DoD Official Policy on New/Social Media

The Department of Defense released its official policy on new/social media today. The policy (Directive-Type Memorandum 09-026), which is effective immediately, states that the default for the DoD non-classified network (the NIPRNET) is for open access so that all of DoD can use new media.

Social Networking

The Defense Department is considering banning Twitter, Facebook and other social-networking sites for security reasons because the sites may give hackers easy access to military networks.
Ledership is working the challenge of balancing the demand signal from soldiers, sailors and airmen (and also benefits of these tools) against the necessary operational security concerns that are inherently military.


The following short video presentation is illuminating:

United States Actions To Counter Piracy Off the Horn of Africa

Bureau of Political-Military Affairs
Fact Sheet
September 1, 2009

The United States Government, in concert with the American maritime industry and other concerned nations and international organizations, continues to work to prevent pirates operating in the waters off of the Horn of Africa from interfering with maritime commerce, endangering mariners, hindering the provision of humanitarian aid to East Africa, and further destabilizing this troubled region.
Each year, approximately 33,000 commercial ships traverse the Gulf of Aden, making it among the world’s busiest shipping corridors. Since 2009, there were 138 pirate attacks on commercial vessels, of which 33 were successful. In 2008, there were 122 pirate attacks with 42 successes. In 2007, there were 19 pirate attacks with 12 successes.
A Coordinated Federal Response: The National Security Council issued the Partnership and Action Plan for Countering Piracy off the Horn of Africa in December 2008 as an adjunct to the National Strategy for Maritime Security. Implementation of the Action Plan is overseen by the Counter-Piracy Steering Group, an interagency forum co-led by the Departments of State and Defense and consisting of representatives from the Departments of Justice, Treasury, Transportation (U.S. Maritime Administration), Homeland Security, and the U.S. Agency for International Development. The Department of State orchestrates United States participation in the international Contact Group on Piracy off the Coast of Somalia, which was created following the adoption of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1851 in order to better coordinate international counter-piracy efforts. Over 75 bureaus, offices, and U.S. embassies are involved in this complex cross-cutting issue that has significant national security implications.
Working With Industry: The United States believes that a critical element to successfully deterring pirate attacks is for the commercial shipping industry to continue to provide input to, and follow, best practices. Accordingly, the U.S. Coast Guard revised its applicable Maritime Security Directive to require U.S.-flagged vessels to implement more effective measures to protect against pirates, particularly those vessels in the high-risk waters off of Somalia. The U.S. Maritime Administration (MARAD) issues specific operational advice to U.S.-flagged ship owners and operators for the Horn of Africa. The U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, operated by MARAD, conducts counter-piracy training for midshipmen entering the Merchant Marine that includes identifying high-risk areas, evasive maneuvering, and repelling boarders. Finally, the United States has reiterated its firm, long-standing policy of not making concessions or paying any ransoms for the return of American hostages.
Actions By Naval Forces: The U.S. Navy and U.S. Coast Guard have contributed ships and aircraft to NATO’s counter piracy operations and Combined Task Force 151 (CTF-151), a multinational coalition whose mission is to protect against piracy in the Gulf of Aden and off the eastern coast of Somalia. The command of CTF 151 rotates among partner navies regularly. The U.S. Navy and CTF-151 actively coordinate with and support the anti-piracy operations of NATO’s Operation Ocean Shield naval forces in the region, as well as those of the European Union’s naval Operation Atalanta. Despite the fact that over one million square miles of ocean are vulnerable to Somali piracy, the United States and other navies have succeeded so far in seizing or destroying 40 pirate vessels since August 2008, rendering 235 suspected pirates for prosecution in various countries, and confiscating numerous small arms and light weapons, including rocket-propelled grenades.
Harmonizing International Action: Following the adoption of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1851, the United States helped to create the Contact Group on Piracy off the Coast of Somalia to coordinate an effective international response to piracy in that region. The Contact Group participants coordinate their naval activities, judicial initiatives, commercial maritime interests, and public information sharing, and are also considering various efforts to map the financial infrastructure of pirates. To date, over 30 countries and international organizations participate in the Contact Group’s Working Group and plenary sessions. The United States chairs its Working Group on Strengthening Shipping Self-Awareness and Other Capabilities.
Capacity Building: The United States is developing a Maritime Security Sector Reform framework that delineates essential components of national maritime security and can serve as a tool for donor coordination. Working closely with United Nations organizations such as the International Maritime Organization and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, other Contact Group participants, and several countries in the region, the United States is supporting the capacity development of regional judicial, legislative, regulatory, and coastal forces in order to better protect against and respond to pirate attacks.
Legal Consequences: The United States believes that the first option for prosecution of a piracy incident should be by the affected state(s) -- the flag state or the state of nationality of the vessel’s owner or crew. The U.S. Department of Justice has already brought one alleged Somali pirate to the United States to stand trial in a case where it was the affected state (see http://newyork.fbi.gov/dojpressrel/pressrel09/nyfo042109.htm). The United States continues to urge states to ensure that they have the proper domestic legal framework to prosecute suspected pirates in their national courts. If an affected state is unable to prosecute suspected offenders captured by the United States, the United States has a Memorandum of Understanding with Kenya to facilitate the transfer of the suspected pirates to Kenya for prosecution in their courts. The United States is exploring similar arrangements with other states to handle cases when affected states are unable to prosecute pirates.

Knowledge Centric Sensei

According to Hirotaka Takeuchi, who is now dean of the Grad­uate School of International Corporate Strategy at Hitotsubashi University and a visiting professor at Harvard Business School, Tokyo-based business scholar Ikujiro Nonaka is “quite simply the father of knowledge management. His research over the last 20 years opened up a whole new field and set the stage for how the best organizations understand human capital today.” Nonaka’s concept relies on a community in which generosity is prevalent, people feel recognized as distinct individuals, and informal, honest communication is commonplace. Tacit knowledge is a key component. Tacit knowledge (as opposed to formal or explicit knowledge) is knowledge that is difficult to articulate and is more about the unspoken knowledge that people draw on from within themselves: observations, ingrained habits, inspirations, hunches, and other forms of awareness. Nonaka’s thesis is that organizations that favor explicit over tacit knowledge limit their capabilities in several ways: (1) defining competence as the ability to rank high in metrics rather than to succeed in real-world business, (2) view people skills as static and so fail to invest in the development of talent AND (3) get mired in IT-based knowledge systems that restrict, rather than enhance staff communication.
In his most recent book, Managing Flow, Nonaka and his colleagues trace the development of knowledge creation in robust detail concluding that there are four stages:
• Socialization involves mobilizing people for face-to-face communication and immersing them in shared experiences that help them develop empathy for customers.
• Externalization entails the translation of tacit experience into words and images that can be shared with a larger group (e.g. in­viting a seasoned team of frontline workers to design a training manual that describes their own tacitly acquired skills).
• Combination is the extension of tacit knowledge into explicit forms that can then be disseminated throughout the organization.
• Internalization is the reabsorption of explicit knowledge back into daily practice, but with an awareness of larger and more complex issues.
Closer to home, Professor Mark Nissen at the Naval Postgraduate has made his own well recognized contribution to mapping key concepts in the net centric warfare context. Just as understanding the mechanics of electrical flow is critical to developing useful electronic devices, understanding the mechanics of understanding information flow is critical to conceiving useful knowledge centric systems.

Bottom line is that designers of knowledge management systems are in left field if they treat humans as interchangeable parts, receiving and processing data. This explains why many companies have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in knowledge management systems that fail to deliver in­novative results.

Trident Warrior 2009

Here is link to a great YouTube video about Trident Warrior 2009.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_CjJs-1PEc

Maritime Domain Awareness

LT Munson makes some good points in his Proceedings article, namely that reliance on identifying anomalous behavior should not be the critical element in developing actionable MDA. Countering the wide range of threats from traditional adversary militaries to non-traditional threats like terrorism, WMD proliferation, drug smuggling, weapon smuggling, low intensity conflict, and piracy requires a wide range of information. Although this is not a new problem, no one nation has the resources required to go it alone. There are both policy and technical challenges. The first is about trust building, the latter focuses on MDA data fusion and analysis.

Clearly the creation of an interagency and international MDA network composed of analysis centers, operators, information repositories, and sensors that continuously monitor the globe searching for burgeoning maritime threats makes sense. This concept aligns well with the Navy's Strategy for Maritime Security for expanded cooperative relationships with other nations who putatively contribute to the rising tide of maritime security for the benefit of the global maritime common. Although as LT Munson points out the current emphasis is on ship positions, this is more because of the technological advent of AIS and the astonishing success of the Maritime Safety and Security Information System (MSSIS) where participating countries freely share unclassified, near real-time AIS data. A collaborative network of coalition partners that will be eventually be able to monitor vessels, cargo, people, finance, and infrastructure, requires establishing relationships and trust in addition to the creation of a physical network. MSSIS and similar efforts are recognition that trust and cooperation cannot be surged, they must be built over time. Recognition that international and interagency partners require access to and the ability to collaboratively process, analyze, and disseminate information on maritime threats has led to the development of a blueprint for a net-centric information environment in which data from disparate sources and security domains will be discoverable, accessible, understandable, fused, and usable, with appropriate information assurance, to enable user defined and common operational pictures. This blueprint is described in the Maritime Domain Awareness Architecture Management Hub Plan.

The technology challenge is related to the explosive growth in the generation and collection of data associated with vessels, cargo and people which will potentially require a new generation of techniques and tools that can assist in transforming these data into actionable intelligence. These tools include preprocessing large amounts of data, data reduction, mining and fusion. Data fusion is generally defined as the use of techniques that combine data from multiple sources and gather that information in order to achieve inferences, which will be more efficient and potentially more accurate than if they were achieved by means of a single source. The well recognized data fusion model developed by the Joint Directors of Laboratories Data Fusion Group provides a common frame of reference for fusion discussions. The point being that while anomaly detection is a component of Level 3, the objective of fusing the combined activity and capability of vessels, cargo, people, finance, and infrastructure is to infer intentions and assess threats.

The vision for a global network-centric environment where users can access, analyze, and exchange a wide range of maritime information and collaborate on maritime problems with others is absolutely consistent with the argument made by Defense Secretary Robert Gates that "the most important military component in the war on terror is not the fighting we do ourselves, but how well we enable and empower our partners to defend and govern themselves."

The Dumbest Generation

From the Economist June 11 :
A recent report from McKinsey, a management consultancy, argues that the lagging performance of the country’s school pupils, particularly its poor and minority children, has wreaked more devastation on the economy than the current recession. American children have it easier than most other children in the world, including the supposedly lazy Europeans. They have one of the shortest school years anywhere, a mere 180 days compared with an average of 195 for OECD countries and more than 200 for East Asian countries. German children spend 20 more days in school than American ones, and South Koreans over a month more. Over 12 years, a 15-day deficit means American children lose out on 180 days of school, equivalent to an entire year. American children also have one of the shortest school days, six-and-a-half hours, adding up to 32 hours a week. By contrast, the school week is 37 hours in Luxembourg, 44 in Belgium, 53 in Denmark and 60 in Sweden. On top of that, American children do only about an hour’s-worth of homework a day, a figure that stuns the Japanese and Chinese. More at http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstates/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13825184