Assume that an organization actually sets a signpost and discovers that a load- bearing assumption is somehow failing and has the warning time to act.
Although the knowledge might be interesting as a harbinger of turbulence ahead, it is useless unless the organization can react.
The media arts provide a perfect example of the need for agility. Accord- ing to RAND, the media arts are dramatically different from the traditional performing, visual, and literary arts. Not only do they lack the long history of other arts forms, they place a premium on innovation and experimentation
and depend to a much greater extent on emerging technology. Produced by using or combining video, film, and computers, the media arts depend on agility for success, especially given the fickle audience for their products.
The problem is that the arts world is particularly unsteady today. Fund- ing is unpredictable, audiences inconsistent, and tastes ever changing. “In com- bination, these developments are reshaping the organizational ecology of the arts world and blurring the traditional distinctions among sectors, disciplines, and media,” RAND reports. “Instead of a sharp demarcation between a non- profit sector’s producing the high arts and a for-profit sector’s producing mass entertainment, the arts world appears to be increasingly divided along the lines of small versus large organizations and those that cater to broad markets ver- sus niche markets.” Survival appears to rest on organizational agility—the abil- ity to adapt quickly to funding opportunities and exploit audience share.
Some of RAND’s most notable work on agility has focused on the Air Force, which is under enormous pressure to go anywhere, anytime to meet new threats. Gone are the days when the Air Force could count on pre- dictable deployments and long periods of rest. It spent the 1990s mounting quick strikes against foreign targets, leading the bombing campaign over Kosovo, policing the no-fly zones over Iraq, and flying more than 500 humanitarian missions to Eastern and Central Europe alone. “The constant drumbeat of these contingencies during the 1990s has taken a toll on the Air Force,” RAND writes, “and shows no indications of slackening.”
Expecting more of the same far into an uncertain future, the Air Force decided to reorganize itself into an anywhere-anytime Expeditionary Aerospace Force composed of roughly 10 Air Expeditionary Forces, each with a mix of fighters, bombers, and tankers, two of which will always be on-call for crises and able to move into battle within 48 hours.
The only problem is that going anywhere in 48 hours takes a very dif- ferent kind of organization. Aircraft can get off the ground in an instant, but their bases and housing cannot. Having been designed for a world with just two theaters—Western Europe and Northeast Asia—the Air Force is increasingly operating in areas where it has no main operating bases, and few, if any, temporary sites. In both a literal and figurative sense, the Air Force must have the organizational scaffolding to achieve its goal, which means more than just a large number of heavy cargo plans. “It takes forever to get one of these planes open because the stuff is so heavy coming in,”
said Robert Roll, a RAND specialist on the agile Air Force.
According to a series of RAND reports, that scaffolding requires a new way of organizing called agile combat support. At a minimum, such a system requires the Air Force to create a global infrastructure capable of moving a
selected set of support resources such as heavy maintenance equipment, spare parts, shelter, and munitions into place quickly. Although new aircraft such as the Joint Strike Fighter may reduce the need for bulky support equip- ment, the Air Force will still need to build new bases and provide shelter. As a recent report argues, “the Air Force goal of deploying a nominal expedi- tionary package (a 36-ship mixed fighter squadron of air defense suppres- sion, air superiority, and ground-attack aircraft) within 48 hours to an unprepared bare base cannot be met with today’s support processes. That timeline can be met only with judicious prepositioning, and even then only under optimistic assumptions.” This study does not question the need for agility, however. The changing Air Force mission demands nothing less. The only question is how to get there.
Drawing upon examples from the business world, one recent RAND report even recommends a virtual command structure modeled on the Rolling Stones’ 1994-1995 Voodoo Loungeconcert tour, which traveled to 26 countries, played a record-breaking 130 dates (including five secret club concerts), played before 6.6 million people, and made $320 million, which is still the record today. The tour was just as complex as many Air Force missions, although hardly as dangerous.
The tour employed 250 workers, required 56 trucks and 9 custom- fitted buses to move from city to city, two 747s and a Russian cargo plane to move from continent to continent, and consumed nearly 4 million watts of electricity per concert delivered by 6000 horsepower generators.7The 200 x 85 x 92-foot stage took four days to construct, required three dif- ferent steel crews leapfrogging from site to site, 8 miles of power cable, the world’s largest Jumbotron video screen, 45 tons of water ballast (roughly the size of an Olympic-sized swimming pool), 1500 lights, and a cus- tomized 1.5 million-watt sound system. The stage was so tall that it actu- ally required aircraft warning lights under Federal Aviation Administration regulations. “This is like moving an army around the country,” one of the production directors said at the time. “At times, it feels as though it would be easier to organize the D-Day Landings.”8
The Air Force faces the same logistical pressures. According to RAND’s report on the virtual air staff, the Air Force “is always ‘on the road’
and must employ the same miniaturized information connectivity and pro- cessing power to allow a staff to coordinate a plethora of issues that include planning (adapting to changing opportunities), logistics (juggling resources), personnel (employee relations), and intelligence (market research).” It also must accept new “bookings” on short notice, and oper- ate from any quarters, no matter how tight or distant.
The Air Force has a long way to go before looking much like Voodoo Lounge, however. It has to shake off the organizational inflexibility associ- ated with the Cold War, the problems in retaining pilots on extended tours of duty, and the natural wear-and-tear on its aircraft.
The Air Force is not the only R AND client looking for agilit y, however. The Army wants it, too, whether for reducing the vulnerabil- it y of lightly armored forces or reducing the cycle time in delivering spare parts.
Given its rapidly expanding inventory of missions, the Army has been looking for ways of moving light forces into battle quickly, while strengthening them against a range of both heavier and more widely dis- persed adversaries. Although the Army is still quite capable of fighting major wars against massed enemies, the question is how well it can do in limited engagements such as the 1992 peace-keeping mission to Somalia, where the lightly armored 10thMountain Division was asked to patrol a densely populated city with the equipment and training for rapid assault across open territory. The results were disastrous, as Black Hawk Down documents.9
Several recent R AND studies recommend an entirely different approach built around a task organizing ortailoringstrategy in which units are mixed and matched for specific missions, and moved into place as fast as possible. “First, the Army needs to be able to assemble the right forces quickly, especially when drawing from a combination of units,” one report urges. “Second, it must facilitate their rapid movement to the combat theater.” Not only would this mean greater decentralization of tradition- ally centralized organizations, it would also require a new command struc- ture that links the dispersed units together into a virtual force.
The Army must also get faster at supplying units in distant locales. If the Army wants to move “as far as it can get,” as Velocity Management expert Marc Robbins notes, it must move spare parts as far as it can get, too.
According to Robbins and his colleagues, the Army has already made great progress in doing so, largely by abandoning its old image of supply chain management:
We had huge, elaborate modeling for warfare in which you deploy 10 divisions at extremely high operational tempo and mobilize the entire industrial base. That didn’t seem to be terri- bly relevant anymore. The kinds of problems we saw our clients dealing with were more mundane. How do we fight this small war here? How do we deploy here? How do we give them the
supplies they need when they can’t take it all with them? It all sounded more and more like what manufacturing firms have to deal with. We decided that the only way we could really help them was to actually look at what they did and help them try to fix it.
Working with others in the Army-funded Arroyo Center, Robbins and his colleagues eventually developed a Velocity Management system based entirely on the notion that supplies had to move quickly into battle.
Before the Army began rebuilding its distribution system, it could take 50 days for material to simply get out of the United States, which produced constant hoarding and over-ordering.
Ten years later, the logistics process had been turned inside out. Just- in-time delivery came just in time for the war in Afghanistan. Since com- mercial carriers such as FedEx and Worldwide Express do not have regular routes to Karshi Khanabad, Uzbekistan, where U.S. troops were stationed, the Army had to invent an entirely new and agile system. According to RAND, end-to-end shipping times averaged just 16 days during the war, even though the tonnage of material increased dramatically.
Over time, the Army is raising the bar on agility. As the Velocity Management team’s leader John Dumond explains, “A whole bunch of peo- ple in the Army were just used to 25- or 40-day order and ship times. Now they’re used to seven-day order and ship times. We have a generation of new soldiers who weren’t in the Army when you had those long delivery times, so they have come to expect seven days. That’s kind of a nice thing.
If it’s not there in 10 days, they think it’s bad.”
Agility is also essential to effective teams. According to Leland Joe’s study of high-performing combat units, teams must be able to respond to changing conditions, new threats, and the “fog” of battle. Joe’s research focused in part on the 3rdArmy in World War II “because it was prepared to make an attack into Germany, but were able to adapt and change their mission very quickly when the Germans attacked into the bulge,” and the 1stin the 1991 Gulf War “because they performed a breaching operation of Iraqi defenses, then were later called to participate in the left hook envel- opment of Iraqi forces,” which meant that they “had the ability to do mul- tiple missions effectively and react in a very short period of time, even though they had not planned to do them all.”
Joe found three characteristics of high-performing units. First, com- manders worked hard to cut through the fog of war, which Joe described as
“getting less dense, but will always be a challenge.” “We found that com- manders had trained all their personnel to be able to report back informa-
tion by going outside channels. In some sense, all the people knew that they had the ability to reach back and tell the commander directly what they felt was relevant information.”
Second, every high-performing unit had “work-arounds” of some kind. “Every staff has strengths and weaknesses,” says Joe. “I think the important thing was that high-performers were able to take advantage of the strengths and sort of avoid the weaknesses. It was very important in military organizations, because people do get killed or wounded.”
Third, high-performing units were aligned around a common pur- pose: “The biggest, greatest characteristic was the common approach to the problem that the units took—the commanders had trained their units to react the same to various situations prior to the exercise. A lot of the focus was on how you move information around and share information to help foster that common perspective.”