Command & Control Research Program (CCRP)
EBR has held a competitively awarded contract to support the Command and Control Research Program (CCRP) of the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Networks and Information Integration (OASD - NII) since 1994. This project involves two general classes of work, both intended to meet the CCRP’s stated goal of improving the state-of-the-art and the state-of-the-practice of command and control (C2): (a) Research and Development efforts focused on the future of C2 and (b) Community Outreach efforts designed to create and maintain a healthy, well-informed international C2 community.
Research & Development
While seeking to encourage and enhance C2 research across the globe, the CCRP selects a small number of specific, crucial research activities to carry out with its own resources. EBR has often been the company of choice to carry out these efforts. Among the more important of these are:
- Efforts to understand command and control for Peace Operations and what makes them effective. EBR has organized a series of expert seminars involving military officers with extensive peace operations experience and carried out detailed analyses of operations in Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Haiti. Books such as Command Arrangements for Peace Operations and Interagency and Political-Military Dimensions of Peace Operations: Haiti – A Case Study have resulted from these efforts.
- Development of systems of metrics for measuring the quality of command and control in operations, field exercises, command post exercises, ands laboratory experiments. This has included understanding how the metrics have changed as national security challenges and operating environments have changed as we have moved from the 20th to the 21st Centuries.
- Research designed to identify different approaches to command and control and to determine the circumstances under which they are effective. This has included analyses of US, UK, German, UK, Israeli, and NATO C2 approaches and the systems involved in implementing them.
- Staffing and managing the CCRP’s Center of Excellence for Experimentation in order to develop greater capability for cost-effective, valid, and reliable experimentation within DoD and the interagency community. EBR’s staff have co-authored both the Code of Best Practice: Experimentation and the Code of Best Practice: Campaigns of Experimentation and taught classes on the topic at Joint Forces Command, NORTHCOM, and NATO’s Allied Command Transformation as well as organizing a number of workshops and seminars to assist DoD and interagency partners in experimental design, data collection and data analysis plans, as well as training for data collectors and analysts.
- EBR worked with the Office of Force Transformation and the CCRP to create the Conceptual Framework for Network Centric Operations, which has been widely taught both within the US DoD and in coalition partners. This tool helps to organize discussions and applications relevant to Transformation and Network Centric Warfare.
- EBR has also supported a number of NATO Research Study Groups that have enabled the CCRP to tap into the research and development communities of a variety of nations to explore new and emerging C2 concepts and issues. These include the NATO Code of Best Practice for C2 Assessments, the NATO C2 Conceptual Reference Model, and the NATO Network Enabled Capability Command and Control Maturity Model (N2C2M2). In the process of supporting these efforts EBR has worked with C2 experts from more than 20 NATO countries as well as experts from other major research establishments in Sweden and Australia.
Community Outreach
The CCRP leverages its resources by developing and maintaining an international C2 community and by encouraging circulation of research, development, and analyses across that community. EBR supports these efforts in several important ways. Maintenance of a C2 expert database, which includes more than 5,000 individuals who work or publish in the field. Maintenance of the CCRP website by which the community is informed of important developments, events of interest, and newly available publications. Supporting the annual International Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium (ICCRTS) at which more than 150 technical papers are presented to and discussed by experts from more than 20 countries. Supporting CCRP publication efforts, including books and the International Command and Control Journal (IC2J), which involves not only technical editing, graphics and layout efforts, but also coordination of peer review processes to ensure quality.