Multinational Information Sharing and Collaborative Planning Limited Objective Experiments

This paper presents a plan for conducting a series of Multinational Information Sharing and Collaboration Limited Objective Experiments (LOEs). The experimental goal is to better understand how multinational partners should share information and do collaborative planning and execution in the future. The Multinational LOEs are also intended to aid in defining multinational participation in Olympic Challenge 2004 (OC04), a major U.S. experiment that will examine Rapid Decisive Operations (RDO) in the 2010-2020 timeframe. The first Multinational LOE scheduled for November 2001 focuses on collaborative planning with Multinational partners who are planning RDO when the planning time is short. The experiment compares the plan developed using a sequential process with a plan using an interactive planning process. The sequential planning process is adapted from the Multinational Interoperability Council (MIC) Lead Nation Concept, and the interactive planning process is based on the Joint Interactive Planning (JIP) Concept. JIP supports RDO Operational Net Assessment (ONA), the continuous analysis of adversary capabilities focused on a limited number of likely courses of action. LOEs are designed to be both discovery events and structured experiments. Since LOEs are pilot efforts for the larger more complex events that follow, there is an element of discovery that is extremely useful. It is far better to discover flaws in a small venue when corrections are easier rather than a large public event where correction is difficult. The Multinational LOEs are also structured to examine assertions made by The JIP Concept. Measures and associated data collection quantify the degree to which information sharing and collaboration take place under different conditions. Multinational participants connect through either the Combined Federated Battle Lab Network or the World Wide Web for LOE participation. A scenario and associated information are distributed to the participants prior to the experiment start. Each participating nation forms small planning staffs. The staffs develop plans that respond to tasking presented during a number of vignettes. Each participating nation has the opportunity to be the lead nation and prepare an operational course of action that responds to a vignette tasking. The other national planning cells review and comment on the lead nation plan and the plan is modified as necessary. For comparison, planning cells also develop courses of action using collaborative tools that facilitate interactive planning.