Foreign Humanitarian Assistance and the New C2: Coordination and Collaboration
Abstract
Foreign Humanitarian Assistance (FHA) continues to gain prominence as a primary mission area across the DoD. Both US military and civilian leadership acknowledge that FHA has emerged as a growth industry which has the potential to enhance our global position through critical partnership and engagement with key strategic allies in their hour of greatest need. Because FHA operations reside at the nexus of Civilian and Military (CIVMIL) cooperation, they force operational commanders to fuse multiple instruments of national power towards achieving mission success. Achieving proper alignment and synchronization among these various entities creates significant challenges which traditional precepts of Command and Control (C) are ill-equipped to overcome. Given the unique attributes of this complex mission area and the resulting challenges it poses, traditional US Military paradigms of Command and Control need to be revised, necessitating a renewed approach that emphasizes Coordination and Collaboration ("The New C") towards enhancing mission effectiveness and unity of effort among a diverse set of military and non-military stakeholders. This paper reviews traditional paradigms of Command and Control and considers their inadequacy when applied to FHA missions, drawing upon recent US experience in foreign disaster response missions in Haiti and Pakistan to demonstrate the efficacy of the new C. The paper concludes with several recommendations for operational commanders to consider whereby the tenets of the new C2 can be better incorporated into FHA planning and execution, thereby facilitating unity of effort in a situation where unity of command is simply infeasible.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- May 01, 2011
- Accession Number
- ADA546097
Entities
People
- Scott W. Larson
Organizations
- Naval War College