Dr Richard
Hayes, Evidence Based Research, Inc.,
rehayes@ebrinc.com
Ms Sue Iwanski, Systems Planning and Analysis, Inc., siwanski@spa-inc.net
BACKGROUND
A MORS Workshop on EBO was held 29-31
January 2002. 177 analysts and decision
makers participated. This number
included nine foreign nationals and produced 61 new
PURPOSE
The original concept for
·
What does the
phrase “Effects Based Operations” mean?
·
What analytic
challenges does it present to the Operations Research (OR) community?
·
What approaches
and tools already exist that offer promise in meeting those challenges?
·
What actions
should the OR community recommend in order to ensure quality analyses in
support of Effects Based Operations?
The Workshop was successful in generating quality
responses to all four issues, though the results also highlight the fact that a
great deal more needs to be done. The effort profited greatly from rich work
group efforts.
WHAT IS EBO?
Consensus emerged that warfare,
particularly effective warfare, has always been effects-based. Sun Tzu, Genghis Khan, Napoleon,
Eisenhower and Schwartzkopf all would be familiar with the
principles that (1) warfare should include all the instruments of national
power and that (2) each instrument should be applied in a way that maximizes its
desirable impacts, minimizes undesirable ones, and complements actions taken in
other arenas. These basic principles,
which define the essence of EBO occur in a context that makes them particularly
relevant today. First, we have the means
to gather, integrate, and apply more data, information and knowledge than
analysts and policy makers in earlier eras — we are in the Information
Age. Second, we live in a world that is
more tightly coupled than ever before, creating opportunities and challenges
for both direct and indirect, desirable and undesirable effects. EBO permits us to seek more efficient ways to
achieve national goals and allows us to consider shaping the environment in
order to minimize challenges to US interests.
EBO does not exclude, and cannot properly be contrasted with, either
kinetic weapons or attrition, as they are tools that may be used to achieve
desired effects. Ultimately, the
“effects” sought will be behavioral, but that may arise from altering the
adversaries’ capabilities or will. EBO
does tend to focus greater attention on will, but not to the exclusion of
altering the capabilities of adversaries, partners or neutrals.
Two crucial differences between EBO
and the ways we have been thinking in the past emerged from the discussions in
the workshop:
·
Effects Based
Operations challenge us to move from an era of increasing Jointness to an era
of “Meta-Jointness” that integrates DoD’s actions into coherent sets of actions
that involve a broader set of participants (e.g., interagency and coalition partners,
International Organizations (IOs), Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs)).
·
Effects-Based
Operations require both greater knowledge and greater capability to deal with
uncertainty than traditional military operations.
In the words of plenary speakers at the Workshop, EBO
therefore becomes “a way of thinking” (Major
General Deptula, USAF), “a
common frame of reference between DoD and other agencies” (Graham Kessler, J9, JFCOM), and it “coordinates sets of actions
directed at shaping the behavior of friends, foes, and neutrals, in peace,
crisis, and war” (Ed Smith, Boeing).
KEY
ATTRIBUTES OF EBO AND THE CHALLENGES THEY IMPLY
Effects Based Operations draw most of their key
characteristics from the environments in which they are needed. Classic EBO problems are:
·
Multi-disciplinary:
with partners, adversaries and neutral parties involved and perceived to have
important interests in the situation.
·
Multi-dimensional:
political, military, social, economic, information, legal and humanitarian
factors are often all highly relevant.
·
Multi-echelon:
cutting across the boundaries between strategic, operational and tactical
arenas.
·
Perception
driven: each actor will see a somewhat different situation and is likely to
interpret actions in somewhat different ways.
·
Dynamic: changing
over time, such that even the interests and goals of the parties will change
during the operations.
·
Characterized by
adaptive behavior: all the parties are likely to learn during an EBO, or from a
prior EBO, and alter their behaviors accordingly.
·
Non-linear: such
that small actions or changes in behaviors may lead to dramatic impacts.
·
Involve both
massive and sparse data regions: some aspects of EBO occur in problem spaces
with so much data that they defy integration and comprehension, but other
important aspects occur where little or no quality data exist.
·
Uncertain:
despite the fact that EBO are often associated with floods of data and
information, they are also typically associated with great uncertainty about key
items of information and knowledge.
·
Probabilistic:
simple cause and effect patterns may be very difficult to detect given the
number of relevant factors and the degree of uncertainty, forcing EBO analysts
to employ probabilistic approaches and tools.
In short, EBO today take place in a highly complex,
multi-dimensional environment. In addition, ideal EBO are highly efficient —
achieving basic goals with limited investments and calculated risks to lives
and national treasure. Taken together,
the attributes of EBO and the situations in which they take place constitute a
major challenge to the analytic community.
The Workshop paid particular attention
to Measures of Merit (MoM) and indicators of success. These represent a meaningful challenge in
EBO. First, they were seen as heavily
situation dependent, though the hope was expressed by those working the issue
that classes of situations could be associated with families of metrics. However, the most profound challenge in this
arena is a cultural change within DoD — persuading military decision makers
that they must ultimately support Measures of Policy Effectiveness (MoPE), not
limiting themselves to Measures of Force Effectiveness (MoFE). This, of course, greatly complicates analyses
to support EBO.
EXISTING APPROACHES, TOOLS AND
TECHNIQUES
On one level, consensus existed across
the plenary sessions and the working groups about the kinds of approaches that
are needed to perform analyses in support of EBO. Qualitative approaches may be necessary because
not all the issues can be handled using quantitative tools. Analyses often will be exploratory, ensuring
a rich understanding of the problem space and helping us see what can happen
rather than predict precisely what will happen.
Analysis will be probabilistic rather than deterministic. Decomposition will be employed in order to
make research issues more tractable, but reaggregation to create a holistic
understanding of the problem will remain essential and challenging. Paul Davis’ (
Several specific tools that show
promise for EBO applications were identified.
The most mature were built on influence networks, which represent expert
opinions that can be examined in detail and experimented with through
sensitivity analyses. The most mature of
these have been implemented in conjunction with colored Petri nets to map them
into integrated plans of action.
Computational social science tools also were identified as a good match
to the EBO arena, as were complex adaptive systems employed in state space
analyses (chaotic control theory and evolutionary game theory), but these tools
have not as yet been applied directly in the EBO arena. Initial efforts using agent based models and
neural networks were reported as promising in briefings to working groups, but
are still in the research and development stages. Leontief input-output analysis, well
established in economic analyses, were shown to be a good match to the EBO
problem space, but cannot be applied unless quality data are available and the
behaviors (changes in resource allocations) of non-market states can be
forecast intelligently.
Finally, a number of research
techniques were endorsed by the plenary speakers and the working groups. These included mining history (both to
generate rich understandings of specific situations and the actors relevant to
them, and to understand the dynamics associated with different instruments of
influence and power), structured games (both war games and games that focus on
broader interactions), and structured campaigns of experimentation.
WORKSHOP RECOMMENDATIONS
Effect Based Operations, as a broad organizing
concept, appears promising as an approach that will help decision makers in DoD
and other organizations in the national security arena to protect US national
interests and achieve US goals. The
Workshop identified a number of tools and approaches that appear promising to
support EBO. However, this will require several important changes. These include:
·
Education of both
the decision making and analytical communities about EBO, including what it
means and what it will take to implement it.
·
Improved sharing
of information, knowledge, training, planning, execution and feedback across all the organizations
that must participate in an EBO (e.g., the intelligence community, DoD, the
National Security Council, and the other departments and agencies in the
national security committee).
·
Adoption of
measures of policy effectiveness and indicators of EBO success as the dominant
focus of analysis.
·
Deployment of
multi-disciplinary analytic teams with military headquarters employing EBO to ensure
responsive support, educating the analysts about real world problems, and
enabling effective linkage to technical communities.
·
Broadening and
deepening the expertise (substantive and analytical) available to support EBO,
including tools for information sharing, research and collaboration. This includes more interdisciplinary work
that involves more social scientists, area specialists and non-military
practitioners (e.g., NGO, IO, business) in the community, broader training of
OR professionals in the “soft” areas, as well as creating the capacity (reach
back, reach out, intermediary organizations such as CINCPAC’s Virtual
Information Center) to use their expertise during EBO.
·
Creation of
databases and data structures designed to support EBO and the networks EBO
seeks to impact. At the same time,
adaptation of data mining techniques to permit efficient application of these
techniques.
·
Support efforts
to develop and employ EBO analyses with an integrating mechanism, similar to
the Command and Control Research Program of the ASD/C3I, that acts to
stimulate, coordinate and integrate relevant activities across government,
industry, academia and coalition partners.
This should include activities to create an EBO community, such as
websites, workshops, symposia and publications.
·
Develop a “tool
chest” to support EBO analyses that includes easily manipulated, specialized
modeling and simulation tools, computational social science tools, data mining,
colored Petri nets, neural networks, and specialized tools developed in
particular application arenas (e.g., counter-terrorism, persuasive
communication, economics). This tool
chest should be assembled in evolutionary fashion, creating a core capability
from “best of breed” products and refining and expanding the tool chest to
reflect user feedback and the results of research.
·
Establish, for
both exploratory research and training purposes, a series of wargames and
experiments to explore the EBO field, make practitioners more comfortable with
the topic, and allow rapid analyses of new challenges and situations where
shaping or coercive diplomacy appear promising.
We still have a long way to go to address the issue of
Analyzing Effects-Based Operations. One of the Synthesis group recommendations
was that
The meeting was held at Booz Allen & Hamilton on
29-31 January 2002 and was structured as a combination mini-symposium and
workshop. The mini-symposium on the first day featured papers to bring us up to
speed on the state of the art on EBO thinking.
The General Chairs Dr Jackie Henningsen, FS, Director, Air
Force Studies and Analyses and MG Dean Cash,USA, JFCOM J-9,both provided
opening remarks to kickoff the meeting. Table 1 shows the list of speakers and
presentations that followed. The keynote address was given by Mr Len Hawley, former Assistant Secretary of State to provide a
policy-maker's view. Practical
perspectives on EBO were provided by Major General Deptula, USAF and General Charles Wilhelm, USMC (Ret), who has served as CINC, USSOUTHCOM and
currently works with JFCOM J-9 in developing and experimenting with new
concepts such as EBO. Paul Davis of
|
Plenary
Sessions |
Topics |
Presenter |
|
Keynote Presentation |
A Policy-Maker's Perspective on EBO |
Mr. Len Hawley, Former
Assistant Sec of State |
|
Special Presentation |
Effects-Based Operations- Change in the Nature of
Warfare |
Maj. Gen David Deptula,
USAF, ACC/DO |
|
Special Presentation |
Effects-Based Operations: An Operator's Perspective |
General Charles Wilhelm,
USMC (Ret) |
|
Technical Presentations |
EBO: A Grand Challenge for Analysis |
Dr. Paul Davis, RAND |
|
|
Effects-Based Course of Action Analysis in Support
of Wargames |
Dr. Lee Wagenhals, GMU |
|
|
EBO Concept |
Mr. Graham Kessler, JFCOM |
|
|
Computational Social Science, Operations Research
& EBO |
Dr. Desmond
Saunders-Newton, ODUSD/AS&C |
|
|
Analytic and Philosophical Imperatives of EBO |
DR. Michael Senglaub, Sandia
National Labs |
|
|
Input-Output Modeling for EBO |
Capt. Anthony Snodgrass,
AFOTEC/TSE |
|
|
From NCW to EBO |
Dr. Ed Smith, Boeing |
|
|
Measuring the Effects of Military Operations |
Mr. Barry Watts, OSD
(PA&E) |
The mini-symposium was followed by a two-day workshop.
This began with a special presentation by Mr Barry Watts (OSD, BA&E) on Measuring the
Effects of Military Operations. Then the
participants met in working groups to examine specific topics. The six working
groups were: Decision Support for Operations; Decision Support for Force
Structure Planning; Wargaming, Experimentation and Exercises; Indicators of
Success; Fundamental Sciences; and, Effects Based Analysis for
Counterterrorism. As with all
SUMMARY
As a consequence of the Workshop,
there is enhanced understanding of the nature of this highly complex and
multi-dimensional problem. In addition,
we are beginning to gain confidence that our traditional approaches to such
problems are viable. However, we are
keenly aware of the major challenges that remain in assembling and applying the
needed expertise, tools and data to analyze real world operations.
|
Working
Group |
Leadership |
Decision Support for Operations |
WG
Chair: Col. Jose Negron, DARPA WG
Co-Chairs: Mr. Bruce Harris, DRC Advisor:
Dr. Cy Staniec, Northrop Grumman IT |
|
Decision Support for Force Structure |
WG
Chair: Lt. Col Kirk Yost, OSD WG
Co-Chairs: Mr. Jim Bexfield, IDA Advisor:
Dr. Andy Loerch, GMU |
|
Wargaming, Experimentation, and Exercises |
WG
Chair: Col. Steve Pennington WG
Co-Chairs: CDR Mike Waldhauser, NWDC Advisor:
Dr. Russ Richards, MITRE |
|
Indicators of Success |
WG
Chair: RADM Gary Wheatley (ret), EBR WG
Co-Chairs: Corinne Wallshein, AFSAA/SAG Advisor:
Mr. Chuck Taylor, Joint C4SIR DSC |
|
Fundamental Sciences |
WG
Chair: Lt.Col. Steve Rinaldi, AF/XPQI WG
Co-Chairs: Mr. Jeff Cares, Alidade
Consulting Advisor:
Dr. Al Branstein, MCCDC |
|
Effects Based Analysis for Counterterrorism |
WG
Chair: Dr. Randy Pherson, EBR WG
Co-Chairs: Lt.Col. Eileen Bjorkman, DMSO Advisor:
Dr. Bob Sheldon, Emergent-IT |
|
Synthesis Group |
WG
Chair: Dr. Stuart Starr, MITRE WG
Co-Chair: Dr. Roy Rice, TBE |
Read more about EBO:
A
Dialogue on Analyzing Effects Based Operations (EBO)