Command and Control: The Sociotechnical Perspective

Guy H Walker, Neville A. Stanton, Daniel P. Jenkins

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138076860
• eBook ISBN: 9781317164043
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: National Security
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Military command and control is not merely evolving, it is co-evolving. Technology is creating new opportunities for different types of command and control, and new types of command and control are creating new aspirations for technology. The question is how to manage this process, how to achieve a jointly optimised blend of socio and technical and create the kind of agility and self-synchronisation that modern forms of command and control promise. The answer put forward in this book is to re-visit sociotechnical systems theory. In doing so, the problems of 21st century command and control can be approached from an alternative, multi-disciplinary and above all human-centred perspective. Human factors (HF) is also co-evolving. The traditional conception of the field is to serve as a conduit for knowledge between engineering and psychology yet 21st century command and control presents an altogether different challenge. Viewing military command and control through the lens of sociotechnical theory forces us to confront difficult questions about the non-linear nature of people and technology: technology is changing, from platform centric to network centric; the interaction with that technology is changing, from prescribed to exploratory; and complexity is increasing, from behaviour that is linear to that which is emergent. The various chapters look at this transition and draw out ways in which sociotechnical systems theory can help to understand it. The sociotechnical perspective reveals itself as part of a conceptual toolkit through which military command and control can be transitioned, from notions of bureaucratic, hierarchical ways of operating to the devolved, agile, self-synchronising behaviour promised by modern forms of command and control like Network Enabled Capability (NEC). Sociotechnical system theory brings with it a sixty year legacy of practical application and this real-world grounding in business process re-engineering underlies the entire book. An attempt has been made to bring a set of sometimes abstract (but no less useful) principles down to the level of easy examples, design principles, evaluation criteria and actionable models. All of these are based on an extensive review of the current state of the art, new sociotechnical/NEC studies conducted by the authors, and insights derived from field studies of real-life command and control. Time and again, what emerges is a realisation that the most agile, self-synchronising component of all in command and control settings is the human.

Chapter 1
Introduction

‘The […] military could use battlefield sensors to swiftly identify targets and bomb them. Tens of thousands of warfighters would act as a single, self-aware, coordinated organism. Better communications would let troops act swiftly and with accurate intelligence, skirting creaky hierarchies. It’d be “a revolution in military affairs unlike any seen since the Napoleonic Age.” And it wouldn’t take hundreds of thousands of troops to get a job done—that kind of “massing of forces” would be replaced by information management. […] Computer networks and the efficient flow of information would turn [the] chain saw of a war machine into a scalpel.’ (Shachtman, 2007; Cebrowski and Gartska, 1998)

Network Enabled Capability

Network Enabled Capability (NEC) is a type of command and control. Command and control is the generic label for the management infrastructure behind any large, complex, dynamic resource system (Harris and White, 1987). Like all good management infrastructures, military command and control is contingent (e.g., Mintzberg, 1979) upon the problem it is tasked with dealing and because that problem, at some fundamental level, has remained relatively stable over a long period of time the term command and control has become a synonym. It has come to mean exactly, or very nearly the same thing as traditional, hierarchical, bureaucratic, centralised, ‘classic’ command and control. This is the type of command and control conjured up by images of mass battle scenes in the film Alexander, the type afflicted by the Kafkaesque pathologies inherent in all bureaucratising organisations and parodied by everyone from Black Adder to Dilbert, and the type of command and control that management books try to encourage their readers to ‘break free from’ (e.g. Seddon, 2003). The arrival of NEC shows that not all management infrastructures need to be the same. It shows that while traditional command and control is highly adept in some situations it is less effective in others.

There is no one definition of NEC. In fact even the label NEC is just one in a number of ‘net-enabled’ acronyms running from Network Centric Warfare, Network Centric Operations (both favoured in North America) to Network Centric Defence (favoured in some North European countries). Regardless of acronym, the techno-organisational vision of NEC (the preferred label in the UK) refers to:

‘…self-synchronizing forces that can work together to adapt to a changing environment, and to develop a shared view of how best to employ force and effect to defeat the enemy. This vision removes traditional command hierarchies and empowers individual units to interpret the broad command intent and evolve a flexible execution strategy with their peers.’ (Ferbrache, 2005, p. 104)

The logic of this organismic approach to command and control is widely held to be based on four tenets: that a) a robustly networked force improves information sharing, that b) information sharing and collaboration enhance the quality of information and shared situational awareness, that c) shared situational awareness enables self-synchronisation, and that d) these dramatically increase mission effectiveness (CCRP, 2009). These assumptions have been appropriated by the military domain and have gathered momentum, so it is interesting to note that they are not based on much more than a decade’s worth of direct military experience. They are based on Wal Mart:

‘Here was a sprawling, bureaucratic monster of an organisation—sound familiar?—that still managed to automatically order a new light bulb every time it sold one. Warehouses were networked, but so were individual cash registers. So were the guys who sold Wal-Mart the bulbs. If that company could wire everyone together and become more efficient, then [military] forces could, too. “Nations make war the same way they make wealth”.’ (Shachtman, 2007; Cebrowski and Gartska, 1998)

This characterisation is perhaps a little crude, and perhaps not entirely fair, but it nevertheless helps us to make a powerful point that goes right to the heart of this book. Or rather, it enables Cebrowski and Gartska (1998) in their pioneering paper on the origins and future of NEC to make it for us. They say:

‘We may be special people in the armed forces, but we are not a special case. It would be false pride that would keep us from learning from others. The future is bright and compelling, but we must still choose the path to it. Change is inevitable. We can choose to lead it, or be victims of it. As B. H. Liddell Hart said, “The only thing harder than getting a new idea into the military mind is getting an old one out”.’ (Cebrowski and Gartska, 1998, p. 8)

Command and control is an organisation just like any other, conceptually at least. What has happened to make NEC the contingent response? What is it about the current state of affairs that makes NEC’s assumptions and tenets make sense? Wal Mart may be the proximal inspiration for at least some of the early thinkers on the topic of NEC but it is probably closer to the truth to say that it derives from a much wider paradigm shift, of which Wal Mart’s networked, vertically integrated operations are merely a part. Cebrowski and Gartska looked over what they saw as the artificial and contentious divide between the military arena and the rest of the world and saw that:

The underlying economics have changed. ‘The new dynamics of competition are based on increasing returns on investment, competition within and between ecosystems, and competition based on time. Information technology (IT) is central to each of these.’ Economies are ‘characterised by extraordinary growth and wealth generation, increasing returns on investment, the absence of market share equilibrium, and the emergence of mechanisms for product lock-in. […] Locking-out competition and locking-in success can occur quickly, even overnight. We seek an analogous effect in warfare.’ (p. 1–2)

The underlying technologies have changed. ‘Information technology is undergoing a fundamental shift from platform-centric computing to network-centric computing. Platform-centric computing emerged with the widespread proliferation of personal computers in business and in the home. […] These technologies, combined with high-volume, high-speed data access (enabled by the low-cost laser) and technologies for high-speed data networking (hubs and routers) have led to the emergence of network-centric computing. Information “content” now can be created, distributed, and easily exploited across the extremely heterogeneous global computing environment.’ (p. 2–3)

The business environment has changed. ‘First, many firms have shifted their focus to the much larger, adaptive, learning ecosystems in which they operate. Not all actors in an ecosystem are enemies (competitors); some can have symbiotic relationships with each other. For such closely coupled relationships, the sharing of information can lead to superior results. Second, time has increased in importance. Agile firms use superior awareness to gain a competitive advantage and compress timelines linking suppliers and customers. […] Dominant competitors across a broad range of areas have made the shift to network-centric operations—and have translated information superiority into significant competitive advantage.’ (p. 3–4)

Where Did the Humans Go?

The vision just described is that of Alvin Toffler’s ‘future shock’ (1981) and ‘third wave’ (1980). While it may have been appealing and relevent there were problems with the assumptions being made about information sharing, shared situational awareness, self-synchronisation and mission effectiveness. One could look over the military/civilian divide and see these fundamental shifts not as new form of business ecology at all, but as a new form of ultra-Taylorism, a situation in which net centric technology was being pressed into the service of even greater bureaucratisation. In a lot of cases what the network seemed to be enabling were the latest Japanese business practices such as lean manufacturing, total quality management, just-in-time stock control, and all the other tools and techniques which in a dynamic and changeable commercial world enable companies, like Wal Mart, to keep at least some aspects of their complex operations in a tightly coupled and predictable state. Naturally, whilst this generally held for the benefactors of the techniques like Toyota and Wal Mart, the same could not always be said for the people at work on the production line of product or service delivery, or indeed the users of roads now overloaded with ‘just in time’ delivery traffic. The ‘technical’ aspects had clearly been optimised but at the expense of the ‘social’. Whilst from some angles these commercial systems looked like an ecosystem of self-organising flexibility, the alternative perspective was that the network had actually enabled a far closer coupled system, the ultimate high speed hierarchy. The original thinking behind NEC bears this hallmark.

It started off with ‘short, decisive battles against another regular army’ in mind (Shachtman, 2007, p. 5), ‘the Soviets, the Chinese, Saddam’s Republican Guard, whoever – as long as they had tanks to destroy, territory to seize, and leaders to kill.’ (p. 5). When Cebrowski and Gartska discussed Wal Mart in the same breath as warfare what they were really driving at was: ‘a single, network-enabled process: killing’ (Shachtman, 2007, p. 8). It is no coincidence that the phrase ‘shock and awe’ (e.g., Ullman and Wade, 1996) made its way into the military lexicon at roughly the same time. But then something started to happen. After the technically optimized military successes had occurred and the mission accomplished banners had been taken down from the bridge of the USS Abraham Lincoln, a new type of organisational pathology emerged, one for which the military context seemed particularly susceptible:

‘He clicks again, and the middle screen switches to a 3-D map of an Iraqi town from a driver’s point of view. “Now let’s plan the route. You’ve got a mosque here. An IED happened over there two weeks ago. Here’s the one that happened yesterday. Hey, that’s too close. Let’s change my route. Change the whole damn thing.” He guides me through capability after capability of the command post—all kinds of charts, overlays, and animations. “But wait—there’s more,” he says. “You wanna see where all the Internet cafés are in Baghdad?” […] It’s hard not to get caught up in [the] enthusiasm. But back in the US, John Nagl, one of the authors of the Army’s new counterinsurgency manual, isn’t impressed. […] he’s more interested in what the screens don’t show. Historical sigacts don’t actually tell you where the next one’s going to be. Or who’s going to do it. Or who’s joining them. Or why. “The police captain playing both sides, the sheikh skimming money from a construction project, […] what color [icon] are they?”.’ (Shachtman, 2007, p. 5)

The paradox in all this is that if, as Cebrowski and Gartska acknowledge, ‘military operations are enormously complex, and complexity theory tells us that such enterprises organise best from the bottom-up’ (1998, p. 4–5) then what happened to the most important low-level component of them all: the human? The focus on Toffler’s third wave of fundamental changes in economics, technology and business has tended to put the focus on the ‘network’ rather than what it ‘enables’. Which is for the most agile, self-synchronous component of all in NEC, the people, to use its capability to perform the one task they excel at: coping with complexity.

For the human factors practitioner encountering the extant literature on NEC for the first time the overriding feeling is undoubtedly one of opportunity. Here we have a huge practical domain of interdisciplinary science where, for once, the human is widely acknowledged to be key. Within this expanding literature are concepts and ideas which have tremendous potential, not only for existing forms of human factors but for fundamentally new types of human factors. Yet for all the opportunity one has to acknowledge some occasional disappointment. In a very real sense, where did the human go? Speaking from a human factors perspective, some of the more military orientated work in this domain seems stronger on doctrine and box diagrams than it does on theory and evidence. Particularly noteworthy are concepts with a long legacy and substantial theoretical underpinning in human factors, re-invented without a great deal of reference to what has gone before, or worse, the human in NEC is reduced to a form of rational optimiser and mathematically modelled from there.

If that is the human factors view, then from the other side of the fence the military reader looking in would probably be inspired and disappointed in equal measure. Common criticisms of human factor’s initial forays into NEC are often rooted in what is perceived as a lack of foundational rigour and mathematical profundity, something that can, and routinely is, levelled at all social sciences. This combines with what can often seem like naivety and a lack of appreciation for military context. All told, the human in NEC represents a very difficult interface and it is clear that NEC is uncommonly prone to scientific antagonism of precisely this sort. Quite simply, every time one crosses an interdisciplinary barrier, of which there are many in NEC research, there is the ever present risk of ruffling feathers and seeming to ride roughshod over any number of finely tuned concepts. It would certainly be easy for the work presented in this volume to be construed in exactly the same way, but that would be to mistake its message.

If the nexus of various disciplines impinging on NEC are seen as a form of Venn diagram then we are not necessarily concerned with the larger parts of allied disciplines which do not overlap and for which a human factors approach is not appropriate; instead we are concerned with the smaller areas which do overlap. This book, rather like the fundamental systems concepts underlying NEC itself, is not focused merely on parts but on the connections between those parts. In line with this motif we seek to build linkages, however tentative, that extend the reach of human factors towards other domains such as organisational theory, complex systems research and military operations. For the reader approaching the work from any of these individual specialisms, there may not be much that is fundamentally new apart from the way it has been applied. Rather than re-invent the wheel and engage in an antagonistic form of science, quite the opposite is intended. The spirit in which this book is written is for these linkages to represent bridgeheads from which human factors tries to reach out across its various interdisciplinary boundaries in the hope that other disciplines can see enough that is relevant to want to reach over from the other side. The linkages may at times appear tentative, focusing on breadth rather than depth, incomplete, crude even, but no apology is made for trying to establish what constitutes a stating point. It is from such a point that those within the NEC research community, human factors included, can begin to speak to each other. The message is one of reconciliation, of an interconnected scientific approach that could potentially become, like NEC itself aspires, to become more than the sum of its disciplines.

Sociotechnical Theory

John Gartska was interviewed by a journalist in 2007 and rightly defends the NEC concepts he helped to set in motion with his and Cebrowski’s paper. Even he, though, acknowledged that in the short space of a decade the net-centric vision has changed:

‘You have to think differently about people’ he was noted as saying. ‘You have your social networks and technological networks. You need to have both.’ (Shachtman, 2007, p. 8)

This is the precise sentiment behind the work contained in this volume.

In human factors literature (and beyond) the word sociotechnical is ubiquitous. On the one hand you have the socio, of people and society, and on the other the technical, of machines and technology. Socio and technical combine to give ‘sociotechnical’ (all one word) or ‘socio-technical’ (with a hyphen). Both variations mean the same thing. In the human factors world we speak freely of ‘purposeful interacting socio-technical systems…’ (Wilson, 2000, p. 557), ‘complex sociotechnical systems …’ (Woo and Vicente, 2003, p. 253), ‘sociotechnical work systems…’ (Waterson, Older Gray and Clegg, 2002, p. 376) and many more besides. But what does it actually mean?

Like command and control, the phrase ‘sociotechnical’ has become a synonym, a descriptive label for any practical instantiation of socio and technical, people and technology, the soft sciences meeting hard engineering. In these terms sociotechnical does not mean a great deal as it is difficult to imagine any meaningful system these days that is not described by these two worlds colliding. Whether designed, manufactured, used, maintained or disposed by humans, h...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• About the Authors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Reconsidering the Network in NEC
• 3 Some Effects of Certain Communications Patterns on Group Performance
• 4 Complexity and Human Factors
• 5 Dimensions of Live-NEC
• 6 The Human in Complex Dynamic Systems
• 7 Beyond NEC
• 8 The Design of Everyday Networked Interoperable Things
• 9 Conclusions
• References and Bibliography
• Index