Ideas as weapons, and the jellyfish enterprise

In his keynote address at MILCOM today, Admiral James Stavridis, commander of the U.S. Southern Command, shared his vision for how his regional command should operate. And his model is the jellyfish.

In the jellyfish, he said, "every cell is a sensor." It's the ultimate model for a flattened, information-centric organization. And he wants his command to be more like a jellyfish — or, in technology terms, more like a wiki.

"We need a culture that embraces strategy and communications," Stavridis said. "We have to be like a wiki, a learning organism, and grow through the wiki process. No one of us is as smart as all of us thinking together."

SOUTHCOM faces a set of challenges that on the surface is different from those facing other regional commands: narcoterrorism, coping with mass migrations, and providing disaster relief and humanitarian aid. But swap cocaine for poppies in Afghanistan, or human trafficking in Africa, and the issues facing SOUTHCOM look a lot more like those facing CENTCOM and the new AFRICOM: the need to provide stabilization, nation-building support and humanitarian aid, and to counter threats to countries in the region from a shadowy enemy that leverages information and innovates quickly.

Those challenges aren't the kinds of things that can be solved by placing a weapon on target — SOUTHCOM is in the business of "launching ideas, not Tomahawks," Stavridis said. And to hit the mark with those ideas, he said, he needs a communications approach that spans organizations — allowing the sharing of information with non-governmental organizations, other governmental agencies and foreign partners.

Stavridis thinks social networking software might hold part of the answer to the need for rapid, shared communication and strategy across his command and its partners. But he made it clear that he wasn't looking for Facebook. He challenged the industry representatives in the audience to help find a way to bring coherence to social networking, and make it work in a way that kept the ultimate purpose in mind: "This is military communication. We must not lose sight of the fact that the military exists to conduct prompt and sustained combat operations," he said. "We need to fail-safe it."

Posted by Sean Gallagher on Nov 17, 2008 at 8:12 AM