trafficking and drug traffickers. The results were furnished to Congress and a summary of the report was included in ONDCP’s annual report.
This interagency focus continued when EBR began working on Peace Operations which involved a series of Command and Control Research Program (CCRP) sponsored workshops bringing together civilian and military personnel who must work together to make them successful. EBR’s CCRP book, Interagency and Political-Military Dimensions of Peace Operations: Haiti – A Case Study has proven to be an important source of insight and knowledge about these challenging situations. The CCRP book Doing Windows: Non-Traditional Military Responses to Complex Emergencies was the first effort to formally model the process of nation-building in a failed state, an effort for which EBR provided the subject matter expertise needed to link qualitative expertise to the modeling community.
EBR has also worked with Joint Forces Command and the state and local community in the Hampton Roads area to analyze and model the responses involved in dealing with natural disasters and major terrorist events. The company also applied its metrics expertise to Strong Angel experiments designed to examine civilian and military communications in major disasters and to Golden Phoenix, 2007, a major interagency training event in the Los Angeles area in which first responders (police, fire, medical) worked with military reserve units and representatives from national agencies to deal with a simulated major earthquake.
Representing the CCRP on a series of NATO Research Study Groups, EBR has been involved in coordinating and analyzing a number of case studies dealing with interagency cases including German responses to a major Elbe River flood, NATO peace operations in Bosnia and Kosovo, international tsunami relief, and NATO response to a major Pakistan earthquake. These efforts have influenced the development of the NATO NEC C2 Maturity Model which applies to collective international activities. These trends are summarized in the CCRP book, Planning: Complex Endeavors, co-authored by Dr. Richard E, Hayes, President of EBR and his International C2 Journal article, “Its and Endeavor, Not a Force.”
Beginning under a USAF Small Business Innovative Research contract that has since been leveraged to meet a variety of different Government needs, EBR has developed a novel approach that uses the Sensemaking literature to support critical thinking and intelligence analysis to address the complex political, social, economic, and military dimensions of insurgencies. This approach can be applied to any organization (civilian, military, or industrial) in order to understand its purposes, structures, and dynamics. Equally important, the approach allows rapid recognition of changes in those aspects of the organization, helping analysts deal with and even anticipate important innovations.
EBR personnel have also been involved in the Project on National Security Reform’s effort to improve interagency coordination, an important effort examining some of the most profound challenges facing the community today.
EBR has also provided subject matter expertise to recent efforts to create models of irregular warfare. These efforts link substantive expertise from a range of fields (economics, sociology, transportation, energy, political science) to modeling tools where their dynamics and interactions can play out to allow assessment of alternative options and activities. In a sense, this brings the work full circle to the early counter-drug and “doing windows” efforts.