Dec. 1, 2009

STAR–TIDES and Starfish Networks: Supporting Stressed Populations with Distributed Talent

The Department of Defense increasingly is involved in postwar stabilization and reconstruction, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief missions, capacity-building of partner nations at home and abroad, and other such complex operations. To provide sustainable support to stressed populations in these environments, an international, networked, knowledge-sharing research project called Sustainable Technologies, Accelerated Research–Transformative Innovation for Development and Emergency Support (STAR–TIDES) encourages innovative approaches to public-private collaboration, whole-of-government solutions, and transnational engagement. It leverages a distributed network of people and organizations to conduct research, support real world contingencies, and bridge gaps among disparate communities.

Dec. 1, 2009

Crosscutting Issues in International Transformation: Interactions and Innovations among People, Organizations, Processes, and Technology

This book is a compilation of papers presented at the International Transformation Conference in Stockholm, Sweden on June 2-3, 2009. The conference was hosted by the Swedish Defence Research Agency, FOI. The papers are organized according to the categories of culture, interagency, transformation initiatives, leadership, and adaptive organizations.

Dec. 1, 2009

Defense Business Transformation

Over the past 20 years, information technology has been rapidly advancing, producing new capabilities that enable organizations to greatly enhance visibility into their business operations. While many private organizations have successfully taken advantage of these new technologies to develop enterprise-wide information systems that reduce costs and improve performance, the federal governments still lags far behind. DoD, one of the largest organization in the world with an annual budget over $500 billion, still relies on several thousand, non-integrated, and noninteroperable information legacy systems, that are error prone and redundant and do not provide the enterprise visibility necessary to make sound management decisions. Moreover, between FY07 and FY 09, DoD has requested from Congress over $47 billion in appropriations to operate, maintain, and modernize these business systems.

Dec. 1, 2009

A Policymaker’s Guide to Bioterrorism and What To Do About It

This paper draws together several years of work in an attempt to suggest the outlines of this thinking about the risk that the author regards as most pernicious: biological terrorism. It is written for those who desire a better understanding of this risk and its implications for policymakers.

Dec. 1, 2009

DTP-071: Forecasting Science and Technology for the Department of Defense

This paper discusses recent trends in S&T, particularly how various disciplines have converged to produce new capabilities, and considers how a new series of studies might be conducted taking into account such convergences.

Nov. 1, 2009

To Build Resilience: Leader Influence on Mental Hardiness

The military profession is inherently stressful and is getting more so for U.S. troops, who are deploying more often and for longer periods of time on missions that are multifaceted, changeable, and ambiguous. Such stressful conditions can lead to a range of health problems and performance decrements even among leaders. But not everyone reacts in negative ways to environmental stress. Most people remain healthy and continue to perform well even in the face of high stress levels. While much attention in recent years has focused on identifying and treating stress-related breakdowns such as post-traumatic stress disorder, scant investment has gone toward the study of healthy, resilient response patterns in people.

Oct. 1, 2009

Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction: Looking Back, Looking Ahead

This Occasional Paper traces the general evolution of the countering WMD enterprise in the Clinton and Bush administrations and anticipates some of the major WMD challenges that lie ahead.

Oct. 1, 2009

President Nixon’s Decision to Renounce the U.S. Offensive Biological Weapons Program

The nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union was a prominent feature of the Cold War. A lesser known but equally dangerous element of the superpower competition involved biological weapons (BW), living microorganisms that cause fatal or incapacitating diseases in humans, animals, or plants. By the late 1960s, the United States and the Soviet Union had both acquired advanced BW capabilities. The U.S. biological weapons complex, operated by the U.S. Army Chemical Corps, consisted of a research and development laboratory at Fort Detrick in Maryland, an open-air testing site at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, and a production facility at Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas that manufactured biological warfare agents and loaded them into bomblets, bombs, and spray tanks.

Sept. 15, 2009

DTP-070: Understanding and Leading Porous Network Organizations: An Analysis Based on the 7-S Model

This paper evaluates STAR-TIDES , an organization seeking to develop and share knowledge and technologies to enhance the capacity of disparate groups to respond effectively to disasters and humanitarian crises. Analyzing STAR-TIDES as a porous network organization, it applies an organizational analysis tool known as the “7-S framework” to clarify some of the key issues that must be addressed for such organizations to be effective and adaptive.

Sept. 1, 2009

Cyberspace and the “First Battle” in 21st-century War

Wars often start well before main forces engage. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, combat often began when light cavalry units crossed the border. For most of the 20th century, the “first battle” typically involved dawn surprise attacks, usually delivered by air forces. While a few of these attacks were so shattering that they essentially decided the outcome of the struggle or at least dramatically shaped its course—the Israeli air force’s attack at the opening of the June 1967 Six-Day War comes to mind—in most cases the defender had sufficient strategic space—geographic and/or temporal—to recover and eventually redress the strategic balance to emerge victorious. The opening moments of World War II for Russia and the United States provide two examples.