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Published: 1 June 2009
Air & Space Power Journal - Summer 2009
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The basic planning, development, organization and training of the Air Force must be well rounded, covering every modern means of waging air war. . . . The Air Force doctrines likewise must be flexible at all times and entirely uninhibited by tradition.
—Gen Henry H. “Hap” Arnold
In a recent paper on America’s Air Force, Gen T. Michael Moseley asserted that we are at a strategic crossroads as a consequence of global dynamics and shifts in the character of future warfare; he also noted that “today’s confluence of global trends already foreshadows significant challenges to our organization, systems, concepts, and doctrine. We are at an historic turning point demanding an equally comprehensive revolution.” Furthermore, to revolutionize the twenty-first-century Air Force, according to General Moseley, we must start with our Airmen since “any organizational renaissance begins with people. We must prepare our Airmen for a future fraught with challenges, fostering their intellectual curiosity and ability to learn, anticipate and adapt.”1
An evolving recognition of “the human as the most important weapon system in the Global War on Terrorism” is evident in the special operations forces’ declaration that “humans are more important than hardware” in asymmetric warfare.2 Consistent with this view, in January 2004, the deputy secretary of defense directed the Joint Staff to “develop the next generation of . . . programs designed to optimize human performance and maximize fighting strength.”3 In response, US Joint Forces Command began a transformation of force health protection (FHP) by addressing human-performance standards, metrics, capabilities, and gaps via a new Joint Human Performance Enhancement Joint Capabilities Document.4 In 2005 the director of the Office of Net Assessment sparked wider interest by publishing Human Performance Optimization and Military Missions, which prompted the Department of Defense (DOD)/Health Affairs to sponsor a conference on human-performance optimization in June 2006.5 The conference report advocated such optimization at all DOD levels, but as yet, no overarching implementation strategy has appeared.6
In the Air Force, human-performance programs are generally more product oriented than human-centric, and relevant strategy and doctrine are limited to health services.7 As General Moseley reminds us, “History is replete with examples of militaries that failed due to their inability to transform organizations and culture, adopt new operational concepts, or leverage breakthrough technologies.”8 The Air Force cannot leverage breakthroughs in human performance unless it is organizationally and culturally ready. Similarly, the 2008 Air Force Medical Service (AFMS) Capabilities Review and Risk Assessment concluded that we must make the most of human capital in terms of recruitment, selection, training, operational performance, cross training, retention, and postretirement health and well-being.9 The assessment recommended a coordinated program to operationalize human performance for all Airmen by developing an overarching human-performance doctrine, organizationally redefining human performance as a line responsibility with health-services input, and developing ethical and legal frameworks for Air Force human performance.
In rising to Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s challenge to “think out of the box” in continuous pursuit of better ways to support the joint force, we believe it is high time to address the shortfall in Air Force human-performance doctrine.10 We propose a holistic doctrine that incorporates a capabilities-based, total life-cycle approach to managing Airmen—a performance-based force-projection model that concentrates on human performance while continuing to provide health care and casualty prevention to joint force commanders.
Doctrine for FHP, defined as “all measures taken by commanders, leaders, individual Service members, and the Military Health System to promote, improve, or conserve the mental and physical well-being of Service members across the range of military operations,” characterizes every service member as a human weapon system requiring total life-cycle support and maintenance.11 It specifically describes this support in terms of three interrelated pillars: “healthy and fit force,” “prevention and protection,” and “medical and rehabilitative care.”12 With this framework in mind, FHP catalyzed the genesis of our model for human performance as providing capabilities of human weapon systems to the joint force commander. We departed from the health focus of FHP and embraced a large scope of application by accepting two transformational tenets. The first involves managing Airmen consistent with other military weapon systems. This necessitates the creation of capability-based requirements with associated performance thresholds and objectives derived directly from needs identified by the combatant commander to drive Airman acquisition and sustainment programs.13 These programs should be managed by a program executive officer (with associated program managers using integrated process and product development) who provides a single organizational focus for the total life-cycle management of Airmen and remains accountable for life-cycle costs, schedule, and performance.14
The second tenet requires health-service support to focus on human performance in addition to health care as the primary means of supporting the joint force commander. Although this may seem at odds with the historical objectives of health-service support, it actually expands upon them, once we understand that health is a prerequisite for performance but that the presence of health does not guarantee performance.15 Given the prerequisite need for health, addressing performance satisfies the FHP pillars of “healthy and fit force” and “prevention and protection” (which we can equate with primary and secondary preventive medicine). In fact, superior performance itself is a means of prevention and protection. For example, victorious forces historically suffer lower casualty rates than defeated forces, and improving situational awareness decreases the risk of fratricide.
Managing Airmen’s capabilities through human performance erects a new doctrinal edifice with three foundational pillars: performance sustainment, performance optimization, and performance enhancement (fig. 1). Since no universally accepted human-performance definitions exist, the names chosen for the pillars serve as placeholders for major enterprise areas rather than specific definitions.16 Figure 1 also depicts the pillars resting on an organizational foundation that embodies attributes of the university model: dissemination of knowledge, research, and teaching.17 Doctrine, organizations, and weapon systems are interrelated—history demonstrates that advances in one area without corresponding advances in the others limit the overall effectiveness of weapon systems.18 Thus, the university model represents the organizational change needed to support the human-performance doctrinal vision for the human weapon system.
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| Figure 1. Three pillars of program management for Airmen |
Performance Sustainment for Airmen
Performance sustainment covers accession through separation/retirement with the goal of maintaining target performance levels throughout a career while minimizing total life-cycle costs. It also embraces the FHP pillars of “healthy and fit force” and “prevention and protection.” Preventive medicine is a major contributor to performance sustainment because physical and mental health remains a necessary, but not sufficient, precursor for performance. Performance sustainment contains most health-service support functions with the exception of consequence management.19 The objective calls for sustaining performance in the face of enemy actions, full-spectrum (natural and technological) environmental threats and stressors, and advancing age.
If we accept the paradigm of the human weapon system, then the breadth of performance sustainment fits comfortably within the larger framework of the DOD acquisitions life cycle (fig. 2), specifically including the use of requirements derived from the Joint Capabilities Integration Development System. Applying the Defense Acquisition Management Framework to Airman acquisitions affects the AFMS and Air Force in the following transformational ways:20
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| Figure 2. Application of the Defense Acquisition Management Framework to Airman acquisitions. (From Defense Acquisition University, Introduction to Defense Acquisition Management, 7th ed. [Fort Belvoir, VA: Defense Acquisition University Press, 2005], 49.) |
• Development of a portfolio of Airman capability documents (ACD) derived from the Joint Capabilities Integration Development System for groups of related Air Force specialty codes incorporating physical, physiological, psychological, and cognitive performance thresholds and objectives.21
• Formulation of a supporting test and evaluation master plan (TEMP) for each ACD, which becomes the source document for conducting preaccession screening, gauging developmental progression during training, and monitoring performance over a career.22
• Consideration of the time from accession to end-of-life instead of a nominal 20-year career during ACD development and preaccession screening, with the aim of minimizing total life-cycle costs.
• Alteration of the AFMS’s preventive health assessments to performance and health assessments, primarily focusing on physical, physiological, psychological, and cognitive performance (based on the ACD and TEMP), with continued emphasis on health maintenance. Examples of performance monitoring include duty-specific fitness assessments, exposure-driven mental-health screening, and neurocognitive assessments.
• Deployment of tailored, multidisciplinary expeditionary-performance support teams containing traditional expertise in preventive medicine augmented by expertise in the physiological, psychological, and cognitive domains.
Performance sustainment will drive research and development of continuous, real-time, and periodic performance-assessment tools to support both the ACD and TEMP; mitigation strategies of the performance-degrading effects of advancing age; and physical and psychological countermeasures to maintain performance during warfare or exposure to environmental threats such as climatic extremes, g-forces, fatigue, weapons effects, prolonged mental stressors, and witnessing or participating in violent acts. However, the systems-engineering process, rather than the development of countermeasures and personal protective equipment, offers the primary means of mitigating threats and stressors.23
Performance Optimization for Airmen
Performance optimization seeks to achieve the most efficient use of limited human resources by comprehensively integrating Airmen within the Air Force’s sociotechnical systems.24 People are the critical elements within systems, so adopting a human-centric perspective of systems increases total system performance and minimizes total ownership costs.25 Optimization occurs in defense acquisitions, starting with the specification of system requirements and flowing down through system design, development, and deployment. It goes well beyond human-machine interface design and involves deliberate planning to efficiently leverage the Airman through the process of human systems integration (HSI), a process model for obtaining performance. Perhaps more importantly, that model defines the domains of performance: human factors engineering (HFE); personnel; training; manpower; environment, safety, and occupational health (ESOH); habitability; and survivability.26 We obtain better system performance with lower ownership cost by actively managing the interactions and trade-offs between domains rather than simply optimizing individual domains. As an illustration, employing intuitive automation in the design of a workstation to simplify a work process (HFE domain), thereby reducing manpower and training requirements (manpower and training domains), yields significant savings over the life cycle of a system. In addition, the HSI tool enables program managers to counter shortfalls in one domain by augmenting another to achieve targeted system performance. For example, a program forced to accept shortfalls in cockpit design (HFE domain) could respond by augmenting training (training domain) or selecting more capable or experienced aircrew members (personnel domain). Failure to adequately attend to HSI results in a degraded weapon system that can become prohibitively expensive to repair.
A new, high-level conceptual model of the HSI process (fig. 3) better explains the essential relationships between the HSI domains and human performance.27 The input domains (manpower, personnel, training, and HFE) are typical items or services procured by the DOD, which makes their specification as process inputs more congruent with the DOD’s capabilities-development process. Additionally, focusing on the four input domains greatly simplifies the challenges of forecasting the impact of HSI trade-offs through modeling and simulation, a necessary consideration given DOD initiatives for simulation-based acquisitions.28 In contrast, the ESOH, habitability, and survivability domains represent desired system attributes or behaviors not directly procurable; rather, they emerge through various combinations of the input domains. These three domains also collectively describe the FHP pillar of “prevention and protection,” directly linking performance optimization to FHP and providing an avenue to address FHP through a systems-engineering approach.
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| Figure 3. Linkages between the HSI process model and the Joint Capabilities Integration Development System gap analysis. (Adapted from Robert Lindberg, to the author, personal communication regarding the 711th Human Performance Wing’s HSI model, 23 July 2007.) |
Performance optimization affects performance sustainment, during which the bulk of prevention activities occur. The HFE domain drives the human physical, physiological, and cognitive performance requirements that, in turn, must be sustained throughout the life of a system. System requirements specified for the ESOH, habitability, and survivability domains influence the likelihood of future hazardous exposures that will require prevention and protection. Failure to compensate for human weaknesses or to capitalize on human strengths when specifying system requirements drives research and development of countermeasures to prevent injury or illness. Therefore, performance optimization maximizes efficiencies and cost savings through primary and secondary prevention.
Performance Enhancement for Airmen
Performance enhancement occurs chiefly through science and technology initiatives that enable Airmen to operate beyond established and sustainable performance thresholds, a spectrum ranging from intrahuman (biotechnology and pharmacology) to extrahuman (hardware and software). We developmentally plan a human-performance science and technology road map “by investigating future threats; recognizing capability gaps and requirements; capturing needed system-performance characteristics; and understanding technology gaps, risks, and needs.”29 Advances in performance enhancement create new capabilities for Airmen, enabling performance sustainment and optimization by expanding the existing performance envelope and providing solution sets for trade-offs in the HSI domain. Thus, the three foundational pillars of program management for Airmen in figure 1 become a set of interrelated enterprises rather than distinct and independent efforts. Integration becomes the key word when we organizationally, functionally, and financially address human performance.
The world’s security environment is changing dramatically in many dimensions—political, economic, social, and military. In response, “the Air Force is transforming into an effects-based, efficient provider of human combat capability, which can sustain air, space, and cyberspace superiority for the joint force and our Nation.”30 As General Moseley pointed out, “It is the Airmen who transform hunks of metal, buckets of bolts, microprocessors, and circuitry into the Nation’s warfighting edge” (emphasis in original).31 Providing capability for human combat, however, requires related doctrine on weapon systems. This article has proposed a vision for a broad human-performance doctrine for the Air Force—to sustain, optimize, and enhance Airmen. It addresses “how we think” about human performance and lays the foundation for future doctrine describing “what we think” about human performance. Ultimately, human-performance doctrine should provide a capabilities-based, total life-cycle approach to managing Airmen. Within the AFMS, it is time to move from a health-based FHP model to a performance-based force-projection model. In this new paradigm, the medical service maximizes successful force projection through its contribution to the human-performance mission while simultaneously standing ready to mitigate performance failures through consequence management. That said, the AFMS alone cannot implement the vision described here: its scope is driven by the breadth of application of human performance, which goes well beyond health services. The Air Force, therefore, must think strategically about its human weapon systems and develop both doctrine and the supporting organizational structures to operationalize human performance for all Airmen. We agree with General Moseley’s observation that we are at a strategic crossroads, believing that a holistic approach to human performance is critical to the posture of the Air Force. We cannot say it any better than did our former chief of staff: “America’s Air Force will succeed in the 21st century only by developing and resourcing a coherent strategy that closes the gap between ends and means. The window of opportunity is shutting fast. Time is not on our side.”32
*Lieutenant Colonel Tvaryanas is a PhD candidate at the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California. Colonel Brown is director, Human Performance Integration, 711th Human Performance Wing, Brooks City-Base, Texas. Dr. Miller teaches human systems integration and human factors engineering at the Naval Postgraduate School.
Notes
1. Gen T. Michael Moseley, The Nation’s Guardians: America’s 21st Century Air Force, CSAF White Paper (Washington, DC: Department of the Air Force, Office of the Chief of Staff, 29 December 2007), 3, 6, http://www.af.mil/shared/media/document/AFD-080207-048.pdf.
2. Patricia A. Deuster et al., “Human Performance Optimization: An Evolving Charge to the Department of Defense,” Military Medicine 172, no. 11 (November 2007): 11, http://www.siib.org/news/367-SIIB/version/ default/part/AttachmentData/data/HPO%20Mil%20Med
%202007.pdf.
3. PowerPoint briefing, 2007 Military Health Services Conference, subject: “Human Performance Optimization (HPO) within DOD,” slide 6, http://www.tricare.mil/conferences/2007/Mon/M107.ppt (accessed 27 May 2008).
4. Ibid.
5. A. Russell, B. Bulkley, and C. Grafton, Human Performance Optimization and Military Missions: Final Report, GS-10F-0297K (Washington, DC: Office of Net Assessment, May 2005).
6. Deuster et al., “Human Performance Optimization”; and PowerPoint briefing, 2007 Military Health Services Conference.
7. Air Force Doctrine Document (AFDD) 2-4.2, Health Services, 11 December 2002, 47–52, https://www.doctrine.af.mil/AFDCPrivateWeb/AFDD_Page_HTML/Doctrine_Docs/afdd2-4-2.pdf.
8. Moseley, Nation’s Guardians, 2.
9. Headquarters US Air Force, Assistant Surgeon General for Operations, United States Air Force Medical Service 2008 Capabilities Review and Risk Assessment: Operationalize Human Performance for All Airmen (Washington, DC: Department of the Air Force, 31 March 2008).
10. Michael W. Wynne, secretary of the Air Force, and Gen T. Michael Moseley, chief of staff of the Air Force, to all Airmen, memorandum, 24 April 2008.
11. Joint Publication 4-02, Health Service Support, 31 October 2006, I-3, http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/ new_pubs/jp4_02.pdf; and AFDD 2-4.2, Health Services, 21.
12. Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), Force Health Protection (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, 6 November 2003), 10, 13; and Department of Defense Directive (DODD), 6200.04, Force Health Protection, 9 October 2004, 2, http://www.dtic.mil/whs/directives/corres/pdf/620004p.pdf.
13. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Instruction (CJCSI) 3170.01F, Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System, 1 May 2007, A-3, A-8, http://www.dtic.mil/cjcs_directives/cdata/unlimit/3170_01.pdf.
14. Office of the Undersecretary, Acquisitions and Technology, DOD Guide to Integrated Process and Product Development (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, 5 February 1996), 1-1 through 2-12; and DODD 5000.01, The Defense Acquisition System, 12 May 2003, 2, 10, http://www.dtic.mil/whs/directives/corres/pdf/500001p.pdf.
15. Deuster et al., Human Performance Optimization, 3, 5.
16. Many organizations have become interested in pushing the limits of human performance, and they have developed terminology corresponding to their interests and funding (e.g., AFMS and Joint Forces Command—human-performance enhancement; Office of Net Assessment and DOD Health Affairs—human-performance optimization; Defense Threat Reduction Agency—human-performance modification). This multiple, overlapping terminology reinforces stovepipes and prevents effective unity of effort, potentially harming the larger Air Force and DOD mission. V. Martindale, to the author, personal communication regarding “Point Paper on Human Performance Terminology for AFMS,” 25 July 2007.
17. Jaroslav Pelikan, The Idea of the University: A Reexamination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 32–43, 58–62, 78–98.
18. I. B. Holley Jr., Ideas and Weapons (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953), 175–78.
19. Consequence management is defined as those individual and organizational activities directed at halting the progress of disease or limiting the damage caused by injury and reducing the long-term social disability produced by any residual impairment.
20. Department of Defense Instruction (DODI) 5000.2, Operation of the Defense Acquisition System, 12 May 2003, 2, http://www.dtic.mil/whs/directives/corres/pdf/500002p.pdf.
21. CJCSI 3170.01F, Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System, A-8.
22. DODI 5000.2, Operation of the Defense Acquisition System, 35.
23. Beverly S. Cohen, “Industrial Hygiene Measurement and Control,” in Environmental and Occupational Medicine, ed. William N. Rom (Philadelphia: Lippincott-Raven, 1998), 1753–55.
24. The term human-performance optimization has been discussed as a focus area for the Joint Medical Research Command. See Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, Force Health Protection and Readiness, to Assistant Secretary of Defense, Health Affairs, memorandum, 26 December 2006. The use of performance optimization in the context of this proposal is not congruent with the formulation of human-performance optimization as used by that command; nor is it intended to suggest that HSI is solely a health-services function since it clearly crosscuts multiple functional capabilities described in the Agile Combat Support Concept of Operations (e.g., acquisition, civil engineer, logistics readiness, manpower, personnel, safety, science and technology, training, test and evaluation, etc.). We use the term performance optimization simply because it best describes the proposed enterprise area.
25. DODI 5000.2, Operation of the Defense Acquisition System, 43.
26. Ibid., 43–45; and MIL-HDBK-46855A, Department of Defense Handbook: Human Engineering Program Process and Procedures, 17 May 1999, 19–20, http://hfetag.dtic.mil/docs-hfs/mil-hdbk-46855a.pdf.
27. Nita L. Miller and Lawrence G. Shattuck, “Rethinking HSI: An Applied Approach,” draft, 2007.
28. Since the key word in human systems integration is integration, any modeling and simulation effort needs to capture domain interactions in order to accurately predict the impact of domain trade-offs on total system performance and ownership costs. For example, assuming we could model performance by using a log-linear model, capturing domain-interaction effects requires a full or saturated model. When we work with all seven human-systems integration domains, the resulting model would have 127 terms—a significant computational challenge. However, by considering only the four input domains, we reduce the model to a more manageable 15 terms.
29. Gen Bruce Carlson and Maj Stephen Chambal, “Developmental Planning: The Key to Future War-Fighter Capabilities,” Air and Space Power Journal 21, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 5, http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/ airchronicles/apj/apj08/spr08/spr08.pdf.
30. Air Force Roadmap: 2006–2025 (Washington, DC: Department of the Air Force, June 2006), 19, http://www.af.mil/shared/media/document/AFD-060713-002.pdf.
31. T. Michael Moseley, “America’s Air Force: The Nation’s Guardian,” Joint Force Quarterly 49 (2d quarter 2008): 11, http://www.ndu.edu/inss/Press/jfq_pages/editions/i49/8.pdf.
32. Ibid., 13.
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University
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