Faced with a wave of digital information, Canadian decision-makers are being challenged to sort, qualify and classify the deluge of data and stream it to the right destinations.
Such is the case in Afghanistan where our contribution under a “defence, development, diplomacy” banner demands a new ability to manage information to steer our resources in the appropriate direction.
To mobilize those internal and external resources, Canada has started to develop Joint Interagency Multinational Public strategies, with important implications for how government does business. In the military context, as the Army’s Land Operations 2021 document states, “increasingly, the likelihood of large force-on-force exchanges will be eclipsed by irregular warfare conducted by highly adaptive, technologically enabled adversaries, media-savvy foes intent less on defeating armed forces than eroding an adversary’s will to fight.”
That new media-savvy environment means that factors beyond military or political control can have an important impact on operations. Even allies can jeopardize a mission. When Afghanistan’s legal system condemned Abdul Rahman to death for renouncing Islam and converting to Christianity, public support in Canada for the military mission began to melt. The Karzai regime defused the crisis by releasing Rahman after questioning his mental capacity but the lesson was not lost on the Canadian government – news travels fast.
Across Canada, many government departments and agencies maintain their own operations centres, as do the various military commands, to provide decision-makers with relevant information in sufficient time to take appropriate action. With much of the necessary information residing on other systems, entities like the Integrated Threat Assessment Centre are aimed at institutionalizing cooperation. In the end, however, many agencies depend on a series of formal or informal bilateral information-sharing agreements, presumably negotiated or modified under the stress of actual events.
In an environment where multi-billion dollar weapons purchases make headlines, November’s announcement of a contract capped at $10 million for the development of the Joint Command Decision Support for the 21st Century (JCDS 21) largely slipped under the radar. Yet it may have an impact well beyond its price tag. This Technology Demonstration Program (TDP) under Defence R&D Canada aims at “a joint net-enabled, collaborative environment to achieve decision superiority in complex domestic operations.” In effect, JCDS 21 will be a test-bed for the ideas and products that could support decision-makers.
One partner in the program is defence contractor xwave, which developed a system for National Defence called the Common Operational Picture for the 21st Century, or COP 21, under a previous TDP. The goal was a “next generation” command system to support a joint Army, Air Force, and Navy command centre. Built with commercial technologies and recognized standards, and working with existing systems, COP 21 was successfully demonstrated in the international JWID exercise in 2004. The TDP ended in 2005 but xwave went on to further develop the concepts in a commercial product, xwaveCP.
XwaveCP allows individuals and organizations to reach the information they need, wherever it exists and in any format, including text, audio, video and geospatial data. As Scott Mutton, a senior product manager at xwave, said, “one of the things that, to my knowledge, remains unique is the idea of being able to have Knowledge Walls in different geographically dispersed headquarters but being able to have people see them and contribute to them regardless of where they are on the network.”
The system allows for multi-agency participation because different organizations don’t have to agree to use the same management systems. As Mutton explained, “one of the advantages of COP 21 is that if you have multiple headquarters and the positions are set up, you can have the army commander in this scenario looking at the air force commander’s briefing portfolio. They can decide [that] their general needs to see a specific piece of information, but also feed information back to that headquarters.”
A well-designed system allows sufficient flexibility to cope with a range of challenges using plug-in software to quickly link different systems to create a shared situational awareness picture. XwaveCP uses off-the-shelf technology to create the foundations of a command and control system. Using the correct protocols and generating a standard output, any system can quickly attach to other systems to share and consolidate information.
In the same way that the Microsoft Windows operating system is the host for a range of software, Mutton explained, COP 21 is the platform for any existing or future tools that can generate compatible outputs. “That’s what COP 21 was designed to do and is still unique, in my understanding in the industry. Mostly, people who are building command and control systems are also building all the different tools, so if you want to do plume cloud analysis, their attitude is, ‘we build that and you have to use our plume cloud tool’ – that’s not the COP 21 approach.”
Overcoming culture
Any system is only as good as the people who operate it, and Mutton points to organizational culture as a key inhibitor to potential cooperation. Developing a situational awareness system within the JIMP context can mean a two-way flow of information with partners who may not share the same understanding of ends and means. “People are starting to talk – when they talk about situational awareness and command and control in operations – [about] going beyond the ‘joint’ perspective into the JIMP perspective,” Mutton said.
Even within the same government, open channels of communication with different agencies can bring conflicting policies to the surface. In recent testimony at the Air India inquiry, former RCMP commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli called the relationship between the federal police force and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service “almost unworkable” because the two agencies often have conflicting goals: securing convictions on one side, and developing informants on the other. Any effective system would need mechanisms to clarify and resolve those conflicts.
Perhaps more important, as Mutton’s colleague, project engineer Brian Lypps, points out, is the experience and training people already have with their existing tools. “They have a certain set of tools they are used to working with and they generate product that is consumed by other people. You can’t just given them new tools. The time it takes to learn new tools is a huge investment beyond the IM/IT.
“If you have a monolithic organization, and DND is probably as good an example of a monolithic organization as exists in Canada, they can dictate the tools that their members will use. When you talk about a JIMP construct, nobody can dictate. And frankly, even if somebody could, I am not sure it is a good idea, because if everybody in the world used Microsoft Windows then you wouldn’t get the kind of innovations that are driven by competitors.”
Cultural differences can limit the automation of data flows. “[For example,] you’re data mining American websites or newspapers and you’re looking for the ‘freedom fighters’. Do that in Arabic and do the same search for ‘freedom fighters’. Who are you going to get? It’s a matter of culture and perspective,” Lypps said.
Canadian convergence
Mutton describes the technological challenges to a JIMP-enabled command and control system as “trivial” and he acknowledges the serious institutional barriers to communication. The real problem, in his view, is a badly damaged procurement system. “It is the challenge of allowing the organizations that need to get access to technology, information and services butting up against all of the concerns that have been put in place from a completely different dimension with respect to fair and open contracting and public service accountability,” he said.
Just as the procurement process faces an unprecedented need for agility and innovation, a succession of minority governments and financial scandals have added even more obstacles to a procurement system that was already slow, clumsy and overly politicized.
The components necessary for an effective, modern command and control system become obsolete quickly, according to Lypps. The key to Canadian success, Mutton believes, is maintaining sufficient flexibility to capture benefits as they arise. “You have to accept that you might be buying something today that you’re going to throw away in two or three years.”
Mutton believes while technological trends may be driven by factors that are outside the Canadian defence, security and aerospace context, the trends and the sector are moving in the same direction. “The beauty is that there is a strong convergence of Canadian agencies’ needs and what is happening anyway.”
From a practical point of view, building command and control systems on open source, open standards and largely commercial products makes excellent sense. Components can be added as needed. Networks can be rearranged quickly to meet changing requirements. Perhaps best of all, that philosophy can effectively limit the size of any given procurement, avoiding the major cost overruns and delays that consistently plague large-scale IT projects. From the perspective of support for Canadian-based businesses, smaller projects give smaller companies a greater chance of innovating and building components, add-ons and sub-systems to complement the system’s overall capabilities.