The idea of decision superiority really rests on this sense that optionality is going to be an increasingly important attribute of our future military operations. By that I mean, if your force has more options available to it, you’re likely to be able to have the ability to make faster decisions and perhaps better decisions than your enemy. Most importantly, you want to have an optionality advantage. I want to have more options available to me as a commander than my opponent has available to him or her.
This is a counter to a forecast centric planning approach, or forecast centric operational approach, which is something that we’ve become comfortable with in the department of defense since the cold war where we decide on a course of action, then we efficiently allocate resources toward that course of action, and then take those resources that are not needed for that course of action and devote them to other things. It’s a very efficient approach but it requires us to predict the future to a great degree.
That is going to be less available to us in the situation we’re up against great power competitors who have the ability to devote lots of resources and brainpower to innovating and creating new challenges for us to address.
So gaining decision superiority is going to rest in a lot of ways on having an optionality advantage over your opponents operationally, and that even extends in time back to the industrial time frame.
… Optionality is driven by two things: force design and command and control. In terms of force design, our forces need to become more disaggregated. We need to take some of our monolithic multi-mission platforms and break that up into smaller less multi-mission units. Those units would then be able to mix and match and reconfigure in ways that are going to create more options for your force and create more difficulties for your opponent.
That was Byran Clark at an excellent Hudson event with Dan Patt, Bob Work, Tim Grayson, and LTG Dennis Crall: Implementing Decision Centric Warfare and the future of joint command and control.
This concept of optionality only makes sense when there is uncertainty. If I knew everything there was to know about ways, means, and ends, then in a sense there are no options but only a decision that maximizes some function. Other choices are simply wrong answers.
Options are also at the core of portfolio budgeting. The lock-in effect of multi-year budgeting to particular projects robs managers of their ability to affect outcomes by deferring decisions and pouncing on opportunities. This problem is especially apparent with commercial R&D moving quickly and presenting a dynamically changing set of products and technologies. DoD has no choice but to be adaptive because it can’t keep ahead on its own. How can DoD predict on it’s own five year plan if it doesn’t know what commercial or dual use companies will be doing in that time?
Here is Lt. Gen. Dennis Crawl for C4 and Cyber on the Joint Staff:
For JADC2, the challenge is speed. We have a budgeting cycle that fits a cold war type of prosecution. During the cold war, we’ve had opportunities they were measured in years — you know a FYDP a five-year plan. It worked fine for some of the the maneuvering that we’re looking at against the Russians these were long staring builds that we had.
Now we’re looking at this idea of agility and we’re supposed to be moving at pace. You know, when I talk to folks in industry that they lament frequently when looking at DoD is they tell me, ‘You guys don’t have an investment capital fund. You see something that you want and it’s cutting edge and you demand it and you get all excited and you slap the table and you’re like, “I need that five years from now because that’s our cycle I’ve got to get into the POM.”‘
I’ve got to lay it in by the time it comes out I don’t even want it. This is really the challenge is how do we budget? How do we how do we move smartly to take advantage of these emerging technologies so that we’re not years and years down the road not able to scale them? Not able to test them properly ?
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