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FAC Teams

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Thu, 2009-01-08 10:14 — admin
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General

This forum is focused on the development of FAC Teams. A key goal in the complex, stressed environments, explored in the U.S. Resilience Summit 2008, is to achieve “unity of effort” in circumstances where “unity of command” is not feasible or desirable. Traditional, hierarchical approaches to “command and control” will not fully address the complex emerging 21st Century challenges, where disparate organizations, both governmental and non-governmental, bring varied traditions, loyalties and procedures into the health, security, ecosystem, humanitarian, and disaster management environments. Accordingly, the Department of Defense has been experimenting with a new, paradigm-shifting approach termed “Focus, Agility, and Convergence” (FAC). In simulations that were run during the U.S. Resilience Summit 2008, the FAC-enabled health, humanitarian assistance and disaster management teams from all sectors of society in the U.S. and abroad were able to respond in a manner that mitigated -- using soft power approaches – potential violent conflict and catastrophic loss of life. As a result of engaging the U.S.-led Resilience System, a local crisis was prevented from growing to regional levels, and potentially catastrophic large-scale social crises and war were avoided. For an introduction to FAC: See David S. Alberts, “Agility, Focus, and Convergence: The Future of Command and Control” in Vol 1, No. 1 of the Journal of C2. Dr. Alberts’ powerful concept has evolved to be expressed as: “Focus, Agility, and Convergence” (FAC). It is built on ideas that emphasize the use of networks to share information which, in turn, allows participants to develop a shared awareness of the situation (“shared situational awareness”). When coupled with an understanding of the overall objectives (feed the people, rebuild the bridge), this allows the participants to Focus on solving problems collaboratively. The organization must be Agile enough to respond to the rapidly evolving challenges it is likely to face, and there must be mechanisms to Converge the resources needed to solve the problems. For the purposes of this paper, teams that have these characteristics are said to be “FAC-enabled.” Inherently non-hierarchical, and “self-synchronizing,” they can handle complex, adaptive challenges more rapidly and effectively than traditional bureaucratic approaches.

Thu, 2009-01-08 10:20 — admin

Please explore background on the FAC Teams at:

http://dkms.ghinet.info/index.php?q=node/321

Thu, 2009-01-22 06:38 — admin

Introduced by: Brooks King

U.S. Resilience Network
Rapid Response Team
Database Questionnaire
Version 0.2
1.21.2009

Presented by:
The U.S. Resilience Network Team

1/21/2009 FAC Rapid Response Team Questionnaire
Page 2
Rapid Response Team Profiling Questionnaire
Contact Information
[First Name]
[Last Name]
[Title]
[Organization]
[Address]

[City, State, Country, Zip]
[Phone]
[Email]
[Fax]
[Skype]
[VSee]
[Twitter]

Team Name
[List your team’s name.]

Team Size
[List your team’s size.]

Brief Description
[Provide a brief description of your team.]

Web Site URL
[List your web site URL]

1/21/2009 FAC Rapid Response Team Questionnaire
Page 3

Organizational Affiliation
[List your teams organizational affiliation, such as: Federal; State; Military; NGO; Volunteer;
Commercial; Community Based; Faith Based; Medical; Other.]

Purpose
[List your team’s primary purpose, such as: Assessment; Infrastructure Augmentation; Search and
Rescue; Medical Triage; Disease Control; Communications, etc.]

Accreditation
[List your team’s accreditations.]

Deployment History
[In the following table, or as an attachment, list your team’s recent deployment history.]

Deployment Team Size Date Role

1/21/2009 FAC Rapid Response Team Questionnaire
Page 4

Capabilities
[Please indicated your teams capabilities, such as Shelter; Communications; Security;
Food/Water; Fire Fighting; Assessment; Power; Medical; Water Purification; DMORT; Search and
Rescue; Veterinary; Transport, etc.]

Dependencies and Constraints
[List any critical deployment dependencies (such as Power; Communications; Transport; Shelter;
Legal, etc.]

Team Status
[List your team’s current status, such as Available; On Standby; Deployed; etc.]

Thu, 2009-01-22 06:44 — admin

Brooks,

Thank you for the good work you are doing on the US National Sustainable Security Infrastructure FAC Team Survey Form. I will put it up in the U.S. Resilience System and in the U.S. Resilience Summit Report Appendix for discussion.

The most important pieces that seem to be missing to me are the Hastily Formed Networks elements and the Focus, Agility, Convergence elements. Could you work on a question/section with Brian Steckler that allows the applying team contact to check off communication and computing capabilities, equipment and system attributes that would demonstrate their machine attributes of HFN and FAC enablement?

Since these questions require a greater level of technical knowledge, perhaps they should go into a Section B, which could be filled in during a following up, so as to not discourage potential FAC-capable teams from making known their presence and domain expertise.

It might start with the following:

"Please check off and note the quantity of the following Hastily Formed Networks / computing and communication system attributes that your team is prepared to bring into the field in Fly-Away Kits or through other means.

_x_ _2__ computers please describe type ____________

_x_ _4__ cell phones please describe type ____________ please note geographic connectivity addressed _____________

__ ___ mesh network unit please describe type ____________

_x_ _2__ satellite phones please describe type ____________

_x_ _1__ Vsat/BGN please describe type ____________ please note geographic connectivity addressed _____________

_x_ _5__ SDC kit* please describe type ____________

_x_ _2__ remote power unit please describe type _____1 Honda 1000 generator, 1set of 200 Watt flexible solar panels_______
*Surveillance Data Collection Kit

_x_ _10__ two-way radios please describe type _____10 24 mile radius radios_______ frequencies ___unknown____

I will work with Alenka Brown and Dave Alberts to lay out questions oriented toward rating the level of FAC-enablement and human interoperability.

The follow issues would be queried:

____ ICS Training and Certification

____ National Framework Training and Certification

____ FAC Team Training and Level of Certification

____ Human Interoperability Training

____ National Sustainable Security Infrastructure Simulations Completed

Please note specific simulations your team participated in: ________________________________________

Please note FAC Team performance rating: __________________________________

Please note Human Interoperability rating ____________________________________

A third question for Section B mind query the FAC Team contact about the contents of their domain-specific Fly-Away Kits. This section probably has to start as free text with some kind of semantic web or folksonomy engine underlying it, because the domain-specific equipment would be so varied between domains (e.g., biosecurity, agronomy, ballistics, forensics, chem, rad/nuc,) However, as this is questionnaire is put in a form online, it will be useful to enable domain-specific check boxes to be pop up in a branched inquiry. This would probably be a phase 3 activity, when there is sufficient resources to implement it appropriately.

Is this what you had in mind?

I have put this material up in FAC Team working group within the U.S. Resilience System at: http://resiliencesystem.net/?q=node/92

Please feel free to comment on this email, but preferably we should be commenting in the FAC Team working group forums.

Mike

On Jan 21, 2009, at 9:47 PM, Brooks King wrote:

howdy folks