Policy-Based Command and Control

Abstract : Governance of large-scale dynamic systems [of systems] requires a management ethos and an associated set of policies and tools competent to allow the system and its subsystems to achieve and maintain viability. At the same time, such governance must actively guide the system's course grain behaviors. The DOD's present effort at transformation and implementation of joint or unified enterprise command and control (JEC2) are attempts at establishing, incrementally, a more formal and agile form of network centric governance over its distributed and traditionally stove-piped military and agency systems. JEC2 is therefore both a philosophy of management as well as an operational set of policies and mechanisms that must find widespread support among the Services, US allies, DOD agencies and the industrial machinery that supports the DOD's strategic and tactical missions. Our thesis is that, in alignment with and support of Jeffersonian principles of governance, a successful JEC2 capability will allow the DOD to govern itself with greater agility, with greater operational transparency, and with greater productively in the utilization of its human and material assets; with the basis of such a system including specific operational C2 capabilities for the dynamic and real-time management of policies that are competent to guide collaborative behavior within the federated DOD enterprise. We present our policy-based JEC2 system model.