Agile Command & Control
Modern military operations are characterized by highly dynamic environments, complex strategic, operational, and tactical situations, a rich and evolving mix of allies and adversaries, inherent and sometimes massive uncertainty, and high risk. This combination of factors requires that military forces must continually transform and adjust to remain highly effective in extremely fluid environments. The U.S. Department of Defense and others around the world who have recognized the nature of the emerging security environment are developing concepts and capabilities aimed at enhancing their ability to succeed in the face of change and uncertainty, both in their military forces and in the endeavors that they support. This ability, known as agility, is emerging as a key attribute of the forces and organizations that will enable them to respond to the nature of modern operations.
If the capability for agility is to be planned and designed for in military forces and systems, there is a need for objective recognition criteria, metrics, and measurement approaches. There must be a means of assessing how agile forces are, and for comparing “as is” forces with “to be” forces and recognizing which has more agility; that is, there is a need for an operationalized definition of agility. In this effort, EBR researchers drew on existing literature and emerging thinking on agility and complex adaptive systems to suggest a framework for measuring agility in command and control contexts, and develop starting-point operationalized definitions of the key attributes of agility. A paper resulting from this work was nominated for the Gary F. Wheatley Best Paper Award at the 13th International Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium in Seattle, Washington in 2007. This work captures the relevant state-of-the-art and state-of-the-practice thinking on C2 agility, and is one of the first attempts to suggest quantitative measures of agility-related capabilities.
| Attribute | Definition |
|---|---|
| Robustness | The ability to maintain effectiveness across a range of tasks, situations, and conditions |
| Resilience | The ability to recover from or adjust to misfortune, damage, or a destabilizing perturbation in the environment |
| Responsiveness | The ability to react to a change in the environment in a timely manner |
| Flexibility | The ability to employ multiple ways to succeed and the capacity to move seamlessly between them |
| Innovation | The ability to do new things and the ability to do old things in new ways |
| Adaptation | The ability to change work processes and the ability to change the organization |
1. David S. Alberts and Richard E. Hayes, Power to the Edge: Command and Control in the Information Age, Command and Control Research Program Publication Series, 2003.