Some view killing as an inevitable consequence of human behaviour.
It seems likely that humans have a kill inhibition just as most other
animals, for humans, there are two problems:-
we have developed methods of killing remotely
we learn to overcome the inhibition
The figure uses the methods of System
Thinking to show the effects of technology and remote killing on
our behaviour. it also shows the effect of different technology,
communications and TV, in restoring our visibility of submission. As
in so many cases, the technology that creates the problem may offer
some solution, too.
What's It About?
Command & Control (C2 for short) is about the management of
conflict. Actually, business management can be about the same thing
at times, but C2 has connotations of extreme force either applied, or
in reserve.
A naive reporter once asked General Schwarzkopf what it felt like
to orchestrate Desert Storm.
"Orchestrated? You start conducting and then some son-of-a-bitch
climbs out of the orchestra stalls and comes after you with a
bayonet!"
General Norman Schwarzkopf
Is Command & Control, in extremis, controlled
aggression through fear, while excess testosterone and adrenalin make
the legs tremble and the palms sweat?.
Egyptian Square. 2nd millennium BC, 100-man deep,
copper battleaxes, bows, quivers for volley fire, wings and
centre, flanking movements, recruit training, cadence step.
Assyria, 9th Century BC, 120,000-man army, archers,
mounted lancers. Archers mounted for mobility, fought on foot in
pairs - one for bow, second for wicker shield. Engineer corps
Greek Phalanx, 7th Century BC, 8-man deep files, 8-ft
pikes, 2-foot swords, centre & wings, advanced to flute.
Roman Legion, 4th Century BC, 120-man maniples,
throwing spears, checkerboard formation.
Alexander
Muslims, 7th Century AD, religious fanaticism-
"The sword is the key to Heaven and Hell" - Koran.
Mail and helmets, but no shields, brute force rather than
tactics, sword, javelin, dagger, bow, scimitar, mounted lances.
Employed Europeans as mercenaries for phalanx operations.
Battle regulated by black and white flags - no oral or
written orders.
Cavalry in five lines.
First two wore leather armour, used sabres and lances.
Following 3 lines - bows and javelins, unarmoured.
Europe, 14th Century,
Crecy, long-bowmen vs French knights
End of 1000 years of mobility-by-cavalry - sacrificed for
firepower
Swiss Phalanx, Spanish Square - 50-man front and per
file.
And so to Napoleon and modern times, infantry, tanks
helicopter-cavalry...
Throughout this time, and today, command is limited by the
abilities of the force to respond as much as by any C2 technology.
What makes an effective Fighting Force
Examples of Effective C2 abound in History:-
The ability of Alexander to sense tentativeness or outright
fear among the troops at a certain point in the enemy lines and to
exploit it with a rapid thrust there.
Caesar's care never to lose "control" of his legions so that,
when a battle was going badly, he could disengage before tactical
set-back turned into catastrophe
Wellington's skill in anticipating the thrust of the enemy's
attack and manoeuvring laterally in time to avoid it
Johnson & Levis, Science of Command &
Control
Expectations of Command & Control
Force Commander. Intelligence, Decision Support;
Execution Management; Deployment Management
Out-of-Area Commander. Focus for Command Information;
Centre for Control
Political Master. Political Situation Control
National MOD. Application of National MOD Influence
Procurement Financier. Force Multiplier to reduce
overall defence costs
Subordinate Commander. Control and Reporting (C&R)
Authority; Mission Source; Resource Source.
Journalist. Source of up-to-the-minute information for
public consumption
A view of the Defensive C2 Task
In practical terms, the Defensive C2 Task is to coordinate the
defensive assets so as to:-
Deter ¥ Counter aggression ¥ Face a changing Threat Direction
¥ Counter Diverse Threat Elements ¥ Protect own Latent Offensive
Forces ¥ Distinguish Friend from Foe, esp. own Returning Offensive
Forces
Be available ¥ Reliable ¥ Dependable ¥ Maintainable ¥
Transportable ¥ Mobile
Win the Cost-Exchange Ratio Battle&endash;cost of Defence
should not cost more than the Assets so saved, in the long term
Command & Control and "Force Multiplier
Effect" (FME)
Force Multiplier Effect is a term used to describe the ability to
make more out of your own forces than you might expect. It is a
much-abused, much misunderstood term.
The Command & Control (C2) Design Issue
Knowing that...
war is generally chaotic
any future war will be a dynamic patchwork, not a series of
set pieces
...The Task is to...
design a human-centred decision- support system for
enemy and environment make situations unpredictable,
therefore...
only human ingenuity, synergy, training, reactivity can
cope
Non-linear Dynamical
real world is made from open, interacting systems, behaving
chaotically, therefore...
we must learn to design adaptive systems without clear
boundaries
Generic C2 N2
C2 can be described, crudely, in a generic way as follows:-
The N-squared (N2) chart show the basic roles (commander,
intelligence, operations, logistics) and the information that they
interchange. so, in the N2 chart,
Commander gives Decisions to Operations
Logistics gives Constraints to Intelligence
Fractal C2
The N2 chart above represents generically the activities at each
of the circles containing C2. the whole diagram represents a nesting
hierarchical organization. In army terms,
the outer ellipse might be a corps
next two inner ellipses might be divisions
smallest 4 ellipses might be battle groups
and so on
While it would be imprecise to insist that the structure in the
figure is strictly fractal, there is evidently a degree of
self-similarity at each hierarchy level.
Deterministic Viewpoint
In attempting to penetrate the mysteries of C2, I developed an
analytic approach based on a created mathematics of pyramid
hierarchies.
Pyramid Laws
C2 Law of Diminishing Lateral Communication. We know in
practice that it is harder to get agreement with someone who is
more distant laterally in the hierarchy, i.e. you have to go
higher up the pyramid to find a common boss.
C2 Law of Vertical Data Compression.
Each of us has roughly the same brainpower - a so-called
Crapper's Brainful (after Sir Thomas Crapper, inventor of the
flush toilet).
So, if you have, say, five subordinates in the pyramid, and
you all have the same brainpower, then you can interact and
capture only one fifth of their information effectively.
As you go up the tree, data gets compressed at something
like the span of control (= pyramid slope) at each level
Decision Rate Invariance - see below
Infrastructure is minimized by symmetrical partitioning
C2 Survivability
Functional survivability is inverse to the number of singular
functional architecture nodes, and to the degree of their exposure
Equivalence Laws
The theory suggests as follows:-
Mean rate of issuing C2 order-sets is proportional to the mean
rate of Action Element Turnaround
Mean rate of Intelligence reporting is proportional to the
mean rate of Action Element Turnaround
To test the theory, I developed the following simple dynamic
model:-
The top half of the model shows the command decision cycle, with
information being used to develop objectives strategies, plans and
orders. See the Generic Reference
Model, Mission Management for further explanation. The lower half
shows a force in various states: ready, in action, etc. The Laws
emerge because of the cyclic behaviour of the action elements. Once
they have been in action, they return and are replenished (perhaps
repaired) before being ready to go again. Giving the action elements
orders more frequently cannot result in those orders being
implemented, because the force is temporarily unavailable. Similarly,
the rate of Intelligence reporting coincides with the action
frequency - no action, no intelligence to report.
The graph shows the results of running the model. At each step in
the magenta line representing orders sent, the force undertakes
actions and then recovers. The fastest that orders can be sent
(sensibly, that is) is that action element turnaround cycle.
An understanding of Mission Management and Behaviour Management in
the C2 context can be gained from Systems
Models. The following figure shows the way in which Belief takes
a central role in command and control.
Ignoring the brown arrows, figure above, for the moment, we can
see three interlocking loops.
The top loop is about the individual. Beliefs give him or her
a straightforward view of the world, offering simple, comfortable
explanations of everyday events and phenomena. This reduces
psychological uncertainty, so reinforcing the Beliefs, simply
"because they work".
Beliefs generate role models of "good" and "bad" behaviour,
where these terms are relative.
These in turn promote conformant behaviour, generating social
cohesion, the development of power structures, etc., as the figure
shows.
Power structures enable formal education to be established,
which will generally reinforce the Beliefs which enabled it to
emerge in the first place
Icons form a vital coordinating focus. Icons may be people, or
things - charismatic generals, regimental colours, etc.
The brown arrows show how military ideas map on to a map which is
essentially generic.
A variation on the previous model shows the top lop to be the
same. This model shows, however, how individuals fare when seeking to
join a group. They find themselves either resonating sympathetically
with the ideals of the group, or antipathetic and dissonant with
those ideals. In the latter case, we should expect the individual to
find another group to which to belong.
It is surprising what you can find in old Bibles. The figure above
shows the Assyrians attacking a fort about 880BC. they are using a
mobile battering ram to breach the garrison walls. Lulls during such
events occasionally saw the garrison commander throwing food and wine
over the battlements for the enemy. This appears to have been early
psychological warfare: "do your worst, we have plenty of provisions
and are rather enjoying ourselves".
The third viewpoint is so difficult to accept that many pretend it
does not exist. But, the facts are there:-
we cannot know the future
the world s generally chaotic, especially on the edge of
conflict
linear predictive views are untenable
we do not know what is going to happen
we do not know what the enemy will do
any decisions we make must be intelligent guesses at best
The figure shows one view of the kind of messy architecture one
might get in a Peacekeeping assignment such as Bosnia in the former
Yugoslavia. In fact, the real situation is much more complex, since
each of the neat ellipses and rectangles would be spread out across
the geography of the country concerned, all mutually overlaid,
intertwined and entangled.
Complex systems like this are not designed - they happen. And,
unlike neat linear systems, there is no beginning and no end. Instead
it is all tangled loops.
So, in such situations how can one cope? Or, can one cope at all?
Unified Systems Hypothesis - Map
One approach is to develop a much more open way of addressing
complex system issues. I have developed the Unified Systems
Hypothesis (USH) to deal with such problems.
The USH Map integrates a number of simple principles into one
powerful causal loop. Key to understanding is that Variety is viewed
as a commodity, of which you can have more or less. Connected variety
forms complementary sets, which
create a stable network, resistant to change. This is represented in
the map by Systems Cohesion. Dominance can arise, and has the effect
of suppressing variety which leads eventually to decay and breakdown,
and the cycle repeats.
It is possible to maintain cohesion by maintaining variety, i.e.
by injecting new variety. It is possible to maintain cohesion with
domination by maintaining variety, i.e. by stopping its suppression.
it is possible to generate more variety by injecting more energy, top
right of figure. Some of this new variety may connect, others may
remain isolated and become dispersive variety, attempting to break
down systems cohesion.
Using these ideas carefully results in a guide to designing
non-linear systems to exist in a non-linear world - the one we
actually live in!
Open System Design Guidelines
Step 1 Establish CIS objectives and requirements by
reference to Containing System(s) (look outwards)
Step 2 Establish sibling systems and their interactions
to be perturbed by new/altered CIS
Step 3 Conceive complementary systems to neutralize
unwanted perturbations
Step 4 Design CIS as an Open System to complement
siblings in contributing to Containing Systems' objectives (i.e.
design outwards first)
