Monday, December 09, 2002

LIVE FROM SUPERNOVA: I'm at the Kevin Werbach's Supernova Conference in Palo Alto.  WOW.  What an incredible group of thought leaders, in the audience and on the stage.  Highlights from the scene are here: http://www.pulver.com/supernova/weblog.html 12:09:21 PM

DECENTRALIZATION OF THE ENEMY.  Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's National Security Advisor, was on Fox News Sunday eight weeks back talking about Al Qaeda, and taking questions about the group's ability to function. Her comments were incredibly interesting because they reflect the struggle our country seems to be having in adapting to this new world of organizational decentralization. I would submit that the challenge is not one of pure information technology. It's the harder issues around doctrine, organizational structure, decision process, and inter-agency/cross-coalition trust that make up the core tenets and values required for decentralization. It does seem clear, though, that we have recognized that the only way to fight a decentralized target is to use decentralized tactics that give us the same agility. When polled about the effectiveness of the ground and air operations in Afghanistan, Ms. Rice offered, "They can't run training camps and commanding and control and communications from a secure base in Afghanistan. That part has been extremely effective." The centricity of command and control infrastructure makes for delicious, hardened targets. This is certainly a core tenet of military strategy, but it highlights the fact that the real wiring behind these groups isn't the central targets, it's the organizational and resultant tactical approach that is giving us the heartburn. But with the success in Afghanistan came the catalyst for horrendous leverage of Al Qaeda's cellular, node-based organizational structure. Rice continued, "But we've always thought that this might be an organization that could function in a fairly decentralized fashion, and so there continues to be concern about remnants of the organization that might still be plotting and planning. One of the issues is, how decentralized is the decision-making?" Indeed. Since Rice's interview some eight weeks ago, we've witnessed the carnage in Bali and Kenya. What are the good guys to do? Al Qaeda's decentralized, cellular structure has pushed decision process down to the nodes. The immediate task is fight this node-based enemy with our own brand of decentralization. The really good news is that the conventional wisdom and ideology that is "Network Centric Warfare" has been embraced and socialized in the defense establishment. Specific to decision-making in a decentralized dogfight, it is recognized that network centric collaboration will need to: Drive the speed of decision. Command and control is an equation for "days and week". Decentralization of decision-making delivers solutions in "minutes and hours". Facilitate lethality in decision-making. This is the realm of John Stenbit's battle call of "Power to the Edge". We need to move away from myopic, centralized decision processes and embrace the gray matter that lives at the edge of the network and in the theatre of operation. These warfighters have the situational awareness, that, when married with hard data (GPS/GIS, force location, scrubbed intel), leads to real situational dominance. Embrace the notion that we will be working with nontraditional constituencies on a need-to-know, ad-hoc, situational basis. Last week, our government found itself needing to quickly swarm with the Israelis and the Kenyans. Before that, it was the Australians and the Indonesians. Recognize the need all of the above for proactive processes, not just the reactive. Tactically, this equates to doctrine and emergent systems that facilitate: Just-in-time workgroups using just-in-time networks: Asking someone to deploy an application for collaboration and then working through the cross-certification of domain certificates so that individuals may begin to work together introduces serious drag. Secure, self-organization is a requirement. But it's also about commodity pipes that can be leveraged using military-grade crypto at the application layer. In a war on centricity, hardened targets may include data communications infrastructure. The need to swarm on "whatever is available to me" will become more important than ever. Even if it means 56kb dial tone to MSN from a hotel room in Qatar, or a Starbucks near the United Nations in New York. Just-in-time workgroups creating just-in-time applications: There is no such thing as a "one-size-fits-all" application when it comes to collaborative practices. We will need to provide decentralized technology that facilitates the process challenges that asymmetry brings. It's a conflagration of componentry that can be assembled as needed, with access to web services. Just-in-time workgroups consuming just-in-time data, information, and intelligence: Web services at the far edges of the network, as well as to centralized object stores, will round out the decision process by facilitating intelligence and knowledge creation around hardened data. Seems straightforward, right? Technology in this case will be the easy part. It's the long-held command-and-control views and doctrine that will need to be refined to facilitate a truly effective attack on a decentralized enemy. In my next post, I'll offer some observations from a government/private industry forum I presented at several weeks ago which point to just one of the issues in tactical execution. 9:44:03 AM