Alternative Models of Command and Control

In Chapter One, we described some of the current dominant theories of command and control: control theory, organization charts, and cognitive science. In this appendix, we provide brief descriptions of other cybernetic-related or cognitive-science-related theories, discuss deviations from these dominant paradigms, and relate the cybernetic paradigm to technology development. The fundamental need for communications significantly constrains the options for both command and control, making communications infrastructure a critical feature of a C2 system. However, describing the communications links and nodes of a fighting force does not suffice to explain, understand, or predict success and failures in command and control. Converting a description of a communications infrastructure into a causal model of C2 requires that the functions at the nodes be represented. Since the traffic over communications channels is most easily described by messages, an obvious approach to modeling the functions of C2 nodes is to represent the functions as generating, consuming, and transforming messages. The result of doing so is, once again, a variant of a cybernetic model, which captures only those aspects of command that can be described as message-processing tasks—only a fraction of the command burden. This limitation biases C2 models toward the reactive aspects of command and, once again, defines the C2 process as a function of how the system is wired together.