Logistics in the 21st century security environment – really about building large scale organizational change.

Recognition of the complexity and the multi-dimensional global environment.

Distributed Adaptive Operations  – Security – diplomatic – economic – social – and ability to sense across mutiple dimensions and respond.

I’m paying more attention than typing – lots of new ideas for me….

DOD case study – sense and respond logistics – > 1/4 of DOD budget is logistics based. Catalyze transformation to a joint, adaptive logistics capability throughout DOD. Incorporate S&R logistics to allow DOD to gather operational data and evalute the sense and respond concept.

Imbed into DOD corporate DNA.

Ability to change the process was dependent on increasing the speed of command.

Transformation  – co-evolution of concepts, processes, organizations and technology, new sources of power,  – broad and sustained competitive advantage.

Shift from industrial to information age: cold war containment strategies are not as relevant. Globalization and connectedness . Security = defense + all else. DOD spends more on IT than any organization in the world – but there are also social network and incentive issues which keep orgs stuck in industrial age behavior. What do they have to change to get people unstuck and into the information age response set.

Thomas Barnett– The Pentagon’s New Map (article) The “Mostly Disconnected Gap” – Life in the gap is poor, nasty, short, brutal, solitary.

There is an emergening security environment – catastrophic, disruptive, 2 others…

Transformational goals for Transformed Joint Forces –

There has been an order of magnitude change in key dimensions of warfare. – Domains – shared situational, – social domain  

 situational – cognitive domain

infomation created and shared – information domain  – it is key, but you need to go through the cognitive and social domains  to get the change out.

 strike maneuver protect – physical doman

Part of the difficult in transforming to network centric ops – is a social network problem. People in IT orgs might not understand how to put out the information in way users can understand it. There are key stakeholders that don’t talk with each other. Implementers don’t necessarily understand the creators.

Video– new situational awareness. Networked forces can outfight non-network forces. Slide still looks like major conventional engagements – NCO case studies are on their website. Stryker Brigade Combat Team (BCP JRTC) report -from Iraq. A robust networked force improves information sharing. Info sharing and collaboration enhances the quality of info and shared situational awareness. Sahred situational awareness enables collaboration and self synchronization and enhances speed and sustainability of command – dramatic increase in mission effectiveness.

Stryker Brigade – Change process and structure  – improve effectiveness. DIfference between a light infantry brigade  vs. a Stryker brigade – organic – new capabilities. Differences –

Lt. Inf – Limited interaction by radio –  Stryker – widespread horizontal interaction, collaborate from anywhere.

There is limited bandwidth at the pointy edge of the spear (forward units may have about 14.4kbps capabilities). However, with new tech, commanders get 2x-10 magnitude change in scale of information – much better picture, shared situational awareness, better operational decisions. Win battle for info advantage, improve positions, win battles.

Technology, process, people and organizations.

Analogy – knowing where your company resources are, where your packages, data etc are – better decision making – increase agility – decrease risk.

Conceptual frame work for network centric operations.

Metrics for the quality of this organic information. Case studies help sell the changes. Leaders need to be able to understand benefit and support your case.

Really a fantastic presentation.

Question – terorrists are networked forces – there is a degree of asymetry – small groups can affect large casuaties with non conventional weapons such as cars and improvised mines – how can we out network them?

Ans: You can have 100% info on your own forces, but may have 0% information on enemy. You have to penetrate their networks or capture their info. engage and draw them out, then respond to what they do. Separating the counter insurgents from their social network – benefits of terrorists going away outweighs the status quo.

Dr. Eivind Almaas of Notre Dame

Scale free network model – networks continuously expand by addition of nodes, new nodes prefer to link to highly connected nodes. Examples – new web pages, airport links. Model is preferential attachment – you get a power law distribution. Exponent changes when nodes age, when there are costs associated with attachment. Think high school – people want to hang out with the popular people.

In biology – protein networks – nodes are proteins, links are physical interactions. Yeast interactions get power law distribution. Scale free type of network, high clustering. There are different local growth rules that give effective preferential attachment – even though proteins don’t express preference or have desires, etc.

Proteins with lots of neighbors have preferential attachments. You can look at chart and see older proteins gain more connections. Similar curves for (spelling) nematode worms and (spelling) drosophilla (fruit flies).

Metabolic networks, driven by enzymes, have similar power law/scale free distributions.

How does structure influence function? Flux balance analysis – very complex stuff…

The power laws come from the structure of the network – the metabolic network is scale free, and therefore the flux distribution is therefore scale free.

Analogies: larger the network, smaller the core, a collective network effect.

Buzz tells the story about how he created Activewords. Discusses his trip to Russia, sending dispatches back to the US, and becoming ‘a rock star’ – ie. everyone knew who he was because people forwarded his emails.

Buzz mentions Anagram – a great plug-in for outlook!

He also talked about, and did his presentation in Mind Manager– also a great and useful piece of software for brainstorming and thoughts management.

Camera phones, small video cameras, etc.

Irony break – Picture of Jamais taken as he was saying this at Flickr.

One implication – telemedicine – dermatologists could tell diagnosis of skin issues 94% of time via camera phone shots vs. in person. Politics – video groups captured images of problems in voting during Nov 2004 election. New group – the Blair Watch Project at the Guardian UK. Every politician now has to assume that they are on camera at all times – including when there are no actual ‘cameras’ present. Sousveillance – all of us watching the watchers. Similar – the Witness project. Abu Garib was the digital camera’s “Rodney King” moment – see, snap, send…media event. To quote Jamis almost verbatim: “Anyone anywhere with a digital camera and a net connection can alter course of a war or shape the policy of the largest country in the World.”

Deja View- Tivo for life- 30 second back storage of everything you see, in a camera.

Company predicting  10 Petabytes of memory drives by 2010. Put it all together…

What happens with Digital rights copyright and digital rights management when you can tape everything you see? Will they make your ‘memory archive’ not be able to record when you see copyright? Will there be lawsuits for ‘memory rights management’ litigating what you can ‘record and remember’?

 Personal memory assistance + tools for social networks = ability for friends to know what you’ve seen and done … ‘was it that restaurant that had the bug’? ‘is he the creep my sister dumped for cheating?’

Picture set at Flickr.

Talking about transportation routes – the huge number of possible paths to work for example.

Talking about Braess’ Paradox. [...(from that link) author provided an example of a traffic network in which travel costs increased when a link was added to the network]. She gave an example where adding a road to make more choices for commuters ends up increasing time of travel for all travelers…
Also relevant to the Internet – adding networks can make things worse for everyone – that’s interesting – I need to learn more about this.

Concept of Supernetworks, which she’s written books about.
Discussion of supply chain and social networks – better relationships might lower transaction costs.

Interesting – some of this work might be helpful to this project at NYU’s Center for Catastrophe Preparedness and Response regarding enhancing medical response in a time of crisis.

Update: My public Flickr photos for MeshForum are here.