Operating In A Persistent Pandemic Environment

Operating In A Persistent Pandemic Environment 27 August, 2020

Using data, machine-learning, and an understanding of the Fleet Marine’s on-base job(s) to, in the face of unknown disruptions, enable leadership to make critical workplace and facility decisions to improve resilience on USMC installations.

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Operating In A Persistent Pandemic Environment As new threats continuously evolve, it is important to quickly understand how they may or may not impact the mission. While a general understanding of threats may be useful at an enterprise level, warriors must be able to respond and execute their specific mission, or set of missions, from their particular location in any threat environment.

Some threats may impact the physical environment, some may impact command and control, others may impact logistics, and some may be planned for and conventional, while others may be unconventional in nature, appearance, and source. In the end, since Marines are our most important weapons system, what individuals need to execute their jobs is at the root of building a resilient system where the capacity and capability to “take a punch,” “stay standing,” and “punch back” is robust and extensible. We need to enable the military to operate in response to such threats as the one we now face: a persistent pandemic environment.

Better preparedness for a persistent pandemic threat, now and in the future, can be accomplished through a novel approach to innovation-based planning, which starts with the Fleet Marine, the installation, and their mission requirements and offers a useful framework around which to design a response. By understanding and modeling their daily journey, it is possible to create a baseline of requirements and dependencies against which to test if any proposal improves their ability to do their job.

The journey, job descriptions, and job locations should consider the temporal and physical requirements specific to particular installations and specific missions that describe what they have to do, where they have to do it, and when it needs to be done.

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Any plan for operating in a persistent pandemic environment should be built around enabling the Fleet Marine to continue to execute mission requirements within a newly constrained environment, with the type of pandemic or threat determining those new constraints.

Based upon an in-depth understanding of the jobs a Fleet Marine is required to execute, a machinelearning-based digital planning tool can be developed that will allow leadership to scenario plan and understand the implications of decisions on the interconnected physical, temporal, and infrastructure systems that make up the foundation of a healthy, operational community.

The resilience Marines and installations need to exercise in the threat of a pandemic environment will take different forms based upon mission requirements of the Force and the installation that supports that and respective tenant commands. Solutions will need to be robust enough to withstand changes to the operational environment while allowing operations to continue and be extensible. This is especially true as the nature of the next unconventional threat is, by definition, unknown.

a marine centric approach Every unit of the operating force and tenant commands has a Mission Essential Task List (METL) that outlines what that unit needs to do and what tools and res o urces t h e y n e e d to g e t t h e job d o n e .

Every installation has a Table of Organization and Equipment and Facilities Unification (TOEFUE). This is a list of all people and equipment the Force needs and the corresponding facility/space requirements for those units and material as dictated by Force Design plans created five years earlier.

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Every installation has a set of functions known as the Common Output Levels of Service (COLS); 40 i n sta lla t i o n fun c t i o n s wi t h co r resp o n d i n g sub-functions spread across seven portfolios designed to provide the necessary support from the installation to the Fleet Marine enabling Force Generation, Force Sustainment, Force Protection, Force Projection, and Force Operation.

Understanding the journey that connects these missions, functions, and tasks from the spaces in which they take place and across the time frame within which these activities must occur to accomplish the mission must be at the core of all planning. By understanding these dependencies and interdependencies, both within the fence-line and out in the host-communities that support the bases, it is possible to understand the backbone of activities, logistics, and other requirements without which the Marine’s ability to do their jobs in a timely and efficient way is severely impacted.

Experience in characterizing installations provides context for the research we believe is required. Many attempts have been made to identify “types” of installations by a range of characteristics, from urban vs. suburban vs. rural vs. isolated and remote to CONUS vs. OCONUS to operating vs. training vs. Depot vs. HQ vs. logistics vs. maneuver, etc.

While these descriptions impact character, they are necessary but not sufficient in describing the systemof-systems that is a base, its mission, its location, and the interdependencies between all of these that truly tell platforms from which to project power. Individually, these single-dimensional characteristics are of limited use in determining how to create resiliency in the system-of-systems in a time of novel threats.

gsd This warfighter and mission-centric planning model’s primary foundation is the principle of “Get Stuff Done,” or GSD. This approach has proven to be a powerful lens for analyzing and proposing solutions that enable Arrowstreet

warriors to do their jobs and effectively execute the mission. As the past months have demonstrated, the pandemic response has added and impeded tasks during daily activities that take time away from other critical mission and life activities. It has also clearly exposed difficult or impossible tasks to do during disruption because mission-essential functions that are under the control of others are no longer accessible or available, whether within the fence or in surrounding host communities.

research Understanding what the jobs are and what kinds of groups they are done are key determinants of how the operational, logistical, temporal, and physical environment needs to be modified to make them resilient. These job descriptions are not about a job title or an organizational association, but rather about how and when it is done, with whom, and where.

For example, the requirements to work in a group (whether maintaining an airframe, working with heavy equipment in a depot, or a combat unit) have fundamentally different dependencies than activities that can be done socially distanced or remotely, such as desk work.

In a pandemic environment, education might be more like administrative work, and maintenance might be more like combat training than it might initially seem.

Whether duty-station or GSD, based on physical, temporal, and organizational characteristics, understanding jobs appears necessary to develop resilient administrative, logistical, and physical interventions to enable the mission to continue despite disruptions to operations under normal circumstances.

These dependencies and interdependencies are important in understanding how jobs can be disrupted and the effect of these disruptions on the entire mission thread. From supply chain fragilities in sourcing, logistics, and strategic reserves to essential tasks such as training and deployment, the mission

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is dependent on having the right equipment, utilities, access, and safety in the right place at the right time.

Any framework that does not identify all of the enterprise’s interdependencies and the stress points that could disrupt them will inevitably fail to allow leaders to understand the risks they face.

framework Mitigating the loss-of or friction imposed on these dependencies must be at the core of planning for operating during disruptions. The strategies will not, however, be one-size-fits-all. While some might be mitigated by creating redundant resources, such as back-up power, others may require hardening of infrastructure, such as cyber, while still others may require a more robust supply chain and joint planning with host communities for things like daycare, food, and shelter.

A framework is needed to prioritize risks and solutions to as yet unidentified vulnerabilities while balancing competing and often contradictory constraints and mission requirements. This framework needs to enable an end-state that reaches across various sectors such as health, the safety of military members, families, and civilians while providing accountability and trust.

This framework must also recognize that, as shown by recent events, more efficient operation is often more brittle and increases the risk to the mission. The lack of redundant systems and strategic reserves has exposed many pain points down the mission thread, both on-base and for GSD. Additionally, since it is people who are endangered by operating in a persistent pandemic environment, the foundation of any new framework must be an understanding of what people do as well as where and when they do it. Without this, leadership cannot model dependencies and interdependencies, determine weak points in the mission string, and determine ways to reinforce them.

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Many stress points are outside of the gate and in our host communities. As has been learned from recent natural disasters (Tyndall AFB, particularly), the inability of host communities to provide not just power and water but also social, educational, and work-force support to installations can severely impair or even prevent a base from executing its mission.

virtual sand table As data becomes more ubiquitous and available, it impacts the nature and design of the installation ecosystem. However, the impact of real-time access to ubiquitous data and ever-evolving mission has yet to have meaningful implications in designing our bases and facilities for resilience. Data analysis, machine learning, and real-time feedback can radically change the way we think about meeting capability requirements and create facilities that are responsive to both warrior’s day-to-day activities and novel threats.

However, mere access to a greater range of information is not sufficient to enable leaders to make impactful and timely decisions. Visualization and analytical tools are required to allow for the testing of scenarios in real-time. Seeing the impacts that scenarios create across a range of considerations and comparing their pro’s and con’s is critical to making effective, resilient plans. This can, and should, be true for responses to short- and intermediate-term threats, such as COVID19, as well as long-range plans for mission resilience.

While progress has been made in digitally consolidating installation planning, infrastructure, and facility information, neither an understanding of the jobs Marines need to do, nor the ability to visualize and model options is sufficiently developed. Dynamic modeling of scenarios will enable leaders to effectively concentrate limited military resources, both personal and fiscal, to have the greatest impact in supporting the people working to execute the mission.

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The MIT Media Lab, among others, has developed an open-source visualization platform that could serve as the beginning of a virtual Sand Table that would allow us to create, visualize, and test scenarios to see their impacts on a wide range of geophysical, temporal, and personnel systems in real-time. It should be possible to visualize impacts on: • Mission essential functions.

• Geo-spatial and temporal characteristics jobs in support of the mission.

characteristics that support the generation, sustainment, projection, and operation of the jointforce will establish a baseline against which to measure proposed solutions. By applying the principles of warfighter and mission-centric planning to selected pilot installations, a dossier will be developed that identifies the various work and living environments on an installation characterized by the jobs to be done (GSD) that occur within. With this information, solutions can be developed to address the potential impact of a future persistent pandemic.

• Utilities, both availability and peak loading.

This proposed solution would require four stages:

• Traffic, both vehicular and pedestrian.

1. Research across the range of jobs that the Fleet Marine and supporting civilian personnel are required to execute to understand their operational characteristics including, but not limited to:

• Critical operational adjacencies.

• Spatial requirements.

• Access to Quality of Life services such as food, fitness, housing, etc.

This type of tool could be built on top of existing geo-spatial data and proposed digital twins of installations and facilities. Rather than relying on prescriptive rules, scenario-based rules of engagement could be integrated into new systems to provide holistic information before a decision is made.

While much of the data consolidation and technology to pilot an interactive planning tool exists, understanding of the Fleet Marine, their jobs, and their mission-centric capability requirements have yet to be developed. This knowledge would be essential prior to creating the virtual Sand Table, which is needed to make impactful planning decisions.

solution detail This current global condition highlights the necessity for new methods of evaluating and planning our community infrastructure, services, and systems, new techniques that allow for flexible testing and modeling of planning decisions against a set of metrics that benchmark health, welfare, and mission-readiness.

Overlaying the physical, temporal, and organizational characteristics of jobs with other installation Arrowstreet

• Type/description.

• Spatial characteristics.

• Temporal characteristics.

• Key adjacencies.

• Ability to execute individually or in groups.

• Ability to execute remotely or spatial/logistics/ equipment dependencies.

2. Develop a framework into which job types and dependencies (physical, temporal, and logistics) can be placed to describe the Fleet Marine’s capability requirements across all nine vectors (protection, resilience, training and range support, maintenance, mobility, community, operational reach, command, and control).

3. Develop a pilot using one or more installations to test the job descriptions, framework, and existing geophysical information to determine if this provides sufficient data to virtually model and create scenario plans for an installation.

4. Develop a machine-learning-based digital planning tool that will allow leadership to fully understand the implications of decisions on the interconnected physical, temporal, and

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infrastructure systems that make up the foundation of a healthy Fleet Marine ecosystem.

The tool should be hardware agnostic– meaning the ability to answer questions that are the priority, regardless of display technology or programming system. An interdisciplinary team of planners, technologists, mission-essential function SME’s, and installation leaders must be involved to ensure that this becomes a tool that can be used across silos.

Operating in a persistent pandemic environment requires many things, but it ultimately comes down to enabling the Fleet Marine Force and its supporting cohorts to have the necessary capabilities to do their jobs wherever and whenever they may be. We believe that understanding those jobs across a range of physical, temporal, and organizational characteristics and, in particular, their requirement to be executed in groups or alone, is a necessary pre-condition to creating a resilient system. When combined with installation and mission characteristics, these job descriptions can create a model in which it is easier to ensure that Marines have the things they need to resiliently execute their mission in whatever environment we find ourselves in as a country.

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