This paper defines a road map for military knowledge creation and learning as organization. It combines the knowledge conversion model with classical educational models and studies different military attempts to achieve better command and control capabilities. The behaviour in military training is explained in each four stages on the map. Some examples of military advance is given on possible roads between stages.
Introduction
“I still learn something new every day. Education and knowledge are the reason behind progress of man, his happiness and stability.
The path of education and knowledge is the key to building a nation
that achieves progress in all walks of life”.
His Highness Shaikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum
Military Knowledge Management has changed as societies are evolving and now we are questioning the rules of knowledge management of industrial era as opposed to information era. In this paper, a military combat operations process called the OODA-loop (Observe-Orient-Decide-Act) defined by John Boyd (1987) is studied with the framework of knowing organisation defined by Chun Wei Choo (1998).
This paper belongs to a series of papers describing the evolution of military competence and C2 (Command and Control) processes supported by evolving enablers in information management. There are three capabilities in military command and control processes from point of knowledge management:
- Sense making, consisting of observation (sensing) and orientation (making sense), is interpreting the equivocal data by enacting interpretations.
- Decision making, which is searching and selecting alternatives according to projected outcomes and preferences.
- Knowledge creating, which is creating new knowledge and improving the whole OODA-loop through knowledge conversion, sharing of information and training.
These capabilities and their effect on OODA-loop are described in figure 1.
Figure 1: Orientation for military knowledge management from sense making, decision making and knowledge creating approach
This paper defines the major evolutionary path of each level of Knowledge Management and describes some short cuts or downshifts that some military organisations have faced when reaching for more revolutionary goals. Paper provides tools to do strategic diagnosis by describing possible paths on both separate and integrated road map where interrelations and challenges may be easier identified. This is to support strategic diagnosis within Information and Communications Technology that is supporting the Knowledge Management.
Orientation to road maps of Military Knowledge Management
“Knowledge is proud that he has learned so much;
Wisdom is humble that he knows no more.” William Cowper 1785
There is a possibility to create a description of general evolution of Knowledge Management in Military Command and Control. A generic evolution is depicted with three roads of Military Decision making, Sense making and Knowledge Creating in figure 2.
Figure 2: Roads for military learning from knowledge management approach
This paper is describing the sub-road map for military learning in more detail. It is combining the organizational knowledge conversion process by Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) with basic education concepts of behavioural, cognitive, constructive and social cognitive by Hergenhahn and Olson (2008) and applying these together in different military cultures. See other sub-maps or description of all roads in other papers of knowledge management maps.
Description of evolutionary paths in Military Knowledge Creating and Learning
This paper is concentrating on how knowledge creating, training of skills and competence have been evolving in military organizations. Four different approaches to knowledge creating, training, education and learning are described in figure 3. This paper is analysing learning from knowledge management point of view, emphasising especially knowledge creation . Knowledge creation is essential process to improve military command and control capabilities as illustrated in figure 1 and stated in UK Joint Doctrine for Understanding (2010) as follows:
“Targeting education and training to support the development of understanding is a crucial enabler. …; such training should include self-awareness, critical and creative thinking skills and open-mindedness.”
Military training has to prepare individuals and collectives to enter into harm's way and perform physically and mentally demanding tasks at the highest possible levels of proficiency. As early as commanders of Greece forces during Persian wars in 480 – 479 B.C. were focusing on team integrity of their phalanxes, history of war repeatedly tell tales of devastating losses after soldiers abandon their tasks, break and run under the pressure of combat. Military training has a traditional to be more like discipline than a process of creating competence.
Military skills are learned mainly in team training with progressive challenges tailored to each team of arms. Repetition is a disciplined way to establish team’s behaviour as part of a bigger system. At battle technical level both individuals, troops and weapon systems are trained to be able to act at level of subconscious habit, motoric memory or pre-set programming. In stressful situations and times of fear a part in human brains, amygdala, takes control preferring automatic habits or reactions like reflex over consideration. To be able to behave effectively under stress requires both individuals and troops to exercise as part of bigger fighting system, obtain skill level of automation and to be able to sense cues of enemy action and execute ones task routinely with conjunction of indirect methods.
Military understanding has several learning approaches. There is a strong legacy of following the doctrine and thinking by book. There is also increased request in not educating soldiers what to think but how to think. This means introducing a combination of three thinking methods: systems thinking, creative thinking and critical thinking.
The ability of military organization to change is influenced by its culture. Armed Forces cultural norms are influenced by military tradition, social norms and ethical standards. These laws and routines shape the thinking patterns of soldiers when changes must be made. The ability to survive over the eventual situation of being surprised is based on military organisations ability to be flexible in:
- Conceptual and doctrine level
- Structure and organisational level
- Cognitive, command and control level and
- Learning lessons from wars and various military operations and disseminating them rapidly, which is defined by:
- Continuous learning, which calls for culture and mechanism that en-courage learning from mistakes and feed experiments promptly all over organization to be utilized in training
- Real-time learning, which requires capability to devise immediate solu-tions and circulate them throughout stake holders.
Drilling what to do and think with behavioural drivers
Drilling has been a tool for military training as documented lividly in roman army’s training description or in Prussian army when soldier was made a standardized, predictable and reliable unit to operate the musket. This is the very basic way of socializing tacit skills when instructor (master) shows how to do movement to soldiers (apprentices) and then supervises their proceedings and corrects possible mistakes.
Thorndike (1911) defined the law of exercise where he described the law of use as “exercising the connection between stimulating situation and a response strengthens the connection between the two”. He also described the law of disuse as “discontinued practice or non-used neural bond is weakening the connections between situation and response”. After 1930 these laws were discarded by Thorndike himself, but culture has been continuing drilling with another reason. In stressful situations and times of fear a part in human brains, amygdala, takes control and it prefers automatic habits or reactions like reflexes. For soldier to reach amygdala preferred motoric automation, repetition has been the main means of exercising.
Military training, especially the basic training, has been generalised as repeating meaningless movements on and on in the exercise field instructed by a drilling sergeant. Similar approach has been seen in class room lessons, where instructor is repeating parts of weapon as chorus with classroom of 30 soldiers.
For artillery crew drilling with piece of weapon is essential to achieve the degree of automation. Trying to educate thinking in similar way and industrialize the military education as happened in USA military academies before II WW, will end up with obedient but dependent soldiers. West Point was able produce officers, who were able to enforce discipline, but did not know WHY and HOW to adjust their leadership according to situation.
In behaviourism learner gets positive feedback when his behaviour and learning results are moving in right direction. This is especially effective, when standard of required performance is gradually increased and award is direct and public.
Behaviourism may be extended with social dimension, where student's behaviour is changing to cope his collective’s behaviour and its consequences. This supports team learning with gradually increased performance requirement and rewarding not as individual but team basis. This is normally utilized in military drilling when platoons are competing against each other.
There is evidence that tangible rewards do decrease intrinsic motivation in situations, when the student already has a high level of intrinsic motivation or given task requires creative thinking. The stress that might build up in problem solving situations from this competition like environment is not always productive and individual's thinking may be restricted and formal.
Industrial way of educating soldiers has another weakness. If the doctrine is not suitable in real operations, “fighting by the book” does not produce right results. This was the situation in Iraq, when Donald Rumsfeld was the secretary of defence before 2006 and failed to recognise the dysfunctional doctrine. General David Petraeus went first to renew the Army doctrine on counterinsurgency and when he was appointed 2007 as commander in chief of allied forces in Iraq, he was able to mitigate successfully the confrontations in Baghdad area based on new doctrine.
Understanding how to think with cognitive drivers
General James Gartwright (2008) called after two changes in officers’ education: learning how to think and improving the pace of learning to meet current speed of evolution of business (3 months), technology (18 months) and war fighting (30 days). This requires combination which is the ability to create explicit knowledge by bringing together explicit knowledge from a number of sources. Combining different concepts requires systems thinking, critical thinking and operational analyses.
The cognitive learning follows more the way of human, when he creates understanding and processes information in his brain. New things are learned within a familiar orientation model. Especially problem solving is using cognitive approach, where one learns a new way of thinking (schema) and is able to utilize this “tool” further in solving for other similar problems. After learning these schemas, there remains a problem of mapping problem to a right pre-existing schema. This requires logical reasoning like systems thinking or operational analyses.
There is a need to combine three thinking methods to create balance of:
- Systems thinking: seeing of “interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static ‘snapshots.’”
- Creative thinking: appreciating and engaging diversity, mixing generalists with specialists, processing information systematically.
- Critical thinking: “In dialogue, a group explores complex difficult issues from many points of view. Individuals suspend their assumptions but they communicate their assumptions freely.”
These thinking tools should be utilized along individually tailored path of learning towards soldiers understanding. The learning path includes a spiral that collects feedback from subordinates, peers and instructors. Spiral curve is accelerated by windows of opportunity to utilize innovative solutions but providing safe environment to make mistakes.
Military training needs to be divided into two main streams:
- learning motoric skills as individual or as team,
- learning to understand.
Skills are learned mainly by team training with progressive challenges tailored to each team. Repetition is a discipline as a part of bigger system, but utilization of skills in different situations and environment is a driver for successful execution in progressively challenging environment. Although team is a unit in learning, individual support is very important in the first phases of learning. Following the maturity of individual and team instructors support should be decreasing as competence base and team support are increasing.
Understanding is soldiers’ ability to perceive their space of operation, teams and systems, other combat supporters, supported and adversary as huge system where different parts interact with each other and with environment. It requires leaders to achieve synthesis when processing towards understanding of this phenomena. Leaders should reach a certain level of insight and foresight to be able to innovate and create best ways to deploy and operate one's system as interdependent part of fighting system of systems. Creativity alone should not be emphasized because of human behavioural weaknesses, but it must be balanced with critical thinking together with timely and right decision making.
Experimenting with constructive drivers
The full knowledge conversion process by Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) is described in figure 3. Individual shares some experiences of his trials (tacit knowledge) with peers and together they come up (socialization) with hypothesis for causality model of their analysed experience. They publish (externalization) their findings in lessons identified (explicit) board. Someone else faces a challenge, finds these lessons together with few more similar, and fuses (combination) these concepts (explicit) to fit into situation in hand. One learns (internalization) from this successful trial and increases his (tacit) knowledge.
Figure 3: Knowledge conversion process (Nonaka&Takeuchi 1995)
One skill and competence learning process has been described as follows:
- Seeing some to give an example and describing core causality behind task
- Doing the task under supervision of mentor and experimenting with variations of inputs
- Doing the task independently with different variations
- Showing how to do task to an apprentice
- Overseeing an apprentice to practice skill.
This process might be cyclic and spinning around many times a year as it has been done when establishing a continuous training of Network and Security Operations Centre personnel. The willingness and ability to learn from experience and then apply those lessons to succeed in new situations is called learning agility. People who are agile in learning continuously seek new challenges, solicit direct feedback, self-reflect, get jobs done resourcefully and solve problems that they nor anyone else has seen before. This has become an imperative skill for cyber defence working force.
Constructivism means that new information is learned within social and cultural interaction and understood in relation to prior knowledge, experience or skill. Constructivism is using sociocultural dimension to support learning. Interaction with more capable peers, skilful leaders or cognitive tools do create mental constructs that enables students to recall learned things longer. The support is provided according to students’ maturity and it is gradually withdrawn as subjects become internalized. This is a coach or mentor approach, where instructor is supporting enough to have student over first fears, provides safe environment for student to experiment, fail and learn, and gradually allows student to have more room for independent action.
Contemporary U.S. Field Manual for training guides the Army to educate leaders who accept prudent risks to create opportunities to seize, retain, and exploit the initiative. They should be willing to try and sometimes error. In case of error they should learn from them, own them, fix them and put safeguards in place to ensure the same error will never be repeated again.
This was successfully implemented in German Kriegsakademie in 1930’s, where instructors were experts in their fields, highly perceived, also often veterans of previous war and had to prove their aptitude in instructing. Instructors taught their courses on a primus inter pares basis. This promoted the students to express themselves more freely. There were no optimal solutions for each exercise likewise there is no in war. Solutions of each student were discussed and studied in a group. This internalization armed students with enormous set possible options to be drawn in the future if faced similar challenges. Same time students adapted a behaviour which preferred decisiveness and creativity over long construction of a supposedly optimal solution. This provided an evident competitive edge to German officers over their allied counterparts.
Military as knowledge creating organization driven by social cognitive learning
Military organizations are trying to mitigate the problem of one man’s constraints in understanding:
“A man has no ears for that to which experience has given him no access.”
Friedrich Nietzsche.
The competitive edge may be gained from continuous organizational knowledge creation and learning by “start talking and get to work” as Alan Weber (1993) says. Conversations are the way knowledge workers discover what they know, share it with their colleagues and in the process create new knowledge for the organization.
Knowledge conversion is enforced by social cognitive learning. It means that learner's behaviour changes as a result of observing others' behaviour and its consequences. There are several factors that determine whether observing a model will affect behavioural or cognitive change. These factors include the learner's developmental status, the perceived prestige and competence of the model, the consequences received by the model, the relevance of the model's behaviours and consequences to the learner's goals, and the learner's self-efficacy. Self-efficacy refers to the learner's belief in his or her ability to perform the modelled behaviour.
Military mission is not waiting soldiers to learn with curriculum and courses, it needs skills and understanding before patrols are given a mission to accomplish. Unit training during operation becomes, not only possible by advanced C4ISR, but also required as mission complexity increases and pace of change accelerates. CSM Chris Faris (2013) calls for training early to need. He defines the early need as
“An examination across the operational and strategic levels of war and control, not just operationally as applied in joint full spectrum conflict, but also in force generation, training, management and budgeting aspects, and then appropriately applied based upon career progression pertinent to duties and responsibilities”.
The modern military task force is based on integrated fighting system in which any of the sensors that sees a target can give targeting information to the best weapon platform optimized according to situation. Machines and men are collaborating, sharing information and creating understanding, learning from past experiences and sustaining the asymmetric capability over the opponent.
The integrated 5th generation fighting system owes its capability mainly to programming and electronics. As military is adapting the continuous knowledge conversion process between people , they also need to include machines in to the loop of continuous learning. Soldiers and their artificially intelligent systems may learn with same pace as the knowledge between people is converted, information technology enables swift distribution of new knowledge and software defined systems are reconfigured with same pace. Semantic knowledge models that are substituting legacy data models and software defined networks, computing and information security are enabling systems to learn even over night to cope with constant and accelerated change in war that both Marshal (1947) and General Cartwright (2008) were requiring. Being able to create organizational knowledge together with organizational and C2 flexibility are also features for surviving force defined by Finkel (2007).
Figure 3: Road map for military learning from knowledge management approach
This concludes the description of evolutionary path defined by the knowledge conversion process combined with education models and illustrated with military studies of training, flexibility and C2. Next we argue over leaps and short cuts in this map of roads for improved organizational learning.
Leaps, downshifts and revolutionary paths on knowledge creation map of possible roads
Leaps
When following the evolutionary road on the map of knowledge creation and training, there are two distinctive leaps: 1. from what to think to how to think and 2. from team learning to organizational learning.
U.S. Armed Forces has been trying to achieve to leap towards how to think since they started follow Prussian/German military officers training after the overwhelmingly successful wars of German unification 1871. As the Vice chairman of U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff 2008 was pointing out the need to teach how to think, U.S. Armed Forces have been struggling to make this leap. Major obstacles on the way are both doctrine and culture of C2. With armies that are mainly applying dominance of numbers and have tendency to attrition operations, there is an inherited need to follow the book in training and operations. They also do not have to adapt in real life operations since their tactics is based in linear usage of fire and movement. Armed Forces that do not have resources to gain overall dominance are more after timely and local advantage, which requires different training for leaders thinking capabilities. This was the case of German officers training from 1888 onwards when Auftragstaktik was introduced.
Even longer leap is faced from team learning towards organizational learning. First obstacle is the culture of information distribution by need to know basis only. Together with tactical level information management via push method, military will always face the dilemma of operational security and survivability. Single owner of information does not have full understanding of where information in his possession might be utilized. Culture needs to be switched to need to share before anything happens. This happened with General McChrystal in Iraq operation when he changed the way of sharing information within Special Operations Task force 2003.
Second obstacle is the autocratic culture of command and control if it is featured by “shut your big mouth and stop thinking above your rank” attitude. This disables the systems thinking, critical thinking and creative thinking needed to try and error together with badly needed critique.
Third obstacle is technology. Information technology systems are still build and maintained based on system boundaries . Data is system constrained because of vendor attempts to maintain market with proprietary solutions. National policy is trying to keep technology dominance by restraining system integration. Different branches in military are trying to sustain their independency and freedom of movement by abiding interoperability standards.
Fourth obstacle is information itself. Either information is unstructured so it is not searchable or understandable but by human. Or it is modelled in proprietary way that data transfer always requires interpretation. These problems may be managed with improving semantic structures that frame all pieces of information with standard metadata, where data objects and their relationships are explained. This way information is understandable both to humans and machines.
Revolutionary paths and downgrading’s
As described earlier, U.S. Armed Forces have been trying to leap from what to think to how to think for decades, but they have this far downgraded back to behavioural basics because of the gravity of their doctrine culture and C2 attitude.
Despite of U.S. Armed Forces tradition McChrystal achieved to take his special operations forces from behavioural level directly to organizational learning within couple of years. Similar short duration revolutionary changes have been observed in troops commanded by H.R. McMaster and John Nagl in counterinsurgency operations.
The Finnish Land Forces have been transforming from cognitive/behavioural culture towards constructive culture when they have renewed their land tactics and fighting. Three soldier patrols in regular army with situational information handy creates an effective platform to continuous social based learning through organization. This has changed training, sensing and sense making together with decision making.
Most advanced forces are gradually working their way towards knowledge creating and fast learning fighting system of systems capability. This is approached as strategic capability of forces that has to adopt under dominance of their adversary and still gain advantage to defend their countries. In Finland there is a goal for “Men and Machines to learn new things and procedures overnight”. The pull of legacy culture is strong as one Brigadier was complaining of frequent updates in the battle management system used by his force. New systems should freeze for 25 years if trained for conscripts according to his liking.
Conclusion
This paper defines a hypothesis that with combining of knowledge creating organization models and classical educational models one can describe a road map for improving the capability of military command and control. Evolutionary road starts with drilling repetitions by the book enhanced with behavioural targets. Next stage is creating mind models with more cognitive approach of how to think. Third stage is knowledge creation within teams enhanced by constructional education approach. Final stage is achieving flexibility by learning as a fighting system of systems. Most military forces have been advancing and sometimes retracting in their achievement to be more effective, flexible and more ready for next war.
As in surrounding society military have been affected by improved information technology but also struggled to cope with the pace of change in modern area of operation. This paper proofs that military can remarkably improve their command and control processes with knowledge creation capability even to the level of strategic advantage.
This map of possible roads towards improved knowledge management presents a method for C2 strategy. One may define his current situation by acknowledging the typical features of each stage in training and knowledge creation. There is possibility to set goal stage for improved command and control. As there is a gap between current and future capability, it is possible to define possible roads that organization may proceed along.
This method is not suitable for linear strategic approach. Improvements in organizational knowledge management are not achieved by simple design of a project and then utilizing basic project management methods to proceed towards seemingly clear goals. Many military organizations have either failed to achieve results or rebounded back to starting point.
This paper provides a frame structure to draft a very complex system of individual, social, cultural and technical interrelationships. They are always dependent on history, surrounding society, current spirit and challenges faced. Strategy should have several parallel lines of operation and more probing-sensing method for transformation. Otherwise complexity should not keep us improving the knowledge creation and C2 since:
"The great end of knowledge is not knowledge but action."
Thomas Henry Huxley
No comments:
Post a Comment