Sessions & Jones
Any discussion of a "single view of military C4I" should be rooted in past attempts at jointness to the extent that it can be. After all, only one Desert Storm has been fought, and the explosion of communications technology over the past 15 years is without precedent. Times do change. Yet, the past abounds with similar injunctions from seasoned military commanders and civilian specialists. That hasn't changed. For instance, back in 1982 Harvard Professor Tony Oettinger said:
Interoperability has been around so long that one wonders it's not being killed with kindness. Everybody is so much for it, and asking for such total interconnectivity, that people throw up their hands at the cost and complexity--particularly Congress and the appropriations committees. So nothing happens--which may be a sophisticated way of reaching the end result desired in the first place, in keeping with service autonomy.(Note 1)
Oettinger's plain words sizing up the late 1970s and early 1980s are linked to other informed observers' views of the military scene:
The problem today (1980) as it was in the days of Pearl Harbor is elementary. It lies simply in the institutional failure to assign proper responsibility and accountability to major operational commanders.(Note 2) Because there are four Services grappling with broad missions in conditions of uncertainty and, at the same time, operating in an environment of scarce resources, there is built-in conflict between the services. The conflict will always exist, no matter how you organize the Department of Defense. The Chiefs [JCS] don't even want to open the unified command book because it becomes a bloodletting when they do.(Note 3) All the Secretary of Defense has to do is saddle up somebody in the Office of Secretary of Defense (OSD) and give him the clout to enforce interservice integration. They've tried to do that with the C3I position, but they've just never given it the same authority and the responsibility to do it.(Note 4)
Integrating the services and promoting a "single view of military C4I" are admittedly different but related matters. In times past, the particular role of each service as determined by geography, precedence, and warfighting capabilities has weighed against jointness for many of the reasons mentioned above. The question now, with Desert Storm as the format and the attending resolve by those who fought in that war to "never again be inoperable" is, "Will the JCS with its C4I and the Warrior be able to reach higher levels of interoperability by controlling acquisitions and establishing common protocols and doctrines, for instance?" Will service autonomy, as stressed by the above quotations, be too much to offset? A comment by Army Colonel David Bryan of the Joint Staff in May 1992 provides a clue:
JIEO (Joint Interoperability and Engineering Organization) will establish the standards and architecture (for equipment including software acquisitions) under a charter from its parent organization DISA (Defense Information Systems Agency). I can assure you this encroaching on one of the Services' last protected domains was not their idea. It has created a fire-storm here in the Pentagon.
Other Voices
Paul A. Strassmann, Director of Defense Information in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense, had this to say:
The excessive emphasis on hardware platforms is not tenable any more. We are going to go, as a civilization, towards hardware as a commodity and therefore what matters is software. You must make software [development] a repeatable, defined, and managed process.(Note 5)
This attitude toward the acquisition of commercial products, both hardware and software, as a dominant procurement policy was substantiated by Desert Storm, according to General John A. Wickham, Jr., U.S. Army (Ret.). Wickham wrote:
Many critics believe that NDI (nondevelopmental item or commercial) equipment, which is not militarized or ruggedized, will break down under field operations and fail to satisfy military requirements. But NDI equipment in general continues to perform superbly [re: Desert Storm]. As a result, much of the controversy over NDI has been replaced with recognition that the philosophy of off-the-shelf hardware and software acquisitions for many applications makes good sense and must continue.(Note 6)
Representing the DOD, Strassmann continued his description of future military engagements and consequent military force structures:
It is the need of small, mobile, rapidly deployed (e.g., fighting anywhere with 48 hours' notice) and locally managed, joint forces that are going to be the focus of our efforts for the next decade and maybe the next two decades. We must look at just-in-time warfare with just-in-time information technology that cannot be cooked, predetermined and prestaged according to a war plan, because the chances are that in most of the engagements we will never be able to execute a war plan that's on the shelf, exactly the way that it's on the shelf.
Strassmann relies on Corporate Information Management (CIM) to reinforce development of these objectives, CIM integrates technology, organizational problem solving, process redesign, and the warfighting doctrine into a whole. However, this holistic approach of Strassmann's is not meant to lead to centralization:
The objective of CIM is not to scoop everything up into one giant galactic division, because that doesn't work . . . CIM should never be looked at as an information technology project, but primarily as the platform or rails on which a major savings train will be able to proceed with speed, certainty, accurateness, and neatness without derailing.(Note 7)
How do you square centralized, culturally autonomous service-related viewpoints with Strassmann's and his constituents' decentralized approach? Is his pursuit of jointness premature? How do you assess Strassmann's definition of future military engagements and corresponding need for new military configurations? Is his argument for almost exclusive use of off-the-shelf, commercial hardware realistic? Is software the main determinant of interoperable effectiveness?
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