PMWT Case Studies and Project Briefs - August 2006
Building an Army - Program Management in Afganistan
by Lt. Col. Brian C. Ruhm, Maj. Adrian Marsh, and Lt. Col. William T. Cooley
Abstract
Since the fall of the Taliban in Dec 2001, the US Government has been rebuilding Afghanistan’s infrastructure, institutions, government, and Army. The particular challenges associated with acquiring a modern army for the Government of Afghanistan (GOA) requires a diverse skill set including acquisition program managers. Procuring a large system of systems; the need to articulate and track risk, cost, schedule, and performance; and the skills required to navigate the trade space within these factors, are the skill set of effective program managers. The utility and need for program managers and the experience at the Office of Security Cooperation – Afghanistan (OSC-A) provide a useful case study for the program manager’s role in nation building and point to several tools and personnel manning changes for the service leaders to consider.
Introduction
Major security assistance programs are underway in Iraq and Afghanistan. More than just supplying weapons and supplies, the US and its coalition partners are building a security infrastructure that includes operational forces, sustaining institutions, and the general staff and ministry that directs those forces and institutions. OSC-A is currently reforming and building both the Afghan National Army (ANA) and Afghan National Police (ANP). Success in these endeavors is critical to long-term US security, but the organizations dedicated to this task have overlooked and under used a potentially important component of their staffs: trained acquisition program managers. These staffs are flush with operational expertise, but are typically short of personnel familiar with designing and developing complex systems. Building complex security forces uses many of the same processes found in complex weapon system development. Security systems are comprised of numerous interrelated subsystems – personnel, logistics, medical, communications, etc. – that must be integrated. It is also similar in that certain activities must precede others and the phasing of developmental activities must be carefully mapped out in order to produce the right effects at the right time. Decision makers need to understand their desired end state, and the sequence and integration of events that will get them there, within budget and on schedule. This is familiar terrain for program managers and they should be included as an integral part of the security assistance staff in places like Afghanistan.
Importance of a Baseline
The accepted standard for managing large acquisition programs includes a documented baseline. The Acquisition Program Baseline (APB) is the contract between the customer and provider regarding cost, schedule, and performance. Experience at OSC-A indicate that a documented baseline is not only useful in decision-making as excursions are considered, but arguably essential for communicating with external and internal audiences.
Large-scale security assistance programs are subject to constant and justifiable scrutiny and oversight from DoD security assistance program organizations, services, OSD, OMB, and interagency stakeholders. Communicating clearly with these external audiences is a constant challenge for organizations like OSC-A not only due to the time zone difference, but also because the operational environment and personnel turnover. The added challenge of changing priorities and adjusting to an ever evolving security situation further frustrate both oversight and execution officials. A well documented APB improves communications between these groups by providing a means to depict not only the desired end state, but the strategy to get there. Once an APB is in place, it also provides internal planners and external audiences with a consistent and agreed to frame of reference to consider implications of changes to budget or schedule.
Congress is a special case of the external audience and merits special attention. Along with all federal funding, security assistance funds are appropriated by Congress and the importance to clearly communicate the funding requirements within the context of the nation-building effort, cannot be understated. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) provides independent oversight for Congress as they did in their recent report on Afghanistan. A key finding and recommendation of the GAO was to “develop detailed plans for completing and sustaining the Afghan army and police forces, including clearly defined objectives and performance measures; milestones; funding requirements; and a strategy for sustaining the results achieved” (4). Although a baseline did not exist when the GAO performed their audit, one was established that documents the elements cited by the GAO and is incorporated into joint planning groups as we explore options to adjust to the changing situation. The baseline is a vital tool to explain, justify, and defend the requirements and rationale for funding requests, and ensure Congress maintains sufficient insight and oversight.
An additional use for the well-documented baseline is continuity—a valued commodity in a high personnel turn-over rate environment. In a deployed environment where nearly all assignments are 4-12 months, minimizing the time spent learning a new job is vital. The APB provides a roadmap that incumbents, at almost any level, can use with their successors to say "you are here, and this is the path to where we are going and here are the reasons why." A clear, easily understood baseline aids the process significantly.
Finally, a baseline aids decision making by providing a documented, known, and understood starting point and context for analysis. Good decision making in the military is very often a result of using the rigorous and oft employed Military Decision Making Process (MDMP); such was the case at OSC-A. The MDMP requires clear facts and assumptions. A baseline provides easy access to facts and assumptions, and more importantly provides the context for intelligent evaluation of alternatives during Course of Action development and selection.
Afghanistan Security: Efforts to Establish Army and Police Have Made Progress, but Future Plans Need to be Getter Defined; Government Accountability Office (GAO) Report to the Committee on International Relations, House of Representatives, June 2005, GAO-05-575
A baseline provides
easy access to facts and assumptions, and more importantly provides the context for intelligent evaluation of alternatives during Course of Action development and selection.
Tools of the Trade
In addition to the program baseline, Acquisition PMs bring a wide array of tools and processes to the security reconstruction environment. The rigor and structure PM’s are accustomed to imposing on a project make them especially valuable members of the security assistance team.
Program schedules are the most basic tools that PMs bring to the security assistance arena. When dealing with complex systems with numerous linked and interdependent subsystems a schedule is a useful and arguably critical management device. Security assistance and nation building programs are usually organized according to functional specialties. OSC-A has US teams dedicated to developing ANA personnel, intelligence, operations, logistics, acquisition, medical, communications, education and training, and other functional subsystems that together comprise the Afghan National Army (ANA). Until recently, however, OSC-A leadership had only limited insight to the details of each and to the linkages among each of these “stovepipe” activities and the critical interdependencies.
Program managers introduced scheduling tools – in this case Microsoft Project –to develop a five-year schedule, organized by functional area, explicitly depicting linkages between activities that crossed functional boundaries. The schedule highlighted instances where linked activities fell along the critical path or where margin existed. Senior decision makers were provided a means to make better resource allocation decisions because they not only understood the interdependencies, they could see whether they were directing resources towards activities that fell along a critical path.
Many of the functional area specialists and operational personnel on the OSC-A staff were reluctant to use a "Gant Chart" approach to security assistance program planning. In contrast, the few PMs on the OSC-A staff understood the benefits that would be realized from taking the time to building a comprehensive, long-term schedule. More importantly, because the PMs were accustomed to using tools like Microsoft Project on a routine basis in their regular assignment, they were able to work with the functional area specialists to capture their understanding of sequenced activities, duration, and interrelationship to assemble the collection of schedules into a cohesive, program baseline.
In addition, trade study and cost-benefit methods also translate well to the security assistance arena. Acquisition program managers spend much of their time making decisions regarding trades between system cost, schedule, and performance. Security assistance program managers operate in a similar environment. Given a fixed budget, decision makers in regions like Afghanistan have to choose between growing forces as quickly as possible and sacrificing quality, or slowing down the rate of growth to improve training, equipment levels, and sustainment capability.
Security assistance program managers also need to make internal, subsystem trades. OSC-A committed substantial resources to build a robust ANA medical system and train ANA medical personnel (one of only three currently recognized ANA Military Occupational Specialties, the others being "soldier" and "cook"). Investments in the medical sector came at the expense of funds for ANA operations, combat equipment, and soldier training. This investment decision reflected classic trade study methodology.
OSC-A determined that the marginal utility, in terms of operational capability, derived from the last dollars spent on medical capabilities outweighed the marginal benefits derived from additional funds for equipment, operations, or training in other sectors. PMs are accustomed to addressing these "last dollar spent" questions in order to derive maximum performance and capability from a fixed program budget.
The OSC-A experience highlights another useful tool that PMs bring to bear on security assistance programs--capability milestones and spiral development strategies. A common challenge for PMs is assessing where to direct additional resources or reduce resources if required. In a multifaceted system like the one under consideration, deciding how to pace investment in the subsystems is non-trivial. Understanding and linking capabilities with investments provide a means to make resource decisions. We've already discussed how a comprehensive security assistance program schedule can help with identifying critical paths via the subtle and not-so-subtle links between elements.
Capability milestones, introduced at OSC-A in July 2005, aid PMs further by expressing, from a holistic perspective, the incremental improvements in capability that activities and expenditures will provide at specific points in time. Capability milestones allow the PM to express the overall capability improvement and value-added from each of the individual activities within a system. Capability milestones also enable senior decision makers to quickly gauge whether their overall resource allocation strategies are appropriate and whether subsystems associated with a large scale, security assistance program will be capable of supporting one another. To draw an analogy to Air Force weapons system, it makes little sense to invest heavily in precision targeting capabilities without a synchronized delivery system to get the weapon to the desired target. Likewise, it makes little sense for a security assistance program to deliver, say, an advanced communications capability well before the education and training systems are in a position to produce qualified operators. Capability milestones improve alignment between the disparate subsystems that make up a large-scale security assistance program.
Not Just Another Acquisition Program
Security Assistance programs benefit from the application of acquisition management tools and techniques, but they also differ from traditional, technology-centric acquisition programs in important ways. Seasoned PMs who anticipate an environment and processes similar to those associated with a typical System Program Office are in for a rude awakening.
The security environment drives the most important difference between traditional acquisition programs and today's large-scale security assistance programs. In Afghanistan, the US and its coalition partners needed to develop and deploy indigenous security system as rapidly as possible to confront existing threats. As a result, less time was available for the extended concept development process that typically takes place in the early phases of an acquisition program. Similarly, there was no time for subsequent design, development, and deployment phases and their associated reviews and milestones. Security assistance in environments like Afghanistan require that combat capabilities and their sustaining institutions be in place even as their underlying structures, support, and policies evolve. Basic operational, personnel, logistics, intelligence, communications, medical, and other systems are typically fielded in rough form as quickly as possible, and then evolve and grow into more mature and capable systems.
Huge complications arise from the parallelism inherent in this approach, but the simultaneous design, development, deployment, and testing of systems is not entirely without precedent in the defense acquisition arena. In many respects, building and fielding a national security apparatus in Afghanistan resembles an Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration (ACTD) program. Like an ACTD, the basic design and organization of the Afghan security system is based on a "mature technology" and a prototype design -- typically an amalgamation of indigenous and US organizational schemes, processes, and systems. Successful implementation of this design requires that decision makers and program managers adapt an unusual design philosophy. Rather than focusing on fielding a complete, coherent design, they need to prioritize their requirements and ensure that operational forces and sustaining institutions – the subsystems of a national security system – develop in phase with one another. In the Afghanistan case, priority was initially given to fielding ANA troops to provide a visible presence and security prior to the Presidential election in October 2004 and the parliamentary elections in September 2005. This operational imperative desynchronized the fielded forces with sustaining institutions--logistics, medical, personnel, and training in particular—needed to maintain readiness. OSC-A was able to overcome the lag in sustaining institution capability through a bridging strategy that saw them apply coalition forces, embedded trainers, and contract services to address ANA sustainment shortfalls. Once past the presidential and parliamentary elections, however, OSC-A instituted a slowdown in ANA combat battalion production to bring the operational and sustaining capabilities back in line, reducing the reliance on US and coalition support and reducing costly bridging capabilities.
Another factor that distinguishes large security assistance programs from traditional defense acquisition programs is the influence of social and cultural traditions. Most experienced program managers have worked within different acquisition organizations or have moved from a single service to a joint environment, and have grown accustomed to adapting to different institutional cultures. There are at least two reasons why cultural and social traditions play a much more prominent role in the Afghan security assistance program. First, there are fundamental differences between western and non-western patterns of leadership and behavior. In a society where there is greater deference and respects toward elders, subordinates are reluctant to initiate activities without explicit guidance. Islamic tradition also frowns upon public confrontations where one side may lose face, and so problem resolution is obscured rather than being dealt with. Tribal loyalties also create parallel decision-making systems that impede formal staffing processes. Second, and more importantly, people are the core of an army, an entirely different experience from designing and developing a weapon system. Social and cultural traditions need to be considered in the design of the national security system in the same way that mechanical, aerodynamic, or electrical properties are considered in the design of a weapon system. Decision makers are often faced with a difficult decision: adapt the system to the ingrained culture, or try to shape and influence attitudes through training and mentoring? PMs rarely confront these considerations in a traditional acquisition environment.
Recommendations
Iraq and Afghanistan arguably represent the most ambitions nation building effort since the end of WWII. Capturing and sharing the lessons and insights from the current nation building efforts enable leaders to more effectively manage these expensive and difficult tasks. The OSC-A experience rebuilding Afghanistan and the Afghan National Army highlights the applicability of program management techniques to large scale security assistance programs. A detailed program baseline enabled OSC-A to more effectively communicate its vision and plan with external stakeholders and provided a common roadmap that eased internal staff transitions. Program managers brought tools that allowed OSC-A to express and evaluate the baseline. The program schedule expressed critical subsystem interdependencies; trade-study methodologies consider the most effective use of the last dollar spent, and capability milestones enabled decision makers to make informed resource decisions and maintain synchronization between related subsystems.
To realize the benefits program management techniques bring to a security assistance organization, trained program management personnel must be fully integrated into the teams responsible for developing subsystems that comprise the national security structure. As part of the teams responsible for developing personnel, logistics, or medical subsystems; program managers serve as force multipliers helping to capture and express the expertise that operational and technical personnel bring. Including PMs on security assistance teams, and ensuring they are properly dispersed throughout the organization will pay dividends in the form of better decisions, improved accountability and communication, and earlier host nation capability at less cost.
Reprinted with gratitude and by permission from an article in: Defense AT&L: July-August 2006
About the Authors:
Major Marsh's holds a B.S. in Environmental Engineering from the United States Military Academy, a M.S. in Environmental Engineering from the University of Missouri, Rolla and a M.S. in Systems Engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park. He is currently serving as the Army Knowledge Online - Forward project officer.
Lieutenant Colonel William Cooley Prior to spending most of 2005 in Kabul Afghanistan, Lt. Col. Bill Cooley’s 15-years in the Air Force included laboratory research of semiconductor materials, laser and space power technologies; a tour in Germany at the Warrior Preparation Center near Ramstein AB; and most recently a Pentagon tour acquiring military satellite communication systems. Mr. Cooley completed a Doctorate in Engineering Physics from the Air Force Institute of technology in 1997 and will begin attending National War College at Fort McNair, Washington DC in August 2006.
Lt. Col. Brian C. Ruhm, (No picture available) United States Air Force, was deployed to Kabul as a member of the former Combined Forces Command Office of Security Cooperation from June to November 2005. He is currently the program manager of the Air Force Distributed Common Ground System Increment 10.2 Program at the Air Force Electronic Systems Center, Hanscom Air Force Base, Massachusetts, USA.""Lt. Col. Brian C. Ruhm, United States Air Force, was deployed to Kabul as a member of the former Combined Forces Command Office of Security Cooperation from June to November 2005. He is currently the program manager of the Air Force Distributed Common Ground System Increment 10.2 Program at the Air Force Electronic Systems Center, Hanscom Air Force Base, Massachusetts, USA."
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