Joint military headquarters redesign

In the past decade, the focus of our military forces has shifted from a major theater of war to many types of operations other than war, including peace-making, peace-keeping and humanitarian support. Current headquarters elements that command and control such forces have, at best, only made marginal changes in organization and structure to adapt themselves to new missions and new technologies. This paper presents the application of systems engineering methods to re-engineer our military forces´ command and control systems around the flow of information to facilitate decision-making and to enhance military force effectiveness. The focus of our re-engineering effort is designing systems for accomplishing high-level headquarters functions. The key functions that a headquarters must perform are informing, deciding and implementing decisions, all designed around the efficient flow of information