Designing Resilience: Preparing for Extreme Events

4. Lessons from the Military Surprise, Resilience, and the Atrium Model

62 4 Lessons from the Military Surprise, Resilience, and the Atrium Model Chris C. Demchak Military strategists are sometimes accused of planning and spending for the worst case and least likely scenarios. Given the difficulty of accurate forecasting and the gravity of failure in war, it would be negligent to do otherwise. Captain George Kastens, Building a Beehive: Observations on the Transition to Network Centric Operations Nations run as effectively as their underlying critical systems. Deleterious surprises can trigger breakdowns as unexpectedly linked events cascade into catastrophes. The continuous operation of these critical infrastructures in the face of surprise and disruption depends on collective knowledge systems and the willingness to act in concert. Critical infrastructures are best defined in terms of complex sociotechnical systems. Their complexity imposes an inherent “knowledge burden” on the operators of critical infrastructures. It is hard to provide knowledge in the form and frequency operators need to employ a single complex system or an array of such systems. This chapter investigates lessons in how to collectively and organizationally assure the resilience of critical infrastructures. It does so by closely investigating the experiences of a particularly prominent, large, and complex modern institution designed to take on catastrophic surprises and yet be resilient—the military. Centuries of military history provide a plethora of trial-and-error lessons. Military failures underscore the difficulties in developing a capacity for collective action in the face of surprise. Often enough, Lessons from the Military 63 otherwise routinely functional organizational designs miss critical but obtainable knowledge in spectacularly consequential ways. Military history is a history of repeated experiences, providing a large set of natural experiments in how an organization may or may not successfully demonstrate the capacity for collective action in the face of unexpected extreme events. More focused than any civilian government on successfully neutralizing surprise from a deliberate or nature-based enemy, modern militaries emphasize knowledge acquisition and an internally socialized, resilient form of collective action. And yet these organizations have still been surprised in foreseeable circumstances. Their actions intended to solve problems in advance and to improvise under urgent conditions have often enough resulted in local and widening crises with unexpected rippling effects. The discussion will include a brief review of such knowledge-based failures , which will result in an institutional design proposal for a seamless sociotechnical system of knowledge. Called the “Extreme Event (EE) Atrium,” the model draws on the axioms of several literatures, including the largescale technical systems field, the emerging collaboration studies field, organization theory, information systems and applications, and complexity. Designed to facilitate resilience in a networked age, this organizational structure directly sustains the necessary mechanisms within and across organizations that have to work together when their members are surprised, scared, and endangered. The Military Experience Knowledge is critical to effectively respond to surprise. It is, however, not easy or necessarily inexpensive to obtain knowledge in complex systems. Public and quasi-public organizations vary greatly in their sense of urgency about the collective need to understand the surprises possible in these systems and then to act on that knowledge in concert. It is generally exceptionally difficult to get relatively sovereign agencies to reciprocally reach out beyond their borders to share knowledge. Militaries offer a rich history of organizations and leaders both fearing surprise and taking steps in advance to nullify its effects. In recent decades, modern armies and navies have altered their organizational structure, socialization , knowledge focus, information content, training, technology, and employment practices to prepare for—and respond to—rippling surprises while operating. The military’s term equivalent to resilience is continuity of operations. Its lessons have been largely ignored outside of military history communities. 64 Chris C. Demchak Crisis Management in the Modern Military Operation Dealing with catastrophic surprise across different organizations and critical infrastructure protection is inherent in the modern military operation. Leaders of large-scale militaries have always struggled with coordinating vast numbers of differentially talented and trained people with a variety of mostly operational equipment. For modern military leaders and force planners , protecting critical systems in operations is intrinsic to their job. Critical systems cannot be rapidly or easily replaced if suddenly disrupted . A sudden disruption can cause immediate or escalating, unavoidable , and nontrivial harm; it can ripple through connected systems with escalating, deleterious effects. The classic military critical path element is ammunition in battle, or water in the desert, or fuel in a major advance. Logistical breakdowns have...