Computerizing Civil Affairs
Information Technology Helps the People Work of Special Ops.
by Peter A. Buxbaum
From the Philippines to Bangladesh, from Colombia to Southwest Asia, teams of the 95th are assisting civilian populations in battle zones, providing humanitarian relief in disaster areas, developing civil infrastructures and offering assistance to governments and militaries in their relationships with local populations.
The operations are ongoing, complex projects, and rarely represent isolated tasks. Aspects of the programs proceed over periods of time and are performed in coordination with, and handed back and forth to, other civil affairs teams and military units as well as U.S. civilian agencies, coalition partners, international organizations and non-governmental organizations.
The work of the 95th Civil Affairs Brigade is largely people work, but the unit has found it useful and necessary to use information technology to document, analyze, search and map information related to its projects. In fact, it could use even more, according to Colonel Ferdinand Irizarry, the commander of the brigade, which is headquartered in Fort Bragg, N.C.
“It is a mistake to look at our development activities as discreet events,” said Irizarry. “We are very sensitive to the developmental impacts of our operations. We want to make sure that our operations fit into a broader sustainable development approach and don’t come across as being cynical.”
For example, the 95th might help drill a well to provide fresh water for a local population. “But if that well is diesel powered and the locals don’t have the ability to repair it or to get the fuel to run it, it’s going to end up being a giant eyesore,” he explained.
Civil affairs capabilities are located throughout the U.S. military and are mostly tasked with providing immediate civil affairs support to conventional forces. The 95th, by contrast, is the only unit within the U.S. military which is dedicated to civil affairs. All of its personnel are officers or non-commissioned officers who volunteer for the duty and are airborne qualified. Some of the personnel in the 95th specialize in specific regional languages and cultures and are deployed to the areas of the world, such as Asia, Africa or Europe, in which they specialize. When President Bush increased the number of brigades deployed to Iraq last year, the 95th was tasked with the job of training additional civil affairs personnel to be attached to those units.
“We engage the civilian components of the battlespace,” said Irizarry. “Our skills are predominantly non-lethal and we are oriented toward achieving objectives through an indirect approach. We believe we are one of the key pillars in the war on terror.”
Soldiers of the 95th are skilled at operating in austere environments and in remote and potentially hostile areas. In addition to their highly specialized civil affairs skills, which include languages, multicultural negotiations, defusing hostile situations and a variety of technical specialties, they are also trained in computer skills, information management and warfighting skills such as hand-to-hand combat, advanced vehicle driving techniques, survival, escape and evasion.
Irizarry divides the brigade’s missions between “offensive” and “defensive.” An offensive civil affairs mission could involve working with local populations in high-risk areas to help establish a proper governance structure. A defensive mission would include helping to protect friendly populations from violent and extremist organizations.
Beyond that, the brigade engages in five core mission areas. Population resource control refers to seeing to the basic needs, such as food, water, shelter and security, of civilian populations caught in or near a battlefield or fleeing from it. “We were involved in helping to absorb dislocated civilian populations in northern Iraq,” said Irizarry.
Humanitarian assistance, also known as disaster relief, involves coordinating relief efforts in crisis areas suffering in the wake of natural disasters. “When the cyclone hit Bangladesh, we came ashore quickly and were able to apply our strengths,” said Irizarry. “We were challenged in this case to avoid competing with other governmental agencies, with non-governmental organizations, and with other assets.”
The 95th’s national assistance mission means helping foreign governments improve their security by developing better relationships with local estranged populations. Most of the work in this area is currently being carried out in the southern Philippines. “The idea is that a better working relationship between the local population and the military can be a source of improved security by reducing strife,” Irizarry explained.
Supporting civil administration, often accomplished in concert with Army reserve units, which often posses high-end civil skills, involves establishing or reestablishing public works such as health and education systems for civilian populations.
The last of the 95th’s core tasks involves civil information management. “The purpose of this mission is to come up with a disciplined and purposeful way of looking at the civil terrain, analyzing it, and using the information to make informed decisions,” Irizarry explained.
The use of information technology fits neatly into this box, although it also influences the brigade’s operations in its other mission areas. The soldiers of the 95th use three bundles of software in support of their missions, to store, retrieve and analyze data, discover links among different packages of information and to graphically map and display mission-area geography.
Analyst’s Notebook, a software tool marketed by i2 Technologies, Inc., of Dallas, Texas, provides an environment for information linkages and timeline analyses. The software enables insights into factors contributing to an issue, evaluating their causes and effects, and understanding the relationships between them. The software also includes collaboration tools which allow users to disseminate critical information concisely.
“Analyst’s Notebook helps us see linkages between things and to peel back layers of information to see the connections between people and places,” said Irizarry. “We may have 10 people working in a town going out and talking to 10 different people. That yields us 100 reports. With Analyst’s Notebook we are able to establish linkages among these 100 people in order to figure out how to approach this population and how to engage it.”
The tool also helps teams of people who come later to do follow-up work. “We may be looking to fix some damage in a given area and we may find that the mayor of the town also owns a construction company,” Irizarry explained. “By using this tool to establish linkages we are able to determine connections between people, places and entities, and to figure out where the primary centers of influence lie in the areas in which we work.”
ORIONMagic, from SRA International, a technology services provider headquartered in Fairfax, Va., is a suite of tools supporting a variety of functions including data collection, statistical analyses and results visualization. The software allows users to index large volumes of data, customize search concepts, process multiple searches simultaneously, collaborate with a team to organize large quantities of data and chart data in two or three dimensions to visualize trends and patterns.
“We worked with this software company to develop this suite,” said Irizarry. “They added features to the original product at our request. We have found it to be a great tool for assessing infrastructure needs. We have used it for civil projects in the agricultural, health and few other domains.”
ORIONMagic has also proven to be very useful for the collection and retrieval of information, according to Irizarry. “You can easily organize information from different sources such as the internet and field reports into cabinets for quick retrieval,” he said. “It allows our personnel to quickly develop a picture of an area or an issue.” Irizarry’s teams have developed a questionnaire using ORIONMagic that they use to assess infrastructure needs in the areas in which they work.
The 95th Civil Affairs Brigade is also using a GPS mapping tool to communicate and visually portray operations on the ground. “As the team goes out and conducts assessments, they take that information and apply it directly to the mapping tool,” Irizarry explained. “It has allowed us to map tribal boundaries, agricultural areas and commercial routes, and to show the locations of infrastructure such as wells or schools in need of repairs. All of this helps us build a better operating picture.”
The same tool is also used to map where other agencies and organizations are doing work in order to prevent duplication of effort. “In Iraq and Afghanistan we found that it paid huge dividends to do our infrastructure assessments on the ground and then affiliate those with the mapping tool,” said Irizarry. “It has gone a long way toward reconciling and plotting activities. With the GPS maps we know better what AID [the U.S. Agency for International Development] and other organizations are doing. This prevents developmental fratricide,” in other words, duplication of effort.
On the whole, the use by the 95th of computers and software help to keep the momentum of projects going, according to Irizarry. “With our continuous operations and their high operational tempo, it is difficult for units on the ground for six or seven months at a time to keep momentum going,” he said. “With these tools, it is easier to hand over operations to succeeding units. They can have situational awareness of what projects are ongoing wherever they are going.
” A major boost toward sharing information with others and developing a common operating picture could through a project the 95th has proposed to the U.S. Department of Defense’s Southern Command. “SOCOM is sponsoring a project that will be looking into joint civil information management protocols,” said Irizarry.
Such protocols would allow information to be shared among systems that use various different data formats. If it comes to fruition, the project will develop a “platform to discuss civil operations across the armed services, government agencies, and others we work with,” said Irizarry.
For all of his effusive praise for the information technology his units use, Irizarry also has confronted the “dark underbelly of technology.” “What we have found is that most of this software is not all that user friendly,” he said. “It takes a lot of training to teach how to use it. We use the systems [in] ways that are not compatible with its out-ofthe- box use, which adds time and resources to training.”
Irizarry would like to have the software designers spend some time with his operators to see first hand what their work is like. “If we could get designers to the field see how the soldiers use the software, they would make it more user friendly,” he said. “The software is flexible and can serve a lot of different requirements, but it is inherently complex. They all require the operator to memorize many commands and be familiar with the full breadth and depth of the software’s functionality. It is like driving a car that requires you to crank the engine and adjust the choke. Most people these days are used to point and click functionality in software.”
Also on Irizarry’s wish list is improved capabilities to model and simulate civil operations. “That is the area where we are experiencing the most significant lag,” he said. “The military has these tools on the kinetic side of the operations, but not for the less-than-lethal operations. It is not true that the lethal and non-lethal operations are the opposite of each other.”
In other words, it is not enough for civil affairs personnel to rebuild what was destroyed. “If you have a model for targeting the Iraqi power grid, it could tell out which node to take out to create the greatest impact,” said Irizarry.
But rebuilding a power system in a place like Iraq means correcting the old inequities perpetrated by Saddam Hussein’s regime, which built an infrastructure primarily to serve the government, the Baath party and their Sunni coreligionists at the expense of the Shiites. “You can’t just repair the hubs that were destroyed,” Irizarry explained. “You now have to create a power grid that supports greater equity across Iraq.”
Modeling and simulation would also help the 95th in its efforts to connect the dots of infrastructure redevelopment, to make sure, as Irizarry said, that efforts are connected to sustainable development and avoid deteriorating into one-shot deals. “We are trying to develop a system with the capacity to do that,” he said. “We don’t yet have the methodology to understand the interaction, for example, between developing a fresh water source and the overall welfare of a population. For us, there is no such thing as developing a well just for the sake of getting fresh water. We have to know how all the pieces fit together.”
On the whole, Irizarry feels that his people exploit well the technology made available to them and provide taxpayers with a good return on their investment. “Technology allows us to operate better in austere and difficult places,” he said. “No doubt the investment in technology is well worth it. Technology improves the capabilities of our teams. It gives us an operational advantage.” In the end, technology may help, but people remain the key. “What we do often comes down to two people sitting down and talking over cup of coffee,” Irizarry said. ♦