CHIPS Articles: Knowledge Management Insights from Global 2001

For over 110 years, war gaming at the Naval War College (NWC) has provided operational commanders with a test bed to experiment with emerging doctrine. The NWC provides the Navy with an operational laboratory to test command and control doctrine, futuristic platforms and sensor capabilities, as well as a variety of information technology (IT) in various stages of development.

Over a year ago, the NWC teamed up with the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and created an Innovation Laboratory at NWC. The mission of the NWC Innovation Laboratory is to look at developing technologies within the Navy as well as technology in development from other Services, for their potential use in future war games and eventual Fleet implementation. The objective is to shorten the original timeline of the product's development cycle by providing a tailored venue of futuristic scenarios for semi-mature technologies. Perhaps the most important factor in this process is the hands-on exercise these products get from senior operational commanders who put these tools to the test and provide invaluable, direct feedback to the technology developers.

One of the key focus area for Global 2001 directly related to Knowledge Management (KM) was "Command and Control in an Information Rich Environment." An important assumption was that the information was readily available; we just had to learn how to effectively use it. The hierarchical command and control (C2) structure formalized by Napoleon and practiced, in part, through today, effectively coordinated military operations across geographical expanses. In Network Centric Operations (NCO), technology spans those expanses in a real-time manner. Consequently C2 is greatly facilitated. An alternative C2 structure was gamed in Global 2001 to take yet another step towards defining the optimal C2 structures for the networked environment.

Using a well known military scenario, senior military leaders from all U.S. Services as well as Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom were challenged with an array of IT tools and new doctrinal concepts. The KM preparation for Global 2001 was a seven-month effort, which built on the experience from Global War Games in 1999 and 2000. In past games, the KM teams involvement started much later in the development cycle. The Global 2001 designers were determined, this year, to have the KM effort integrated into the game build process from the very beginning. The KM scheme encompassed everything from the C2 structure of the players, to IT tools used in the game—that is the C2 structure, processes and tools for Global 2001. Some of the key questions considered included:

Global 2001 KM Team

The Global 2001 KM Team included partners from government-- military and civilian, industry, and academic sectors. The KM approach was to divide the effort into three groups: Knowledge Engineering (KE), Metrics, and Knowledge Sharing Initiative (KSI). KE was the core design of the KM schema, that worked the entire gamut of game design—from determining information flow and command relationships to selecting and developing the IT required to pull it off. The Metrics group was involved in game design, so they could identify information pulse points and analyze of the effectiveness of the network- centric environment. The third aspect of the KM effort, KSI, is an ongoing knowledge sharing effort, in coordination with the DON CIO to disseminate experiences throughout the Navy so that others can leverage from lessons learned, and make other gaming and training evolutions more effective.

Determining information flow and command relationships was a critical early step in the K